Everything Old Is New Again

by Lula Bo

How do the same things happen every year in so many different ways? A year in the life of Lorelai, Luke, Rory, Emily, and Richard. Followup to Separation Anxiety.

12. July

Many, many, many thanks to CIAChick, sosmitten, and allthingsholy for the feedback and hand-holding. It was a hard chapter to write, and you all were fabulous putting up with my neuroses. It's better for the help.

July

The end of June had been humid and hot, and the strange, sickly sweet smell the occasional faint breezes carried made Luke anything but sad to see it go. June had always been his favorite of the summer months: there was the residual giddy feeling of possibility left over from years in grade school and last days of classes, and even he had to admit that Stars Hollow blossomed in the most surprising and lovely ways. He wasn't a flower guy and he didn't understand people who liked gardening for fun any more than he understood people who considered golf a serious sport, but the town decked itself out in the frilliest, pinkest, whitest, frothiest blooms, and he couldn't deny it pleased some latent part of his brain. The June that had just passed, however, was of a different character altogether. Everything that should have been pretty and sweet was wilted, limp, soggy, and possessed of a faintly rotten odor. The heat was so all-consuming that the lethargy that came over almost everyone Luke knew seemed to take over the buildings and streets and trees. The whole town drooped.

He contemplated the heat as he sprawled flat on his back on the floor of his new bedroom. Lorelai's old room was now longer and wider, and the ceiling sloped up more towards the back side of the room. He tried to remember the way it had been arranged before, the comfortable mess and girly floral decoration. The sheer expanse of white around him obliterated the old room—sunlight slanted against the sheetrock and glared hollowly off the opposite walls and bare wood floor. Luke folded his hands over his stomach and tipped his head, trying to picture how it would look after Lorelai was through with it, but the reflections off the walls were too bright, too unrelenting, and he gave in, closed his eyes, and enjoyed a moment of pure, blissfully self-indulgent misery.

No matter how many years he'd lived in Stars Hollow, the heat and humidity were always a surprise. He'd been through it literally dozens of times before, seen the seasons change every year, and empirically, he knew it was going to be hot. He knew this the same way that he knew that Kirk would come into the diner every day at the same time and perform the same obnoxious rituals as the day before. Yet he always let himself be taken by surprise at how miserable the heat could be and how irritated he could get; he was perpetually unprepared for the inevitable sameness in each summer. After tucking his chin to his chest and walking his way through the cold winters with his eyes cast down, determined to get through the worst of it, he saw summer as a softer reprieve. He was fooling himself, he knew: June had already smacked him upside the head for his naïveté, and July was looking just as torturous.

The front door slammed downstairs, and at the click of heels on hardwood in the foyer, Luke knew he should get up.

"Luke?" Her voice was weary.

"Up here."

He listened to Lorelai coming up the stairs. First one shoe landed with a dull thud, then the other. He heard the distinct sound of a zipper, imagined he could hear the whisper of the fabric as she pushed the skirt she wore down over her hips and climbed the remaining stairs. She was struggling to yank her shirt over her head as she came in the room. When she emerged, red and perspiring, she didn't return Luke's lazy grin, her face puckered in a sour expression. She fairly collapsed to the floor beside him, rested her head on the center of his chest.

"Oh, my hell. It is so friggin' hot. I want to die," she mumbled. "Hate."

Luke stroked her hair away from her forehead. "Right there with you."

"Too hot for clothes," she continued. "Take 'em off."

"You did," he told her. "Thank you, by the way."

Lorelai scowled. . "Har-dee-har-har. I meant you, you goon. Just looking at you makes me hot," she said, gesturing with one hand to his jeans and tee shirt.

"Thank you. Nice to know we haven't lost the passion."

She sat up and stared at him balefully. "I feel like we've entered the Outer Limits and we've swapped personalities, here. Me, all grunty, you all quick with the quipping. You aren't suddenly overcome by a desire to wear high heels and toss your hair, are you?"

He lifted one eyebrow. "Now that you mention it…"

"Oh, stop," she said. "C'mere." She took his hands in hers and pulled him to sit up, rolled his shirt off, and in one swift movement, had him flat on his back again and herself seated atop his thighs. She worked the button in his jeans, muttering to herself. "Just too hot. Stroke hot."

Luke lifted his hips to allow Lorelai to undress him more easily, settled one arm behind his head and the opposite hand lightly on her waist as she straddled him, her knees pressed to his ribcage. He rubbed his thumb against the elastic waistband of her underwear and studied her a moment. Her mission to get them as close to naked as possible successfully completed, she stared out the window, her eyes vacant and her face slack. He squeezed her ribcage, and she looked back at him apologetically.

"I'm just tired, babe. I'm tired because I'm hot, and because I'm hot, I can't think, and because of all that together and the communal stupidity of people, I hate everyone who is not you, Rory, or—well, me, actually. This heat makes me stupid."

He traced his fingers along the small of her back. "I doubt that."

"You weren't at the inn today," she replied, blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. "I just couldn't—I couldn't speak. This weather violently sucks."

Luke pulled her down beside him and held her loosely with one arm. She wriggled a little closer, and he knew that, despite the heat and the foul mood it was putting her in, she wanted contact. He encouraged her wordlessly, sliding his hand down her back to cup her ass and draw her in. With a sigh, she threw one leg over his and pressed her cheek to his chest, laid her arm across his middle and hooked her foot around his calf. He kissed her forehead, toyed with the curls over her ear.

"Let's go away," he said abruptly. "Let's say we're going to do it and actually do it."

"Go away where?" she asked.

"The cabin, like we said. For the fourth. We'll make a really long weekend of it—the Friday before, maybe the Tuesday after—what do you say?" he asked.

"Okay," she said, without hesitation.

"Yeah?"

She closed her eyes and sank further into him. "I think that sounds nice."

"Really?"

"Yes, really, Luke," she retorted, her tone more than slightly pissy. "I promised you, and I really do want to go, and yes, it's a little close to the wedding, but it's not like that's not covered or as if my mother will let one single detail fall through the cracks if we go away. There's nothing really going on that Michel can't handle at the inn, and Rory's going to be in Cambridge with Marty. And," she said, raising her head, "if that's not good enough reason, I'll throw in the fact that we haven't had any down time together lately and I'd like to be alone with my guy. Why is that so hard to believe?"

She was flushed, her skin slightly damp. Luke tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and took in the set of her mouth and the slightly irritated flash in her eyes. "I just know how you are about town stuff—"

Lorelai rolled her eyes. "Oh, like Taylor doesn't have all the three hundred and however many other days planned out to make up for the few we'll miss. They have fireworks at this lake of yours?"

"They do."

"Coffee?"

"It could be arranged."

"And you'll be there?"

"Yeah," he said softly, feeling chastised.

"That's all I need, then," she told him. "It's settled. We're going. Come hell, high water, or exploding toilets, we're going." She fell back to his shoulder and, without warning, dug her nails into his side. "You seriously underestimate where you are on my list of priorities, sometimes, you know that? Give me a little more credit than that, Luke."

The heat wore her patience thin, he knew. Though she was liable to snap in certain moods and tempers, she still managed to contain it in frivolous language; now, the veneer of sarcasm and wit had momentarily been stripped away to leave the truth bare. They'd had their share of moments of naked honesty, but there was a pattern to those that Luke felt more comfortable with: fight, ignore, fight again, talk, make up, make love, return to regularly scheduled relationship. The barbs they traded in day-to-day conversation were always cushioned—they were more fluent in their language of subtext than anything else. Striking out as she'd done, without provocation or premeditation, stung them both. Luke gathered her closer, pressed his lips to her hair.

"Will you go fishing?" he asked.

"If the fish are peanuts and they're in a bowl nearby, yes. Otherwise, it's unlikely," she said. Her voice was slightly raw. "I love you."

"I know," he replied. "I love you back."

"Luke?"

"Hm?"

"I'm hot."

"You hungry?" he asked. She nodded into his shoulder, and he could feel the petulant look on her face as she rubbed her nose against his skin and kissed him lightly. "Go take a cool shower. When you get out, there'll be dinner."

"Something light," she said, as he pulled her to her feet. "Because—"

"It's hot," he finished. "I know." He dipped his head and kissed her briefly. "Go cool off."

She scanned his face, her own enigmatic. "Thank you," she said. She padded to the door in her bare feet, paused on the threshold, and looked back at him. "Luke," she said. "This is going to be our bedroom."

He grinned. "Yeah, it is."

It was almost a full forty-five minutes before Lorelai stepped out of the shower. Luke waited in the kitchen, redressed in his jeans and tee shirt, a bottle of beer sweating in his hand. He ran the wet bottle across his forehead, his eyes closed, and sighed.

"So cliché, my life." Lorelai grinned at him. She stood just outside Rory's door, leaning against the wall. "Starring in a beer commercial in our kitchen, are you?"

"Is that what I'm doing?"

She took a few steps towards him and reached for the bottle. "Hot weather, refreshing alcoholic beverage, hot guy—"

"Hot guy?"

She shrugged and took a sip. "Call it like I see it." She gave him back the bottle. "You should take a shower, too. I can wait."

"You feel better?"

"I do. I needed that." She had changed into a thin gray tank top and shorter than decent shorts faded to pale blue. Her hair was piled high on her head, and Luke followed the line of her neck and shoulders with his eyes, felt a familiar tug in his chest. She smiled questioningly at him, her head tipped to one side. "You want to shower, or what?"

"Maybe later," he said, his voice faint. "So, dinner." He rose and stepped towards the fridge. "Can I say that as a fan of the whole underwear look that I'm slightly disappointed it's all covered up?"

Lorelai slapped his rear and reached past him into the fridge to grab a beer. "Not covered," she said. "Abandoned altogether."

"What?" He stopped mid-movement, his hand hovering over a plastic container of potato salad and his head a quarter of an inch from the top of the fridge.

She raised her eyes heavenward with an innocent shrug. "I've gone commando, Luke. I am of the panty-less. Flying free, feeling breezy." She hoisted herself onto the counter and sipped her beer. "Luke? The food?"

He swallowed thickly and continued to stack the cartons he'd brought from the diner that afternoon. They were already damp with condensation, slippery in his hands. As he backed away from the fridge and closed the door with his foot, Luke concentrated on hanging on to the containers of food, on forgetting that his temperature had risen at least five degrees in the already stifling heat and the pressure in his head and chest and groin could possibly cause him to spontaneously combust right there in the kitchen. From the corner of his eye he saw Lorelai tip her head back against the cabinet behind her and spread her legs as she kicked her heels at the cubbies beneath the counter.

"Mm. I see mayonnaisey goodness," she sighed. "Excellent." She rested her beer on her thigh and shivered. "Have you ever noticed that, as nice as it is to come in from the cold and warm up, it's not quite as, oh, I don't know, satisfying, as cooling off when you're hot?" she asked. She dragged the bottle along the outside of her thigh. "Almost makes me like the heat." She paused. "Almost." Smiling softly at Luke, she propped her chin on her shoulder and closed her eyes. "Don'tcha think?"

Luke cupped Lorelai's knee, slipped his fingers under and into the crease between her calf and thigh. With the other hand, he took the lids off the salads and lined them up on the counter. He kneaded the thin, soft skin behind her knee. "I know what you're doing," he said.

She lifted her leg and brushed the top of her foot up his arm. "And what am I doing?"

Still massaging the back of her knee, he reached towards the cabinet beside her for plates. "What you're doing is trying to get me worked up."

"Oh, aren't we so sure of ourselves?"

He cocked an eyebrow. "You took a shower, you're in a better mood, and you're—"

"What? Doing my best to get you so hot and bothered you take me right here on the kitchen floor?" she asked.

"Something like that."

She caught his wrist as he began to pull away and pressed his hand firmly to her thigh. "Can you blame me?"

Luke would be the first to admit that June had been slightly strained, through no fault of his or Lorelai's. Things had not gone according to plan from the start and continued spiraling slightly out of their control for the rest of the month. It didn't help that they were bunking in Rory's room and were both highly aware of the fact that it was somehow sacred space that they couldn't violate, and so they'd slept barely touching each other for weeks on end. Why they'd so determinedly abstained from talking about it—as well as from the act altogether, at least there in Rory's room—they had never discussed. It was a tacit agreement that having sex in Rory's room was somehow inappropriate and strange. It didn't leave them many other options other than romps in the living room (which Lorelai pointed out did get kind of old) or trysts in the apartment over the diner (which Luke pointed out was practically a giant billboard advertising their sex life to inquisitive and gossipy townies). Between unforeseen plumbing disasters, a larger than usual influx of tourists, a spontaneous trip to the Cape for Lorelai, and a general lack of personal, private space, they were both tense and on edge.

"No," he replied. He stroked her knee idly with his thumb. "It's—you know, we didn't plan this all that well."

She reached for a container of salad and pinched out a chunk of potato with her index finger and thumb. "Plan what?"

He gestured between them. "This. Our—our relationship."

Lorelai smothered a smile. "Oh, how I love hearing words like that come from that gorgeous mouth of yours. But I don't know what you mean."

"Just, you know, we got together and we've been together and we're—"

"Together?" she ventured, no longer trying to hide her amusement.

Luke took his hand away and retreated to the refrigerator. "Yes," he said tersely. "But it all happened during the first year your new business was open, and that's just a bad time to start anything."

"Other than the business itself," Lorelai said. "I'm not following you on this one."

He rubbed his eyes. "Stuff keeps coming up. Keeps—I don't know, getting in the way." He leaned his head back against the door of the fridge. "You know what I'm talking about, Lorelai."

She licked the tip of her finger clean of potato salad. "I do. And I think partly you're right, that the first year of a business is its most unpredictable, but I also think that things happening is just what we're going to have to deal with on a permanent basis. That's just what life is, Luke. Things happen." She helped herself to another bite. "I do believe that would be the makings of a great country song."

He opened a drawer and grabbed a fork. "Stop eating with your fingers."

"Thank you," she said. She turned and began to put the lids back on the containers he'd just opened, her movements slow and deliberate. When they were covered and neatly stacked, she raised her head. "But I'm really more interested in ravishing you at the moment." Her eyes were dark, her stare provocative. She crooked a finger at him.

"I thought you were hungry," he said. He took his cue, advancing slowly. "And hot."

"I'm always hot," Lorelai told him, leaning back and bracing herself on the palms of her hands. "Aren't I, lover?"

Luke stepped between her knees and rested his hands heavily on her thighs. "Generally, yes. Don't call me that."

"Just generally?" She straightened up once more and slung her arms over his shoulders. She held his gaze silently a long moment. "We'll get better at it. And I think I will call you that."

"Get better at what?" he asked, sliding his hands up her thighs and teasing his fingers under the hem of her shorts.

"Dealing with things when they happen. We got better at everything else. In fact, I think we're ready for prime time." She scooted forward on the counter. "Or slightly later."

He drew his left hand back towards her knee and ran his palm down her calf, circled her ankle. "How so?" he asked, watching her extend her leg in an effort to tempt his hand higher once more.

"Reality TV," she said. She began to massage the muscles at the nape of his neck. "One of those competition shows like The Amazing Race. We'd win."

"Would we?"

She bit her lip as the hand still on her thigh moved towards her hip even as Luke inched it beneath her, grasped the back of her leg as though to lift her up. "Definitely," she breathed. Her voice, throaty as she spoke, caught slightly. "We're problem-solvers."

Luke eased her forward, forgetful of the heat, conscious only of the rise and fall of Lorelai's chest and her ragged breathing, of the way she was curling around him, the hairsbreadth of space between her mouth and his. He swallowed hard, wondering how the atmosphere had changed so quickly; Lorelai closed her eyes and the brush of her eyelashes against his cheek as she erased the last space between them reminded him that the air was always different wherever she was no matter the weather. She tugged gently on his lower lip, simultaneously hooked her leg around his waist, and pulled him flush against her. As he lifted her up and she wrapped herself more tightly to him with her arms and legs and tongue, he staggered back, fell against the refrigerator, overcome.

"Where?" he asked, when he found his voice.

She threw her head back and her eyes shone. "God, I don't—throw me up against a wall for all I care." Fisting her hand in his hair, she tipped his head away from her and kissed him again, leveraged herself higher on his waist with her hips.

He grunted. "Floor's good."

"Second that."

When they parted, they lay silently side-by-side, both flat on their backs and winded. Lorelai pushed her hair off her forehead and turned to look at him. "So," she said. "Huh."

Luke nodded, and winced. "Yeah."

"That was—"

"Yeah," he said again.

"—different," she finished. She turned to stare at the ceiling again. "Intense."

He cleared his throat. "Sorry about—"

"It happens," she told him, waving a hand dismissively. "How's your head?"

"Gonna hurt in a bit." He reached out blindly, rested his hand the first place he felt skin, brushed his fingers across her abdomen. "You?"

Lorelai folded her hand into his. "Better than yours. Your hand's a good pillow. Among other things," she said. "My ass, however, is another story."

"Ah, geez." He raised his head and surveyed the small space they occupied between the table and counter. "We're lucky we didn't break anything."

She rolled onto her side and cushioned her cheek on her arm. "We should probably move at some point. Shower. Get a little less naked." She closed her eyes. "If we ever do this again, we're going to carpet the damned floor first."

Luke hauled himself across the floor, swallowing over the hitching whine of pain in his throat. He pulled Lorelai into him and she curled against his side, sighed on his shoulder. "How're you feeling, really?"

"Mm, sleepy. Hungry. Relaxed," she said. She skimmed her hand over his chest. "Thinking I should go without underwear more often."

"Was this whole thing just an elaborate seduction plot?" he asked.

She turned his face to hers and kissed him softly, kissed his forehead and eyes and cheeks and chin. "Only partly. I really was hot. The central air was on the fritz today and the inn was just unbearable. I called Harley and had her come in early, and she's all, 'oh, sure, Ms. Gilmore! I'm totally used to the heat, because, like, Central Florida? Where I grew up? Totally worse than this, you have no idea.'" She spoke in a high, lilting imitation of her night manager, rolling her eyes. "But everything else was premeditated, yes. I had no idea I was going to get a long weekend out of it." She propped herself up on one elbow and tapped her fingers against his chest. Her eyes roved over his face. "You serious about that?"

Luke took her in, her heavy-lidded eyes and swollen lips, the curve of her cheek and rosy glow of her skin, the tumble of her dark curls falling from an elastic band. The ache in his side, one unrelated to the hard surface beneath him, crept higher. "If you want."

She grinned. "I want." She leaned down to kiss him again. "But," she said, her mouth against his, "at the moment, what I want is you to come upstairs with me to hose ourselves down"—he snorted at this—"and then to take me to some cheap, cheesy restaurant with fabulously bad food and really cold air conditioning and then to a movie for more fabulously bad food and really cold air conditioning."

"And then?"

"And then," she said, raising one shoulder, "we'll see." She played with his hair with one hand, teasing the locks into odd spikes and twists. "So," she began, "you're sweaty."

"So are you," he told her, softly nipping at her shoulder. "That a problem?"

She fell against him again. "Nope. I'm just saying: this was fun. Good, sweaty fun."

"I enjoyed myself."

"I kinda noticed that," she laughed. "But all around, a positive experience, however unexpected."

"A little uncomfortable."

"And yet," she said. She struggled to sit up, groaning. "So, two weekends away in two months, plus the honeymoon? My staff is going to hate me."

"I think the fact that you employ them will help them overlook that."

With a look over her shoulder at him, Lorelai pushed herself to her feet and pulled him with her. "Come on, nympho. Let's go wash the sex off."

In the next few days, hurried arrangements were made for the upcoming weekend—including Rory's decision to come home while the house would be empty, under the proviso that Marty not be a sleepover guest (though Luke heard Lorelai amend this to not be seen as a sleepover guest)—and late on the afternoon of July first, Luke pulled his truck into the drive at home and honked. Lorelai leaned out the front window, a look of consternation on her face.

"What is this, a cattle call?" she yelled.

"Do you have any idea what kind of traffic we're going to hit on a holiday weekend?" he yelled back.

"And what is traffic when you have the pleasure of my company?" she called, disappearing back into the house.

Luke jogged inside and surveyed the living room. It looked only half-ransacked, which was half better than he'd expected. He shouldered the duffel bag he'd left at the bottom of the stairs that morning, wandered towards the kitchen. "Lorelai?"

"Here," she said, popping her head around Rory's door. "Ready. Did you pack the books?"

"I packed the books."

"And the—"

"I have everything on the list," he said. "And I have a cab full of groceries out there, sitting in the heat. You ready?"

She leaned forward and pressed her lips briefly to his. "I said I was. Just have to put my shoes on."

He sighed. "Ready implies nothing left to do, you know."

"I don't have anything left to do," she said. "Just put on my shoes."

I-84 North was clogged and traffic was intermittently stopped the closer it came to the Mass Pike. The Pike, when they came to it, was a gridlock of sports utilities and campers and convertibles up to the ticket booths. Lorelai leaned out her window, craning to see where they were in the order of things. She sat with her heels on the edge of the seat, her arms wrapped around her legs. Turning from the window, she laid her cheek on her knee and gazed at Luke.

"I told you there'd be traffic," he said. "Fucking gas-guzzlers."

"And this baby is a model of environmental efficiency," Lorelai teased. She closed her eyes. "The heat's making me sleepy."

"If you want to sleep, sleep."

"But then who would entertain you?" she asked. "I'm fine." She paused, staring blankly at the back end of the trailer in line before them. Luke glanced at her sidelong, watched her as she tugged at the hems of her jeans, fingered the fraying edges of the fabric. She leaned forward to hide behind the curtain of her dark curls a long moment. He felt himself tense in the silence as he edged the truck a yard or two along. She flipped her hair back and studied his profile. "Luke?"

"Yeah?"

"Have you ever wondered if we're—that we might, I don't know, unravel? After we're married?" Her voice was tentative. "Like all those couples in Victorian novels that get married and then realize that they hate each other?"

Luke remained carefully still, his hand on the steering wheel, his elbow propped on the ledge of the open window. "Nope."

"You never even thought about it?"

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "Have you?"

She folded her arms atop her knees and stared blankly over the jammed turnpike. "Not seriously. It's just—something Sookie said to me the other day made me think, a little."

"What did she say?" he asked, biting back the growl of irritation in his throat.

"I mentioned something to her about 'after the honeymoon,' and she said we needed to get through the wedding first. She didn't—"

"What?"

She gave him a look that he could never decide that he liked or not, one that was at once amused, conciliating, and affectionate. That she was often amused by his anger, he was used to, though it was still more often irritating than not, and that she was patronizing him when she tried to calm him down he'd never appreciated, but that she could look at him with that particular tilt to her smile could nearly compensate for the other two. Nearly. "She didn't mean anything by it. She was frosting a cake, and she wasn't really thinking. You know how she gets when she's baking—it's like trying to have a conversation with, like, a marathon runner."

"A marathon runner?"

"Yeah. Concentrating on running but not consciously thinking about it. That's Sookie in the kitchen." She pushed her hair behind her ears and sighed. "She was just talking out loud. Because of, you know… before."

"I know about before," he said tersely.

"It just made me think, a little. I mean, as much as I would love to live in the media spotlight and I'm more than deserving of the adoration of the masses—" He grunted. "—I don't have any plans to pull a Jennifer Wilbanks and then nearly get indicted on faking a federal crime. I know I've done the running part before—" Again, he made a noise deep in his throat. "—but I like to think of myself as something of a trailblazer and I have no desire to be known as a copycat runaway bride. So, that's reason number one, but more important, reason number two: you're the guy waiting at the other end of the aisle." She reached out and touched his wrist, swept her fingers over the top of his hand as it rested on the gearshift. "But it did make me wonder if things will change."

He said nothing a moment. Traffic began to move, and as he eased the truck forward in line towards the automated ticket machines, Luke felt a familiar numbness in his fingers. It was a sensation he hadn't experienced recently, but it was immediate, cold. He remembered how it took a sudden hold on him when Lorelai told him Max had asked her to marry him, the way his hands seemed inexplicably deadened even as he shook coffee grounds from a can into the filter—it had happened before and it would happen after, but never with such abrupt, seizing strength as it had at that moment in the diner. He could go about the motions, but he was powerless, and in his impotence, resigned. Sitting in his truck on the Mass Pike with Lorelai's hand resting lightly on his wrist, the numbness made him nauseated. It was weakness, at its root, something he'd never had the stomach for.

"What would change?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Don't know. It just—it seems like something should change, right? Because it's a big deal." She paused. "But it doesn't have to. I like the way things are."

"I'm pretty good with them myself," he replied. He leaned out for the ticket and tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel. He pulled onto the Pike bound east, shifted awkwardly in his seat. "I don't know what you want me to say, Lorelai."

"I don't—you don't have to say anything. Or worry, I swear. We're good. We're solid. Just try and get rid of me."

Luke glanced over his shoulder and changed lanes. "We talked about this before."

"What?"

"The stuff—all the shit that happened before. That's not—that's not now. It didn't happen with us. We're not gonna unravel. Nothing's gonna change," he said, aware of the grim determination in his voice. He cast a sidelong glance at her. She was wearing that face again. "Stop looking at me like that."

She slid across the seat and draped one arm across his shoulders, reached the other over his middle in an awkward embrace, and lay her head on his shoulder, facing away from him. "I'm glad it's you."

He relaxed into her arms. "Believe me, me too." He kissed the top of her head. "Now go back over there and buckle up. It's not safe, riding like that."

"Heh," she chortled. "Dirty."

"Ah, geez."

Though it was well past seven when they reached the end of the long, rutted lane that led to the family cabin, the evening was still faintly light, the last of the dying sun that worked itself under the canopy of trees a thin, brittle pink. The road approached the back of the house, cutting through the evergreens that encircled the property before the hill sloped down towards the small expanse of beach and the dock below. Luke parked the truck at the bottom of the back porch stairs, where he always did, and swung down to the uneven, stony path. He jogged around the front of the car to open Lorelai's door for her.

"Pretty," she breathed. "Oh, and smell that."

"Smell what?" he asked, handing her out.

"Earthy, lakey, piney, woody good smells," she told him. She inhaled deeply, hung on his arm as he led her up the back stairs to the door. "Why haven't I been here before?"

"What about you exactly screams nature girl?"

"Oh, hush," she said. She followed him over the threshold.

Luke stepped quickly through the main room, sweeping the coverings from the furniture as he went. "Stay by the door, I have to go find the fuse box and get the lights up." With that, he walked into a coffee table and stumbled into a doorframe, issued a string of curses at the shooting pain in his shin and the sharp tingle in his forehead.

"Luke?"

He pressed his palm to the center of his forehead. "I'm okay."

"You want help? A flashlight?"

"You have one handy?" he asked.

She paused. "It's the thought, my life."

"Just—stay there a sec."

When he'd successfully turned the electricity on, he returned to the living room. Lorelai stood in the back door, fumbling with her cell phone. She looked up as Luke hit the lights and the darkness flickered and died.

"I'm getting no signal out here," she said. "I was hoping to call Rory, but—Luke! you're bleeding!" she cried. She snapped her phone shut and came towards him, arms extended.

He touched his forehead with the tips of his fingers, looking up as though he could see the wound himself. Lorelai cupped his cheeks in her hands and drew him towards her. "Just nicked myself," he said.

She pressed a line of kisses to his hairline. "I think you'll live. But we should clean it anyway. You have first aid stuff here?"

"Bathroom," he said. "But it can wait, I want to bring the rest of the stuff in." Off her dubious look, he rolled his eyes. "It's hardly even a cut, Lorelai."

"Tell that to the emergency room doctor when they have to amputate your head because you've contracted some nasty case of gangrene."

It was another fifteen minutes of hauling in the food for the weekend and their bags after Luke located the first aid kit and let Lorelai fuss over him, which he cowed to only when she began singing tuneless songs about gangrene, staph infections, and the bubonic plague. He wouldn't let her put a band-aid on his forehead; he had to maintain at least a semblance of dignity, he said.

Lorelai followed him through the cabin as he lugged her bag into the back bedroom. "I know what you're going to say."

"That your bag—"

"—is impractically heavy. But I swear, it's all necessities. Like, towels, I didn't know if we'd need towels. Or sheets. Or pillows. But those are in the truck. And shoes," she added. "So can we save the lecture for another day? I'd like to take a shower."

"Go right ahead," he said. "I'll get dinner going."

She looked around warily, one hand on her hip. "So, where's the bathroom?"

"Down by the lake," Luke replied.

"Excuse me?" Lorelai squeaked.

"Yeah—they're communal, but they tend to be pretty clean. Bad water pressure, though." He smiled. "Nothing like an outdoor shower."

Lorelai paled. "Please tell me you're joking."

"I'm joking."

"Luke? Seriously?"

He looked at her from beneath brows set in quiet amusement. "Seriously. It's right through that door," he said, pointing. "But I had you for a minute there, didn't I?"

"You suck."

"I try."

He kept the grill on the front porch overlooking the lake—this was a vantage point he always savored, the bright expanse of water and the pinpoints of light from cottages on the other side, the surrounding woods and the pebbly sand. When he was small, he always thought of the lake and the cabin as some secreted fortress, a protective enclave where he could retreat when he needed peace and rest. It still seemed that way, though certain things had changed; people in the neighboring houses had begun to rent their places to vacationers, and the beach was occasionally overrun with loud strangers. It wasn't the way things were done during his dad's time, when cabins were like season tickets to the Red Sox, more likely inherited than purchased or given away; the same people had been coming here for as long as Luke could remember. Neither Luke nor his father were exactly friendly with their neighbors, but each recognized the other as members of an exclusive club that only acquired new blood when families expanded.

As Luke rolled out the dough that he'd brought with him and listened to the sounds of Lorelai showering in the next room—singing "Vacation" at the top of her lungs—he tried to remember all the time he'd spent here. He couldn't recall the exact first time, and his recollection of the time here in the years before his mother's death was equally fuzzy. It startled him somewhat to realize that few of his memories of this particular place involved Liz. He wasn't sure if the memories he had of his mother, fanning herself in the shade on the front porch as he and his father returned from a day of fishing, sweeping the dust bunnies away and snapping clean sheets in the air as she made the beds, were manufactured or true. In the end, he supposed the distinction didn't matter, but the confusion between what he remembered and what he wished to was vaguely depressing. Other memories were more stable. He could picture his father manning the boat, showing him the back trails in the woods that were better for hiking, standing over the old charcoal grill with a pair of tongs in hand and an imperious expression on his face. He was at a loss to place Liz here, and it unsettled him. She'd never returned to the lake after their mother passed away—the weekends that Luke and his father drove up from Stars Hollow she spent sleeping over at Crazy Carrie's or some other brain-dead hippie groupie she'd fallen in with at school. It had been over twenty years, he realized, since someone other than himself or his father had set foot over the threshold. Until today, he corrected himself, and he began to whistle as he finished patting out the dough.

He went through the motions of lighting the grill—propane, cleaner and easier than charcoal, and more than likely less carcinogenic—and laying the two flat discs of dough he'd rolled across the top. He listened to the sounds of the house, the woods, the lake, as he rummaged through the cooler for a beer; the lake and the woods sounded as they always had, still and stirring at the same time, full of silent movement rarely broken by anything louder than the distant hum of a motorboat pulling away from a dock. The house, however, was suddenly noisier than it had ever been. Lorelai's movements were distinct enough that he could hear her cursing as she rifled through her overnight bag, brushed her teeth, dried her hair. The silent sanctuary he was used to was half-overcome by the sheer volume of her presence, by the space she took up just being Lorelai. Her noises were as familiar to him now as those of the lake and the woods had been for years and, strangely, just as comforting.

She emerged barefoot and in her pajamas not long after he turned the dough. Luke gave her uniform a once-over, unsurprised: she wore a white tank top emblazoned with the words "java freak" in red script and pale blue cotton pants with tiny pictures of full and steaming coffee cups on them, and she'd pulled her hair into a high, messy knot and traded her contacts for glasses. She was pale and relaxed, here at his family's cabin. Luke said nothing as he studied her, only half-aware he was staring. She gave him a questioning smile.

"What's up?" she asked.

He shrugged and focused his attention on the grill. "Nothing."

Lorelai sat on one of the chairs Luke brought out from the kitchen, stretched her legs out before her and propped her feet on the other. "Whatcha making?"

"Pizza."

"On the grill? Intriguing," she said. "How?"

"Made some dough this morning, brought it in the cooler. Cut it in half. Toasting it on the grill now, and when that's done, I'll do it up," he told her. "I saw it on the food channel."

"My, my, Luke Danes. You're surprising sometimes, you know that?"

He shuffled his feet and poked at the pizza shells with the tip of his finger. "Nah."

Lorelai closed her eyes and propped her chin on her shoulder, exhaling slowly through her nose as she did. "Oh, I like it here. Very On Golden Pond." / She opened her eyes. "Listen to me, mister. You're my knight in shining armor. Don't you forget it." She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear and twisted the ring on her finger. "I'm going to be right behind you, and away we're gonna go, go, go."

Luke looked at her over his shoulder, took in her soft smile and the slightly faraway shine of her eyes. "A knight, huh?"

She nodded. "Henry Fonda to my Katharine Hepburn. Away we're gonna go, go, go," she said again, sighing. "Can I have a beer?"

He fished a bottle out of the cooler near his feet and handed it back to her. "You find the shower sufficient?" he asked.

"Mm," she replied, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. "Kinda dark, but it was nice. It's not as hot out here as it is in Stars Hollow." She took another swallow of her drink. "Is it always this quiet?"

"Pretty much."

"Luke? Have you lost the capacity for complete sentences since I got in the shower?" she asked.

He looked at her over his shoulder. She was grinning at him, her chin tilted towards him. He shook his head. "Nope."

"It's okay," she said. "I know this has been, like, your man country since—and, whatever, you don't need to go out of your way and do stuff differently just because I'm here now." She watched him brush olive oil across the pizza shell. "Okay?"

"Man country?" he asked, laying slices of tomato on the crisped dough.

She hesitated. "Well, it has, right? Since—you know, since—"

"Since my mom died," he finished. He dropped a few curls of fresh basil leaves on top of the tomatoes. "It's okay, Lorelai. You can say it."

She was quiet a moment. "I just don't want you to feel like you have to entertain me. I happen to find myself plenty amusing—enough so that I can keep myself occupied for days at a time. I'm very self-sufficient. And suddenly thinking how dirty that sounds," she said. "But really. I'm like—"

Luke slid the finished pizzas onto a platter and set it down on the side shelf of the grill. He turned and leaned over Lorelai, kissed her forehead. "You're babbling, love." He rested his hands on her shoulders. "I didn't come here to be alone in man country, which, please, don't ever say that again, I came here to spend some time alone with my girl. Okay?"

"You are so cute sometimes you make me sick," she said, cupping his face in her hands. She kissed him lightly on the tip of his nose. "Thank you."

He pulled her to her feet. "Now get your ass in there and open the wine."

"Wine? You feeling a little sexy tonight, lover?"

"Haven't we talked about that word?"

"What word, lover?"

"Why do I bother?" he asked the air.

Lorelai looked back at him as she stepped into the kitchen. "I've asked myself that about you many times before, my life."

"And?"

She shrugged and continued into the house. "I think you're infatuated with me."

It was growing dark as Lorelai poured the wine and Luke set out plates and silverware. He began to protest when Lorelai reached for the light switch to turn off the overhead lamps. She held up a warning finger and produced a packet of matches from her hip pocket. Luke lifted a questioning eyebrow at her.

"I picked them up at the gas station in Massachusetts," she said. "They were complimentary with the condom/cigarette combo I bought—it's in the bedroom, and I love the name. The 'Oh Baby, Oh Baby Kit.'" She kept a straight face as she lit two hurricane candles she'd found under the kitchen sink. "Very apt, don't you think?"

"Not if that's all there is in it," he replied.

Lorelai began to laugh so hard she had to sit on the kitchen floor and catch her breath.

They talked over what they might do for the weekend as they ate the grilled pizzas by the light of the candles. Lorelai sighed. "I really don't care what we do while we're here. It's just nice to be away. And not sleeping in Rory's room."

"So you'll go fishing with me?" he asked.

She paused, her wine glass raised halfway to her lips. "I will sit with you in the boat while you fish, but I'm really not an angler."

"I know."

"Yes, but do you also know that it's your job to make me feel good about myself when my confidence is lacking?"

"Well, if I ever see that happen, I'll jump right in. Hasn't yet," he said.

Lorelai drained the wine in her glass after they'd eaten and Luke was wrapping the leftovers for the fridge. She stood by the table, one hand on her hip, gazing thoughtfully out the wide window that fronted the beach. There was something wistful and nostalgic in her expression, lit from the candles below, that made her seem ethereal, distant. Luke again felt the familiar fire in his chest, the sudden winged hollowness that he'd never quite gotten used to. And when she turned to him, feeling his eyes on her, and rested her chin on her shoulder with that infuriating, lovely smile, she was no longer far away but within arm's reach, luminous and soft and teasing.

"You're staring again," she said quietly.

He shrugged as he walked towards her, pulled her into him. "Not allowed to look anymore?" he asked.

"Didn't say that," she told him, and she twined her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek to his. "You're just very mysterious this week. You're all silent-broody-Jane-Austen-hero guy."

Luke tightened his hold on her. "I'm just thinking."

He felt her smile. "You just keep thinking, Butch, that's what you're good at."

"Ah, would you two give that a rest already?" he moaned, dropping his head to the crook of her neck.

"Now what fun would that be?" she asked him, slid her hand beneath the bill of his hat to flip it off and cradle his head in her palm.

Straightening up, he asked if she wanted to take a walk with him. "Go down to the beach, maybe?"

"Mm-mm," she said as she shook her head. She rubbed her thumbs along the sides of his neck, dropping light kisses on his face as she spoke. "You go. I'll get the bed all warmed up for you." She kissed him squarely on the mouth, gently bit his lower lip. "I promise I'll be Dale Evans to your Roy Rogers—"

"That's cowboy stuff, not—"

"Can you honestly say you have a better reference having to do with fish?" she asked. "Tomorrow, I'll be your devoted sidekick all you want, but I think I just want to lie down for a while."

He kissed her. "I won't be long."

"When you get back we can put the 'Oh Baby' kit to shame," she said, smirking. "Go. But tell me you brought ice cream, first."

"In the freezer."

He was halfway down the front stairs when he heard her holler of delight. "Ben and Jerry's, woo hoo!"

It was his habit to jog down the hill from the cabin to the beach every first evening he arrived. He couldn't remember how this had started, but for as long as he could remember he'd been arriving breathless at the shore at the hour after sundown when the sky was velvet purple. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks, and strode slowly towards the water, his hands in his pockets. The few moments he spent at the water's edge sitting down on his haunches, balanced precariously on the balls of his feet, were blissfully thoughtless ones. This was the time he let himself slow down, when things settled inside him and fell away, when the stillness and the quietude of the lake and surrounding woods worked its way beneath his skin and calmed whatever irritation had pushed him to become a recluse for a handful of days. Stars Hollow and the small bumps and hitches that had marked his summer and Lorelai's were all distant here, and he left them at the edges of this smaller, tidier place, annoyances to think about later, after.

When he pushed himself to his feet and retrieved his shoes and socks, he searched the sand for the right stone. He found it at the very edge of the beach, oblong and smooth and grey. He jogged once again to the water. After a deep breath, he pulled his arm back and whipped it forward, releasing the stone. He turned back towards the cabin without watching to see it skip across the surface of the water; he didn't wait to listen for the watery thunk as it slipped beneath the water.

Lorelai was already in bed, propped up on a pile of pillows almost as big as the bed itself, a magazine spread on her knees. She didn't look up when he came into the room. "Did you know that communication is the key to the perfect orgasm?" she asked conversationally. "Thank God I have Cosmo to tell me these things, because I would be just lost without insights like that." She closed the magazine and watched Luke as he unbuttoned his flannel and toed off his shoes again. "What kind of communication, though? Do they mean general commands, or are they talking about something more specific, more technical, like a GPS system for my girlie parts?"

He pushed his jeans down and rolled his eyes as he walked towards the bathroom. "You have sex on the brain," he told her.

"Generally I like to have it on the bed, but the floor or the couch work in a pinch."

"If you give me a second, I can help you out with that," he called, fishing his toothbrush from the traveling kit he kept such things in.

"Luke, I'm going to need more than a second to figure out the best method of communication in order to achieve the perfect orgasm. I wish I had some paper. I could chart a map," she said, her tone mock-thoughtful.

"Have I ever needed a map?"

"No, my life, but who am I to question the wisdom of Cosmo?" she called.

Luke finished brushing his teeth and turned off the bathroom light. He stood in the door, leaning against the wooden frame, and crossed his arms over his chest. Lorelai held his stare, her expression arch and challenging. "It was good we came," he said, at length.

She lifted an eyebrow and pursed her lips. "And it'll be good when we—"

He took three long steps and climbed onto the bed, hovered over her. "No kits," he said, "no magazines. Now, if you'll please stop talking."

Kicking the sheets aside, she ran her hands along his abdomen. "Communication is occasionally overrated anyway."

He woke early, momentarily disoriented by the sweet, damp scent of the room and the difference in the slanting light that shone weakly through the blinds. Lorelai turned restlessly in her sleep, curled herself even tighter around her pillow, and the movement swiftly reminded him of the wheres and whys. He turned on his side and spooned her back, smiling into her hair as she sighed and relaxed against him. Luke closed his eyes again, awake but unwilling to leave the warm cocoon of the bed.

The noises that Lorelai made in her sleep had been from the first night he spent with her one of her more endearing and unusual qualities. The way she sighed, the clicking noises she made in the back of her throat, the periods of incessant, whining moans she had each night, the occasional snort or snore or smacking of her mouth could combine to make her the loudest woman he'd ever encountered asleep. On nights he couldn't sleep, he was comforted rather than annoyed by the strange cacophony she made; it was proof of her presence, a reminder that, whatever was causing his insomnia, she was simply there with him.

She shifted in his arms, angling for a more comfortable position. Luke eased an arm under her neck and rested his hand on her shoulder, his other at her hip. She sighed again and pushed back at him, nestled herself in the curve of his arm, tangled her legs in his. Luke was close to sleep again when Lorelai's hip jerked slightly under his hand. He pressed his hand lower and into her abdomen to soothe her when he realized—she was laughing.

This was a recent phenomenon. As he listened to her chuckle quietly, giggling in intermittent fits, he tried to figure out exactly when this had begun, or when he'd first noticed it. Sometime back in May, to the best that he could remember, Lorelai had woken him up with what he thought were convulsions—for a few panicked seconds, he thought she was choking in her sleep. Without opening her eyes, she'd turned on her side and pushed her forehead into his shoulder, and he'd realized that she was shaking with suppressed laughter that surfaced an instant later in an odd, hiccupping chortle.

It shouldn't have been surprising—more perplexing was Lorelai's denial of it the next morning. She'd shrugged it off. When he'd asked her what she was dreaming of, she'd only shaken her head and claimed she couldn't remember. The few times he'd brought it up since, Lorelai had dismissed it—whatever it was, she told him, she never remembered and it wasn't keeping her awake, and it was a little weird but it was better than crying.

He kissed her lightly on the temple, now, and began the complicated process of extracting himself from the bed without waking her. When he'd freed his arm again and twitched his legs away from hers, Lorelai lolled onto her back and threw an arm out to one side. Luke pulled on his jeans and padded in his bare feet to the kitchen. The morning routine then began: put the kettle on, find the tea, sugar, milk. He hoisted himself onto the counter and watched the sun rise over the lake.

He'd always liked the kitchen best of all the rooms—there weren't many, it wasn't as though his father had left him a palatial estate, but with two bedrooms, a living room, a bath and a half, and the kitchen with the porch out front, it had always been more than big enough to suit the whole family. The back porch, the arrival point for each visit, lead up to the living room and the bedrooms off of that; the kitchen took up the entire front half of the house. There was a couch along the wall adjacent to the main bedroom, and an old, roughly-hewn dining set Luke's father had purchased more for its functionality than appearance and that his mother had fondly referred to as "rustic." It was, he knew, an unremarkable room; like the others, it was sparely furnished, carelessly decorated, comfortable and serviceable. A lot like his dad, his mother would have said.

Lorelai found him some time later in much the same position, an empty mug and a pile of orange rinds beside him on the counter. She shuffled into the kitchen, knuckling her eyes and yawning. "Coffee?"

He smiled ruefully. "Good morning to you, too."

She came to stand in front of him, resting her hands on his knees as she leaned forward and buried her face in his neck. "Morning. Coffee?"

"You sleep okay?" he asked.

"Better than okay," she replied. "But still, eyes don't open without coffee."

"What if I told you I forgot the coffee?" he asked.

Lorelai raised her head and faced him with her eyes still firmly buttoned shut, her nose scrunched in an expression of irritation. "You know how in Aliens that thing just bursts out of the guy's chest? Something like that happens when I'm deprived of coffee. Do you want that to happen to my chest?"

He kissed her forehead. "No, I actually really like your chest."

"Luke? Please?"

He slid off the counter. "You sit here. Pancakes?"

"Mm, and eggs. I'm starved. Is there any of that pizza left?"

He eyed her askance over his shoulder as he measured grounds into a coffee filter. He paused and reached for an apple. "You're not having pizza for breakfast," he said, tossing the apple. "Have this if you can't wait."

She nearly fell off the counter in her attempt to catch it. "You're kidding, right? It's too early for fruit that's not juiced." She set it on the counter and stared at it in distaste. "You know, I had a nightmare about coffee last night."

"A nightmare about coffee?"

"I don't remember a whole lot, but it ended with Kirk wheeling me out of the diner on a stretcher, and I was screaming like Charlton Heston in Soylent Green. Something about the coffee being urine," she said. She raked her hands through her hair. "And yet, I still wake up without the craving dampened in the least." Luke cocked an eyebrow at her, shaking his head. She wrinkled her nose in response, sighed. "I know. I'm weird," she said.

"Was that what you were laughing about?" he asked, his tone carefully light.

Lorelai vaulted off the counter and moved towards the fridge. "Was I doing that again?"

"When I woke up."

"I didn't wake you, did I?"

He lit the burner on the stove. "Nah. Just curious."

She stared blankly before her a moment, a cart of orange juice in her hands. "You and me both, buddy."

He decided to leave it at that and began to make her breakfast. Lorelai stood beside him, her eyes fixed on the coffee maker. After a moment, she tucked her arm in his and rested her cheek against his shoulder, and he felt restive, warm—this was new to his routine here but already familiar and easy. They remained this way, companionably silent, listening to the sizzle of butter and bacon on the stove, the early morning birdsong, the gurgle of the coffee as it perked, the distant lap of water against the dock on the beach below, until Lorelai poured herself a generous cup of coffee, kissed Luke on the cheek, and slipped wordlessly out onto the porch. She was smiling when he called her in to eat, rubbing her eyes. She helped herself to more coffee before she sat down and picked up her fork.

"You okay?" he asked. "You're quiet. It's weird."

She leaned over the table and kissed him briefly. "I'm good. Still a little sleepy, that's all. Either that, or you've finally started to rub off on me."

Lorelai quizzed him on the beach and the surrounding area while she ate, asking him where he liked to go best and what he usually did when he was here, what other people did, where the fireworks he'd promised would be. When she'd finished her third cup of coffee and the last of her pancakes, she pushed the dishes aside.

"This laughing thing is wearing me out."

"It's never happened before?"

She shrugged and rose, gathered the dirty plates and brought them to the sink. "Not that I know of. But it's not like I've been in a position to have someone tell me before, either."

"Huh."

"And so say I," she said. She leaned her elbows on the sink, tilted her head back. "I really like it here. I was afraid it was going to be like living in a tree, all Butterfly Whoever, but it's really homey. Cozy." She closed her eyes. "You know, I'm tired, but I feel rested, if that makes sense."

"I get it. I'm glad it's—" He paused, searching for the right word. "—I'm glad it's comfortable."

"Very," she smiled. "This is a Luke place."

Luke pushed himself to his feet and crossed to stand before her, planted his feet on either side of hers, her legs together between his. He rested his hands heavily on her hips. "You'd tell me if there was anything to worry about, right?"

Lorelai smiled softly at him, trailed her fingers up and down his forearms before launching herself at him in a crushing embrace. She spoke without looking him in the eye, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. "I would." She was silent again, and he rubbed her back, his breath catching painfully in his chest, uncertainty a sudden weight on his back. Lorelai straightened up and kissed him. "You want to shower before we head down to the beach?"

"Is that your way of telling me I'm less than fresh?"

She merely raised her eyes heavenward and lifted one shoulder. "I'm just making a suggestion, my life. Far be it from me to prevent you from being the burly mountain man that you are, stench and all."

"I can take a hint," he said, slapping her on the rear. "Be ready to go when I'm done, though."

He was unprepared, on returning to the kitchen, to find Lorelai hanging precariously from the porch railing outside. He swallowed the instinct to yell, afraid it would send her falling flat on her ass on the ground below. The sight of her—all long legs and slender arms in her short-shorts and halter top, her hair loose, longer than usual, falling across the bare slope of her back—was less arresting given her current position and the cell phone she clutched in one hand.

"Oh, I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it, Marty—it's always nice to have another convert to the Ab Fab tribe. Any chance Rory's going to be done with that shower soon?… no, I know, I wasn't implying that you were—if you could just—sure, Marty, that would be great. Tell her that the service out here sucks, so she shouldn't be too alarmed if she calls twenty times in a row and doesn't get me, which tell her, big fat hint, okay?" Luke cleared his throat, and at this she turned, rolled her eyes back and stuck her tongue out, tilted the phone away from her mouth and sighed gustily. "Yep. Okay, good. Thanks, Marty. Oh, yeah, you, too."

She snapped the phone shut, and Luke immediately stepped forward. "You trying to break your neck?"

"Mm, I was actually going for a lower back injury. That would get me the really good drugs," she said. "Help me down?"

He caught her around the waist as she made an awkward hop, bracing her hands on his shoulders. She stumbled, fell against his chest with a sighing half-laugh. She gestured sheepishly with the cell phone.

"Sorry. I just wanted to check in with Rory. I feel so bad, I didn't know there'd be no signal out here and I hate being out of range and her not knowing—I woke up this morning feeling oddly overprotective and I just need to know she's not, you know, falling into knives, or something."

"This about Marty?"

"No, of course not," she scoffed. "Marty's great. He's a gentleman. He's just home alone with my daughter and for some reason I'm just insanely hormonal and my maternal instincts are in overdrive."

Luke took her by the wrist and led her back into the house. "What's with the acrobatics?"

"Standing like that, I can get half a bar instead of no bar. It's higher." She leaned on the counter and watched him as he put their lunch in a cooler. She gave him a surreptitious up and down glance. "I'm sorry. Are you actually wearing swim trunks?"

"What am I supposed to wear to the beach?" he wanted to know.

She grinned wickedly. "I can think of a few things. Or one thing. Actually, I'm thinking of nothing." She leaned over the counter and laid a hand flat on the center of his chest. "I just never thought I'd see you in anything mesh." She paused. "Except, of course, the fishnets. But we both know those will never see the light of day."

"Ah, geez." They walked down to the beach, Lorelai keeping a running commentary as they descended the hill as to the number of bugs (few), the state of her flip flops (sorry), the smell of the air (oddly sweet), and the appearance of Luke's ass in swim trunks (commendable). She swung the cooler lightly in one hand, holding his tightly in the other. "It's beautiful here, Luke."

"It's not bad."

She squeezed his hand. "I love it. Are you going to make me wear a life vest?"

"Are you planning on falling overboard?"

"Planning, no, but I do like to be spontaneous," she laughed.

Once out on the water, Lorelai again became quiet, thoughtful. Luke motored the boat around the small inlet that comprised the beach and houses near his and out further. As Lorelai rooted through her bag for a book, she muttered about murder on the open water and sunstroke until Luke produced an umbrella from under the seat and held it out to her.

"My husband-to-be, the Boy Scout," she cooed.

He eyed her askance. "Are you okay?"

"What makes you ask that? Again?"

"The way you're acting," he said. "You're all over the place."

Looking out over the water, she seemed to consider this. "I'm just a little hormonal, like I said."

"Anything I can do?"

"Keep me in chocolate and coffee until it passes," she said. "Or rather, on a permanent basis."

He chuckled. "I can do that. You gonna read?"

"Indubitably. Let's see what sort of skanky behavior Newland's getting up to now."

After lunch and several chapters of The Age of Innocence, full and sleepy from the food and hot sun, Lorelai coaxed Luke to lay down with her and let the boat drift where it would. She settled herself against his chest, her eyes closed. Luke stroked her hair and remarked that he'd never been so lazy in his life as he was with her.

"Don't think of it as lazy," she said. "Think of it as a concentrated period of relaxation making up for too many years of hard work with no break."

"You can spin anything, can't you?"

"Just about. Should get me a job at the White House, huh?"

And the day passed this way, quiet and slow—they read aloud, they talked, they were silent, all in equal degrees. They had their dinner on the shore and watched the pre-fourth fireworks, stretched out on a blanket Lorelai had spread out for them; she huddled close to Luke and complained of cold as the last of the fireworks fizzled and the noises died.

"You wouldn't be cold if you were dressed more appropriately," he groused.

She waved a dismissive hand. "I have a sweatshirt on," she told him.

"And shorts that would get you arrested anywhere but at a beach."

"I doubt they'd get me arrested. Maybe sent home from school with a note for my parents—which has been known to happen in my life—but not arrested. Besides, it's your fault, so it's not fair of you to pick on me."

"How is it my fault? Did I not tell you to put long pants on?" he returned.

"Yes, you did, but I put these on specifically for your benefit."

"Mine, huh?"

She tipped her head, conceding. "Well, mine via yours. You get all friendly when I show a little leg." He snorted at the 'little,' and she wagged a finger at him. "You do. And I like it when you get all friendly, and you like it when I like it when you get all friendly, so being cold is a small price to pay for all that liking of friendliness. Besides, it's only cold down here by the water. It's still warm up at the house."

Rather than reply, he tightened his arms around her and pulled the blanket beneath them over her legs. She threw one leg over his, tucked the blanket more securely about her, and made a wordless noise of contentment.

Luke was beginning to doze, later, when Lorelai shifted restlessly in his arms. "You want to go back up?" he asked.

"No. I'm fine out here."

"Just let me know."

"Okay." She paused. "Luke? I have to tell you something."

She spoke hesitantly, her voice small. Luke bodily tensed, and irrational panic began to bubble and churn in his stomach, rose in his throat like bile. Lorelai, feeling him suddenly rigid beside her, rested one hand on his abdomen, fingering the line of buttons on his shirt. "You have to tell me something," he echoed.

"It's not bad," she said.

"It's not bad."

"No, I promise. It's just something that I did that I need to tell you about."

"Something you did," he said, his voice flat.

She swallowed hard. "Something I stopped doing, actually." She waited. "You're not going to repeat that one?"

"Could you lose the cute and just tell me?"

She sat up, raked her hands through her hair, and looked at him with serious eyes, her mouth puckered in a guilty pout. "I stopped taking the pill."

"You stopped…"

"Taking the pill, yes," she said patiently. "I'm not on the pill anymore."

"The pill," he said. "The—you mean—do you mean, you know, that pill?"

He saw her struggling to suppress a smile and laugh, and the panic roiling in his stomach thickened to irritation. "Yes, Luke, also known as the birth control pill."

"When?"

Lorelai ducked her head, averted her eyes. "May."

"May? May?" he repeated. He mentally began to count how many times they'd been together since May. "Jesus, Lorelai. So, we've been—"

"Jumping without a parachute for two months," she supplied. "Yes."

Luke sat up, propped his elbows on his knees, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. "Two months," he said. "And you're telling me now." She was silent. He dropped his hands and looked at her. "You're telling me now."

She looked away. "Yes, I'm telling you now. I would have told you before—"

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I forgot, okay?" she cried. "I know how incredibly stupid that sounds, I do, but for crap's sake, Luke, it's not like there haven't been a hundred other things on my mind lately. I just—I ran out of the prescription, and the doctor wouldn't phone in any more refills until I'd had a physical, and then the toilets exploded and I didn't have time for an appointment, and then I just—I just forgot."

"This whole time," he said, "you just forgot. For two months, you forgot."

She scowled. "Don't do that, don't condescend. I know how I fucked up, okay? It's my body, believe me, I know. I don't have a better excuse. The times I remembered were, like, three in the morning moments where I woke up and remembered that I forgot to take it, but I didn't forget because I wasn't, and I'd promise myself to tell you in the morning." She tugged a lock of her hair, her face screwed into an expression of extreme frustration. "I'd fall asleep, and I'd forget again. That's all. It's not like we live in Port Charles and I'm secretly trying to get pregnant so you'll be forced to marry me, since I like to think you're doing it willingly. Luke, I swear that's all it is."

"Two months," he said again. He raised his eyes heavenward and took several deep breaths. His insides still burned; he felt as though he were slowly coiling into himself, strangled by the sudden heat within. "Why are you telling me now?"

Her gaze was level. "Because if you're jumping without a parachute eventually something's gonna land."

"Something's gonna land? Has something landed?" he asked, his voice thin, cracked, an octave above its normal register.

She shook her head, smiling ruefully. "Probably should have put that in the headline, huh?" she said. "Most definitely not. I just had my monthly unpleasantness."

"Your…?" he asked, brow furrowed.

"My period, Luke. You do know how the menstruation process works, right?" she asked.

"Could you be serious for longer than five seconds at a stretch?" he spat. "Could you stop talking in fucking code?"

Lorelai sat back slightly. "I could, yes. Could you be a little less scary right now?"

He sighed. "I don't mean to be scary. I'm just—geez, Lorelai, two months?"

"I'm not trying to be flip, here, but can we please move past that and onto what's going to happen now that you know?" she asked.

Luke stared at her a moment and got to his feet. "I'm going for a walk."

"Luke, please, don't—don't do the retreat, silent guy thing. Please? This doesn't have to be a big deal," she said, kneeling, her hands clasped together. "Please?"

He inhaled slowly through his nose. "I need a minute."

Her face fell. "Okay. I'll just—I'll meet you back at the house, then."

"I won't be long," he told her.

Away from the beach, the air was more humid, dank. It was difficult to make out a path as the trees grew closer and the canopy overhead thickened. When he was nearly beyond his knowledge of the property, Luke dropped to sit beneath a tree, folded his hands over his hat and hunched forward, dug his heels into the loose, sandy ground. He just needed to sit, he told himself. He needed to sit and he needed to think.

He wasn't mad—he wasn't upset—why he should be, Luke wasn't entirely sure. Discomfited, strange, caught, concerned, slightly panicked, those were all battling for supremacy and seemed much more valid. Still, he'd felt the need to put space between him and Lorelai. It was too easy not to think when she was near, not to roll the news around in his head for hours until he knew what to do, what to think. She could be distracting even on the occasions when she wasn't trying. It wasn't just that he still had to wonder, every so often, how one body could contain quite so much personality; the woman was just so damned physical, she couldn't be ignored.

It was something he hadn't quite considered before he moved in with Lorelai, though he'd noticed it in a rather thoughtless, incidental way, the fact that his relationships in the past had never really been quite so physically intimate. It wasn't about sex—that wasn't the sort of intimacy his life had been lacking before Lorelai. It was hard not to notice how comfortable she was with her body, how easily she moved in her own skin; in the years they'd been friends he'd seen how carelessly she was able to embrace others, to take Sookie by the arm and lead her out of the path of a moving vehicle, to smooth Rory's hair, to pat Kirk on the shoulder, to throw her arms around a guy bringing ice to her daughter's birthday party. His family had never really been demonstrative—his father, he corrected himself, had never really been demonstrative, though his mother was quick with a hug and Liz was the kid in the department story who had to touch absolutely everything. Luke himself tended more towards his father's way of acting: he rarely showed affection in public, and Luke had rarely felt inclined to hold a girlfriend's hand, to kiss her anywhere but behind the privacy of closed doors, to lay claim to her somehow in mixed company with a hand on her knee or an arm over her shoulder. It was different with Lorelai.

She was simply a tactile person. She thought nothing of grabbing his hand over the dinner table as she made a point or cutting him off mid-rant in the center aisle of Doose's Market with either a swift slap on the ass or a brief kiss square on the mouth. Luke knew it to be something that most people misunderstood in Lorelai: others often took her physical exuberance as a constant ability to live in the moment without regard for anything else. Lorelai was spontaneous, but she was anything but shortsighted. Her tendency to act on impulse was just another way she embraced life, one more way she lived full-out, evidence that Lorelai didn't give affection half-heartedly.

This, however, was at the moment beside the point. He had things to process, and he couldn't do it with her in any sort of proximity to him. The longer he sat in the strange, purple light, feeling the chill set into his skin and sink lower, the less able he was to string together any sort of coherent, verbalized thought, despite the distance. The possibility that had loomed just at the edge of their relationship was suddenly close, present and startling and huge. He let the idea sit, let his thoughts go where they would without trying to give them direction or language or figure out what it all meant. After a time, there was only quiet within, and the strange wordless rustling of the woods around him became white noise in his mind; he pushed himself to rise and turn back to the cabin.

He stood at the edge of the property a few moments, watching her before he approached. She paced the front porch, her strides short and shuffling. She held her body in that way that he wasn't sure she'd adopted from Rory or that Rory had learned from her, one arm held close to her chest, the other elbow propped on the wrist, her hand cupped at her chin as she tugged at her lower lip with her index finger and thumb. The difference in the way each Lorelai did it, he'd always thought, showed the divide between them—Rory hunched, her posture almost simian as she worried her fingers at her lower lip, and Lorelai always stood up straight. Lorelai had learned years ago how to face life with her shoulders back, and this was something Rory hadn't yet done. He'd always admired Lorelai's refusal to slump.

As he approached the house, he cleared his throat, alerting her to his presence. She ceased pacing, dropped her arms, and waited for him. Luke cast a furtive glance at her; it was dark, but the thin moonlight wasn't what made her expression hard to read. She cocked an eyebrow at him, challenging him to speak.

"Hi," he said.

The corner of her mouth twitched. "Ladies and gentlemen, behold the master equivocator," she said. "Hi yourself." She tipped her head to one side. "So, are you going to tell me what that was about, the leaving and the going away? Where've you been?"

He waved expansively. "Out," he said. "I just needed—I needed a minute."

"So you said. If you're mad, I understand that, I just need you to tell me."

Luke lifted his hat and scratched at his scalp. "I'm not—I'm not mad. I'm concerned. We haven't been safe."

"Safe? Luke, it's not like we're a couple of irresponsible teenagers—I've been an irresponsible teenager, I know what that looks like, and we're nowhere near it. For one thing, the sex is way better—"

He sighed. "I'm not joking."

"I know you're not, and neither am I. For another thing," she continued, "I know that if I did, somehow, in these last two months, manage to get pregnant, you wouldn't turn into Steve McQueen and get all freaked—you and me, this is it, we're not going anywhere, and we both know that, whether you throw a baby into the mix or not." She held up a hand when he opened his mouth to speak. "Also, no matter what you think, it wouldn't be a mistake if it happened this way."

"Not a mistake," he said, "but still an accident."

"An unexpected surprise." She paused. "Well, that's redundant. I mean a pleasant, happy sort of surprise. Look at Rory—she wasn't planned, nowhere near it, and some people would say she was a mistake, but look at how fabulous and amazing she is. Luke, it could only be a good thing. Right?"

He stared at her for a beat, hated himself for the look on her face, painfully hopeful and nervous and sad. He reached for her, and she stepped forward and into him without hesitation. Holding her tightly to him, he spoke low in her ear. "Better than that," he said. He leaned back slightly better to look her in the eye. "But it's still not safe, what we've been doing."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm sorry, I think I've seen that tree before."

"I just mean that, for the sake of argument—"

"Heavens to murgatroid, like we need another one of those."

"—say you were pregnant."

"I'm not," she said immediately. "I'm telling you. Right now? It's not possible. I had my period like, ten days ago." He looked at her levelly a moment. "Sorry. You were saying, I'm hypothetically pregnant."

"Thank you. Just say you were, and you didn't know—hell, Lorelai, you've been drinking coffee and wine all weekend, who knows what kind of damage can get done in forty-eight hours if you don't know—" He stopped, scowled at her. "Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm Peter Rabbit."

She rested her hands lightly at the crooks of his elbows, squeezed him lightly, and tilted forward on the tips of her toes, pressing herself closer to him. She managed to continue looking at him as though he were Peter Rabbit and be simultaneously serious and pouting. "Luke, if I thought there was the remotest chance that I was pregnant—we're talking remote like the possibility of life on Jupiter, here—I wouldn't be. Well, coffee, but not alcohol. The remotest chance. Life on Jupiter, Luke—Pluto, even, and we're not even sure that's a planet anymore. I swear. And I promise, I'll be careful. I'll be super careful. I'll be uber careful, even. The carefulest of careful." Off his doubtful look, she made a noise of impatience. "Or we can invest in parachutes, if that will make you feel better."

"Parachutes? What the hell—" She raised her brows at him. "Oh. Well, if you think—"

"I'm fine free-falling," she said, and she winced. "I killed the metaphor."

"I think you did." He tugged the ends of her hair, sighing. "But I'm good to go, too."

Lorelai's eyes were bright. She affected carelessness as she spoke, tilting her chin up and her face away from him. "What an interesting way to phrase it," she said.

Luke took one of her hands in both of his and led her into the house, back to the bedroom. The darkness here had a different quality—a thickness that enveloped them as they sought each other out. He held her so closely to him, his eyes open, that she was a barely visible form in the dark. Lorelai pushed him back, took his hands, guided him along her curves as she moved. Her skin was softer than the darkness, smoother, and he felt rather than saw the pearly luminescence she took on beneath his hands. She kissed him breathless, whispered an endearment against his ear, and suddenly she stilled, digging her nails into his shoulders. Her sharp cry seemed to sever something in the darkness, and he saw her clearly above him, silhouetted in the new silver light, her hair tumbling down her back and her face alight with some emotion he couldn't quite define.

They sat up late into the night, talking and not talking, Lorelai eating ice cream out of the pint container Luke brought back for her when he got up to get himself a glass of water. As much as he hated humidity and the interminable length of the summer months, it was moments like this that Luke could appreciate the heat. Sitting like this, his back against the ancient headboard, he remembered the first night that Lorelai had spent in his apartment, how he and she sprawled on his leather couch and continued making tentative steps on this strange trip they had started together. The heat of that night, he remembered, was not unlike this: the air had felt thick and he'd eaten cold pizza in bed with Lorelai, holding her in his narrow twin bed as he threw back sheets damp with sweat, hating the clammy feel of the fabric on his legs even as he relished the slickness of her skin against his.

She settled herself now back against his chest, reached up with one hand and stroked his cheek as she ran her foot along his calf, a newly habitual gesture. Luke rested his chin on her hair, closed his eyes. He let the night settle on his skin. The slight breeze drifting in beneath the curtains was heavy, thick now not only with the smells of summer and the iridescent sheen of humidity but also the dense feeling of possibility. Lorelai shifted in his arms, and he tightened his hold on her. She was warmth and softness and she gave the night air a sweetness of oranges and vanilla and honeysuckle. She trailed her fingers along his arms, danced her fingertips and nails over his skin, making him shiver. She felt him react and laughed.

"We should have done this before, my life," she said.

"Seems to me we do this quite a bit," he replied.

She kicked him lightly with her heel. "Not this," she told him, gesturing down the length of her torso, "this." She waved her arm. "Here."

"You've said that."

"Well, it's true." She yawned. "And I think we need to schedule regular periods of nakedness in our day. It's really quite something."

Luke snorted at the thought, considered it a moment. "Huh. It still amazes me that I get to see you naked, you know," he said.

"Oh?" she asked, amused. "Why is that?"

He shrugged. "Just, you know, thinking of all the years I looked at you from afar—"

"You were looking at me naked from afar?"

"Lorelai," he said darkly.

"You know you can get arrested for that," she told him. "Wait, should I feel violated?"

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm trying to be sentimental, here," he said.

"Oh, I know," Lorelai smiled. "But I also know how uncomfortable that makes you, so I was just trying to lighten the mood with some inappropriate banter. Plus, when you use words like afar, which is so completely not you, it makes me feel like I'm in a Merchant-Ivory film." She kissed his cheek. "I appreciate the effort, though."

"Thank you," he said.

She paused. "You're not looking at other women naked from afar now that you get to look at me naked up close, are you?"

Luke tried to smother a smile. "I'm going to take that as a rhetorical question because the only answers I'm coming up with right now are really inappropriate and potentially disturbing."

"Oh, Luke. Gross." She sat up. "Hey, let's go skinny-dipping!"

"No."

"Oh, come on! Why not?"

"Because we're not nineteen," he told her.

"Interesting. So the last time Luke went skinny-dipping was at nineteen. What's happened to your youthful sense of frivolity and nudity, my life?"

He looked at her. "What about you?"

"Twenty-four," she replied promptly. "Man, did that night suck."

"Why?"

She sighed. "Oh, it was my one Friday night off of the month, and Rory and I were going to—I don't remember what our plans were, but we had plans. And then Sookie set me up on this blind date with this pastry chef she knew in Hartford, who was—he wasn't worth whatever I was going to have to give up doing with Rory, and then Sookie, in the only one absolutely wretched moment she's ever had as my friend since I've known her, somehow got Rory worked up into a state about how lonely I was and didn't she want me to be happy and not lonely…" She shook her head at the memory. "I was so furious, I didn't speak to her for a month. But I couldn't not go on the date at that point because Rory was just—she was just so, so upset. She had it in her head that I needed to go on this date, that if I didn't go on this date I would die and it'd be her fault, and she just wouldn't let it go. So I went. And the guy turns out to be one of those jackass guys who won't date a girl who lives in a potting shed and cleans toilets for a living."

Luke's jaw tightened. "I hate this guy. And I gotta say, Sookie's really on my shitlist right now."

She smiled softly. "She means well, always, Luke. And this was, like, twelve years ago, so it's water so far under the bridge it's in France getting purified for bottling right now. Anyway, the date went badly and he made me pay for my half, which I couldn't afford, but I did, and then I took the bus home from Hartford, and it was awful. I was having one of those moments where, no matter how good I knew I had it, no matter how much I loved my life, I was seeing what it must have looked like to other people, and I just couldn't—I couldn't speak. I don't know how to describe it, it was—it was one of the only moments in the history of my life that I can honestly say I thought my mother was right, if this is really how it is, she'd been right about everything. And that made me crazy. So I get off the bus in Stars Hollow, go to the packy for a few nips, and head to the lake. Got a little drunk, went for a swim, cleared my head." She paused. "God, I haven't thought of that in years."

Luke squeezed the back of her neck gently. "It was tough then, I know. I remember."

She chuckled a little as she leaned back against him once more. "Do you know how long it took me to figure out you were undercharging us? For everything?" She looked back at him, the expression on her face slightly rueful. "You're blushing," she teased.

"I didn't know you knew," he said, his voice thick.

"I didn't, for a while. And then someone else gave us the check one day and you came barreling across the diner before I could even look at it and said it wasn't ours, and you wrote out a new one, and the other guy working for you looked at you like you were eight kinds of mental. And I just got it. What drove me nuts for a few days was that there was no nice way to thank you without embarrassing you, and there was no way to insist that you stop doing it without looking ungrateful and embarrassing you."

"I don't remember—"

She shrugged. "I didn't end up doing anything. Except I stopped calling you Duke."

"Is that why?"

"Well, you hated it."

"Yeah, I kinda did."

Lorelai grinned and shifted down, pressed her forehead into the crook of his neck. "Stopped calling you Duke, started to try and figure you out."

"And how'd that go?" he asked, stroking her hair.

She snapped her fingers. "Like that."

"That's a little pathetic for me, then."

She raised her head and gave him a slow, lingering kiss. "There was more to it than that," she said softly. "Still is. But that's when I knew what a good person you were. Are. You're still blushing," she laughed. "See, this is why I didn't say anything to you then. You're totally my Boo Radley. Without the weird, violent, criminal streak."

"So you keep saying."

"Go skinny-dipping with me."

"Now?" he asked.

Her eyes widened. "Hey, if you're agreeing, we're going to go now before you have the chance to change your mind."

"This is a one time thing," he warned.

She was already out of bed and shimmying into a long tee shirt, throwing clothes at him. "Oh, man, I wish I had a camera."

The rest of the weekend passed all too quickly; the days were unremarkable, unvaried, but restorative, as time spent here always was for Luke—more than that, they were fun, a word he hadn't associated with the cabin and the lake since he was a kid. The weekend was a novelty for Lorelai, and watching her, being with her, gave the place a new sort of shine in addition to everything that had always been comfortable about it. It began to feel more like it had when he was younger—not a last resort, but a place to go and simply be.

He wasn't anxious to get back to Stars Hollow and the sure-to-be constant discussion of the wedding. That it was imminent meant that he could no longer put off talk of it without seeming like a prick not entirely anxious to go through with it at all. And while normally such public opinion wouldn't bother him, he remembered still the conversation he and Lorelai had had after their last huge fight during which Lorelai told him he'd made her question his attitude towards the whole married thing. Though he was sure she'd blow off the gossip at this point, he thought he owed it to her.

He was able, for nearly two weeks after their return, to maintain a tolerant, if not cheerful, disposition. It fizzled when, a week before the day of, Lorelai turned up at the diner with a large overnight bag slung over her shoulder and a chagrined expression on her face. Luke only watched her as she skirted the counter, not meeting his eye as she smiled brightly in greeting, and hauled her burden upstairs. He waited just long enough to hear her footsteps growing impatient and ever louder on the floorboards above before he joined her in the apartment. She was unpacking the bag—packed to near bursting with tee shirts and flannels—and laying the clothes neatly in his old bureau.

"What are you doing?" Luke asked.

She didn't look up. "I've decided that you're going to stay here for the week. I think I have everything you'll need here, but you should check. If there's anything missing—"

"You've decided what?"

"You'll thank me," Lorelai said.

"That's unlikely."

She sighed and sank to the bed, leaning back against the wall. "Luke, I don't want to fight about this."

"I didn't know we were fighting yet."

He watched her slide down the wall and burrow among his pillows. It was then he noticed that she seemed pale, drawn, that her bright alertness was merely a shiny façade. Her eyes were slightly glassy, her movements stiff. She knuckled her eyes and attempted to dredge some semblance of her normal energy up from the depths of its typically bottomless well. "I've brought the fight into being just by thinking about it. Like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man." Her voice was flat.

Luke crossed the apartment, sat beside her, and took her by the hands to pull her into a loose embrace. She fell against his shoulder heavily and rubbed her cheek into the collar of his flannel. "Talk," he said.

She drew a deep breath as she sat upright and straightened her shoulders; her moment of weakness, of exposure, was over, and Luke saw that particular tilt to her chin that signaled resolve and forbearance. She kissed his cheek and got to her feet. "You'll stay here this week, I'll stay at the house, and that way we can do what we need to do and get it done and not kill anyone in the process." She walked away from him, towards the bathroom, as she spoke. He caught sight of a Hello! Kitty cosmetics bag as she unzipped it and began to place things into his medicine cabinet.

"Why?"

She shrugged. "It made sense to me this morning."

"That's not really an explanation that, you know, explains anything."

She smiled and ignored him. "Feel free to say you'll miss me."

"I will," he shot back, "which is why it's a stupid plan."

"I think the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man just entered the room," Lorelai sighed. "I know it seems stupid, Luke, but—"

"Because it is stupid. I don't wanna spend the week before we get married sleeping alone," he said, irritated at the sullenness he heard in his voice.

"I know," she said. "But seriously, my life, it's not going to be a fun week at the house. My mother is going to be in and out constantly, and Rory and Ashley will both be there, too, and more than likely Sookie and Lane will be dropping by more than a couple of times a day. I'm going to be—to be busy entertaining them—not to mention all the stuff that I have to do to get everything ready for the ceremony and the reception. You don't want to be there," she told him, closing the medicine cabinet. She zipped the Hello! Kitty bag closed and lobbed it in his direction; he caught it with one hand. "You're much better off bunking here with Jess."

He tossed the bag back at her, hitting her square on the ass. He flopped back onto the bed and sighed gustily. "Better off or not I'd much rather be bunking with you." He raised his head. "Jess doesn't exactly—"

"If that's a dirty joke, Luke Danes, I beg you not to finish it," she said. She crawled onto the bed beside him. "Because, ew. A lot." He didn't reply, just stared at the ceiling. Lorelai watched him for a moment before she wriggled across the mattress and insinuated herself against his side. After a moment of hesitation, Luke responded, raising his arm to allow her to cuddle closer and to wrap her in a tight embrace. "It just seems easier."

"Right," he grunted. "We should have eloped and gotten it over with, anyway."

Lorelai sighed his name. She shifted in his arms, tucked her forehead against his neck. She pressed her lips to his throat. "You don't get a marriage over with, my life." Her voice was low in his ear, her breath hot as it tickled his jaw.

"Marriage, no. A wedding, yes."

She threw her leg over his hip, curled it across his mid-section. She said nothing for what seemed to Luke an unnaturally long time. When she spoke, she kept her voice light. "Luke, you know that I'm not—that I haven't been fantasizing about the perfect wedding since I was three, or anything, right? That that's not what this whole thing is about?"

"I know."

"I just think that it's important."

"I know," he said again. It wasn't the first time they'd had the conversation.

"And besides, you know you wouldn't want to elope, Luke." She propped herself up on one elbow and laid her other hand flat against his cheek, turned him to look at her. "Under all that stubble and flannel and poo-pooing of tradition—"

"Don't say poo-pooing," he said.

"Stop interrupting me," she shot back. "Under all that stubble and flannel and poo-pooing of tradition beats the heart of a sentimental dorkhead who is so enamored of me he can't help himself."

"Is that so?" he asked.

Lorelai moved to lay on top of him. She rested her chin against Luke's and folded her hands across his chest. "It's so. What you're really worried about is you'll be so overcome with emotion you'll weep."

"I am not."

She began to giggle. "Oh, I can just see it. 'My love for you is like a red, red rose…'"

"Stop," he said. He took her hand and folded it in his. He spoke without meeting her eye, studying their joined hands instead. "It's just—the vows, the things we'll say, that's for us, those… feelings… those are ours. Having people there for that part of it—I don't know," he finished lamely. "It seems like it should be different."

Lorelai squeezed his hand. "I understand that, my life, I do."

"But?"

"I just want everyone to see."

"See what?"

"My striptease," she replied.

"Lorelai."

"Having people there won't make it any less ours Luke. It's just a way of making it more, you know?" She paused. "Luke, please? I know you know all this."

He rubbed her back. "I do. I just—it's just a little overwhelming, thinking about people seeing us say private things to each other."

"So don't think about them," she said. "I promise you, I'll be stunning, so it'll be a good distraction for you."

Luke mumbled against her forehead, defeated. "You really going to make me live alone for a week?"

"You won't be alone," she reminded him. "You'll have Jess."

"Which is such a comfort."

She gently bit his lower lip. "You want comfort?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow. "It can be arranged."

Jess arrived that afternoon. He snorted at the new living arrangement. "Man," he said, "do the Gilmore women have you whipped or what?" He paused. "More than they did before, which is impressive."

"I am not whipped," Luke replied.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night."

That had been the last extended amount of time he'd spent with Lorelai that week. It seemed to Luke that the closer they came to their wedding day, the less time he and Lorelai were able to be in the same place at once, even in the company of others. For what Lorelai called "a non-elaborate while elegant and still Luke-friendly affair," there was a lot of running around, and for what, he couldn't fathom. After she'd talked him into asking Jackson to serve as a groomsman and coerced him into allowing Liz to perform the ceremony (as an ordained minister of some new age "faith group" with a fruity name like Children of the Universe or something) when the wedding talk began, Lorelai had thankfully left Luke out of the planning process. She kept him informed of her decisions, prefacing them always with a remark about his astounding enthusiasm for the whole thing, but she'd kept his interests in mind and defended him from dealing with Emily after his future mother-in-law spent a week early on calling him multiple times a day with suggestions for "suitable attire."

He now had a night, a day, and another night left to grit his teeth and get through until the wedding. Sitting in the diner, wilting in the heat despite the late hour, the thought made Luke close his eyes and bang his head against the wood behind him with a resounding thwack. Jess looked up from the pair of cards that lay on the floor between them.

"What's with you?" he wanted to know.

Luke pointed a thumb over his shoulder and grunted. Jess cocked an eyebrow, his smile ironically amused.

They were hiding together, Luke with his back against the cabinet beneath the cash register, Jess facing him as he leaned back into the cubby holes under the back counter. On the other side of the divide, Kirk, TJ, TJ's younger brother, Jackson, Bootsie, Andrew, the rabbi, the reverend, and the troubadour were carousing around two kegs: one contained hard cider, the other non-alcoholic beer. It was, Luke knew, the worst bachelor party in the history of the event. He and Jess had retreated to their current stronghold with a pack of cards not long after the debate over Betty and Veronica began. No one had missed them. Luke concluded that it was better this way not only because he would eventually have resorted to homicide with so many irritating people packed into such a small space discussing such an inane issue—and everyone knew that Veronica had the body—but also because he and Jess were entirely lacking as partiers at the moment. Jess had rather unexpectedly taken a week off from work to be around before the wedding, and there had, in an equally surprising turn of events, been a sudden rush of tourists in town laying siege to the diner. Both men felt worn inside and out and decidedly not up to mediating a discussion over which Angel was the most inferior replacement after Farrah left Charlie's agency.

"I'm kicking your ass here, man. You're not even trying," Jess said.

Luke squinted at the cards. "I'm getting bad hands."

"You're playing crappy cards."

"Either way, you win."

"Yes, I do," he said. "You want a beer?"

"You realize that beer over there is basically warm piss in a tin can," Luke said. "And no way no how am I drinking hard cider."

"Also warm piss in a tin can," Jess said. "Nah. I'll go upstairs, grab a coupla bottles." He threw his chest out in mock heroism. "Unlike you, I think I can take 'em if they attack."

Luke swatted at Jess's ankles as he walked past towards the back stairs. As the curtain fell back into place, the phone began to ring. He ducked into the kitchen as he answered, his voice low, "Hey."

"This is how you answer the phone now?" Lorelai asked.

"Only when I know it's you. Having fun?"

She snorted. "Actually, no. I should be, but I'm in a funk—I'm Jennifer Grey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

"Where are you?"

"At a bar in Hartford by the train station." She lowered her voice and spoke in the husky drawl she always adopted when imitating men. "Dollar well drinks after ten on Thursdays, dude. Frat city!"

"Well drinks?"

"Drinks made with the cheapest of the cheap—bottom drawer liquor," she said disdainfully. "I'm not drinking, it's not worth it." She sighed. "But Lane's band is actually kicking some cover tune ass with Dave and Gil on guitar, and Rory and Ashley are just lapping the vodka up like it's Kool Aid. My baby girl, a veritable stumbling drunk. I'm so proud."

He chuckled. "She and Ashley are getting along okay?"

"Oh, honey, once the drinking begins, Rory and Ashley get along with everyone." Lorelai paused. "This is my last fling with single living, I really should be having more fun than this."

"Single living, she says.

"Well, only technically speaking," she conceded. "I lost Sookie again. She keeps wandering off. I'm afraid I'm going to find her at the bottom of the stairs—"

"Liz still there with you?" Luke asked.

"Mm hm." Lorelai took an audible sip of something over a mound of ice that Luke could hear clinking in the glass. "She's reading palms at the pool table in the back. Hand to God, Luke. Miss Patty and Babette are cool handing some barely legal drinkers out of their tip money at the other one, and if those boys are not careful, they're going to end up going home in Patty's back pocket before the night is over, too."

"That is an image I could have lived without, thank you, love."

"I do my best to make you squirm," Lorelai replied, laughing. "And, if I remember rightly, often succeed." She sipped her drink again. "The conversation just took a dirty turn, by the way."

"So I gathered."

"I didn't want you to miss the all-important segue."

"That's very thoughtful of you," he said. "You want to bail? I can come get you."

"What? Leave your merry band of revelers?" Lorelai asked. "What will Little John and the Friar—Friars, actually—do without their mighty Prince of Thieves?"

"Kirk is Little John?"

"I was thinking Jackson," Lorelai said, "since Kirk's really more of a damsel in distress than sidekick."

Luke rubbed his eyes wearily. "How did I become Robin Hood?"

"I'm a little punchy." Again, she sighed. "Is it me or has this week just sucked?"

"It's not you," he replied.

"I should go. I'll call you later. Promise me you won't fall asleep," she said.

"I promise."

"And if I remind you of that when you complain that I woke you up—"

"I'll be up."

"Heh," she chortled. "Dirty."

"You'd think so."

He could tell she was smiling. "I do. Don't fall asleep."

They were a six pack worse for wear between them when Jess alerted Luke to the fact that Kirk had fallen asleep and was currently drooling on a table, TJ and his brother were trying to hoist Bootsie into a keg stand, Andrew and Jackson were crooning an off-key rendition of "Eli's Coming," and the rabbi and reverend were arm-wrestling. Luke, pleasantly relaxed, merely rolled his eyes and trudged upstairs. He'd sacrificed the bigger bed to TJ and his brother (Liz was staying at Lorelai's, the men and women divided up like kids at summer camp), and rather than sleep there on the unmade remains of the night before, he opened a sheet over the sofa, stripped down to his boxers, went about his nightly rituals, and lay down to wait.

He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa; the leather of the cushions creaked, and Luke pulled away from the back of the couch, hearing more than feeling the loud sucking noise of the material releasing his skin where it stuck to the parts of the sofa that the sheet he'd laid out didn't cover. He stared through the darkness of his old apartment—he paused a moment, reflected on the fact that this renovated office of his father's had become his "old" apartment in a matter of months after so many years of being his home. As he beat a more comfortable hollow into his pillow and twitched his legs against the sheet beneath him, this old apartment felt more like a poor temporary substitute than home; it was the set of clothes worn on laundry day, when the everyday jeans and favored tee shirts were unavailable and all that was left were the oldest and the over-worn remnants of a wardrobe, clothes that perhaps used to be favorites but had outlived their usefulness and preference except as a last resort. Without the heat of Lorelai's body beside his, the comforting weight of her arm draped across his chest, this little apartment was just the place he didn't live anymore.

TJ and his brother—Luke could not, for the life of him, remember the guy's name—made their presence known just as the beer was making Luke drowsy and restful. They fumbled around the apartment, bitching at each other, rooting around in their bags for their things, laughing at their own jokes, and, when they finally stopped trying to goad Luke and make him acknowledge them, fell asleep, and began to snore at a decibel level Luke had previously thought only congested German shepherds were capable of.

Above the nasal din, he thought he heard soft scuffling noises in the diner downstairs. He waited, trying to decide if Bootsie and Andrew had come back to raid his stockroom as they'd threatened to. The sounds subsided after a short moment. The silence was sudden, a lull in the snorting, horking of the brothers, and brief, as the heavy tread of footsteps echoed in the stairwell. The door swung open, and Jess leaned in. "Luke, man, I've got two drunk girls downstairs. One drunk girl is way beyond my tolerance level, and seeing as how one of them—"

Luke sat up. "Ah, geez," he groaned, reaching for the first article of clothing he could find, an old denim work shirt, sliding his feet into a pair of sneakers as an afterthought.

He saw Ashley first, leaning her forehead against the glass partition between the diner and the soda shoppe next door. She wore a drunken squint, a confused expression, as she blinked at the transparent reflection before her. Jess rolled his eyes and crossed the diner. Ashley turned her face to him without lifting her forehead from the window. She smiled sleepily.

"Hey, I know you," she said. She stood upright unsteadily and flung her arms over Jess's shoulders. "Where ya been?"

"Not at the distillery you were," he said.

Luke averted his eyes, realizing he was staring. He turned to the counter. "Ah, geez," he breathed again, passed a hand over his eyes. Rory was sprawled across the countertop, half falling off a stool. Her arms were spread wide, her cheek pressed to the Formica surface. Luke approached her tentatively, completely unsure how to approach a Rory Gilmore passed out and possibly drooling in his diner, like Kirk.

He opted for a hand on the shoulder. "Rory?" He shook her slightly. "Come on, Kid."

She raised her head a fraction of an inch and opened one eye, smiled. "Pops."

"You ready to go home?"

Shaking her head, Rory folded her arms across the counter and rested her cheek on her wrist. "Tired."

Luke hooked one hand under Rory's elbow and reached a careful arm around her waist, slipping her off the stool. She got to her feet without complaint or opening her eyes. He negotiated her into the crook of his arm, her head lolling on his shoulder. She was disconcertingly loose-limbed in her current state, a rag doll in his arms. He looked over his shoulder at Jess, who was supporting Ashley as he walked her to the stairs. His nephew cocked an eyebrow at him, a silent "I'm fine," and Luke nodded. He leaned down and caught Rory behind the knees, hoisted her to cradle her in his arms, and jostled her a little until she was easier to carry.

"I'm going to bring her home," he said.

Rory raised her head and looked at him with drowsy eyes. "You just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at," she said.

"I got vision," Luke replied, and Rory giggled, slumped her head back against his shoulder.

He heard Jess clear his throat just as he reached the door. "You ever consider pants, man?"

Luke left without answering.

"Where're we going?" Rory asked.

"Bolivia," he answered, knowing what was expected. This had become their thing, their bit, though he couldn't quite remember how or when. One too many viewings of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the living room, one too many times responding to "Butch" when she called him that, he supposed.

"Wherever the hell that is."

"Beats the hell out of me."

She began to giggle again. "Butch, the total tonnage of what you don't know—"

"Kid, the next time I say let's go to Bolivia—"

"—let's go to Bolivia," Rory finished for him. "You get all the good lines."

"Well, the Kid's not much of a talker," Luke said. He shifted her slightly. She was beginning to feel like dead weight.

"Naturally blabby," she said. "Luke?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you're marrying Mom."

"Me, too."

She released a heavy breath. "When're you going to tell her about the chuppah?"

Luke swallowed thickly and slowed his steps. "Soon," he said.

"It was nice that you made it. It's pretty," she said. "And it's fun to say chuppah." She pronounced with a choking noise, and Luke found himself involuntarily jerking his head away.

He spoke carefully. "Does she know?"

"About what?"

"The chuppah."

Rory paused, pursed her lips together. "Nope."

He thought about this a moment. "How'd you know?"

"Found it. Looking for duct tape when I was packing to go to Dad's." She sighed. "Never found the duct tape." She began to rock her head from side to side, tapping her temple lightly against Luke's shoulder when she tilted to the left. She hummed tunelessly as they came to the end of their street. "You can't come in the house," she said suddenly.

He angled to look at her. "Why?"

"Mom's dress is in the living room. She was trying it on before the party, and then Babette called that she was coming over, so she had to put it back on the mannequin and she just left it in the living room. 'S bad luck to see it before the wedding," Rory slurred.

Luke furrowed his brow. "She had to put it back on the mannequin," he repeated.

"Mm. She's all done with it, though."

His throat constricted a little. "She made it."

"Mm," Rory said again. "'S very pretty."

"I'll bring you through the kitchen," he told her. "And you're going to go to bed right after you drink some water."

She made a face, puckered her mouth. "Not thirsty."

"Don't care," Luke told her.

The house was dark, the windows open. Luke strained against the dark as he stepped onto the lawn. He deposited Rory on her feet when they reached the kitchen door and immediately felt his knees and back creak from the effort. She shuffled ahead of him, raking her hands through her hair and yawning. She stopped short in the door to her room, confused. "Lane?" Rubbing her eyes, Luke saw her expression change to one of chagrined amusement. "Oh, hey, Dave." She looked over her shoulder at Luke. "Is my room, like, the make out room, now?"

"Who're you talking to?" Luke heard Lane ask.

"Butch," she said with a nod and grin. Rory slumped against her doorway as Lane appeared beside her, slightly mussed. "Butch and me have been talking it over, Lane. Wherever the hell Bolivia is, that's where we're off to."

Lane rubbed the tips of her fingers at the space just between her eyes. "This again?" she asked. "Hey, Luke. You guys need a new bit."

Rory frowned. "I like this bit." She swiveled to look at Luke. "Don't you?"

"Sure I do, Kid," he said, smiling. He rocked back on his heels. "You should get to sleep, though."

"Mm," Rory murmured. She waved a hand at Luke over her shoulder as she entered her room. "Thanks, Pops. You're the best. Love ya. Dave, get off my bed and put your shirt on, okay?"

Lane crossed her arms over her chest and bit her lips together, looked guiltily at Luke. "It's been a long night," she said at length.

"You're telling me," he sighed. "Do me a favor, make sure she drinks some water before she passes out again?" She nodded. "Lorelai home?"

"She drove Sookie's car home. She's probably walking back now."

"Thanks, Lane."

"Sure, boss." Just as he turned to go, she called to him. "You do know you're not wearing any pants, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, then."

They met up halfway between their place and Sookie's. Lorelai seemed surprised to see him, stopping dead; she immediately began to laugh. "Luke! Where are your pants?"

He looked down. "At the apartment. I left in a hurry."

"So it would appear," she said, meeting him in a crushing embrace. "God, am I glad to see you. Every other person I know is drunk, and when you yourself are not drunk, that's depressing."

"Not drinking tonight?" he asked, brushing a kiss across her forehead. "You okay?"

Lorelai wrinkled her nose. "Yes, I just don't—the idea of drinking anything boozy just makes me kind of queasy right now. I was hitting the diet Coke pretty hard, though." She stepped back and slipped her hand in his. "Come on, I'll walk you back to the diner. I don't trust you walking back all flapping in the breeze like that."

"I am not flapping in the breeze," he said darkly.

"I know, but it amuses me to say you are."

She kissed him at the door to the diner and rested her palms flat on his chest. "Okay, so. It's all set. We did the party thing, and tomorrow's the rehearsal dinner, and then the day after that we'll do the whole exchanging of vows thing…" She trailed off. "I'm so tired right now, I can't believe how not excited I sounded saying that. I'm sorry."

Luke slid one hand beneath the hem of her shirt and rubbed the small of her back in slow, reassuring circles. "I get it."

"This whole week has just been one thing after another, I know, and we haven't had time to breathe or actually think about what's actually happening. We're getting married," she breathed. "Which is just—well, it's something." She paused, waiting for him to reply. He only smiled in silent agreement."Don't you think? I mean, aren't you excited?" she asked, her voice tentative.

He touched his forehead to hers. "To be getting married to you? You bet I am," he said.

"Good." Lorelai smiled, her eyes closed. "Heaven help you, Luke Danes. Do you have any idea why you're marrying me anymore?"

"I have some," he said, chuckling. "You?"

"You mean do I have any idea why I'm marrying you? Isn't it obvious? This way, I can tease and torment you for the rest of our lives," she said, her tone deliberately light.

He pulled away to look at her. "Well, yes, but you'd have done that anyway. Really, though, why?"

"I would have, yes," she agreed, her voice throaty with laughter. She circled his wrists with her hands, tapped his palms. "Why are you asking?" Luke shrugged awkwardly and remained silent. Lorelai sighed. "Well, first of all," she said, "you asked me to."

"Yes, I did."

"There's also the fact that you're pretty good in bed."

"Pretty good?"

She continued, ignoring him. "The coffee is also a bonus, not having to pay for it. You also give quite good foot rubs," she said. "And if I didn't take pity on you pretty soon, you just know Patty would have set her tractor beams on you and made you husband number five."

"If I had known I had that option—"

"Very funny," Lorelai drawled. "Hey, do I have to call you Lucas when we say our vows?" she asked. "I don't know that I'd ever feel properly married to you if I had to call you Lucas. I've only ever called you that when I'm trying to piss you off."

"Luke is fine," he replied.

"In many, many ways," she smiled. She leaned up and kissed the edge of his jaw.

"So, other than the fact that I asked, my abilities in bed and status as your coffee supplier, and your graciously saving me from Patty, there are no other reasons?" he asked.

"There's also that whole 'I love you and want to be with you until I die' thing, too. Luke, my life, what is this about?"

Again, he shrugged. "We're saying vows in a few days. I just… I've been thinking about it. Wondering. How I got so—why you—you know."

"Why I what? Why I love you? Why I want to marry you?" He didn't reply, and she bit her lip, shook her head. "Oh, Luke. Sometimes I forget… for all our talky-talk-talkness, there are still a lot of elephants in the room a lot of the time, aren't there? We'd give Maddie and David a run for their money, sometimes." Lorelai looped her arms around his neck. She looked at him a long moment, her expression serious and sad. "You shouldn't have had to wonder," she said softly. "You should have known that all along—we shouldn't—we shouldn't have to explain it." She raised a hand to his face and stroked his cheek, falling silent once more. "I love you," she said slowly, "because you're Luke."

Luke closed his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest. "Not helpful, Lorelai."

She swept her hand across his brow, through his hair, down his neck. "I couldn't help it if I wanted to, Luke. Okay? Do you get it?" She pressed her palms to his cheeks and pulled his mouth to hers. "You're ridiculous, you know that?"

He exhaled shakily. "Pot," he said.

"I know, Kettle," she laughed. "I have to go home." She pulled him in for one last, soft kiss. "Once more into the breach. See you tomorrow."

It had been tempting to have the rehearsal dinner at Luke's just to horrify Emily, but Lorelai told him she thought she'd finally outgrown doing things to horrify her mother and had moved on simply to saying things to do so. Sookie volunteered to host the dinner and the party following, and so Luke found himself cornered in Sookie's living room the night before his wedding, being regaled with embarrassing anecdotes about his past romantic ineptitude and Lorelai's commitment phobic ways by a Miss Patty so pickled in her own punch she was reeling where she stood. Jess was pointedly—and delightedly, as much as he ever expressed such a feeling—ignoring his uncle's silent pleas for help. Rory's appearance at his elbow had Luke so relieved he was tempted to hug the girl right there, but she was expertly guiding him from the throng of well-wishers with a firm hand on his arm before he could.

"Mom's waiting," she told him in a low voice. "Outside. She's a little worn out, I think she wants you to take her home."

Lorelai was sitting at the edge of Sookie's lawn, tapping her bare feet against the sidewalk below her. She looked up as Luke crouched beside her, smiled wearily. "Hey, stranger," she said. "What's happening, hot stuff?"

"Rory said you want to go home?"

She nodded. "I need my beauty sleep. Apparently I'm getting married tomorrow. You know anything about that?"

"I heard some things," he said, pulling her to her feet. "Some lucky bastard you found."

"I keep telling him that, and his response is just to try to feed me health food, which I think is really a slap in my pretty little face," she said. She leaned into him as they began to walk, slipped one arm around his waist as she swung her sandals in her free hand.

Luke slung his arm over her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. "Maybe if you gave in, he'd stop nagging."

"Doubtful," she teased. "It was a nice party. You think anyone will notice we're gone?"

He checked his watch. "Equally doubtful," he answered. "It's late."

"Mm," she murmured. "It is that."

"Your parents, maybe," he conceded. "Your mother has been in high dudgeon—"

"Forever," she said, "that's how long. I talked to her before I left. She was fine. Well, as fine as she can be about a party in Sookie's house at which no one used or mentioned a doily. Hey," she said, tilting her face to him. "I wanted to tell you that I'm very proud of you. You've been very British this week, and I want you to know how much I appreciate it."

"I've been British?"

"Stiff upper lippy," she grinned. "Very impressive. I even have a present for you."

"Oh, yeah?" he asked, pleased. For the first time all day, he felt himself begin to relax. He'd felt stilted and awkward at dinner; too many people focusing too much attention on him, too many speeches with too much embarrassing detail, too much rich food and not enough alcohol to wash it down and dull himself to everything else. Lorelai had been, once again, strangely quiet, and it had worried him slightly to see her pick at her food, to hear the hollow falseness in her laughter when people cracked lame jokes. "I've got some stuff for you, too."

She gave him a slight squeeze. "I love stuff."

The house was dark as they approached; Luke sighed, thinking that once he walked Lorelai inside and the place lit up, he'd be on his way back to the old apartment again. It irritated him enough to think Jess was right, he was whipped, and it was really rather pathetic. That they were getting married the next day took the heat from the revelation, but it still made him sigh. Lorelai stopped in the drive, looked at him with a furrowed brow.

"I know," she said. "It hasn't been the easiest week, and that's my fault. But it'll be worth it."

"That so?"

"It is," she told him. "At least, I hope so, because otherwise we just spent a really crappy week apart for no reason other than my—well, my last, desperate grasp at tradition, I guess. Come inside?"

"Just a sec," he said. He took one of her hands in both of his and led her towards the garage.

"You okay?" she asked. "Your hands are cold."

He squeezed her hand. "I'm okay." He could feel himself speeding up, his pulse quickening painfully and his breath coming too fast. "So, I gotta show you something. In the garage."

Lorelai wrinkled her nose. "It's not, like, hairy or anything, is it?"

"Not hairy," he replied. He released her hands and pulled the doors open. "So. Go on in."

He'd brought the chuppah front and center in the small space earlier that week, arranged the other furniture around it. The rocker was off to the left, hidden slightly in shadow now, the small bookcase and table opposite it. Luke hung back by the door as Lorelai stepped into the darkened garage, his eyes fixed to the ground, at his feet. He braced his hands on his hips as he waited, listening to her sharp intake of breath, the soft, wordless noises of appreciation and approval she made as she ran her hand over the posts of the chuppah, as she fingered the edges of the table, palmed the shelves of the bookcase. He looked up at the creak of the rocker against the cement floor; Lorelai sat gingerly in the chair, her hands folded at her knees. She held his gaze, her expression tearful and overwhelmed.

"All of this?" she asked.

He shrugged one shoulder.

"Luke?" Her voice shook. "When?"

He gave the chuppah a once-over. "Before your birthday, some of it. Some of it, later." He turned in the doorway, scratched the back of his neck. "You knew about the chuppah, didn't you?"

Lorelai sat back in the rocker, flattened her palms against the arms of the chair and stroked the wood reverently as she began to rock with a gentle push off the balls of her toes. "I found it," she said. "Awhile ago. I didn't want to say anything, I knew it was a surprise, but, Luke—I wasn't—I didn't expect this." She gestured broadly with one arm. "All of this," she said again. "I can't believe you did this."

"You like it?" he asked.

She was at his side, her arms around him so quickly she nearly knocked him off his feet. She held him, pushed herself forward into him, one hand in his hair and her nails digging into his scalp, his shoulder. She pressed her cheek to his, whispered hotly in his ear. "I love you."

He closed his eyes. "I just wanted some stuff that was ours."

She said nothing in reply, took a shaky breath, and rubbed her cheek across his, now damp with tears. "Oh, Luke," she said. "Come inside, okay?"

Holding tightly to his hand and pulling him behind her, Lorelai led him to the front door and through the living room to the stairs. She caught him looking over his shoulder as he followed her up the stairs, and she snorted. "It's in Rory's room," she said.

"What is?"

She stopped on the landing and put her hands heavily on his shoulders. "The dress. It's in Rory's room. She told me about her little drunken slip last night." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Don't think it's a big deal, or anything."

Luke smiled as he kissed her. "Wouldn't dream of it."

She rolled her eyes as she took him by the hand once more. "I'm thinking of wearing my Hello! Kitty slippers with it. I've found that of all my footwear, those go with it best."

"All your footwear?"

"Well, I had to try it with everything, my life, see what worked best." She paused at the top stair. "It's between the Hello! Kitties and my red Chucks. But you'll see which ones I choose tomorrow. First, you need to see your present."

The bedroom door was closed. She stood between Luke and the entrance, her hand on the doorknob. He looked at her, his brows raised in expectation. She took a breath, held it, and pressed her free hand to his heart. "If you don't like it, you need to tell me, okay? My feelings won't be hurt."

"Lorelai—"

"I'm serious, Luke—this is your room, too, now, and I don't want you going all Charlotte Perkins Gilman on me because you don't like it and haven't told me. If I catch you chewing on the furniture, I'm going to be seriously pissed." She swatted his hand when he reached around her to open the door. "Luke."

He sighed. "I promise."

He stepped in behind her as she turned on the light. The new curtains caught and held the light, softened it and glowed greenly against the night beyond the windows. Lorelai had decked the room out in dark, rich colors—deep greens and blues, burgundy and cream accents. The new bedding was plush and inviting, the reupholstered armchair in the corner draped with a new quilt and handmade pillows. He swept the room with his eyes, took in the floor-length window coverings, the throw rugs, the new, dark finish on her old furniture, the starkly bare walls, freshly painted and gleaming almost damply in the light. His first thought, beyond wanting to sink into the bed immediately with Lorelai to make love or sleep or stay awake all night with her tucked comfortably under his arm, was that he was glad to see the girly wallpaper gone for good. He planted his feet firmly and pulled her to him, brushed his lips across her forehead.

"I like it."

"Yeah?" she asked, pleased. "Really?"

"Definitely not going to be chewing on the furniture."

"I thought you'd like it," she said, laying her head on his shoulder. "Well, I hoped you'd like it, but I thought you might."

"Do you like it?"

He felt her smile. "Mm, I do. It's very warm, you know? It wants to hug you. It's simple."

"And this is why you asked me to leave for the week."

"It is, yes."

They were silent together a moment, Luke gathering her closer to him, Lorelai slipping her arms around him in return. "Thanks," he said. "You're going to make me go back to the diner tonight, aren't you?"

"Not yet." She wet her lips. "Hey, Luke?"

"Yeah?"

Slowly, Lorelai began to pull away. "I wasn't sure I was going to do this tonight…" She trailed off, turned from him, and stepped further into the room. "But I think I should."

"Do what?" he asked, watching as she opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a plastic bag. "Lorelai?"

She bit her lips together and stared at the package in her hand a moment, looked up at him from beneath her eyelashes. She was pale, shaking, as she handed him the bag. "Open it."

Luke knew before he opened the bag and saw its contents what it was. He heard the faint rattle of plastic as she raised her arm and gave it to him, felt the hard corners of the box through the bag as he took it. His mouth went dry, his face and hands suddenly numb. "Is this…?"

"Yep," Lorelai answered. She crossed her arms over her chest. "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," he said. "I kinda—I'm a little—I can't—"

She raised her eyes heavenward. "Pretty much my reaction, too." Again, she took a deep breath, rubbed the back of her neck with one hand. Luke remained where he stood, stock-still, as Lorelai began to undress and tie her hair back, pull on a pair of old cotton pajamas and take off her jewelry. "You'll stay?" she asked.

His chest felt tight, and his skin was fevered and stinging as he came back to himself. "Do you have to ask?"

She held out her hand. "Let me," she said. "I'll just be a minute."

"You want me to—you know?" he asked as he returned the package to her.

She smiled faintly. "No, I think I can handle the weeing part on my own. But—just, don't go anywhere, okay?"

He watched her cross the hall, gripping the bag in both hands, close to her chest. "Lorelai," he called. She turned, uncertainty in her very posture, worry written on her brow. "I love you." His voice was thick, rough.

Her face blossomed in a smile. "I know. I'll just be a sec."

Luke sat heavily on the edge of the bed. The room should have felt alien, both too big and too small in its newness; he thought about it as he kicked off his shoes, pulled his shirt over his head and sat there, bare-chested in his good dress pants, settled himself back against the enormous pile of pillows Lorelai had made, and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. There wasn't any need to make himself feel at home, he realized, just comfortable. He folded his hands behind his head, closed his eyes, and waited. The tightness in his chest was slowly worsening, descending to his abdomen. He felt poised on the edge of something, his entire body waiting, humming, overheated and worn and caught in skin suddenly too tight and thin.

The bathroom door creaked open a brief moment later. Lorelai padded across the hall and crawled up onto the bed beside him. She curled into herself, her knees tucked to her chest, and laid her cheek on his side. When she spoke, her words buzzed against the skin over his ribs, tickled the hair on his chest.

"It doesn't take that long," she said. "I just didn't want to look at it."

"I need to oil the hinges on that door," he replied.

Lorelai chuckled, pressed her lips to his stomach. "Oh, Luke," she said. "King of the panicked non-sequitor."

He twisted a lock of her hair around his index finger. "I'm not panicked," he said.

"No? So that look on your face is what, a reaction to your dinner?"

He tugged gently on her hair. "I'm not," he said softly. "I'm—I'm worried. About you. Feeling a little overwhelmed, maybe, but not panicked. We can—we can do this. We can handle this."

Lorelai lifted her head and folded her hands on his chest. She regarded him a beat, her expression inscrutable. "Do you think so?"

"I think so," he said, sliding the tip of his finger along the curve of her cheek.

"You just keep thinking, Butch—"

He groaned. "I'm going to burn that movie," he said.

She began to laugh. "Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?" she teased. "Hey, did you know that Edith Head did the costumes for that movie?"

"Who's Edith Head?" he asked.

"And Burt Bacharach did the music, which explains the weird 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head' scene. Despite the Bacharach, it's a good movie."

"Who's Edith Head?" he asked again.

"Edith Head is Edith Head, Luke," she said, as though that explained everything. "Hey, have I told you that you smell pretty tonight?"

"I do not smell pretty."

"Yes, you do." She sat up, leaning over him as she did, and kissed him lightly. She looked him in the eye as she spoke. "I think it's been long enough. More than long enough."

Luke swallowed over the constriction in his throat. "Okay. You want me to—"

She pressed her hand to his chest, stared at her fingers as she tapped a beat against his skin. "You stay here. I need to—I need to see it for myself." She climbed over him and rolled off the bed. She paused in the bedroom doorway. "Luke? Either way…"

"Either way, we're good."

"I know," she said. "Just… you know, just saying it. I'll be right back."

Closing his eyes, Luke gritted his teeth and drew a long breath through his nose. As he exhaled, he began to count. At three seconds, the beat of his heart began to seem painfully fast. At five seconds, he forced himself to fold his hands and still the shaking. At eight and a half seconds, he heard Lorelai from the bathroom.

"Oh," she said.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, got to his feet. The time she took to cross back to the bedroom seemed torturously long, but he remained where he stood, his hands in his back pockets, his whole body tensed as though ready to spring forward. Lorelai leaned in the doorway and crossed her arms over her chest.

"So," she said casually, "how do you feel about a shotgun wedding?"

His knees gave out. He let himself fall back to sit on the bed. He felt a tingling in the tips of his fingers, and the room seemed to collapse around him, close in and expand again. Lorelai wore a strange smile, but her posture was easy, sure. "No shit," he said.

She raised her right hand. "No shit."

"No shit," he echoed softly. He ran his hand across the back of his head. "So you're—"

"Knocked up," she said. "Baking a bun in my oven. With child. Pregnant." She paused. "You are going to weigh in on this without obscenities, right?"

Luke braced his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet once more. He spread his hands, shrugged, his expression sheepish, and she was on him in an instant, her arms around him, her chin on his shoulder, her mouth against his ear. Luke lifted her off her feet as he held her.

"Wow," he said at length.

Lorelai was clinging to him, tightening her arms around his neck and shoulders, lifting her legs and hooking them around his waist. He stumbled under her weight, tripped over his own feet, and toppled back onto the bed. She was shaking in his arms, trying to untangle the knot they'd made of their bodies, and as she pulled away, Luke could see her face was tear-stained, a flower wilted by rain. She sat up, tucked her legs beneath her, and turned her face away.

"Hey," he breathed. "What's this?"

She reached for his hand and pressed his palm to her abdomen, taking a long, shuddery breath as she tried to calm herself. "This is what this is," she said. She held his wrist fast with one hand, covered his fingers with the other. "This. I'm just—I mean—I can't—"

Luke sat up. With his free hand, he reached for her, and she dug her nails into the hand she still held tightly to her belly. "You're going to have to help me out, here, love."

Her laughter was loose, slightly hysterical. She forced him onto his back and kissed him, a long, messy, wet kiss. When she pulled back, her eyes were bright, but calmer. She pushed herself up and sat straddling him, took his hands and laced her fingers with his. As she spoke, she shook her hair back, squeezed his hands, tried to regain possession of herself.

"I've been dreaming about this. Actually dreaming, not, like, symbolically speaking," she said. "Every night, almost, I've been having these bizarrely vivid baby dreams—so real, Luke, they're just so real that I wake up and I feel—it's like I'm suddenly without, and it's just, it's so—I don't know." She drew a slow, purposeful breath. "They're the laughing dreams."

Luke raised his head. "Say that again?"

She shook her head slightly. "I don't know how to explain it. In the dreams, I'm pregnant, or the baby's already here, and we're somewhere we'd never, ever be—a Laundromat, a car show, one of Taylor's Historical Stars Hollow seminars—and I just can't stop laughing. I don't even know why, but it's like whatever's going on, this is the most perfect moment it could be, and I have to laugh." She squeezed his waist with her knees. "I'm crazy, right?"

"Yes."

"Thank you," she said, rolling her eyes. "They started right when I stopped taking the pill. Talk about biological clocks, huh?"

The question stuck in his throat. "Are you okay with this?"

She nodded silently and pulled him to sit up. She studied him a long moment, sitting high in his lap, her expression a confusion of emotion—hesitant happiness, he thought. "We're having a baby," she told him.

It hit him in the chest, diffused through his whole body, this strange, strangling feeling he could only define as that of being overwhelmed. Just the words obliterated any other sense of what he thought, what he felt. "We're having a baby," he repeated.

"We're going to have to talk about this," she said seriously. "Talk a lot. Lots of talking about practical things."

"What, now?" He heard the note of disbelief in his voice, an admission that at this moment, he was far from capable of discussing practical things. That required time, time to think of questions and concerns and all the other things that would occur to him when Lorelai was no longer looking at him like that, her eyes soft and serious and bright. When he'd had time, there would be practical things to talk about in abundance, he knew.

Lorelai smiled, the Peter Rabbit, I-love-you-you-crazy-weirdo-dork smile. "No, my life. Not now. After tomorrow." She paused. "You haven't said what you think."

He swallowed thickly, felt the color rising in his face, and he felt a burst of self-irritation, of stupidity, that she'd have to ask. He kissed her eyes. "I think this is very good."

"Do you?" she asked, the corners of her mouth turning down. "You're not just—"

"I am not just," he said firmly. He looked down at their still-joined hands. "I don't know how—" He sighed. "I'm not a words guy."

She hugged him, pulling his head to her shoulder, and stroked his hair. "I know this, Luke." She cupped his jaw, ran her thumb along his cheek. "Just tell me that you're good with this."

"I'm good with this," he said, looking up at her. "I'm very, very good with this." And with that, he did the only thing he could think to do: he kissed her, held her so tightly she groaned and slapped his shoulders in laughing protest. "Love you," he said.

Her eyes were full, and she spoke with her lips just touching his. "Love you back."

"We have to get you to a doctor," he said. "Soon. Soon-soon."

"So not just soon," she replied. "I know. Tomorrow, I'll run in super early, see a nurse or something at the hospital just for confirmation and vitamins and whatever. It's Saturday, so there's no way I'm going to see my doctor, but at least we'll know for sure. I mean, we do, but we will more." She closed her eyes. "That made no sense."

Luke reached up and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and he felt something hot rise behind his eyes as he traced Lorelai's features with the tip of his finger in a gesture now as familiar as holding her hand. "I get it. Are you still going to make me leave tonight?"

She bit her lip. "Rory's bunking with me tonight. We planned this months ago, Luke—this is so huge, and I want you to stay, but she and I, we have to do our thing tonight. Do you understand?"

"Yeah," he sighed. "I do."

"Stay with me until she gets home?"

"I can do that," he said.

There was no sleep to be had that night. He stayed at the house with Lorelai for another hour or so before Rory came home, laying back against the mountain of pillows with Lorelai's head on his chest; they kept their conversation purposefully light, marveling over the fact of it, the timing of it, trying to figure out exactly when it had happened. It was hard for him to talk; it was hard for him to joke, to speculate about when and what would happen, but he made the effort for her, spoke without any idea of what he was saying. Lorelai feigned shock and disapproval when Luke casually cursed—claiming he had not a fucking clue about it.

"Luke!" she gasped. "Not in front of the baby!" She began to laugh. "And also, you made a pun!"

"Ah, geez."

"If those are this child's first words, I will hold you personally responsible," she said.

This child's first words, he thought. There was going to be a child—his child, his child with Lorelai. A year from now, he thought, and stopped himself. It was more than he could think of, more than he could picture or put to words. He'd wanted this, and he knew he'd wanted this, but it hadn't prepared him for what to think or feel or do when the time that it happened actually came. It was the same feeling he'd had when Lorelai had accepted his proposal: he knew, eventually, they were going to come to this moment, and together, but that knowledge did nothing to help him react. He could only listen to Lorelai, hold her and feel her solid and warm and comforting against him, and try to understand that it had happened, that he'd gotten what he'd hoped for so long.

She walked him to the door when Rory finally came home, led him out onto the porch, and kissed him goodnight. She fit her body as close to his as she could, drew him in with her hand against his face, kissed him with a fierceness that was both new and not new, that ended any possibility for coherent thoughts or words when they parted. He rested his forehead to hers, breathing heavily, and closed his eyes. The heat had lessened, slightly, but the air had a heavy feel to it, a metallic smell and tang. He was suddenly aware he was listening, that the silence was strange and dead—the stillness wasn't normal silence; it was waiting.

He squeezed Lorelai's waist in his hands. "It's gonna rain," he said. "You smell that?"

"No," she said, feathering kisses along the line of his jaw. "Just smell all that pretty Luke smell."

"I do not smell pretty," he said again. "And you really don't smell that? The rain? You can almost hear it, too. The thunder. It's gonna be big," he continued, almost to himself.

"Sure, Luke," she smiled. "Whatever you say." She let her hands come to rest on the lapels of his dinner jacket and tugged him towards her. "Much as I love Rory and I'm excited to have this thing with her tonight—"

"What thing?"

"Can't tell you," she said. "It's strictly for girls named Lorelai."

"Ah."

"I really wish you were staying," she said softly. "It doesn't seem quite real, yet. I need you here for that."

He tipped his head back. "Well, after tomorrow, I'll be here pretty much on a permanent basis. How's that?"

"I'll take it," she said. "C'mere. Kiss me, tell me you love me, and then get going before I lose all vestiges of self-control and decide to take you right here on the porch."

"Are you really going to go to the doctor tomorrow?" he asked.

Lorelai wrinkled her nose, considering this. "It's seriously the last thing I want to do on my wedding day, but we're leaving for… wherever it is we're leaving for… on Sunday, and we won't be back for a week, and I don't know how else—" She stopped. She said nothing for a beat, only rocked back on her heels and gathered the fabric of Luke's shirt in her fists. "Where are we going?"

"You know the deal," he told her.

"I know I know the deal," she replied. "But the thing is, if nothing you've set up is non-refundable, there's no reason to go some place funky or exotic or whatever, because you'll hate it and go all Clint Eastwood and that will be absolutely no fun for me, and I'm just as happy going to the cabin."

The wind shifted, however slightly, and the almost-sound of thunder was loud in his ears as he went over the idea himself. The slight caving in, the disappointment in his chest, was easily ignored when he thought about the baby, about long, long hours of seclusion with Lorelai, with Lorelai who he'd be married to in a matter of hours, about quiet fortresses and personal strongholds and familiar, familial places. "You're just as happy going to the cabin," he said.

She rolled her eyes. "My God, Luke, would you quit it with the Rainman repeat-o-meter thing you've been doing? Yes, I'm just as happy going to the cabin! More, in fact, because at least that way I know you'll be having a good time, too, and I won't have to be constantly asking you like Sorority Sissy Barbie."

"Sorority Sissy Barbie?" he replied, without thought.

"Oh, my hell, Luke. Seriously, I need you to stop doing that," she said, dropping her head to his shoulder. "It was the first thing I thought of to say. Now, tell me. The cabin—yes, no, what?"

He squeezed her again. "Sounds good to me. Nothing's been set up that can't be cancelled, I guess."

"Good. That way, we can just hole up here for an extra day, I can go in for an appointment on Monday, and we can just leave from Hartford—I can just see us trying to go another week without seeing the doctor and you turning into stumbling, nervous Luke who's afraid to touch me until he gets the okay from someone with an MD."

"I would not."

She smiled. "Yes, you would. But that's okay, I think it's nice." She leaned up and kissed him again. "Okay, so you should go."

He resisted the urge to echo that he should go and kissed her instead, ignoring the sudden press of the air, the weight of coming thunder and rain, the electric charge of the space around them as he held her to him.

Lorelai called to him softly as he came to the edge of the lawn. "Tomorrow, I'll be the one in the big fancy dress," she said. "No matter what Miss Patty tries to convince you of, I'm the one you want."

"You are that."

"Hey, Luke? Just out of curiosity, where were we going to go?" she asked.

"Key West."

Her mouth fell open. "Kitsch capital of the world!" she cooed. "Next year, okay?"

"Next year," he replied.

She narrowed her eyes. "Tomorrow? The repeating of the vows? That's all you get."

The rain held off through the night, though Luke could still feel the weight of it in the air. The wedding day itself dawned cool, gray, and misty. Luke watched the slow change of light from his makeshift bed on the old apartment couch. He hadn't slept, but he was full of a strange energy that made his wakefulness less anxious and more bearable—this was Christmas-morning insomnia, he thought, rather than doctor's appointment insomnia. He was unable to give his thoughts words, to shape them into meaning. They remained a fog of too much, too big, too monumentally much. Just before five, he gave in and rose, dressed, and stepped quietly out of his apartment. Jess, TJ, and the dipshit brother were still snoring and dead to the world, along with the rest of Stars Hollow. He walked Main Street, hardly seeing the businesses around him, shuttered and dark as they were. He walked without any idea of destination, just wanting the damp smell of the rain to come to clear his head, let him breathe without this strange weight on his chest.

He was halfway to the cemetery when the rain began, when he realized where he was headed. It was a half-hearted sort of rain at best, a gentle, smeary sort that drifted rather than fell. The clean, flowery scent soothed him, settled something in him. He didn't often go to the cemetery, but he was unsurprised to find himself picking his way through the maze of statues and monuments. The family plot was small, set back in a corner away from the others. Luke dropped to a crouch, folded his hands, and regarded the names before him, his elbows on his knees. On the occasions he came, he never spoke to the headstones as he knew some people did: they were granite grave markers, not his parents. It had never been helpful to imagine what he'd say to them when he had good news, were they still around to hear it. They weren't, and he couldn't tell them, and though somewhere in the back of his mind he thought they knew, he'd never been able to construct a conversation with them in his head about certain things—there wasn't a single choice he'd made since his dad's death that he didn't know what his dad would have said, but it was different, trying to think of how he'd tell them both things as if they didn't already know. Dating Lorelai, getting engaged, learning he was going to be—they were—that she was pregnant, all of it, he shied away from thinking of how he would say it to his parents, as though it was all too fragile for words in the end. It was enough that he knew, that he thought they'd somehow know even if they weren't there to tell him they were happy. Still, it felt important to come, to commune with them somehow. In his own way, he paid what tribute to them he could.

It was raining harder when he left, light straining behind the heavy cloud-cover. Stars Hollow looked downright dreary as he walked the streets back to the diner. Luke turned his hat to cover his eyes and jogged the rest of the way, his hands jammed into his pockets. The diner was closed, empty, Jess and the others not yet awake, and so Luke set himself to making breakfast, ignoring his sopping clothes and sodden shoes and going about his everyday routine. Keeping his hands busy was the best remedy against thought. The ring of the bell over the front door startled him as he sat down to his eggs.

Rory shivered in, shut the door behind her. She smiled sheepishly at him, stood dripping in the doorway. "Morning," she said.

He was on his feet, guiding her to the counter. "Coffee?" he asked even as he reached for the filters.

"Yes, please," she said. "One for me, and some to go, if you don't mind. And if there's any sort of breakfast-shaped food around—"

"I'll whip up some pancakes," he said. "What are you doing up already? It's early."

She shrugged. "We didn't really sleep last night. Mom conked out a little while ago, but I'm too wired."

"And you want to add coffee to that," Luke replied.

"You are not surprised," she told him. "Besides, you're going to give us your new special Lorelai-decaf blend that Mom won't be able to tell is decaf."

He paused. "Do I have a new special Lorelai-decaf blend?"

"You do now," Rory said solemnly. "Whatever you have to do, Pops. She's got the nose, but I think she'll be a willing participant in her own deception this time." Her expression was somber, her eyes amused. "Know what I'm saying there, Butch?"

He held her gaze a moment. "Think I do, Kid."

"Well, thank goodness," she sighed. "All this subterfuge is making me need to pee. But, hey, finish your breakfast first, please."

"Coffee'll be ready in a minute," he replied.

She sat at the counter, reading a newspaper she'd scrounged from one of the tables while she waited. As he hovered over the grill in the kitchen, Luke smiled to himself. He added a handful of chocolate chips to the pancake batter; she'd understand he was grateful for making this easier on him. He insisted on driving her back to the house, rather than letting her carry the food back through the rain. She was quiet as he drove, but as they neared the house, she took a hesitant sip of one of the to-go cups in the carton she held.

"Huh," she said. "Tastes like actual coffee."

"It is actual coffee," he drawled. "Decaf isn't actually completely without caffeine, you know."

"I know," she said. "But still. It's good. Up to the Lorelai standard, I think."

"Will she be able to tell?"

Rory took another sip and swished it in her mouth as though it were a fine wine. "Mm, it's hard to say. It's got that sharp undertone she likes, and it's generally a full-bodied sort of flavor, so the odds are good she won't be able to tell the difference. However, it's impossible to underestimate that woman's palate. It's freakish. She's like one of those drug-sniffing dogs." Luke pulled into the drive as she spoke, and she began to gather her things to cart them into the house as best she could. "Ten to one she's already up and waiting for delivery. Thanks for doing this." He shrugged. Rory leaned across the cab of his truck and daintily kissed his cheek. "Welcome to the family, Pops," she said. "Mazel tov."

"Do you want me to help you bring that in?" he asked, feeling the blush rise up his neck.

"Nope," she replied. "Bad luck to see the bride before the wedding, first of all, and second of all, really bad luck to see the bride in her dress, and if last night is any indication, she's probably trying it on again."

"Say what?"

Rory rolled her eyes affectionately. "Every hour on the hour," she said. "But I have to go. See you later, Butch."

He cleared his throat as she put her hand on the door handle. "Rory, I—"

"They say that your life goes in seven year cycles, did you know that?" she asked. She looked him in the eye in that startling, unsettlingly direct way she'd had since childhood.

"I did not."

"And if that's true, that means that, with me turning twenty-one this year, I'm about to go into a new seven year cycle. And if you figure that my life and my mom's life operate on the same wheel, to use a bad metaphor, then that means she's about to go into a new seven year cycle, too," she continued. "And since you're marrying Mom, we're all on the same wheel, which means you're about to start a new revolution, too."

"Okay," he said slowly.

"So, the way I'm looking at it, we're all starting our way around again—not over, just, you know, one more time," she said. "And we're all doing it together, starting again one more time, which is the way it should be. Plus," she said, swinging the door open, "there's plenty of room for whatever little person or little people to join us this go-round."

"Thank you, Rory," he said, embarrassed to hear his voice uneven and choked. "You're a good kid."

She smiled. "I know. See you in the funny papers, Butch."

The rain continued through the morning. Luke deliberately kept away from the front windows of the diner, of the apartment above; he had no desire to see the progress Michel and his minions were making in the square, setting up for the ceremony and the reception to follow. He was mildly curious to see how it would all go should the rain not end, but he was too full of nervous energy and a strange, strangling flutter in his chest to stay in one place long enough to watch. Instead, he cleaned his apartment. He cleaned the diner. He did push ups. He avoided conversation with the brothers TJ as much as possible, as well as ignored all of Jess's bemused glances.

By the time three o'clock rolled around and he began what could only be called primping, it was already the longest day he could remember. Luke considered himself a patient person, generally speaking, but this sort of waiting was excruciating. He knew it to be a horrible, disloyal thought, but he needed this day to be over. He needed to be out from under the weight of expectation, from the tiring and constant gaze of others. He needed not to be sleeping alone at his old apartment, as well. And he really, really needed not to be wearing a tie when all was said and done—the knowledge that half the population of Stars Hollow would be staring at him, and that Liz would be pontificating on life and love in that hippie way she had, and that there would be no way of avoiding a dance with Miss Patty, Babette, or Emily (and possibly all three) were choking enough, and the tie seemed a cosmic middle finger waving in his direction.

It wasn't a fashionable time for the ceremony, but five o'clock found him standing at the bottom step of the gazebo, Jess and Jackson just behind him, Liz smiling beatifically from the stair above him, her hands folded in front of her. They'd placed the chuppah just at the bottom step, and he stood under the arches he'd made and that Lorelai had since hung with garlands of flowers and greenery. It was warmer than he'd expected—the rain had forced them under a tent in the square, and the collected body heat gave the outdoors a balmy closeness that made it difficult to suppress the urge to tug at and loosen his tie. The lightweight suit Lorelai had chosen for him, for all its selling points of breathability and casual softness, was still a suit and therefore uncomfortable. He was thinking about the itch under his left arm when Dave Rygalski began to play his guitar just to the side of the chuppah—Sookie's arrival at his end of the aisle very nearly startled Luke, still unprepared for the ceremony's actual start when she took her place opposite Jackson. Luke cleared his throat, smoothed his tie, and waited.

He was more attentive to Rory's approach; she walked slowly, her smile serene, her head held high. She seemed to have grown three inches since the morning. She wore her hair swept back in loose curls, the barest touch of make up and no jewelry, all youthfulness and easy beauty in her blue gown. As she came to stand by Sookie, she gave Luke an encouraging nod, and he could see her eyes already brimming.

The air shifted almost palpably as the small congregation rose and turned towards the end of the makeshift aisle to see Lorelai's emergence into the tent from the rain. She ducked beneath the canopy, laughing and breathless, the train of her dress draped over one arm. She shone in the grey light of the afternoon, her curls damp and her bare shoulders just glistening with rain. Taking a breath, Lorelai shook her dress out behind her and began her slow saunter down the aisle. Every other person was watching her with him, but she held Luke's eyes with hers as she walked, oblivious to the rows of people she passed. When she reached her parents, who had risen from their seats and stood just behind Rory, she extended one hand to her mother, squeezed Emily's fingers lightly, and touched her father's elbow before she passed.

"Hey," she whispered, taking her place beside Luke beneath the chuppah. "Fancy meeting you here." She handed her small bouquet off to Rory, slipped her arm through his, and rubbed his bicep with her free hand. "You look nice."

"You're beautiful," he returned, and she tightened her arm in his just slightly. The small gesture anchored him to her, steadied him and cleared his head. The group of people behind him dissipated as Lorelai leaned into him, and his world shrank to the small circle of her family and his at the bottom of the gazebo, beneath the chuppah.

He tried to pay attention to his sister as Liz prattled on about soul mates and best friends and journeys, but instead he found himself listening to Lorelai's breathing, to the steady rhythm of her presence beside him. He hardly heard the questions Liz posed, the promises to love and honor and respect, to nourish spiritually, mentally, and physically, all till the end of their days; he heard only Lorelai's low tones, her promise of "I will," her pledge to him as she slid the heavy ring on his finger. He heard himself do all the same, saw himself put the ring on Lorelai's finger, but all that he could think of was the warmth of her hands in his, her eyes on him. And suddenly, Liz was declaring them husband and wife, and Lorelai was leaning in, tilting her face to his in silent invitation, and as he met her in a soft, simple kiss, the realization that the ceremony was over and he was married and Lorelai was married to him and they were married was interrupted by the startling, disorienting explosion of applause, and Lorelai was laughing as she slowly pulled back, as she took his hand and led him down the aisle, as she pressed her lips to the edge of his jaw. He put his arm around her as they continued out of the tent, across the street to the diner through the misting rain, and she fell against him, warm and solid and reassuring.

Once inside, Lorelai placed her hands on his shoulders and looked at him levelly. "So, husband of mine," she began, "love of my life, take a breath. You're a whiter shade of pale."

Luke smiled sheepishly, reached up and took her hands in his. He held them fast against his chest, and as he spoke, leaned forward to rest his forehead to hers. "We just got married," he said.

"Is that what happened?" she asked. "I thought we were witnessing the opening of a new mini-mart." She kissed him several times quickly in succession. "You look shell-shocked."

He rubbed her hands. "It was really fast. Was it really fast? I feel like I missed it."

"You did," she said seriously. "I had to marry Kirk. In fact, he's waiting for me at the reception." At his look, she softened, kissed him again, twining her arms around his neck to pull him closer, deeper. "You were there," she said, at length. "I told you, my life, that you were going to be just so overcome with emotion—"

"I did not weep," he said. "That much, I know."

She smiled and ran her hand through his hair. "No, but you were certainly overcome. It'll all catch up, I think—I get it, it's overwhelming. But it's like garlic, so no worries."

"Excuse me?"

"Two people eating garlic cancel each other's bad breath out when they're kissing," she said. "And I'm right there with you, a little shell-shocked and reeling and overwhelmed and whatall, so I figure together it all works out to having one very good memory between us. I mean, I know I'm going to remember you today better than I'll remember almost anything else ever for, you know, ever—"

He cut her off with another brief kiss. "Likewise."

Her smile was brilliant. "Well, then, there you go. Like garlic." She tugged on his lapels with both hands. "We gotta go, lover. They're having a party out there in our honor."

"What will it take to get you to stop calling me that?" he asked.

She cocked one eyebrow. "Ask me when we're alone."

"We're alone right now."

"Ask me when we're alone and naked, is what I meant," she said.

Luke settled his hands at her waist, looked down at her. "I like your dress."

"It did come out nicely," she said. She ducked her head, lowered her eyes. Luke felt her breathing, suddenly aware that she was shaking. She pressed her palms to his chest, and when she looked up, working her lower lip between her teeth, her eyes were full. "Hey, Luke," she began, a fine tremor in her voice.

"Yeah?"

"We got married today."

By the end of the day, his face would be sore from all the smiling, he thought. "We did."

"So…"

He circled her wrists with his hands, raised them to his face, and kissed the heels of her hands. "So this is where we start."

She shook her head, cupped his face. "Nope. This is the place we keep going."

"Because we're already started."

"You catch on quick, Butch."

He indicated the door with his head. "Should we go?"

"We should," she sighed. "Listen, I haven't told anyone about our little surprise. Rory," she conceded, "but no one else. I think we should wait."

"Whatever you want," he told her.

She brushed her lips against his cheek and spoke in his ear. "A very fine way to start this marriage."

Luke lifted her off her feet in a hug. "Love you."

"I know. Love you back."

"I know."

The reception was as much a strange, blurred watercolor event as the ceremony had been—Luke felt himself propelled forward, all his movement directed by some force outside himself—Lorelai, mostly, Rory, occasionally, Jess and Emily and Liz. As he stumbled through pictures beneath the chuppah and toasts and readings and the cutting of the cake, Lorelai kept her hand firmly in his. Her hand in his was sanity; it continued to keep him grounded even when all he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears. They shared their first dance on a parquet floor beneath the tent, and Lorelai kept up a continuous stream of chatter as they stepped lazily to the beat.

"You're handling me," he said.

She tucked her forehead into the crook of his neck. "Yep. You're in need of handling," she said. "You still have that googly-eyed confusion thing going on. But I think you're doing very well."

"Am I?"

"You are. No one else is going to notice the googly-eyed confusion."

"It's just a lot of stuff."

"It is," she agreed. Her tone had taken that infuriating quality, that amused, attempting-to-soothe quality, a tone that complemented that smile that was somehow as satisfying as it was irritating.

"And a lot of people are staring," he continued.

"Well, you're very pretty."

"I don't think I'm the one they're staring at."

"They're staring at both of us," she told him. "This was a very good choice of song."

"Lane helped me," he replied.

"How long did it take her to convince you to go with the original Dylan over whatever covers there are?"

He chuckled. "I told her I liked the original, but she still went on for five minutes about why all the covers were inferior."

"This is a good wedding we're having, Luke."

"Yeah?"

"I'm enjoying it."

It was full dark by the time Lorelai tossed her bouquet. Rory drove them home in an antique car her grandfather had borrowed from a friend. When she'd pulled into the drive and put the car in park, she peeked over her seat at them, grinning. "It was a good day," she said.

"I believe this is a unanimously held opinion," Lorelai laughed.

"Luke?"

He tipped his head to one side. "Ask me tomorrow."

"Will do, Pops," she said. "So Jess and Ashley and Marty and I are all crashing at Lane's—"

"Oh, man to be a fly on that wall," Lorelai groaned.

"And Liz and the brothers TJ are staying at the diner, and Grandma and Grandpa and everyone else are all going home," she finished. "So go be married."

Lorelai sat forward and dropped a kiss on her daughter's cheek. "Thanks, sweets. We'll see you Monday before we go."

"I love you guys," Rory said. "Now get lost."

Lorelai gathered her skirt up with one hand as she walked, picking her way up the path to the porch and holding tightly to Luke's hand with her free one. She led him to the door, and she paused there. Luke took the opportunity to kiss her thoroughly; she pulled away, breathless, and Luke stooped, hoisted her over his shoulder, and opened the door. She laughed, slapping his rear with both hands.

"Luke, I don't think this is the way it's traditionally done," she choked out.

"You know what I'm going to say to that?" he asked. He shut the door and crossed to the stairs, took them two at a time.

"That tradition is overrated," she answered, and he deposited her to her feet at the bedroom door. She stood a moment, just looking at him, and then began to undo his tie. "The fresh hell is over, my life," she said. "Sigh in relief if you want."

He kissed her as he backed her into the bedroom, let her take off his tie and push his jacket from his shoulders. When he cupped her face in his hands, swept his thumbs along the smooth skin of her cheeks, she paused, her hands on his belt. She withdrew reluctantly from his kiss and studied him curiously. Luke pushed a lock of hair off her face, and he began to catalogue her features, to memorize the way she was at this particular moment—the curve of her cheek and neck, the hollow of her throat, the way she caught the light straining through the curtains, the tilt of her head and smile, the particular fall of her curls in the delicate upsweep style she wore, the way her dress hugged her, the shape of her in his arms. He wanted to imprint her in his mind, to save her this way, all lit up and lovely and soft, no matter how frail a memory it would be—it brought to mind a line from one of their recent readings, something that had hit him hard in the chest when she'd read it aloud.

"Every time," he said, his voice low and rough, "you happen to me all over again."

She closed her eyes and leaned into his palm. "For me, too," she returned.

Even the simple act of undressing felt somehow reverential, and as the dress she'd made fell from her hips and she stepped out of it towards him, he dropped to his knees, traced kisses along her abdomen, slid his hands along her hips and thighs. She laughed softly, threading her fingers through his hair. He saw the garter that she'd made in addition to the dress and began to laugh as well: blue plaid flannel, edged in lace and ribbon.

"Hey," she said, "come here."

He rose, and she took his left hand, held it against the flat plane of her stomach as she had the night before. "I'm sorry if I was a shit head today," he said.

"Luke," she said. "Wedding night. I don't care. I just—" She bit her lips together, and her voice shook when she allowed herself to speak again. "We're married."

He smiled. "Yeah, we are."

"Married, married." She laughed tearfully. "Sheesh," she added, sniffling. "We're married, and we're here, and there's this—this baby that we're going to have, you and me, and we've got this house." The tears began to get the better of her, and Luke furrowed his brow, stepped closer. She shook her head. "No, I'm okay," she said. "I'm just—I can't tell you, I just can't tell you how many times I never thought this was going to happen—I'm talking about before," she told him. "Before, when I was alone and trying to keep Rory in clothes and food, and I was alone…" She wiped her eyes with one hand, still holding his left hand to her middle tightly with her other. "I never really thought I'd get to have this."

"This what?" he asked. The raw emotion in her face made him ache.

She waved expansively. "This—you, this life, this whole—just everything," she said.

And he realized what she meant, spoke without thinking. "The whole package."

"The very one," she said. She drew a long, quivering breath. "It's just that—this—this is possibly the scariest thing that's ever happened to me."

Luke swallowed over the tightness in his throat. "I'm not going anywhere."

"That's not what scares me," she said. She said nothing a moment, and the familiar numbness began to creep into his hands—it was, he knew, not just weakness, not just fear, but the knowledge that there were things he couldn't fix, and it pained him. "I don't know how to put it, just that it's not normal to be this happy." She rolled her eyes. "I am so ridiculous."

"I don't know what to say," he said. "I want to say something that's gonna—that'll make this not scary, but I—"

She cut him off, kissing him hard. "It's supposed to be scary, I think. I didn't mean to get so weepy, I don't want you to think I'm not happy, because that's so far from the reality of the situation it's the planet behind Pluto. It just sort of hit me, just now, what today is, and where we're going and what we're doing and everything." She swallowed thickly. "Everything's happening, you know? And I am so, so, so very glad that it's with you. I love you," she said. "I just do."

He kissed her, then, and he laid her down, and with every touch he tried to show her how he loved her, with every move tried to make her know what he felt, tried to share the crushing, painfully expansive feeling he'd had all month, that there was just too much, that he ached with the feeling, and when she came crying his name and laughing against the dark, a new calm settled in the space where all the panic and nerves and confusion had been roiling within him. When they'd both stilled and the air around them began to cool, he shifted, gathered her close.

"Everything's changing," he said.

She traced nonsense patterns on his chest with the tip of her finger. "It is."

"That ain't so bad."

"Mm," she sighed, closing her eyes. "It's very, very good, actually."

"Scary, though," he said.

"Good scary," she murmured.

"I think so." He stroked her hair. "It's all for the better, love. I didn't get it before."

"Get what?"

"The good scary. I thought—"

Lorelai sat up and looked at him, her expression serious and sad. "I know what you thought. You thought being afraid meant you were a bad person and you didn't love me the way you think you should. But I knew you'd figure it out."

"You did," he said.

"I'm very smart, Luke."

"I know this."

She gave him the whisper of a smile. "You still don't think you deserve this, do you?"

He averted his eyes, and though the answer was there, on the tip of his tongue, he struggled, found the words heavy and slow to come. "I think—I think if you spend enough time alone in your life you get used to the idea. And even when you're with someone, and you know you're not, and you know—you know it's for good, that that's it, that that's everything—it's hard to believe it." He spoke haltingly and without looking at her. "And when you figure it out, that it's all happened, it kinda knocks you out. And freaks you out."

Lorelai climbed onto his lap and narrowed her eyes at him playfully. "Believe it, buddy. You got it. You got me. I'm here."

He held her loosely in his arms. "Back at you." He sighed, closed his eyes as she curled up against his chest. "We got married today," he said.

"How many more times do you think we'll have this conversation?" she laughed.

"Couldn't say."

"You all talked out there, my life?" Lorelai asked. "That was some confessional for you. Plus, there were the vows and everything. I figure your word quota is about used up."

"You trying to tell me to shut up?" he asked.

"Never," she replied. "But if you would like to worship my body in that delicious and non-verbal way you have, I'd be okay with that."

"Whatever you say, love."

"It is so hot when you say that."

July faded into August that weekend, all yellow humidity and heat. Luke watched the sun rise over the lake from the family cabin each day that week, savoring the start of the new month, remembering Rory's comment about the wheel and starting again. Not over, she'd said, but again—this is where we keep going, Lorelai had put it. He no longer felt that he was the only one standing still.