She hadn't seen Luke since the morning after. The morning after Christopher, the morning after her mistake, the morning after he refused to elope, the morning after everything had gone wrong.

May was quickly about to turn into June, and she hadn't even seen him. Of course, she was careful to avoid the parts of town where the diner was in view as much as possible, and when she was near the diner, she got out of the area, or walked past the diner, as quickly as possible, so it wasn't any small wonder she hadn't seen him.

But now he had something she needed–besides her heart, she thought sarcastically. She'd put this off as long as she could, but she had to do it eventually, and now was as good a time as any. He'd had weeks to cool off. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

She arrived at the diner just after ten, knowing it would be closed and Luke would be cleaning up. She didn't need an audience for this, her first meeting with Luke in weeks, something she knew most of Stars Hollow would love to be privy to. She tapped on the door lightly, so lightly that he didn't hear her at first. She finally summoned up the courage to knock, and his head jerked up. She couldn't see any emotion on his face as he walked over to the door to let her in.

"Lorelai," he said, his voice void of any emotion.

"Luke, hi," she said awkwardly.

"We're closed," he said gruffly.

"No, I know… I mean, I'm not here for coffee or dinner or whatever. It's just… you have my glasses."

He looked confused. "I do?"

She nodded. "You do. I'm just here to pick them up and then I'll be gone in a flash. We can pretend this never happened."

"I don't remember having your glasses," he stated.

"Well you do," she snapped.

"After all this time, you come here for them now?"

"I've been using my contacts, and I have an older pair of glasses I can use if I really need my glasses, but the prescription's not strong enough and they give me a headache."

"Oh."

"So, please," she said with a sigh. "If you could just look for them upstairs?"

"Fine," he said, heading towards the stairs and gesturing for her to follow. "Let's go."

She nodded, a little surprised that he was asking her to come upstairs with him to look, but it kind of made sense being that he apparently had no idea he had her glasses, and probably had no idea where to look.

His apartment looked the same, she thought with a sigh. It looked the same as it did all those nights she spent there, the same as it did all those years they had been friends. She sighed, thinking about how for a while she had practically had him moved out of this tiny place, in with her, and now he was back here completely.

"Any idea where they'd be?" Luke asked, breaking her from her thoughts.

"Oh. I'm not sure. I just know that they're here somewhere," she stated. "Maybe in the bedroom."

He nodded, and she took that as confirmation that she should look herself. When did things get so awkward around Luke? Who was she kidding, she knew when. But she didn't like it. She couldn't remember ever feeling awkward around Luke, ever, except for maybe once or twice not long after they first met.

"Darn," she said, shutting the drawer of the nightstand on what used to be her side of the bed. "I really need them."

"Yeah, well," Luke scoffed. "We all need a lot of things. Like fiancée's that don't cheat on us."

And there it was, the red checkered flag.

"I didn't cheat on you," she shot back quickly, straightening up from where she'd been hunched over the drawer of the nightstand. "We broke up."

"According to you," he said with a shrug. "I, however, had no idea that was the case."

"Wow, we're really turning into Ross and Rachel here, aren't we?" Lorelai said with a roll of her eyes.

"No. No, we're not turning into Ross and Rachel, because Ross and Rachel were friends after all that crap. Ross and Rachel ended up getting together in the end. We are not Ross and Rachel."

She was wide eyed at his rant, partially for all his knowledge of Ross and Rachel-- he really had been paying attention to the reruns she made him watch-- and partially for his insistence that she would never be a part of his life again.

"Okay, fine, we're not Ross and Rachel," she grumbled, suddenly angry. "And you know what I needed?" she asked. "I needed a fiancé that trusted me, didn't lie to me, and included me in his life!"

Luke suddenly stiffened."Oh, do not try and put all of this on me," Luke retorted. "I may have screwed up, yes, but you never said anything to me for months. You acted like everything was fine. You never acted like you were holding it against me that I kept April from you for two months. You acted like you forgave me for that."

"I did!" she exclaimed. "I did forgive you for that, I understood that, I got over it. But you remember what I said? At the winter carnival? I said that we would make it work. And by that I didn't mean you, in your own little world where you lived without me, but I meant us. You completely shut me out of the biggest part of your life for the past four months."

"You never said anything!" he shot back, gesturing wildly. "All you had to do was call me on my crap. You always call me on my crap, Lorelai. You wouldn't even let me get away with claiming to live with Nicole when I wasn't, really. So why in the hell would you let me get away with hurting you like this? Do you think I wanted to hurt you like that? Is that what you think?"

"No, of course not!"

"Well you know what? I can't say the same thing about you."

"What?"

"You and Christopher that night."

"I didn't do that to hurt you!" she exclaimed. "I didn't, Luke. I'd never do something like that to you--"

"And yet, hey, look at that, you did."

"I never would have done it if we were together. And I didn't do it on purpose," she said softly. "I went there, I wasn't thinking, I thought I'd lost you anyway. You didn't want to marry me, what the hell would you care who I slept with?"

"I did want to marry you. I wanted to marry you so much, Lorelai. But not that night. Not without Rory. Not when you were so upset. Not without working through all the problems you'd presented that I hadn't even known about."

"Well you still let me walk away!" she said, tears springing to her eyes. "All you had to say was something, anything, and I would've come right back and realized how crazy I was acting. All you had to do was say something to stop me from thinking you were willing to let me go!"

"So it's all my fault? I sent you right to him that night, is that it?" Luke asked, raising his eyebrows.

"No, I'm not saying that…" she trailed off softly, unsure of what, exactly, she was saying.

"I had no idea you were so hurt. You said something about the wedding, one time, when we were in Martha's Vineyard, and that was it. Nothing about anything else. You just let this go on and on without talking to me even once. You think I shut you out of my life? Well, fine, maybe you're right, maybe I did without meaning to. But you shut me out of yours, too, by not telling me how you felt."

"Oh, please," she scoffed. "That's hardly the same thing."

"It is the same thing, Lorelai. I had no idea that you were so goddamn hurt, and then you come to the diner begging me to elope, dropping all this crap on me about how miserable you've been and how apparently it's my fault, stuff I had no idea about… and you expected me to just jump in the car and head off to Maryland and get married? Like that? Was that really how you wanted us to get married?"

"It's not even about that anymore, Luke! Where was that that night, huh? Why didn't you stop me from walking away and ask me that then?"

"I don't know. Because I didn't think that your next stop would be Christopher's bed, maybe."

"God," she said, exasperated. "I give up. I don't know why I'm fighting with you about this, what does it matter? You said it yourself, we're not Ross and Rachel, we're not going to be friends, we're not going to end up together. And this is just going to keep going the same way, with you throwing that back in my face."

He laughed bitterly. "You say that as if it's something I should easily forgive you for. I trusted you. It was Christopher, Lorelai."

"I know!" she said, clearly angry at herself.

"Christopher. The one that you told me would always be in your life just because of Rory. The one you said you'd cut out of your life for me. The one that you assured me meant nothing to you, over and over and over, because you loved me."

"I know!"

"Then I screw up, I become a jerk for a few months and suddenly he's prince charming and our roles have reversed. Twenty-two plus years, he's been a jerk to you. Ten years I've done anything for you. And then we switch places for a few months and suddenly you're switching relationships, to stick with the good one at the moment. And hey, maybe it's great he's the good one now, so you can finally have your chance with him."

"It's not like that, Luke. You don't understand. No one understands!" she finally burst, choking back a sob. "No one understands that I've never loved anyone but you. Oh, that Lorelai, she had a kid at sixteen, she's thirty-eight years old, so she must have loved before. Besides, she didn't even look at Luke for all those years. If she really loved him, especially only him, she would've noticed it sooner, right?"

"Lorelai," Luke said forcefully.

"Well maybe they don't know everything about me! Maybe it just so happens that I managed to go thirty-six years before falling in love. Maybe I do love you more than any man in the entire world, despite the fact that I danced around you for eight years. Maybe I really do!"

"Lorelai!" he tried to get a word in.

"And if you can't understand that, either," she sighed. "If you can't understand that I love you more than anyone I've ever been with, then maybe it's good we're over." There was a long silence, and Lorelai wiped at her tears and glanced around the apartment. "Forget about the glasses, I'll just order new ones."

He nodded dumbly and let her walk away again, out of the apartment as she let the door swing open with a bang. He heard the door to the diner open and shut, and he sighed.

She was gone again.

xxxxx

"So you went to get your glasses, and you fought with Luke?" Rory's voice asked over the phone as Lorelai lay in bed later that night.

"Yes. I finally summoned up some courage to go get those stupid glasses, which I've put off doing since the break up, and then we got into a screaming match."

"What about?"

"What not about?" Lorelai asked. "Him shutting me out of his relationship with April, him lying to me about April, me and Christopher, me not speaking up about how I felt--"

"I still don't understand that one myself," Rory interjected. "That's not you, to let someone else control things when it's hurting you so much."

"I didn't want to push him," she admitted. "I knew if I pushed him, I'd lose him, just like last time we broke up."

"And yet…" Rory let the silence speak for itself. "Mom, you need to find some kind of medium. Not pushing him like last time, but not going mute, either."

"Well, doesn't matter much now, anyway. We're done."

"Oh, Mom…"

"And don't try and tell me there's still a chance. There's not. We're over. He'll never get past the Christopher thing, I made sure to put the final nail in the Luke-and-Lorelai relationship with that choice."

"I got past it with Logan," she pointed out. "When he was with those other girls."

"Other meaningless girls that you haven't felt threatened by for the entire run of your relationship," Lorelai pointed out.

"Well, true."

"He's so right, you know? This is the one thing I could have done to completely betray him. After all those times I assured him Christopher was nothing, that he was just the past…"

"It was a mistake. You didn't mean for it to happen, you didn't want to hurt Luke like that, I know that. But it's harder for Luke to see that, especially when he probably thinks Dad is your first true love that you're never going to get over. Something weird happens to you when you get around Dad. You kind of give off that impression."

"But he's not. I've only ever loved one man, and it's Luke."

"I know."

"Even though I went to Chris that night, it's not because I love him. It's because I know that he always wants me. And I was so sure that Luke didn't want me anymore. I just needed someone to want me."

"I really think Luke could understand that, if you give it time."

Lorelai sighed. "No, he won't. After today I realize that my pleas with Luke to see that it was a mistake are meaningless to him. Before I felt like it was just... I don't know. I realized today it was more than just sleeping with someone, with Chris. It was about me shattering every bit of trust he had in me by doing the one thing he always feared but trusted me not to do. Like you said, he thinks somewhere deep down I'm in love with Chris still, and now it's like this proved it or something. You know, he saw. He saw all those times I tried things with Chris, he saw me at my worst because of Chris, he probably always thought... God, I see this in a whole new way now." She sighed. "I really see how it looked to him all of a sudden. And you know what the worst part of it all today was?"

"Of your fight with Luke?"

"Yes. The worst part was that," Lorelai picked at a thread on the bedspread, " while I was standing there, screaming at him, having him say all this hurtful stuff to me, I just kept thinking that I miss him."

"Well of course you do," Rory said softly. "He's… he's Luke."

"I miss seeing him, I miss the way he used to light up when I'd walk into the diner. I miss having him next to me when I wake up in the morning." Lorelai paused. "Do you know his arm always ended up across me, or around me, somehow, almost every night? I miss that. I miss him complaining about what I eat and what I watch, and I miss him making me watch some baseball game when there's a Lifetime movie on starring some popular actress as a teenager. I just miss him."

"I know you do," Rory assured her.

"And my life will never be the same. I can't even go into the diner as a regular customer. We'd probably get into a fight over something stupid, like the salt shakers." She paused. "Yep, we could. See, April was filling salt shakers when I found out about her. Even discussing salt shakers could bring on the next world war. And I don't have him around anymore, even as a friend. I hate that I lost that, too. But mostly I hate that I lost him, as the guy I was going to be with for the rest of my life, and I miss him."

"You loved him," Rory said knowingly, offering an explanation for why she missed him so much.

"Yes," Lorelai said, thankful someone seemed to understand. "I did–I do. So much. And that's why I miss him in this way that I've never missed any of the others."

The conversation turned to silence, so Rory changed the topic. "Mom, you do know what's coming up…"

"I don't want to talk about it." Lorelai immediately knew she was talking about what would have been her wedding day.

"I know, but it is coming up, and you're going to have to live it."

"I don't want to talk about it, Rory," she said. "If I don't talk about it and I don't worry about it and I just live it like any other day, it will come and go, no big deal."

"That's not going to work, Missy, and you know it," Rory insisted. "Let's just think of something to do on that day, something that'll keep your mind off it."

"My mind isn't going to be off of it, now or ever. So let's just drop it, this is not what I need today."

"Fine," Rory said with a sigh, knowing her mother was only going to cause herself more pain."

"So have you talked to Logan lately?" Lorelai asked, stealthily moving the conversation onto Rory's relationship and guiltily, she thought, onto Rory's pain.

Maybe that would keep her from focusing on hers.

tbc...