Title: Right Where You Want Me
Author: carleymarie
Category: Gilmore Girls
Disclaimer: I own nothing except my thoughts and the MacBook I type them on.
Rating: T
Pairing: Tristan/Rory
Reviews: Greatly appreciated. Thank you to everyone who reviewed the first chapter.
Summary: Relationships are complex. AU Trory.
A/N: It has been more than a while since I last penned a fic. I'm trying something a little different. Confusion may be felt while reading, but try to see each new chapter as a piece of a larger puzzle to be understood as the plot progresses. I have added a link on my profile to my livejournal for news about my fic updates. Happy Valentine's Day. Enjoy!
Chapter Two
The night I saw him in the bookstore made me feel like something had changed. Maybe not changed exactly, but had the potential to change. This "potential" for something was what had held my deep fascination with him.
Naturally, I knew that when we both left the bookstore, separately of course and we would be back on our different journeys.
Him to a party, where he would naturally find a new girl, and me back home, endlessly analyzing our conversation from that evening. Thinking about what I could have said differently, or done differently to have us leave together. I wanted to be the girl he left with.
This relationship was like nothing I had experienced before. It was like, somehow I knew that if we got together, we would be the perfect couple. Or as perfect a couple as two people could be.
It's that old concept in dating where a good girl could find a good boy and be content, but good girls want bad boys, because it's the challenge and the chase. Some things can be too easy. Moreover, every girl wants to be the one girl who can change that boy.
Like most of our meetings, it would be for very little time and then we would not see each other for three times that. Not fair in my mind, but I think the stars lined up for us to meet again, as we did on the first day of our second term:
First term I feared not knowing anyone in any of my classes. Of course, not being in high school anymore, I felt that it would be easier to meet new people. As long as I did not see anyone from my past, I would be fine.
There was one person I wanted to see. Tristan DuGray.
I went to all five of my classes over the course of my first week. He was not in a single class of mine. Of course, I was taking social sciences and humanities classes, and he was taking business classes.
Second term on my first day, I entered my freshman English Literature classroom.
I looked around the room. Not a large, but at the same time, not a small room. One hundred seats in the room, at the most.
I sat about eight rows from the front of the room, and a little off to the left. As the classroom began to fill with other people, I surveyed the room. I turned around in my seat and saw the profile of a person that I would know anywhere. Tousled blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and a smirk that could be seen a mile away.
Sitting at the back of the room of course. I knew that he was a smart person, but I also knew that he did not want anyone to know how smart he was.
I stared for a moment, lost in how natural and at ease he was. In his seat, arm draped casually across the back of the seat next to him.
A small smile rose to my face, but at that second he had to turn and look at me. Of course, I in turn, quickly turned my head to face the front of the room, grabbing the course syllabus off my desk and began to frantically flip through the outline, hoping that the pages flipping would fan away the blush off my face.
The rest of the class passed with a lack of any activity between the two of us. Obviously due to the fact that the professor was lecturing.
Class ended quickly, and I began placing my laptop into my messenger bag, planning to grab a cup of coffee before my next class began.
Engrossed in my thoughts, I did not see anyone come up beside me:
"New computer?" the person asked.
Startled, my thoughts being interrupted I simply replied, "Yeah," wanting to say more, but not wanting to ramble.
"Nice," he said back.
I was wondering if he was being charged by the word in our conversations. I recalled a snippet from one of our past conversations that discussed our differing conversation styles:
"You talk too much," he said to me.
"Well, you don't talk enough," I said back.
It was always our problem.
"So, how is your boyfriend?" he asked, startling me out of my thoughts.
"What boyfriend?" I asked back.
"Never mind," he said.
I knew it was a not-so subtle way to find out if I was dating anyone. We had been through this before. Many times in fact, and just like those times, I always felt compelled to find out if he was seeing anyone.
"How about you, any girlfriend?" I asked him.
"No. You know me," he said back.
It was such a loaded statement. I knew the many sides of Tristan DuGray.
I had expected that he did not have a girlfriend. Why would someone like him want to be with one girl, when he could be on a rotating basis with five or six girls at once?
I titled my head and stared at him a moment, scanning through my mind trying to figure out if he was trying to say something with a hidden meaning.
Did I really know Tristan DuGray? More importantly, could I really know everything I wanted about Tristan DuGray?
Finally, I softly replied, "Yeah."
"We should get coffee sometime. You know, catch up," he said to me.
"Yeah, sure, sometime. " I replied, nonchalantly.
Sometime. It is just a case of when that sometime would be.