Disclaimer: I don't own a damn thing. Yes, I'm bitter. It all belongs to Amy Sherman Palladino and the WB. The conversations between Rory & Lorelai and Rory & Trevor are from The Fundamental Things Apply.

Rating: PG-13 for now. Will go higher eventually.

Spoilers: Everything up until episode three of season 4, The Hobbit, The Sofa and Digger Stiles.

Author's Note: It seems like I am on a roll with this one so I am going with my muse. Even if I am not feeling the CMM love lately (Damn you, Lucas Scott!).

Dedication: To Susie, Sur, Gracie, Priya, Lessa, Janine, Nat and Roxy. Just 'cause they say nice things to me about this fic.

Chapter Three: The Dating Game

Trying not to eavesdrop on Paris's loud and rather angry conversation with Jamie over the phone was a very hard feat. Rory watched as her roommate rolled her eyes and screwed up her face as her boyfriend talked to her and when Paris caught her gaze, she stuck her finger down her throat to emphasize her distaste. Rory knew that Paris and Jamie were going through their whole this-long-distance-relationship-is-not-working-you're-not-there-for-me-when-I-need-you hoop-la but she wasn't sure how bad it really was until just now. Wanting to throw up when your boyfriend is talking to you was not a sign of relationship stability.

While Rory shuffled around with her notes, Paris finished her conversation/argument with Jamie and hung up the phone in a huff. She stared at the phone and then at Rory before pronouncing, "I need to scream. Very loud."

"There's a pillow on your bed," Rory suggested. "Scream away."

Instead of screaming, Paris fell back on her bed and sighed. "First Tristan and now Jamie."

"Tristan?" Rory asked surprised. He didn't seem all that shaken up when she talked to him in the morning. "Something happened with Tristan?"

Paris buried her face in the pillow. "Yesterday. Jerk wanted to be friends."

Rory fake gasped. "The fiend! How dare he?"

"You don't get it," Paris retorted. "You don't understand the way his warped mind works. I don't even know why I am telling you."

"Because it's obviously bothering you."

"It's not bothering me."

Rory shrugged. "If you say so."

"It's not, okay?" Paris repeated. "I am so over it. I was over it the minute he left for boot camp. Can we please not talk about him?"

Rory wanted to tell her that Paris that she was the one who brought it up but decided against it. She sat down on her bed and folded her arms over her chest. "Alright so let's talk about Jamie. What's wrong?"

"I don't want to talk about that, either." Paris sat up on her bed and hugged a pillow. "Tell me something. About anything."

 "I got asked out today." Rory blurted the first thing that came to her mind. She hadn't really given Trevor asking her out much thought even though it had thrown her off at first. But apparently, it was still floating around in her subconscious.
 

"Oh," Paris said and then paused, "Is this your first date after.?"

"I didn't say yes. And what do you mean 'after.'?"

"After Jess ran off," she answered tactlessly.

"Oh." Rory shifted on her bed. She hadn't thought of it that way. Leave it to Paris to remind her of what she lost. "Yeah, it is."

"Ah," Paris said knowingly.

"Ah?" Rory returned, furrowing her brows. "What do you mean 'ah'?"

"Never mind, Gilmore. Your life truly is very boring." Rory scowled and Paris stood up and stretched. "I'm going to go and focus my attention on something more productive."

As Paris left the room, Rory called after her, "Leave Janet alone!"

~*~

"Oh, yesterday Janet woke up to find that Paris had chaired her in her room." Rory told her mom that same night when she went home to do laundry. "And then, later, when Janet had climbed out the window, she retaliated by gluing shut the opening of Paris's glue gun."

"Wow, she went for the crafts."

"This war is getting totally out of hand," Rory complained although she left out the part where she suspected Paris's behavior this was due more to the Jamie issue rather than her own neuroses. "This morning Paris turned off my alarm because Janet woke her up. I almost missed breakfast. I ran down to the dining hall in my pajamas and bunny slippers, and of course I ran into Marty."

Lorelai grinned. "Naked guy."

"It was totally humiliating." Not to mention that Tristan showed up to complete the public disgrace, she added to herself silently. She had yet to tell her mother that he was attending Yale, the opportunity never came up.

"Humiliating 'cause naked guy's hot?" she prompted, the grin never vanishing.  

Rory pouted. "It was humiliating because I had terrycloth rabbits on my feet."

"So naked guy's not hot?" Lorelai asked sounding a little disappointed.

"Naked guy is Marty, and it's not like that. He's sweet."

"Ah. Sweet means bad butt." Lorelai claimed. They argued back and forth about Marty's 'hotness' before her mother moved on. "No? How about a professor - someone older, wiser, with brown cords and whiskey breath?"

"Oh, well, yeah. There's one of those."

"Come on, Rory."

"Well, this guy asked me to go try this restaurant this weekend, but it was a totally casual thing." She tried to play it off because she knew Lorelai's tendencies to over exaggerate everything.  

"So what'd you tell him?"

"That I was busy."

"You don't like him?"

"No, I like him fine. I mean, he's smart, and he takes my side in the debates, and he's decent to look at," she responded and then continued to illustrate her somewhat well thought out hang-ups with Trevor while Lorelai mocked her in that subtle way of hers.

"And he's preppy, and I don't really like preppy. Plus, he's gonna go study in Barcelona next year."

"So?"

"So it's a waste of time. It can't go anywhere," she defended.

"It could go to dinner, maybe a movie." Lorelai suggested.

"Mom..."

"No, look, Rory, I know you've never really dated."

"What are you talking about?" Rory asked appalled.  "I've dated."

"Who did you date?"

"Dean.

"You and Dean did not date. You had a relationship."

"Well, Jess."

"Was relationship number two." Because her mother was right, Rory did what she knew always worked in a debate - she turned it around on Lorelai. After arguing about Lorelai's own inability to date, her mother gave up and continued, "Okay, fine, I may not be the world's best dater, but I do it and you should give it a shot. I mean, you're in college now. What else is there to do in college but date?

What to do when cornered by logic? Bail. "I'm gonna go wash my clothes now."

"Wait," Lorelai called after her. "Was that it? Is this conversation over? Sorry, did I win?"

~*~

"Saturday night?" Trevor asked a little apprehensively, the next day.

"Saturday night." Rory confirmed, wondering if he saw right through her or she was actually managing the whole asking-a-guy-out-without-making-it-seem-like-you-asked-him-out.

"Are you saying you want to go to dinner on Saturday night?"

"Wow." She played dumb and then nodded. "Um, okay. Yeah. Well, I will be hungry."

"Well, that fact has been pretty well established," he noted with a tiny grin and she felt her inner cool falter for a second.

"Okay. Sure. Yeah, let's go to dinner Saturday night," she reconfirmed.

"So, you're at."

"Durfee, suite 5." He told her he would pick her up at 7:30 and then she added (just to make sure they were clear on who asked whom out), "Wow. I gotta hand it to you there, Trevor. You sure are persistent."

As Trevor left, the sound of someone clearing their throat behind her claimed her attention and she turned around to face a smirking Tristan. "Rory Gilmore, in action. I never thought I'd see the day."

She rolled her eyes and adjusted her book bag. "So you've added stalking to your endless list of annoying habits? It's illegal in all fifty states, if you didn't know."

"Don't flatter yourself, Gilmore," he responded as he fell into step with her. "I just happened to be coming out of class when I overheard you asking that guy out. I must say, he's a change from the leather-wearing-bracelet-making-courtyard-confession kind of guy you usually go for. Speaking of whom, dumped you again, did he?"

With Dean's surreal wedding to Lindsay still fresh in her memory, Rory chose to ignore Tristan's comment and furrowed her brow. "Did it sound like I was asking him out?"

"Oh yeah," he returned easily. "You have desperate written all over you."

"Kind of like the flashing neon 'Jackass' sign stamped to your forehead?" she retaliated as they stepped out of the building. "And you should talk about desperate. Or was that whole pretending I was going with you to the PJ Harvey concert and then stealing my books when I rejected you all in my head?"

Instead of getting angry, he simply chuckled. "Ouch. Right for the jugular. Mary, you still don't realize the extent of the damage you caused my entire emotional system that day, do you?"

"Oh I'm sure you recovered just fine," she deadpanned as they walked towards Durfee. "So, um, listen.did you and Paris get into a fight?"

He visibly tensed and nodded, expelling his breath. "Well, it was more like she was yelling at me while I stood like an idiot and wondered what the hell was happening."

"Don't take it personally," she told him and without thinking, she divulged information she was pretty sure Paris didn't want him to know. "Paris is a very difficult place right now. Things aren't going well for her and she's having problems with her boyfriend."

"Boyfriend?" he asked sounding surprised. "So the C-SPAN thing was true."

Rory knew for a fact that Paris would not like that he had heard about it. "Yeah."

"Well, that explains a lot," he stated pocketing one hand in his jeans and running a hand through his hair with the other. "Why she's at Yale, why she's so.off. Harvard was her dream for so long. Paris has never been able to deal with rejection very well."

"Tell me about it."

"Wow, I feel like such a jerk." He sighed, frustrated. Having never heard him acknowledge any transgression on his part Rory was taken back. Self-deprecation didn't suit him, very well. "And don't say anything."

"What?" she asked puzzled.

"I know you were going to come up with some clever quip for that jerk comment," he stated a little too harsh. They stopped under a tree and she turned to face him.

"No I wasn't," she told him, tucking her hair behind her ear. "I was going to say that you shouldn't feel like a jerk, you haven't been around so it's not like she should expect anything from you."

"Yeah," he said, looking over her shoulder. "I haven't been around for a long time. I screwed up."

"Well, that's very mature of you." Rory smirked a little and gave him a sidelong glance as they resumed walking. "I see military school has set you on the path of self-actualization."  

"Oh yeah," he snorted and shook his head. "Military school did me a world of good."

Realizing she had a more subdued Tristan walking next to her, instead of the one who teased her constantly, she decided to do a little prodding. "Was it really that bad?"

He winced, almost imperceptibly and shrugged. "I don't know if 'bad' is the exact word to describe it. It was a drastic change from Chilton, that's for sure. Maybe it did me some good. Maybe it didn't do anything for me at all."

"Oh feel free to be more vague."

He grinned and made a tsk-ing sound.  "Vaguer. Tut-tut, Gilmore. You're slipping."

She rolled her eyes. "Whatever. You're avoiding the issue."

"What issue?" he asked playfully and then noticed the dining hall a couple of feet ahead. "Hey, I'm starving. Do you want to grab some lunch?"

"You're incorrigible, anyone ever tell you that?"

"Plenty of times."

"Well, it's true," she shot back when he smirked (oh how she hated that smirk) and glanced at the dining hall. Lunch with Tristan DuGrey? There was no way she'd be able to withstand that and escape unscathed. And she did have a lot of reading to do. "Maybe some other time. I have work."

"Work, of course." He nodded slowly, almost resignedly, and she could tell by his expression that he knew she was really just trying to get out of it tactfully. "See you later, Rory."

He walked away and she wondered why she didn't just follow him. Idiot, she sighed to herself and then trudged to Durfee, by herself.