A/N—Thanks so much for the reviews! Everyone has been awesome so far. BTW: the italicized words are spoilers or thoughts, depending on the situation. This one has spoilers from "Let the Games Begin." Sorry for the confusion. Enjoy!
Rory moved from the table to her spot at the end of the counter, nearest to the curtain, eventually giving way to Jess and Luke's apartment. Jess was roaming the diner, taking orders impatiently, a scowl affixed to his face comfortably as Luke watched on, shaking his head.
"You don't suppose you'll be able to knock some sense into him, do you?" Luke asked her out the corner of his mouth.
She sighed overdramatically. "Maybe there's some hope," she said as they watched him wander back over their way.
Jess went behind the counter, threw down his apron, called in the last of his orders, and told Luke that he was done for the day.
"My ass!" Luke said, sticking his head around the corner. "You're supposed to close tonight!"
"Huh," Jess said as he grabbed Rory's hand and led her behind the curtain. She didn't have the proper time to react, to take the last sip of her coffee, to squeal his name and giggle. Not that she was the squealing, giggly type, but she didn't know second boyfriend sneaks you behind curtains etiquette.
"Hi," he said, once they were upstairs, behind the frosted door of the apartment. He grinned full on this time, interlacing their fingers and pulling her closer. She obliged by grinning back.
"Hi." They reeled each other in for the closest thing to a kiss they were yet to have as a couple. Then the door banged open.
"Oh god," Luke said, covering his eyes and turning. Rory scrambled out of the room, mumbling apologies and thanks to Jess.
"What was going on up here?" Luke asked with Jess cornered at the kitchen table.
"Nothing," Jess replied nonchalantly.
"Nothing? I come up here and the two of you are like shrapnel!" Luke said, gesturing at the explosive separation that they had.
"We weren't doing anything," Jess reiterated.
"You know what? It doesn't matter," Luke said simply. "Because when you guys are here, there's me. When you're at her house, there's Lorelai. And when you're out there…there's Taylor," Luke said, gesturing out the door.
"Romeo and Juliet had warring families and still managed to do some damage," Jess replied with his eyebrows knit together.
Luke shook his head, confused at his nephew. "Sometimes I don't get it, what she sees in you. And then you whip out Shakespeare factoids and it's all very clear," Luke said as he walked out the door and back downstairs into the diner.
Rory sat at the kitchen table, staring at her now frigid Pop-Tart.
'He wanted to kiss me. I wanted to kiss him. It wasn't wrong,' she said, trying to wrap her brain around it. Then she had the visual of Luke ripping into the room flit across her mind and winced reflexively. Jess had either received the ultimatum of the millennium or had been ordered back into the diner as his punishment. Rory couldn't see an ultimatum, he had Shane in his closet at one point and Luke had done nothing short of close the door and roll his eyes.
"But you're the Virgin Mary, Star's Hollow's Sweetheart,' she thought, sighing heavily. The stigma, the innocence, the virginity, she hated them all. She hated the way people smiled at her on the street that didn't even know her. Hated the way that people pretended to know her. "Oh, there's Rory Gilmore. She's going to Harvard. She goes to a private school in Hartford. Bet she'll make valedictorian. She's so nice. She is so wonderful, Lorelai is so lucky.' She heard it all in her head. The nauseating kindness, the frightfully perfect persona that she upheld.
"Lorelai Two?" Lorelai called as she crashed into the front hall. She had brought with her a disgusting amount of Chinese food and the intention of a discussion regarding Jess. Lorelai knew it would be a long night.
"Bedroom!" Rory called as she stood and quickly cantered into her room, pretending to be looking at her small bookshelf for something that she had lost.
"Ah ha!" Lorelai said when she found her, and grabbed her arm, dragging her back into the kitchen.
"Everything on the menu that entailed an appetizer as a side dish," Lorelai said proudly at the spread of little white boxes. "At least a quarter of the menu."
"If we keep breaking our own records, it'll just get boring," Rory pointed out as she brought down plates and silverware from the cupboard.
"Ah, I see. So once we take over the menu, we need a new place, I remember how this works," Lorelai said as she spooned out a nauseating quantity of food onto a fairly small plate.
"We can't wear out a good place too quickly. It loses its appeal after single-handedly sampling every chicken dish on the menu," Rory said as they walked into the living room and fell onto the couch gingerly, making sure to not spill any food.
"We'll just have to try to control ourselves," Lorelai said, shoveling the food into her mouth and staring at the blank television.
"I guess we will." Lorelai let the silence build for a few seconds before she thought of the next thing she needed to say.
"So…Jess." Rory did a mental sigh.
"Jess."
"I guess since you guys are together now, we actually need to talk about him now," Lorelai said as she chewed slowly.
"We probably should've talked about it seriously before it happened," Rory said, her irritation trickling into the conversation.
"At any rate, you're together now and it needs to be discussed." They boiled in the silence for a moment, and then Rory rolled her eyes.
"This cannot be what happens every time he comes up in a conversation, mom," Rory said, shoveling yet more food into her mouth.
"I know, I know, but it's just…Jess! Your father wanted to rip his head off after you guys got into that accident. I'm having a really hard time trying to wrap my brain around the fact that you're with him now," Lorelai said, putting her hands over her face and laying her head back on the couch.
"You have to be nice to him. You can't hate him just because. You have to give him a chance," Rory said, looking at the side of Lorelai's now shaking head.
"I'll try babe, I promise I'll try," Lorelai said, muffled by her hands. "You have to be patient with me, or this will never happen." She was silent for a moment, expecting a reply from Rory that was yet to come. "Your grandparents are going to freak," she said finally.
"Well, we can tell them when we need to tell them. Nobody said they needed to hear about it the day it happened. Besides, it's not like they're going to invite him over for engagement parties and DAR auctions. We'll be lucky if grandma will remember his name just despite him," Rory said, rambling to fill the void.
Lorelai smiled. "My mother, Emily Gilmore, the craziest woman ever to walk the streets of Hartford, Connecticut."
"It makes me feel privileged," Rory said, smiling brightly.
"Look at it this way," Lorelai said, picking up her plate again. "You're probably one of the sanest people in all of Connecticut."
Jess sat in his room, reading as usual, music playing in the background. Luke opened the door and glanced at the clock. Jess momentarily lifted his eyes to the clock to see what was of such interest.
"Do you know what time it is?" Luke asked, squinting vaguely at his nephew.
"Ten," Jess said as he turned a page.
Luke grimaced a little at the music in the background. "How do you go from smash metal to crybaby rock?" Luke asked when he finally caught on to the background noise.
"The Wallflowers are not crybaby rock. And the Distillers aren't smash metal," Jess said simply. "They're artists. The Wallflowers are one of my many vices." Luke tried to listen for another second and then opened his mouth again.
"Aren't they a little, um, poetic for your type?" Luke wanted to know. Jess, in response, lifted his book higher so Luke could see the title. It was a loosely bound copy of some obscure E.E. Cummings poetry. "Ah," Luke said, understanding.
"Yup," Jess said, returning the book to its resting spot.
"Anyway, Rory's on the phone, thought I'd let you know," he said as he walked out of the room, leaving the door partially ajar. Jess paused as Luke walked out of the room, his breath caught in the balance between his throat and his mouth. Rory had called him. Rory had made another move. He felt the urge to run across town and kiss the innocence out of her trip into his blood stream.
Jess rose and walked into the other room to the small, corded phone that sat on the counter. The receiver was sitting face down next to the sink.
"Luke, we're getting a cordless, even if that entails me cutting the cord to this," Jess said, right as he picked up the phone and the dock, walking them into his room, stretching the cord across the macadam kitchen.
"Break it, you bought it," Luke called from the other room.
"Hey," Jess said pleasantly once he got the door to his bedroom closed.
"Hi," she said with a dazzling smile, shining in her word.
"How are you?" he asked, turning down his music a few notches so the words were a little more obscure.
"Tired. I think I heard the phrase 'So…Jess,' about eight thousand times today, from various sources," she said, sounding happy but exasperated.
"Funny, I heard, 'Hurt her and die,' a few times," Jess replied, smiling.
"You know what else I heard?" Rory asked teasingly.
"What?" he asked, for the hell of it.
"That you should meet me tomorrow afternoon after school at the bridge."
"You talking to Miss Patty again?" Jess asked mockingly.
Rory rolled her eyes and readjusted herself. "Bye Jess."
"Bye Lorelai," he said, hanging up the phone before she could protest.
"Mean!" Rory yelled at the dial tone.
"What'd he do?" Lorelai said, shuffling triumphantly into the room.
"He called me Lorelai."
"I knew this would come back and bite us in the ass," Lorelai said, standing hands
on hips, shaking her head.
"Just call us both Snapping Turtle Tina," Rory said.