You can irritate the hell out of one another, fight about the fact that she would only pay for the groceries with her own money instead of theirs, or that he had dyed her favorite white blouse pink. There was the fact that he ran the vacuum on occasion at five in the morning before he went to work, or that she was procrastinating about getting new tires put on the jeep.
And there was the occasional rant about customers at day's end, which she'd tried to listen attentively to in the beginning, even offer helpful suggestions for, until the epiphany dawned that he was merely venting. So, she let it drift into background noise until he was spent and himself again, while she worked on a quilt or went over invoices.
Or his maddening certainty that when the snow began to fall (which, without fail, would begin two hours before he had to wake up for work), she would slide her hand around him and stroke and grasp until he was as wide awake as she. And he'd look up into her bright eyes then and curse the hour but marvel at the woman and wonder how-the-fuck he got so lucky.
And they'd ride the contractions and squeeze to prolong them until she lay atop him breathing hard and laughing, but refusing to release him. And then he'd be hard and hungry for her again.
And so it went.
There comes a point where, convention or no, one realizes that this is it. And it isn't cinematic or even at the forefront of one's consciousness. It's just where it should be, snug, tucked up and warm inside. And though some might find this a kind of taking-it-for-granted, Luke and Lorelai had both well-reached the point in their lives where so much had already been lost as to make this impossible.
It was there and it was staying there. Even when it got a good shaking.
So Luke was smiling as he wiped down tables one frosty late November morning, despite the fact that he'd been awake since three, despite the fact that a pipe had burst in the kitchen at the house the day before. He was just smiling. He wasn't thinking: I'm smiling because of Lorelai. I'm smiling because of 'us'. All he knew was that wiping tables, draining grease traps, and dealing with order changes just hadn't been that big a deal today. And that was nice.
And then he looked up and saw Lorelai's jeep being towed through the square. Adrenalin surging, jaw clenching and cold, he ran outside. When he got to Gypsy's Garage, she and Frank were unhooking the tow chain. And his stomach flipped when he saw an indentation in the driver's door.
"Where's Lorelai?" he demanded. They didn't know. Just gotten a message on the machine to collect the jeep out of a snowbank on the old highway to the Inn.
Back at the diner Luke called the Inn: No, she hadn't arrived.
Tried her cell: Got a voice message.
Then called the house and got the machine. Shit.
He got in the truck then and headed northward.
And, of course, she was fine. Pissed, embarrassed, sure, but fine. They'd missed each other with the phone calls. Her cell phone had died after she'd called the garage. It didn't occur to her that he'd see the jeep and be frightened.
He blustered and yelled at her, as was his right, and she listened tearfully, nodding. Yes, she should have done something about the tires, but black ice was black ice. And this was Connecticut. And she was fine.
He stared at her then as they stood in the kitchen.
"Christ, Lorelai..." he choked out, his anger gone now.
"I know, I know," she soothed.
And they clung to one another then, trying to get warm again, inside and out, trying to reestablish what had shivered and almost been broken between them.
