Rory awoke to the deep chiming of a grandfather clock. For whom the bell tolls indeed she thought as she counted the twelve chimes to midnight. She was on a bed in a darkened room lit only by the silvery light of the moon that streamed in from a window.
As her eyes adjusted slowly to the dim light and her other senses gradually came to life she realized that she was not alone. On the far side of the bed propped half sitting against the backboard was Logan. His deep even breathing and the dark shadow of eyelashes on his cheeks told her that he was still asleep. He was a good three feet away from her but incongruously their hands crossed the space that separated them and lay joined in the middle of the bed hers clasped atop his. She was struggling to recall how they had come to be here together. The memories filtered back slowly the nearly implausible story of the horrible machinations of his father, like the twisted plot of a Danielle Steele novel, the revelations about sleeping with Dean, crying on the stairs and waking as he carried her into this room. Then a last memory surfaced, she had asked him to stay.
She looked at him with new eyes. In the ghostly moonlight her eyes traced the lines of his face so relaxed and peaceful in its repose. It was the first time she had truly observed him without her attention focused on trying to anticipate what smart comment would exit his smirking lips next or what hidden message his teasing eyes held. It was the first time she had really focused on his face. Before last night she would have called him rakishly cute, kind of a cross between Val Kilmer in Real Genius and Ferris Bueller, scheming, cocky and charmingly irreverent. A bad boy who through some lucky combination of charm and intelligence managed to land on his feet even under the most improbable circumstances.
Logan with his party face on was amusing, entertaining, life of the party, leader of the pack and all that jazz, but in the end she could put him in a nice little niche and she could walk away from that Logan, she could keep him at a distance. She almost wished that was all he was, that Logan she could dissect and understand.
Last night had put a tiny crack in that facade and she was starting to suspect that the real Logan Huntzberger that hid behind that cocky grin and devil may care attitude wasn't nearly as easily categorized or dismissed as his public persona. She was starting to suspect that perhaps he was a sheep in wolf's clothing. That he wasn;t really as self absorbed or arrogant as he wanted people to believe. He was more than she had expected. As she stared at their joined hands she shivered. She wasn't sure it would be easy to walk away from Logan after all.
She watched him, in sleep he was a perfect specimen of nearly cherubic male beauty and she could nearly believe the little boy lost scenario.... treacherous territory to tread. She had been down that road once before with Jess, believing that he could change, or at least that there was a redeemable side to his bad boy ways and rebellious attitude. Jess wasn't a bad guy at all; he just hadn't been able to give her what she wanted, maybe had never had it to give. Dean was the opposite, he was safe, and all he had ever done is give her what she had wanted, only for her to realize that she didn't really know what she wanted. The thing that scared her about Logan is that he hadn't offered to give her anything, in fact if anything he was teaching her that waiting around for someone else to figure out what you want and give it to you was not only often fruitless but also infinitely less interesting. In some ways she thought, despite the difference in their methods that her mom would agree with Logan's philosophy, minus the criminal and life threatening stunts of course. Her mom had always approached life like a battle or at the very least a game where you took what you were dealt and tried to make it in to more, Lorelai Gilmore had never settled for what she was given, she had taken those cards and wheeled and dealed and schemed and charmed her way into peoples hearts to build a castle from them.
The slamming of a door and the high-pitched chatter of excited voices broke the stillness and catapulted Rory out of her musings. Logan's eyes fluttered open and connected like a high intensity beam with her scrutinizing gaze.
Caught staring at him redhanded she dropped her eyes self-consciously and pulled her hand from his before making a big show of stretching as if she had just awakened. She sat up and threw her legs over the bed before she looked back to catch him still staring at her with that intense perceptive stare. She shivered a little but then stiffened when he addressed her in a voice still slightly husky from sleep
"Don't worry Ace, you aren't the first girl I've caught daydreaming about me."
She cast him a dismissive glare " More like studying you for my next Psych 101 paper, I can see the title now "The Peter Pan Syndrome; An age old argument of nature vs. nurture."
He chuckled "I see the old Ace is back after her little setback and making up for lost time. So are you going to interview me as part of this study? You know an in depth look at the boy who wouldn't grow up."
"Absolutely:" she thrust a hand toward him pretending to hold a microphone "So, Mr. Pan, tell us what is life really like for the perpetually adolescent, inquiring minds want to know."
He grabbed her wrist "You really want to know what makes me tick, what winds my clock, what sets off my alarm? I'll give you a hint my dear Wendy it isn't crocodiles or old pirates with hooks or Indian Princesses or pixies."
His voice had gone low and sultry; his thumb was softly caressing the inside of her wrist and the air suddenly felt like breathing in syrup. Rory backed away from the question in his eyes as carefully as she could, things were shifting a bit to fast for her and this felt a little like the time that she had gone ice skating when she was about 6 and had ventured beyond the safety zone on the lake. The fear that had clutched her gut at that moment, when the treacherous, deceptive ice, so solid and beautiful in appearance had begun to crack in fine hairlines that spread outward in an ever widening net felt pretty much the same now as her solid footing threatend to buckle. She remembered standing there in frozen panic as her mom raced to reach her before she plunged into the icy depths of the lake. Only this time her mom wasn't around to rescue her so she was going to have to rely on her own wits.
She pulled her hand away and stood "Sorry to disappoint your rather impressive id but I think I already have all the answers I need."
He released her wrist but gave her an inquisitive look "You think you have me all figured out, is that it?" There isn't even the slightest possibility in your mind that you have me pegged wrong?"
She considered his question, a slippery slope indeed. She was not quite ready to admit that she had her doubts about her initial impressions of him; this would call into question some of the main tenets of her approach of life and change of that magnitude required a bit of percolation. Best to stick with the party line for now.
"Nope, its a statistical and metaphysical impossibility."
"Well, now this should be fun, you do know how much I love a good dare. Now I will greatly enjoy proving you wrong."
Rory rolled her eyes and headed for the door "Its good to have goals, better than your usual aimless pursuits but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for me to recant my opinion if I were you, I wouldn't want to have go find Finn to do CPR on you."
Logan gave a disgusted look "Now there's a mental image I really did not need imprinted on my subconscious."
She looked smug as she exited the room "I'm going to see what all the commotion is about."
She beat him to the bottom of the steps but he was close behind as they joined the milling group of LDB members and unknown strangers in blindfolds. Darcy who appeared to be the de facto leader of the milling contingent stepped towards them and gave them a knowing once over.
"Hey cuz, you look rested.' The sly tone was accompanied by a teasing wink in Rory's direction and Rory flushed beet red at the implication. Damn she should have thought about how it would look, the two of them coming downstairs together, obviously having only just awakened. She looked at Logan, silently urging him to set the record straight but he didn't seem to mind the inference one bit and moved blithely on to the next topic of discussion. She narrowed her eyes in annoyance, that was one black mark against his claims of pure heartedness.
Logan gestured to the group of blindfolded boys sitting on the couches in the parlor "Are we hosting a geek convention I don't know about? I think we have exceeded our pocket protector to person ratio by about 10 to 1. "
Darcy grabbed his arm and pulled him out of hearing range from the parlor with Rory trailing behind. "Those, my friend, are our chess team members." Rory vaguely remembered an item on the list that asked for 16 chess players from Ivy League chess teams.
"How did you get them here?" she asked peeking around the corner at the parlor and then paled at a sudden thought and turned back to Darcy with eyes as wide as saucers "You didn't kidnap them did you?"
"Hey honey, we are in this together, there is no I in team you know." Darcy held a straight face for about three seconds and then burst out laughing to Rory's dismay. "God, Finn told me you were gullible but I didn't believe it. The answer to your question is no, we didn't kidnap them, kidnapping and transporting across state lines is generally considered bad form, even for the LDB, plus we really don't like to tread in the jurisdiction of the FBI if we can help it. "
"So how did you get them here voluntarily?"
"Good old fashioned bribery."
"Money?" Rory asked surprised.
Darcy gave her an pitying look "No, of course not, most these guys have plenty of their own.... no, we offered them the one thing that is near and dear to any self respecting chess geeks' heart.... fame and notoriety. We told them we were holding a super secret chess tournament that only the top players in the country were invited to, sort of a search for the next Bobby Fischer type event. Every one of them fell for it hook, line and sinker." She gave a little self-congratulatory giggle "We even got them to sign secrecy agreements and convinced them that they had to wear blindfolds because the destination was top secret...to avoid the media blitz of course."
Logan stuck out his hand and Darcy shook it with a proud gleam in her eye "Beautiful work. I knew genius ran in the gene pool. So, now you just need to work your magic on eight more unsuspecting egomaniacs."
Darcy blew on her fingertips and rubbed them against her shirt "Piece of cake, just leave it to the master. You take these eight and we will meet you tonight at the manse. You are going to love my outfit." She turned to leave rounding up a few of the others to accompany her.
Rory turned to Logan in confusion "Manse? Outfit? Did I miss something?"
He sighed and put his hand on her shoulder "Again with the questions...just go with the flow Ace, we've gotten you past the half way point without death, injury or incarceration, we are in the home stretch. What can go wrong now?"
Twenty hours, three states, four close calls with various law enforcement officers and about five clicks past anything that Rory could even remotely call normal they were back on their home turf preparing for their last stunt before they retired to the final destination for the official ending of the Great Scavenger Hunt of 2004. The day had passed like a whirlwind, most of the stunts during the daylight hours had consisted of petty misdemeanors, minor slights of hand and collection of an eclectic mishmash of items. Rory had to give credit to the creative if slightly mentally questionable genius behind the list of required contraband. On the return trip they had shared the plane with a veritable menagerie, a full suit of armor, a bath robe from the Plaza (Rory still wished that she had been present to see Finn strut out of the hotel in his Emperor's Finest Clothes to pull that one off), a New York Subway sign and a NYPD police barricade, a flock of inflatable sheep, 8 chess team members all happily in blindfolds, the head of John Harvard, paraphernalia from most of the ivy league schools, a beer and a miniature flag from every country in the UN, a model of the Empire State Building made entirely of popsicle sticks, several of the great classic novels of the century all pilfered from various Ivy League libraries and a number of other items that Rory did not want to question the origin of for fear of violating deniability should the authorities come looking for said items.
She glanced around at the Yale campus, she was glad to be back on familiar soil. At least she was until Logan explained the last item on their list.
"You want me to help you break into the Dean of Student's office and steal all his furniture?" Logan nodded in the affirmative. "You do know that I actually want to graduate, you know get a little piece of paper with the good old Lux et Veritas that I can hang on my wall, I know it may seem a paltry goal to some but this is very important to me. "
"You have the strangest phobias." Finn commented thoughtfully.
She scoffed and crossed her arms "This from Mr. Heliophobia himself, king of the vampires."
Colin stepped in. "Don't worry Gilmore, no member of the LDB has ever not graduated, well except for the ones who dropped out, and that one that got deported and the one we lost on that trip to Mexico, is he still working in that brothel by the way?" he paused and looked around "I'm not helping am I?"
Rory shook her head "Not so much, but thanks for trying." She rolled her shoulders "Okay, lets just get this over with, I guess I've come this far and it would be totally ridiculous to back out now."
Logan slung an arm around one shoulder as she huddled looking slightly miserable "That's the spirit Ace, nothing like unbridled enthusiasm to get a stunt kicked off right. Now we are in this together, so we all have an interest in getting out in one piece without being discovered, in fact my inheritance depends on it and if that isn't a motivator I don't know what is."
She rolled her eyes and shivered in apprehension "Great to know you are in it for all the right reasons. "
"We are like the Three Musketeers, if one shall fall the others come to his rescue."
"I think Dumas just rolled in his grave."
"If so its only because we just made a woman the character of D'Artagnon."
She narrowed her eyes to retort and then thought better of it when she realized that she had just gotten more proof of her claim that he was a closet book lover. Her smile turned smug "You better watch it Huntzberger, your true colors are showing."
He gave a harrumph and then turned back to the task at hand. They were back to their perennial favorites the all black ensembles, this time complete with masks so they wouldn't be recognized on any security cameras. It was just the four of them, Logan, Colin, Finn and Rory. Logan and Colin were quibbling about how best to pick the lock to the building when with some grandeur Finn produced the piece de resistance...the key to the door. Rory rolled her eyes at his theatrics, Finn was a certifiable nutcase most of the time but he kind of grew on you. "Do we even want to know who you had to bribe or perform sexual favors on to get that key?"
He tried but failed at a martyred look "No one ever appreciates the sacrifices I make for the team."
Logan grabbed the key and inserted it in the lock, they all held their breath as he turned it and they gave a collective sigh of relief when the door swung easily open. They quickly entered and they crept silently along the deserted corridors pausing at every creak and misstep certain they had been discovered. When the finally reached the door to the Dean's office they discovered an unwelcome surprise, a keypad instead of a lock.
Logan turned to Finn "I don't suppose you have the code to that as well."
"Sorry,my bag of miracles is empty."
Without the code they were going to have to find another way in. Logan looked around the hallway in search of ideas. Suddenly he had a stroke of genius, he looked up at the ceiling and then back at Rory. Who began backing away and shaking her head as he explained his idea. About the only emotion that was getting through the daze was abject panic as Rory listened. She saw his mouth moving but she couldn't believe the words coming out. She looked disbelievingly at Logan again and her voice came out on a squeak as she stared up at the ceiling of hallway
"You want ME to climb through the heating vent to get into his office?" He nodded. Her whisper got more vehement "What about all that one for all and all for one stuff? You sure abandoned that pretty quickly, I guess chivalry really is dead and decomposed."
"You are the only one small enough and light enough to fit."
She looked up at the vent again. "Fine! Lets get this over with." She stood up and began to climb carefully on to Logan's shoulders. He stood so she was sitting on his shoulders then she slowly pushed herself up to half crouching as she reached for the vent. After a few pushes in began to move with a grating sound until finally it gave and the way was open. She slowly pushed her head up in to the opening, followed by her shoulders until she could grab on and lever herself up further. She was muttering rather caustic remarks about rodents and dust and the that she was going to inflict upon him should something go wrong with their little plan most of which would fit right in to Dante's Inferno at about the seventh level of hell.
He chuckled and she aimed a dirty look his way. "Laugh it up Bozo, you won't be laughing if I don't get out of here in one piece with my diploma getting skills still intact, my mother is a hell of a lot more fearsome than I am." He sobered at that, he had already had one reminder of that particular fact and still got the shivers.
Rory was eternally grateful that the section she had to climb through was blessedly short; she did not like dust and spider webs and dark tunnels that might contain rodents of unusual size. There were some fears that were just healthy common sense. She reached the section over the dean's office and peered down into the dark room certain that she was going to be discovered any minute. Once she had ascertained that the room was empty, at least as far as she could tell she carefully began to pull at vent. It was a little stuck but it finally gave with a screech of metal and Rory froze to make sure that there were no running feet or whistling security guards in response to the noise. Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears she doubted she could hear them anyway. She wiggled forward a little further so that she could see what was below the vent; thankfully there was a chair and a desk in close vicinity. She carefully began to inch her way forward until she could dangle one leg and then the other out of the vent. She was never, she assured herself, going anywhere with Logan Huntzberger again if she survived the rest of this night. She finally got her legs and body through the vent and with one last look down she carefully lowered herself until she was hanging by her hands, her feet could quite touch the desk or the chair so she finally gave a little kick, aiming for the desk and let go of her hold on vent. She missed the desk and land rather ungraciously in the chair with a loud thud. She picked herself up and limped towards the door, she seriously needed hazard pay for this. It took her a moment To figure out the latch and then she pulled the door open as silently as she could and peered out to gesture her partners in. When she was met with an empty corridor, she was about to go in search of her erstwhile companions with deadly vengeance in mind when the deserters appeared out of the janitor's closet across the hall.
"Well its about time" she said with hands on hips, refusing to act relieved.
Logan shrugged helplessly "Hey, we heard a noise, sounded like a herd of elephants or something.'
She glared at him "That was my butt hitting the chair from about a 8 foot drop." she rubbed the injured area with a pouting look "It still hurts too I'll have you know."
Finn sidled up to them "You know for a little thing you sure do make a lot of noise." she smacked him on the arm before turning back to the office and gesturing them in.
Their instructions said that they had to break into the Dean of Student's office and move all of the furniture to the roof of the building and set it up in an exact replica of his office. Being one of the "weaklings" as Finn so lovingly put it she had been put in charge of the diagram. Rory pulled a small notebook out of her back pocket and began to make a rough diagram of the office furniture.
Logan looked over her shoulder "make sure you get it right, they will dock us points if anything is wrong." Just to be sure they took a couple of pictures with the camera phone as well and then began to move the furniture. It was laborious work and took them nearly an hour. Logan and Rory were just finishing up the last minute touches while Finn and Colin cleaned up the evidence of their entrance downstairs. Rory surveyed the scene with a critical eye. It was hard to believe that they had actually managed to get it all up here without being seen, but then I guess not many security guards were watching the Dean's office on Sunday night as time marched towards midnight, there probably many more important uses of their time, like donut eating and watching football and maybe occasionally breaking up an underage party, just to keep their average up.
She sighed as she sat down with a plop in the chair and stared up at the stars as she swiveled. Logan joined her, sitting on the edge of the desk.
"Is it over yet?" she asked in a tired voice. He watched her for a long moment, caught by the line of her slender graceful neck as it arched backward, the fall of dark eyelashes on her cheeks as she sighed in exhaustion.
He cleared his throat before he answered. "Not quite but we are nearing the finish line and from here on out its all about rewarding yourself for a job well done."
"More hedonistic pleasure huh?" her eyes were still closed. He watched her lips move and found himself mesmerized by their soft curve. He wanted to kiss her. This baffling urge seemed to be coming more frequently now. The silence was palpable for a long moment as Logan tried to wipe the suggestive thoughts from his mind and Rory feared that he had left.
She opened her eyes and caught his thoughtful expression. She wasn't sure what to make of it as she cocked her head at him in curiosity. "Penny for your thoughts partner."
He shook his head dismissively and scrambled for an acceptable answer. "Uh" it was rare that Logan was at a loss for words and this got Rory's attention. He pointed out over the campus "Just looking at how beautiful the campus is up from up here." That diverted her sufficiently for him to rise from the desk and walk towards the edge of the roof.
Rory followed him and when she spoke her voice held a note of soft wonder "I have always thought that Yale had one of the most beautiful campuses in the Ivy Leagues, even when I wasn't planning on attending it."
This surprised him "You weren't going to go to Yale? I would have pegged you for the type that knew her college of choice in preschool when other kids were still learning how to spell their own name."
She laughed a little as she leaned on a parapet looking out over the darkened campus "You aren't far off, I think my first word might have been Harvard."
Now he was shocked, a legacy of Yale attending Harvard, it was unheard of. "You were going to go to Harvard, after your family had gone here for generations?"
She shrugged "My family is an odd amalgam of the old and new regimes you might say, I think maybe it started out as a power struggle between my mom and my grandfather but for a long time I really wanted Harvard for myself.'
He was listening curiously now. "So what happened?"
"I got in both places and in the end I guess I followed my heart and my gut. I liked the tradition and being able to share this experience with my grandparents, I guess it hurt my mom that I turned my back on her dream for me, our dream I guess, but luckily our relationship was strong enough to survive it. I think in the end she just wants me to be happy."
He stared out over the rooftops of Yale for a minute "You're lucky." His voice had a note of wistfulness rarely a part of his emotional repertoire.
Rory shrugged slightly uncomfortable with the sensitive ground they were treading. "Yeah, I am, I guess sometimes its easy to take for granted what has always been there but I am starting to see just how lucky I am."
A long pause stretched between them before she broke the silence again in a thoughtful tone "You know, if I were the Dean I would insist that they build my office up here in a room entirely made of windows...you can't beat the view."
Logan looked at her with a smile and bumped her shoulder with his own, glad to be back on stable ground "Okay Willy Wonka, do you want a glass elevator too?"
She gave him an impish smile "Of Course Daddy Warbucks, what use would an office be without an elevator, you know we Gilmore Girls abhor excessive physical labor of any sort."
He chuckled and then offered her an elbow "Well my dear Gilmore Girl are you ready for our final destination?"
She looked slightly doubtful "Does it involve wild animals or ritual sacrifice?"
He considered the question for an uncomfortable length of time before smiling mischeviously "None of that on the menu for tonight but I will promise a night to remember."
