AN: I had fun with this chapter. Please let me know what you think!

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

Jess sat back on the couch and Rory, her feet up on the cushion beside her, leaned against him. Jess's arm around her shoulders pulled her in tighter and her hand on his thigh returned the comforting gesture. They had been flipping through channels for the last half an hour. Or rather, Jess had. Rory had often heard of men liking to control the remote. She'd long since discovered, in Jess, the truth behind the rumour.

She knew the pattern. Watch one show for a while on this channel, then during the commercial break, flip to another show on that channel. Watch the second show until you'd missed the commercial break—as well as some vital plot point from the first show. Repeat.

Or else, Jess would get sidetracked by something entirely different on a third channel and wouldn't even bother flipping back to the first, paying little mind to the time he'd invested there previously. Rory smirked and shook her head. It would be annoying if it weren't actually a little cute.

Tonight though, Rory was too preoccupied with her thoughts to care.

"Saturday TV sucks," Jess uttered.

"Uh-huh," she said, smirking still. "Maybe if you were actually watching it, it wouldn't suck."

"What do you want to watch?"

"Doesn't matter. I'm just thinking anyway."

"About the internship?"

"Um. Yeah," she lied, but for once Jess didn't notice. In actually, it was her mother's voice that echoed through her brain, specifically the irritating allegation that Jess would leave her to raise a child alone. She really couldn't see that happening. He was just too attentive, she decided. He wasn't in this relationship just for sex, after all they'd never even had sex and he was still with her, attentive as always. He really cared about her. And they'd been friends for a long time. She knew him.

She convinced herself valiantly but the thoughts were starting to wig her out. She couldn't quite picture him raising a family either.

Finally, when she caught a snippet of a Huggies commercial, nanoseconds before the channel switched—and she decided the entire world, including network TV advertising executives, must be conspiring against her—she summoned a bit of courage and dove right in. "What do you think about kids?" she asked.

"Well that's burying the needle." Startled, the remote-control-in-hand dropped into his lap and he turned away from the TV to look at her in surprise. "I dunno. What do you think about kids, Rory?"

Jess's eyes widened further as she rambled. "Well I suppose I'd like to have them some day. But not for a while. I mean, a long while. A long, long while."

"A long while. Got it." Concern marred his features.

"I think I'd like to start my career first, you know?"

"OK." He paused. "But would you really like to start your career and then interrupt it? Assuming of course, that it would need to be interrupted."

"Well it would probably need to be interrupted for little while, at least."

"Yeah, for a little while."

"A lot less than the long while previously mentioned."

"So I gathered."

"Yeah. But it would be good. Worthwhile and stuff," Rory rambled, not really paying attention to what she was saying, "Besides they start out as these cute little cherubs but then become these whole people. These whole people who are family. How cool is that?" Jess was staring at her as if she were deranged, so she added, "Of course it would be a lot of work to get to that point…"

"Uh-huh."

"But I think it would be worth it. I think." Rory took a deep breath. "Actually I've never really thought about it. I've always just thought of my career."

"Sounds like you got it all worked out," came the ironic reply.

"Hey! You didn't answer my question."

"Didn't I?" he enquired, disengaging his hold around her shoulders and reaching into the pocket of his jeans.

"No!"

"What question was that again?"

"How do you do that? Evade questions so easily, I mean."

"Sheer talent, I guess. Or maybe it's just verbal sleight of hand." Jess turned towards her and offered a shiny coin for her perusal. Dramatically, he placed the quarter in his other hand and those fingers closed around it. Rory, who watched with a raised eyebrow, was no stranger to these antics; she wasn't the least bit surprised when he opened the hand which should have contained the coin and the palm was empty, as though the quarter had vanished. But expectation aside, Rory was still mesmerized for a moment.

But only a moment. "God! You're doing it again!" She shook her head as she caught herself drifting off topic for a second time. "What about kids, Jess?"

Jess looked extremely blindsided. "Having them, you mean? Just so we're clear here."

"Well... Yeah." Her cheeks heated up.

"Jeez," he said, growing serious. "That's a crazy question. What kind of father would I be?" He grabbed the remote and aimed it briefly at the TV. Several channels flicked by.

Rory was patiently silent until he looked at her. With a start she realized he was truly asking her. "I don't know," she replied, too surprised to formulate a real answer.

Jess nodded and looked away again.

"Well would you play with the kids? Like basketball or something?"

"Only until they got too big to fit through the hoop."

"Jess!" she admonished, laughing despite herself.

"Nothing but net!"

"And the crowd roars," she said dryly as she shook her head. "Come on. Seriously."

"Yeah, I'd play basketball with them, I guess. If they wanted to." He shrugged, decidedly ill-at-ease and non-committal.

"Would you be a disciplinarian?"

"Discipline." Jess snorted. "What I know about discipline you could fit into a thimble."

"That's not true. You work two jobs and you're very conscientious about it. I mean, you get there on time and you do what you should."

She digressed as a thought occurred to her. "Although, there was that one time when my mom and I helped out at the diner, when Luke was swamped with his uncle's funeral. You were supposed to be working but I could barely get you to lift a finger. I turned my back for a second and you were out the door."

Jess smiled. "I only did that so that you'd have to come find me."

"So the truth comes out!" Rory shook her head happily at the memory. "Actually I kind of thought so. It was a really good excuse to grab your hand."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. See? More history. But anyway, otherwise you're really very diligent about work. Luke said your manager at the evil empire really thinks the world of you. He told me about the Employee of the Month award."

"Two of them now," Jess conceded.

"That's right! Two. I forgot." Rory paused, thoughtfully. "So you know a thing or two about discipline. Don't tell me you don't."

"It's different."

"Well, would I have to be the disciplinarian?"

"I dunno."

"Would you change diapers?"

"Couldn't we just stop feeding them instead?"

Rory wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, maybe."

"Thank God."

"We've already established that I would be the one to help them with their homework. Math and sciences, especially."

"You got that right."

"But you'd read to them, I imagine."

"The classics."

"Yes, you'd bore them to tears with the wearisome Ernest Hemingway." Rory smiled.

"You're forgetting they'd be my kids too. So they would've inherited the Hemingway-Appreciation gene. The Hemingway-Dissing gene is recessive."

"I don't even know my own kids anymore," Rory lamented, deadpan.

"What kind of mother are you?"

"Indeed."

Jess snorted. Then after a while, as Rory was wondering about her own commitment to having children, he went on. "I could teach them how to evade questions."

"Your kids would be a handful, wouldn't they?"

"Oh sure, now they're my kids. When the chips are down…" he lamented.

"Yes, only when they're behaving badly. And reading Hemingway."

"I see where this is going."

"Same diff' though really," she said, sliding in one more crack at Hemingway before pausing for more thought. "Your kids will be a handful," she stated finally.

"Hey! They'd get just as much sass from your side."

"Oh would they now?" She raised her eyebrows in amusement.

"Hell yeah!" After a moment, he sighed. "But they'd get all their good traits from you too," he conceded dismissively.

Rory smiled. "Not all of them."

"Why do you ask, Rory? I mean, did you jump on while I wasn't looking or something? Is there something you're trying to tell me?"

She chuckled. "No."

"Are you actually saying you want kids?"

"No! At least, not any time soon! I swear!" Jess looked visibly more relaxed. "No, these are just the kind of things a person needs to know."

"Does a person? What kind of person is that?"

Rory blushed more. "A person who thinks about…"

Into the silence, an expectant Jess said, "Kids?"

"Sex."

Jess nodded silently.

"I just need you to tell me that having kids wouldn't be the worst thing ever. If accidents happen."

"As long as you're OK with them having such a screw-up for a father."

"You're not a screw-up."

"Have we met? The name's Jess," he barked.

"Come on…"

"Jess Mariano," he elaborated. "Son of Jimmy, the Master of Absenteeism."

At the mention of Jimmy, Lorelai's words came flooding back. Rory gulped. "You'd be there, though, right? To help raise them."

"Jeez. If you actually wanted me to be. I wouldn't leave you in the lurch, if that's what you mean. I've always hated that about Jimmy." Jess sighed deeply. "But you should know, I'd really suck as a father. I don't know the first thing about it. I never had one."

"Well neither did I, really."

"But you had a mother. I barely had one of those either. Luke's the first stable family member I've ever met! And even he's a little whacked." Jess paused. "Given my role models... You'd want to have kids with me?"

"I don't really think about kids," she admitted. "When I picture my future, I'm really only picturing what I'm doing. My career. Kids don't seem to fit the lifestyle of a jet-setting foreign correspondent. I mean, I'll be on the road a lot. Airplanes, taxis, bullet trains. Wherever the story goes, so will I." She sighed. "Sometimes I think I'd make a bad mother."

"I doubt that." A strange sadness was in his eyes.

"Just promise me you don't think it would be the worst thing ever."

"It wouldn't be the worst thing," he said. "And I'd want to be there. Whatever you want. We could knock out a couple of kids and screw them up together. It'll be the stuff fairy tales are made of. Brothers Grimm, mostly." Jess placed his arm around her shoulder again, and kissed the side of her forehead. "You have to promise me something too."

"What's that?"

"Promise me you'll wake me before you jump on. I'd really like to be there."

Rory laughed and hugged him suddenly. "Deal."

After a moment, Jess shook his head silently as he went back to flipping through channels, as though he couldn't quite believe they'd just had this conversation. Truth be told, Rory couldn't quite believe it either. She only knew she felt a whole lot better.

"There's nothing on TV," he said again.

"Well, I should do some homework anyway…"

"Now there's the discipline!" Jess turned off the TV quickly and the whirlwind dizzied her. He jumped off the couch and strode to her bookcase. "Hey, where did you put that photo album?" Rory suspected he was overjoyed at the change of topic.

Rory had been sitting cross-legged on the floor for about twenty-five minutes. Her Ladefoged textbook—her professors liked to refer to textbooks by the author's last name rather than the title or the subject matter—was sprawled out on her coffee table in front of her. She became aware of how long she'd been sitting there when she felt the sensation of her legs going numb. Sighing, she adjusted her posture and stretched both arms above her head.

Turning, she caught the gaze of Jess who was sitting on the couch behind her, leaning up against the armrest. She noted with a tinge of surprise that he was still looking through her album of photos from the European backpacking trip that she'd shared with her mother. Come to think of it, he looked at her photo albums a lot. He smiled at her and turned a page of the album which was propped upright in his lap. She returned the grin.

"Hey Rory," he began.

"What's up?"

"What's the story behind this photo, again?" He tilted the album towards her, offering her a brief peek. The page was dedicated to their stay in Rome and the picture he gestured to was the one of la Bocca della Verità. Beside a stone wall ornamented with a large abstract face, Lorelai was standing with an expression of mock horror on her face and waving her "handless" arm in the air. "I'm sure you told me about it before but I don't remember why your mother's hand is pulled up into her sleeve like that."

Rory chuckled at the memory. "It's the Mouth of Truth," she said. "Legend has it, if you put your hand in his mouth, he'll decide if you've been honest or not. If you've ever told a lie, he'll bite your hand off."

"So, according to this picture, your mother's been a very bad girl."

Rory laughed. "It was her idea to pretend our hands had really gotten chopped off. I did it too, but the picture of me is in her photo album back at home. I can't tell you how long we stood there, debating and trying to summon the courage to actually stick our hands in that little hole."

"Did you?"

"Eventually."

"Freaky?"

"Very freaky. I felt like there was actually someone back there wielding an axe."

"I guess the real test of whether someone had told a lie or not was whether or not they were comfortable sticking their hand in the hole."

"Yeah, I bet."

"So you've been dishonest then?" Jess smirked.

Rory smirked back. "Well, would you stick your hand in there?"

Jess, still grinning, looked at his fingers for a moment and said, "Touché. I'd probably debate as long as you did."

"I thought so," she verbally poked.

"Not lies. Half-truths. Half-truths."

"Yeah, yeah."

"And this one?" Jess pointed to a photo of a flustered Rory and a block of limburger, next to lemon trees and a yappy-breed little dog in a basket.

Rory laughed in self-effacement. "That's Caffe Della Penna, on the corner of 'Bark' and 'Cheese'," she began and Jess nodded thoughtfully. She was about to explain further that she'd received the unwanted, stinky cheese, due to a misspoken Italian word or two, and, because she hadn't wanted to harangue the staff over her own mistake, she'd forced herself to eat it.

Jess spoke first.

"Well that's all I wanted to know. Sorry to interrupt you. As you were." He gestured to her texts then flipped the page in the photo album before burying his nose in it.

Surprised at being cut so short, Rory murmured, "Oh, right," and turned back to her books, shaking her head.

Despite her momentary surprise, in no time she'd attained the optimal state-of-being for studying—all distracting sights and sounds blocked out—and she easily maintained that state for another twenty minutes.

As she shifted her legs again before stiffness set in, Rory suddenly became aware of the sound of a pen scrawling across paper. She, herself, wasn't writing and she'd thought Jess to be reading by this point. She craned her neck and caught a clear glimpse of Jess scribbling, his arm moving back and forth with every line of text he was apparently composing. He was still holding the photo album in his lap. "Are you writing in my book?"

Jess looked up, startled out of his concentration. "I wouldn't do that."

"You most definitely would. What about my copy of Howl?" she accused lightly, referring to the poem that he'd secretly "borrowed" from her the day they'd first met.

"Oh I would do that. It's Ginsberg. How can I not comment?"

"What are you doing?" Rory queried as she stretched an arm towards him, meaning to tip the album towards herself. Jess pulled the book out of her reach before she could grasp it.

"Ah-ah-ah!" he teased.

"What are you doing?" she repeated.

Jess took a deep long breath and let it all out in one perfunctory sigh. "I'm writing."

"I know. In my book." She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt but found herself just a little bit irritated. "And although I love it when you write in the margins of my novels, because you know I find your comments insightful and brilliant, you writing in my photo album is not cool. Those are my memories. You weren't even there!"

"Not in your album. Behind your album."

"Behind?"

Then Jess reluctantly held up a yellow steno pad, back cover towards her.

Her eyes widened. "What are you writing?"

"Grocery list."

"Yeah right. Then why are you trying to hide it?"

"It's fiction."

"Fiction," she cooed. "Your novel?"

"No, it's a fictional grocery list. I told you. I wouldn't want you to go out and actually buy anything on this list."

She ignored him. "What's it about?"

"Not that you would buy groceries anyway."

Rory smiled expectantly. "Come on, Jess. Tell me what it's about!"

"I can't tell you that."

"Why not?"

"I don't know."

"I won't stop hounding you until you give me a reason."

He sighed again. "Then you're about to get really annoying." He closed the photo album with the steno pad safely tucked inside it.

"Just tell me what it's about and the annoyance will stop."

"I don't know yet."

"Don't know what?"

"What the story's about."

"How can you not know? You're writing it and you're surprisingly intuitive."

"It's not finished yet."

"Oooh," Rory uttered as a new thought occurred to her. "Do you write every weekend, sitting on my couch, while I'm doing my homework?"

"Impossible. I just learned how to spell."

Realizing she wouldn't get any information, Rory pouted. "You suck." At that moment the telephone trilled. Such was her sudden excitement, that her lungs instantly imploded. "And you're extremely lucky that I have to take this call!" she cried with the little oxygen she had left, jumping up from the floor with such vigour her legs cramped up. In a flash, a breathlessly excited and nervous Rory had retrieved her phone.

"Hello?"

"Ms. Gilmore?" questioned a sociable voice.

"Yes!"

"This is Professor LaFavre."

"Oh Professor! Hi! It's so good to hear from you!"

The voice chuckled at her enthusiasm. "I think you know why I'm calling."

"Yes?" she squeaked, on pins and needles.

"I've just heard from the head of the committee. They've made their decision and I think you'll be very happy with the verdict."

Rory gave a frenzied look at Jess, happily gesturing towards him with her free arm. "I'm going? They picked me! Oh thank you, Professor! Thank you for your recommendation, and your assistance and for calling to let me know and… Thank you!"

"I assure you Ms. Gilmore, it was your dedicated work which made the difference."

"Oh thank you!" she said again.

The professor laughed lightly. "Stop by my office on Monday, during office hours. I'll have the information for you then."

"Oh, yes, Sir. I'll see you Monday."

"All right then, good-bye."

"Good-bye, Professor!" Rory hung up the phone, spun into a little twirl and flopped down on the couch beside Jess's feet. Jess scooted his toes out of the way just in time. "Jess! I'm spending the summer in Guatemala!"

"I gathered that."

"I'm going on a media trip!"

"Yeah."

"To work alongside a coffee-cooperative volunteer group!"

"Yeah."

"And help actual coffee farmers with coffee growing, maybe harvesting, marketing!" Rory jumped up from the couch again to pace a few steps back and forth, gesticulating gleefully.

"Yeah."

She turned to Jess. "And they're building a new school for the local community. Maybe they'll have me help with that. You know, I volunteered on a construction project when I was at Chilton. Which, by the way, was not without its near-disasters, so maybe they won't want me to help with that, but Jess, coffee!"

"Yeah. I know." Jess smirked wryly.

"And I'll meet all these people from the community and get their stories, and learn so much from them and shed light on the plights of the country and the plights of the coffee farmers and the truth about sustainability and biodiversity and eco-tourism practices! And, oh God, what will I learn? And think of all the coffee I'll drink! Fresh-from-the-bean, pure coffee!" She jumped a little, on the spot.

"I think maybe you've had too much already."

"And my articles are going to be published as a series!" she cried dreamily. She plunked down on the couch again, her knees finally threatening to give out.

"You sure are excited about going."

"I sure am!"

"You should celebrate."

"Yes we should!"

AN: In a perfect world, I'd have the next chapter up within the week. But I've got quite a bit more work to do on it so that doesn't seem likely. Wish me luck! In the meantime, please review! Thanks for reading!