The flashbacks in this chapter take place in Season One. The first one is directly after Max lends Lorelai his copy of Swann's Way, the second is after the engagement is broken, when Lorelai returns from the Harvard trip. Enjoy!
You gave me a wagonful of flowers, and I used it to carry the memories we had made together through the rest of my life. – Me.
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"I can't believe it."
"Neither can I!"
"He gave it to you?"
"He gave it to me! To keep! Not to rent or loan, like a library, which I guess is good because it would be really weird to have a boyfriend who's like a library, you'd have to pay a fine whenever you were late to the restaurant and I ain't made of money over here, I can't afford to pay fifty cents for every five minutes I get stuck in traffic –"
Luke paused in his productive bustling behind the counter at the far end of the Diner, listening to the high-pitched tones of squealing and giggling that carried through the noisy restaurant, piercing his ear like a needle. He pretended to scowl at the slightly panicked Kirk, who sat rambling aimlessly at the counter; tuning out the other man's nervous mutterings, he focused instead on the breathless tirade coming from the window table, in a vain effort to discern the words that tripped over each other and became tangled in themselves like the frantic rushing of a waterfall. There was only one way he knew to stem that particular brand of hysteria; leaving Kirk abandoned at the counter, he set out across the teeming restaurant, armed with a coffeepot and an iron will.
" – and then there'd be the whole alphabetizing thing. I mean, what is the point of alphabetizing anything? It just gets you all confused and turned around because Az is at the whole other end of the spectrum from Za and –"
Edging up behind the small table, holding the coffee high above his head to prevent losing even a single precious drop, he judged himself close enough to speak the magic word; "Coffee?"
Immediately the rambling ceased, and Lorelai tilted her head back to look up at the man standing behind her, not even bothering to turn around in her seat. "Wow, you look tall," she said brightly. "Especially from this angle. Hey! Upside down, it actually looks like you're smiling!"
"Coffee, please," Rory sighed, holding out an empty cup. "She's been like this all morning and I don't think I can stand another minute. Thank you for getting her off the library thing, at least. We were about to embark on the evils of alphabetization."
"Anytime." Eyeing the slightly manic grin with which Lorelai still beamed up at him from her awkward position, he edged around the table under the pretense of filling Rory's cup. "How many gallons has she had already this morning?"
"Of coffee? None." Noticing Luke's incredulous look, she shrugged. "I swear. There was none in our house, and we only got here ten minutes ago. I guess all that caffeine she's been storing away over the years is finally being released into her bloodstream."
"Tell me about it. The pointless rants don't usually start until at least ten a.m. So, what happened? Did she fall out of bed this morning and hit her head on something solid?"
"Nooooo," Lorelai cackled mischievously, lifting her purse from the floor beside her and clutching it to her chest, "Sooo, Luke! How much do I owe you?"
Luke blinked, lifting Lorelai's empty cup. "You don't owe me anything yet. You haven't ordered. I haven't even given you coffee."
"Hmm." Lorelai paused to consider this, while Rory watched with raised eyebrows. "Well, if I order pancakes and eggs with my coffee, how much will I have to pay you then?"
"Why the sudden interest in paying me?" Luke grumbled, edging around Lorelai's chair to get a clear view of the table behind her, which needed to be cleared. "Most days you just grab your coffee, run away and hope I forget to send you the check. You haven't paid me in months. So did you win the lottery or something?"
"He's got you there," Rory interjected, trying and failing to hide the grin spreading across her face. "We never pay Luke. So why the sudden insistence on being financially correct? Hm?"
Faced with this two-pronged attack, Lorelai mumbled something inaudible and pouted, playing with the strap of her bag in a decidedly gloomy way, her shoulders slumped in a pose of weary resignation. Luke took in this picture of abject misery, glancing across the table at Rory with a questioning look.
"She wants to open her purse," Rory clarified, as though that should have made everything clear.
"I see." Luke paused to mull this over, trying and failing to unravel the many ramifications of this statement. "Is there any particular reason behind that, or is it just one of her wacky moods?"
"Aha!" Lorelai shrieked triumphantly, startling both Luke and Rory, "I thought you'd never ask!" Tearing the clasp open, she dug through her purse for a ridiculously long time, with the attitude of concealing some great secret. Finally she found what she was looking for, and pulled it out with a flourish, waving it before Luke's astonished face.
"A book?"
"Yes! A pretty book!"
"He gave you a book?"
"But this is not just any book, my friend! No, this is Swann's Way by Marcell Proust! Marcell Proust! Isn't that the silliest name you've ever heard? Now I can tell people that I've read Marcell Proust, and they'll say 'Wow, what a silly name, he must be a great writer'!"
Luke blinked, reaching out to take the spasming book in his large hands. Handling it gently, cautiously, as though it were made of nothing stronger than glass, he turned it over, examining both covers with a roving eye. "Does he know that you don't have the attention span to read anything longer than People magazine?" he asked gruffly. Placing the book reverently back onto the table, he shoved his hands into his pockets, fixing a scowl on his face to try and hide the fact that the fat volume had sudden taken on immense meaning in a moment's flash of realization. "He must have mistaken you for Rory. After all, he sees her all the time. I'm sure he's easily confused."
"Why, because I'm pretty enough to be sixteen?" Lorelai asked evilly, tilting her head at a bizarre angle to watch his expression slowly change from contempt for the book into the uniquely patient look of irritation he reserved only for her.
"You can't kill her mood today," Rory commented, inhaling the fumes from her coffee with a look of beaten resignation on her face. "Trust me. I've tried. I even went through Lane's reject pile and found a reggae CD, and I played it in my room. No luck."
"Really?" Luke whistled, impressed. "You brought out the big guns, huh? Wow." Pouring the last of the coffee into Lorelai's cup, he grumbled under his breath, "I guess you really like this guy."
Lorelai didn't answer, only closed her eyes and began humming under her breath. Rory jerked bolt upright, her expression changing to a mask of utter terror. "She's gonna start singing," she moaned, taking a large, fortifying gulp of coffee. "Run, Luke, run!"
Luke obeyed, trudging back across the Diner, the empty coffeepot in one hand, allowing a slow smile to emerge on his face as the high-pitched strains of song drifted after him.
"I feel pretty…… oh so pretty…… I feel pretty and witty and --"
"Mom!"
Grinning broadly now, Luke retreated behind the counter, leaning closer to the unnaturally pale man now sitting across from him, fidgeting restlessly. Pulling out his notepad and pencil with an uncharacteristic flourish, he said genially, without a hint of annoyance in his voice, "So, what can I get you, Kirk?"
Luke Danes was an honest man. He had never lied, cheated or stolen in living memory; in his opinion, there was no use hiding anything, as he had nothing worth hiding. There was only one secret that he had never spoken, that he clutched close to his heart, silent and warm; but that secret was never touched upon, never mentioned, so he had never needed to say anything untrue in its defense.
That afternoon, he lied to a friend for the very first time.
Yelling back to Caesar that he had a delivery, he slipped out of the Diner and trudged down the street; once out of sight of the restaurant windows, however, he doubled back, taking a side lane down between a row of houses, glanced nervously around, ducked into the bookstore, and returned ten minutes later with a lumpy package burning a hole in his coat pocket.
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Swann's Way.
Luke mouthed the words, softly, silently, the golden letters burning into his vision, imprinting themselves on his mind, and coming unbidden to his lips as he cradled the black book in his rough hands. Blowing several years' worth of dust off the cover, he ran his fingers along the binding, pressing gently, locating the spots where the glue had come loose, or pages might be falling out; all traces of anger, all smoldering embers of bitterness were absorbed in the delicate task, the blinding force of unshed tears transmuted into a careful pressure as he felt the corners, checking for dog-ears and tears among the gold-leafed pages. The book had never been read, and it had never been touched by any hands but his own; yet he felt it was immensely important that the book be in good condition, be unblemished, be whole. That book was a tether; a chain that held him bound to the real world, the world of moon and stars and sunlight, that kept him from drifting helplessly into the dark mire of his own mind.
A misty tendril of thought drifted to the forefront of Luke's consciousness as he caressed the book with the fondness of memory; that the thing contained within these pages, beneath the leather and gold, was not a story; it was not a moral, a philosophy, the life of some imaginary hero. There was a man between those covers; a man that he had never met, a man whose face faded into the obscurity of forgetfulness, who had vanished completely out of Luke's world as he had vanished out of Lorelai's, leaving behind only a name; Max.
"Max." He said it softly, but with a throb of passion in his low voice, with an unconscious clenching of his hands around the wafer-thin pages. "Max." The name was a specter, a shade, an invisible menace; it was an aura that seemed to pervade the very air around him, a figure painted with words, descriptions, celebrations that he had overheard lurking at the fringes of Lorelai's life. It was a sullen flare of anger, quickly suppressed by an illusion of joy that knew no bounds; a strained smile, a hand clenched into a fist unknowingly amid a flow of honeyed congratulations, a desperate, shuddering attempt to hold his small world together as it seemed to be falling apart.
Luke had never met the man; or if he had, he could not remember the meeting. All that remained was a sensation of grit teeth, of the muscles in his face forced into an unwilling grin, a smothered hatred for the man that had become a contemptuous reverence for the book. Max was the breath that had driven him out of the Diner on a long-ago afternoon, a whisper that had stirred him from his complacency into a sense of overwhelming fear, had taunted him into a bookstore in search of a volume that he bought because he wanted the same ties to Lorelai as Max might have. Max was a distorted presence, twisted and bloated like the image of something frozen in glass, as it appears to someone on the outside, yearningly looking in.
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The door of the Diner swung open with a bright, gleaming clangor of bells, a joyous clash that Luke completely ignored, engrossed as he was in the illegible scrawlings that covered his notepad, and the pencil eraser that he champed between his teeth. His face set into an expression of intense concentration, he allowed his eyes to gloss over the actual words, his gaze turned inwards, tearing, digging, searching……
"Luke!"
He jumped, startled, the pencil dropping from his hand and skittering away across the floor, the notepad flopping back against the counter as he relaxed his grip. Hands flying instinctively to his pockets, he glanced up, barely perceiving the familiarly beautiful face, the startlingly clear ice-blue eyes, framed by dangling black curls, looking at him from across the counter.
"Hey," he said absently, reeling from being so sharply recalled to reality. "Haven't seen you in a couple days. Where've –" he glanced over at Lorelai again, noticing for the first time the miserable cast to her mouth, the desperate frenzy in her eyes, the tear tracks that stained her cheeks, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the harsh light. Immediately his tone changed, rising sharply from gruff acknowledgement to frantic fear. "Where've you been?" he asked sharply, leaning over the counter, notepad forgotten. "Lorelai, what's wrong?"
" I've been at Harvard. Didn't you hear?" she asked tremblingly, her tone rising into a falsetto of strained brightness, though Luke could hear the quiver of unshed tears beneath the false cheer in her voice. "I thought Miss Patty would've told you all about it by now."
"No, I haven't heard anything, you know I never listen when that woman talks." Reaching across the distance between them, he cautiously, daringly let his hand rest over hers where it lay on the counter. "Now, tell me what happened." His voice dropped, briefly, from sharp concern into a growl of anger that was almost feral. "Was it that Max guy?"
"No. Well – yes," she sniffed, moving her hand up to her eyes under the pretense of brushing her hair away, trying to hide the tear that was swept away by her thumb. Feeling the weight of Luke's gentle gaze upon her, she straightened her shoulders in a visible effort to pull herself together. "It wasn't Max's fault," she said thickly, her voice still quavering as though about to break, her expression only slightly more under control. "It was me, I wasn't committed, I wasn't ready, I wasn't –" She broke off, breathing deeply, turning her head away, giving no sign that she noticed Luke's hand tightening suddenly around hers. "I need your help," she continued, staring determinedly down at her feet, avoiding Luke's searching gaze.
"Of course," he replied immediately, without a moment's hesitation, feeling a sharp, tearing pain blossom uncomfortably close to his heart as he watched her begin to rummage through her purse, determinedly not looking at him in a fruitless effort to hide her tears. Pulling out a small bundle, she dropped it on the counter, jerking her hand away as though burned by its touch.
"I need you – I need you to get rid of that," she said softly, still refusing to meet his eyes. "Burn it, chop it up, throw it in a lake, I don't care. But I can't look at it anymore and – and I need to get it out of the house."
"All right," he said softly, "Whatever you need." He paused for a moment, scrutinizing her tear-streaked face, debating whether or not to risk breaking down the fragile barrier of self-restraint she held against the flood of tears, whether to appease the cold fear that clenched around his stomach as he watched her staring at the floor, her hand limp and unresisting in his grasp, biting her lip to keep from breaking down.
"You and Max –" he said tentatively, quietly, expecting no answer, only leaving the sentence open in case she showed him some other way to ease her anguish, asked him for some favor he could grant, gave him some way to dry her tears, to mend her heart with gentle hands in hope to soothe the ache that tightened his own chest.
"Broken up," she said softly, in a half-sob that was barely above a whisper, so that he had to strain to hear it. "I didn't want to marry him – didn't – didn't want to try on my wedding dress – at all –"
She stood up suddenly, drawing in a sharp breath and turning her back on the counter, but not before Luke saw the gleam of tears breaking loose from her iron will, trickling down their familiar tracks. "Get rid of that," she said firmly, wiping her eyes with subtle, furtive movements. "I've got to get back to the Inn –"
"Of course," he murmured to the empty air, watching her walk stiffly through the door and disappear down the street, her shoulders slumped, head bowed, dejected in a way that he had never seen her before.
She looks – defeated, he thought vaguely, and for some reason the thought sparked a wave of burning rage, a surge of fire that invaded his hands, his face, twisting his mouth into a snarl, his fingers twitching with the desire to throttle the man who had beaten her down, who had stolen the light, the laughter, the spirit, from the most vivid and joyous woman he knew.
Fighting down the flickering flames of unreasoning rage, he turned his attention to the long, thin paper-wrapped bundle that still lay in perfect innocence on the counter, heedless of the pain it had unknowingly caused. Glancing around at the nearly-empty Diner, his hands stole forward of their own accord, furtive fingers peeling back the wrapping, laying the torturous contents out before him.
This is what she wanted me to get rid of? he wondered, carefully smoothing back the paper, lifting out a single yellow daisy, that rose in a gleaming rain of petals that drifted down like fragments of the sun.
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Biting his lip from the memory of that pain, feeling the familiar ache flare up in him with an edge dulled only slightly by time, Luke turned the book over again, slowly, absently, as though seeing some divine image beyond the leather-bound pages. Sliding his fingers slowly beneath the front cover, he lifted it, revealing the first sheaf of pages, slightly wrinkled with age. Between leather and paper, pressed flat and preserved in all of its heedless glory, lay that same daisy, petals missing where Lorelai's nervous fingers and Luke's reverent ones had plucked at its golden head. Slight discolorations marked the title page, where Luke had torn the daisy's leaves away, and its sap had seeped like blood from the jagged green tears; lifting the flower as though it was made of nothing but spun glass, Luke crossed over to the bed, setting it down on the coverlet to shine like a brilliant star through the unlit darkness of the apartment.
Leaning against the stolid bedframe, the book still held open in his hands, Luke stared down at the golden blaze of petals, perfectly arranged so that it seemed to have been twisted from his memories and given life, a plummeting comet trailing a ripple of hatred, of joy, of unadulterated longing through the gloom of his darkest day. The very flower itself seemed no more solid than a memory; out of place in the rain-washed darkness of the November day, it refused to succumb to the darkness, but gleamed and shimmered with a light of its own; and Luke smiled, noticing that the graceful curve of the stem brought to mind the swift, expressive movements of slender white fingers; that the golden light defying the gloom of darkness shone out of the petals as it so often did from the face that smiled eternally before Luke's eyes, daring to win free of the mediocrity, the dull repetition of the suffocating world around her.
With a titanic effort, he managed to tear both eyes and thoughts from the fluttering daisy; returning his gaze to the book that still rested between his palms, he slid his thumb underneath the pages, flipping through chapter upon chapter, not reading the words but admiring their grace as they flowed seamlessly by. Reaching the near-center of the book, he paused suddenly in the movement of pages; for lying under his close-peering eyes lay, not another roll of liquid ink unfurled in trailing phrases, but a blazing red rose, lying prone between the sheaves of paper with the crimson glory of an unbruised and unbroken heart.
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This is the only chapter I will post without reviews. I must have at least three reviews on this chapter before I post the next one, and that number may increase! Tell me what you think, please? Good? Bad? Ugly? 'Take some writing classes, you idiot'?