Thanks everyone for reviewing, it means a lot so please keep on doing it!
As CircleSky pointed out, Lane should have asked about the book when she and Rory talked. I added a little something to that point in this chapter, but maybe I need to go back and revise the talk? Let me know!
And to SA-fan: Without spoiling anything I think I can say that I'm planning for the next chapter to give us a bit of insight as to what Lorelai might be thinking about the situation.
And last, but not least: Thank you to Iscah McKrae for the wonderful picture you made for this story!
It's still dark out when Rory wakes up; she rolls over and glances at the clock, 5 AM. Too early to get up. She rests her head back on the pillows and closes her eyes. After a few seconds she opens them again. It's no use. She's been sleeping enough since yesterday morning.
Her mother had tucked her in last night after the talk with Logan. Everyone had been so understanding, no one had asked questions. She knows they must be wondering, they must be wondering what will happen next, but no one asked. Lane was the only one that had asked a question. Before she left she had taken Rory aside and asked her about the book mentioned in the letter. Rory had promised to show it to her at a later time.
No one else knew about the book. Eventually she would tell them; eventually she would show the book to them. But right now she didn't want to share this with anyone else. Having the book there, right beside her bed, felt almost like having a small piece of Jess next to her and she wasn't ready to share that piece with anyone just yet.
She stretches her hand out, picks up Jess' book from the floor and turns on the bedside light. She slowly runs her hand over the front cover. A book about their love. She carefully opens it and reads the first sentence.
Once upon a time there was a young boy who had lost all his faith in love.
The first sentence reads like the start of a fairytale. But the book is no fairytale. The book is a story without an ending. She knows that now, but she didn't know it the first time she read the book.
His book tells the story about an old man and a teenage boy. After being left heart-broken by the girl he loves, the teenage boy tried to take his life. He survived but has lost all faith in love. One day he starts talking to the neighbor across the street; an old man that usually keeps to himself in his big house, filled with books. The old man tries to restore the teenager's belief in love and while doing so he tells him about a girl he fell in love with when he was a teenager and whom he has loved ever since.
There is no doubt that the old man in the book is Jess, and he's telling their story. She turns a few pages and starts reading on a randomly chosen page. The old man and the boy are having their first conversation while drinking coffee out on the old man's porch.
The old man looked at the boy and felt sad. So young and yet so disillusioned.
"You know, I fell in love when I was your age."
The boy looked at him with disbelief.
"She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Brown hair and eyes as blue as the sky. And she was smart too."
The boy smirked.
"Yeah, and I bet you were crazy in love, and then she broke your heart, and now you're going to tell me that a broken heart will heal and that I'll meet many other girls to love."
The old man shook his head.
"No. I never stopped loving her, I have never loved anyone else. My heart's been broken since she left my life many, many years ago."
"Did she die?" The boy asked, suddenly interested in the old man's broken heart.
"No."
"What happened then?"
"If you have the time, I'll tell you the story from the beginning. But it's not a story about a broken heart. It's a story about love."
"Isn't that the same?"
"No. A broken heart is merely one of the things love might bring in its train. There are many wonderful things that come along as well. Things you wouldn't want to miss out on."
She would never have imagined that Jess' second book would be a book about love. But it wasn't the kind of love story you could find anywhere. It wasn't a feel-good, the boy gets the girl in the end, kind of book. It was a book about how love is always worth it. Even if you're left broken-hearted and alone, it will be worth it as long as you have had love in your life at least once. She turns another page.
"You know, the second time I met her I showed her a magic trick."
The boy raised his eye brows and looked at the old man as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"Yeah, I know, corny, right?" The old man chortled. "I only wanted to get her attention and she hadn't been impressed or weak-kneed by my rebellious character the night before, so what was I to do?"
The boy joined the old man in his laughter.
Rory smiles while reading. She remembers the magic trick and she remembers him giving her the book he 'borrowed' from her. He had left notes in the margin, clever, insightful notes, and she had realized that there was more to this boy than what he let people see. That move had triggered her curiosity and the more she learned about him the stronger her feelings grew until one day, without realizing how she got there, she was head over heels in love with him.
She runs her finger along the side of the book and puts her finger between two pages and skips to that place. This is the best she has felt since she got that letter, it's nice to look back and remember what they had. Sure, it's sad knowing they won't have it again, but it's nice knowing they had it. Just like the old man in the book said: it's not a story about a broken heart, it's a story about love.
In the page she just opened the man is telling the boy how the girl he loved had kissed him and then disappeared for an internship over the summer, without contacting him at all and then when she came back they got into an argument.
"She was jealous of this blonde I hooked up with over the summer. She didn't admit it, but she was. So I told her I wasn't some lapdog that would sit around and wait for her like her boyfriend did." The old man smiled at the boy and whispered as in conspiracy. "Of course, you know I would have waited for her. I would have waited forever, the blonde was just a distraction to prevent myself from going crazy, and to be honest; the thought of making her jealous was rather pleasant at the time."
Oh, she had been so jealous. She had been crazy with jealousy. Seeing Jess with Shane had made her furious. That was her first encounter with jealousy and she had hated that girl.
And she had tried to write him a letter. Every night the entire summer she had sat down with a pen and paper in front of her but the words just wouldn't come out. Writing to Dean had been easy, but writing to Jess – that had turned out to be impossible. There was so much she wanted to tell him, but in a letter; when she couldn't see his reactions to her words, when there was so much time for him to read and reread and interpret her words, see the feelings that was behind them, she simply couldn't. She figured it be better if she talked to him in person, she had planned on talking to him as soon as she got back, before Dean arrived. But nothing had gone as planned. Jess had been wrapped up with Shane and then Dean had arrived early and before she even had time to think about it everything was back in the same old rut it had always been – with the addition of Shane that is.
She flips through the pages again and stops at a random page somewhere near the middle of the book. It's the chapter were the man tells the boy how he left his love to go visit his father in California without even saying goodbye.
"But if you loved her, why did you leave her?" The boy asked in confusion.
"I left her because I wanted to come back as a man that was worthy of her love."
The boy wrinkles his forehead.
"But didn't she already love you?"
"Maybe she did. But the boy I was then kept hurting her; he couldn't be the man she needed him to be. Therefore, I had to leave. You see, love can conquer many things and survive through the toughest ordeals, but love isn't immortal and sooner or later that boy would have killed her love."
Would Jess have killed her love if he'd stayed? She can't imagine he could ever have. But there was a palpable difference in him now. He had matured. If that was because he needed to make amends with his father or because the years had changed him she had no idea. But she knows that chapter was written for her. Well, the entire book was written to her, but that chapter was especially important to her. It explained something that she never really understood. She had never understood how important it must have felt for him to leave.
Even though her father hadn't always been there for her she had a mother who would always be there for her. She can't picture what it was like not having the support from at least one of your parents. His mother had sent him to Luke and hadn't even wanted him to come home for the holidays. Her mother had postponed Christmas only so they would be able to celebrate it together. His father had left when he was still a kid. So had hers, but her father had come back, several times, and she had always known that he loved her. Jess hadn't known that about his father. Maybe it had been an important step in Jess' life to go see his father, maybe he needed to understand why his father hadn't been there for him.
She continues reading where she left off.
"Didn't you miss her while you were away?" The boy asked, seeming unwilling to understand how someone could leave the one they love like the man had done.
"Every hour of every day. That's why I couldn't say good bye. If she had asked me to stay I would have, and that would have been the beginning of the end for her love for me."
If only she had known he was leaving, she would have wanted to kiss him goodbye, and she would have asked him to stay, she would have begged him to stay, so maybe it was for the best that he hadn't said goodbye. At least now she knows why he never said goodbye.
"Wasn't she mad that you left?"
The old man chuckles.
"Oh boy was she mad. A year later I saw her again, I tried to stay away cause I felt I wasn't done, I wasn't worthy yet, but our paths crossed and she told me off. Told me she was curious to see what possible explanation I could have for disappearing like that."
"What'd you tell her?" The boy leans forward, reminding of a child all caught up in his favorite fairytale.
"I told her I loved her, and then I fled."
The boy wrinkles his forehead.
"Why did you flee?"
"Because I was afraid to hear her answer."
What would she have answered? She wishes she could say with certainty that she would have told him she loved him, but she's not sure. She had been so mad at him and she had been so hurt by him leaving and walking the other way every time they happened to run into each other. She had been hurt that the reason for his first visit in Stars Hollow since he left had been to retrieve his car and not to give her an explanation. Now she knows why. He wasn't ready yet. The same way she hadn't been ready when he came to Yale and asked her to come with him. Their timing was never right, it still wasn't.
She takes a large bunch of pages between her fingers, turns them and lands on her visit to Philadelphia and Jess' opening of Truncheon. That was the last time she saw him and it is also the second to last chapter in his book. She starts reading.
"I finally felt as if I was worthy. I finally felt I had everything I needed to make her happy."
Oh, Jess. Why couldn't he see that he needed nothing but himself to make her happy? He had been worthy since day one. She sighs. Jess was worthy, but it wouldn't have mattered if he wasn't; she would love him just as much either way and to complicate it even more, didn't that automatically make him worthy? She shakes her and continues to read.
"So? Did she come?"
"Yeah. She came. She was more beautiful than ever. The moment she walked through the door was the happiest moment in my life, I thought that her coming there, to see me, meant that we would finally be together."The man said sadly, foreshadowing that this had not turned out to be the happy reunion he had thought it would be.
She has to put the book down; the tears pouring out of her eyes are making the words all blurry. He had thought that she came because she wanted to be with him, and instead she had told him she was in love with someone else. She can't even imagine how that must have hurt him. It was so cruel of her, letting him build up all this hope of them finally being together and then with a few words ripping it all away.
She skips a few lines, she doesn't want to read about how she had let him kiss her, how she had let his hope raise as high as it could possibly get only to watch it crash down and shatter into a million pieces.
"But by then you were a man worthy of her love, so why did she leave?"The boy impatiently said. As he was still only a teenager he remembered the fairytales he read not that many years ago and he longed for that kind of happy ending.
"Because I waited for too long and another man had captured her heart."The man said and looked at the boy as if trying to imprint an important life-lesson in his mind.
"Was he worthy of her love?"
The man looked up at the ceiling and sighed, reluctant to answer, but the boys eyes begged him to and he continued.
"When you love someone that much you'll never see anyone as worthy, not even yourself."
Logan hadn't captured her heart. He couldn't have, her heart had always been with Jess, even though she hadn't known it. She had just been blinded. She had been so angry with Logan. When Jess kissed her she had felt that something was wrong, only she hadn't realized that Logan was what was wrong, not Jess.
She turns a few pages to last chapter were the boy and the man are talking about love. This time she doesn't start reading at a randomly chosen page, this time she knows which lines she wants to read. She wants to read the lines were the boy and the man are talking about love. 'Guess I'll call Matthew's poet and have him explain love to me', that's what Jess had said when she told him she loved Logan. She wonders if he did. Probably not, Jess had never been one to open his heart to people. The words in this chapters are all his own, his thoughts about love. With a deep sigh she starts reading.
"What is love then?" The boy asked, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, beneath the old man's chair eagerly listening to every word.
"Love is the most powerful of any emotion we humans are capable of feeling. Love can be both awful and wonderful. Love can make you happy as well as sad. Love can fill your head with thoughts and dreams just as easy as it can steal away the capability of thinking at all. All depending on whether you're the only one feeling this emotion or not.
"I wish love would only have the power to make you happy, as it is now, I'm still not sure it's worth it."
The man smiled, got up from his chair and picked out a book from his bookshelf.
"Have you ever read 'The Count of Monte Cristo'?" He asked, the boy shook his head.
"Let me read a few lines about feelings from the book to you." He opened the book at a marked page and started reading as the boy listened.
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living."The man closed the book and looked at the boy.
"So you see, if you don't experience the sad consequences of love, you might not know to appreciate the wonderful consequences also connected with love."
'The Count of Monte Cristo', she didn't know Jess had read that book, they had never discussed it. Then again, it had been several years since they last discussed a book.
'The Count of Monte Cristo' was a book about revenge and love. It's been years since she read that book, but she still remembers what comes after the quote; the count tells the young lovers that all human wisdom lingers in the two words: wait and hope. Right now, that is all she can do. She can wait for something to happen and she can hope that that something is Jess changing his mind about moving on.
Don't know if 'The Count of Monte Cristo' is a book that either Jess or Rory would like, but it's a personal favorite and that quote just made so much sense there. If you haven't read it: Do it! That quote won't spoil anything!