Disclaimer: I do not own the Gilmore Girls or any of its characters, nor do I have any connection or affiliation with the actors and actresses, producers, show-runners or the CW. Because let's face it – if I did, Gilmore Girls would still be on, Rory would've married Logan, and I wouldn't be writing this fanfic.

Rating: PG for now, for language.

Major Relationships: Rory & Logan, with Luke & Lorelai from time to time.

Author's Note: Hope you continue to enjoy the updates.

NEWS: I am now a registered Beta Reader for . Please feel free to contact me if you'd like me to Beta your story.

If I Never See You Again

By Heather Nicole

Chapter 15

The flight to Stars Hollow was agonizingly long for Logan.

He was nervous – both for Rory and for himself.

They'd stayed up all night talking it out.

Rory had decided without a doubt that the conversation she was going to have with her mom had to be her thing – Logan tried to convince her to let him be there, to be a buffer. But in the end, he let her make the decision – if she thought it was like walking into a lion's den without a chair, it probably would be.

They'd realized that among all the other things that Rory needed to pack and bring with her, she'd also left her car at home. They'd decided they'd ship it from Connecticut to California – it was going to cost a fortune, but it was better than spending days driving. It was now Tuesday, and Logan and Rory had yet to purchase return tickets to California, not knowing how long this would take. But at any length, Logan would start work in less than a week and he couldn't afford a cross-country road trip when his house was lacking in furniture (that had now been ordered, but still needed to be put together) and he still needed to unpack.

Logan had called Honor, who was ecstatic to hear that Rory and Logan were back together. They'd be taking a cab to her place first, and Logan would lay low there until Rory was done talking with Lorelai. Of course if the conversation went badly, Logan could be spending a night or two there as well.

Hopefully, if all went well, they would be back on a plane to Palo Alto by Thursday afternoon, giving them plenty of time to get settled in the house before Logan started work on Monday.

Of course the trick to getting to Thursday was getting through the next few days alive. Logan wasn't sure how Lorelai would react. He was more worried for Rory than he was for himself, and while he was 99.999% sure that Lorelai would never actually resort to violence to put Rory on the path she thought she would be on, Logan knew that at any length, she wasn't going to be happy … at least not at first.

He knew that for Rory, the plane ride probably felt fast. He could see in on her face and in her eyes that she was using this time to prepare herself. He could see her lips moving ever so slightly, as if she was running over the speech in her head. He reached over to take her hand to comfort her, and squeezed it softly. She squeezed his hand back, and looked towards the window. Rory was dreading this even more than he was.

But for Logan, dreading it just meant that he wanted to get it done and over with. He wanted the next few days to be over quickly so that he and Rory could get started with their life. He wanted it to be done and over with so that he could get started on a job that he was actually excited to do, that only 24-hours ago, he'd been thinking about giving up. But mostly, he wanted it to be done and over with so that Rory could stop stressing about it. He hated to see her stressed.

Of course, he knew that while her anxiety over this would go away, it was only the tip of the iceberg. Rory had spoken with Hugo Grave this morning, which meant that the job that was hers was officially not hers anymore, and although not showing up for her first day was almost as official as it got, actually saying the words made it more real and now, she'd be stressing out over finding a job.

'If only she'd ask my dad for help,' he thought. After all, Logan wasn't on Mitchum's list of favorite people, but as of lately, it seemed he liked Rory more than he liked Logan. But that wasn't Rory – she always wanted to do things for herself. She didn't want anything handed to her. Rory had yet to accept the fact that nepotism made the business world – and the world of journalism – go around. And in the world of journalism, there was no better man to speak on your behalf than Mitchum Huntzberger. He'd shoot an email to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle about needing a possible position for a friend of the family, and two reporters would be fired just to make sure that she could be given a substantial salary. It was the Huntzberger way.

Of course, this was what made him love Rory – she was different, self-sufficient, determined and unique. And she was incredibly talented and bright. In theory, she shouldn't need anyone to get her a job. But in this job market, where newspapers across the country found themselves experiencing leaner times, it was often the younger reporters with not as much to show for themselves that didn't even get a glance from big name papers – or any paper, for that matter.

In Logan's opinion, there was no more talented a writer than Rory Gilmore – he'd thought that before he dated her, from the second her article on the Life and Death Brigade appeared above the fold in the Yale Daily News. He knew she had it, even if his father had only a few months later told her she didn't. But sometimes, age means a lot in the job market, and so does name-recognition. And sometimes, a word or two from a big wig would get you just a slightly better chance, just enough to actually give an editor a chance to see how fantastic you are. It was like a magnifying glass that only gave you a chance for your positive attributes to shine.

But it would be hard for him to convince Rory of this.

And at the moment, it didn't matter.

In an hour, Rory and Logan would be landing in Hartford, and within the next two hours, she'd be on her mother's doorstep, entering her childhood home that she'd left only just yesterday to tell her mother that she'd bucked her job opportunity, the one they'd stressed over for three days straight, only to hop on a plane to California and make the bold and spontaneous decision to move in with her boyfriend. And this just left Logan with a series of questions, all of which he wished would be answered sooner, rather than later, and made the plane seem small, as if it were suffocating him.

Would Rory living with Logan really seem so bad to Lorelai?

Which was worse – Rory living off a bus and in motels, never knowing when she could come to Stars Hollow but having a stable job, or living in California when she could come to Stars Hollow whenever she pleased but having no job prospects yet?

And – and this was the question that plagued him – now that he was, by choice, bringing her home to Stars Hollow, the place she loved more than anywhere in the world, would be able to the extrapolate her from it again, from the place that was so near and dear to her heart that it drew her in like a magnet?

She loved all those people. She loved that place. And even though he knew how much she loved him, he wondered if at the end of the day, she could love him enough alone, more than all those things combined.

And he found himself wondering if he was worth the agony he was putting her through.