chapter five

xi.

September came mild and bright. Work on the house occupied much of their time; their paying jobs left them little free chance to truly get together and relax. The autumn guests were arriving at the inn in droves, and their business drove up sales around town, including Taylor's Shoppe and, of course, Luke's diner.

Lorelai was on the look-out for something special when she found a new lotion at some shop in Hartford that her mother would have died rather than be in. When Lorelai spotted it, she smiled slightly and picked it up to examine it more closely. Emily Gilmore would have been scandalized, and there was no way that she could have taken it up to the register to purchase it.

Sometimes Lorelai loved not being her mother.

Later that night, she dragged Luke into the bedroom. She was already dressed for the occasion, and Lorelai was certain that the flash of leg that Luke saw underneath her robe was more than enough persuasion for him to follow her.

"I have something for you," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. Luke stood by her, arm around her shoulder. She shivered, and he held her tighter. "Mmm. I think you'll like it."

Lorelai picked up the opened bottle of lotion from the bed stand and shook it at Luke. He stayed standing, raising an eyebrow. Luke was nothing if not a skeptic, and it was part of the fun to entice him into her little games. For his part, she knew, he liked playing reluctant in her amusements.

"A lotion?" he asked.

Lorelai gave him patented eye roll number six hundred thirty-three. She'd practiced it all evening in the bathroom mirror while preparing herself in the bathroom with all of her womanly concoctions laid before her.

"Not just any lotion. This is special."

"What's so special about this lotion? It doesn't burn, does it? Because you know that didn't work last time."

"Turn off the light and see."

She slipped off her robe and turned her back to him. When the room went dark, she heard a sharp gasp come from Luke. This was the prize for which she'd been working all night.

"You like it?" she asked, turning her head over her shoulder. "This may squick you out, but I had Sookie help me with the message. There was a problem involving a mirror and the fact that you can't read what's written in reverse. It was either go through a two-week course in mirror writing a la da Vinci or, you know, get help."

Luke had stayed motionless where he stood at the light switch. Lorelai smiled into her shoulder at the sight of his open mouth. He was so cute that she almost hated to ruin the moment -- almost. She was, after all, only human, and there were two people in the room, not one and a mannequin (though which was the doll, she wasn't certain).

"Luke?"

After a moment, he cleared his throat.

"It glows ... in the dark."

"You catch on quick," said Lorelai, arranging herself that she was facing him once more. "C'mere. You got anything that you wanna tell the folks back home?"

This was not when they conceived. They had accomplished that a week earlier.

xii.

Early the next morning, she was awoken from a deep slumber by Luke, who looked a little less than pleased with her.

"You drew on me in that lotion!"

Lorelai wasn't quite awake yet. It was only seven in the morning by her purple alarm clock, which probably meant that it was actually a quarter hour earlier (or was it later?).

"What are you talking about?"

She managed to grope her way to a sitting position and peered at Luke from behind bleary eyes. Lorelai sucked in a great gulp of air through her nose and exhaled groggily. Was she awake yet, or was she merely dreaming that her husband had bounded in so early to yell a bit at her?

"I'm talking about the fact that Caesar calls me 'Sexyboy' now!" Luke said. That caught Lorelai's attention, and something nagged at the back of her mind of an act which she had done the night before. What was it though? "Early morning deliveries mean no shower! Early morning deliveries mean no sun! No sun means glow-in-the-dark lotion glows in the dark!"

Oh. Lorelai laughed, long and luxuriously.

"You're so sexy when you're irate."

"Lorelai!"

"I was drowsy," groused Lorelai not at all sullenly. "And you were there. You don't expect me to remember things like common sense when I'm about to fall asleep after a night of wild lovemaking, do you? 'Cause if you do, I gotta tell ya, you don't know the woman you married."

She sat up more fully in bed and grinned cheekily at him. He couldn't hold her eye for more than a few moments before he was matching her expression, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Luke shook his head in exasperation at her, and she blew him a raspberry.

"Sometimes, Lorelai," he said. "Just sometimes ..."

She reached up and pulled him down on the bed next to her.

"Mmm, I know. I kill you." Lorelai kissed the back of his neck. "How long did you say you were here?"

"Just a minute," he said warningly.

"Luke, Luke, Luke, Luke. We both know that we need a lot more than a minute. One does not rush these things."

He would have liked to argue, she knew, but there was no chance.

xiii.

One late September evening, Lorelai came home to the most amazing smells that she had ever encountered emanating from her kitchen. Closing her eyes, she let the aroma take her into the room, inhaling great whiffs of the air as she walked.

"God, if this tastes half as good as I think it will, I might have to marry you all over again." Luke pressed his lips to her mouth, and she opened her eyes. "Hey, you."

"Hey, you're home early."

"Wanted to be with you."

Luke had taken a day off from the diner -- a habit which he had begun most recently, Lorelai reflected with amusement -- and had planned to spend most of it working on the house. Now, from the looks of things in here, it appeared that he'd finished early and taken to the kitchen. Her counter had several cakes on them, and there were quite a few more pans covered that looked as if they too could hold some delicious concoction.

"What's going on?"

"Jackson asked me to help out for Sookie's birthday, remember? I'm testing a couple of recipes."

"If there's a carrot cake in there, I would definitely nix it," Lorelai said. "Sookie has a thing about carrots. Childhood trauma. Long, confusing story. Wanna hear?"

"I'll pass," he answered, gathering two of the pans and moving them aside. "No carrots whatsoever?"

"Not unless you want her in tears, no. Sookie always thinks about the past on her birthdays. She says it makes her feel less old and more adult. And don't ask me to tell you what that means; it's Sookie."

Luke grabbed another pan and placed it with the other two. He sighed heavily and looked at the four pans remaining. Lorelai followed his gaze and was caught by what looked to be a mixing bowl filled with chocolate frosting. She started edging her way over in hopes of getting a spoonful.

Bah. Maybe not. It smelled funny. Something else captured her attention though, and she zoomed over to it. It was what had led her to the kitchen in the first place if she remembered correctly, and it looked divine. She looked up at Luke and pointed down at the pan.

"What's this?"

"This," said Luke, "is bread pudding."

"God. Say that again."

Luke fixed her with a sincerely perplexed look, but he answered her nonetheless. She sure had him trained crazy well.

"...bread pudding?"

"Oh, Luke," said Lorelai. "Dr. Atkins hates you, but I adore you."

"You want some?"

And Luke seemed truly surprised by that, as if he had never envisioned Lorelai wanting something as simple as pudding before in her life. She wondered if the dish were something that her mother would have burned had it set foot in her kitchen. To Lorelai, it sounded homey and comfortable -- and Emily Gilmore did neither home nor comfort.

"Do I like to dance naked to the Eminem Show? Of course I want some!"

With a bewildered eagerness, Luke dished out a generous helping of the bread pudding onto her plate. Lorelai made her way to the large breakfast table in the corner of the room by the window with the plate in one hand and a fork in the other. She sat and got a large forkful of bread pudding.

Luke watched as she put it in her mouth, almost as if he were afraid that she'd spit it out. He shouldn't have worried though -- Lorelai loved the first spicy taste of the still-warm bread and sauces. She dig in with greater alacrity, taking a piece that looked different in color and texture than that first. This one was more crisp; yet it was a soggy crispness that gave rather than forced a pleasantly tart taste in her mouth.

Lorelai got another bite.

Seeming to want to take advantage of her temporary silence, Luke breached a subject that was unlikely to come up by Lorelai's own volition. He cleared his throat and caught her eye.

"Rory called me."

Lorelai stopped mid chew, momentarily thrown. Forcing herself to resume eating, she swallowed the rest of mouthful and reached around for a napkin to dab her mouth with. Brief attempts at respite from the subject.

"That diner phone is getting popular."

"She used my cell," Luke said, moving away and beginning to clean up the kitchen. "She called my cell just after you'd left for work."

"Rory always was one to embrace technology."

Luke cleared his throat again There was obviously something more that he wanted to tell Lorelai, and it wasn't for his own behalf that he was turned wary but for that of another. Whatever Rory had said had been something that Luke didn't think she'd like.

"Forget it Luke," she said. "If she really wanted me to know for honest reasons, she'd call when she knows I'm home."

"Or you could always call her."

"This is delicious," Lorelai said. "What did you put in it? Vanilla pudding? I know that I don't taste banana, but I'm not sure what I taste. These, for example --" and she stabbed a piece of the tarty stuff up "-- I'm not sure what these are."

"Those are apples. The tiny brown thing you're eating is a raisin, and the spice you taste is the cinnamon. You gonna stop eating now that you know what's in it?"

"Fruit?" asked Lorelai. "I've been enjoying fruit? God, I knew you were good in bed, but I never knew that you were so amazing in the kitchen. I love bread pudding."

She peered down at the apple on the end of her fork for a moment -- and then ate it.

xiv.

"I went skinny dipping today," Rory said.

It was late in the afternoon, the sky bright and cloudless, and, unless Rory were several time zones to the East, today had been living on sunshine all throughout. Lorelai felt heavy in the bosom, and definitely not in the sexy way.

"Really?"

"Yeah." A pause then. "It was early in the morning. We were all exhausted, and we suddenly found ourselves driving by this really inviting apartment complex."

Oh, Rory.

"Really?"

"Yes!" and Rory laughed. "Four AM with moonlight barely there, we swam stark naked in the private pool of a hundred random strangers."

"What then?" Lorelai asked. To her own ears there was dread lining her voice; to Rory's, she was sure, there was only interest laced in there. In her own way, she had become too good at faking approval and applying apathy.

"It started to thunder, and the first flash of lightning had me streaking to the car, clothes in my hands."

"Logan must have found that --" and Lorelai searched for a word that wasn't crude, that wasn't full of blame and disappointment "-- hilarious."

"So did Colin and Finn."

"Did it rain?" she asked, biting into a celery stick full of peanut butter. The crunch and chew resounding in her ears were not nearly loud enough to drown out the way that her heart was thudding so loudly in her breast.

"No, not a drop."

At least, that was what she heard through Luke, and that was what she thought that afternoon she and Rory would have talked about. Though it was the end of all she truly knew, she had a strange desire to continue the conversation. She needed to know so many more things, even through her own castles in the sky (it was a very leaky castle lately and quite low hung).

She couldn't find a voice.

(Things not said: did you peek at anyone? was it cold? Lorelai wanted to know. Also -- what about school? is it the same? are you still in that club? Mostly though -- are you ever coming home?)