Author's Note: And we're back! I'm sorry for such a long hiatus on this story. As some of you know, there was a death in my family, which meant I had to take an unexpected weeklong trip to Georgia. But what 12-hour car rides are good for are brainstorming lots and lots of fic (and singing songs at the top of your lungs, including the "Numbers Song" from Sesame Street), including this story and the follow-ups I have in mind. I will be traveling again soon (if you plan to attend ECCC in Seattle, shoot me a message and I'll let you know my Artist Alley table) but the updates should remain steady from here on out.

Chapter 8: Moments of Transition

The same day - Rome

They let Rory do the honors because Lorelai lost one round too many of rock-paper-scissors. Luke stood behind them with all their backpacks, wanting nothing to do with it and muttering under his breath just to get on with it already.

So Rory swiped the key card and gently eased the door open, carefully getting the lay of the land.

"Well?" Lorelai asked, bouncing on her toes, trying her best not to look over Rory's shoulder and failing. But what lay before them seemed promising - an entrance flanked by doors and an open space that lay beyond. She saw the corner of the bed, tastefully made with a grey and cream duvet and she longed to fling herself across it.

Rory took two steps inside. "It's .. It's heaven. There's a king-sized bed."

"Oh my God." Lorelai whirled around to where she and Rory had dumped their backpacks at Luke's feet. She admitted the view there was pretty fine too. She had coaxed him into shorts in Avignon and had added a couple of short-sleeved plaid shirts to his travel wardrobe that reminded her of those he had at home. He was still sans baseball cap, as the three she'd bought for him in the days since Paris had been roundly rejected. "There's a king-sized bed!"

Luke merely sighed.

"And? And?" Lorelai spun back, clapping her hands.

Rory stuck her head outside, gesturing to one of the doors that flanked the room's entrance. "And an ensuite bathroom!"

Lorelai clutched her chest and staggered a couple steps. "You hear that, Elizabeth? I'm comin' to join you, honey!"

"Oh, Mommy! It's real! It's really real!" Rory caught Lorelai's hands in her own and they did a little impromptu dance that consisted of bouncing on the balls of their feet and squealing. "It's a private room, and it's ours! At least for the next week.

Luke sighed and pushed past the girls to haul the three backpacks in the room as Lorelai cried, "And it doesn't smell like feet!" She raced inside and took in the full effect. There was said king-sized bed in the center of the room and a cot set up alongside the window. She promptly flung herself facedown on the bed. "Just wake me in six days," she said into the mattress as Rory flopped down next to her. She listened to the sounds of shuffling as backpacks were placed, the soft creak of the cot as Luke settled on it. She didn't need to look up to know he'd probably dug out Rory's book again. Minutes past as the three of them did nothing but breathe and enjoy the air conditioning that circulated the room.

"Do you hear that?" Rory asked.

"What?" Lorelai replied.

"Silence."

Lorelai rolled onto her back, flicking a quick glance across the room. Yup, Luke had the book out. He was about two-thirds of the way through from what she could tell. He hadn't talked much about it other than to say he liked it well enough. "I never thought I would love silence so much. Well except for the time Mom dragged me to that spa but didn't honor any of the silence signs during the sessions and -"

"Lorelai, silence means no talking," Luke said, not bothering to look up from the book.

"You're talking," she pointed out.

"Only to tell you not to talk."

Lorelai grabbed a pillow and lobbed it across the room at him. It knocked the book from his hands.

"Mom, that was my pillow!" Rory protested.

Luke lobbed the pillow back at Rory, making sure it landed next to her and not on her. Ergo, it fell to the other side of the bed.

"Thanks, Luke." Rory picked up the pillow and hugged to her chest. She sniffed at Lorelai. "Meanie. I should make you sleep on the floor."

"You wouldn't let your only mother sleep on the floor," Lorelai gasped.

"I would if you keep stealing my pillows. Go steal someone else's pillows."

"The only other pillows other than mine are Luke's. His pillow to bed ratio is higher because he has his own bed."

He had retrieved the book by this point and was smoothing out the bent corners from being attacked by a pillow. "I have a cot," he corrected. "Besides, I should have my own room."

"Well they didn't have any more for the length of our stay," Lorelai replied.

The B&B in Rome had been one of the few non-hostel locations they had booked prior to Luke's surprise arrival in Paris. The newly opened Nicolas Inn was so close to the Forum and Colosseum that Rory nearly wept when Lorelai announced she had secured a reservation there. It was their big splurge of the trip. But it only had four rooms, so they couldn't get another. But the owners were not only happy to supply a cot for Luke to use, but were excited to be a fount of research that Lorelai could take back for the Dragonfly.

"I told you, I can crash somewhere else so you and Rory don't have to share," Luke insisted and was rewarded with twin cries of "No!" and all the pillows being thrown at him. This time, he plucked them up before the girls could bother moving off the bed to take them back.

Lorelai levered herself onto her arms and scowled. "Well, now Luke has all the pillows," she told Rory.

"Too bad, you lost your pillow privileges." He emphasized this by folding his arms on top of them and picking up the book once more.

"You know, there's something I've always wanted to know about you …," Lorelai began, her eyes twinkling with such mischief that Luke narrowed his own at her.

"You found the answer to that when you pawed through my luggage."

Lorelai laughed. "Dirty!"

"I don't want to know," Rory muttered, covering her face with her hands.

"Well, there's something else I've always wanted to know," Lorelai continued.

"What's that?" Luke asked suspiciously.

Lorelai waggled her eyebrows, then her fingers. Rory uncovered her face as her mother did this. Her eyes went wide, then she smirked at Luke. He felt sweat start to roll down his back.

Then Lorelai launched off the bed and pounced him while Rory lunged for her camera.

Yes, Luke was ticklish.

The hard part about kissing was that at some point you had stop kissing. Even when you really, really wanted to keep kissing. Especially when you wanted to climb the guy you were kissing like a tree, wrap your legs around his waist and kiss until the cows came home. Or you were arrested. Which they nearly were in Paris.

Who knew the public indecency laws in Paris were so strict? He had been touching her breast over her clothes, damn it.

Kissing was a bad idea. It was such a bad idea, because now that the dam had broken, Lorelai didn't want to stop. And she knew Luke didn't want to stop either if those looks he kept giving her meant what she thought they meant. She was perfectly aware she was about to either combust from the heat of his gaze or melt into a puddle of Lorelai goo. Either one required a good bit of awkward explaining to Rory, and it was only the thought of her daughter waiting for them that kept her from finding the nearest taxi, going back to the hostel, and tying him to the bottom bunk until she throughly had her way with him.

She wondered in the days since if he would be open to that.

There was no grand proclamation of the change in their status, mainly because she wasn't quite sure what they were yet. Were they still just friends? Friends who kiss? Friends on their way to enjoying lots and lots of benefits? Were they now boyfriend and girlfriend?

They needed to talk, but the universe seemed to be aligned against them. As the next 10 days took them through the south of France and into Italy, no amount of cajoling or flirting netted them anything other than the dormitory-style hostels that the girls had pre-booked before their trip. B&Bs had been booked, and all but the most wallet-gouging hotels were either full or didn't have rooms big enough to accommodate all three of them. They found beds for Luke easily enough at their hostels, but there were no more private rooms. The three were segregated into gender-based dorms, jammed among strangers. It suited Rory and Lorelai just fine, both of them easily adaptable to the situation. It unnerved Luke to no end, having avoided dorms since he was a Boy Scout - and he wasn't a huge fan of them back then either.

One golden afternoon, they thought they had their moment when they escaped for a picnic in a secluded park in Pisa. But then Mother Nature decided to get in on the act and put an abrupt end to any thought of sex for the next five days. But they at least talked a little bit between the kissing. Really, they had about seven years of kissing to make up for, priorities right?

But now here they were in Rome for the next week and Lorelai was determined to get a real date out of this and find out where they stood. She felt like they were at the top of a wobbly pile of Jenga sticks, waiting for that final piece that would crumble the whole pile. No, no, that was a bad analogy. Maybe more like a balloon about to pop. A really, really big balloon of unresolved sexual tension that seemed to get fuller and fuller with every stolen kiss, every secret hand grab, every molten stare exchanged in a public setting. Yes, that was better. She was going to pop with frustration. But, she knew the explosion was going to be nothing short of spectacular. Granted, she'd always thought that. So had Sookie, her not-so-secret pervert of a best friend who had once told her that she fully expected Lorelai and Luke to go "Bull Durham" in the diner at some point. Lorelai had laughed it off at the time, but now she was eying the table in the corner of their room and getting ideas.

"You've gotten pretty far in the book," Rory was telling Luke, and this was enough to pull Lorelai's attention away from the table, which was loaded with various snacks and the remains of the dinner they'd ordered in.

While Lorelai was lost in her thoughts, somehow Rory's books had all managed to leave the relative safety of her backpack and were now spread across the floor. There were considerably more books in the bag than Rory had started with, and Lorelai didn't need a Magic 8 ball to realize that another package would be winging its way across the Atlantic to Babette to join the one sent from London, the one sent from Paris, and the one sent from Pisa. Luke and Rory sat among Rory's pile of treasures, his borrowed book in hand as they talked. Lorelai rolled onto her stomach and saw that the bookmark in the book that Luke held had moved much closer to the end and smiled. If he was in the book where she guessed he was, he'd be done with it by the next day.

"It's not that hard of a read," Luke was telling Rory. "But, I don't like him."

"Who?" Rory asked, brow furrowed. "Harry?"

"No, Dumbledore." He waved the book at her. "I mean, who in their right mind would allow a kid to live under the stairs for the better part of a decade? Don't they have some sort of magical CPS?"

Rory smiled. "I'm sure they do."

He was already knee-deep into rant territory. Lorelai wondered how long he'd been saving this one up. "They had people checking up on him, wouldn't they notice all the clothes and the chores and the taped up glasses? I mean, c'mon, I know they're Muggles, but abuse is abuse."

"He has a much better time of it after this book, I promise," Rory reassured him and passed over Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

"It's still not right." Luke took the book with a thanks and set it on the cot next to his pillow. Lorelai hid her smile. "Bookworm," she sang under her breath, but he still heard her anyhow. He glared at her, and she blew him a kiss.

"Your outrage has been noted," Rory said with a nod.

Rory then coaxed Lorelai out of the room, claiming she needed coffee and needed it right away. They had passed several cafes on their way to the B&B, and they made their way toward one of them, chatting lightly about the trip and teasing Luke in absentia that he was so far into the climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone that he waved them off with some general muttering over poisoning their arteries, now be quiet so he could finish the book.

"You're going to turn him into another you," Lorelai mock complained as they accepted their go-cups of coffee and one with tea for Luke.

"I would like to think it's a good thing. Besides, imagine the look on Jess' face once he finds out that Luke's read Harry Potter." Rory laughed, but Lorelai stared soberly into her coffee.

"Hey," Rory said quietly. "I'm OK."

"He did a number on you, kid," Lorelai said. "He's not exactly my favorite person on the planet."

"Mom, he's never been your favorite person."

Lorelai huffed. "Yes, well it went from Archie Bunker grumbling to 'You killed my father, prepare to die' in my list of least favorite people on the planet. He does still at least rank below Mitzi Harwick."

"Who's that?"

"Someone I went to high school with." Someone who had tried tripping Lorelai on the stairs in the early days of her pregnancy, just to see what would happen. Lorelai had sacrificed her dignity and the already-banged up condition of her textbooks to grab onto the railing. She'd tripped down a couple of steps, but hadn't fallen, hadn't risked losing Rory. She never wanted her daughter to know how close she came to not existing because a stupid bitch had been jealous of Lorelai sleeping with Christopher.

Lost in her own thoughts, she almost missed Rory's next comment. "So I was thinking of mixing up the itinerary."

Lorelai frowned at her, then immediately laid her hand on Rory's forehead.

Rory screwed up her nose. "Mom?"

"Just checking. You wanted to deviate from your itinerary. I wanted to make sure you didn't come down with a fever or the bubonic plague."

Rory rolled her eyes. "We've been deviating from the itinerary ever since your debit card was stolen!"

"Potato, potahto." Lorelai absently waved her hand.

Rory sighed, then blocked Lorelai's path. She tugged her until they were just inside the front garden of the B&B, out of the way of onlookers. "Look. I'm 18, I'm not an idiot. Mom, please do me a favor. Go on a date, do whatever it is you do on a date, don't tell me the details. The two of you are driving me insane, and quite frankly, I really suck at this whole chaperone business. So, instead of all of us going out together tomorrow, I am going to look the other way and go tour some ruins or something you won't go near …"

"Like a bookstore."

"Like that." Rory nodded and saluted Lorelai with her coffee cup. "And you and Luke are going to go on a date and do whatever it is you want to do together on a date, and please make sure there is no evidence of said date activities for Rory to find later."

Lorelai just stared at her daughter, her heart growing at least three sizes like the Grinch's. She wanted to hug her, but it was an awkward thing while carrying two go-cups. Instead, she bestowed her with one of her happiest smiles and tried to ignore the anticipation curling in her gut. "You're a great kid. Seriously 10/10 would recommend."

Rory smirked. "I pride myself on my excellent reputation." She waggled her eyebrows suggestively."You know, if you two wanted to share the other bed together …"

Lorelai snorted. "As much as I'd love to, I don't think we're quite there yet. I know Luke won't do it if you're in the room, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that either."

"I know, I know," Rory said with an exaggerated sigh. "So much for my campaign to get my own bed."

"Is that what that was?"

"I was going to be magnanimous and take the cot. It's not like I wanted that entire huge king-sized bed that doesn't carry the lingering scent of 1,000 farts to myself."

"No, you weren't coveting that at all," Lorelai said gravely. "And I certainly just wasn't thinking of banishing you to the couch so I can have the bed all to myself."

"Mother, how could you?"

"What can I say, I had inspiration."

Lorelai waited until Rory was in the bathroom taking a shower before telling Luke of the change in plans.

"So, Rory's deviating from the itinerary," she said, sorting through her backpack and noticing with great dismay that the amount of dirty clothes far outweighed the amount of clean ones. She tried to remember the last time they did laundry. It was probably somewhere in the south of France. She pulled out what she was pretty sure was her last clean pair of panties and decided that in addition to date day, tomorrow would also be laundry day.

Already two chapters into Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Luke peered over the top of the book at her with some surprise. He hadn't read this much since he'd been in middle school, and he realized he actually missed it. As he moved into high school and gotten more involved in athletics, reading seemed to just fall by the wayside as he pursued other interests. "She feeling OK?"

Lorelai pointed at him. "Same question I had! She's not sick. She thinks we need a day to ourselves."

"Yeah?" Surprised, he nearly chuckled at the amusement in Lorelai's eyes. "OK,' he finally said.

Lorelai pulled her pajamas out of her backpack and dropped them on the bed. She moved to the cot and nudged Luke until he shifted his legs enough for her to sit on the mattress. "That's it? OK? Run out of ideas there, Mr. Romance?"

His gaze flicked to the bathroom door, where the shower was still running, and his cheeks went flush. Of course he wouldn't say what he was thinking, what they both were thinking with Rory within earshot. "We should go out. To eat."

"Unless you've sneaked a full kitchen into that backpack, I assume that's a given," Lorelai said casually. She rubbed his leg. "Or … we could order room service. I can work on my really bad Italian and we can spend the day in the room eating whatever they bring us."

"No!" She stopped rubbing his leg at his yelp, and Luke put the book facedown on the floor next to the cot before levering himself into a sitting position. "I mean … that's good. I assume we're going to … well, I shouldn't assume."

Lorelai nudged his side. "You know what happens to people who assume."

Luke huffed at her. "But I wanna do this right."

"Oh, honey, you tossed traditional out the window two weeks ago."

"I want to do this right," he insisted. "I just don't want to throw you on the bed like a Neanderthal the moment Rory walks out the door."

Lorelai's eyes sparkled, and Luke swore she was imagining all sorts of delicious, extremely dirty thoughts. They just happened to mirror his own, and he shifted uncomfortably. "I wouldn't mind that," she said, her voice dropping an octave.

"You deserve better," Luke muttered, sounding so much like a grumpy teddy bear that Lorelai pressed her cheek to his shoulder with a good deal of fondness.

"Dumping your girlfriend to fly across the world to bail me out? It's hard to top that in the romantic gesture department," she commented lightly.

The words were more effective in quashing Luke's growing arousal than thinking about the most disgusting thing possible while taking a cold shower. He shot out of bed, pressing his hand to his forehead. It had been two weeks, just 14 days since he'd left Nicole at the gate in Newark and took off to France, following his gut and the insane part of him that wanted to at least try. Two weeks of being swept up in jetlag, caught in the hurricane that was the Gilmore girls and ratcheted up to a category 5 because they were in Europe. Two weeks of belonging to a family, of actually being wanted and included in things. Ten days since he kissed Lorelai Gilmore and she kissed him back and made it very clear she wanted to keep kissing him. Five days since he all but made love to her on a riverbank, stopped only by Mother Nature. Fourteen days of not thinking, just feeling.

But it still didn't erase the fact that he was barely two weeks removed from his last relationship, and he never made a habit of hopping from bed to bed. It was distasteful to him and disrespectful to the person he was involved with. At least, even though he had walked away from Nicole, she didn't have to put up with him thinking about another woman while on the cruise.

"It's only been two weeks," he finally told Lorelai.

Luke expected a flippant remark ladened with some pop culture reference he didn't get in response. It was Lorelai's defense mechanism when things got real, and things were getting really real. But her blue eyes were steady and everything about her was serious, and he knew this was as important to her as it was to him. They were important to her. They had yet to discuss exactly what they wanted to become, but for the first time in all the years they'd known each other, it felt like they were standing on the same page.

"Look, did you roll out of her bed and straight into mine?" she asked quietly.

Confession time. Here's what he had. "No, I haven't touched her since April" he admitted.

He could see Lorelai doing the math in her head. "You mean you haven't … since the fire at the inn?"

Luke set his jaw and just stared at the wall.

"Let's go to brunch and see what happens," Lorelai said after a long, tense moment. "This … whatever it is. You and me. It isn't just a passing thing, is it?"

"It never was."

Lorelai nodded. "OK then. So, let's get dressed up, do brunch, then see what happens."

"Brunch? Is that what we're calling it?" Rory asked as she tucked her guidebook inside the small messenger she used for day trips.

Lorelai rolled her eyes. Through the wall, they could hear the shower going as Luke took his turn getting ready for the day. "Yes. Look, kid. We have some things to sort out, and we probably should do it before we do the mattress tango."

Rory shuddered. "I told you, no details!"

Lorelai stared at the wall dividing the bedroom from the bathroom. Rory finally decided that Jane Eyre would be her companion for the day when her mother spoke up."Rory, would you be upset if we stayed friends?"

Rory put the book in her bag and studied her mother for a moment. She walked around the bed to lean against her. "Mom, I just want you both to be happy. I also hate to be the one to tell you this, considering I'm your 18-year-old daughter and it was obvious to me when I was 11, but you two were never just friends. Someone once told me that it's scary, but it's a good kind of scared. It's better than the alternative, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is." Lorelai hugged her and sent her on her way.

Fifteen minutes later, Rory had a croissant in hand and was wandering outside the Forum, trying to decide if she wanted to visit now or wait until the afternoon. As much as Rory loved spending time with her mom, as much as she got a charge out of having Luke be a part of their little family unit, she loved exploring new places by herself. This trip to Europe was designed to make up for all the years Lorelai and Rory couldn't travel beyond Hartford, and really their road trip to Harvard had been their first crazy trip outside of Connecticut by themselves. It was nice to take in the city at her own pace, and she was itching to continue putting her new camera through its paces. It'd taken her the better part of the 10 days since Luke had given it to her to master the controls and take some test shots. But she was confident in the photos she was going to make now. Lane would be seriously impressed. Maybe she'd even send a few prints to Paris.

"Rory!"

Rory almost didn't hear it at first, lost in her own thoughts. It took her moment to register it as she heard her name called again, and her brow furrowed. It wasn't a masculine voice, so it wasn't Luke. And it wasn't her mom. There was no one else she knew that was going to be in Europe.

"Rory, wait!"

Startled, Rory looked over her shoulder at the sound of her name for the third time. Her jaw dropped. "Grandma!"