A/N: As always, rescued by catterwall.
"You still there?"
Lorelai squeezed his hand gently. She had an amused look on her face.
"Yes," Luke breathed, finally opening his eyes. He could feel his heartbeat in his hands and knew that she must be feeling the vibrations through his skin. He released his fingers from hers and slipped his hand around her lower back, scooting her crate closer to his. His expression was suddenly serious.
"And are you still there?"
She framed his face with her hands and forced herself to take her eyes off of his lips. "I told you," she said forcefully. "I'm always going to be here."
"Even after we go back?"
"Everywhere," she said. "Connecticut, California, Calcutta. I'll be there. I promise."
And he saw that she was sincere.
He gazed into her beaming eyes and finally felt almost at ease. His anxiety was slowly ebbing, his frustrations defused.
He took a deep breath, deeper than he'd ever taken, exhaled, released the distressed tension he'd been storing in his muscles. The sight of her over-heated, brightly colored cheeks and his diminishing anxiety made him completely light-headed.
"Cairo," she continued. "Cape Canaveral. You'd better nod or something because I got a million of these. Copenhagen. Cor-"
He suppressed a chuckle, pressing a thumb to her mouth while cupping her jaw. "I got it."
"Corpus Christie," she mumbled unintelligibly through her crushed lips.
As he gazed past her smile and into her tired face, Luke was fascinated by the look of frenetic passion in her eyes, wondering if something similar was being reflected in his own.
She understood him, she recognized the unquieted mind that his past relationships had left him with and she still wanted to take him on, knowing that she would have to convince him every day that she was in it for the long haul. She hadn't run away from the proposition of such a burden; she thought he was worth it.
She thought him worthy of her. Such a foreign notion.
He drew her into him and they both stood up simultaneously, pulling close to one another, holding each other. Lorelai breathed deeply, feeling a mixture of complete serenity and total satisfaction. She hoped she had been able to convince him of the depth of her feelings, no man had ever successfully demanded this of her.
She buried her nose in the open collar of his white shirt, sliding her hands underneath his jacket and around his trim waist. He smelled clean.
"Aren't you hot?" He asked a few minutes later, noting her clammy skin as he kneaded the back of her neck. The small, stuffy room that had been overheated to begin with was now something of a furnace. "Here," he offered, slipping her jacket over her shoulders.
"Luke, are you trying to undress me?" She asked teasingly. The look in her eyes was hazardous, he thought.
"No," he answered. "Stop presuming things."
She dropped her jacket on the crate, covering the green scarf, skimming the hair off her sticky shoulders.
"I'm not presuming anything," she responded, smiling playfully. She swept his suit jacket off his back with one brisk motion, letting it fall over hers below.
He recognized the look she was giving him from the first morning they were together.
"Stop," he said firmly, trying to look menacing.
She grinned and pressed her hands into his chest, backing him against the concrete wall. It felt refreshingly cool through the back of his thin shirt. "Seriously, Lorelai. Stop."
She countered by raising an eyebrow and stepped between his shoulder-width legs, grabbing his hips and pulling him against her waist. Once comfortably situated there, she caressed his face and neck, kissing with more force than she had previously.
As her sweet tongue skimmed over his, he succumbed. He stopped trying to recall Canseco's stats for his years with the A's and fell blissfully into the moment.
Lorelai pulled back and smiled as she felt him shift and swell between her thighs. She kissed and stroked his neck while mumbling, "We shouldn't be doing this."
Luke removed his hands from her waist and took hold of her bare arms, startling her. He then turned her, forcing her against the wall, settling his body over hers. "No, we shouldn't," he croaked, his grip firm on her wrists.
She whined as he sucked on the base of her neck, squirmed beneath his weight. His lips feathered under her jaw, his hot breath flushing her skin, an electric sensation mainlined through her body.
Lorelai had always admired Luke from the vantage point of several feet away. She'd stared at his hands, his lips, his eyes and wished they were all on her; stared at his chest, longingly at times, and aspired to one day be pressed against it, curled into it, rising and falling with his breath.
And now, though her range of vision was limited to the dangling cord of a bare bulb, she didn't have to remind herself that this was the man that was touching her, kissing her and holding her.
This, this moment was the enactment of countless fantasies, the fruit of years of wishful thinking, of jealous glances and unnoticed stares, she thought.
She'd imagined him there before, his body pressed into hers, his mouth searing its way down her neck. He was more subtle than she expected, pulling strings that most men don't think to pull when they've got a woman in their arms. With each kiss, he was inciting sensations that she didn't know she was capable of feeling. Suddenly, the tip of her shoulder was the most erotic patch of skin on her body.
Or maybe it wouldn't be a turn-on with any other man. She didn't plan on finding out.
Her hairline was tingling, her eyes forced themselves closed, her left leg involuntarily clutched the back of his thigh. She tried to draw his hips under her while she went up on her toes, trying desperately to leverage his hips under her, to climb his body. Luke, however, had pinned her to the wall in such a way that her efforts were rendered futile.
"Quit it," he muttered. The deep reverberation of his words went through his chest and into hers, rattling her body with the acute vibrations. She shivered severely.
As he straightened out to kiss her mouth, she turned her head away, keeping her eyes locked with his. "What is it?" He asked, concerned.
"Let go of my hands," she demanded, and Luke immediately untangled his fingers and let her hands drop to her side. He hadn't meant to push her.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to push…"
His eyebrows jumped as her fingers used their newfound freedom to slide the straps of her black camisole down off her shoulders. She eyed him seductively. "You weren't," she said in a mild tone.
"Lorelai," he groaned, "we're in church."
"We're not in church," she countered. "We're in a church. And… so what?" Her voice was close to a conspiratorial whisper. She was beginning to slide down her bra straps.
"But we're.. at a funeral," he said, not able to tear his eyes from her hands.
That got to her. Her hands stopped. She wrinkled her nose and guiltily pulled up the straps of her top, pushing herself off the wall. "God, yeah," she sighed. "You're right."
Luke caught her as she came off the wall, twisting a lock of her hair around his fingers and brushing the frayed edges along her clavicle.
"Maybe we should hold off, huh?"
"Yeah," she said grudgingly, looking around the dusty storage room. "Not very civilized, I guess. And I think I saw a mouse earlier, I don't do very well with an audience."
"No, I mean- we should hold off until we get back," he said, avoiding her eyes. "To Star's Hollow."
"Seriously?" She half-laughed, looking at him incredulously.
"I just…" He wasn't sure how to even go about explaining himself to her. He also was sort of stunned that he was even saying this to begin with. "I just think it would be… disrespectful. In a way. You know?"
"Disrespectful… toward me?" She was shaking her head slowly, trying to figure out where he was coming from.
"No," he said quickly, "Disrespectful toward… the reason we're here in the first place. Towards… you know." He sort of jerked his head towards the direction of the main room of the church. "It's not right."
She sighed and nodded. "Okay. Yeah, I know what you mean."
Luke handed her the jacket and the scarf lying on the crate as he shrugged his black suit coat back on. "Doesn't mean that, you know, I don't want to or anything," he said in a low voice, fixing his collar.
"I know," she answered, smiling.
"Because, I really do." He stepped back over to her and kissed her gently while pressing his body into hers, the evidence of his statement clear.
"I know," she said when their lips parted, smile broadening. "That's fine. If you can wait, I can wait."
He gave her a quick kiss and stepped away, watching her lean over and adjust her bra straps as she picked up her purse. "Well, we should try, anyway," he sighed.
Lorelai sat on the end of the pier, her bare feet swinging in the warm air. She looked out over the Channel Islands just visible in the distance, the setting sun coloring them with red and orange hues.
"Are you sure you don't want to go somewhere nicer?" Luke asked, coming up behind her. He handed her a basket of tacos from the stand across the way and sat down cross-legged, a little further from the edge.
"Are you kidding? This is perfect," she assured him. "Look how beautiful this is."
Luke gazed out for a moment, then up and down the length of the pier. The only person nearby was an old fisherman, casting his reel lazily as he read a novel. Lorelai's face glowed in the light of the sunset; she closed her eyes and breathed deeply as a salty breeze played with her curls.
"It really is," he said gently, taking her hand.
She grinned before she turned to look at him, her eyes narrowed in the refracted sunlight. "Since when are you such a romantic," she teased.
"There's a lot you don't know about me," he asserted, matching her smile.
"Really," she said, delighted. "Do enlighten us, please."
He bit into his taco, deep in thought.
"Good taco," he said.
"Stop stalling," she answered, pushing him lightly.
"Well, for one thing, the way you're swinging your legs over the edge is making me really nervous."
She batted her eyelashes. "Why, afraid I'll fall?" She laughed, the boards creaking under her pumping legs.
"Will you just…" he put a hand on her bare knee, causing her to still. "Just don't. Please."
"Okay, fine. Then tell me something real."
He thought for a few moments. "I have to look into my shoes before I put them on."
"Seriously?" She squealed, overjoyed at this new piece of information. "What's wrong with you?"
"I don't know," he answered, smiling sheepishly. "Liz found a little snake in her boot one time when we were camping and, I don't know, ever since then…"
"That's like, psych ward material," she said. "I love it. What else?"
"Jeez," he mumbled. "Um… Let's see. My socks have to match."
"Boring. What else. Something not foot-related."
"I have a birthmark on my lower back."
"You're totally boring! C'mon, Luke, get creative. What else don't I know about you?"
"Hey, this isn't easy," he countered. "Your turn."
"It is too easy. Um, let's see, where to start." She thought a moment, then offered him a hand. "I'm secretly attracted to Ben Stein."
"I don't think I want to know any more," he grumbled.
"No!" She cried, laughing. "I get to keep going. Let's see… okay, I have a lucky pair of underwear, it has monkeys on it. Camels creep me out, I think it has to do with the spitting thing. Very unnatural. Um, when Rory was younger I used to make her watch Plan 9 From Outer Space as punishment. Not that she ever did anything wrong, you know, but she wanted to go jogging once and I had to kill the instinct."
"Uh huh."
"What else. The first time I got drunk was from an emergency bottle of absinthe my dad brought back from France; I hallucinated that my toes were melting and haven't had it since. I have twelve credit cards, thirteen if you count my bank card. There was a week when I was pregnant where all I could eat were strawberries dipped in mayonnaise. Umm… oh, until recently, I used to slip a David Bowie CD into my parent's collection every few months, which would mysteriously disappear a week later."
He laughed to himself. "Okay, I get it," he said, putting an arm around her.
She settled comfortably into the crook of his arm. "Fine," she said, "You go then."
Luke was quiet a moment, rubbing Lorelai's knee. He looked out at the sailboats on the water, following them with his eyes.
"You know that blue hat you got me?"
"Yeah, of course."
He looked at her shyly, playing with her fingers. "That's probably my most prized possession."
She grinned, a laugh deep in her throat. She squeezed his hand. "I stole one of your shirts once."
"You what!" He cried.
"Yeah, um, the morning after the inn burned down, when I spent the night. I took it home, it's in my closet."
He laughed and kissed her temple. They were quiet, the sun had finally gone down, the islands no longer visible in the darkness. Damp clouds of mist hung around them, only really visible under the yellow lights of the pier.
Luke finally spoke. "I was jealous of Max."
She had been playing with the soft hair on his forearm, tracing the veins down to his calloused hands. She rolled his sleeve back down and smoothed out the cuff. "I was jealous of Rachel."
They both tightened their hold on one another. Luke leaned in to kiss her, tenderly stroking her back, shivering when she slowly pulled away.
"Let's go back to the room," she said quietly, her face solemn.
He nodded, helping her up, intertwining their fingers. Luke swung his jacket over his shoulder with his other hand, and together they walked back down the pier.