Disclaimer: Anything you recognize isn't mine.
AN: Time jump ahead! Two months. It's in the fic, but I'm being careful.
POSTED DAY EARLY DUE TO FAMILY MEDICAL ISSUE.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Emily Gilmore hated echoes.
Her voice echoed.
Emily Gilmore disliked her aging reflection.
Her home was full of mirroring surfaces. Black glass, bright metal.
Emily Gilmore despised banality.
The mansion was full of simplistic shapes that could, quite honestly, be bought at some department store.
She sat in bed, with her brightest emerald green silk pajamas on, and a breakfast tray on the table, with four magazines in front of her. One was about beautiful houses, and another about gardens, and the third about interiors and designs. The fourth was French Vogue, because Emily believed in balance and inspiration.
Using tasteful sticky-backed note slips, she marked advertisements, jotting ideas on those note slips, until her phone chimed a reminder.
She had one hour until her hair appointment.
Sighing, she padded to the shower, an expansive chamber with built-in benches and niches with bare white tiles and slate-blue towels. It struck her as frustratingly boring, and when she was done washing, drying, dressing, and applying cosmetics, she studied the lipsticks in her make-up case. She chose a pink she rarely used, walked to the bathroom, and with bold looping movements, drew a four-petaled flower on the glass shower door. The violence of her action wore the lipstick to nothing in moments.
"Better," she concluded with a tiny smile, and tossed her head before she tugged her tweed jacket straight and sauntered out to her car.
At a stop light, she pressed a few buttons on her phone.
"Dominick," she trilled when someone answered. "It's Emily Gilmore, I have a marvelous project for you. Oh no, I adore the Art Deco, of course, but wouldn't it be splendid to accessorize it with plush and luxurious fabrics? I saw a delightful Moroccan rug with the most elegant design, and suddenly it popped into my head. Think of it! Yes, yes, exactly, hand-woven fabrics and raw silks!" She glanced up, as traffic began to move. "Yes, I'm quite busy today but tomorrow? Excellent!"
She set down the phone, and returned her attention to driving. Now she had a project. In the spring, she could focus on the garden. For now, she could fill the mornings for at least three months. The house would be full of noise. There would be comings and goings every day but Sundays.
Her breath came easier, knowing that.
GG GG GG
Luke's heart raced as he checked his reflection. It was the same, yet different. That little inner-Luke didn't accuse him out of his own eyes. Some of the lines of the face were deeper, and some more relaxed. A hardness came into his gaze, behind his eyes, and he recognized it as that long-time friend-foe. The Great Wall of Luke, Lorelai had jokingly dubbed it once.
She would see it. Know it.
"Time to go all in, Butch," he told his reflection quietly, and lightly shook out his shoulders and arms to rid them of building tension. "She said yes to a date. No standing still till it's too late, no running when it is too late. Gotta walk. Together. Or get off the road."
His reflection agreed this was all true, and seemed to find no reason to scold him. Luke wet his lips nervously, smoothed his hands over the pullover sweater. Lorelai had bought it for him, years ago, and it still seemed classic and perfect.
He remembered her hurt, when Anna bought him luggage, and thought of Rachel, coming across Lorelai dressing him in the diner. Rachel had known then, he suspected, that their chance had gone when she last did. Lorelai must have seen that luggage, he cringed inwardly, as his repudiation of her and their past, their future.
If Christopher bought her luggage, he'd have…
His stomach flipped. I can't. She knows how awful I can be. She'll run. She did run. But we crawled back. I'm...
"Dad!"
He left the bathroom, more or less terrified.
April shook her head. "And you complain about how much time I take. Okay, you have money and your phone?"
He smiled faintly, to think he'd aged into an era where you didn't take money for a phone call, but had a phone in your pocket. "Yes, I do, and you need to get downstairs, you know how your mom is if you're not on the sidewalk five minutes early."
April sighed, huffed, rolled her eyes, and not-quite-stomped a foot. "Ugh. Parents!" she growled, put on her winter jacket, and flung this year's overloaded schoolbag across her back. "Geez. I just wanted to see you on the big day."
"No pressure," mumbled Luke, discovering he missed wearing blue jeans. It felt wrong to wipe his sweaty hands on the dressy trousers. He hugged her impulsively, kissed her forehead. "Thanks, kiddo. Your old man's…"
"Yeah, I know, it's kinda not an incentive to date," replied April, and preceded him out of the apartment. "Seriously, if it doesn't get easier when you're older, why bother? Practice obviously isn't helping anyone."
"Keep thinking that," he advised sternly, hopefully, and triple-checked his face for stubble. He was coming to enjoy a clean-shaven face. It showed he could look at himself in the mirror. "Till you're fifty."
It had taken two months to get from the supper at Richard Gilmore's, to a supper on their own, in a dating context. Their phone calls had become daily, and conversations had been intense, long, rambling, casual, virtually every word in Jess's abandoned copy of Roget's Thesaurus. That hadn't made it easy to ask her.
Yet she hadn't hesitated to say yes.
That meant a lot. No doubts it was a date. No wondering what line was going to be crossed. No confusion. Stark terror, yes, but not a bit of confusion.
He waited with April until Anna picked her up, violet shadows around Anna's eyes. Her mother's condition was the kind Luke dreaded, a slow decline into decrepitude and helplessness. According to April, it was made worse by her grandmother's relentless criticism of Anna's life, while Anna was housing her at no cost. Not even Anna could argue against the diner apartment as a quieter study venue, although Luke knew she'd wanted to.
He banished his ex from his thoughts. He got into his truck. It was a very big car, in his opinion, and smelled faintly of the air freshener April insisted he needed, lest her friends' noses be offended.
"We're not starting over," he told himself firmly, and loudly. "We never ended. Not really. No, that's wrong. We're… Crap, I shoulda had Jess write me something to say!"
Finally, he was at Lorelai's house, and knocked on the scarlet door.
She opened it immediately, hand dropping in a way that told him she'd fastened an earring a heartbeat before. Her dress was a sort of purplish color, her hair loose, and he made a noise that might have been "Wow" if he'd been able to breathe.
"I, you, uh, whoa," he said at last.
She blushed. "That's a good compliment. Thank you. You look very handsome, and I'm not only saying that because you were nice to me."
He relaxed all at once, warming inside and out. "Uh. Thanks. So. Oh, here," he blurted, and grabbed her coat sleeve to help her slide into the gray wool. "Okay, here's the trust exercise part I warned you about. April picked the restaurant."
"Why would that be… Ooooohhhh," comprehended Lorelai, eyes dancing. "She's on her vegan kick."
As she locked her door behind her, he admitted ruefully, "Yeah. There's this supplemental drink she uses, to help with nutrients. What's the point if you have to buy this expensive powder that smells like lawn clippings and gym socks?"
By that last, he had helped her into the truck, and Lorelai burst into a laugh. "Less than sixty seconds to full rant!"
"Sort of a rant," he modified, walked around, got in, and re-started the engine. "The full rant was when she asked me to make a bean burger for her with something called spirulina. Who eats that?"
There was a strange hesitation in the air between them. Lorelai exhaled out a curt, "Thank you for telling me."
"About algae?"
"April," she whispered. "I don't want to take it for granted."
They were at a stop light, allowing him to reach over and touch her hand with his, a brief tap of reassurance. "Hey. I'm still… Y'know. Ashamed. Of what. Who. All that. But you were right."
He waited for banter, quips, distracting chatter. She offered none, but encouraged him to continue with a tiny bob of her head.
"When you said it's nothing to be ashamed of. That Anna didn't tell me about April." He cleared his throat, his face growing hot. "What you said, about how Rory's dad was the one who needed to be ashamed, he knew all along and… Well, it helped. Meant a lot more from you than Liz, for some reason." He grinned as he spoke. "Maybe because Liz is… Well, she's Liz. She was telling me we found our wormhole."
Lorelai's forehead and nose scrunched up. "Our wormhole? Did you ask what that means?"
"Hell no. Some things I don't want to know."
A few moments later, they were at the appointed restaurant, a tiny-looking place with a discreet sign reading Nude Food.*
"Oh God," snickered Lorelai, and begged, "I have to take a picture for Rory, please?!"
"At least they didn't spell it F-U-D-E," said Luke weakly. He thought April was on his side. He'd ground her until thirty for this. "Yeah. Picture. Rory."
Lorelai took two snapshots with her phone, squared her shoulders. "About the internet, Luke… Menus listed online is a thing."
"Yeah," he conceded. "Might not be a bad idea if I ever get a website."
"You don't have a website? With a hotlink from the homepage for the local chamber of commerce and state tourism bureau? I have to set you up with the guy who did ours, we've had three events from the online exposure, y'know, venues in quaint Connecticut," Lorelai enthused, which got them in the door, and through the tedium of waiting for the hostess to notice their existence.
"We found Michel's long-lost twin sister," muttered Luke when the young woman's accented voice implied infinite boredom and disgust at her plebian job.
"I'm sneaking a picture, seriously," whispered Lorelai in return. "No way they're not related. They have the same pouty-mouth thing."
Their table was for two, softly lit by dangling lamp, and the prints on the walls were all of food plants, artistically rendered. Luke wondered if April set this up as some test. If they could survive a vegan dinner, then… Realistically, then they'd never return, and he'd make April's next nutrient shake with hot vanilla milk in revenge.
According to the menu, there were three courses. An appetizer-soup-or-salad; an entrée; a dessert. A quick look reassured Luke immensely. He prepared to tell Lorelai what a few items were.
"Oh, quinoa," she said with a tiny grin. "Hah, I told Sookie people really eat it. But I'm not going vegetarian, so… I think I'll have the mixed greens, then the filet mignon, and maybe we can split a dessert?"
Luke choked up.
He covered his eyes with his hand.
From across the table, he heard a firm, "Luke. Eating healthy is a good thing, no matter why I'm doing it, right?"
He nodded, still hiding his eyes.
Her fingers glided over his, and tugged them down.
She stared at him, steady and sober and kind.
"Right," he said, and smiled warmly. "Yeah. And beef's full of bad things."
Her eyes glinted mischievously. "What're you getting, then, Mr. Health Expert?"
"Tomato bisque and, uh, well, the uh…" He reddened. "Okay, fine, filet mignon."
They shared a grin.
"I'm not splitting a 'chocolate volcano cake' for dessert," he warned. "They've got fruit tarts."
"Well, I'm not splitting something made with rhubarb, because I really can't stand it, even with sugar and strawberries, so I guess I'm having a lot of cake. I thought you'd get the fish."
"Yeah, about fish," he said uncomfortably, and leaned back, waiting for the server to take their orders. "It's salmon. If I eat the salmon, I'm ruining the world."
She giggled. He'd missed that sound. "Oh no. You got guilted. I wasn't allowed to look at bacon for about three years after Rory first read Charlotte's Web."
He laughed, and felt a happy thrill. They really could talk the same in person as on the phone, and be at ease, and maybe, just maybe, all in really was about joy instead of fear.
GG GG GG
AN: *Nude Fude was the name of a real restaurant that offered, in fact, very little food without a lot covering it, and the only vegetarian option was if you picked the weird bits out of the salad. The idea 'nude food' crops up as a slogan for anti-waste, anti-processed-foods, and many other causes, and I don't own the idea of it, the names, or anything else. The real Nude Fude was not in Connecticut, but I figured it'd sound ominous and then surprise the Ls. The real one certainly surprised me and my husband. Never assume a turnip on the sign means vegetables inside, that's all I'm saying.
EB White's book Charlotte's Web is, to my knowledge, not linked to any decline in the consumption of bacon. Nor any decline in spider-smashing. Hmm.