disclaimer in the first chapter
author's note
: thanks for all of the kind reviews, especially for the ubercrazy one that appeared in my inbox last night...you know who you are. Hilarious -- cuz it reminded me of me in a review. :-D


They are two minutes early for their appointment; Kirk is waiting for them at the stables, face bright and nose rather red from the somewhat chilly night air. Luke grumbles only slightly as he helps Lorelai into the carriage. It's a gorgeous, old-fashioned deal, with a sheltered area for whomever is riding inside and a place up top for the driver to perch himself.

"Do you like it?" Kirk asks anxiously. "It's a renovated stage coach. I bought it off of eBay. Had to outbid a Wild West aficionado in Tokyo."

"It's ... enclosed." Luke can't think of another way to describe the carriage. Sure, it offers privacy, but Luke thinks that the entire reason for taking a carriage-ride in the night is so that one can look up and view the stars with someone close to one. It isn't like the carriage can be used for an emergency make-out session, either. It's not that shielded from the outside world; the windows have no panes. Also, there is some sort of shelf extending over his head, and he has to slouch a bit.

Lorelai makes a shuddering movement as Kirk closes the door before clambering on up to his post.

"If I were claustrophobic, I would be two seconds away from throwing up all over you." She rests her head on his shoulder, then snorts. "Don't look now, but I see something brighter than the moon glarin' at us."

Luke glances straight ahead and catches an eyeful of several inches of very white ankles in black socks and dress shoes. Geeze, Kirk seems to get more and more pale each time Luke happens to catch a glimpse of his skin (and, well, he knows the color of Kirk's skin fairly well, it pains him to admit).

"Curtains," he says. "You'll need curtains."

"A-yup."

The carriage lurches forward with a sudden, jarring start. Lorelai is thrown from her seat into the middle of the coach. Luke leans down and helps her up, sitting her next to him and gripping her arm tightly lest she should take another fly.

"That was elegant."

"We need to get this entire room cushioned or padded."

"Are we the first to test out this sideshow ride?" asks Luke. Lorelai shrugs. "Great."

"Hey, don't think of it like an extremely bumpy carnival ride," she says. "Think of it like it's one of those vibrating beds like in the motel rooms."

"What?"

"Yeah, that was so much better in my head." She clutches his arm more tightly as they go down a particularly bumpy patch of gravel. "When I was -- ow! watch it, Kirk! -- a kid, I used to dream about going to a motel and trying out one of those vibrating beds. I had this idea that I would show up with twenty dollars in quarters and spend an afternoon there."

"You ever get to try it?"

"Rory was seven." Even in the dim light, Luke can see her smile softly. "She threw up all over the place, including our luggage. But it was great."

They dip into a soft silence after that, adjusting to the buzzing in their bodies because of the rough ride. Lorelai lets out a low hum, an acoustic measurement of the velocity of the carriage's jolting.

Her humming gets a good deal more intense; louder and deeper. In fact, it sounds just a tad to deep to be her. Luke glances at her, but she's playing with a jacket on his coat and isn't paying attention to much of anything else. He's about to say something -- he has his mouth open! -- when suddenly the humming breaks into singing.

For the first moment or two, he's too shocked to try to figure out what's happening. It enters his brain, dimly, that someone is crooning a love song in a crooked, creaking voice. It certainly isn't Lorelai, as the voice is most definitely masculine. And yet ... there seems to be a certain trait to it ...

Three seconds into the song, it hits him.

"It's Kirk," he tells Lorelai, feeling as if the anger will seethe out of his very pores.

Lorelai reaches up and taps on the paneling beside Kirk's ankles. The singing does not desist. She bangs a little harder. If anything, the song goes on with more intensity, though Luke thought that maybe it was modified slightly in order to fit the beat of Lorelai's knocking.

Luke reaches over and yanks on Kirk's pants, a pull cord doorbell. The screeching stops, and, suddenly, Kirk's head appears between his ankles. Luke shudders at how flexible Kirk is, disturbing images flitting through his mind.

"Kirk, what are you doing?" Lorelai asks in a voice all too calm for Luke's liking. He decides to put in his own two cents.

"Kirk!" he screams. And then, again, "Kirk!"

Even upside down, looking down at them from his perch above, Kirk gives the appearance of a disrespected elder, throwing his heavy eyebrows to his hairline and making his eyes follow suit, his mouth fashioned into a frown.

"I," he explains patiently, as if to a very small child (Luke mentally prepares to strangle Kirk), "was serenading you."

Oh, geeze.

"Kirk," Lorelai quips, "your asonia is well-known, no need to demonstrate."

Luke is not halfway near as amused by Kirk's declaration as she seems to be.

"You were what?"

"Serenading you. It's romantic. It's a little sumpin-sumpin" (and Kirk makes that the most white-sounding thing that he's ever uttered, Luke notes) "to take away your anxiety about performing." He swings back proper side up, and once more all that they see of him are his thin legs.

"Anxiety ... about ... performing?"

Luke hates how Kirk always brings out the emphasis in his speech. It isn't enough that the man drives him crazy; no, Kirk must also make Luke's speech patterns as strained and unusual as possible. Sometimes, Luke feels that if he doesn't go hoarse from screaming at Taylor, he will from the wild ups and downs his voice takes when he's talking to Kirk.

"Well, I know that you and Lorelai have yet to consu--" but Kirk can't finish, because Luke yanks up and pulls Kirk down with several thuds and a disturbingly nasty sounding crack. "Ouch!"

"Does the entire town know that we haven't slept together yet?" Luke hisses at Lorelai.

"I don't know!" she wails. "I've been drinking less coffee, you think that they would've noticed!"

"What does coffee have to do with this?"

"Everything."

Luke really doesn't know how to respond to that. He starts drumming his fingers on the wooden structure of the coach.

"Okay, what?"

"I drink coffee." Lorelai's whisper becomes strained in her agitation. "I drink less coffee when I'm, you know, active."

"Active?" Oh, God, please don't let her say it. He doesn't want to notice every little bit of coffee that she's drinking and know that she's active or not, even if he very well knows if she is or not. It is right up there with knowing her cycle. People think it's personal and oh-so-couple, but how can one enjoy knowing it? It's just disturbing, the coffee thing, that is.

"Having sex, Luke!" Ah, yes, she said it. Luke manages to hit his head on an overhanging as he sits of straighter. "I drink less coffee when I'm having sex, and apparently the entire town knows those."

"I don't know this!" His lowered tones take on a bit of irony.

"Well, yes, apparently you go to the Luke Danes School of Denial."

He's been a top student there for several years, first majoring in Denial of Interest, then adding others along the way, including Denial of Attraction, Denial of Fantasy That Is about Lorelai, and Denial of Insanity.

"Are you sure you're not overreacting? The whole town can't know."

"Mrs. Kim made a reference to it."

"Ah." Well, then. Though they've been speaking in whispers, he lowers his voice even more. "So, wait, you've been drinking less coffee in order to dupe the town into thinking that you and I have been sleeping together?"

"Yes."

Bless her, she didn't seem to be at all in jest.

"I'm ... glad that you were trying to protect my manly position in this town, but you didn't need to do that."

"I was trying to get into a state of mind."

Lorelai Gilmore has to get into a state of mind in order to sleep with her boyfriend Luke Danes.

"Let's talk about this in the room," he says as he motions with his head toward Kirk.

He's not angry, he's not. He's just, well, frustrated by Lorelai's actions. He tries to relax, a bit, and wonders if Kirk heard anything that he and Lorelai were talking about. The man has very good hearing, so it's quite possible that he did. However, he thought that he was creating a lot of background noise which might have distracted Kirk.

"Do you think he heard anything?" she whispers.

"No," Kirk answered. "I didn't hear anything."

"Oh, good," Luke replies sarcastically.

"You know, Lorelai, Luke, I can tell that you two kids really love each other." Kirk lets out a long breath. Lorelai snickers into her hand. "You look at each other the way that Lulu and I do. When I look at Lulu, I have this certain quality in my gaze that just screams --"

"'Norman Bates?'" suggests Luke under his breath. Lorelai stops her sniggering long enough to elbow him with a grin. He can't tell if she's encouraging him or asking him to be nice to Kirk.

"-- devotion. Lulu makes my eyes shine out, and your eyes are bright like the sun. It's a wonder you haven't blinded each other, because you're not supposed to look directly into the sun."

A cloud bursts above them, and they are assaulted by a random storm, pebble-like drops of rain pelting them with a heavy hand. Kirk squeals.

"I suppose that it's a good thing we'd already planned on going back to the room."

"Do you think," Lorelai asks over Kirk's girlish screams of distress, "if he realizes that he's already turned the carriage around toward the Dragonfly?"

The ride back to their room is quiet, partially because Luke was trying to figure out what to say once they were alone, partially because Kirk was still making little noises every time a drop of water hit him. They dashed out of the cab, Lorelai calling last minute instruction to Kirk to make sure he dries 'the pluvial run' off of the horses, and into the bungalow.

Though they dashed, they're both dripping wet. Lorelai grabs a towel from the bathroom immediately and starts drying her hair. He manages to rummage through the wardrobe and find two incredibly clean-looking robes. He tosses her one, and she catches it mid-air.

"Wait, I've got just the thing," and Lorelai turns to her bag.

"I don't think you'll find a hot coffee in there," he tries, an attempt at making the mood lighter.

"Here," she says, handing him a large, thick pair of woolen socks from out of her purse. "These are my dad's. That means that they probably cost more than everything that you and I are wearing put together." She stops and quirks a brow at him, as he stares at the socks in his hands. "I know that you have a really bad history with socks, but these are family."

So then he kisses her, because that's the only thing that he can think of to do when she hands him her father's socks.

"Hey," he says when they're done, dipping down to touch foreheads with her. They stand there, forehead to forehead, just looking at one another, for several moments.

"Hey," she at last replies, nuzzling his nose with her own. "You really don't wanna wear those socks, do you?"

"I just wanted to say something."

He waits for her consent, as he really doesn't want to begin this and have her interrupt him halfway through. Luke remedies that thought. He doesn't want her to interrupt him in order to stop him halfway through.

"Go ahead."

He feels like he's sixteen.

"We don't have to have sex." Ah, yes, there it is, with the teenage appropriate line. "What I meant to say is that, obviously, you're still in an adjustment period with us."

"Oh, God, Luke, I'm so sorry," Lorelai exclaims. "No, it's not that I don't want to have sex with you. I do, I do want to have sex with you."

"Good."

"I want to have lots and lots of sex with you."

"And I want to have lots and lots of sex with you, Lorelai. So what is it?"

"I just ..." Lorelai trails off. "I don't know! I just wanted our first time to be special. It has to be perfect, you know."

Luke stares at her, as she's clearly gone mad.

"It won't be perfect."

"No, it -- what?" She blinks. "That's not your line. Your line is, oh, 'Don't worry, Lorelai, it'll be perfect because it's us,' which would be your way of trying to make me feel better but would only serve to prove my point."

"We're following a script now? No wonder that I'm always so lost."

"I'm trying to be serious here, Luke."

He throws his hands up in frustration.

"What do you want, Lorelai?" he asks. "Do you think that our relationship comes with a list? The top ten ways to get into bed with Luke Danes without breaking a dinner plate? Because it doesn't! It's trial and error, it's two people who are comfortable enough to go to the next level!" He lowers his voice. "You have to understand that."

"You come with a list?

"More along the line of instructions, now that I think of it."

"Well," Lorelai laughs, not exactly nervous but well away from it. "That is certainly something to keep in mind." She sighs. "I'm sorry. I know that it's me, and I'm terrible. I just don't want to disappoint you."

"You're not going to live up to every single expectation that everybody has for you, Lorelai," he says. "I'm not your mother. I don't expect our first time to be magically wonderful."

"God, if my mother expects our first time to be magically wonderful, I'm seeing a shrink."

"Lorelai."

"I know. I just -- we're so good for each other."

"Exactly: good but not perfect." Luke sighs. "You know, life's never going to be perfect for us. For one thing, you're always going to talk too much."

He pauses, waiting for it. Lorelai looks up at him, and he sees her face quirk in understanding; he's not long in limbo.

"You're always going to wear too much flannel."

He smiles. He knows her too well. This is what their relationship is made out of: sometimes bickering, sometimes Lorelai acting absolutely insane, sometimes just understanding what one is trying to say without the other having to come with Scrabble tiles and spell it out.

Is this comfort in their relationship already, or is it a false lull? Luke finds that he doesn't care, as long as he can continue just being with Lorelai for the longest of times. He knows that they're going to have times when he's going to look up and find that she's done something upsetting, but he also knows that those pass. Isn't that what a relationship is all about?

And so he says: "But we're going to be fine, Lorelai."

"We're gonna be fine. Not perfect. But fine works for me."

"Yeah."


finis

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