Disclaimer: I still want Jess Mariano, and I still can't have him. You'd think, if I were Amy Sherman-Palladino, I might not mind because I'd have the next best thing.

Author's Note: If anyone can suggest a better way to pull this style off (without suggesting stupidities, please), I'd love to hear it. Because there's something about it that clunks.

Additionally, I'll probably follow each episode for more than one chapter. But, as always, don't you dare expect anything linear. It doesn't work that way. And there's a whole lot of what-ifs to cover. (Mmmmm...Jess...)

Chapter 1

She grows impatient with Paris's rant--Paris is always ranting, and Rory doesn't see the point. Particularly when it's Berkeley versus MIT, and about calculus, no less. Now, if it were a rant about people who dog-ear their pages...or about people who belittle The Velvet Underground...

She isn't thinking about anything particularly important when she lets Paris be swept into Chilton without her. She simply turns about, avoiding the teachers coming in the main gates, and catches a bus for New York City. And she has a glorious day.

It is when she reaches the end of it, the afternoon-cum-evening, that she finds herself on a precarious balance, unsure of herself. She doesn't want to leave, and every action has a ghost of an action behind it. She chooses to act like Rory Gilmore, as she knows she must return to being the Stars' Hollow Cinderella (she is too on edge to find a more apt comparison; besides, she likes the alliteration).

He says: "The sign says Boonesville." And she does not twist her fingers through her hair--though she wants to--and she does not say: "Umm...you know, there's a later bus back. And you haven't even shown me the touristy stuff yet, Mr. Lenny Shepherd." (He would laugh and tell her he didn't do radio. Cop-out stuff.) (And she dearly wanted to see the Met and to show him the Strand.)

Earlier, when he eased up from his bench in the park, he was so close to her that she felt...loved. And then, even then, she did not grab his hand.

She says: "I should go," instead of taking his hand (so many opportunities!) and following the poor tourist downtown to point the poor lout in the direction of 44th.

She gets on the bus.

When his voice comes through the glass, warped, the auditory equivalent of the rippled windows of hundred-year-old buildings--at least, then, she opens the window.

When he says: "Why did you come here?" she sees the two ways it can go. She sees the easy way--for once it has come to her: "Because you didn't say goodbye." She sees the flash of disappointment-guilt-want-...something... in his eyes as he says, "Oh. Bye, Rory," and she bats down the knowledge that the something, the half-smile, the bye-Rory say I Love You. And then she sits on a bus for hours next to a hick spitting into a can.

She sees the easy way, and then she says the hard way, the way she does, with a burst of impatience and embarrassment and anger: "Because I missed you, you idiot!"

His eyebrow quirks. "Oh, so you do want to spend time with me after all."

She colors. "I didn't say that. I merely said that I missed you."

"Which implies the time spent with me was worth the effort."

She has enough sense not to say anything.

And then he reaches up through the open window, and she doesn't know what he wants to do--he doesn't either, maybe he's going to tickle her, maybe he's just reaching up and up and up and he'll come to a stop in outer space and have adventures on his great glass elevator. She doesn't let him touch her. She gets off the bus.

She holds his hand, and they ditch their bags in the convenient shelves in the Strand, on Broadway (and they ride the Subway again--how else are you going to get half way up Broadway?), and when she knows that there's no way in hell she's going to make it back for her mom's graduation (and she does care), they head back to the bus station and find another bus back to Stars' Hollow. She stands there in the bus terminal and puts her arms around him and feels the warmth of his shoulderblade against her face and the feel of his hands all the way around her and the way their tennis shoes touch.

And she gets lucky. The bus is an express.