She should have known that casual wouldn't be possible. She was kidding herself from the beginning, oh it's not a date, just drinks. La la la, it's just a date, just casual dating. I'm a totally chill dating girl. Jesus Christ, Rory, what were you thinking? For maybe the first time in her life she finds herself wishing that she had a cigarette. Something to steady her, an activity to accompany her anxiety. Is that why people smoke? To manifest the need to shake apart into a physical action?

It's past three a.m. and there's a ghostly glow from the streetlight providing illumination in Jess' small lower east side bedroom. Over the bed there's a large George Bellows print, one of his boxing paintings, she doesn't know the name, a chaotic choice for such an organized bedroom. The headboard of the bed has built in bookshelves, containing what she assumes is his to be read pile. No knicknacks, not surprising, she's never known him to be very whimsical. His bedspread is white swiss army crosses on a black field, black sheets, black pillow cases. If the rest of his apartment is warm and inviting the bedroom is cold and spare in comparison.

She looks over at his sleeping form. His face in sleep looks younger. He's on his stomach, one arm drawn up to his face, brow knit in a near scowl. She's never known him to rest easy and that still seems to hold true. His body is different, bigger now, muscular, more solid, more real somehow. All the angular scrappiness of youth gone out of it save for the sharp cut of his jaw, his cheekbones. She takes in the slope of his shoulder, the planes of his muscular back, the curve of his buttock under the sheet. She feels hungry for him again already, her fingers ache for want of touching him.

She used to daydream about what it would be like to have sex with Jess. She imagined their first time, sometimes aspirationally in a fancy hotel or a romantic cabin in the woods, sometimes realistically in her bedroom or Luke's apartment. Sometimes, swept up in how dangerous and out of control Jess made her feel, she would imagine them having sex on a teacher's desk at Chilton or a table in the diner, or among the stacks in the library, books falling down around them like the ruined building around Spike and Buffy. Very occasionally she would imagine just doing it in the backseat of his car for the hell of it because she just didn't think she could wait much longer.

Physical contact had always been the one lifeline of communication between them. When they kissed it was like an empathic link, transferring some of what he was feeling to her. Now that the link has been reestablished, though, the feelings he is communicating through it are very different. There's hunger in it, of course and an undertow of abandon that she still finds a little threatening, but she feels a great openness from him now, a warmth, a gentleness. His lovemaking…she doesn't know how to describe it. It was full of curiosity, like he wanted to know her, to find her rhythms and grooves, to work with her to make something amazing. What's that blues line from that song Lane played her once? Good tone is more important than the show or the biz . He has good tone, vibrating like Jimmy Page's Les Paul against her, within her. Playing her like an instrument, together making something beautiful, something new.

Rory shakes her head, trying to pull herself together. She's down a sex rabbit hole in her mind again already. This is not what she meant when she said date. She was thinking more along the lines of getting coffee, getting dinner, talking about books, taking walks, and browsing at The Strand. At the same time, she can't pretend she doesn't want this, doesn't like this, that this doesn't feel right. She feels like they're two puzzle pieces that you used to have to hold just so to see what image they made but over the years they've grown to perfectly fit one another.

She pulls her knees up, resting her chin on them, looking at the bruise around his left eye. Over the years she's thought about the ways he hurt her, but never about the ways she might have hurt him. Seventeen year old me didn't really have any tools for dealing with hurt feelings from the one person he trusted. That sentence rings in her head. She was the one person he trusted? She's never thought about it like that. She suddenly remembers his face in Doose's in front of a shelf of Lever 2000 when he asked her if she was still with Dean. Remembers the doleful look he gave her as he was cleaning the deviled eggs off his car. Remembers the pleading in his eyes at Kyle's party, long before the bedroom and the fight, the way he looked at her when he told her he wanted to go. Listen to me, his face says in her memories, believe me, choose me .

She had always told herself he didn't care. That it had been about the chase for him and that he didn't know what to do with her once the chase was over. But maybe, for him, he was being open and vulnerable with her. He trusted her with his heart and he did his best. The boy with the thorn in his side, behind the hatred there lies, a murderous desire for love. How can they look into my eyes and still they don't believe me?

His whole way of being was so foreign to what she was used to. She needed communication, attention, ambition and he couldn't give her those things. But maybe he needed things that she couldn't give him too. Maybe he needed someone to see that he was hurting and just meet him where he was and accept him for who he was, and she couldn't do that for him. Even though her favorite thing about him was that he saw her for who she was.

She thinks again about his face the night of the party, how much must have been going on inside for him to verbalize any need to her at all…and all she could do was say that she wanted to stay at the party for Lane, because she truly just didn't understand that when he said he wanted to bail he was telling her that he wasn't okay, that he needed her help. She can't blame herself, really, she's not psychic, she didn't know, but that doesn't mean she didn't hurt him too.

She reaches out a hand, tentatively, and strokes his dark hair. He doesn't wake, but his face relaxes a fraction. She pulls her hand back as if from a stove. What is she even doing?

She slips out of bed, gropes around until she finds her discarded panties and the t-shirt he had tossed aside earlier and pads into his living room. The reading lamp behind the sofa is still on. She pictures him sitting there with a book, with his laptop, with a notebook and a pen clamped in his teeth. His apartment is very solitary. Something about it makes her heart break a little. It is exactly made for his life, filled to the brim with books, no space for anyone else except the day bed in his office for guests. The bed he said is really just for Doula but he doesn't want to tell her that because then she'll want to decorate. Three walls of the living room are built in bookshelves and the third is shelving for records plus his stereo and television. There are a few photos on the wall near the kitchen counter that she noticed earlier: Manny's wedding, Luke and Lorelai's wedding, the Truncheon crew at the opening of the NYC location, one of Jess and Doula in the Stars Hollow gazebo, but they seem like an afterthought, a vague gesture at reminding himself he has connections. She thinks of Murakami's Toru Okada spending his days alone listening to records. At least Okada had a cat.

She slides The Legendary Pink Dots The Lovers out of the shelf and out of its sleeve and drops it carefully on the turntable, turning the volume down low before she presses play and moves the needle over.

She wanders towards the entryway and retrieves her phone from her purse where she abandoned it hours ago, uninterested in anything that wasn't Jess. She wants to text Lane, but it's too late for that at least on a Sunday night. Too late for Paris, even. She puts her phone facedown on the coffee table and peruses his bookshelves. Organized by genre, and alphabetical by author within each genre section. She's surprised to find one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves full of science fiction novels, guessing she can blame the Danes' DNA for that predilection. She moves on, looking for one of her comfort reads, something to calm her overthinking brain. He's still inclined towards paperbacks, specifically of the small vintage ilk with illustrated covers, broken spines, and yellowed pages. The perfect size for a back pocket. Many of the spines of the oldest books are covered in linen book repair tape, titles neatly and carefully hand written with sharpie. She eases one of these, a well loved copy of To The Lighthouse, out of its home on his shelf.

She curls up on the sofa in the corner under the lamp. Edward Ka-Spel drones low over the speakers as she opens the small tome, turning the pages reverently. His marginalia renders each of his books a sacred object, a relic, from the latin, reliquiae , meaning remains and relinquere , to leave behind. The notes are not only insights, references, ideas, they are the remains of the self he was when he read each book, the self he's left behind (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) . This one contains traces of multiple Jesses. Jess at seventeen, Jess at twenty-three, Jess at thirty. Different colored inks marking his passage through time. She traces the ballpoint runes with her fingers, as if to decipher the holy writ, turns the pages to see his underlining.

So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us ; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.

In his cramped, strained hand he had written next to it: sonnet 116

She racks her tired brain for a moment, rifling her mental card catalog for Shakespeare's sonnets. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark which looks on tempests and is never shaken.

An image of him in her dorm room, frantic, desperate, flashes in her mind . You know we're supposed to be together. I knew it the first time I saw you two years ago, and you know it, too

An ever-fixed mark. She chews on that for a while. Surely it would be very presumptuous to think it's about her. She'd be jumping to wild conclusions, and yet…the way he looks at her, his entire demeanor, so eager to please, so open with her in this new way…can it be?

"Rory?" comes the sleep thick voice from the bedroom doorway.

She gasps, startled, nearly dropping the book, her face flushing. He's standing there, leaning on the door frame, his hair mussed, a lock hanging in front of his eyes, wearing nothing but a pair of worn out running shorts, the elastic overstretched, hanging low on his hip bones leading her eyes down towards…

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"Mmhmm, great, just couldn't sleep."

"Worried about something?" he asks.

"N-no, what makes you think that?"

"Pink Dots," he gestures to the stereo, "One of my go to albums for when I'm driving myself nuts."

"Oh, I just find them relaxing," she lies. "Came out here to look for a comfort read to lull myself back to sleep," she holds up the Woolf volume.

"Mmmm, that's a good one," he runs a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face. "Well, don't let me stop you. When you weren't in bed I just thought maybe…." He leaves the thought unfinished, but the words "maybe you left" dangle between them anyway. It's too dark in the room for her to really see his expression well, but his voice has a fragility to it, or maybe she's imagining that. She's struck by how much power she has, how easily and how deeply she could hurt him if she's careless. The sheer responsibility of it is frightening, maybe it always should have been.

He goes back into the bedroom. She follows a few minutes later, after replacing the book and the record in their respective dwelling places. His back is to her, facing the window. She slides under the sheets, curling up behind him, pressing her face between his shoulder blades, sliding her hand up his ribs to rest on his chest, feeling his heart beat beneath her fingertips. Be careful . She mouths a silent warning to herself as she closes her eyes.

In the morning there's a note on the pillow next to her: Went for a run, coffee's on -J

She rolls over. Her phone is charging on the nightstand. She definitely didn't put it there. She picks it up, 6:30am. She groans. Too early. He's already up and out? She drapes an arm over her eyes to block out the light, intending to go back to sleep.

Some time later she hears him come back through the front door. He's doing something in the kitchen, she dozes off again but is pulled back to consciousness by the smell of food. She lets the familiar fragrance draw her out of bed and towards the kitchen. "Pancakes?" she asks.

"Pancakes." he confirms. He's flipping pancakes in a skillet, wearing a pair of black running pants and one of those long sleeved under armor shirts that defines every muscle in his chest and arms.

"You didn't have to make me breakfast, you already cooked last night," she says, swinging up onto one of the barstools at the kitchen counter.

"I know," he says, with a self-deprecating smile, "I couldn't help myself. It's too much, isn't it? I'm freaking you out. Sorry."

"No, it's great, I love pancakes. Just, you don't have to work so hard, I already like you."

"Sorry, I think maybe I'm not very good at casual dating," he says. "I'm not a very casual person, maybe. I either do things seriously, or not at all."

"I'll allow for the possibility that we both overestimated our ability to be casual about this," she gives him a slightly rueful smile. She sees him cringe a little so she adds. "I think it's okay though. Maybe it's not casual, but it's nice. We're two serious people, plus we've known each other for a long time."

"So it's okay, you're okay? Last night it seemed like maybe you were rethinking things."

"I'm good. I was rethinking the past, not the present. Sorry if I freaked you out."

"You didn't…maybe you did, I don't know." He chuckles. "I like having you here."

She feels the smile radiate from somewhere deep in her core. "I like being here. You have all the best carbs."

"True," he says. "I'm going to have to add more workouts if I'm going to keep up with Rory Gilmore's appetites." He puts a stack of pancakes in front of her.

"I can think of a way we can burn it off," she says, winking at him.