Chapter Three: Divided

Rory smiled at him hesitantly, wondering if he picked up any of the same imagery she had when seeing him after so long.

"Right," Tristan grinned, ducking his head in a nod as he received no response. "By golly, I swore near the virginal Mary; how could I have sinned so, my Lord, please tell me--Gah!"

Rory's smile turned wide and plastic as she kicked Tristan under the table. "Shut up. If anyone, you should have the honor of not calling me virginal, thank you very much."

She saw a flicker of the old Tristan when he smiled suggestively, clearly remembering a night of more than what one would call cautious love-making. Then his eyes dimmed as he looked down, and she wasn't sure what set off his defense mechanism, but it had and he was somehow back to polite and mannered.

"Yes, well," he opened the menu, looking at it far too studiously. "No sense in rehashing the past, right? Hmm... It all looks so... Well, I think I'll have the teriyaki chicken and some green tea, please. Oh--and an eggroll, light on the plum sauce."

The waitress, who seemingly appeared out of nowhere, took down his order and directed her gaze toward Rory.

"Umm... Mongolian beef and some coffee, please," she smiled, handing her the menu. The waitress left, leaving the two companions without menus to falsely distract them from one another. Rory sensed that tension between them, especially since Tristan was quite subtly avoiding her gaze. "Tristan. Tristan."

"Hm?" he looked up.

"Do you want to..." she sighed. "Look, I know this is weird. We haven't seen each other since that night... and we both know that a hangover is not the best conversational aid in the world, so that didn't end well, but I'd like to think we can carry on a conversation now that we're older." She looked around, biting her lip. "And more mature."

Tristan looked at her, staring for a moment, before folding his napkin in his lap. "You're... right. Of course, you're right, Rory Gilmore."

She eyed him suspiciously. "Thank you." Another silence crept up onto the stale set of words resting in the air, waiting for new ones to replace them. "So--you wanted to talk to me about something. Something that's been bothering you. Something that's wrong. What's wrong?"

"I didn't want to talk to you about it," he corrected with a chuckle. "You penciled me in, as I remember."

"Well, you called me at four am on a Tuesday as I remember, so I sort of went on a hunch and figured that hey, something is going on with this guy--he's awake and dialing away at four am, waking people up with morbid phone calls like a modern-day Edgar Allen Poe, so I'm going to ask again." She eyed him seriously. "Tristan. What's going on?"

He looked down at the table cloth, fingering the red embroidery, then folded his napkin. Biting his lip, he unfolded it and seemed to concentrate on folding back into place, yet again. Finally, as Rory was about to speak, he dropped it on the table in front of him.

"Robin's pregnant." He expelled a deep breath, looking down and suddenly looking older and more dishieveled than he had a moment ago.

Rory's mouth opened in surprise, but she honestly had no idea what to say. She knew Robin was his daughter because she faintly knew of his college girlfriend and the fact that they were pretty serious, but she wasn't so close as to offer any advice or previous memories to console him. She just sat there, dumbfounded, hoping a broken Tristan would say something more to aide her in aiding him. She knew it sounded ridiculous, but it made sense to her.

Luckily, he came to her aide as he looked up.

"Robin's pregnant. And I don't know with whom or by whom, I just know she's pregnant and..."

"You can stop talking about the weather, Lee," Bobbey chuckled softly, clutching the phone to her ear. "It's not like I'm dying soon or anything." She paused. "At least not as far as I'm concerned. What do you know?"

"Shut up," Leah, Bobbey's friend of half a decade, snapped in response to her teasing. "It's just... weird, you know."

"I, more than anyone," Bobbey confirmed with a head nod.

"Well, yeah," Leah rolled her eyes and sighed into the phone. "I just--I know I'm supposed to be all supportive best friend but I don't know what to say, Bobbey. I don't." She expelled another breath, thankful her conversation partner hadn't said anything in response. "I want to tell you it's okay and stuff, but..."

"But it's not," Bobbey finished. "I know, Lee. I'm not... I'm not asking you to solve my problems for me with some Chinese proverb you found on a fortune cookie. I don't want you to tell me everything is going to be okay, because then you'd just be giving me false hope. Not even that," she smiled. "I'd know you were lying, and then we'd have to have a throwdown, and we both now how those end between us."

Leah grinned. "Yeah. And I don't really want to beat up a pregnant girl, so..."

"Even withchild I could kick your ass, McAllister," Bobbey replied with a snort.

"Right," Leah smiled and looked down. Pregnancy was not something she was really comfortable joking about when it was her good friend on the end of the phone that was due to pop out a baby soon. She sighed and pulled at the comforter of her bed. "I don't mean to... but how's your dad about all this?"

"Oh, he's ecstatic. No, he's like one of those mothers in their mid-50s ready marry off their kid in exchange for a grandchild," Bobbey replied with more sarcasm than she thought necessary. Hearing her friend sniff subtly at her lack of serious thought on the subject, Bobbey pursed her lips and unscrewed a nailpolish tube. "He's stoic, Lee. It's weird. And he wants to know who the dad is."

Leah paused. "And... you're going to tell him, right?"

"Sure, Lee, I'm going to tell him I got knocked up by a loser college drop-out five years older than me at a party I went to when I told him I was sleeping over at your house?" She sighed. "Yeah, I didn't think it was a swell idea either."

"Did he threaten to like kill him and suck the life out of him in the most torturous, slow and vile means possible?" Leah asked.

Bobbey furrowed her brow as she swiped a line of nail lacquer on her toenail. "Yeah, actually. He went off on quite a tangent about it."

"Yeah, it's what my dad does when he sees my dishieveled date stumbling to my doorstep with me for my good-night kiss," she explained, then paused. "But, you know, it's probably four thousand times worse for you."

Bobbey stopped polishing. "Uh huh, yeah, I would have to agree." Sighing, she swept more of the sparkly pink lacquer on her toenails, chewing her lip silently as she thought of something that'd been bothering her. "Hey, Lee. If you--I mean, when you screw up in school and stuff or when you do something really parentally unacceptable, does your dad tell his friends about it?"

Leah scoffed. "What do you mean, when I screw up?"

"Lee," Bobbey rationalized.

Leah sighed. "Um, not really. My mom does, though; big time. She doesn't tell me outright that she's telling all her friends, but it's like a goddamn network between mothers if you ask me. She tells them about my report cards, my dates, she told them about that time in Tijuana--which I never even told her about but somehow got in trouble for." She paused glare in the direction of her mother's bedroom before reaching for the bag of chips on her nighttable. "Nothing is sacred between you and the parents, Bobbey. I'm serious." She padded down the carpeted stairs to her living room. "Why? Did something happen?"

Bobbey bit her bottom lip again. "Well, my dad brought this... girl home yesterday."

"Girl," Leah repeated thoughtfully. "Toddler, adolscent, mid-forties, what are we talking here?"

Bobbey rolled her eyes. "Oh, you know, in the Driving Miss Daisy range."

"Egh," Leah responded. "Unless you're not serious. Which you're not. You know, you're wasting my minutes, Robin, you could at least deal out your problems without a proportionate sarcasm ratio."

"You're telling me to change who I am to be with you?" Bobbey answered dramatically, shaking her head. "That simply just can't be."

"I'm setting a time limit."

"And I thought you loved me for who I was..."

"Fourteen minutes, forty-four seconds left, and counting."

"And my personality meant nothing..."

"So your dad brought home an eighty-year-old woman with a personal driver," Leah sighed.

"I'd say she was around her early thirties," Bobbey replied, remembering the strange brunette that penetrated the boundary of her threshold yesterday.

"Pretty?"

Bobbey scrunched up her nose. "That depends on who she is to my dad."

Leah lifted a brow. "You suspect she's somebody more than an acquaintance?"

"How the hell should I know? I've never seen this woman in my life before yesterday and I really didn't have time to objectively observe their relationship."

"Stormed to your room in the middle of dinner, huh?" Leah guessed, a knowing smile forming on her face.

Bobbey went to shake her head no but realized her friend couldn't see her. "The steak was dry."

"Right," Leah agreed. "Let's say she's your dad's hippie, foul-mannered animal rights activist friend that had followed him home from a rally he just happened to pass. Who's lesbian."

"Huh?" Bobbey tried to picture the get-up on the woman she met yesterday with difficulty.

"How pretty would she be then?"

"Oh. Well. Definitely the hottest animal-rights slob I've ever met," Bobbey admitted, recalling the woman's appearance. "She's got this porcelain doll look going for her. Shocking blue eyes, pale skin--not pasty. Very sheik."

Leah chuckled. "And if she was your dad's very straight new secretary?"

"Lee, I would never attack that very sad, desperate innocent schoolgirl-looking whore no matter who she was to my dad," Bobbey replied through gritted teeth.

"I see," her friend laughed, the sound dwindling to a chuckle as she heard very unhappy grunts from the other line. "Fine, okay. I'm stopping. I just don't see what this woman has to do with you. If he just brought her over for dinner, then I'm sorry to say, she probably is a dat--"

"Don't say it," Bobbey warned. "Just don't even go there. Besides, I heard them say my name just as she was leaving. Why would they talk about the daughter when the two of them are on a... social gathering event."

Sighing, her friend shouldered the phone. "Look, honey, I don't know what's it's like to be in your situation. And I especially don't know how someone's dad would react to that, but if you ask me, I think he's just looking for someone to talk to. And…" she hesitated, "you are, too. And you'd be better off talking to each other than to some uninvolved friends like you're doing now."

"Lee--"

"Bobbey, I have to go," Leah concluded pointedly. "My dad's freaking out about my quarter grades. I'll see you tomorrow, granted I'm alive."

Sighing, Bobbey looked at the phone, hearing her friend's phone click as it hung up. "Bye."

Author's Note:

So, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who reviewed so far. Glad you guys like the story. On that note, I tried to update a couple of days ago but every time I tried to log in, the server was down or some crap like that so if I don't update for a while, sometimes it's not because I'm a lazy asshole that doesn't finish stuff. Sometimes it's because is a lazy asshole.

Love you. Review.