Chapter 6: One Santa Burger, To Go

Lorelai stared at him for a few seconds. Did he really just say it? That he loves me? she thought to herself. Say something.

"I love you, too." she finally said after forcing her voice to become audible once more. They sat there in silence for a while, her staring at him, studying his right ear as he looked intently at his hands which were now clasped together, his arms on his legs as he bent forward. His gaze turned slightly upwards.

"Where did your TV go?" he said, clamoring for a break in the silence.

"Upstairs." she answered, taken aback by the random change of topic.

"Reason?"

"Rory had Frank bring it up there a while ago. Right after…it's just upstairs." she answered, not wanting to elaborate much more than that or draw any attention to the fact that they were broken up.

Luke stood up in one swift movement. Lorelai sat there, no movement whatsoever, not even a flinch. She sat, now starring at the coffee table and the People magazine that was on it. The headline read "Brad and Jen call it quits." Somehow, this didn't seem to bode well considering her current situation.

"What happens now, Luke?" she asked, inquisitively.

He stood there in silence…

"Say something." she pleaded just under her breath.

"I don't know. I don't know what happens next. I have no answers. You seem to have found one though. Without even telling me." he said, sounding very hurt and very angry.

"You mean leaving?"

"No, watching TV in the comfort of your own bedroom wallowing with Ben and Jerry. Yeah I mean leaving." Luke replied with a particularly nasty brand of sarcasm she hadn't heard in a while.

"What else was I supposed to do, Luke? I'd sit in this room and all I did was think about you and remember all of the things that happened between us in here. I'd walk around town and all I'd see were places that reminded me of you, not to mention people giving me the patented 'I'm so sorry this happened' look which just made me feel worse. All I knew was that you were gone, that you wanted nothing to do with me and I'd blown it. You certainly weren't about to start up a conversation with me and all I could think about was the fact that I'd lost my best friend and the only man I'd ever fallen head over heals in love with in one fell swoop. So you tell me, Luke, you tell me what else I could've done?" she rambled.

"You could have talked to me! You could have told me you were going to leave, you could have told me when you started thinking about leaving but you didn't! You ran! You ran like you always do whenever things get too rough for you to handle on your own." he yelled.

"You're right, I ran, I'm weak, and I run. It's what I do, like you said. So why are you surprised huh? You know me sooo well and you care about me so much, what else did you expect?" she yelled right back.

"I don't know! Maybe I expected more than you getting scared! Maybe I thought, Hey, she's with me now, which we both apparently wanted, maybe she's grown up some and won't spaz out and run, but no, it appears I was wrong about that one!" he accused.

"You know what? You were the one who wanted out to begin with. You're the one who decided that this was all just too much and you didn't want to deal with it anymore and you ran, Luke, you ran first."

"Oh so we're doing the whole you-did-so-that-means-I-can-now thing huh? Nice. Real grown up, Lorelai." Luke said.

"You know what I think? You got what you wanted. We were together, which you had said you had wanted for such a long time, and you got scared. You got scared because there was no challenge in it for you anymore, there was nothing you had to work for so you ran. There wasn't anything you had to do. You had me-"

"I didn't have you, if I had had you, you wouldn't be doing this. You wouldn't have given up so easily!" Luke shouted.

"Me given up so easily? ME? Are you insane? You gave up on us long before I even had the chance to. I still haven't given up on us. You sit here, say you love me and then say that I'm scared? I'm the one who showed up at your apartment today, you're the one who couldn't say anything when I flat out asked you how you felt. So before you start accusing me of giving up, look at what happened those last days. Take a good hard look at who was giving up on who." Lorelai screamed.

"Okay. So I gave up, you sure as hell didn't make an effort to fix anything." he conceded.

"And you did?"

"This is pointless! There is absolutely nothing that is going to be resolved here."

"Thanks for stating the obvious, Captain Stubbing." she said.

"I can't deal with this right now." Luke said, shaking as he headed for the door.

"Yeah. You can't deal so you're leaving, again. And I'm the one who runs right?" Lorelai said, her voice quavering out of shear anger.

"You know, Lorelai, I actually thought that maybe, MAYBE, if I came over tonight, we could patch things up and start over. Go back to where we were two months ago. But it ended up like this. Us fighting, at each others throats, the way it always ends up."

"Yeah? Well this isn't exactly how I had tonight playing out in my head either, Luke, but it happened."

"So now I'm standing here, making a fool out of myself, actually wondering what it is that you want me to do. After everything we've just said I'm thinking to myself 'should I stay or should I go?'"

"That's up to you. I'm going upstairs. If you stay, do whatever the hell you want. If you leave, lock the door, I know how worried you get whenever it's left open." Lorelai quipped, sarcastically as she headed up the stairs to her bedroom.

Idiot. Luke thought to himself as he combed his hand through his hair, still debating on what he'd do. Go up there. No. Don't. She's too angry, you're too angry, you're just going to upset the both of you even more than you already are.

"So this is it." Lorelai said to herself, looking in the mirror in the bathroom as she carried her weight on her hands which were on the sink now.

She wiped her face with her hands, feeling the head that seemed to be pulsating from her face due to the overwhelming amount of anger she was experiencing. Idiot she thought.