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Chapter 6

Halloween, 2010

By October, Rory knew she had overstayed her welcome at Lane's. The twins called her "Auntie" but Lane and Zack both joked that she was their third kid. She tried to be helpful - she paid Lane and Zack rent every month, cleaned often, ordered take out (not wanting to subject them to Gilmore cooking), and frequently babysat Steve and Kwan. But the fact of the matter was that she was on the downward slide of her mid-twenties and she shouldn't be sleeping on a couch covered in legos and crayons.

Her last few months had constituted an impressive show of paralyzing inaction. Rory made enough money from subletting her New York apartment that she could afford to pay Lane and not run out of health insurance or food, but it wasn't a comfortable existence. Worse were the calls she would get from her mother all the time. Lorelai alternated between wheedling her to come home - "Rory, come on, we can order pizza and go through and the classifieds - I saw some great positions the other day, including a Veterinary Acupuncturist and, get this, some charming little family-run place called 'Big Daddy's' has a dancer position open and we both know how much you loved to tap as a kid" - to using her most serious, disappointed mother approach: "Rory, living off of your friend who has two young kids to deal with is almost worse than taking your grandparents' money! Come home, it's free, we can figure this out. But you can't do this to Lane. I'm really worried about you, I wish you'd come home so we could work on this together…"

Rory didn't fall for either tactic. She tried to be patient, to assure her mom that she was being inordinately helpful at Lane's and that she had a plan and all of this was just temporary, but she could tell Lorelai was devastated at her distance. If there was one thing Rory was not good at, it was handling failure. And she didn't want her mom to witness that.

As the late summer transitioned into fall, and the beautiful Connecticut foliage grew into vivid shades of orange and yellow in the crisp fall air, Rory began making moves, compromising her vision for her reality. She applied to other jobs in New York, and managed to get hired by a tutoring company for private school kids. She told her subletter that she'd be taking her apartment back at the end of October. And she resisted seeing her mother until she had good news, or as Emily liked to say pointedly whenever Rory drove to Hartford to quietly suffer through dinner, "a career."

On Halloween, Rory packed up Zack's car with all of her stuff and promised to be back in a couple days to return it. She felt a bit like Kerouac: Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

Lane gave her a tight hug, "Please don't get scammed by the New York parking lots. Come back anytime. Steve and Kwan are going to miss you."

Steve and Kwan were currently running around the yard. Upon hearing his name Steve stopped suddenly and stared at Rory and Lane, causing Kwan to run into him. Both boys tumbled to the ground, looked at each other, and burst into giggles.

"Seems like they'll be just fine without me," Rory smiled, "although hey, I think I really figured out that Steve is going to be your heavy rock guy and Kwan is going to be more of your alternative, indie boy."

Lane appraised her sons. "I could see that. Steve started head banging at two."

"A true metal head," Rory nodded.

"And Zack taught him how to do devil's horns with his hand. He flashed that one for his preschool photo."

Rory snorted. "Course he did. Thumbs-up is so overrated at this point."

Lane sighed, glancing at her other son. "But, Kwan is the drummer, and we both know how drummers are."

"Straight up trouble," Zack interrupted their conversation, grinning and throwing an arm around Lane's soldiers. "If Kwan's the drummer, he's also the front man. Boy's got some pipes."

As if to emphasize this, Kwan tripped again, fell to the ground, and, upon observing adults watching him, immediately burst into tears. Rory tilted her head. The kid's wails were surprisingly on pitch.

Zack hurried to scoop up his kid, and Rory gave Lane one more hug. "Thanks again, for everything. I really mean it. I know I've been a mess lately but you guys have really saved me the last few months. Forever in your debt."

Lane waved her off, "You can stay anytime. Text me when you get there."

Rory waved at the twins, "Bye boys. Rock on, little angels."

Steve gave her a solemn, one-handed rocker devil's horns, and Kwan waved cheerfully.

She climbed in the car and put the key in the ignition, hearing the old engine rattle and bang to life. The car shuddered violently, as if shaking itself from sleep, before mellowing into a quiet roar with infrequent hiccups and crashing noises. Zack grimaced and shouted, "If she breaks down, just give me a call!"

Rory gestured in agreement and then pulled the car away from the curb. She rounded the little town square, which was crammed with hay bales and pumpkins and scare crows and other Halloween décor. She could see Taylor Doose standing on the gazebo steps, shouting instructions down to a crowd of lackeys, Kirk foremost among them with a clipboard and a quizzical expression on his face. She knew that tonight would be trick-or-treating and apple cider and town ghost stories and all of the quirky bits and pieces that she loved most about her little hometown, but she couldn't bear to stay for it. Lane had offered to let her take the boys trick-or-treating (Steve was going as Gene Simmons and Kwan was going as Freddie Mercury), but Rory had declined, feeling undeserving to join in on lighthearted, weird, small town fun when she lived as a sort of tribal nomad on Lane's couch.

She exhaled heavily, surprised at the tension that released from her shoulders, as soon as she turned out of Stars Hollow and onto the Connecticut road that gradually joined up with the interstates that all funneled naturally to New York City, like streams chattering towards the ocean.

The trip was slow - it seemed like traffic into the city started halfway through Connecticut - but she didn't mind. She stared ahead at the road, her mind full, chewing on her bottom lip. She wasn't sure how she felt about getting back to her Brooklyn apartment, but she knew it was the right thing to do. Maybe this time her knick-knacky furniture and string lights would be exactly what she needed. Maybe she would enjoy tutoring Upper East Side private school kids, destined for Harvard and Yale and Princeton in all of their Ivy League, privileged, school-uniformed glory. Maybe she'd get a phone call tomorrow from a publishing company seeking her help. Or maybe in three months, when she inevitably ran out of money, she'd be back driving Zack's car to Lane's couch.

She shook her head, trying not to let mental images of her destitute future self mess up her return to Manhattan. But it gnawed at her.

Soon enough she was driving through New Rochelle, then the Bronx, and finally the skyline of the city rose in front of her. The sun was golden in the mid-afternoon, illuminating the fall foliage that peeked through the heavy urban sprawl. Rory's stomach clenched. She gripped the steering wheel, careful as she maneuvered through the thick traffic, feeling her heartbeat quicken to match the pace of the city, her slow Stars Hollow pulse long gone.

Rory stared at the city ahead of her, glimmering in that golden hour, indifferent to whether she stayed or left. Cars honked. And something deep inside of her recoiled - her confidence was shaky, not certain. She felt her body get more and more queasy as the car inched towards the skyscrapers, descending into the metropolitan madness.

Abruptly, as if realizing she'd forgot something, she switched two lanes, exited towards Washington Heights, and took the George Washington bridge across to New Jersey, the opposite direction of her Brooklyn apartment. The water of the Hudson glimmered beneath her.

She let out a nervous laugh. She had no idea what she was doing. If she stayed on the I-95 south it would eventually take her to Philadelphia.

Rory glanced at the city in her rearview mirror. She let the interstate carry her on.

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By the time Rory reached Philly it was around six o'clock, the sky darkening, and she was thoroughly doubting her impulsivity. Jess could be out of town, or busy. But, more likely than not, he was holed up at his apartment or the publishing house or some bar somewhere, pen to paper, hair messy from running his hands through it too much, focused single-mindedly on his work. And he had told her to stop by Philadelphia whenever she snapped at Stars Hollow.

The last two times she had seen Jess he had seemed worse for the wear. When he caught up with her on the street in Stars Hollow in June he had looked exhausted, with dark bags under his eyes and the unhealthy, pale, drawn look of a man who stopped taking care of himself. But as always, he had looked at her as though he could see straight through her, dark eyes inscrutable, evaluative. And she knew he could have ripped her to pieces for living on Lane's couch - "Really? Grandparents to Lane's?" - but he refrained. Instead, he had offered Philly as a refuge. And months later, after quite literally getting up off the couch, Rory was ready to take him up on it.

She took a few wrong turns on the way to Truncheon Books, but managed to find it as the sky turned an inky blue. Little trick-or-treaters wandered up the street, hand-in-hand with their parents, dressed as superheroes and monsters and animated movie characters. Rory smiled despite herself as she parked Zack's car. The early hours of Halloween, when the tiny kids that were Steve and Kwan's age got their candy before the older kids took to the streets, had always been her favorite.

Before she got out of the car she glanced at her reflection in her rearview mirror. Her hair was a damn mess from driving with her windows open, so she pulled it up into a haphazard knot. But her eyes were clear and she had a pink glow to her cheeks that she attributed to the nerves of driving two hours out of her way without even confirming that Jess was available.

Screw it, she decided. Worst case scenario, she drove back to Brooklyn.

Rory locked the car and hurried up the steps. The sign said closed, so she rang the bell that she assumed was meant for the apartment upstairs. She knew Jess had moved back in above the publishing house in the last few months because Luke had closed his diner for a day in August to help him move, which meant Rory had stood on the step of Luke's, confronted with a closed sign, befuddled and not caffeinated and forced to berate Luke the next day about advanced notice for café closures.

She bit her lip again. Eventually, she heard footsteps and the door swung open.

Jess stood there. If he was surprised, he hid it masterfully. He leaned sideways against the doorframe, one hand drumming the door.

"Er, hi," she said, awkward.

"Hi." He assessed her. "You hungry?"

"Starved," she said gratefully. She meant it.

"I know a place," he opened the door wider. "Let me just grab my jacket."

She stepped into the entry of the publishing house, enjoying the smell of old books and something like a hint of whiskey. The main floor was mostly dark, closed for the day, but she could still see that the place was much busier than the last time she'd been there. They had more bookshelves now, stacked with materials, and the workspace in the back corner was overflowing with papers. If she squinted through the darkness she thought she could see Jess' books on one of the shelves.

He hurried back down the stairs, one hand holding a dark grey blazer and the other jangling keys. "Alright Gilmore, let's go."

They returned to the street. Rory motioned to her car, "Need me to drive?"

"Nah, we can walk," he gestured up the street, "after you."

Rory fell into step beside him. They maneuvered around the miniature trick-or-treaters. The area was mostly residential, but she could hear the sounds of revelry not too far off. "Where are we going?" she asked, curious and hungry.

"There's this one bar a few streets over that has decent food and good window seats," Jess replied. "It's a good night to people watch."

They passed a college-aged boy wearing a full Henry VIII costume, tights, turkey leg and all. "That it is," Rory agreed, nodding in approval.

He didn't seem to care too much why she was in Philadelphia, so Rory let the easy silence continue as they walked. She felt warm, happy. It seemed very natural to her to be strolling next to Jess, the chill of the night beginning to set in, leaves crunching under their feet.

After ten minutes they reached a busier area, a historical looking street lined with little red-brick restaurants and cafés and shops. String-lit patios, nearly closed for the winter, were full of adults in costumes pre-gaming their own Halloween festivities. Jess led her to a place on the corner with big floor-to-ceiling windows. It was dark inside, all exposed brick and mismatched tables and candlelight. Jess led her to two empty seats at a window-front counter.

"You always 'know a place,'" Rory said, impressed despite herself.

Jess shrugged. "Writing at home gets boring. And I'm not a fan of that where-should-we-go game where no one wants to make a decision and half an hour gets wasted and everyone feels like they're disappointing each other."

Rory also disliked that game. She smiled and accepted the menu that a waitress walked over and handed her.

"This looks great," she said honestly. She saw a cheeseburger on the menu and felt at home.

The waitress came back quickly and took their drink orders. Jess ordered something dark and whiskey-like, and Rory asked for a glass of red wine. Her last time drinking whiskey with Jess on New Years had ended with her nearly blacked-out and incapacitated by an excruciating hangover for two miserable days. She lived sprawled on her bathroom floor and drank water and gingerly ate saltines, watching the pattern of her shower curtain swim side to side. Thirty-six hours later, when she was properly detoxed, she had ordered about six grilled cheeses from the deli next door and watched reality TV and nearly cried she was so grateful to feel human again.

But, despite the overall unpleasantness of the whole experience, it had been the night and the fallout that she needed. Drinking with Jess had felt like a compounded assault of muted anger and unhappiness, each of them descending into their own self-disgusted spirals, wrapped up in short glasses of dark liquor and the grungy, loud beat of a tiny East Village venue where everyone was drinking to forget the last year. She had needed to feel as crappy as she could, to hit the bottom of the barrel so to speak, and dear god had she found it, curled up on the cold tile of her bathroom floor, her body so miserable that she nearly considered taking herself to the hospital for an IV or a medically induced coma. It may have been just another heavy drinking night for Jess - he had outpaced her by a mile but somehow didn't need a cab driver to coddle him home - but for her it had been a proper, necessary cataclysm. She called her grandparents and asked them to stop sending her money the next day.

She sipped her wine. Thank god all that was over.

Jess put his elbow on the counter, resting his chin in his hand, eyeing her. "So you just in town, or what?"

"There was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars," Rory quoted Kerouac. She shrugged. "I missed my exit for New York."

His half smile grew. "You missed your exit about two hours ago."

"Funny how that happens, huh." Rory kept her tone light, enjoying the banter. "Did I keep you from any big Halloween plans tonight?"

"Oh you know, the usual," Jess leaned back in his chair. "Witch burnings, wiccan poetry readings. I heard one of my favorite coffee shops was going to have a monster mash, but to be honest I'm more of a séance kind of guy."

Rory snorted. "I'm clearly interrupting you from some very important activities."

Jess shook his head. "No. Honestly, you're just interrupting me from a night of writing and whiskey, with the potential for an Edgar Allen Poe reading or two."

"Oh, good choice," she approved.

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary," he recited "The Raven," slowly revolving his glass of whiskey. He glanced outside at the revelry, the warmth in his eyes belying the melancholy of his words.

Jess didn't look weak or weary anymore. Rory eyed him briefly, as his attention was focused outside, and was surprised at the change in him. He'd clearly gotten a hair cut; his dark hair was still a side-swept mess but in that easy, natural way that looked good on him rather than unkempt. He was no longer thin and pale. Rather, he seemed as though he was sleeping regularly, spending time in the sun, possibly eating meals. His skin had some color to it and his five o'clock shadow - no longer a five-day shadow - highlighted the sharp of his jaw line. His sleeves were rolled up in a casual sort of way and he seemed perfectly relaxed, sitting with her at the counter.

"Anything to eat?" The waitress returned, interrupting Rory's scattered thoughts.

Rory ordered a double-decker cheeseburger and extra fries. Jess, amused, told the waitress he'd have the same.

"So is your metabolism ever going to kick in, or do you have a lifetime ahead of you of eating enough food for multiple humans?"

"I've been driving all day," she protested. "And you've met my mother, what do you expect."

Jess took that as an acceptable answer, but his smile stayed, even as he drank his whiskey. "Alright, I have a game for us."

"A game?"

"Yeah," he gestured outside with his whiskey glass at the costumed passerby, "A point system of sorts. Five points for literary figures, obviously. Three for actually decent artists or actors or musicians. Two for joke costumes that don't make you cringe too much."

"Four for miscellaneous greatness," Rory contributed.

Jess shot her a skeptical look, so she defended her position. "Henry VIII wouldn't have fit into any of your categories, and you know in your heart that he deserved four points."

"Fine," Jess agreed. "And one point for unbearable clichés."

She nodded in agreement but glanced again at him out of the corner of her eye. He was barely halfway through his glass, no longer drinking like he was trying to injure himself in a dark East Village bar on an icy night. Instead, he seemed to be enjoying himself, unbothered.

"Five for me," Jess pointed to a group on the street corner. "Alice."

A little girl, who looked about six or so, was indeed dressed like Alice in Wonderland, clutching a pillowcase of candy. Rory immediately rolled her eyes. "No way, come on, 'literary reference' doesn't count for an actual Disney princess."

"The Brothers Grimm would disagree," Jess countered. "Not to mention the right honorable Lewis Carroll."

"Completely unfair."

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?" Jess quoted, teasing. "Up your game, Gilmore."

Rory pretended to glower, but inside she felt buoyant. She sipped her wine and scanned the street. "There," she pointed across the street. "Harley Quinn. Five points."

"One point. Unbearable cliché." Jess dismissed her.

"Oh, so the pretentious bibliophile is opposed to graphic novels?"

"Not at all," he seemed insulted, "but come on."

She raised her eyebrows at him over her wine glass. "Five points."

Jess let her have it. The waitress delivered their food, and Rory was too interested in her cheeseburger to participate proficiently in the game. She let Jess rack up the points as she devoured her food.

"Honestly," he shook his head at her. He seemed vaguely impressed.

Rory didn't care. She pointed her elbow at the street in front of them. "One point for that egregious political statement."

Jess rolled his eyes at the idiot in the suit and the politician's mask that stood in front of them. Then he nodded across the street. "Three points for Stevie Nicks."

"Nice," Rory said, appreciatively.

Before long the waitress came to collect their plates, Rory's scraped clean and Jess' more or less taken care of. Rory sighed and leaned back, holding her wine glass. She felt full but wide awake, buoyant.

"So you were driving to New York, huh?" Jess said casually, as if continuing an ongoing conversation.

She nodded. "Yeah. Borrowed Zack's car to move back to Brooklyn."

"So you were moving back to New York," he clarified.

"Yes," she said. She could tell her voice was a little high, but she pretended to be confident. "Felt like the right time."

"What are you going to be doing there?" he asked. "Oh, five points, Gandalf."

Rory snorted at the Gandalf, who was clearly inebriated and had just dropped his staff while trying to cross the street. They were getting to that slightly later time of night when middle school kids ran the candy circuit and adults who had started drinking in the middle of the day were beginning to make idiots of themselves. She saw more than a few groups of sorority girls begin to pass by, giggling and self-conscious, wearing various forms of leotards and animal ears.

She answered his question slowly. "Uh, working. I got a job as a tutor. And continuing to try to find an editing job. It was just time to try again."

Jess' slight smile grew. He signaled to the waitress to refill their glasses. "From what I remember, you're a terrible tutor."

"From what I remember, you're a terrible student," she retorted. "Five points. Beowulf."

Jess squinted into the night. "No way. That's Thor."

"No," Rory held firm, "Look, he's holding Grendel's arm. Come on, Jess, don't stereotype Scandinavian heroes, it's so offensive."

Jess saw the arm and chuckled. "Fine, five points to you. And fifteen points to that guy for originality. Also I fully disagree - I was a model student. From what I remember, my tutor told me to keep driving around in circles instead of going back to study. And I do nothing if not obediently follow directions."

Rory laughed. "Well you're the one who coerced me into driving around in the first place. Besides, I'll be in Manhattan, none of my students will know how to drive."

"Alright, then you'll probably be a fine tutor," he amended. "Just don't tutor and drive."

She shook her head, highly amused. The wine was starting to get to her. "Two points. Couch potato. A for effort."

Jess ducked his head, nearly choking on his whiskey. The guy was wearing a horizontal refrigerator box with cushions stapled to it, and his face was painted brown like a potato.

"Or," Rory raised her eyebrow, self-deprecating but also in a wicked funny mood, "alternatively titled Rory: A self portrait at 26."

Jess appreciated her humor. He clinked his glass with hers. "Thank god that's over."

"What, being a couch potato?"

"No, 26." He glanced at her. "Right, your birthday was a few weeks ago?"

"Oh, right," she nodded. Her birthday had been extraordinarily uneventful. Lane had made her mac and cheese and she and Rory had indulged in a full bottle of wine and a showing of Clueless. "Being done with sleeping on a friend's couch is also nice."

He absorbed her words and sipped his whiskey. She turned slightly towards him, one knee brushing his unintentionally. "What about you? You seem better than when I saw you last."

Jess, she was sure, recognized and ignored her implication. "You caught me at a good time. Annual Poe appreciation day is always worth waking up for."

"No," Rory smiled, but stayed steadfastly on topic. "I mean it, you seem great. And last I saw you, you looked a bit like Luke had kept you in his car trunk for the weekend."

He acknowledged her with a tip of his shoulders, but he didn't look at her, his eyes fixed outside. "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

"You have been reading Poe," Rory rested her head in her hand, looking at him. She was curious. "No really, you seem better."

"I got a new idea for a book," he said indifferently. Then he quoted Poe again. "Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."

Rory was fluent in both Jess's evasiveness and Edgar Allen Poe, so beneath the haunting quotations that he spun out over his whiskey, she recognized the undercurrent of an acknowledged prior depression. "How bad did it get?"

"Not bad, comparatively," he glanced at her, noticing her concern. "You know, a few months of alcoholism and insomnia. Damaged a few relationships - sorry for being a non-communicative asshole over text, by the way. But eventually it came time to pull it back together."

She hesitated, not sure how much she wanted to press him. Jess was notoriously difficult to pin down, and although he was good at brutal honesty, he was less capable of revealing his inner self in any sort of candid, non-sarcastic, straightforward way. But Rory could try. "And this all came about because of the cheating girlfriend?"

He took a swig of whiskey. "She helped."

Rory understood 'helped' to mean the opposite of its dictionary definition. "But there was more to it than that? Is your family okay?"

"Three points, Kurt Cobain," Jess craned his neck, trying to see across the dark street, "that might be Courtney with him, in which case six points."

She just sipped her wine, waiting.

"And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy," he quoted Poe again. Jess was in prime ambiguous form tonight. But then he swiveled towards her, resigned. "No, family is fine. I think I was just tired. It's been a lot of years of being on top of my game. Regression was inevitable."

Rory contemplated his words. "Regression was inevitable?"

"You never feel like that?" he raised an eyebrow.

"I think we grew up with different views," she said.

"Ah," he nodded, "right, golden child, rose petals lining your shining, pre-destined path to Yale, no room for failure."

Rory shot him an annoyed look. "Not that bad. But sure, sort of . . . failure's not really in the Rory Gilmore playbook. The family never seems to like it much. Three points, Donnie Darko."

Jess evaluated her. "But you're good now?"

"I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind," she replied. He wasn't the only one who could quote Poe.

Jess appreciated this. And like her, he waited for her to answer the actual question.

"I'm getting there," she said, honestly, "I'm doing the steps. Getting the job, paying the bills. Maybe one day I'll get to do what I want, but I just don't know how."

Something struck her, and she drained her wine glass. "Jess, I'm so envious of you. How did you manage to make this happen? How do you get to spend your days writing and creating, doing what you love to do?"

He gave her a funny look. Rory knew she was taking this conversation down a slightly deeper path than Halloween games and careful, elusive banter, but she didn't care too much. She was only slightly dizzy from the wine, in that comfortable place where she became ignorant of everything around her, where she felt nearly sober but for her tunnel vision on the man in front of her. Her peripheral vision and ability to hear background noise were nearly gone.

"Writing isn't an option for me," he said, carefully, as if he were trying to come up with the right response to her question. "It's like - I could try not to. But even if I were at a desk job right now, I'd spend half the time working on my own stuff instead of my job. Or, if I couldn't do that, I'd sacrifice sleeping for writing. It's like a catharsis. You get it - it's like reading for us."

She heard the us in his sentence and felt it deep, warming her. "So I feel like that with editing. But the problem is, I need things to edit. And I have no idea how to make that happen without a single publisher even giving me an interview, or how to . . ."

Jess turned to look directly at her, and she swallowed her words. His eyebrows were furrowed, his dark eyes searching. She became uncomfortably aware of just how long his eyelashes were.

"Do you want to do me a favor?" He asked, abruptly.

"Sure," she said, not even thinking about it before she agreed, caught in the intensity of his gaze.

"Want to edit my current project?"

This time she heard him, internalized it, and barely let him finish speaking before saying an emphatic "Yes."

Jess's eyes twinkled. "I can't promise it's any good. You read my last trash manuscript, and somehow got it back on track. It would save me a lot of time and misery if you just did that chapter by chapter instead of me having to grapple with an entire novel constructed of crap and then send it to you for last-minute saving."

Rory nodded and felt her heart beat a little quicker, her mind already racing, imagining another opportunity to edit Jess' work. Her last experience with one of his manuscripts was undoubtedly the reason for her current unemployment and general life dissatisfaction, but she did not regret it in the slightest. Reading Jess' searing prose, digging through the layers of his haunted characters and connecting the lines of his intricate plots, had lit a spark deep in her soul and her intellect that she knew tutoring or article editing would never quite quench. She found herself missing the feeling of having a pen in hand and a great work before her, raw, newly developed by a talented artist. Above all else, she yearned to be connected to that artistry, to be swept in the tide of modern literature and to help shape it, to work with writers like Jess who saw the world as an immense opportunity for poetry and pain and profound emotion and were able to translate those visions into literary monuments.

Jess tapped the counter. "I'll be right back."

He rose and disappeared, and Rory stared after him. She had an aching feeling in her chest. She couldn't tell if it was because of the opportunity he had just handed her, as nonchalantly as if he had asked her to run to the grocery store for him, or if it was something else.

She swallowed at that thought and turned back towards the window. The night was getting truly sloppy now. A drunken clown was hunched over a trash can on the corner as his friends, who all appeared to have lost key aspects of their costumes, harassed him to keep walking.

But Rory couldn't shake her mind clear. She felt something different, something pulling at her. Jess was always a dark enigma: an artist that spoke to her nearly exclusively in literature and sarcasm; an old friend that made her feel like she was returning to a well-loved book; and, for years now, a more confident, slightly less reckless, smoother version of his younger, angrier self. He held a glass of whiskey like an indifferent habit and watched the world outside with dispassionate intensity, lacing lines of literature in his mind that she caught glimpses of in the tilts of his head and the way his eyes hungered at the world outside. If she asked, she was sure he would admit to identifying characters in passerby, analyzing drama in observed conversations, filing away the complexities and quirks of the human experience for future literary purposes.

Then again, for Jess, everything was for future literary purposes. He drank like Hemingway, demanded like Kerouac, and philosophized like Vonnegut. Although he claimed today was Poe appreciation day, she had seen Poe's melancholia wrapped up in his Spring depression. And, to her vague surprise, she felt fascinated by him, by his free artistry and the life of passion that he lived. He had what she wanted, even if he didn't appreciate it as deeply as she did, sitting at this bar next to a writer that lived and breathed his artistry.

Perhaps she was just in a cloud of nostalgia. It was a time of transition for her, a time of moving and life reconfiguring and recalibrating. And Jess was always Jess. Mary Shelley knew it best - The companions of our childhood possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

He returned to his seat. Rory immediately and purposefully dropped her train of thought.

He pointed out the window. "Five points. Cat in the hat."

Rory grinned and leaned forward, arms on the counter, returning to the game.

They stayed for a while longer, mostly bantering and occasionally collecting points on the diversity of costumes that paraded before them. Rory felt cheerful, deeply grateful that she had missed her exit to Brooklyn and taken a chance on Philadelphia. She laughed more than she had in months, enjoying Jess' sardonic quips and quick wit. Eventually they paid and walked back to Truncheon books, the chill of the witching hour settling upon the streets of Philadelphia.

"You can stay here," Jess offered, concerned when she pulled her car keys out of her purse.

"No, it's okay," she said. She meant it. The wine had long worn off and she felt wide awake, energized by the night and the conversation. "There will be less traffic now anyways."

"Are you sure you're okay to drive?" He wasn't convinced.

"I'm fine," she promised.

He didn't seem too pleased about the prospect of her driving to New York at midnight, but he had never been one to tell her what to do. So, instead, he brought her into the publishing house for a minute, printed the first chapter of his current project, slid it into a manila envelope, and handed it to her. "Rip it to shreds."

"I do nothing if not obediently follow directions," she said, teasing, stealing his words from earlier.

Jess rolled his eyes. "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"

She fought the urge to give him a brief hug, and instead waved, held the envelope tightly, and returned to Zack's car. When she started up the engine and flicked on her headlights she could see Jess, standing in the door of Truncheon books, arms folded, watching her.

She left his dark figure in the doorway and drove up the street, glancing one last time at him through the rearview mirror. Then she set her direction to the highway. She drove quickly through the night, occasionally glancing at the manila envelope on the seat beside her, fighting waves of excitement and nostalgia as the eastern seaboard flew by.

.

.

Late the next morning, after Rory woke thoroughly dazed and confused in her Brooklyn apartment, she hurried to put on yoga pants and a sweatshirt and brush her teeth. Her hair was still in a knot and she hadn't worn mascara in months, but she didn't care much. She walked to her favorite coffee shop a few blocks away, took a seat by the window, and ordered a giant mug of steaming black coffee and a sesame bagel with veggie cream cheese. She pulled her favorite pens out of her purse, the fancy ones that scrawled dark ink seamlessly across the page that dried quick enough to prevent her from smearing everything in her excitement. Before she opened the envelope she took a deep breath and looked out the window. The sky was bright and blue in the November morning, hinting at the frosty winter to come, and the remaining leaves clung to the trees, fighting the breeze that threatened to tug them away.

She smiled despite herself. The coffee was strong, and she had a new chapter in front of her. Carefully, she pulled the sheaf of paper out of the envelope, uncapped her pen, and began reading, losing herself in Jess' fiction.

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