Author's Notes: Well, here it is! It took long than I wanted it to, but
my job's been tedious lately, and when I get home the last thing I want to
do is sit in front of the computer. On a positive note, Chapter Seven has
been mostly written for months, so it'll be up quicker that this one was.
My deepest thanks to all of you for reading, and extra thanks to those who take the time to review. The reviews really motivate me to keep going, and I appreciate all of them.
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 Six: I've Got a Feeling So Strong
Rory pushed her hands though her hair again and looked at the clock. She'd been studying for hours and still wasn't anywhere near ready for her upcoming finals. Sure, they were two weeks away, but they were also going to be incredibly tough. Two more weeks on top of the ongoing studying she'd been doing all semester didn't seem like it would be anywhere near enough time to finish everything that was coming up due.
However, looming deadlines or not, there was only so much of each subject she could take at one sitting. Rory thought she would break down if she tried to cram one more important historical date or name into her head, so she shunted her history notes aside and pulled out the research for her literature paper. As she was shuffling through her notes for her outline, the phone rang.
She reached over with a groan and answered the offending hunk of plastic. "Hello?"
"Hey, babe. You sound exhausted."
"Good to know I sound like I feel," Rory sighed.
"As long as you still look pretty."
"I'm afraid I look like I sound," Rory said, looking over her shoulder at the dorm room's somewhat wavy mirror.
"Shame on you! What have I been teaching you all your life?"
"Mom, I'm really not in the mood for this."
"Sorry," Lorelai giggled. "I was just calling to let you know that I got you out of Friday night dinners until the semester's over."
Rory hadn't even remembered that she'd asked her mother to do that. She didn't even feel like she had the time to call her grandparents herself. "Oh. That's great. I just don't feel like I can take the break; I really need to study."
"The grandparents were more than understanding," Lorelai assured her. "Of course, they're insisting that I show up anyway, so they can still get their weekly inquisition in."
"You could just not go."
Lorelai scoffed. "Yeah, sure. I skip it, and Grandma takes it out on us for months. Pass, thank you very much."
"Aw, my mommy loves me soooo much!"
"Exactly. The things I do for you."
"It's not that bad, Mom. Just stop a Luke's first, get good and caffinated, and eat something deep-fried before you go to Grandma and Grandpa's."
"Uh, there may be a problem with that," Lorelai said.
"What did you do?" Rory asked.
"What did YOU do?" Lorelai countered.
"What?"
"I had a little chat with Luke the other day about you."
Rory felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. "How mad are you?" she asked quietly.
"On a scale from Gandhi to Joan Crawford in a closet full of wire hangers, I'm about a Madonna with photographers in her kids' faces." Lorelai took a deep breath, "But, I'm trying to keep it under control for now."
"I appreciate that," Rory told her mother.
"Rory, why didn't you just talk to me about this?" Lorelai wanted to know.
Rory sighed and weighed her words carefully. Even as a small child, the one thing she'd dreaded was upsetting her mother. For so long they were all the other had, and it hurt when they were mad at each other. But Rory was at a loss to find the words that could explain everything to Lorelai without starting an argument and making everything worse.
"Mom, promise me that you'll let me talk and not interrupt me every twenty seconds to argue."
Lorelai huffed but agreed, "Fine."
"Okay. Thank you." Rory paused again to collect her thoughts one last time. She decided to start with the facts. "You never liked Jess. You were kind of happy he was gone. When he left there was so much going on, my life was so crazy, and maybe a small part of me was happy, too. Happy that I didn't have to deal with the problems he and I were having on top of everything else. And then there was Europe. Weeks of traveling where we barely had time to sleep much less time for me to think about Jess leaving and what that really meant."
Rory stopped to catch her breath and waited for Lorelai to jump in and protest something. When she didn't, Rory was surprised and also grateful that her train of thought wasn't going to be derailed.
"The thing is, Mom, we had to come home eventually, and every other direction I turned there was something that reminded me of him or something he did. But I'd built up this mask around everyone that made it seem like it wasn't a big deal that Jess left without even saying good-bye. I wanted to talk about it, about how much I was hurting, but I couldn't. Everybody, especially you, thought that I was fine. I didn't want to let anybody down, so I just bottled it up and kept going like it was all normal. Then that letter came, and I couldn't do that anymore, but maybe I shouldn't. Maybe it's time for me to deal with what happened, but in order to do that, I have to do it my own way. You would have tried to talk me out of it or to wait if I'd come to you with it."
Lorelai was stunned. She didn't have any idea that Rory had felt that way. "Rory, you don't have to pretend with me. If you're upset about anything you can tell me. If you had just said that you missed Jess and wanted to talk to him, I would have supported that."
"Then why, when I opened that letter, did you tell me I wasn't ready to deal with him?" Rory wanted to know.
"Sweetie, you were hysterical in a ball on the floor. You really weren't ready to deal with it."
"I was in a ball on the floor because I HADN'T dealt with him! Maybe if I had, if I'd felt like I could grieve when it all ended, Jess getting in contact with me wouldn't have caused such chaos now!" Rory was yelling now, her voice echoing in the small room.
"Don't raise your voice with me!" Lorelai snapped back. "Besides, I thought you got plenty of time to grieve and be comforted with Luke!"
"Luke is in the same position I am! Everyone was telling him he was better off not having to worry about Jess, that Jess was going to screw up anyway. 'Better now than later, and hey! at least he didn't steal anything from the diner, right?' Luke was hurt too, and he couldn't let anyone see that anymore than I could." Rory's voice was still raised, but it was shakier because she was trying not to burst into tears. "We didn't talk about it," she told Lorelai, "we just understood."
Lorelai was struck by how much Rory's words were echoing what Luke had said. There was now a tiny gnawing at the back of her brain suggesting that she'd been letting her daughter and her friend down. "Rory , I . . ."
"I know, Mom. You didn't mean it, and neither did anyone else. It's still what happened, though." Rory sighed and wiped the only tear that had escaped off of her cheek. "This doesn't really have anything to do with you, anyway. This is about me and what I have to do to get over this and get on with my life."
"I still don't think it's a good idea, Rory. You've got too much going for you to get messed up with him again," Lorelai said firmly.
"Well, Mom, it doesn't really matter what you think about it," Rory told her. "This is something I have to do without you holding my hand."
"I'm not going to like it."
"You don't have to. It's time for us to grow up a little, Mom."
Lorelai knew that Rory was right, that they were too dependent on each other, but she was still affronted that Rory had actually come out and said it. "Fine, do what you want," she tossed out petulantly.
Rory heaved a dejected sigh. Now she could add an upset mother to the growing list of things making her head spin. "Good-night, Mom."
"Good-night," Lorelai said and abruptly hung up the phone, leaving Rory to shiver with the chill that had accompanied the words.
"Well, that went very well," Rory told herself sarcastically. "Couldn't have gone better." She looked down at the piles of work on her desk. "At least you still love me," she sighed and caressed the spines of her books.
Twenty minutes of studying later, the phone rang again jolting Rory out of a literature induced haze. She groped on the floor around her chair where she'd dropped the phone earlier.
"I know you're upset, Mom, but let's not start round two already, okay?" she asked quickly.
"This isn't Lorelai."
Rory almost dropped the phone back on the floor. Or maybe almost threw the phone on the floor would be a better description. "Jess?"
"Hey."
"Um, what . . . I mean how did you . . ."
"I can talk to Luke, too."
"Oh, sure. Sure you can." Rory felt like the earth was spinning backwards.
"So, how are you?" Jess asked.
"Busy," Rory snapped.
Jess made an understanding noise in the back of his throat. "That your way of saying you don't want to talk?"
"Yes."
"Okay. I'll call you back," Jess said. "Talk to you soon." And then he hung up.
Rory stared at the phone in confusion. She was starting to think she'd forgotten to wake up that morning and was trapped in some sort of bizarre dream. That was really the only explanation for her day.
**********
The next afternoon Rory returned back to her room to find a note in Paris' tidy scrawl taped to the door.
'There's a message for you on the machine. Sit down before you listen to it -- P'
Rory regarded the note skeptically as she kicked the door shut. Mentally, she ran down a list of all of the people who might call her that would necessitate sitting down. It wasn't an overly long list: her father, Sherry, her grandmother, and given recent events, her mother. Still, she didn't think she actually needed to sit to hear anything any of those people had to say. She stabbed at the blinking button and started sorting through the mail Paris had left on her desk.
Her head snapped up and the mail fluttered, forgotten, to the floor. For the first time in her life, Rory wished she'd listened to Paris.
*beep* "Hey. Luke wasn't sure when you were done with classes. I guess now isn't when. I'm calling back tonight. Nine o'clock. I still have to say some things you need to hear." *beep*
Rory gaped at the answering machine as the creepy little mechanical voice declared that there were no more messages. She slapped frantically at the delete button until the voice announced that all messages had been deleted. Rory stood there numbly for a few moments and then turned, almost on automatic pilot, and crawled into her bed, pulling the blanket up over her head. If she hid, then she wouldn't have to face it. Him. Jess. Because there was no Jess under the blanket. The world outside the cocoon of soft blue and white cotton ceased to exist as long as she stayed hidden.
She'd almost convinced herself of that an hour and a half later when Paris returned to find Rory still hiding in her bed.
"You didn't sit, did you?" Paris asked.
"No," Rory muttered from under her protective shell.
"I warned you."
"You could have done a better job. You could have said something more like, 'Rory, it's imperative you sit because your world's about be flipped upside down again,' or 'Rory, the answering machine is set to self- destruct. Don't play it!'"
Paris chortled in amusement. "Okay, Mr. Phelps. I'll keep that in mind for next time. So, what are you going to do?"
"I'm doing it," Rory insisted.
"You're going to hide under your blanket?"
"Yes. And perhaps cover my ears and hum."
"Because if you don't hear the phone ring, then it never happened?"
"Exactly."
Reaching out, Paris lifted the blanket off of Rory's head. "It's just a phone message."
Rory sat up, "No, it's not. It's Jess calling back after he said he'd call back. The day after he said he call back. Not two days, not a week, the NEXT day! It's against practically everything I know about him. If this little difference is throwing me off this much, what's a major change going to do? What if he makes some huge revelation over the phone? It might actually kill me!"
"Now you're just being dramatic."
"You know my mother. Does that really surprise you?"
"You don't have to talk to him," Paris reminded her frazzled roommate. "You're still the one in control."
"Is that what this feeling is?" Rory asked. "Funny, it feels more like panic."
"Just tell him you don't want to talk to him, and that's that," Paris said matter-of-factly.
Rory only wailed and hid her head in her hands. Just because she had to talk to Jess to get some sort of closure, that didn't mean she wanted to rush head-long into it. There was enough stress in her life without willingly piling on more. Taking her deep breath, she made a decision. She stood quickly and started haphazardly shoving her books into her bookbag.
"Okay, Paris. Here's what we're going to do. I am going to the library. When Jess calls, if you answer the phone, you tell him I'm studying . . . and ONLY tell him that I'm studying." Rory narrowed her gaze at her roommate. "You will NOT say anything else. Not what you think of him, what you think I think of him, nothing!"
Paris reluctantly agreed. "I still don't see why you just don't tell him off and be done with it."
"Because," Rory huffed, "I'm not done with it. I DO have to talk to him; I have to close this part of my life so I can get on with the rest of it." She yanked on her coat. "But that doesn't mean I have to look forward to it."
"Coward," Paris muttered under her breath.
"Yeah, well, the Wizard forgot to mail me my courage. I'll be back later, Tin Man." Rory slipped out the door, and the sound of Paris calling down the hall after her, asking what she was talking about, traveled after her.
**********
Rory managed to dodge Jess' daily calls for three days by hiding in the library. That all ended on the fourth afternoon when she stopped back in her room after classes to pick up a few books and drop off the ones that she wasn't planning on using that night before she went to the library. The phone was ringing when she pushed through the door, and she answered it without thinking twice.
"Hello?"
"You done avoiding me yet?"
Rory mentally cursed herself. She should have known. "Jess," she said tersely.
"Rory," he mimicked.
"What do you want?" she asked. Maybe if she pretended she didn't know what he was talking about, her dodging him wouldn't seem so blatant.
"I want to talk to you," Jess said simply.
His voice sounded rough and raspy to Rory, like he hadn't been sleeping or had started smoking again. The latter cause was more likely, and not appealing to Rory, but the results still made her knees feel soft. She'd always loved the timbre of Jess' voice. She shook her head to dislodge the thought; she couldn't let something that simple get to her. Taking a deep breath, she unloaded her mind with machine-gun rapidity.
"Look, Jess. I can't do this now. It's the end of the semester. I've got finals, and then I've got to face the holidays with my grandparents and my dad and Sherry. Luke and my mom are at each other's throats, things between my mom and me are tense, and I haven't had a decent night's sleep in almost a week. This just isn't a good time for me to have to deal with you on top of it all."
"Then when is? I'm not going away this time, Rory." He sounded like he truly meant every word of that statement.
She sigh wearily. "After the new year. Everything will calm down after the first. I promise I'll call you after that. Just, please, leave me alone until then?"
"Okay, but I'm going to hold you to that promise." He sounded almost menacing. She wasn't completely sure he didn't mean to sound that way.
"I promise. Good-bye, Jess." She hung up before he could reply. At least she'd have this last word this time.
**********
Author's Notes the Second: The next chapter should be up in about a week, and it will contain . . . The Phone Call! Stay Tuned!
My deepest thanks to all of you for reading, and extra thanks to those who take the time to review. The reviews really motivate me to keep going, and I appreciate all of them.
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 Six: I've Got a Feeling So Strong
Rory pushed her hands though her hair again and looked at the clock. She'd been studying for hours and still wasn't anywhere near ready for her upcoming finals. Sure, they were two weeks away, but they were also going to be incredibly tough. Two more weeks on top of the ongoing studying she'd been doing all semester didn't seem like it would be anywhere near enough time to finish everything that was coming up due.
However, looming deadlines or not, there was only so much of each subject she could take at one sitting. Rory thought she would break down if she tried to cram one more important historical date or name into her head, so she shunted her history notes aside and pulled out the research for her literature paper. As she was shuffling through her notes for her outline, the phone rang.
She reached over with a groan and answered the offending hunk of plastic. "Hello?"
"Hey, babe. You sound exhausted."
"Good to know I sound like I feel," Rory sighed.
"As long as you still look pretty."
"I'm afraid I look like I sound," Rory said, looking over her shoulder at the dorm room's somewhat wavy mirror.
"Shame on you! What have I been teaching you all your life?"
"Mom, I'm really not in the mood for this."
"Sorry," Lorelai giggled. "I was just calling to let you know that I got you out of Friday night dinners until the semester's over."
Rory hadn't even remembered that she'd asked her mother to do that. She didn't even feel like she had the time to call her grandparents herself. "Oh. That's great. I just don't feel like I can take the break; I really need to study."
"The grandparents were more than understanding," Lorelai assured her. "Of course, they're insisting that I show up anyway, so they can still get their weekly inquisition in."
"You could just not go."
Lorelai scoffed. "Yeah, sure. I skip it, and Grandma takes it out on us for months. Pass, thank you very much."
"Aw, my mommy loves me soooo much!"
"Exactly. The things I do for you."
"It's not that bad, Mom. Just stop a Luke's first, get good and caffinated, and eat something deep-fried before you go to Grandma and Grandpa's."
"Uh, there may be a problem with that," Lorelai said.
"What did you do?" Rory asked.
"What did YOU do?" Lorelai countered.
"What?"
"I had a little chat with Luke the other day about you."
Rory felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. "How mad are you?" she asked quietly.
"On a scale from Gandhi to Joan Crawford in a closet full of wire hangers, I'm about a Madonna with photographers in her kids' faces." Lorelai took a deep breath, "But, I'm trying to keep it under control for now."
"I appreciate that," Rory told her mother.
"Rory, why didn't you just talk to me about this?" Lorelai wanted to know.
Rory sighed and weighed her words carefully. Even as a small child, the one thing she'd dreaded was upsetting her mother. For so long they were all the other had, and it hurt when they were mad at each other. But Rory was at a loss to find the words that could explain everything to Lorelai without starting an argument and making everything worse.
"Mom, promise me that you'll let me talk and not interrupt me every twenty seconds to argue."
Lorelai huffed but agreed, "Fine."
"Okay. Thank you." Rory paused again to collect her thoughts one last time. She decided to start with the facts. "You never liked Jess. You were kind of happy he was gone. When he left there was so much going on, my life was so crazy, and maybe a small part of me was happy, too. Happy that I didn't have to deal with the problems he and I were having on top of everything else. And then there was Europe. Weeks of traveling where we barely had time to sleep much less time for me to think about Jess leaving and what that really meant."
Rory stopped to catch her breath and waited for Lorelai to jump in and protest something. When she didn't, Rory was surprised and also grateful that her train of thought wasn't going to be derailed.
"The thing is, Mom, we had to come home eventually, and every other direction I turned there was something that reminded me of him or something he did. But I'd built up this mask around everyone that made it seem like it wasn't a big deal that Jess left without even saying good-bye. I wanted to talk about it, about how much I was hurting, but I couldn't. Everybody, especially you, thought that I was fine. I didn't want to let anybody down, so I just bottled it up and kept going like it was all normal. Then that letter came, and I couldn't do that anymore, but maybe I shouldn't. Maybe it's time for me to deal with what happened, but in order to do that, I have to do it my own way. You would have tried to talk me out of it or to wait if I'd come to you with it."
Lorelai was stunned. She didn't have any idea that Rory had felt that way. "Rory, you don't have to pretend with me. If you're upset about anything you can tell me. If you had just said that you missed Jess and wanted to talk to him, I would have supported that."
"Then why, when I opened that letter, did you tell me I wasn't ready to deal with him?" Rory wanted to know.
"Sweetie, you were hysterical in a ball on the floor. You really weren't ready to deal with it."
"I was in a ball on the floor because I HADN'T dealt with him! Maybe if I had, if I'd felt like I could grieve when it all ended, Jess getting in contact with me wouldn't have caused such chaos now!" Rory was yelling now, her voice echoing in the small room.
"Don't raise your voice with me!" Lorelai snapped back. "Besides, I thought you got plenty of time to grieve and be comforted with Luke!"
"Luke is in the same position I am! Everyone was telling him he was better off not having to worry about Jess, that Jess was going to screw up anyway. 'Better now than later, and hey! at least he didn't steal anything from the diner, right?' Luke was hurt too, and he couldn't let anyone see that anymore than I could." Rory's voice was still raised, but it was shakier because she was trying not to burst into tears. "We didn't talk about it," she told Lorelai, "we just understood."
Lorelai was struck by how much Rory's words were echoing what Luke had said. There was now a tiny gnawing at the back of her brain suggesting that she'd been letting her daughter and her friend down. "Rory , I . . ."
"I know, Mom. You didn't mean it, and neither did anyone else. It's still what happened, though." Rory sighed and wiped the only tear that had escaped off of her cheek. "This doesn't really have anything to do with you, anyway. This is about me and what I have to do to get over this and get on with my life."
"I still don't think it's a good idea, Rory. You've got too much going for you to get messed up with him again," Lorelai said firmly.
"Well, Mom, it doesn't really matter what you think about it," Rory told her. "This is something I have to do without you holding my hand."
"I'm not going to like it."
"You don't have to. It's time for us to grow up a little, Mom."
Lorelai knew that Rory was right, that they were too dependent on each other, but she was still affronted that Rory had actually come out and said it. "Fine, do what you want," she tossed out petulantly.
Rory heaved a dejected sigh. Now she could add an upset mother to the growing list of things making her head spin. "Good-night, Mom."
"Good-night," Lorelai said and abruptly hung up the phone, leaving Rory to shiver with the chill that had accompanied the words.
"Well, that went very well," Rory told herself sarcastically. "Couldn't have gone better." She looked down at the piles of work on her desk. "At least you still love me," she sighed and caressed the spines of her books.
Twenty minutes of studying later, the phone rang again jolting Rory out of a literature induced haze. She groped on the floor around her chair where she'd dropped the phone earlier.
"I know you're upset, Mom, but let's not start round two already, okay?" she asked quickly.
"This isn't Lorelai."
Rory almost dropped the phone back on the floor. Or maybe almost threw the phone on the floor would be a better description. "Jess?"
"Hey."
"Um, what . . . I mean how did you . . ."
"I can talk to Luke, too."
"Oh, sure. Sure you can." Rory felt like the earth was spinning backwards.
"So, how are you?" Jess asked.
"Busy," Rory snapped.
Jess made an understanding noise in the back of his throat. "That your way of saying you don't want to talk?"
"Yes."
"Okay. I'll call you back," Jess said. "Talk to you soon." And then he hung up.
Rory stared at the phone in confusion. She was starting to think she'd forgotten to wake up that morning and was trapped in some sort of bizarre dream. That was really the only explanation for her day.
**********
The next afternoon Rory returned back to her room to find a note in Paris' tidy scrawl taped to the door.
'There's a message for you on the machine. Sit down before you listen to it -- P'
Rory regarded the note skeptically as she kicked the door shut. Mentally, she ran down a list of all of the people who might call her that would necessitate sitting down. It wasn't an overly long list: her father, Sherry, her grandmother, and given recent events, her mother. Still, she didn't think she actually needed to sit to hear anything any of those people had to say. She stabbed at the blinking button and started sorting through the mail Paris had left on her desk.
Her head snapped up and the mail fluttered, forgotten, to the floor. For the first time in her life, Rory wished she'd listened to Paris.
*beep* "Hey. Luke wasn't sure when you were done with classes. I guess now isn't when. I'm calling back tonight. Nine o'clock. I still have to say some things you need to hear." *beep*
Rory gaped at the answering machine as the creepy little mechanical voice declared that there were no more messages. She slapped frantically at the delete button until the voice announced that all messages had been deleted. Rory stood there numbly for a few moments and then turned, almost on automatic pilot, and crawled into her bed, pulling the blanket up over her head. If she hid, then she wouldn't have to face it. Him. Jess. Because there was no Jess under the blanket. The world outside the cocoon of soft blue and white cotton ceased to exist as long as she stayed hidden.
She'd almost convinced herself of that an hour and a half later when Paris returned to find Rory still hiding in her bed.
"You didn't sit, did you?" Paris asked.
"No," Rory muttered from under her protective shell.
"I warned you."
"You could have done a better job. You could have said something more like, 'Rory, it's imperative you sit because your world's about be flipped upside down again,' or 'Rory, the answering machine is set to self- destruct. Don't play it!'"
Paris chortled in amusement. "Okay, Mr. Phelps. I'll keep that in mind for next time. So, what are you going to do?"
"I'm doing it," Rory insisted.
"You're going to hide under your blanket?"
"Yes. And perhaps cover my ears and hum."
"Because if you don't hear the phone ring, then it never happened?"
"Exactly."
Reaching out, Paris lifted the blanket off of Rory's head. "It's just a phone message."
Rory sat up, "No, it's not. It's Jess calling back after he said he'd call back. The day after he said he call back. Not two days, not a week, the NEXT day! It's against practically everything I know about him. If this little difference is throwing me off this much, what's a major change going to do? What if he makes some huge revelation over the phone? It might actually kill me!"
"Now you're just being dramatic."
"You know my mother. Does that really surprise you?"
"You don't have to talk to him," Paris reminded her frazzled roommate. "You're still the one in control."
"Is that what this feeling is?" Rory asked. "Funny, it feels more like panic."
"Just tell him you don't want to talk to him, and that's that," Paris said matter-of-factly.
Rory only wailed and hid her head in her hands. Just because she had to talk to Jess to get some sort of closure, that didn't mean she wanted to rush head-long into it. There was enough stress in her life without willingly piling on more. Taking her deep breath, she made a decision. She stood quickly and started haphazardly shoving her books into her bookbag.
"Okay, Paris. Here's what we're going to do. I am going to the library. When Jess calls, if you answer the phone, you tell him I'm studying . . . and ONLY tell him that I'm studying." Rory narrowed her gaze at her roommate. "You will NOT say anything else. Not what you think of him, what you think I think of him, nothing!"
Paris reluctantly agreed. "I still don't see why you just don't tell him off and be done with it."
"Because," Rory huffed, "I'm not done with it. I DO have to talk to him; I have to close this part of my life so I can get on with the rest of it." She yanked on her coat. "But that doesn't mean I have to look forward to it."
"Coward," Paris muttered under her breath.
"Yeah, well, the Wizard forgot to mail me my courage. I'll be back later, Tin Man." Rory slipped out the door, and the sound of Paris calling down the hall after her, asking what she was talking about, traveled after her.
**********
Rory managed to dodge Jess' daily calls for three days by hiding in the library. That all ended on the fourth afternoon when she stopped back in her room after classes to pick up a few books and drop off the ones that she wasn't planning on using that night before she went to the library. The phone was ringing when she pushed through the door, and she answered it without thinking twice.
"Hello?"
"You done avoiding me yet?"
Rory mentally cursed herself. She should have known. "Jess," she said tersely.
"Rory," he mimicked.
"What do you want?" she asked. Maybe if she pretended she didn't know what he was talking about, her dodging him wouldn't seem so blatant.
"I want to talk to you," Jess said simply.
His voice sounded rough and raspy to Rory, like he hadn't been sleeping or had started smoking again. The latter cause was more likely, and not appealing to Rory, but the results still made her knees feel soft. She'd always loved the timbre of Jess' voice. She shook her head to dislodge the thought; she couldn't let something that simple get to her. Taking a deep breath, she unloaded her mind with machine-gun rapidity.
"Look, Jess. I can't do this now. It's the end of the semester. I've got finals, and then I've got to face the holidays with my grandparents and my dad and Sherry. Luke and my mom are at each other's throats, things between my mom and me are tense, and I haven't had a decent night's sleep in almost a week. This just isn't a good time for me to have to deal with you on top of it all."
"Then when is? I'm not going away this time, Rory." He sounded like he truly meant every word of that statement.
She sigh wearily. "After the new year. Everything will calm down after the first. I promise I'll call you after that. Just, please, leave me alone until then?"
"Okay, but I'm going to hold you to that promise." He sounded almost menacing. She wasn't completely sure he didn't mean to sound that way.
"I promise. Good-bye, Jess." She hung up before he could reply. At least she'd have this last word this time.
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Author's Notes the Second: The next chapter should be up in about a week, and it will contain . . . The Phone Call! Stay Tuned!