He doesn't get it, how anyone in this town actually ends up on the beach by choice. Walking on it throws his balance out of whack. What Jess wouldn't give for pavement that actually stays in one spot, and slush in the gutters.
But even avoiding the beach, there's sand goddamn everywhere. It's in-between his toes when all he's done is put on his socks. Somehow gritty on his scalp when he goes to gel his hair in the mornings, after he peels off the crooked bedsheet that smells like stale closet air and sticks to his legs in the heat.
Hanging around Jimmy's can get dangerous, where every sidelong glance from Sasha means she's seconds from roping him into walking her twenty-eight dogs or trimming the azaleas or God knows what else ("Hey, you're young and you're able and you're staying here for free, let's shake a leg.").
By now he's gotten wise and stays out of it. He spent a couple hours today weaving up and back on the Santa Monica Pier, rolling his eyes at the infinite stands of tie-dyed crap and daring somebody to point out his dark jeans, because like hell he was buying shorts. No one did.
The day's mostly over but if he goes back to Jimmy's now, for all he knows Sasha will stick him with reading her kid a bedtime story. So he's gonna take a table at the hot dog stand and fake like he's actually comprehending Ginsberg so nobody talks to him.
Even without the ability to process plot he's still thinking about her constantly, and he's done pretending he's got the will to fight it.
There are voices now, high-pitched and babbling all at once up at the counter, and then what feels like a solid minute of giggling. He picks the wrong moment to look up and catches the eye of the tallest girl in the group, who's all dark legs and sun-streaked hair.
Whatever. He's losing natural light anyway, and he's not gonna stand by the counter all night and get a headache from the fluorescents.
"Jimmy, I'm goin'."
He gets a raised free hand in acknowledgment. Its owner is hitting keys on the register and jokingly offering a discount to whatever girl can prove she has the most temporary tattoos from the boardwalk.
He walks down closer to the ocean, because despite the sand issue it's sort of like the East River, and (his chest tightens) Larson's dock in Stars Hollow. And sure, every shrink and psychic wack job within a three-mile radius would love to get at that one: he's drawn to water because his chi is off-center. His aura has a dent in it. He misses the womb.
Fuck that.
Niggling grains of sand have already worked their way inside his shoes and gotten through the holes in his socks, which is the worst kind of predictable. Off down the beach a ways, the setting sun flares off the Ferris wheel on the pier.
He sits, pulls his knees in toward his chest, and sets his book next to him. He counts the seconds between waves fizzing out into the sand, looking past a cluster of people tossing a Frisbee down by the pale water.
A creased neon green flyer blows across his path and he stops it with his foot. Past the scuff marks from his sole, the flyer is all about "Pre-summer bash at Pacific Park! ½ off wristbands all day Sat. May 17th!" with "TODAY!" in letters too big to be allowed anywhere. The whole thing makes him swallow hard, crave a Red Bull out of nowhere.
Today's May 17th.
He should call.
They'd meant to go out that day, he forgets where, but when he went to go pick her up the wind got going pretty strong and the frames on the mantle was rattling in time with the thunder. So they picked what they wanted from her bookshelves and gave up on going anywhere else.
She was sitting upright on the couch and he was on his back, his head on a pillow propped against her hip, when he heard a page turn from overhead right as something poked into his scalp. Before he could get out, "The hell is that?" the tingling sensation moved, over towards his ear and then down, in the direction of his neck.
He'd always made it clear to Shane that either of her hands in his hair would give him full license to chuck one of her dumb celebrity magazines in the trash. He didn't mess with gel every morning for the thrill of it.
But this - Rory was etching mellow pathways through his hair and he was getting these shivers up his spine that weren't half bad, which meant he kept having to restart his current paragraph. So he shut his eyes and set his paperback, tented, on his chest.
You stopped, he said, finally.
Huh?
You stopped.
Hey, I'm in the throes of a plot twist, here. The swish of another page turn.
He opened his eyes and pressed a finger into the U-shape of her book's spine, easing it towards her by a few inches before she moved it back. So multitask.
Just like when I was able to both watch and commentate on Memento? You mean that kind of multitasking, that you did not relentlessly shush me for?
Musta been some other boyfriend of yours. From the sounds of it, the rain wasn't easing up yet but Lorelai was supposed to be back from work soon. He had reason to believe she was the type to stay put during a rainstorm if it meant saving her hair. At least he hoped as much.
Hey, Jess? How do you feel about… chicken?
Excuse me? He tilted his head back, but couldn't get a read on her expression from that angle.
I mean like the overcooked kind you eat at a restaurant, before you hop in a limo and go to a dance.
The couch springs sighed as he gave into them. You're asking me about prom.
I said nothing about it. No "p" words were uttered from this side of the couch.
But you wanna go. He eased up into a sitting position, saving his place with his thumb.
She kept her gaze steady on his. Yes. Please. The one in Stars Hollow. It's my last dance, and Lane and I always kind of talked about going.
I think you're forgetting they pay me good money to not wear a tie.
What if we only need to dance during the slow songs? "Rock Your Body" comes on, and you can keep it parked.
On the list of inescapable things in life: the rain stopping, Lorelai banging in through the front door, and bogus dress shoes that would cost a week's overtime pay so he could wear them for six hours. Better to make peace with it all now, before it happened. Minimal dancing, huh?
Well there'll still be some.
When is it?
It's gonna be May 17th. Don't forget to ask off.
I won't.
She nuzzled in close to his face, and he felt her breathe thank you into his mouth.
The Ferris wheel lights flip on, signaling him to transition, to go somewhere.
In the earliest days with Luke, his uncle had demanded that he come home when the streetlights came on. Jess had reminded him that not only was it the 21st century, it was fall, so the streetlights came on right around mid-afternoon.
There's a three-hour time difference that he's been accounting for out of habit. It's almost eleven for her. She must be… what? Asleep? Doing a movie marathon with Lorelai? There's no way she went without him, but he puts her in some arbitrary prom dress anyway. This does him no favors.
He picks Howl up from the sand and folds back the cover, into the weathered crease along the front edge of the spine. He's been starting and stopping at various poems today, not reading cover-to-cover like he used to.
He can't call. Shouldn't. Practically midnight there and for all he knows she's been asleep for hours. And to get Lorelai instead -
Just shy of the embossed grooves in the inside cover is a cell number he doesn't recognize in handwriting he does. Worst (best?) of all is the added "consider this payback" underneath, in measured loops that make him feel like lying down on his back so he can let hundreds of thousands of grains ruin his hair, and slide under his collar and engulf his chest and swallow him and Howl forever.
But it's May 17th, and he can't.
A numbing chill races up his spine when he remembers that May 17th isn't even the half of it. The exact date of her impending graduation doesn't come, even after the memory of her soothing thumb running over his palm under the kitchen table while Lorelai launched into all the possible rhymes for mortarboard. He digs a hand into the sand. And of course he'd agreed to visit her at Yale, and in September and October and the months beyond there will be more of these days to spend while literal sand fall through his fingers, an image that forces a laugh from him.
He pushes himself to his feet as the sun is just about set, and walks back toward the payphone at Third and Broadway that taunts him with her "So, you'll call me?" every time he passes. He's stopped looking at it dead-on, but it's impossible to ignore.
It's unoccupied, which is - fine. Now that he's close enough he can see four graying wads of gum stuck to the top of the payphone. A skateboard rolls over grooves in the asphalt, somewhere behind him.
He lets out the breath he's been holding and picks up the phone so he can wedge it between his jaw and shoulder, and grasps Howl by the cover with his left. One of the corners creases under his thumb.
He gets through a few numbers without much trouble but he starts thinking about the way she might say his name, plaintive and right in his ear, with her chin in the hollow between his neck and shoulder.
Hey, I know it's May 17th and I just wanted to say -
I hope you went anyways -
I hope you stayed home and said, "screw it" -
I'm thinking about you a lot but it's cool if you're not thinking about me, I get it -
I hope Dean's got a busted shoulder, I never thought to check.
He drops the phone in the cradle and the coins plink down into the return slot but he leaves them, turns on his heel and just picks a direction and walks. The sky darkens.
Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow night he'll call her cell, hope she's asleep and sees the mystery area code in the morning and figures it out. Because he said he'd call and he will, but the day he leaves a message is a day that's not happening.
He flips pages against his thumb over and over and over and over, the thhhwpt sound drowning out the bugs that swarm the boardwalk lamps overhead.
A/N: Thank you to notthereneveraround, for feeding my inspiration and sending me gifsets of Jess and Rory on the phone.