Sleeping with Dean Forester was the worst mistake that Rory had ever made. There were reasons that she had made that choice that were... fairly understandable. Not excusable, but understandable.

The roots of that terrible decision went back to when Jess was new to Stars Hollow. She hadn't thought much of him the first time they met, when he came into her bedroom. He was interested in her books, but far more interested in sneaking out. Sure, he was undeniably cute, but she was in a very serious high school relationship that was not to be disrespected.

No, their first meeting wasn't when she started to enjoy his presence in her life. That happened when she was in Luke's diner, already closed, after an absolutely disastrous presentation into high society. Her mother and Luke did their whole flirting-not-flirting back and forth, and Jess showed up in Luke Danes cosplay. He was quickly kicked out, of course... but he knew that Rory was watching. He shot her a smile before going back upstairs to change.

That smirk popped into her head a few too many times in the next couple of weeks. It wasn't until far later that she realized why.

Only a couple weeks later, Dean and Jess came head-to-head for the first time. She was outside Doose's, waiting for Dean, and Jess found her. She was upset with him - who knows why - and he was using his clever humor to try and fix the problem. He teased her, he teased the town, he - oh! He'd drawn an outline in chalk, like a crime scene, on the sidewalk outside the market. She shouted at him about how terrible it made Luke feel. He finally showed understanding, a little remorse, and then moved back into jokes. He proved that he was human... which, of course, was not something he bothered to do in front of Dean. The warmth that came from him only seconds before was completely absent. It was the first time she saw the face that the rest of Stars Hollow saw. From that moment on, Dean unsuccessfully tried to hide his unease around Jess Mariano.

Dean's unease made her feel guilty. That ended up being a recurring theme for the remainder of their relationship, actually. The carriage ride, the snowman competition, the removal of her poster from the video store, the basket auction, the umbrella in the diner, the night they ate take out with Paris, his great uncle's funeral... there were more times, she was sure. Every time she was around Jess, he made her smile or laugh. He made her feel like life was less serious... and then she would try and forget the way she felt. She didn't want to examine those feeling she had because then she would have to stop herself from having them.

Thus, the guilt.

Their very public break up felt like karma in the moment. It was a punishment that she deserved to suffer through. Looking back as an adult, she wasn't sure that that was wrong.

"I'm gonna sit here as long as I like, and I'm gonna do whatever I like, and if you don't like it, then just ignore me and pay attention to your boyfriend."

She didn't pay him enough attention. Dean would never have worked as her long term partner, of course. They were too different. He tolerated her info-dumps, he didn't like to read or analyze film as constantly as she did, he wasn't academically or professionally ambitious, and he wanted a traditional male-female split of household responsibilities. None of that would work for Rory and if she forced her opinions on him, he'd have been miserable. But none of those reasons lead to their break up the way they would have if they'd matured together.

Rory knew that Jess was the only real reason, no matter how many excuses she could come up with post-mortem.

Her guilt was all-consuming for a while. She'd even kissed Jess for the first time right before crawling up to Dean's bedroom window. The apology she offered, for all the things she'd done wrong in their relationship, didn't assuage the nausea the way she thought it would. When he asked if she was "With him now?", Rory almost threw up on the spot. She couldn't sleep for a long time, she just forced herself to study instead.

She already loved Jess at that point, something she never stopped feeling guilty for. That was probably why she never got the nerve to tell him, it was the last betrayal of Dean's trust.

Maybe that guilt was partially Jess's fault. He never respected their relationship... but he'd never said he loved Dean. He never promised anything to Dean. It was her job not to cross the line.

And yet, she held her guilt against Jess. She distrusted him instead of admitting that she couldn't trust herself. She assumed the worst in him because she couldn't admit to her own low self esteem.

For all of his faults, Jess was a near-perfect boyfriend. They had everything in common, they spent every moment they could together just talking about nothing and everything. He had secrets, but he was a seventeen year old. He never trusted that Luke would take care of him forever, so he felt that he had to make his own money and that snowballed into an unmanageable shitstorm that he eventually bailed on.

Maybe when she started to flirt with Dean again, it was because she was trying to fix the way things ended.

Maybe she was trying to pretend that she'd never ruined what she had with Jess just to appease a boy that she wouldn't have ended up with anyway. If she and Dean were meant to be, then Jess could be a footnote in their story instead of a the worst heartbreak of her young life.

Maybe it was something else.

But the last thing that had pushed her from inappropriate flirting to homewrecker, was when Jess came to her dorm.

"Come with me."

"Where?"

"I don't know…away!"

He was desperate and scared.

"Are you crazy?"

"Probably. Do it. Come with me. Don't think about it."

"I can't do that."

Knowing that she felt the urge to say yes was scary, too. She was finally in college, she was on the right track, she had to be over him.

"Look, we'll go to New York. We'll work, we'll live together, we'll be together. It's what I want. It's what you want, too."

"No!"

This wasn't what she needed, even if he was still magnetic.

"I want to be with you, but not here. Not this place, not Stars Hollow. We have to start new."

"There's nothing to start!"

She needed him to want her as more than an escape. She needed him to understand that her home was a part of her, that he couldn't separate the two.

"You're packed. Your stuff is all in boxes. It's perfect. You're ready. And I'm ready. I'm ready for this. You can count on me now. I know you couldn't count on me before, but you can now. You can."

She was scratching her fingers against the walls of her cage until they bled, begging herself not to be strong. He said he was ready for this, for her.

"No!"

She knew he wasn't ready.

"Don't say "no" just to make me stop talking or make me go away. Only say "no" if you really don't want to be with me."

She knew that she wasn't ready.

"No."

Then he left. Not one more word was exchanged. He gave her a long look, but he didn't cry. Neither did she, actually... she sat there in her living room for almost two hours, her head in her hands, before getting ready for bed.

She told Lane about it, who was scandalized. And Rory said she thought it was weird, that it was crazy and awful... but Lane said it was romantic. Every time her best friend affirmed her inner thoughts, she felt more sure that she had to push them down. The rush of scarily powerful emotions had shaken her to her core; suddenly, someone had the power to derail everything she'd been working for with three simple words: "Come with me."

Her relationship with Dean, on the other hand, had been built on a much shallower love. That was why he felt safe: no matter what he said, he would never have the power over her that Jess had.

Rory probably should have seen a therapist at that point. Instead she decided to sleep with a married man...

Which ruined her relationship with her mother...

Leaving her to make the stupid decision to drop out of college.

At that point, she was an out of control snowball on a very steep hill. Her only support system, her grandparents, had never done something so wrong in their lives. They were also refusing to admit that she had made a wrong decision because she was finally turning to them instead of her mother for support.

Even Logan didn't really try to stop her from dropping out, or "taking time off" as she put it. After all, if she was going to be his wife then she didn't technically need a job, let alone an education. To be fair, he did think that she would go back to school eventually. He had faith in her love for academics, but he accepted her as she was.

When she measured that against her fractured relationship with her mother, it felt like he was her strongest supporter.

He was more accurately one of her many enablers. Where Lorelai couldn't convince her to do the right thing, her grandparents and Logan couldn't have convinced her either. It needed to come from someone she didn't think was looking down on her from a high horse, definitely someone that wasn't an authority figure in her life.

She needed Jess, it turned out.

Jess, who stole Pierpont the gnome and 500 baseballs. Jess, who created a fake crime scene outside of Doose's. Jess, who annotated her books, jumped onto a moving carriage to sit with her, destroyed a snowman so she would win, switched censored DVDs to take her picture down, bought her basket, made up a reason to bring her dinner, took her our for ice cream, made sure that she was out of the car and okay before even checking his own injuries in a car accident, took her to a NYC record store, ended things with Shane the moment she was available, put up with her hiding them as long as he could, put up with her not defending him from Dean, put up with her taking Dean's side...

That Jess was the one that came to find her at her grandparents house and presented her with his first ever book: a sarcastic and insightful coming-of-age story, subverting most of her expectations.

He proved with every word in that novel that he had become the man that she always knew he could be. Jess proved her wrong, because he had more potential than she could have ever known.

And when he left her life again, when he shouted at her for dropping out of Yale... that was the last push she needed.

It was the first time that she considered that the power he held over her didn't have to be scary, not if he was the only one holding it.

He wasn't the reason she didn't marry Logan Huntzberger.

She didn't marry Logan Huntzberger because she knew that she would never be able to grant him that power...

Once she'd finished talking to Paris that night in July, Rory started to write all of this out. Every night she would write a little more, sometimes a lot more. She poured everything onto the page and she didn't look back until she had finished.

The retelling above is a much shorter version of what she wrote, with less scribbles and eraser-marks. The margin notes have been folded in, of course. But nonetheless, it is as accurate as she could have managed.

And, at the bottom of the third sheet, she wrote what Paris said: Doing nothing won't push the ball forward.

It seemed that pretending that she didn't love Jess had never been effective in the past, and she was not a mad woman. So Rory wrote one last thing, folded her paper very nicely, tucked it inside her bottom desk drawer, and decided that she would do nothing.

Nothing is exactly what she should have done, rather than sleeping with Dean.

She would not make the same mistakes twice.

Friday, 8.12.2011

Two weeks of living in New York City should not have been so boring.

After a day of rest, Rory tried to jump back into work but there wasn't anything set out for her to do quite yet. Stories had been assigned and the most she could do was take some work off of the lower level interns' plates. She did run and get coffee once, but she was told that no one would hold it against her to take the full four days off that she was given.

She ended up leaving the offices by lunch time, trudging home to be bored out of her mind. After months of non-stop interviews, one would think that she didn't want to think about a the news for a little while. Rory was not as laid back as most people, surprisingly enough.

It was cinematic, really, the way that Charlie found her in the lobby. He was tossing his head back and laughing, his curly hair bouncing like a prince's. He was a very attractive guy, she was well aware. When he was drinking, his cheeks got pink and he looked... distractingly good. And just as she'd given up on catching his eye and turned to continue walking, he called out her name.

Of course, after that, she had to let him take her out for lunch.

"How does it feel to be back home?" Charlie asked her, giving her his unabated attention. "Not that this is really home for you, but it is the mainland."

Rory smiled, mostly at the fact that he knew her so well. It was hard to remember all the things she'd told him while they were on the island. They were each other's main friend for an oddly long time, but now that they were back, she had trouble fitting him into her pre-established life.

"It's nice," she shrugged, leaning back in her chair. She'd finished her food too quickly whereas he always took his time eating. He was careful about everything.

The corner of Charlie's mouth twitched. He raised his eyebrows at her wordlessly while he set down his spoon. Once he started sipping at his drink, she realized he wasn't going to respond to that.

A reluctant groan spilled out of her mouth. "I've been bored out of my mind, Charlie. It's been terrible. I got to see my mother, she spent the night on Monday with Luke and my brother, and we watched a bunch of movies. But since they left, I've been itching to work on something. Everything feels unfinished and I've already turned it in."

The sunlight was warmer when Charlie laughed at her admission. She could nearly smell the salty sea air.

"I've never met someone that insanely driven that wasn't an artist," he observed, setting down his cup. "Not to say that you aren't an artist, the way you paint with words is unparalleled in the modern age." The lilt his tone took on at the end was silly enough to make Rory laugh too.

"And I suppose that you blame your artistry for you staying later than you were supposed to?" she questioned.

"How else would I have gotten away with it?"

"Fair point," she nodded, taking a sip of water. Relaxing or not, it was still late July and she didn't want to sweat through her clothes. "I'm not sure you can get away with something like again, so I understand why you did it. Things are very different when you're on a foreign island."

The air had become unreasonably thick the moment that the last sentence left her mouth. They both politely chuckled at what she said and then were absorbed in their food... well, she was absorbed in her half-empty glass of ice water.

In a move very unlike him, Charlie broke the silence first.

"Things don't have to be different now that we're back," he suggested, turning the full force of his gaze back onto her face. His eye contact was intimidatingly strong. "I live in Brooklyn, you live in Queens. It's not exactly a different country."

Rory swallowed her last half-sip of water and set down her cup. His eyes were distracting her. It was hard to think straight.

"Yeah?" she stalled. She could imply that they'd always been just friends, but she knew better. And they didn't lie to each other. "I'm not sure that either of us has the time to dedicate to a new relationship, Charlie. We're both climbing a ladder, and I doubt you want to be side lined any more than I do."

He gave a thoughtful nod and didn't immediately respond further than that. Unlike when they first met, she gave him time to formulate a full thought. "Then maybe we shouldn't have a relationship just yet, maybe we can have what comes before a relationship."

"What exactly comes before a relationship?" Rory asked, not willing to think back on her past experiences.

"The first stage of a relationship is the butterflies-in-my-tummy honeymoon phase, right? It's the part where two people spend all their time together and forget about everything else. That's the part we want to avoid, correct?"

Rory nodded, though she felt silly to treat this as a business discussion.

"Well, we won't get to that phase until we're ready. We can have scheduled hang outs, not dates. We can limit it to three times a week, at least twice of them in public. No hand holding, kissing... anything else." Rory was sure she was blushing. "We'll be at stage zero, before the official 'what are we' conversation. That way, we don't really have any obligation to each other. We can work as much as we like and neither of us will have a legitimate reason to feel shoved aside because of it."

"Even if one of us cancels plans?" Rory asked skeptically.

"Usually, in stage zero, you don't want the other person to be sure that you like them, so you tend to roll with the punches," he shrugged.

It sounded like a terrible idea in the first place, but... it was something to hold onto. She needed something to hold onto.

He needed to know what she was thinking.

"I'm not sure that I'm over my ex," she admitted, surprised by the evenness of her voice.

A flicker of surprise lit behind Charlie's eyes. He didn't say anything.

"It's been an embarrassingly long time and there's no chance of us getting back together. He's got a serious girlfriend and we've done the whole 'closure' conversation, but he's still in my life. He's Luke's nephew, basically his son, and he's always going to be in my life, however distantly."

Another nod of acknowledgement. It took Charlie almost no time to respond.

"Do you think you would go back to him, if you had the chance?"

Rory looked down at the table. "If everything was perfect," she said.

She wasn't sure if Charlie was still looking at her, she couldn't look at him.

"Do you think you can give me a real chance to pursue you?"

Her eyes snapped back up to his face in disbelief. He wasn't a liar. He looked curious.

"Rory, I don't plan on being in stage zero forever. Do you think that you could try it out with me when you have the time?"

He was offering her time and pure understanding. He was willing to wait for her to choose him. For the first time in her life, the man she was involved with was not intimidated by Jess Mariano.

Maybe if she gave him a chance, she wouldn't have to be so intimidated by his power over her.

"I think so, Charlie. I want to give it a chance."

Again, the sunshine was brighter. The sound of cars passing by was replaced with the sound of waves breaking on the shore.