Chapter Five- Hardly a Whisper

Lorelai smoothed the cuff of the flannel between her fingertips, taking in for the first time how soft the material was. She'd touched Luke a number of times in the four odd years since she'd met him and never once had she appreciated quite how comfortable his favorite shirts were. The naughty part of her whispered that it would be so much better pulled over his biceps or spread over his broad chest. For the first time in days she actually felt a smile trying to creep across her face. She'd been forcing them into place to appear as normal as possible but the ease of a natural smile almost surprised her.

Luke cleared his throat from across the room and she raised her gaze up from the cuffs hanging far over her fingertips to meet his eyes. He'd asked her a question that she wasn't sure she had the answer to just yet. So instead of even trying to find the answer in the dark of her mind she just handed off the sweat pants as she passed him on the way over to the window.

She used a finger to part the blinds, granting her a sliver of a window out into the rest of the square where the people who had gathered to attend her wedding were spilling out of the church. Rory, Max, and her parents were huddled near the limo off to the side of the church. It was too great of a distance to read either her daughter or mother or father's expressions but Max, his mood was all too apparent. His face was slowly turning the color of a ripe summer tomato and his arms were being flung around, seemingly to accentuate his every word, but without those articulate words at what she was certain was a high volume to go along with it, his gesticulating just made him look like one of the excitable monkeys at the zoo.

She felt Luke's presence at her back before she heard anything. He said nothing as he leaned over her to look out of the small space in the blinds with her and Lorelai had to resist the immediate temptation to lean back into him. Raising a hand to her mouth, she stuck a thumbnail between her teeth and began to use her lower teeth to pick off the blush pink polish that she'd let her mother talk her into.

"He's pissed," he said quietly. Lorelai felt the words rumble their way under her skin rather than just listening to them normally.

"Yeah," she agreed.

Luke hovered over her and she knew he wasn't looking out of the window any longer and while her eyes were trained in that direction, she saw nothing. Her senses were on high alert as she tried to drink in his presence through every pore on her body. Every hair on her body stood at attention, making her hyper aware of exactly where his body wasn't touching hers and she swore she could hear his heartbeat filling her ears. Or was that her own? She couldn't be sure anymore. She removed her finger and let the two blades of the blinds fall back into place but she couldn't tear her eyes away. Lorelai knew that if she turned and looked at him with his face so close she was going to lose herself in her best friend and her life was already spiraling so far out of her control that she needed to be able to grasp onto one tiny little thing.

His mind was working an overhaul trying to figure out her motive for showing up on his apartment, demanding his help in removing her wedding dress when she was supposed to be breaking his heart. He felt like his skin was going to get up and walk off of his own body but he refused to push her because he knew her well enough to know she did everything in her own way at her own pace and pushing her would do absolutely nothing but serve to further frustrate the hell out of him.

They both remained transfixed in their spots, barely daring to breathe, for a full ten minutes before Lorelai finally found her voice.

"I couldn't marry him," she whispered at his shades.

"He likes me, loves me even, but not for everything that I am. He wants me to eat my vegetables but he doesn't just want it, he expects me to do it. He wants me to suddenly share how I raise my kid and he expects me to just give in and change all the rules to something he agrees to. He reads three papers every morning and he expects me to do the same. He's a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and Rory and I wanted him to fit, we did, but he doesn't. He doesn't fit and it isn't right and I can't marry him."

Luke felt that dead weight he'd been carrying around in his intestines start to dissipate with every word that fell from her lips. There were so many things he still wanted to know and a lot of those things had to do with everything he'd confessed less than twenty-four hours before and how that fit into all of her musing. His brain was zipping around the inside of his skull so fast that he almost missed the next thing that came out of her mouth.

"When I looked to the end of the isle today I actually expected to see you there. Not in the pews with Babette and Miss Patty and all the other townies, but there, at the other end of the isle."

It was hardly a whisper but she might as well have screamed it for how quickly the nerves began to claw holes in her innards. She'd expected the centimeter of air between the curves of their bodies to stiffen when he realized how big of a whack job she was. What kind of woman pictured someone she'd never even kissed at the receiving end of the wedding march during her own wedding to another man? Crazy women, that's who. The kind of women that men avoided like the plague because getting sucked into their insane little world was like a never ending carnival of horrors where the clowns had bloody fangs and every tunnel of love came with a father-in-law holding a shot gun and six screaming infants.

Instead, she felt him relax fractionally as he exhaled quickly, as if he'd been holding his breath or something.

"Thank God."