A/N- Hey guys. Sorry for posting so late in the day, but I'm sick again. Ugh. I hope you'll forgive me the brevity of this chapter. Oh, by the way, quick announcement. I don't want to offend anyone, but it's starting to drive me crazy all the posts about how it needs to be longer. Some chapters will be longer, others will be shorter. Most will be around the same length as they were in the late teens-early twenties. That's not going to change, as I've said before. So I'm sorry. I'd rather post every day than post long chapters, and I don't have the physical capacity to do both every time. So I hope you'll forgive me for continuing to ignore those particular pieces of feedback. It's not that I don't understand it, it's just that I have no control.
I'm glad you guys enjoyed the last chapter so much. This little bit is really for you clue-seekers, to see if any of you can figure out what's going on in Rory's head. It'll be addressed directly soon, but there are a few necessary bits in between, so enjoy this if you're dying with curiosity.
As always, read, review, recommend if you'd like. I don't own Gilmore Girls or any of its characters or concepts. I bow down to ASP.
Chapter 28
As Jess waited for the elevator, he sighed. Of course leaving her Ayn Rand would further fuck with her, but at this point she needed her mind screwed with. She was clearly in denial and refused to see anything.
At least Jess was finally seeing what was going on. Although there were details unbeknownst to him, a number of things about Rory had become infinitely clear to him during that fight. First, she was in denial of the fact that something was wrong. Second, she was broken. She was actually no longer functioning in any manner consistent with her personality, who she had been or even wanted to be, and she was in survival mode. She was functioning, not living. And she didn't want anyone to know it. Finally, she had probably been broken for a long time now, but in varying stages of gravity. It had occurred to him about halfway through their dialog that maybe Rory wasn't ever just completely fixed after the losing her virginity thing, after stealing the boat. Maybe all of those moments were things that contributed to the mess she was in. Those were moments of acting out, moments of desperation, moments of trying to escape one's own personal hell or whatever life you're trying to inhabit most of the time.
He wasn't enough of a self-centered prick to believe it had much to do with him. His visit to her and proposal to run away to New York did seem like a convenient place for the timeline to begin, but there was nothing else to indicate any impact of his actions since that time on her well-being. Out of the sake of his own curiosity, he decided to re-examine that night and the night of their confrontation outside the restaurant.
When Jess had come to ask Rory to run away with him, he'd had absolutely nothing to convince her to go but love. He knew that she quite possibly still loved him back then, and that not loving him wasn't the reason she said no. He also had never really bought that she wanted to say no. Every time he demanded her answer, he could see in her eyes the desperation and wanting to agree, that was eventually overpowered by her inflated sense of duty, sense of practicality, what she was supposed to be doing, what she should do. She didn't have the capacity at that age to set those things aside and live selfishly. It was quite possible that she feared people's reactions more than the idea of throwing away her life altogether, Yale, the paper, her college friends (which, to be fair, he'd never heard of anyone really but Paris being in the picture).
Sleeping with that moron, though, he couldn't figure out how that would connect with the idea of Rory's fear of what other people think. Obviously people would think terribly of her. The guy was married! Even Lorelai would judge that decision. She was completely acting out in a way that everyone would judge her for, and Jess couldn't even imagine that being something Rory really wanted to do. She always said the guy was safe, and made her feel stable, but that he never could make her blood run hot or even induce a furious flush on her cheek. And Jess knew she wasn't saying that for his benefit. He'd seen her with him and the lack of passion was palpable. Rory might have cared about security but having held her as close as he had, Jess knew she didn't want her first time to lack heat, passion, fire. She had always wanted to feel that. So something must have superceded that choice. He would have to find out when it happened from Luke so that he could figure that out better.
Finally, at the end of the following year, her boat-stealing and fight with her mom, and their separation for a time, completely threw him. Especially when Luke described to him how Rory was about the whole thing He knew that Rory didn't take rejection well, and probably would have been crushed by the kind of comment that douchebag's father made to her, but it wasn't like her to give up, change her life so easily. And that's exactly what she'd done. She'd traded in everything from her wardrobe to her home to the people she surrounded herself with, taking up a different dream. But just because some asshole had told her she wouldn't make it? It didn't matter who it was, that just didn't seem like Rory. The way she'd been so transported upon seeing Jess, so happy, so amazed by his accomplishment and how she'd immediately reverted back into the girl he drove to get ice cream one night, being his personal cheerleader without giving a damn in the world what anyone else thought. Her return to Yale and her life after Jess' intervention.
He still didn't understand really what had transpired between them outside the restaurant. Rory didn't say she was wrong or that she was angry or anything at all really. Any time he really got to the root of something, her answer was "I don't know", that was brimming with a weakness and confusion that even after so many years he could her. It wasn't a surface level uncertainty, it went down leagues and leagues.
But she'd gone back, figured it out, graduated. She'd rejected the guy's proposal and followed her dream, becoming a reporter as she'd always wanted. Her life was what she'd always wanted. So what was happening now?
Jess stepped into his car and started to drive away. He had a lot of thinking to do before he could do anything to help her. But the book was a start.
