A/N: This just goes out to all those who've taken the time to review my stories. Thanks to you all!
Wow, this is a decent size. Not as tiny as my usual one-shots…
Just some Luke fluff!
Luke had learned to press flowers at a young age.
When he was little, maybe five, he'd stumbled across his mother picking flowers in her garden. He'd asked with childish curiousness what she did with them.
"I put some of them in vases," she told him. "And I press the other ones."
"Press?" he'd asked, confused.
"Do you want me to show you?" his mother asked, smiling.
Luke had nodded eagerly. At that age, he had wanted to do what adults did. It made him seem grown up.
So with her flowers in one hand and Luke's small hand in the other, she had bounded upstairs with her son. She put Luke on the bed and laid the flowers gently beside him. Then she pulled a blue box out from under the bed.
Out of the box she removed what looked like a scrapbook, which she handed to Luke. He flipped through the pages. Inside there were sheets and sheets of flattened flowers. So this is pressing… he realized.
She then proceeded to show him how to lay the flower between sheets of wax paper and press them inside a book. "In a few days," she told her son. "we can take it out and put it in the book with all the flowers."
Luke was very excited. With his five-year-old impatience, he asked his mother every day if it was time to move the flowers yet. Each day she'd smile, suppress a laugh, and tell him that no, he had to be patient because the most beautiful things develop with time.
Finally, after days of nagging, Luke's mother told him that it was in fact the day to relocate the flowers. He was ecstatic. Luke raced up the stairs, his mother behind, laughing at her son's enthusiasm.
And for the three years after that his mother was around, he continued to press flowers with her, once a month. It was their thing. Liz and their mom did stuff together all the time: it was that crazy mother-daughter bond that always develops. But Luke and his mother shared nearly nothing, and pressing flowers was the only thing that ever brought them close.
After his mother's death, he stopped pressing flowers. First of all, because he couldn't do it with her, so he didn't want to do it at all. Second, the other thought leering in the back of his mind was that if the guys at school found out, he'd really be in for it. Because, as all children know, flowers equals girly.
But when Lorelai handed him that slightly wilting yellow daisy on that late spring day, he'd wanted to keep that moment suspended in time. Especially when he found out the meaning behind it. He wanted to keep that moment in which he knew nothing of her engagement and could still entertain the possibility of a future with her, no matter how farfetched it seemed at the time.
So two days after receiving that little yellow flower, he pulled out the trusty, faded blue box from the very back of his closet. And he very carefully pressed the flower between the slightly yellowing pages of the old, large dictionary that him and his mother had used all those years ago.
And days later when the flower was ready, he skipped a page in the scrapbook, somehow marking a new phase in his life. He carefully put the flower in the book and shut it. After returning the book to the box, he placed it back in the closet, not to be seen again for three years.
Because three years later she gave him another flower. Yes, she gave him flowers before then, too. But that was at Thanksgiving, and he didn't think those meant much. She gave flowers to everyone on Thanksgiving. This was a rose.
Sure, if he thought about it, neither the daisy nor the rose meant much more than the Thanksgiving flowers. But for some reason he saw them as special. Like she went out of her way to give them to him.
After her disastrous trip to the mall with her mother and after she and Rory took over his diner, she handed him the rose from her lapel. He saw it as a thank you, maybe. A thank you for what? Thank you for letting them use his diner as sort of a second home, he supposed. It really didn't matter.
And after he closed up that night, he went upstairs and pulled out that blue box again. And as he pressed the rose, he thought how very odd it was that she had given him two flowers, plus the ones at Thanksgiving, and he had had given her none. In fact, now that he thought about it, he'd never given a girl flowers. Never. Then he told himself that if (when, he scolded his mind when) he dated Lorelai Gilmore, he would be sure to buy her flowers.
So two months later, he stood in a flower shop, pacing the aisles, staring down the flowers. He fruitlessly willed the perfect ones to stand out or yell 'pick me!'. After wandering aimlessly for ten minutes, he grabbed a bouquet of flowers that were a majority of pink and white. He was pretty sure she'd like them. And he knew that even she didn't, she wouldn't tell him that.
He stopped by the diner to make sure Lane and Caesar had everything under control before heading off to the test run. Before he left, though, he dashed upstairs and tossed one of the flowers from the bouquet onto his bed.
He'd press it later.
The End
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