Author's note: I am just as surprised as you are at how fast this story is going at the moment. Some characters are just a bit eager. There's some additional footnotes at the end of the chapter.

Chapter 6: Walkabout

When Rory initially announced that they would be spending a day on their own, Luke hadn't taken it seriously. But, he realized in a sudden panic the next morning, it was true. They were going to spend the day off on their own adventures. Rory was going to go in one direction, Lorelai in another, and he in a third. They would meet at a specific restaurant at a specific time and would have dinner together.

And it'd all been done with a casual "bye," "see you later," "have fun," and "watch your purse" as the girls took off in opposite directions, leaving Luke standing in front of the Pret a Manger with a slightly horrified look and the almost desperate need to call after Lorelai.

Luke couldn't remember the last time he'd had the entire day to himself. No, wait, he did. It'd been the previous summer when he'd gone to the cabin and stewed over his shattered friendship with Lorelai, trying vainly to lick his wounds and convince himself that it just wasn't worth having her in his life. Well, that turned out to be complete and utter bullshit. He was a year old, a year not-so stupid about that aspect of his life, and now he was alone again. Not permanently, but he certainly had no idea what to do with himself, especially in the middle of a city where hardly anyone spoke his native language.

Resigned, he went back to the hostel to find that one of the girls had liberated his camera. He was willing to bet that girl's name began with "Rory." Luke had given her a graduation present already, going with the tried and true check that he knew went toward this trip, but she loved his camera so much that maybe Lorelai would let him get her one of her own for her birthday. Maybe even now as an early gift. That perked him up slightly. Buying a gift for Rory wasn't shopping per se. It wouldn't ruin his rep to buy a camera. It gave him something to do.

After the bank fiasco, Luke had bought a calling card and spent the better part of an hour changing the travel notices on his credit card, so he didn't need to worry about that. He glanced at the copy of Harry Potter laying on the bed. With a shrug, he collected it, the map and the Metro timetable that Rory had gotten for him.

He inquired at the front desk for a decent camera store that had a staff that could speak English. The attendant marked the store on his map and he headed out into the city. Paris reminded him of New York, just older. The overall ambiance to him was still the same — there were a lot of people and everyone was rude. It was about as far from Stars Hollow as someone could get, and he would deny it until his very last breath, but he was just a bit homesick. God, he even missed Kirk. In Stars Hollow, Luke knew his place. He was the gruff, grumpy owner of a hardware store-turned-diner with a long-denied crush on the manager of the town inn. He'd been born in Stars Hollow, and he would live his entire life there. Here, he was just a confused soul adrift in a sea of people and didn't even have a clue how to ask for basic directions in French.

He eventually found his way to the camera store, and thankfully the entire staff was bilingual. It was as classy and reputable as the one he'd visited in Hartford, and a half hour of browsing later, he had the new camera for Rory. It was the same model Canon that Luke had purchased for himself, and he hoped neither Gilmore would bother looking up the price. Lorelai would kill him for spending the equivalent of $1,000 on Rory. But it would last her for years and was a good and sensible purchase.

As the salesperson retrieved the camera for him, he spotted a smaller digital camera that was a pretty reasonable price. He'd done his homework before buying his own camera and remembered that particular model had decent reviews. It'd be good for Lorelai, and she could use it to help with the Dragonfly. So he added it to his purchases.

Then came the trip back to the hostel, because the last thing Luke felt comfortable doing was hauling two expensive cameras still in their boxes around Paris, especially after Lorelai's misfortune that brought him to Europe to begin with. Grateful once more for having their own room, he stashed the bag beneath his and Lorelai's bunk then set back out.

Camera shopping had eaten up two hours of the day. Luke glanced at his watch and nearly groaned. Seven more hours on his own until he met up with Lorelai and Rory as a branch of Chez Clément, a chain of restaurants where celebrities were known to frequent. Come hell or high water, Lorelai had told him, they were not going home before interacting with someone famous.

Or, Luke thought, he would be bailing her out of jail in the process. Then again, Lorelai's flirting powers were nearly unsurpassed.

Still, he was back at the beginning of it all, alone in Paris with nothing to do other than read the book that Rory had given him, so he set back out to do just that.

The hostel was not far from the Grand Palais, which was built as a home for Parisian art events. The streets surrounding it carried familiar names: Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and General Eisenhower. He wondered if it was linked to the liberation of Paris by the Allies in World War II and made a mental note to ask Rory that. It was a gigantic structure of glass, iron, and steel, and he found himself wandering through it. In some ways, it reminded him of the Javits Center in New York, which he had visited once during a visit to see Liz and Jess.

After Luke emerged from the Palais, he stopped by the café outside it to buy water and a sandwich and carried it across the street to the waterfront. Leafy green trees provided plenty of shade, and people were taking advantage of the nice weather to have impromptu picnics. He stood at the short wall overlooking the Seine, watching the boats drift down the river and missing his father more than a little. Shaking his head, he found a tree nearby and settled himself beneath it. He glanced at his watch again. Six hours to go. He opened the book to the first chapter and unwrapped his sandwich.

At some point after Harry received his Hogwarts letter, he sensed her. He could always sense her. He could walk into a room blindfolded and wearing earplugs and know exactly where she was. The nerves in his stomach kicked up, then he caught the scent of her perfume on the breeze. Ordering himself to not leap up and fling his arms around her in gratitude, Luke merely turned the page and read the paragraph on Harry learning how to enter Diagon Alley three times before Lorelai dropped to the ground next to him.

"Hey there, bookworm!" she said cheerfully.

"I'm not a bookworm," he muttered.

Lorelai brandished her camera, waving it beneath his nose. "That's not what me and my trusty camera tells me!"

Luke suddenly regretted buying her that damn digital camera. Who was he kidding? He was still going to give it to her. "I thought you ran out of film."

"I got more. I've been looking for you for ages."

He read the paragraph again and hoped he didn't look ridiculously pleased. "I thought the point of this whole thing was to spend the day by ourselves."

"Well, I went to one of those old royal palaces, the one that belonged to Cardinal Richelieu because hey, Three Musketeers. Then I wandered through some of the shops. I know Rory will be spending all day at Shakespeare and Company, so I was worried you'd be lonely."

He had been lonely. Not anymore. "I'm managing."

"Do you want me to leave you alone?"

No! Luke placed the bookmark Rory had given him in the book and closed it, giving her his full attention. "No, no, you're fine. You can stay if you want. I don't mind." Please, please don't leave me.

Lorelai scooped up his half-eaten sandwich and took a bite without looking at the contents. The look on her face was so comical that he bust out laughing. He couldn't remember the last time he even laughed, and he couldn't decide if Lorelai's look of horror was because of his sandwich or his reaction. It only made him laugh harder.

Gamely, she swallowed the bite and scowled. "Oh God, it tastes like old socks!"

"It does not!"

Lorelai grabbed his water and took a swig. "What was in that? Legwarmers from the 80s that curled up and died?"

He chuckled. "Cucumber, chicken, hummus, and sprouts."

"Sprouts?"

Luke leaned in closer to her, as if imparting a great secret. "Alfalfa sprouts," he said gravely.

Lorelai went pale. "Oh my God."

"I think you just had more vegetables in that one bite than you've had in a year."

With a shriek, Lorelai pitched the sandwich away. They watched as it arched through the air and landed with a plunk in the river.

Luke gaped at her. "Did you seriously just throw my lunch in the Seine?"

"It needed to die. That was a mercy killing. You'll thank me later. I've got to go purge this with ice cream. Quick, let's get out of here."

"You mean before the cops come and fine us for throwing food in the river."

"Oh! I got something for you!" Instead of scrambling to her feetl, Lorelai pulled her purse around, and Luke was pleased to see it was the one he'd bought for her at the Newark airport. She rummaged through it until she pulled out a baseball cap of deep crimson. "Do you know how hard it is to find one of these here?" She turned it so it faced backwards and he obligingly let her plunk it on his head.

She sat back, tilted her head and frowned as Luke adjusted the fit. "What?" he asked.

"Well," Lorelai said after a moment, "you at least look like you again. Somewhat."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Luke asked, but Lorelai was already digging in her bag again. She pulled out a thin sack and leaned against the tree, scooting closer to him. To his surprise, she pulled out a pair of circular knitting needles with a colorful sock started on it.

"You knit?"

"When I get in the mood. It was something small I was able to bring on the plane now that they allow knitting needles again. And it met the Rory approval criteria. Mainly because she benefits from it."

"Oh yeah?"

Lorelai was actually good at it and had some speed. "It's another one of those things I taught myself after I left my parents'."

"Knitting's not on the Emily Gilmore approval list, huh?" Luke opened his book again, but was completely uninterested in reading.

Lorelai shrugged as she pushed one side of stitches down the needle until they rested on the cable. She flipped the sock around and moved the other side of stitches into place. "I don't think it ever occurred to her to even try. But when you have a curious toddler and the floor of a potting shed, a pair of needles and some cheap acrylic yarn make durable socks that are more cost effective than cheap ones from Wal-Mart. Mia taught me how."

"You sew too," Luke observed, remembering that Lorelai had made a number of Rory's formal dresses over the years.

"I didn't think I'd like it as much as I do. At first, it was just a way of making sure I didn't have to spend so much on clothes, especially considering kids act like they're on a Miracle-Gro diet for the first decade or so of their lives. I bought everything from thrift shops and made them over, cut down my old clothes for Rory. Then I had to get good enough to where Rory wouldn't be teased about it. Rory's been made fun of because she's a bookworm, but no one ever claimed she looked like she was dressed in hand-me-downs when she was for the first 11 years of her life."

"What else did you try that your mom would hate?"

"Crocheting, but I hated it. I just didn't catch onto it like I did with knitting. Embroidery reminds me too much of Hartford upper crust society, but I've done it. You can get those kits from the store where you embroider on pillowcases and they're cheap with coupons. So I did some up for Rory when she was little. I like making scrapbooks. We made a lot of our own cards because it was cheap and people were thrilled to get them. Mia kept a scrapbook of every single one of them we gave her." She nudged him. "Hey, take off one of your shoes."

"What?"

"Take off your shoe. And your sock too." Lorelai dove into her bag as Luke goggled at her, emerging with a second small bag, a pen, and a notebook.

"I'm not taking my shoe off," he protested.

"Fine, I'll take your shoe off." She scooted down to his feet and pulled at the laces of his left sneaker. "I don't see you wearing these often."

"That's because if you drop something in a kitchen, boots are more effective than tennis shoes. Lorelai, what are you doing?"

She pulled off the shoe and the white sock beneath it. "Measuring your foot."

"Why?" he stuttered.

"So I can make you socks!" Lorelai opened the small bag and took out a tape measure.

"You want to make me socks?"

"Mmm hmm." She pulled the tape measure around the widest part of his foot and noted the measurement. She tilted her head. "You have nice toes."

Luke really hope she couldn't see that he was blushing. He cast his gaze to the trees above, silently beseeching them. "Geez. They're just toes."

"Yeah, but you see some really horrible toes out there. All covered with fungus or ragged hangnails or no nails at all. Yours are just really nice toes.

Lorelai measured the length of his foot at a couple of places, then pushed his jeans up ever so slightly. His breath hitched as she measured the circumference of his lower calf, then the length from his heel to a point several inches up on his calf. She wrote it in all everything down in her notebook.

"I still make socks for me and Rory. Sookie too, she loves them." Lorelai showed Luke her notebook, his name written in all caps across the top of one page. She flipped back to show pages for Sookie, Miss Patty, Babette, Mia, and Rory at various ages. All of them had different measurements she'd taken over the years. "I don't do them as often as I did when Rory was little, but I usually do a pair for everyone's stockings at Christmas. Stockings in stockings, get it?"

"Yeah, I get it."

"So, I'll add you to the list."

"Make sure they're not those." Luke nodded to the garish-colored socks already on her needles.

"Don't worry, I'll make them manly just for you." Lorelai patted his leg, massaging it as she did so.

Carefully, Luke lowered his book so it was resting facedown on his lap, trying to keep the movement as casual as possible. Her fingers ghosted over his foot, and he had no idea that feet could be so erotic. She traced the blue veins over the top of the foot, her head bent, and he wondered what she was thinking.

He wondered how long it would take them to get back to the hostel.

He wondered if Rory could manage to somehow stay out overnight.

He wondered how steep the fine was for public indecency in Paris.

Lorelai suddenly grabbed his big toe. "This little piggie went to market," she teased wiggling it.

"Lorelai!"

"This little piggy went home." She moved from toe to toe. "This little piggie had roast beef, except if his name was Luke, because then he'd say how bad red meat is for you and insist that he have turkey instead of roast beef like the rest of us. Ergo, this little piggie had none. And this little piggie went …" She attacked his foot at the last one, tickling him so ruthlessly that he couldn't stop the laughter if he tried. He wasn't sure if she finished the rhyme because he couldn't hear her over his own laughing. By the time he managed to collect himself, his sock was back on his foot.

Lorelai scrambled to her feet, bouncing on her toes. "Let's go for a walk!"

Luke took several deep breaths until he was sure he could move the book without embarrassing himself. He tugged his shoe back on and got to his feet, tucking the book, his map, and the Metro timetable into Lorelai's purse.

It turned out to be quite a long walk, but he didn't particularly mind. Two hours of walking with Lorelai with various stops along the way was vastly preferable to an afternoon of solitude and less dangerous than sitting in one place alone. Luke reminded himself of every reason why starting something sexual was a bad idea at the moment considering they were sharing close living quarters with an 18-year-old. Rory was more effective than a chastity belt. This was a mother-daughter trip, not a let's-get-it-on trip. He needed to go home before he lost his freaking mind. But to do what? Sit in the diner and pine until the girls came back? Both were distinctly different forms of torture.

Their walk took them into the Montmartre part of Paris, and the way Lorelai suddenly began consulting her guidebook made Luke think this had been her original goal all along for the day. It touched him that she apparently wanted to share it with him, no matter what it was she was doing. He just enjoyed spending the time with her, following as she led their way through small shops and sampled an array of food from a number of cafes. He even begrudgingly admitted that macaroons weren't entirely horrible as he ate a raspberry one Lorelai gave him, telling himself that fruit had to be used at some point during its creation.

Eventually, they reached a canal that looked big enough to have at least one boat be able to sail down it. Luke could see a couple of stone bridges and an iron bridge in the distance if he squinted. Most of the passages over the canal though were provided via narrow locks that could be raised out of the way when a boat needed to pass through.

"Oh, my God!" Lorelai ran ahead and onto the footbridge which he knew predated the both of them and had to be sturdier than it looked, yet he still worried. Not so much for the bridge. Just that Lorelai would somehow slip off it and into the canal. "This is it! The Amelie bridge!"

"Sorry?"

She rolled her eyes at him. "She cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Plunging her hand deep into a sack of grain …"

"Is this why you were molesting that sack of grain a few streets back?"

"… Cracking creme brûlée with a teaspoon …"

"Which is why you ordered three of them at dinner last night."

"… And skipping stones at St. Martin's Canal." She spread her arms. "This is it, Luke! It's the bridge from Amelie!"

Luke shook his head. "Never heard of it."

Lorelai huffed and pointed at him. "You, my friend, are sentenced to mandatory weekly appearances at movie night until we get your cinema knowledge up to snuff. Now, help me find a stone."

"You're crazy," Luke muttered, but he obliged her. He quickly found a couple stones of a good size and weight for skipping and handed them over. Lorelai grabbed them and all but danced back onto the bridge. She carefully approached the side without the protective railing and knelt. His breath caught. He wasn't sure if it was being overly worried she'd plunge into the canal or if the smile on her face was just that breathtaking. He hadn't seen her this happy in a long while.

Lorelai hefted the first stone, then just tossed it into the water. She frowned. "It didn't skip."

"That's because you didn't throw it right. You have to skip it properly."

"That's what I'm trying to do!" She tried the second stone and it flew two feet away and promptly sank without skipping.

"Have you ever tried skipping a stone?"

Lorelai huffed. "Well, it wasn't exactly on the course listings for the Emily Gilmore School of Failed Debutantes."

Luke found a few more stones that were skipworthy and carefully joined her on the bridge. She shifted so he could slide around her and crouch beside her on her left side. "So, to skip a stone," he explained, "you have to have a flat stone that's like this one. Pretty large, fairly hefty. So, you curve your fingers around it like this, so you're kinda just holding the outside and not the middle. Then hold your hand like this." He showed her the proper way. "Then throw it out and at the water at the same time." He threw the stone he held, and it skipped over the water three times before sinking.

Lorelai clapped. "Oh! You did it! Of course you've skipped stones before."

He smirked. "That's because I didn't attend the Emily Gilmore School of Failed Debutantes."

"Ha!"

"Here, try it now." Luke handed Lorelai another stone, then reached for her hand to adjust her grip on it. The moment his hand touched her skin, he felt his knees wobble and wondered for a moment if he would accidentally wind up in the canal instead of her. He'd shown her how to do things countless times, and each time was the same - that initial shock of skin-to-skin contact, then the heightened awareness as he showed her what needed to be done. He wrapped his arm around her to pull hers back to the angle needed. "You good?"

"Yeah," Lorelai replied, her voice somewhat strained. "Yeah, I'm good."

"OK, now, throw it. Down and out."

She threw the stone, and it gave two short skips before sinking.

"Oh! I did it! Did you see? I skipped it!" Lorelai whipped her face around until their lips were inches away from each other. "Just like Amelie," she breathed.

The memory swept back to the forefront of Luke's mind in a wave, plucked from the part of his brain labeled "Missed opportunities, you idiot." They'd been just like this crouching behind the counter at the diner, hiding from the rest of the town and not wanting to acknowledge the attraction that was there. But it was there, this living thing that dogged and curled around them, ensnaring them until they were forced by circumstance to acknowledge it. He was fully prepared for something, someone to come along and destroy the moment. It wasn't like that was a new thing.

He wasn't sure who made the first move. Maybe they moved together, in sync as they seemed to be so much of the time. Then his mouth was touching hers, and he heard her soft, surprised gasp. In reflex, he pulled away, worried that she didn't want it, but then her lips were on his and it was glorious.

The arm that was around her tightened, bring her fully into the kiss as his nerveless fingers dropped the remaining stone he held into the water. She shifted, throwing her arms around his neck and catching the rim of his cap in the process. It popped off his head and fell in the canal.

"Good," she muttered against his lips. "I hated that cap."

"You're the one who bought it."

"It's not you. I'll buy you another." And then she was kissing him again, and it was so much better than anything he allowed himself to imagine. He poured every year, every month, every hour, every minute of his repressed feelings into that kiss and hoped beyond hope that she felt even a fraction of what he felt for her. He pulled her into him, his hands diving into her hair, and the footbridge swayed slightly from the movement. He knew he couldn't maintain the crouch, that she couldn't either, but he couldn't seem to break the kiss long enough to attend to his screaming legs.

The loud jangle of a bicycle bell had them jumping apart and nearly tumbling off the bridge. He looked over her shoulder to see a man on a bike with a delivery basket on the back, muttering under his breath in French. He slowly got to his feet and helped her up, and with an apologetic wave, they crossed to the other side. The bicyclist tore across the bridge like the hounds of hell were at his heels, and the middle finger salute he gave showed them exactly what he thought of their first kiss.

Their first kiss.

A thousand scenarios had crossed his mind at one point or another over the years about how their first kiss would go. Luke was pretty sure it would be born out of them yelling at each other, one of them snapping, then they would be going at it. Breaking of numerous health codes may or may not have been involved. None of them came close to the reality, and it was so much better. He found himself studying her, trying to gauge her reaction. Her eyes, such a brilliant brilliant blue, had glazed over, her pupils blown wide from surprise and arousal.

Lorelai licked her lips and threaded her fingers through his. She tugged him until his forehead was touching hers ."Hey," she said softly.

"Hey."

Her lips pulled up in to a mischievous smile. "Wanna do that again?"

His response was to back her into a nearby tree and fully oblige her.

Research notes: I based the fictional hostel on a real hostel in roughly the same location of Paris. It's a couple blocks from the Grand Palais and about a 5-minute walk from a Pret a Manger. The Eiffel Tower is across the Seine. The first sub-$1000 DSLR didn't debut until August 2003, which would be while they were on their trip, so I fudged the date slightly to have Luke (and now Rory) already owning one of these Canons. The camera for Lorelai is a Nikon Coolpix.

In "Knit, People, Knit!" no one acted surprised that Lorelai knew how to knit other than He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and even then it wasn't a surprise that she knew how, just that she was doing it. Given how quickly you can knit up toddler-sized socks once you're used to it, and Lorelai's thriftiness when it came to making over clothes for Rory, it makes sense that Lorelai would learn how to knit when she and Rory lived in the potting shed. What better way to stick a thumb at Emily by knowing how to darn a sock?