Alright y'all. I know it's been a long minute. I won't list excuses - my last year has been a lot. But this has always been simmering on the back burner, and hopefully now I can make good on my promise to never leave a story unfinished. Better late than never?

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Chapter 5

Father's Day Weekend, 2010

Jess sat on a stool at the counter of the diner, nursing a coffee and watching Luke take measurements of every conceivable surface with a scuffed tape measurer. Luke was muttering under his breath, occasionally scribbling numbers on a pad of paper near the register. "Four by .. no, four and a quarter … no, four…"

"You could just estimate and see what happens," Jess suggested. He had a headache, and just barely managed to keep his sarcasm on the nice side of obnoxious.

Luke looked up at him, stern. "Are you completely crazy?"

"Why aren't you having a contractor do this?"

"Because then why wouldn't I just hire a chef to make the food? And a manager to run the place? And a barista to brew the coffee? And hell, a bouncer to keep out the Taylors of the world?"

Jess nodded, "Yeah, those are all great ideas. Do those too."

Luke scowled at him. "The point is that I am more than capable of doing this renovation by myself. What kind of man would I be if I couldn't do a little bit of floor repair? And what kind of business owner would I be if I just hired a bunch of young idiots your age to run this place? Honestly, Jess."

"Hey, if I remember correctly, you called me - a young idiot - to come help you get this stupid project done."

Luke ignored him. He got on his hands and knees and began measuring the dimensions of the floor behind the counter. Jess groaned and put his head in his hands. His coffee was cold. He needed pain meds for his headache. Actually, if he really thought about it, he probably needed about twelve hours of sleep, a decent meal, and to lay off his excessive reliance on alcohol and cigarettes, but screw it, some ibuprofen could probably do the trick.

Jess knew he'd let himself go to hell the last few months, but habits were hard to change and he didn't really see the point in trying. He suspected that he had lost some weight, and he felt sick most of the time due to a likely combination of a hangover and nicotine poisoning. He drank too much coffee, stayed up half the night writing, and maintained a largely empty refrigerator and empty social life. In the late hours of the night he tortured his characters; he spun out plotlines that tangled into knots, pushed them to untimely ends and miserable conflicts, and took a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in shattering their love stories and ambitions. There was no great artistry in this heartache.

He was a mess, but he was a functional mess. His paid his bills. He showed up to work (sometimes late, usually hungover). He answered Luke's calls. He knew this was a phase – something that he would exist through, something that would gradually end.

It wasn't about Emma – Jess was clear about that. Sure, he was pissed off, and wished her nothing but ill will, but he would not give her full credit for the smog that had entered his life, choking his initiative, smothering that tiny, underused part of his brain that sought out happiness. It was more like, after years of steady progress, of upward movement, of growing and maturing, and being punched in the gut nonetheless, Jess was exhausted. He stalled. He gave himself months of regression. He sunk into the Hemingway-esque depression that always lingered on the edges of his subconscious, that he had repressed for years but that always called to him, whispered reminders of the hellhole that he grew up in, of the psychological damage that he knew he had probably incurred but chose to largely ignore.

Luke had put up with it with fairly impressive grace. After Jess didn't show up on Christmas, Luke clued into the situation pretty quickly. He called Jess every two weeks, asking how he was doing, what he was eating, if he needed anything. Jess gave him multiple-word answers because he didn't want the man to drive up to Philadelphia.

But now, in June, six months later, Jess was suspecting that Luke was fed up with it. He had called Jess the week before and asked that Jess take a long weekend to help him repair the diner floor. Jess had mulled it over for a few days, but eventually, begrudgingly, called Luke back and agreed to lend him a hand. Jess knew it was time for him to start to pull himself together. But it would take time to force the light through, to push the wisps of depression back to the sidelines, to regain and re-conquer the ground that he had lost.

"Alright," Luke stood, hands gripping the hem of his tattered flannel shirt, surveying the floor, "I think we're ready to hit the hardware store."

"Hooray," Jess said flatly. He chugged the rest of his coffee and stood to leave.

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The 'floor renovation' that Luke had bemoaned over the phone turned out to be only a few floorboards, rotted due to a twenty-year leak from a coffee maker that could have been called antique before Jess' birth. They weren't integral to the structure of the building. Luke could have replaced them by himself in a couple hours. But, nevertheless, Jess joined him at the hardware store, made sardonic and inappropriate comments about Luke's obsessive interest in wood, and obligingly carried the lumber out to the truck. He squinted in the sunlight and rubbed his eyes. He had done his best to avoid the sun for the last few months.

Luke climbed in the truck and rubbed his hands together. "Floor should be good as new by this afternoon. 'Bout time – Cesar has been threatening to quit over hostile work conditions."

"You are pretty hostile."

"No, the floor, Jess," Luke shifted the truck into gear and pulled out of the parking lot, shooting him a look, "hey while you're here let's get you a doctor's appointment, I think there's a disconnect happening somewhere between ear and brain."

Jess snorted. "I feel like this truck is a hostile work environment."

"Oh I can make it a hostile environment," Luke threatened. But his eyes were warm. He let the conversation drop, reaching to turn the music up. Jess leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

They fixed the floor quickly, with minimal hassle. Jess helped tear out the rotten boards, welcoming the strain in his muscles and the sweat that beaded on his forehead. He threw the old boards out on the sidewalk, almost hoping that Taylor Doose would come to confront them. But the streets stayed surprisingly quiet. Most people – to Jess' surprise – respected the 'closed for repairs' sign that Luke had taped to the front door. He almost wondered if Luke had paid them off.

They cut and fitted the new boards, installed them, and then stained them to match the rest of the floor. It looked mismatched anyways, but Luke shrugged. "It's behind the counter. Who cares."

Jess swept up the sawdust and debris, and helped toss Luke's tools in the back of the truck. Luke poured him another mug of coffee. "Free coffee for life, on me, for your labor."

"Thanks," Jess said. He leaned on the counter. He stared at the coffee, but he was craving a cigarette.

"Hey I had an idea, since this only took today," Luke began. His tone was conversational, but Jess narrowed his eyes at the subtle, planned tone in his uncle's voice.

"What if we took the evening and tomorrow and went up to the lake and went fishing? I know you don't have to be back until Monday – it's just starting to get nice up there. And Lorelai is at her parents' for Father's Day so I don't have anything happening here. What do you say? Could be a nice chance to, uh, unwind…" he trailed off, looking at Jess.

Jess thought about it quickly, but couldn't come up with a decent excuse since it was damn true that he had told Luke he could be here until Monday. He swore under his breath. "Alright, fine."

Luke beamed and clapped him on the shoulder, "That's great! Let me go grab a bag, and some gear, and the rods. Finish your coffee, we'll leave in an hour."

Jess tipped his mug to him, barely clinging to the strings of acceptable sarcasm. But Luke, clearly pleased that his plan had worked, didn't notice. Jess returned to staring into the black depths of the coffee. Probably, this trip would be good for him, in that whole heal-your-soul, get-into-nature, hippie bullshit kind of way. But Jess didn't have enough cigarettes to get through a couple days in nature with Luke, and he certainly didn't have the social capacity to sit by a campfire and talk.

He sighed. He drank the coffee. Too late now.

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Although Jess had never really been one for nature, the lake was beautiful in that quiet, East Coast, wooded sort of way. The water was a clear, tranquil blue, a pale, shimmering mirror of the June sky. Tall pine trees and long yellow grasses bordered the water, marching back into an indecipherable sea of forest. Luke's spot – a patch of grassy land near the north side of the shore – was hidden from plain view by a convenient clump of thick trees and brambles. Jess was sure that there were other people around, but he couldn't hear a sound other than the calls of the birds and the breeze that whispered through the branches, tugging at leaves and pine needles, sweeping ripples over the reflective surface of the water.

Luke set up a tent and a couple of beat up, old camp chairs. Jess threw some old, brittle sticks and larger branches into what was clearly an old fire pit in the center of the campsite, blackened with ash.

As evening fell the two men sat by the crackling fire, nursing beers and watching the last light of the day play out, both in the sky and on the shimmering lake. Jess gazed out, eyes unfocused, wrapped in his own thoughts.

"You know," Luke said, conversationally, "you should come out here more often, hit the lake, get out of the city. Lorelai absolutely refuses, and I like to avoid TJ as a rule. It's nice not being out here by myself."

Jess stretched his legs. "I like the city."

"Well sure, but don't you ever feel like you need to get out, to catch your breath?"

Jess remembered the ceiling of his room in his apartment. He had it just about memorized by now, every crack and paint chip, every change in coloration that reminisced of old water damage or faded paint. He had lain on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, hands behind his head, for hours every week over the last few months. He let his eyes roam the ceiling while his mind wandered, spinning, feverish. If he needed to, he could have drawn that ceiling down to the last, minute detail right there, in the dirt on the side of the lake.

Jess shrugged, shaking off the disturbing thought. "I guess. Sometimes."

"I'll start inviting you more often," Luke said. He stared back out over the lake, a hint of a smile just barely visible in the lines of his face.

Jess took a drink from his beer. He could feel the starting pains of a headache in his right temple, a dull, throbbing reminder. He ignored it.

Luke stayed silent for a long while, sipping his beer and watching the light gradually fade towards the western horizon. The sky became a deep, inky blue, stars beginning to twinkle as the last dregs of light clung to the surface of the lake, slowly dissolving into darkness. Jess tugged his jacket closer around him, burying his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders against the cold. Luke threw another log on the fire.

Luke handed Jess another beer, and cracked one open for himself. He cleared his throat. "I uh, I actually have been meaning to talk something over with you."

Jess glanced at him, raising one eyebrow.

Luke took off his baseball cap, twisting it in his hands. "Things are … things are going pretty good with Lorelai. Better than last time. And I know that the last engagement was, well, a disaster, but it's starting to feel like it's time that we tried it again. And maybe it's stupid to throw something like that in the mix when things have been going so well, but it just seems like the right thing. I don't know." Luke rested his elbows on his knees, gruff and a little self-conscious. "What do you think? You're good at telling me when I'm being a moron."

He could feel the tension in Luke's pause, waiting for affirmation. He rolled his eyes at his uncle. "Of course you should propose already."

Luke cracked a grin, relieved. "You think so?"

"She's an absolute nutcase," Jess warned. "But you seem to know that already. Neither of you are going anywhere, you might as well make it official."

Luke leaned back, smiling. "I just needed to hear it from somebody else, before I bungled this up again. I'm just ready, you know? I'm not getting any younger. Seems stupid that we haven't made this happen yet."

Jess nodded. "Definitely overdue."

"And she's dropped a hint or two," Luke added, building his case. "Of course she doesn't say anything serious ever, because why would that woman ever get to the point, so half the time I'm sure she's just giving me crap and talking out loud for her own entertainment, but I'm getting the sense that she's thought about it too. She keeps suggesting long term vacation plans. Like either of us is capable of ever taking a vacation." He seemed scandalized by the very idea.

"Is she doing better?" Jess asked bluntly. He hadn't noticed much improvement with Lorelai since last summer, when Luke was recovering from his broken leg. Around the holidays she'd had that blow out with Rory, and when Jess had seen her in April she still had worry lines around her eyes and jabbered pop culture references a bit too quickly and automatically.

Luke shrugged. "Yes, and no. She isn't talking to Rory much but at least her job has settled down. I think she's waiting it out, playing the long game. Rory will figure it out eventually. Everyone goes through that in their twenties."

Jess was suspicious that the last comment was vaguely directed at him, and his current pathetically unhealthy state, so he sidestepped his own line of conversation. "What's your timeline?"

"Soon," Luke took a swig of his beer. "I've got the proposal all planned out too – nothing too fancy or crazy, but it'll make her laugh. I think to make it work I'll need to get Kirk in on it ... which could be a terrible idea but I'm hoping this will be one of those rare times that he follows directions. We'll see if . . . "

Luke continued on, thinking out loud about his proposal plan and throwing occasional veiled shots at both Kirk and Taylor. Jess's eyes unfocused as he stared out at the darkening lake, occasionally nodding in agreement with whatever Luke was saying but mostly treading water deep in his own thoughts.

Luke was getting engaged again, this time undoubtedly for good. It wasn't surprising to Jess. But it made his inner ache - usually caused by the burn of whiskey, coffee, and cigarettes without a decent meal - twinge a little more harshly. Engagement was distasteful to him already, with all of the pomp and circumstance and the overproduced monotony of weddings, but he saw through all of that the real strings of emotion and companionship that wound tightly around Luke and Lorelai. The engagement was a fine next step, sure, but the real thing that made Jess grip his beer can more tightly was the fact that Luke was finally confident enough to live with a Lorelai, torn up over her daughter, and still maintain a relationship healthy enough to move forward. Something deeper seemed to bind them now, a quiet confidence in the happiness of finding a soul that matched your own and knowing it was meant to last. Jess could see quite clearly, through Luke's rambling, how deeply he cared for Lorelai and how much he longed to put her back to her usual bubbly, word-spewing, wisecracking self. And how even if Lorelai was only mostly there, her happiness temporarily strained, Luke still wanted every bit of her. And she would come back eventually. Luke would be sure of that.

Jess felt a little disgusted, as he turned over his uncle's relationship in his mind. But it was only because it reminded him of how dark and isolated his apartment was, how he had memorized the water damage in his bedroom ceiling from staring up at it, soaking in his own distaste for life. He was sick of himself.

He pulled himself back to reality, enough to hear Luke say, "I'm glad you think it's a good idea. I was worried this was bad timing, what with everything that has been going on."

"Everything can always be bad timing," Jess said. "But I don't think you can pick bad timing for this."

Luke half smiled. "I'll let you know how it goes."

"Can't wait," Jess said. His tone was mostly sarcastic, but he knew Luke would see through it.

Luke stood, tossing his beer can in the back of his truck. "I'm calling it."

"I'm going to stay here for a bit," Jess said. He felt his usual moodiness starting to increase, the dark of the night and his Uncle's news pressing down on him.

Luke evaluated him for a moment. "Alright. See you in the morning."

Jess tipped his beer can towards him. Luke disappeared into his tent, zipping it closed and fumbling with his sleeping bag. After a while it all fell quiet. Jess could hear the sounds of the night around him, the lake lapping quietly at the shore, the grass rustling. Insects chirped. It was very dark, and the fire began to smolder down to the coals. He thought about throwing another log on the fire but decided to wait, preferring the low, red smolder over the bright yellow crackle of a recently fed flame.

He felt his insides twist further, wringing out slowly, painfully. He sipped his beer and brooded.

Perhaps Luke's news had shaken him more than he wanted to admit, pulling him briefly from under the waters of self-destruction and showing him the way the world could look when it was bright and untainted by depressants and sleep deprivation and nihilistic authorship. His mind was fast, racing, as he stared out over the dark and silent lake. He could picture it, Luke living with a woman who had been a shell of her usual vibrancy for nearly a year now and still planning a life with her, supporting her, brightening her day both unintentionally and deliberately. Although Jess was internally quite sour, he was still unexpectedly touched by the simple beauty of Luke's desire to propose despite Lorelai's ongoing pain.

Jess had never had a partner who could grapple with his moodiness. All of his past relationships had been complex and satisfying and destructive and shattering, but in each of them he had felt the urge to shutter his darkness, to expunge it in prose in the early hours of the morning while whichever woman it was slept deeply and knew nothing of his emotive catastrophes. He tried, at least, not to share that inner part of him that was depressing at best and violently self-destructive at worst. He knew they suspected it. But he was also wary of sharing it, because he knew that his baggage came from a predictable montage of child abandonment, daddy issue clichés that hardened his heart to people but made him a damn good artist. All the best artists spent half the time choking on their own misery, after all.

Emma - cheating asshole - was his latest attempt at intimacy that unraveled into a heartbreak muse for literary purposes. And she was the main reason he was in this damn camping chair, freezing hands grasping a cheap domestic beer can, stuck in the woods so Luke could try to force him back to whatever reasonable form of adulthood he attained before his latest romance kicked him in the gut.

He drained his beer and chucked it in the back of Luke's truck. It tasted like shit, but it was there and available.

If he was honest with himself, his thing with Emma never had a chance of working out. And Luke's plans to propose to Lorelai made that very clear to him. Not only had he not wanted to share his internal brooding with Emma, but she didn't want a damn thing to do with it. She liked his seriousness, his unaffected charisma and his dark artistic tendencies, but she didn't like grappling with anything deeper than the surface level of his intricacy. She enjoyed the act of his writing but she didn't want to read it; she liked his body posture as he tortured himself over a manuscript but she didn't want to know the reasons for the knots in his shoulders and the terse tapping of his foot. She liked the background noise of his music but she never internalized the lyrics. And as time went on, and he lived an act of competent contentedness, she gradually became bored with the façade and the shit it hid. When he escaped to indulge himself in his writing for weeks in New York - to let his true inner sardonic shine - she tried her best to forget him and find joy and satisfaction in whatever other guy in dark skinny jeans made cute smiles at her in the break room. She wanted the image of a guy like Jess - she didn't want Jess himself.

But, like the sucker for pain that he was, Jess had still grown attached to her. Love might be too strong of a word, but he knew something deep had gutted him and put him in this state for the last months. He was tired of getting over it.

His other early relationships had been variations on the same theme. He played the other man once or twice, always disappointed in himself but enjoying the magnetic pull he could exude when things were complicated and wrong. But he always faced the same result. At his core he was an artist who needed to bleed to make a manuscript, and women never wanted to see the real gore behind literary fiction.

Rory . . . Rory was maybe the only exception. Jess stretched his legs out, unwilling to access the locked part of his teenaged heart that held that breakup. But Rory, as a woman who loved great literature for what it inherently was, knew intimately the process that went into creating works that bled for decades to come. She lived for the hunger and the longing strung through the chords of great fiction.

They were too young when they dated for Jess to know how she would handle his usual state. For the most part he was a smooth talking, high functioning, nearly alcoholic entrepreneur and writer, but like any artist he had to break himself up to create. Emma and his other girlfriends couldn't handle that. But Rory, at least from what he remembered of her naïve, high school self, had analyzed his self destruction and told him to create something out of it. She acknowledged that he bled and challenged him to channel it into greatness. She expected more out of him. And when he saw her on New Years, she seemed perfectly fine to let him focus on the cyclone of anger that tore through his veins. He knew he hadn't been great company that night, but he appreciated her for draining the bar with him and letting him deconstruct. And - as was clear from her and Lorelai's ongoing issues - Rory was just as much of a fucking mess as he was right now, if not more so.

In the last months he had only barely maintained whatever semblance of a friendship he had with Rory. It wasn't her fault - she got the same treatment he had given everyone else. But he nevertheless knew that she probably noticed that he responded in one-word answers to her book recommendations and exclusively texted her quotes from literature's darkest alcoholic spirals. So it goes, he typed, often, channeling Vonnegut's dead indifference. But she had observed his state on New Years, and she herself was wrapped in some kind of quarter life crisis, so he presumed she didn't care much about the lack of quality control in their conversations.

He could only guess if she would handle his adult self differently than his other girlfriends, now that he was generally put together but still prone to bouts of depressive artistry. Then again, she had read his manuscript with the empathy and expertise of a Jess-fluent, experienced editor. And he had thanked her for making him bleed.

He shook his head, heavy and tired. Luke was right to bring him out to this godforsaken lake, as much as Jess may have resented being caught in his uncle's plan. It was high time for him to pull himself out of his slump. The upward track loomed long and challenging ahead of him, but he knew it was the only choice.

Jess stayed in the chair for a few more hours, hands itching for a pad of paper or his laptop to torment his characters, but as he had neither he let the prose write and rewrite itself on the surface of the lake.

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When they returned from camping Jess helped Luke unload the gear and pack it away. He also let Luke make him a full meal for lunch, and resisted the urge to follow it with a cigarette. Instead he drank a glass of water and poured himself a cup of coffee, feeling overly wholesome and also just weary enough of feeling like shit all of the time not to care.

He hugged his uncle goodbye - a tight, one-armed squeeze and a strong clap on the back - and wished him luck. He told Luke to call him when it happened, or better yet have Lorelai call because Jess knew who the true storyteller was in that relationship. Luke agreed, his eyes warm despite the usual gruff expression on his face.

Jess walked out, swinging the his car keys around his finger, squinting less-resentfully in the bright sunlight. When his eyes adjusted, he saw a familiar head of dark hair across the street.

He hesitated, and tilted his head. When she paused to read a sign on a post, her profile visible, he confirmed that it was Rory and walked across the street without checking for cars.

"Hey." He caught her attention, standing a few feet behind her.

She turned and raised her eyebrows, surprised to see him. "Oh - hi. What are you doing here?"

She looked uncomfortable at being caught and a little worse for wear. Her hair was messy and she was wearing one of Lane's band t-shirts. But her posture was defiant and the lack of bags under her eyes made it clear that she was abusing herself less than Jess was. She probably still did responsible things like eat breakfast and sleep properly and not pick up a cigarette habit.

"Luke," Jess thumbed towards the diner, "used a weekend floor renovation as a ruse to make me go camping with him and 'experience nature.' Why are you here?"

"Oh," she looked down at her feet, "uh, living with Lane for a minute, actually. I sublet my apartment in New York to try to pay back my grandparents some rent."

Jess appraised her, not very surprised. It made sense that she would escape to Stars Hollow after being chewed up and spit out by New York City unemployment and the consequential family fallout. But he was also a bit disappointed. He'd told her, not subtly, to get a job and start paying rent. Her current plan seemed like another step in parachuting her way through the realities of life and jobs and adulthood.

"I'm paying Lane too," she clarified, as though she could read his mind. It didn't help much.

Her comment made him think that maybe she was offended at the tough love he had given her on New Years. But then again, she had texted him, and Jess had never been one to sugarcoat anything. He laid it all out for her, usually uncensored and unfiltered, because he knew she could handle it and because she definitely needed to hear it. The sheltered Rory of his high school days had needed it, and the grown up Rory floundering now needed it.

Still, Jess was tactful. There was a time and a place for brutal honesty, and Rory on the sidewalk right now, caught living on her best friend's couch, seemed to already know the truths he could lay on her. Her eyes were defensive.

"Listen," he said, knowing he needed to get on the road and get back to work, "if you ever need a break from this place and want to visit Philly, I know a bar good for reading and commiserating."

She gave him a wry smile. "Whiskey and sympathy?"

"Whiskey always," he shrugged. "I can say sympathy but we both know it's not my strong suit."

"Whiskey and commiserating then," Rory agreed. "I'll let you know if and when I finally crack here."

He nodded, looked at her one more time, and then turned and headed back to his car. He could feel her eyes on him as he started the ignition and pulled away from the diner, fingers drumming the wheel.

Jess felt his gears begin to turn, thoughtfully, delicately. The inner artist in him quit throwing matches on his manuscripts. Rory's lone figure, arms tightly crossed, standing on a street in Stars Hollow with no particular direction to go, stayed locked in his mind.

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