Disclaimer: Gosh, still not mine.

Author's note: Thank you so much for your great, humbling reviews. I'm sorry for taking such a long time between updates. But I am writing, and I refuse to abandon this or any of my stories. Hopefully you'll decide to stick with it as well.

CHAPTER 2 - Running

Writing The Subsect had represented the hardest year in his life.

He'd bruised his fingers holding leaky blue pens. His hands had shaken as he put out cigarettes next to his typewriter.

He'd finally produced something he thought she would be proud of.

And she had been. Her smile had widened and she had devoured the book, cover to cover.

But it hadn't been enough.

They'd broken each other's hearts in ways no fiction could mend.

So he had walked away, and then she had.

It was what it was.

And what it was, was this: past tense.

But it really wasn't…

One doesn't write about the girl in present tense if one is over her, Chris had wisely pointed out.

That conversation had ended in a fist-fight, and it was the last mention Chris or Matt had made of the mystery girl in the acknowledgments.

Yes, writing The Subsect had represented the hardest year in Jess Mariano's life.

And it had marked the beginning of the silent loneliness of lunch-hour newspapers and empty apartments.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Anonymity. Rory had craved it. Stars Hollow had always had a first and last name for her, she was never one to get lost in the crowd. But here, in Philadelphia, no one knew her.

She had asked for anonymity, because she hadn't wanted Jess Mariano to know it was her column in the paper, to know it was his town she was invading. The editor had gladly granted her request, enjoying the thought of adding mystery to the column.

She still wrote for a couple of hard news outlets, freelance, using her own name. Usually, she never wrote for the same paper or magazine twice. Usually, she picked media based in cities as far away from Philly as she could get.

She wanted him to think she was off to see the world.

But in reality, she just e-mailed.

Denial. It ain't just a river in Egypt.

In truth, she waited for him to run into her outside the paper, or in her corner store.

Why else had she moved here?

She had traveled so many miles just to end up back in the place where she'd lied to him the most.

- - - - - - - - -

I cannot help writing unsigned postcards to her. In them, I warn her.

I tell her to run. Because if she doesn't, she'll have to stay… forever.

I tell her made-up stories about our travels.

I send each from a different town, because I refuse to wait for unknown recipient notices.

I send them each from a different town, because I can't face the idea of her not writing back.

Dave and I, we move at the speed of light.

Dave and I, we bum around, all limbs and hair, and the messes we've made trail not so far behind.

Dave and I, we hardly sleep, we're driven by inertia alone.

Once you start moving, it's so fucking hard to just stop.

- - - - - - - - -

Jess had a routine worked out.

It included calling Luke, but not asking about Rory.

It included calling Lily in California, avoiding all subjects pertaining to his father or his love life.

It included checking up on Liz and hearing Doula's first words over the phone and maybe, once in every blue moon, dropping in for a visit, stealthily, without a soul in Stars Hollow knowing.

His visits were quick because he knew if he had enough time to stay he would, and if he stayed he'd go to her house and knock on her window, the window of the house she no longer lived in.

In his routine calls to Luke, he always failed to ask about her, but that did not mean that he had lost track of her.

She wrote for papers and magazines all over the country.

Part of his routine included imagining her on planes and trains, cars she drives, bullets she dodges. He read as she wrote about everything under the sun, nothing too personal, no real town profiles. She moved around a lot, Jess imagined, and it prevented her from getting to know the communities she wrote about. She would often track and profile cybercommunities.

He had done his best to never visit Stars Hollow for too long, and he never visited on holidays. He was certain that if he were to stay and see her, he would stop breathing.

He'd had to run from Stars Hollow.

Because if he hadn't, he might have just stayed... forever.

- - - - - - - - -

Dave and I part ways somewhere between Montreal and Anchorage. No matter how hard he tries to find it, his promised land keeps slipping further away. He pawns his guitar and looks at me sheepishly. I drop him off at the nearest Y. He leaves his lucky pick on the dashboard.

When I meet the fork on the road, I hesitate.

- - - - - - - - -

The Canadian landscape is covered in snow, and I know there is no way for the road to get me to where I'm going.

There is no truth to the Great American Roadtrip, at least not when it's my car I'm driving, with no chains and all the roads three inches deep in snow.

Anchorage is a dream, and I don't do dreams.

I retrace my steps, retrace the roads, retrace.

I end up at the same sleepy old town.

I was supposed to run.

I have crawled back.

The soup kitchen is closed.

Hicksville, USA, eight o'clock at night: everything is closed.

I walk the town, tracing squares around the tiny blocks, around the town square. All shop windows the same.


All except one.

I see postcards on the bookstore window, up and down, forming rows and columns and it all seems too perfect.

I throw gravel at the window above the bookstore.

And I wait.

- - - - - - - - - - -

There was optimism in The Subsect that Rory had not expected from Jess.

Of course, it was a tragic book about loss and friendships scattered on the road, it was a book about leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back… But the fact that it was written in present tense had always felt like a curious oddity to Rory.

It was almost as if it was Jess's way of saying: This is still happening. We can still do better than this. We can be perfect this time. Or this time. Or this time.

She decided this would be the place to start a review.

She decided.

As she set pencil to paper, she came across one clear thought.

This was, perhaps, her first real adult decision since saying no to Logan's marriage proposal.

This was it.

And her pencil furiously covered the paper with words.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Words. Words had been his weapon. He had used them to write an ending for Joshua, for the girl-with-no-name, for Dave the guitar player, for the Alaskan man in Chapter 1. He had used them to convince himself that everything would be fine once he wrote those two simple words.

But he hadn't been able to.

At the last moment, the night before the book was to go to print, he had Matt change the end.

He removed those two words. That oh-so-final The end.

He replaced them with the phrase "fork in the road".

These days, he never faced forks in the road anymore. He took no roads. He walked to and from work. He tied himself down to a routine.

And now, words, the weapon of choice, had decided to leave him.

His routine included sitting in front of his computer – which he now had – and staring at the blank screen for two full hours.

His fingers were devoid of ink.

Every night he would resign himself to becoming just the guy at the bookstore.

- - - - - - - - - - -

There's no answer from the apartment above the bookstore.

I fall asleep on the front step, fully aware that it may warrant my arrest in the morning.

Instead, I'm awakened by the jingling of keys, and the sound of the aforementioned keys dropping to the floor.

When she sees me, she does nothing special.

She says nothing.

She doesn't open the bookstore.

She tugs at my jacket.

She leads me home.

- - - - - - - - - - -

The thought that I have no home does not stop her. She grins like a child, she leads me to a half-empty apartment building that's probably condemned. She takes me up the stairs, because the elevator doesn't work, and she avoids the drunk man on the second floor landing, and the squatters on the fourth floor.

Her door is open, I won't ask why.

It's not just her door, I realize. A few people brush past us on their way out.

She says nothing.

She does have a room all her own, or so it seems, and it's enough for the moment. She takes off my clothes. She takes off her own.

I still have gravel on the palm of my hand.

She refuses to run.

She is doomed.

I am doomed.

We are the subsect.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

He always imagined what sex with her would have been like.

It was what one might call an obsession.

He had written out drafts of sex scenes for The Subsect, but none of them seemed to do her justice. It all seemed cheapened.

Finally, he'd decided to write everything as an impression, a collection of polaroids, hazy and dreamlike, sharp corners with blurred middles.

He imagined that it would be like that, with her. All confusion and hesitation and memory.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

She found, hours after starting her review, that what she had written was instead an apology.

Or not exactly an apology, but definitely not a review.

It was a letter.

Once, long ago, her mother had asked her to describe her relationship with Jess.

It was, Lorelai had said, a motherly exercise.

Rory had closed her eyes, tightly, as tight as they would go, and she had found just one way of describing what she and Jess had had.

It had been a relationship of unsent letters.

All the times she started to write to him, when she was in Washington, when he went to New York, when he went to California, when she was on the campaign trail. All the things he had left unsaid. All the things she wished she had said.

It was a relationship of unsent letters.

And this almost-epistolary relationship of theirs had never ended, because they had always longed to say more.

Or at least she had. Still did.

She was afraid, and fear was always the greatest of enemies.

But what she was scared of was harder to pin down.

Was she afraid that he hated her? Or worse yet, was she afraid that he'd forgotten her?

She had always wondered what it would be like to meet again, on a street corner, in a bookstore.

She had wondered if she would stammer. She had wondered if he would stare.

She still remembered his lips on hers, from last time. It was a vague flash of a memory, soon followed by the sinking of her stomach into a bottomless pit. She had told him that she didn't love him.

She had regretted it the second it came out of her mouth.

And she'd never had the courage to show her face in front of him again.

But she owed him this letter, this unsent letter.

She owed him the review she couldn't print, the words she couldn't say.

She folded it three times and sealed it in the envelope.

She owed him a sent letter.

TBC...

Please tell me what you think. Every review helps me fine-tune my writing... Thank you for reading. Di.