Goodbye Rory
A/N: Thanks for reading and reviewing.
Disclaimer: Thanks Amy!
"What am I doing? Please turn around and walk away!" Rory silently begged her feet. Her body seemed to have a mind of it's own. Her head was saying "walk away", but her heart and body was saying "you need to see him." Rory had no idea what she was going to say to him. She had just walked up nine flights of stairs, hoping it would give her time to think of a really good excuse for being in his apartment building, or give her rationale time to return. Both had failed her. Here she was standing at his door, none the wiser. No good opening line and no reason as to why she was here. Yet, she couldn't bring herself to walk away. Neither could she knock on the door. So she was standing in the middle of the hallway, not walking away and not knocking on any doors, looking like an idiot.
As if fate was testing her, the door to his apartment swung open. To her temporary relief he had his back to her, yelling something about being home by five, to somebody inside. Rory took the chance to walk away, before he could see her. She had gotten halfway to the elevator when she heard her name. "Rory?" She turned slowly to face him. For a minute at least, neither of them said a word. Finally Jess broke the silence. "Why'd you come here?" Rory took her time answering the question. Seeing him again really took it's toll on her. He looked the same. Same dark hair, same mysterious, brown eyes, same Metallica t-shirt, same everything. He didn't even look as if he'd aged. But he wasn't the only thing that remained the same. The feeling she got every time she saw him, that was the same too. It'd never left her. "I wanted you to look me in the face and say goodbye." She told him with the suspecting feeling that he wouldn't be able to.
"It's important in any relationship, to let the other person know you appreciate them so you don't create barriers that might delay any hope for reciprocation." Jess wished he hadn't remembered that particular conversation at this moment. He was supposed to be convincing himself that he no longer needed Rory. He no longer lived and breathed for her. And in order to convince himself of this, he first needed to convince her. "Goodbye Rory." He said in a flat tone and continued down the hall past her.
What? That in no way was what Rory expected to hear. "That's it? Goodbye Rory? That's all you can come up with?" Now furious that she'd come all this way just for him to tell her 'goodbye' she demanded an explanation.
"That's what you asked for. You told me to look you in the face and say goodbye, so I did." He tried to persuade her, as well as himself that, that was the real reason. Rory just stared at him with tired eyes. She'd been on the road for the last five hours. She'd just confronted her ex-boyfriend, who she was still in love with even though she was engaged to someone else, she had just heard from him exactly what she expected to hear and she now had to drive another five hours back to her fiancé, where she should have been all along. "You're getting married tomorrow Rory. And not to me. I'm sorry you came all the way to New York to hear that, but you let me walk away." Jess reminded her.
"Okay, I'm with someone else, but it never stopped you when we were in high school, when I was dating Dean." Rory couldn't let that be it. She didn't just risk her entire life's happiness, to be told to go away.
"That was different. You weren't engaged to Dean. I was young and blinded by…" He couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. Not when he was almost winning the 'I-don't-love-you-anymore battle.
"Go on. Say it. You were blinded by love. You said it yourself, you needed to hear me tell you that I had moved on, so you could move on too. Thus meaning you hadn't previously moved on. So here I am telling you that I haven't moved on and you're throwing it in my face!" That was it. She couldn't believe she was begging someone to love her, when he quite obviously didn't. "If that's the way you want to leave it, fine. It was lovely to see you again, I hope you have a very happy life with your job and your wife that you don't love and all that Lady Luck may bring you. Goodbye Jess." Rory spat out in the most sarcastic tone she'd used in a while.
Good. She was mad at him. It would make it easier to get over him if she hated him. 'Yeah right cool guy.' Jess thought to himself. 'You've waited two years to hear her say that to you, why are you letting her walk out of your life?' Jess didn't have answers for the questions his conscience was throwing at him. But he knew that even though he just rebuilt them, it was time to burn all those bridges, let go of the façade and tell her what was really on his mind. But of course, by the time he'd come to realise all of this, Rory had already walked away. Gone. It was now or never. He made a run for the elevator hoping that he might catch her before she left his life forever. All the great boy-meets-girl movies did it all the time and just as you thought he'd miss her, there she was sobbing in a corner, waiting for him to come to his senses and console her. But this was no movie and by the time Jess reached the front doors Rory's car was disappearing into the heavy flow of midday New York traffic.