Author's note: All my apologies for a few chapters ago, where I noticed some glaring typos that completely changed meanings of sentences. Work life writing= occasional typos. Thanks for continuing to read, however!
CHAPTER NINE- Certainty
Luke Danes wasn't a man accustomed to regret, and it fit him poorly on the rare occasions he indulged himself in it. Thus, his mood was less than pleasant when he woke the morning after he'd very nearly opened his mouth and told Lorelai he loved her.
He considered himself a practical man, so he wasn't surprised at her absence the entire day and evening before, and he couldn't help but recall Rory's angry words to her mother the morning after she'd slept with Dean, the morning after he'd kissed Lorelai, the morning after everything had changed for everyone, it seemed.
"I don't find guys the way you do, Mom, I'm not the six-month commitment-phobe who knows she can replace the last guy with a new one. I don't expect you to understand what it's like to need someone to care about you, because you always have that."
It was no less disturbing to hear it in memory than it had been to hear it the first time.
Of course she would run away from him, that was what she did. He'd always been a bit pleased to see her run before, because she'd been running away from someone else. But now it was a different matter entirely.
He laid his head to the well-tended tile of his shower and patiently waited for the hot water to ease the tension in his back.
It wasn't working.
He was different from all the man who had come before; he knew he had to be. He just didn't know how, exactly, or what he had to offer her that they hadn't already tried.
And since he was already regretting his actions of the day before, Luke figured he'd go right ahead and regret that he'd never done at least a little prying into her personal life all those times she'd sat at his counter, staring up at him with those damnable big blue eyes. God knew she was never exactly unwilling to talk; he'd just never wanted to hear it.
He was even more ill-suited to being jealous than he was to being regretful.
When the shower started to cool and neither his disposition nor tension had improved, he turned the shower off and sloughed water off his face with one large, not entirely steady hand.
He couldn't lose her, even if keeping her meant backing off.
He dressed with the ease of long-formed habit, grabbing the jeans, tee-shirt, and flannel shirt at random from their places in the closet and drawers, then he shoved his feet into his tennis shows and was on the move into the diner even as he rubbed a towel over his damp hair.
A shadow, thrown only faintly in the wavering, early a.m. light, passed in front of the diner door, then back again, and without a bit of forethought, Luke unlocked and opened the door, already leveling a chastisement at his dairy delivery man, who endlessly forgot the key.
And, as he'd done countless times in the past few days, Luke simply stared.
He didn't know how he possibly had it left in him to be surprised at any of her actions. Her long, pajama-clad legs carried her back and forth across his storefront, her eyes drooping with lost sleep and dearth of caffeine. In one hand, she carried a brown paper bag, and in the other, a wad of money. Any other time, it would have been on the tip of his tongue to tell her she looked like a misplaced wino, but here, now, he just wanted to gather her up and whisper "good morning" into the top of her head, into all that curly hair.
"I meant to come last night, but I got held up—"
"Sounds familiar," he said dryly, unable to help himself, unable to think straight, unable to quash the niggling, horribly uncomfortable jealousy that wanted to rear up and ask her what had come up.
But as usual, Lorelai would not be deterred once she'd chosen her course, and he braced himself for the inevitable barrage that did, indeed, follow.
"And I couldn't sleep because I felt like I'd stolen your coffee, and then there was that picture—I didn't k now you still had that picture, by the way, that was sneaky—and so I got money to pay for coffee for the rest of the month and for whatever else I took, and I drove to that 24-hour place over in Hartford and got the picture reprinted—did you know they sell 5th Avenue candy bars in there? I haven't seen one of those in years, and they sell those, but no coffee while you wait for your photo to print in one hour or less and while you shop for two picture frames to put your old picture and your new picture in—and so, here—" she shoved the bag into his hands, "And here," she handed him the money. "And were you getting ready to tell me you loved me?"
She wanted to wince, wanted to curse, but instead stared at him forthrightly, unwilling to show him any weakness. She'd meant to be cool, meant to be oh-so-casual, to turn the tables by offering him a framed copy of that damned photograph and sarcastically paying her coffee fines.
But then he'd come out rubbing that towel over his hair, his shoes unlaced, a few drops of water still clinging to his jaw, and her carefully prepared speech had plummeted to the bottom of her stomach.
And damn it all, she'd actually asked him about the L-word.
The hand moving the towel over his hair stopped, and he stared at her, his hand atop his head, his eyes narrowed.
"Not right this minute," he said, effectively skirting the question in a way… well, in a way Lorelai herself would have been proud of.
She'd have been damned proud of him if he'd been directing the diversion to anyone other than her.
"Yesterday," she said, giving a childish stamp of her foot. "Damn it, Luke, you… you come to the airport, you send me muffins, you throw Dean out, and then Jason, and then you offer to take me away, and…" She didn't know what he'd done next. Had he almost said it? Had she completely imagined it? She couldn't finish the sentence without knowing, and she wouldn't guess and make a fool of herself if she was wrong.
He shrugged then, sliding the towel over his shoulder, crossing his arms over his chest and regarding her in the foggy morning light. "What do you want me to do, huh? Finish my sentence now? Nuh-uh, lady, you walked out on it, I'm not gonna repeat myself."
But, oh, how he wanted to, just as badly as he wanted to pluck that picture out of the bag and take a good, long look at it.
"You can't just… say things like that, Luke." Unable to look at him and that unwavering stare, she started to pace again, knowing what he was thinking—he hadn't actually said anything at all, she'd only assumed.
In the meanwhile, she hadn't asked for any coffee yet, and of the two of them, only Luke had noticed her uncharacteristic oversight.
He counted it as a point in his favor.
"You can't just decide that, because it's… insane." She'd spent the entire, sleepless night—picture or no picture—trying to carefully list the reasons why Luke couldn't love her.
Luke couldn't love her because Luke was Luke, and quite frankly, Luke was too good for her.
"Who says I decided anything?" he asked, predictably torturing her because he could, and he added, "You still haven't told me what we're talking about."
He was being sadistic, and he damn well knew it, but coming on the heels of the nearly debilitating fear that things were going to not only stop in their tracks but move backward, this was a little bit satisfying.
Seeing Lorelai scramble now was just as good as seeing her run into doors and waiters.
"You can't just kiss me and start this whole thing without… without me knowing what the hell's going on!" she finally shouted, throwing her hands in the air.
Cool sophistication had nothing on Lorelai Gilmore. Lorelai Gilmore had flat panic.
"So what the hell's going on?" Luke asked, gesturing widely with his own hands, the paper bag raising right, the money raising left, a few dimes slipping from between his fingers to hit the pavement.
"Right now, we're arguing about how insane you are, that's what the hell's going on!" she retorted, and before she had time to register anything else, he'd stepped into her, not touching her with those lovely hands, no, he kept those to his sides, but he kissed her as though he hadn't stopped kissing her on the porch, and the hell of it was, she kissed him right back, stepping into him until he was against the doorframe, his fingers clenching tightly into paper money and the paper bag, and this wasn't at all like kissing her on the porch of the Dragonfly, no, this was something else entirely.
That had been just a little slower, that had still possessed tentativeness.
This was absolutely certain, and both of them knew that with absolute certainty.
And then Kirk came along and ruined the whole damned thing again.
"Well, I was going to stake out my table, but I think this is much more interesting."