Author's Notes: Wow! Another batch of wonderful reviews. I'm glad that
people are enjoying this so much. The much asked after phone conversation
is in this chapter, but if you're hoping for something fluffy you'd better
look somewhere else. There's lots of yelling coming up, and few spots of
questionable language. I'm sorry if it offends anyone, but I feel that
Jess probably has a mouth on him when he's upset.
Also, this will likely be the last of the fairly frequent updates, as this is the last chapter that I have fully completed. I originally intended for this to be two chapters, but I felt they worked better staying together. Rest assured that I do have bits of upcoming chapters typed, but there's still the matter of fully fleshing them out and polishing them to my liking.
Disclaimer: I own nothing thus far other than the plot. All events through the end of Season 3 have occurred, but I'm trying to stay spoiler free for the upcoming season. Any similarities between what I've written and what will occur in Season 4 are coincidence. Chapter titles are borrowed from various Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers songs. I don't own those either.
Chapter Three: I Hear a Voice Come On the Wind
Sunday Night
Rory sat on her bed with the phone in her lap. Propped against her pillow was the phone number she'd gotten from Luke. She was alone in the room; Paris wasn't due back from visiting Jamie until the morning just before her first class. Rory'd been debating over calling Jess all weekend. She had picked up the phone, dialed the area code and first three digits, and hung up before going further at least a dozen times since Thursday night. Now it was nearing midnight on Sunday, she had to get up in six hours, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to sleep unless she completed the call.
Picking up the phone, Rory furiously dialed all ten numbers before she could stop herself and waited, shaking and tense, for someone to pick up on the other end. The ringing seemed to go on forever, sharp and trilling in her ear, but truthfully the phone only rang three times before someone picked it up.
"Hello?" The voice belonged to a young sounding girl.
Rory took a deep breath, "Um, hi. Is Jess Mariano there?"
"Uh-huh." There was no indication that the girl was going to give up phone.
"May I talk to him, please?"
"Okay." Footsteps echoed through the phone and a door creaked. "The phone's for you," came softly over the line. The girl had covered the mouthpiece but not well. "It's a girl."
There was a thump and then, "Yeah?" It was him.
"Jess?"
"Rory. Um . . . hey." There was a scuffling on his end of the phone. "Hang on a sec?"
"Sure, I guess." Rory bit her lip and strained to listen to what he was saying.
He sounded frustrated. "What, Lily?"
The girl who answered the phone spoke, "Is that the picture girl?"
Jess sighed, "Yeah. Shouldn't you be asleep by now?"
"Tell her I think she's very pretty," the girl insisted. "Then I'll go."
"Fine." Jess got back on the line. "Lily thinks you're very pretty."
Rory felt herself blush, "Um . . . tell her thank you."
"She says thank you, now will you go to bed?" Footsteps scampered away and a door slammed. "I'm sorry about her," Jess told Rory.
"It's okay. She sounded sweet. Who is she?"
"She's Jimmy's girlfriend's daughter." Jess blew out a heavy breath. "She kinda found one of the pictures of you I took over Christmas last year, when you were throwing tinsel around the diner, and she's been asking about you ever since."
Rory didn't know how she felt hearing that he kept pictures of her around after all this time. "You have pictures of me out?" It sounded almost accusatory in her ears. She wished she could take it back.
Jess hesitated, "Well . . . I use one as a bookmark. I . . . jeez . . . I like having it around, I guess."
"Oh." Rory didn't know what else to say to that.
"I wasn't expecting you to call," Jess admitted. "How did you know where to . . . "
"Luke."
"Oh, right."
"Why are you sorry?" Rory suddenly blurted.
"What?" Jess sounded like he'd been slapped. Verbally, he kind of had been.
"In your letter. You said you were sorry. Why? Are you sorry you loved me?"
Jess swallowed audibly, "No. I'm sorry I didn't know how to handle loving you. That I couldn't do it right."
Rory's chest suddenly felt tight, "Jess . . . I . . . why . . . "
"I never loved anybody before. I didn't know how to do it. I mean, I tried, but it just . . . I couldn't . . . "
"Jess, stop. It's okay. You don't have to say anymore." Rory thought she needed to hear him, but she was starting to feel like she'd made a horrible mistake in calling him.
"No, Rory! I do have to say it! I loved you! I loved you, and it scared me. I was trying to do the right things, to be someone you could be proud of, and instead I screwed it all up. Nothing went the way I thought it would, and I didn't know how to tell you about it. And then I tried to show you how I felt, and I screwed that up too. Everything I touched fell apart, and I didn't want to wreck you too, not any more than I already had."
Rory was crying, tears streaking down her face. "Stop it! I can't do this. This isn't what I want. I thought I was going to call, let you apologize for whatever it is you think you have to apologize for, and then yell at you for writing to me after six months and making me feel all these things that I'm feeling."
She heaved a ragged breath and sobbed harshly before finding her voice again and continuing to yell at him.
"I told you I wasn't going to pine, that you shouldn't expect me to wait for you . . . but part of me has. A part of me still thinks about you every day, wants to share things with you, wants to laugh with you, and it's killing me. I can pretend that I'm fine, and that it was no big deal that you took off, but no matter what I tell my mother or myself, it hurts so much! I thought I could call and hear you out, say my piece, and finally get over you. It's not . . . this isn't going to . . . I'm sorry, Jess. I just can't."
The phone clattered noisily back into its cradle, and Rory pushed the whole thing to the floor, not caring if it fell of the hook again or broke. Burying her head in her pillow, Rory wept bitterly in pain, sadness, and confusion until exhaustion overrode her body and she slipped into a restless and uneven sleep.
**********
At the same time, on the other side of the country, Jess sat listening to the incessant buzzing of the dial tone. It felt like he'd been pelted in the chest with a load of bricks. All he'd wanted was to apologize, to show Rory that he'd grown in some small part, and somehow things had gone incredibly wrong. He had no way of knowing that she was still holding feelings for him. When he'd called her last summer, she'd told him everything she'd just reiterated, and he had believed her. He had written to her because he'd wanted her to know that he knew he did things wrong. He wanted in some way to make things up to her. Apparently he couldn't do that right either.
"Damn it! Damn it!" Jess pushed out of the desk chair and began pacing the office. Now he really had a problem. He didn't know what he'd done, but he had to fix it . . . again. And this time he needed help. Picking up the phone again, he dialed a familiar number, knowing he wasn't going to be warmly received on the other end.
The ringing was ended by a gravelly, "What?"
"Luke."
"Jess? It's almost one in the morning . . . what did you do?" Luke sounded pissed.
Jess decided to continue with his recent honesty kick. "I kinda screwed up, Luke."
Luke grunted, but not in surprise. "You break something or someone out there? I'm not helping you if you got kicked out of another house."
"No. I sort of sent Rory this letter."
"Yeah. I know. She call you?"
"Yeah, just now. I said some stuff, tried to apologize for the way I took off, and she sorta flipped."
Luke kicked a chair out from the apartment table and sat down heavily. "What happened?" He couldn't believe he was helping Jess after everything the boy had put him through, but Luke didn't want to see Rory hurt anymore than she had been.
"When I wrote . . . see right after I left, I called her a couple of times and hung up without saying anything, and she started talking the last time 'cause she knew it was me. She said she might have been in love with me, and I treated her like shit, and I should have just talked to her or at least said good bye. And she was right about all of that."
"Jess, speed it up," Luke barked.
"Yeah, okay, so I wrote and told her that I loved her, and I was sorry." Jess hesitated before continuing. "I told her all that when she called, said I was sorry I didn't know how to treat her better, told her I bailed so I wouldn't hurt her anymore, and she freaked."
"What am I supposed to do about it?" Luke wished Jess was around so he could shake the boy until he reached a point.
"She went off and started yelling that she couldn't talk to me 'cause she still had feelings for me, and she couldn't listen to me because it was too hard." Jess' voice broke, and he knew his breathing was erratic. "How do I fix it?"
"You're asking me for advice about women?" Luke asked incredulously. "Can't you talk to Jimmy about this?"
"Luke, he's just like me. He won't know how to handle this anymore than I do. When stuff like this happens, he runs."
Luke snorted into the phone. "But I'm some sort of idiot savant when it comes to women?"
Jess growled in frustration, "Better you than my dad, whose answer for everything is to take off."
"And where have I seen that before?" Luke asked snidely.
"I fucking know!" Jess shouted. "That's what I'm trying to change here!" Jess took a deep breath to calm down. "You've known Rory forever, Luke. You know how she is. Tell me what I can do to make it better." There was silence in Jess' ear, and he reached out further, "I'm finally asking you for help, Luke. I should have done it a long time ago for a lot of different reasons. I know I gave you a million reasons to be angry with me, but, please, help me."
"I don't think I can, Jess" Luke told him. "I don't think you can fix this in a letter or a phone call. Rory tried not to let anyone see it, but she was devastated when you left. She's going to need time to deal with the fact that she can't pretend you fell of the face of the earth anymore."
Jess sighed, feeling defeated and hopeless again. "So, what? I give up and accept the fact that Rory hates me?"
"I don't think she hates you, Jess. If she hated you, she wouldn't have acknowledged you at all. Just give her time." Luke scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed wearily. "Look, I'll check up on her in a couple of days, okay? If it doesn't look like she's going to try to talk to you again, I'll let you know so you can do something if you still think you have to."
"Otherwise I just have to wait?" Jess asked.
"Yeah. Might do you some good to feel like you used to make her feel, ya know?"
Jess nodded in agreement and then realized that Luke couldn't see him over the phone. "I think I already do, but yeah. Okay. Thank you, Luke."
"I'm not doing this for you, Jess. I'm tired of seeing Rory get hurt and you being the cause."
"I know. I'm sorry." Jess took a slow breath, and it echoed in the phone. "I'm sorry I just took off on you, too. I should have said that when you were here, but . . . . I look at Jimmy, Luke, and I don't want to be almost forty before I finally figure myself out. He's stuck in this weird place, like he still thinks he's twenty or something. He's got his business and all, but he's still, I don't know. Sasha called him Peter Pan the other day."
Luke nodded on the other end of the phone. "Yeah. That sounds about right. Even when he was with your mom he was like that." Luke scrubbed a hand over his tired eyes. "Jess, you aren't your father, no matter what you mother may have told you. Just remember that, okay?"
"Okay."
"I'll talk to you in a few days." Luke hung up without saying good-bye or allowing Jess to do so. Slumping, he let his head rest on the back of the stiff wooden chair for a moment before pushing to his feet with a heavy groan. Just when he thought life was calming down, Jess popped back up and set the whirlwind in motion again. Luke wasn't sure if he wanted to kill the kid or thank him for making life interesting again.
**********
Author's Notes the Second: For those of you planning to review (and I treasure each and every review) I'm toying with a possible Luke/Jimmy phone conversation in a future chapter. Would that be something you'd be interested in? Let me know what you think of that idea as well as this third chapter. Thanks so much for reading!
Also, this will likely be the last of the fairly frequent updates, as this is the last chapter that I have fully completed. I originally intended for this to be two chapters, but I felt they worked better staying together. Rest assured that I do have bits of upcoming chapters typed, but there's still the matter of fully fleshing them out and polishing them to my liking.
Disclaimer: I own nothing thus far other than the plot. All events through the end of Season 3 have occurred, but I'm trying to stay spoiler free for the upcoming season. Any similarities between what I've written and what will occur in Season 4 are coincidence. Chapter titles are borrowed from various Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers songs. I don't own those either.
Chapter Three: I Hear a Voice Come On the Wind
Sunday Night
Rory sat on her bed with the phone in her lap. Propped against her pillow was the phone number she'd gotten from Luke. She was alone in the room; Paris wasn't due back from visiting Jamie until the morning just before her first class. Rory'd been debating over calling Jess all weekend. She had picked up the phone, dialed the area code and first three digits, and hung up before going further at least a dozen times since Thursday night. Now it was nearing midnight on Sunday, she had to get up in six hours, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to sleep unless she completed the call.
Picking up the phone, Rory furiously dialed all ten numbers before she could stop herself and waited, shaking and tense, for someone to pick up on the other end. The ringing seemed to go on forever, sharp and trilling in her ear, but truthfully the phone only rang three times before someone picked it up.
"Hello?" The voice belonged to a young sounding girl.
Rory took a deep breath, "Um, hi. Is Jess Mariano there?"
"Uh-huh." There was no indication that the girl was going to give up phone.
"May I talk to him, please?"
"Okay." Footsteps echoed through the phone and a door creaked. "The phone's for you," came softly over the line. The girl had covered the mouthpiece but not well. "It's a girl."
There was a thump and then, "Yeah?" It was him.
"Jess?"
"Rory. Um . . . hey." There was a scuffling on his end of the phone. "Hang on a sec?"
"Sure, I guess." Rory bit her lip and strained to listen to what he was saying.
He sounded frustrated. "What, Lily?"
The girl who answered the phone spoke, "Is that the picture girl?"
Jess sighed, "Yeah. Shouldn't you be asleep by now?"
"Tell her I think she's very pretty," the girl insisted. "Then I'll go."
"Fine." Jess got back on the line. "Lily thinks you're very pretty."
Rory felt herself blush, "Um . . . tell her thank you."
"She says thank you, now will you go to bed?" Footsteps scampered away and a door slammed. "I'm sorry about her," Jess told Rory.
"It's okay. She sounded sweet. Who is she?"
"She's Jimmy's girlfriend's daughter." Jess blew out a heavy breath. "She kinda found one of the pictures of you I took over Christmas last year, when you were throwing tinsel around the diner, and she's been asking about you ever since."
Rory didn't know how she felt hearing that he kept pictures of her around after all this time. "You have pictures of me out?" It sounded almost accusatory in her ears. She wished she could take it back.
Jess hesitated, "Well . . . I use one as a bookmark. I . . . jeez . . . I like having it around, I guess."
"Oh." Rory didn't know what else to say to that.
"I wasn't expecting you to call," Jess admitted. "How did you know where to . . . "
"Luke."
"Oh, right."
"Why are you sorry?" Rory suddenly blurted.
"What?" Jess sounded like he'd been slapped. Verbally, he kind of had been.
"In your letter. You said you were sorry. Why? Are you sorry you loved me?"
Jess swallowed audibly, "No. I'm sorry I didn't know how to handle loving you. That I couldn't do it right."
Rory's chest suddenly felt tight, "Jess . . . I . . . why . . . "
"I never loved anybody before. I didn't know how to do it. I mean, I tried, but it just . . . I couldn't . . . "
"Jess, stop. It's okay. You don't have to say anymore." Rory thought she needed to hear him, but she was starting to feel like she'd made a horrible mistake in calling him.
"No, Rory! I do have to say it! I loved you! I loved you, and it scared me. I was trying to do the right things, to be someone you could be proud of, and instead I screwed it all up. Nothing went the way I thought it would, and I didn't know how to tell you about it. And then I tried to show you how I felt, and I screwed that up too. Everything I touched fell apart, and I didn't want to wreck you too, not any more than I already had."
Rory was crying, tears streaking down her face. "Stop it! I can't do this. This isn't what I want. I thought I was going to call, let you apologize for whatever it is you think you have to apologize for, and then yell at you for writing to me after six months and making me feel all these things that I'm feeling."
She heaved a ragged breath and sobbed harshly before finding her voice again and continuing to yell at him.
"I told you I wasn't going to pine, that you shouldn't expect me to wait for you . . . but part of me has. A part of me still thinks about you every day, wants to share things with you, wants to laugh with you, and it's killing me. I can pretend that I'm fine, and that it was no big deal that you took off, but no matter what I tell my mother or myself, it hurts so much! I thought I could call and hear you out, say my piece, and finally get over you. It's not . . . this isn't going to . . . I'm sorry, Jess. I just can't."
The phone clattered noisily back into its cradle, and Rory pushed the whole thing to the floor, not caring if it fell of the hook again or broke. Burying her head in her pillow, Rory wept bitterly in pain, sadness, and confusion until exhaustion overrode her body and she slipped into a restless and uneven sleep.
**********
At the same time, on the other side of the country, Jess sat listening to the incessant buzzing of the dial tone. It felt like he'd been pelted in the chest with a load of bricks. All he'd wanted was to apologize, to show Rory that he'd grown in some small part, and somehow things had gone incredibly wrong. He had no way of knowing that she was still holding feelings for him. When he'd called her last summer, she'd told him everything she'd just reiterated, and he had believed her. He had written to her because he'd wanted her to know that he knew he did things wrong. He wanted in some way to make things up to her. Apparently he couldn't do that right either.
"Damn it! Damn it!" Jess pushed out of the desk chair and began pacing the office. Now he really had a problem. He didn't know what he'd done, but he had to fix it . . . again. And this time he needed help. Picking up the phone again, he dialed a familiar number, knowing he wasn't going to be warmly received on the other end.
The ringing was ended by a gravelly, "What?"
"Luke."
"Jess? It's almost one in the morning . . . what did you do?" Luke sounded pissed.
Jess decided to continue with his recent honesty kick. "I kinda screwed up, Luke."
Luke grunted, but not in surprise. "You break something or someone out there? I'm not helping you if you got kicked out of another house."
"No. I sort of sent Rory this letter."
"Yeah. I know. She call you?"
"Yeah, just now. I said some stuff, tried to apologize for the way I took off, and she sorta flipped."
Luke kicked a chair out from the apartment table and sat down heavily. "What happened?" He couldn't believe he was helping Jess after everything the boy had put him through, but Luke didn't want to see Rory hurt anymore than she had been.
"When I wrote . . . see right after I left, I called her a couple of times and hung up without saying anything, and she started talking the last time 'cause she knew it was me. She said she might have been in love with me, and I treated her like shit, and I should have just talked to her or at least said good bye. And she was right about all of that."
"Jess, speed it up," Luke barked.
"Yeah, okay, so I wrote and told her that I loved her, and I was sorry." Jess hesitated before continuing. "I told her all that when she called, said I was sorry I didn't know how to treat her better, told her I bailed so I wouldn't hurt her anymore, and she freaked."
"What am I supposed to do about it?" Luke wished Jess was around so he could shake the boy until he reached a point.
"She went off and started yelling that she couldn't talk to me 'cause she still had feelings for me, and she couldn't listen to me because it was too hard." Jess' voice broke, and he knew his breathing was erratic. "How do I fix it?"
"You're asking me for advice about women?" Luke asked incredulously. "Can't you talk to Jimmy about this?"
"Luke, he's just like me. He won't know how to handle this anymore than I do. When stuff like this happens, he runs."
Luke snorted into the phone. "But I'm some sort of idiot savant when it comes to women?"
Jess growled in frustration, "Better you than my dad, whose answer for everything is to take off."
"And where have I seen that before?" Luke asked snidely.
"I fucking know!" Jess shouted. "That's what I'm trying to change here!" Jess took a deep breath to calm down. "You've known Rory forever, Luke. You know how she is. Tell me what I can do to make it better." There was silence in Jess' ear, and he reached out further, "I'm finally asking you for help, Luke. I should have done it a long time ago for a lot of different reasons. I know I gave you a million reasons to be angry with me, but, please, help me."
"I don't think I can, Jess" Luke told him. "I don't think you can fix this in a letter or a phone call. Rory tried not to let anyone see it, but she was devastated when you left. She's going to need time to deal with the fact that she can't pretend you fell of the face of the earth anymore."
Jess sighed, feeling defeated and hopeless again. "So, what? I give up and accept the fact that Rory hates me?"
"I don't think she hates you, Jess. If she hated you, she wouldn't have acknowledged you at all. Just give her time." Luke scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed wearily. "Look, I'll check up on her in a couple of days, okay? If it doesn't look like she's going to try to talk to you again, I'll let you know so you can do something if you still think you have to."
"Otherwise I just have to wait?" Jess asked.
"Yeah. Might do you some good to feel like you used to make her feel, ya know?"
Jess nodded in agreement and then realized that Luke couldn't see him over the phone. "I think I already do, but yeah. Okay. Thank you, Luke."
"I'm not doing this for you, Jess. I'm tired of seeing Rory get hurt and you being the cause."
"I know. I'm sorry." Jess took a slow breath, and it echoed in the phone. "I'm sorry I just took off on you, too. I should have said that when you were here, but . . . . I look at Jimmy, Luke, and I don't want to be almost forty before I finally figure myself out. He's stuck in this weird place, like he still thinks he's twenty or something. He's got his business and all, but he's still, I don't know. Sasha called him Peter Pan the other day."
Luke nodded on the other end of the phone. "Yeah. That sounds about right. Even when he was with your mom he was like that." Luke scrubbed a hand over his tired eyes. "Jess, you aren't your father, no matter what you mother may have told you. Just remember that, okay?"
"Okay."
"I'll talk to you in a few days." Luke hung up without saying good-bye or allowing Jess to do so. Slumping, he let his head rest on the back of the stiff wooden chair for a moment before pushing to his feet with a heavy groan. Just when he thought life was calming down, Jess popped back up and set the whirlwind in motion again. Luke wasn't sure if he wanted to kill the kid or thank him for making life interesting again.
**********
Author's Notes the Second: For those of you planning to review (and I treasure each and every review) I'm toying with a possible Luke/Jimmy phone conversation in a future chapter. Would that be something you'd be interested in? Let me know what you think of that idea as well as this third chapter. Thanks so much for reading!