AN: Got most of this written and had a slight block. Sorry for the longer wait for the bit of an angsty last chapter. More angst here and to come, but I hope you'll find the last part less angsty, especially after the last two.
"Hello?" came a sleepy response from the still mostly asleep recipient of this particular phone call.
"Okay, you're a rich 22-year-old man in Paris, where are you staying?"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I don't have time for questions, I need answers!"
"Why didn't you call the other rich 20-something boy you actually know and wake him up in the middle of the night to ask him?"
"Because I didn't think of that, and I already called him for help," she answered honestly.
"Did you try the Ritz?" Lorelai sighed.
"The Ritz, great, hang on," she told her mother as she instructed the driver of her new destination.
"So, you're in Paris, safe and sound?"
"Yes. And hopefully Tristan won't put me out on the street when he sees me."
"He wouldn't do that."
"You don't even know him."
"I know he's important to you, and that this fight you've had is nothing in comparison to how you two feel about each other."
"I might need you to explain that to him later," she bit her lip in worry.
"Just give me a call, I'm glad to do it. I'm good at getting boys to see things my way," she assured her daughter.
"I really am going to call and see how you are one of these days, not just blurt out my own personal crises."
"I believe you. By the way, I'm having triplets and Luke is building an extension onto the house."
"What?"
"Just seeing if you were up to paying attention to your mother. I'm pretty sure there's just one swimming around in there."
"I'm calling Luke later to make sure you haven't switched your decaf back to caf."
"Evil. Good luck."
"Thanks."
She hung up the phone again and tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for her cab to pull to a stop. She'd been on autopilot since obtaining her ticket to Paris, the only thought in her mind was what to say to Tristan when she tracked him down. So far, she wasn't having much luck with that, but at least she was getting good leads on where to find him.
XXXX
Armed with the key that the concierge had given her, due to the fact that Tristan had the good sense to add her name to his register upon reserving his room, and not the foresight to cancel it upon arrival, she turned the lock slowly and opened the door while saying a small prayer that he would be in the room and not out in the city. Paris was not a place she'd be able to track him down in—the possibilities of his whereabouts were literally endless if he weren't in the hotel room. Honestly she was just relieved that she'd chosen the right hotel and the man behind the desk had nodded in recognition when she said Tristan's name.
The room was dark due to the fact that all the massive draperies were drawn closed. No internal lighting had been turned on, and everything was cast under a shadow. Allowing her eyes a moment to adjust to the semi-darkness, she caught sight of him. He sat alone in an armchair, a table with a half-empty bottle and a mostly full glass of a dark liquid on it. His hand still grasped the glass, resting it from its journey back and forth to his lips. He'd looked up at the door's opening, but hadn't bothered to stand. Or perhaps unable was a more fitting description. He had beaten her here by a good hour and a half at least, as those were the differences in flight times and of course he hadn't had to figure out where to go.
She closed the door quietly behind her and took a hesitant step into the center of the main room. This wasn't a hotel room he'd secured for them—it was more of a suite. She'd been in enough of them at this point not to be in complete awe of the expansive luxury of it all, but she did have to marvel at how somber and dank he'd managed to make it appear. Almost as if he'd unleashed his current mood on it, transforming it to become and extension of himself.
"I'm sorry."
He took another drink, almost as if he'd not heard her. In fact, she might have repeated her barely audible words had he not been looking directly at her.
"What are you doing here?"
"Officially, I've had a family emergency and I'm taking a week off. Unofficially, I said really stupid things to the man I love, and I followed him to Paris."
"You shouldn't have come."
"I couldn't stay there."
"You walked away from me."
"I was walking away from the situation, not you."
"Same difference," he spat back at her, his tone more than enough to make the tears spring to her eyes.
"No, not the same difference. I wasn't ready to tell you about my dad."
"Maybe you weren't ready to be with me."
"Don't say that. You don't understand."
He finished the rest of the whiskey in his glass, and poured yet round into the now empty space. He looked up at her again, and shook his head.
"I'm sorry, where are my manners? Can I get you a drink?"
"Stop it, Tristan. Talk to me."
"You want to talk now? Fine, let's talk. Let's see, you think I don't understand having issues with your father?"
She began to feel very small, as he stood up in front of her now. She was determined to hold her ground and let him get his frustrations out, reminding herself of what her goal was in coming here.
"You're right. I have no idea what it's like to be given up on, sent away for others to deal with, and basically have my existence ignored except on holidays for the greater part of my life."
The hurt in his voice seeped through her skin, attacking her whole body at once. "Except I don't think that your father also makes you live a life that you don't agree with, and have to be very skilled at avoiding at all costs, now do you?"
She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have assumed," she began, and he grabbed the mostly empty bottle of whiskey and hurled it into the trashcan, shattering the glass into the metal receptacle. She winced at the noise, but returned her eyes to him.
"And neither should I. I shouldn't have assumed that you'd been talking to your ex, should I? Because I should have believed that the woman I loved would tell me things like that."
"Tristan, I didn't tell you because it wasn't important, and I didn't really have time to tell you," she informed him. "I don't love him, I love you, which is what I told him!"
"Did you tell him things about your dad?"
"What?"
"Answer me."
"Yes," she admitted, looking down at her feet.
"And I'm the one that isn't trusting in this relationship," he scoffed, finishing the rest of the whiskey in his glass.
"We were together six months, Tristan. He was there the last time I had to deal with my dad, he saw what happened," she explained, trying to catch his gaze as he slammed his glass down on the table.
"Why won't you tell me things? Why can't you just let me into whatever it is that eats at you? Do you know how I feel when you wake up in a panic attack, and won't tell me what's wrong? Or when you can't seem to get it through your head that I am not going to just run off after the next girl that wants to sleep with me?"
"Since when did we have to put all our cards on the table, Tristan? Have you done that with me? I don't remember you telling me anything about your parents, other than the few jaded comments you offered to your grandfather."
"If you came here to fight, you can leave," he said suddenly, moving to the liquor cabinet, but she moved faster than him, blocking his destination.
"I'm not going to leave and let you drink yourself into a stupor."
He leaned into her, and she could tell he'd had too much already from the way the whiskey penetrated his breath.
"So, you're going to stay and watch as I do?"
"What do you want me to say?" she yelled. "Do you want me to say that I never loved Logan? Because I can't do that. I did love him, I just didn't love me when I was with him. We weren't right together, and I knew if I married him I'd end up as Mrs. Logan Huntzberger and nothing else," she confided.
"Huntzberger? You've got to be fucking kidding me," he shook his head at her words.
"What?"
"That's a hell of a lot of money you ran from," he informed her.
"I wasn't with him for his money," she allowed her voice to lower. "Most of the time I was with him in spite of it."
He nodded, and remained stoic as she stepped closer to him. "But with you, I love us together. Well, most of the time," she added for measure as she couldn't say she was a big fan of the feeling in the pit of her stomach when they were fighting. "I just assumed that we could put all our cards on the table as we needed to play them. Over here, with you, my dad and Logan didn't seem like issues. Maybe I was running away from all of that when I came over here, but honestly I can't say I'm sorry about that because coming here is how I found you again."
He closed his eyes at the feel of her hands on his face, as she couldn't stop herself from touching him anymore. "I'm sorry, too," his voice was barely audible, the softest whisper, and slightly slurred as the alcohol was much more prevalent than anger in his system now. She pressed her lips into his, tasting the whiskey on his lips and tongue as he pulled her closer. He lifted her up at the waist, bringing her properly up to his level to intensify the kiss. He groaned as she dug her fingertips into his back in efforts to hold onto him as he lifted her completely off the ground en route to the bed. She could feel wet heat of tears against her face as she pressed her cheek into his, not willing to open her eyes to check and see if they were hers, his, or both intermingled against her skin. His hands felt too good against her bare skin, making the drama of the past day melt away and dissolve into fuel for the fire that built so quickly between the pair.
Halfway into the mind altering dance that would put this blow up behind them, he slid off of her, his torso hanging off the bed. She groaned at the loss of pressure from his lips against her body, and propped herself up to inspect her skin where he'd just been lavishing his attention. A small red welt was forming as the burst blood vessels on her hip spread to the surface. He came back up onto the bed, and but didn't move up her body. He rested his elbows at either side of her hips, running his free hand over the mark he'd just made on her.
"I didn't get to give you your present," he smirked.
"Oh?" she breathed, still feeling the adrenaline that only he could start up coursing through her body as his bare torso rested between her uncovered legs. She wanted to tell him she would willingly go the rest of her life without presents from anyone if he would just continue on where he'd left off.
He placed a small, soft box on her skin, just above her belly button. She ran a hand through his hair before picking it up. It looked alarmingly like the one that Logan had presented her with just weeks before during his leave of sanity. This didn't cause her to want to scream and yell—in fact she was feeling pretty speechless. Upon prying the box open, she gasped as she saw a beautiful sapphire staring up at her with pride from its platinum setting. It seemed to gleam even in the dark of the room.
"It's beautiful."
"It reminded me of you."
"It's too much," she said as she fingered the ring still in its holder.
"No, it's not. It's not enough—nothing could be."
She looked up into his eyes, hearing nothing but sincerity. She knew his anger earlier had come from the passion he felt for her, and moments like this only proved it to her. Just as he knew that she got overwhelmed and acted out of fear. They'd both been to blame, they both knew it, and they were both over it. They could move past it. He took the ring out of its confines and picked up her right hand, sliding it over her knuckle.
"It's perfect."
"Tristan?"
"Yeah?"
"I want to tell you things. But I can't do it all at once. There's too much in my life that I'm not proud of, that affects me," she bit her lip as she looked back at the ring. "And when I'm with you, honestly a lot of it falls away. It's not on my mind, and I just want to focus on us."
He nodded, placing a kiss on her stomach as he slid up her body. One more kiss to her lips, and he cradled her face in his hands. "I get it. I feel the same way. You'll see a lot of things being here this week with my family, and none of it good, either. But you can tell me when things get bad. You have to; I can't deal with not knowing."
"I promise."
She kissed him again, taking up where they left off before he presented her gift to her. They gave more of themselves over to one another, whispering words of promise as they gave of their bodies.
XXXX
"What about your meeting with your supervisor this week?"
"It's rescheduled. What about your appointment, how did that go?" Rory asked, flopping down across the pillows on the large unmade bed.
"I got the first ultrasound picture!"
"Really? So, who does it look like?"
"It bears a remarkable resemblance to a kidney bean."
"So, Luke, then?"
"Haha. Are you sure it's fine that you took off to Paris? That meeting sounded important."
"Mom, I am allowed to take time off for family emergencies."
"Since when is Tristan family, is there some important detail you've left out of your story?"
"It's not an engagement ring. It's a birthday present. By the way, should anyone from school call, you've come down with something much more life-threatening than Luke's spawn."
"I never got a precious jewel for my birthday. Mom gave me pearls when I turned sixteen, but it felt more like a noose than anything else."
"Well, I still think it's too much, but it is incredible. But the best part is, we're good."
"Good. I like to hear that. So, what kind of reward does Dan get for finding the magic plane ticket?"
"My adoration and affection until I die?"
"Might want to run that past lover boy first."
"He's on board. It got me to Paris, and that is where we made up. He owes his adoration and affection as well."
"Where is Mr. Wonderful anyhow?"
"In the shower. Which reminds me, I should get going."
"Please hang up before you slip up and inform me that you are going to join him as soon as you hang up with me."
"Done."
Lorelai gave a shiver of disgust as she heard the dial tone in her ear. She put the phone down on the bed and made another face as she stood up and headed downstairs in search of anything to take her mind off of the mental images her daughter had imparted on her.
