"What about you?" he asked suddenly.
"What?" Her fist was still clenched close to her lips, in case she'd need to bite down again.
"You travelled Europe." She stared again, seeing his features form the words. Individually, the words made sense. It was the string of them together that was difficult to interpret.
"Oh," she said suddenly. "Yes, I did." She took a deep, deep, very deep steadying breath, her core muscles feeling stiff. She was grateful for the change of topic and distraction from her thoughts.
"And...?"
"Well… We stayed in some hostels also. Some really questionable ones that my grandparents would never have approved of."
Jess nodded with a tentative smile. "I remember your grandmother. I'd be surprised if there were any sort of hostel she'd approve of."
"I know. It's true." Rory laughed faintly. "It was a whirlwind trip. We saw a lot of stuff. We ate a lot of food."
"I don't doubt it." When she paused, he urged, "So tell me about it."
Speech came more easily once she looked away from him, and once the safer topic denied all other thoughts. "We sat in the bar of the Clarence Hotel for two days eating soda crackers and funky cheese."
"You were waiting for Bono and The Edge to show up," Jess stated, unfazed.
"Yeah," she replied, only slightly surprised by his intuition. "But they never did. So after two whole days of eating nothing but crackers and cheese and waiting, I swore we needed to eat something better, some local specialty. So we went to this little pub around the way and ordered the colcannon, which we were really excited about eating by the way, until we discovered that it was kale and we hate kale. So we're sitting there looking at our very green colcannon pondering our next move, until Mom flirted with the guys at the next table and convinced them to trade their beautiful, non-green meals for ours. So we ate their corned beef sandwiches and potatoes, which was good I guess, but it was no burger and fries at Luke's."
"That sounds about right."
"So yeah… That was the great Dublin adventure, not my favourite culinary experience, but good memories. I enjoyed the food in France more." She digressed, "Of course, I mean, how could you not? We ate the most delicious patisseries in Paris and then we saw the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe before going back for more patisseries.
"Oh!" she interjected into her own string of words with severe reverence, any lingering discomfort instantly forgotten, "In Rome, we had this heavenly... well it wasn't quite a dessert, and not quite an iced espresso so I don't really know what to call it, except to say heavenly. It was shaved slivers of frozen espresso-heaven with this velvety whipped cream," she sighed. "What did they call it? Mmmm… granita di caffè con panna… Jess. It was…"
"Heaven?" He smirked.
"Yes! Exactly!" she laughed a little at herself. "We went to all these espresso bars to compare their granita di caffè, because they all make them a bit differently. And Mom swore the best one was at Sant 'Eustachio but I'm sure it was at Tazza D'Oro. Mmmm," she sighed for a moment.
"And when the buzz wore off?" Jess questioned.
She giggled softly. "Well there was this other little cafe in Rome…"
"I should have known," he joked.
Rory looked up to see Jess, his eyes brighter, his manner more relaxed, though he still leaned far away from her in his seat. As she smiled lightly at him, earning a raised eyebrow and another slight tug of a smirk, she tried to gather her thoughts to tell a compelling story of Bark and Cheese. But, seeing the play of humour upon his face that, for a year, she'd missed so dearly, she recalled instead what she'd secretly done the morning they'd first arrived in Milan, then twice more in Florence and Rome. Her speech faltered.
She wasn't proud of it, and she'd told no one—she never would—but she'd stolen brief moments away from her mother to check the local phone directories. Idly, she'd wondered if any Marianos, long distant relatives to one certain someone, lived in Italy.
Though the idea that Jess might visit family in Italy was nearly impossible to imagine, she'd pictured it nonetheless. She'd pictured bumping into him on some bustling street of Rome so that they might share a late supper on some Van Gogh-inspired patio under the stars. She'd imagined strolling the maze of Venice with him, pretending that they weren't nothing to one another.
In Venice, she and her mother had found the most unique, rummage-style bookstore Rory had ever seen. Indoors, a large gondola and an assortment of boats, barrels and bathtubs held piles of books, mostly Italian, defying categorization and confounding the visitor. Any books not inside a waterproof vessel, were on crates stacked almost to the ceiling. Between rooms, still more stacks panelled the brick walls of the open-air walkways and, in an outdoor courtyard, even a staircase was made entirely of bundles of books. At first Rory had been enamoured to see such whimsy and she and Lorelai had delighted in taking the book staircase up to a lovely view of the canal.
Descending the staircase gave her a new perspective, however. She'd thought of her own books in Stars Hollow, stacked tightly under her bed and in drawers, and how it was bad enough to treat a book by keeping it under furniture and away from sight. Books weren't something to walk on, she'd thought, which was precisely what she'd done in that bookstore in Venice to those poor weathered books, many of which were globbed with foam cement and distorted by tight twine and humidity. She'd felt a pang of regret in that.
The books were real, at one time something a person could read, now damaged by the elements and worn out by salt and sogginess and brutal footsteps. As she'd watched her mother carefully scamper down the piles of books, Rory had imagined Jess standing beside her, sharing her pain for a scene of sad, unloved, decomposing books.
The truth was, Jess had never been far from her mind during that entire trip. What should have been the ultimate in celebrations: the culmination of twelve years of schooling complete, the divergence of a path towards bright new adventures, the long-awaited tasting of cultures she'd only dreamed of for years…
It had all been tempered by a loss of self-esteem and a loneliness so profound that she'd ended up skipping certain adventures. With such a large hole lodged in her heart, the very accomplishments and experiences she should have been celebrating swirled deep into a vortex never to be felt again, crushed under the weight of extreme gravity. A good portion of her trip had been tainted by a profound despair.
She'd been in the City of Love and she'd just been unceremoniously dumped. At the time, she'd never felt so worthless and unwanted. (Well that's not true, the day she'd met her grandparents, Strobe and Francine... that had been worse.) But she'd decided during their European tour—frequently and repeatedly with every divergence of thought—that it wouldn't do any good to dwell on her feelings. Her mother had never dwelled on those kind of things and Rory had forced herself to remain strong like her mother had always been, like her mother had always taught her to be, and she'd pulled herself out of that darkness.
"Bark and Cheese," she said quietly.
Jess's brow arched good and proper after that.
She told him about the architecturally stunning street which had led them to that fateful, little cafe in Rome, where the tiny dog in the basket proved his bark was worse than his bite and Rory proved her French and Spanish were crucially better than her Italian. She'd ordered what she'd thought was cream for her coffee but had gotten a horribly fragrant cheese instead.
"Sounds like you really enjoyed Rome."
"Stinky cheese aside, it was amazing."
"I've heard there's a bookstore in Rome where some of the works date back to the sixteenth century. Did you see it?"
"No. My mom tends to steer me away from bookstores. For obvious reasons." She cleared her throat, preparing to paint a sunny picture of a sad story. "We only saw one bookstore on our trip, in Venice. It was recommended to us so she couldn't refuse." She added parenthetically, "I may have been asking-around about books, in order to prompt the recommendation... But it was worth it; Mom was amused and I didn't want to stay there that long anyway."
"Not long? So only three hours?"
Rory smiled. "No, we were only there for about twenty minutes. Thirty, tops."
"What? That can't be right."
She went on to lightly describe the Libreria Acqua Alta, carefully skirting her moral dilemma.
"Books in the rain?" he said with concern.
Rory breathed sharply. He'd caught her dilemma nonetheless. "Yes, and subjected to humidity and floods. They were damp and tied in bundles so tightly the spines buckled. I can honestly tell you it was the only time I've gone into a bookstore and hated the smell."
"Mouldy?" he worried.
"Yes, and there were cats, and smokers."
"My God. Those poor books. Seems so barbaric."
"Yeah," she said, "That's what I thought…" She smiled weakly and finished her sentence silently, you'd say. Oh why did she persist in this conversion with him? Before long she'd have herself believing again that she'd known him in any real way. If Rory knew what was good for her, she'd just ask him to take her back to Stars Hollow and put an end to this madness.
For distraction as she set out to continue her story, Rory once again ran her thumb nail along the contours of the dash in front of her, scratching vigorously at the grime. This time, however, the glove box popped open, perhaps having been subjected to far more manhandling on this night than it had seen in years. Rory gasped as papers and CDs and other random objects unexpectedly dropped out of the overstuffed compartment and slid down her legs.
"Oh! I'm sorry," she murmured, finding distraction at last and welcoming it gratefully, as she groped around her feet, collecting the items from the dusty floorboards.
"Don't worry about it," Jess muttered dismissively.
Rory stuffed a fistful of Jess's belongings back into the glove box only to push several others out. How on earth had they all fit in the cramped space before? It was during her second attempt to restrain the objects when handwriting caught her attention. Rory stopped struggling with the glove box and, seeing their chance for escape, a well-worn novel and a couple of CD cases slid out, bouncing lightly and unnoticed off her shoe.
She pulled the papery object to the top of the pile she'd gathered in her hand, tilting it towards the source of light. Upon closer inspection, she realized her eyes hadn't deceived her. The handwriting was her own, written on a napkin that one day, long ago, she'd liberated from a dispenser at Luke's diner. On it, she'd written a simple note.
You're cute when you're hopeful.
Rory quietly gasped.
Rory remembered the day she'd written it. She remembered the saucy twinkle in his gaze as they'd spoken in hushed tones across the counter. They'd had their own language that night. He'd stated his case and he'd made some very good points. Good points that she hadn't yet been willing to concede outwardly, though inwardly, she'd been on the very same page.
Rory fingered the creases of her note. She remembered that day, shielding this napkin as she'd written upon it and then folding it secretively, feeling a lusty delight at letting him believe the note would contain more than it actually did. She remembered the kiss she'd given him, slow with seductive promise, as she'd stuffed the note in his jeans pocket for him to read after she'd gone.
"You kept this." After a moment more, she fanned through the papers in her hands to discover with wide eyes, along with actual letters, several more short, seemingly insignificant notes from her. "You kept these," she said more decisively. She looked up at Jess just in time to catch his deer-in-headlights look.
Then he shrugged. "My car's been in Stars Hollow since before I left."
That wasn't the response she'd wanted to hear. "Oh," she replied with a certain free-floating disappointment that promptly dissipated. "But you did keep them. I mean, you could have thrown them out, but you didn't." She pulled a few more papers out of the glove box to inspect them. "You stuffed them into your glove compartment and kept them."
Jess shrugged again. "The glove box was the one place where Luke couldn't go snooping. I didn't exactly have a lot of privacy at his place."
Rory stared until, finally, Jess sighed and gave her an exasperated headshake. He ran his hand along the back of his neck and breathed, "Of course I kept them."
"Oh." She looked down again at the items cupped in her hands, shuffling through them one more time as her pulse quickened and her heart began to yearn for something she didn't really understand. "Wow."
"It's no big deal."
"I think it is." She gestured to the bundle of papers she held in her hand. "This matters."
"It does?" Disbelief rang through his voice. "What are you talking about? Why?"
She paused, unable to answer, until Jess continued, "Why are you staring at me like that?"
"Because maybe you did love me."
Jess rolled his eyes and turned them towards the steering wheel.