A/N: Thanks to those who keep on reviewing - love to hear your thoughts on each chapter, as well as Literati in general, and even Milo's good looks ;) Yes, this chapter is coming at you a day early, because tomorrow is Good Friday. I wish those who celebrate a wonderful and peaceful Easter. Now, time for Rory's (long-awaited) reaction to Jess' love confession :)

(For disclaimer, etc. - see chapter 1)

Chapter 14

"Hey, sweets. You okay?" Lorelai asked, frowning some as she stared at Rory.

"I... I don't know," she admitted, stepping in over the threshold of her old home and heading straight to the kitchen.

On automatic, she started to put on the coffee machine, almost not realising she was even doing it until Lorelai asked again if she was okay.

"What? Uh, I just talked with Jess, or mostly he talked to me. Apparently, he loves me. As in he's in love with me. He's always been in love with me, forever. Well, since we met, obviously, but always, Mom. Always."

The smile on her mother's face took her by surprise. Not the same kind of shock that had come with Jess' confession, but not a million miles away from it. People had been telling her for a while that they thought Jess still had feelings for her. Noah, Lane, even Lorelai, she thought, maybe, but love. Deep, real, all-encompassing, three-decades long love? She hadn't quite been expecting that, especially not today.

"Honey, don't take this the wrong way," said her mom, sitting down at the kitchen table and folding her hands on top of it, just so, "but you're not stupid, so I'm really not buying that you never realised Jess had feelings for you."

"Of course, I knew he had feelings, you know, way back in the beginning, when we first met!" Rory told her, realising too late quite how loud she was becoming and immediately toning it down. "I mean, he liked me, I liked him. That's why we dated. He even told me once, back then, that he loved me, after we broke up, actually, and then, he just drove off into the night, and I had no idea what to do with that."

"Well, he didn't drive off after he said it today, did he?"

"No." Rory shook her head, staring so hard into the kitchen tile that her eyes started to water with the effort. "I almost wish he had. It might have been easier. Instead, he just sat there, staring at me, and I stared back at him. We must have looked really stupid. Not that anybody was there to see us, thank God, but still. Really stupid."

It was only when Lorelai got up and came over, prising the jug for the coffee machine from her hands, that Rory even realised she was still holding onto it. She turned to watch her mom finish putting on the coffee, then allowed herself to be guided into a chair and sat down like the child she felt she was regressing into.

"Okay now, from the top," said her mom, sitting across from her. "Jess came over today, and apparently, without preamble, just blurted out, 'By the way, I still love you'?"

"Yes. No. Well, kind of. I don't know, he said other things too, obviously," Rory admitted, one hand going to her forehead as she tried to recall, tried to process too. "He said he had something he wanted to tell me, needed to. That he meant to for a while and that maybe now was a bad time, but he just had to. I never thought... I mean, sure, Lane had said something about him maybe having feelings for me, and even Noah... but not this whole time. Now, like a renewed, reignited thing, that I could understand. It's not like seeing Jess again didn't spark something in me too. It did. Of course, it did. I mean, I know you haven't always been his biggest fan, but you see how he looks, right?"

"I do." Lorelai nodded, with a smile Rory almost wished she wouldn't wear. "Much as the 'tude never thrilled the mom in me, I always understood the attraction, babe, and not just the physical one either. If there had been a Jess when I was seventeen, I would've been interested."

That remark made Rory squirm, even though it was strangely unsurprising to hear. The Gilmore girls had a type, a similar kind of type, actually, even though they tried not to talk about it much. For all the differences between Luke and Jess, and there were plenty, Rory wasn't blind to the fact that the things they had in common were probably some of the same things that attracted her mom and herself to them. Not to mention there were all those glaring similarities between Logan and Christopher...

"One problem at a time," Rory muttered to herself, running a hand over her face and back through her hair. "Since he's been back," she said of Jess then, "I can't deny, I've felt things. I kind of started to wonder if that was what Jess wanted to say. That he felt it too."

"Clearly, he does." Lorelai smiled.

Rory couldn't return the look. "Clearly, he always has. He's loved me all this time, Mom. All this time. Thirty years he's just been... I can't believe it. Can you believe it?"

One look at her mom and the answer was clear, even before Lorelai said it out loud.

"I can believe it," she told her, nodding her head. "Come on, Rory, you're an amazing person. The most amazing in the whole world, if you want my opinion. Okay, so I have some bias, but it still comes as no surprise to me that somebody has loved you for as long as they've known you. It really doesn't surprise me that that somebody is Jess.

"Now I have ragged on the guy for plenty of things, and I had a right to, but I don't think I could ever really say that I didn't believe he had feelings for you, even at the start. Did he treat you badly? Yes, he did. Was he a seriously messed up teenager? Oh, boy, yes. But he grew up pretty good. He got his head on straight and made a really good life for himself.

"More than once, when Luke has talked to me about how well he's doing, and I say that a lot of it is down to his influence, he won't take the compliment. Not just because he's Luke and barely knows how, which you know is a part of it, but because he tells me that you made the real difference. I'm pretty sure that's not all conjecture either. I'm almost certain Jess must have said it himself. You changed his life, sweets. I really think you had a huge impact, and that kind of thing sticks with a person."

It was a lot to take in. The second wave of Jess-related revelations to come crashing over her like a tsunami, and Rory was having real problems keeping her head above water. It was true. Jess really did love her the way he said he did. Not that she wanted to doubt him, but to hear her mother - one of Jess' harshest critics, especially in the beginning - give her own confirmation, it just made it all the more real.

"He told me once," she said then, shaking her head right after when she realised her mom thought she was on repeat. "I don't mean the love thing, I mean when he said that I helped him. When he brought me a copy of his book, The Subsect. He said... he said he couldn't have done it without me. It was sweet, but I don't think I entirely believed it."

"Yet you remember him saying it, after all this time."

"It was a compliment from Jess." Rory smiled in the saying of it. "He was a little sparing with those, so I made a habit of remembering them all. When they did come along, they were always worth the wait."

"Quality over quantity," Lorelai mused. "That's not necessarily a bad thing."

Rory let those words wash over her slowly. Quality over quantity. In a lot of ways it described her relationship with Jess just perfectly. They hadn't been together very long romantically, and even their close friendship was broken into pieces, with long stretches of absence in-between. Still, she wouldn't trade all the good parts, all the special moments, all the beautiful memories, not for anything in the world. The way Jess could make her feel was something special, and that didn't just pertain to when they were young and supposedly in love, or when he was kissing her breathless, though both of those were pretty good feelings, in and of themselves.

He understood her. When she was with him, talking to him, she never doubted that he knew where she was coming from, or that he would at least always try to help her find a way through the muddle and chaos. He was forever supportive, right from the start. Though he was surprised to know she had dreams of being an overseas correspondent, he swore he believed she could do it. When she started to go off the rails, dropping out of Yale and fighting with her mom, it was mostly down to Jess that she got back on track. When she floundered over where her life was going, what to do for the best for her career and her future, it was Jess that told her she should write a book. In that last one, he was at least partly responsible for her having enough money to raise her son. Rory wasn't sure she ever told him that.

"I should've known," she said aloud, looking to her mom then and realising that remark required further explanation. "I guess I did know that he loved me. I love him, just like I love Lane or April or Paris. Well, not exactly like that, but you know the way you just love people who have been good forces in your life for as long as you can remember?"

Lorelai nodded, because, of course, she knew exactly.

"I just never thought... For years now, it never really, seriously occurred to me that Jess would love me that way. That he might want that kind of relationship again." One more glance at Lorelai at her eyes going wide. "You knew!"

"I didn't!" Her mother denied it fast. "I mean, not for sure. At least, not until really, really recently."

A scoff of laughter escaped Rory's throat. "What does that mean?"

"It means I didn't know for sure, until the last time Jess was here," Lorelai told her, a little defensive, not that Rory was sure she could blame her for that. "I just always suspected is all, and then, on that last visit, Luke got talking to Jess about you and he told him that he still had the same feelings for you that he always had."

"Oh my God," Rory muttered, her face in her hands. "Everybody knew. Everybody but me."

"Not everybody," Lorelai insisted, even as she got up to make the coffee now the machine was ready. "I mean, it seems like maybe Lane suspected, but she's smart like that, good at reading people. Sookie made comments a couple of times, but that was a long time ago, I guess around the time when Jess was here before, you know, when Noah was still a munchkin."

"Noah. He knew too," she said, looking up helplessly at her mom. "Jess actually told me that my son encouraged him to tell me how he feels. My son knows more about my love life than I do!"

When Lorelai bit her lip, it was clear she was trying not to laugh. Rory wanted to be mad about that, she even was, a little bit, but she could also understand where the humour was coming from. This whole situation was just this side of crazy. Her ex had a thirty-year-old crush on her. More than that, he had been in love with her this whole time, and everybody knew, or at the very least suspected, while she wandered around in ignorance. Well, maybe not complete ignorance, but without the hope she might otherwise have let herself hold onto.

"So," said Lorelai then, placing a steaming cup down in front of Rory and retaking her seat, her own cup held in both her hands. "I guess the most important thing now is, after Jess said he loved you, what did you say?"

Rory swallowed hard, actually struggling to recall exactly what she had said. She hadn't said it back, that much she did know. At least, not in the way Jess might have hoped she would. Mostly, she just remembered telling him she needed time and then rushing him out of house. That probably wasn't fair, but then, she considered, had it really been fair for him to spring three decades of deep feelings on her, all at once and without any real warning?

"I said I cared about him, that I always cared about him, but that he had caught me completely off-guard. I told him I need time to process, but that I didn't want him to feel bad because, because I was glad he told me. I think that's true, although I probably would've said it either way. He looked so... vulnerable," she realised with another hit of surprise. "I know that's such a weird way to describe Jess, but he did. He looked like his entire life was hanging on my response and it was actually a little scary."

"The big moments usually come with equal parts awesome and scary," Lorelai considered. "When I asked Luke to marry me that first time. When we actually got married. Not to mention when you came into my life, kid," she said, reaching across to put her hand on Rory's own and give it a squeeze. "You do see the awesome hiding in the scary, right? There's somebody in the world that loves you, Rory. A nice guy who you really care about, and he loves you more than anybody else. Now, that doesn't mean you have to feel the same way, and if you don't, that's okay too, but doesn't it at least give you a great feeling? Doesn't it feel so good knowing somebody loves you that much?"

Rory couldn't deny it was true. Knowing somebody had that much love for her didn't suck, in the least. In fact, she liked it. She especially liked it because it was Jess who was telling her about his feelings. Given a little time to think, and someone to talk it through with, she finally felt able to bask, just a little bit, in that love that Jess professed for her. It was nice. It was actually really special and wonderful. She would like to think she told Jess that when he was sat in front of her. She had a horrible feeling she had shown him a lot more shock and panic than she had gratitude or hope.

"Rory?"

At the sound of her name, she looked over. It was only then, from the concern in her mom's voice, as well as the fact that she appeared blurry, that Rory knew she was crying. If she could have stopped she would have. If she could have explained what the tears were for, she would have done that too, but she really wasn't at all certain.

She wasn't sad, but she couldn't really say she was crying for pure joy either. Mostly she felt frustrated, confused, and shocked, but even she could admit, when she finally found her voice again, that there was a warm glow in her chest that she really did like. Jess had put it there and at some point she needed for him to know that, probably sooner rather than later.

To Be Continued...