Wires and Waves
Summary: 4x21. Rory has enough money for a cab and so doesn't call Dean for a ride home. Jess shows up too early and, while waiting outside her dorm, has a chance to re-think his proposal. Season 5 re-write: What if Rory stayed in touch with Jess throughout his transformation into the guy we see in Season 6?
A/N: Sorry I've been gone a little while, I've been moving house aka discovering exactly how much crap I really own, and it's been both exhausting and time consuming, but I'm back now and should be updating as regularly as before.
A quick apology to continuity-pedants: the timing here is not always going to be completely true to the show, for the sake of the plot. Sorry! I'll always mention the episode to give a vague idea of where we are in the series, even though the plots won't always track, and I'll be skipping over or combining a few.
Episodes: Pulp Friction
Disclaimer: I own nothing. If I did, this would be a lot better written.
As ever, Rory was surprised by how easy it was to slip back onto the friendship path with Jess, no matter what major events had made them briefly divert from it. Sure, the first few meetings after The Talk had had their moments of awkwardness, but given that their main joint activities were book buying and music browsing, it was never too long before they could find safe ground, drawn back to the comfortable poles of common interest that had first brought them together. And while Rory loved slipping back into their comfortable, familiar dynamic as friends, she couldn't help feeling a slight prickling of something else under the surface.
It had been easy to keep Jess and any potentially more-than-friendly feelings associated with him at a safe distance when their relationship was confined to light, breezy phone calls. For one thing, he had just been a voice before, one she'd somehow managed to divorce from its physical form while they were talking. But now that she was seeing him regularly, all the attraction that drove her insane as a teenager was starting to creep back, with the added factor that she was now infinitely more familiar with that body and the way it could interlock with hers than she was as a teen. It was like an airlock on all those old feelings had been broken that night, and the conversation that had followed had helped detangle the lingering resentment from the good memories she'd had of their relationship. Now she found herself jolted back two years whenever she saw someone scribble in a margin, or smirk in a particular way, only now these memories didn't set off little jabs of pain but instead brought about a kind of jittery fluttering feeling. And with no Logan to distract from these feelings (she'd been successfully avoiding him ever since that night), she was struggling to keep them in check.
And yet she knew she had to. Jess may have been showing signs of positive change, but she was still teaching herself to trust him, and a part of her was still waiting for the other shoe to drop and him to withdraw. Not to mention the fact that she doubted he could ever feel that way about her again after what she'd done. They'd kind of brushed over that night when they talked things out, and since then they hadn't mentioned it at all: spontaneous sexual encounters didn't really fit too well into the whole friendship narrative they were gradually rebuilding. But she strongly doubted he could ever really see her as a romantic prospect after her little runaway act: he'd probably expect her to hop on a plane to Hawaii if he so much as brushed her hand.
And so it was with some trepidation that Rory prepared for the next step in their renewed friendship, a vital one in any Gilmore relationship: the movie marathon. At their last music browsing trip, Rory had made it to the store's DVD section and had drifted towards the Tarantinos, saying how she'd been meaning to re-watch the classics ever since she'd seen a bunch of classmates heading off for some Tarantino themed party in costumes. To which Jess had admitted, somewhat shame-facedly, that he'd never actually watched a Tarantino movie. Once Rory had finished her exaggerated gasp of horror, she immediately said they had to remedy this, and suggested a movie marathon at her dorm.
But when the appointed day came, it struck her that she hadn't entirely thought this through. Jess was going to be there. Alone with her. In their first meeting outside of a public space since they'd slept together.
The planned movie night had a reduced her to a state of quiet nerves all day, so much so she'd even asked Paris if she wanted to join them later, and was disappointed when Paris replied, "The last time I chaperoned one of your weird non-dates with that guy I ended up having to lie to that cross between a farmer and a quarterback and suffered from a sugar hangover for days after, you're on your own tonight – I'm going to Doyle's."
And so now there she was, in her empty apartment, waiting for him to show up. Without realising it, she'd found herself in front of the mirror, engaged in what could very well be described as primping. When she realised what she was doing, she hastily dropped the hairbrush and headed out to the living room, collapsing onto the sofa and trying to distract herself with a book. But she found her eyes glazing over as they slipped over the words without really taking them in, allowing her thoughts to creep back to the guy that was due to show up any minute. She was on the point of re-organising her DVD collection when she finally heard a muted thud on the door.
Pausing for what she thought was a reasonable amount of time, she got up and opened the door to reveal Jess, who had unfortunately not been disfigured by some freak accident on the way there, and so managed to set off little sparks of excitement within her just by appearing before her. "Hey," she said, smiling in a way that she hoped didn't read as shy.
"Hey, yourself," he replied. "Fancy place you got here, I walked past three guys in tuxes and two girls conversing in Latin just on my way from the car."
"Yeah, well, they don't charge you through the nose so that you can wear clothes you actually feel comfortable in and speak in languages still in use," she replied, moving aside so he could come in. "So, this is my dorm," she said, gesturing around.
"I see that. No printing press?"
"Thankfully Paris found a better home for it."
"She's not hiding around some corner, is she? I didn't bring any mac and cheese to placate her this time."
"No, she's off with Doyle tonight."
"What's a Doyle?"
"Oh, so many things: my newspaper editor, my roommate's chronic hook up, the guy who walks around my apartment in nothing but a giant fluffy gown…"
"And I think that's all the insight I need into Paris' love life for one night, thank you very much."
"Would that I could detach so easily," she replied with a grin. There was a brief pause before Rory remembered what they were actually there for, "So, do you want to sit?" she asked, and they moved over to the couch, sitting a reasonable distance away from each other, much to Rory's relief. "So, I've compiled some of the classics: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill – I'd say that's the bare minimum needed to plug this gaping hole in your cultural knowledge. Also, any good marathon needs plenty of fuel," she said, gesturing to the obscene amount of snack food and drinks she'd assembled on the coffee table.
"Oh, that was for tonight? I thought those were your supplies for the next month."
"Let me record you next time you say something like that so I can compare it to Luke – I swear it'd be indistinguishable."
"Harsh."
"But fair," she countered.
He grabbed the book she'd hastily discarded onto the couch, quickly flicking through, "The Collector, really?"
"I was in a Fowles kind of a mood."
"The mood for kidnapping people and locking them away in your country house?"
"If they tease me about the amount of snack food I consume, maybe," she said, and then tried to dial back as she realised she was inching close to flirtation. "And besides, it's not like it's torture porn – there's a lot of interesting discussion on art and class in the 60s."
"Whatever you say, Bundy."
"Hey, serial killers and kidnappers are two distinct categories of criminal – that's just sloppy referencing. Anyway, speaking of bloodshed, want to get started?" she said, gesturing towards the DVDs.
"We'd better get to it quick, before I start dying from this gaping hole in my cultural knowledge."
Rolling her eyes fondly, Rory got up to put in the first DVD before settling back to her position on the couch.
Rory awoke with a jolt, confused to find herself alone on her couch. As her eyes flicked over to the TV and she saw the last half hour of Kill Bill playing, she realised she must have fallen asleep mid-movie marathon. And then her eyes returned to the empty half of the couch, where Jess had been what to her seemed like moments ago. Her confusion soon turned into a familiar knowing disappointment. So he'd left, again, and in record time, too.
She was about to turn off the movie and start going through the motions of the usual 'abandoned by Jess' emotional routine when she heard movement from the other side of the apartment. To her surprise, Jess emerged from the bathroom, meeting her befuddled gaze with an amused smirk, "Re-joined the land of the awake, I see."
Still recovering from her initial assumption, Rory made a distracted reply, "Barely."
"And after all the speeches I got whenever I fell asleep mid-marathon."
"Hey, I'm not the one who needed to see these movies," Rory said, getting back into her conversational stride. "And what's up with not pausing when you leave the room?"
"I thought that broke the no bathroom breaks rule."
"That rule doesn't apply when a) I'm asleep and b) we're watching a classic that you have somehow never seen before."
"I didn't want the abrupt silence to wake you up," he said, flopping back down into his seat.
"How very chivalrous of you," she conceded, "but if you think we're not rewinding to the place you left off at, then you really don't know me and my completionist tendencies at all."
"You were a lot less bossy asleep," Jess complained, as Rory started rewinding. "Okay, that's where I was."
"Good, now if there are any future interruptions, we are going to pause, like civilized people," Rory said, pressing play as they returned to the movie.
But Rory found it difficult to focus from then on, and not just because of her recent state of unconsciousness. Why had she just assumed that Jess had up and left? Even with their past, it would have been way more natural to assume he'd gone to the bathroom or got up to get a snack or something. It alarmed her how deeply rooted her conviction was that he could disappear at any time. She thought she'd finally put a lot of the stuff that had happened between them behind her, but she still found herself unable to trust him completely, as her snap assumption moments before went to show. She tried to settle back into the comfortable flow of the evening, but she found it hard to shake the uncomfortable feeling that had come across her when she woke up and he wasn't there, and she remained reserved for the rest of the night.
A/N: Please review!