gilmore girls. jess/lorelai (jess/rory). 2107 words. she is just a bad liar.
He's a good novelist, maybe just decent, maybe overrated and her daughter writes down factually specific accounts for papers and Luke tells things like they happened, to the best of his bias, and she--she is just a bad liar.
Maybe she's a little alienated in this crew, this set who grew up without it all handed to them, who know there's something expected to get by, a certain level of convincing, a certain baseline level of truth--who don't think charm is enough and who don't pretend to strike it on their own when they still have, just behind them, the privilege of a safety net.
Jess is a liar like her. But he is a better one.
-
She's learned what comes out of her disapproval. Believe it or not, she does know when she makes the same mistake twice.
So she tries to like the Huntzberger boy. She does.
It doesn't end up mattering too much, anyway.
-
It's that summer. You know, the one where Rory's in Washington. Luke goes away on one of his fishing trips and of course Jess would rather hang himself with a Catholic schoolgirl's tie than go with him so it's them in town and it's late in the day and the sun's going down and the whole place is kind of orange and there's a glass of water down next to her and she looks up and he tips his head to the side and smirks a bit--it's very boy of him.
"Water?"
"You looked thirsty."
"Well, that was very gentlemanly of you, Jess."
"I do try."
"You don't have to be here, you know. Cesar's running the place fine on his own, I think."
"Well, as you said," he says, "I am a gentleman."
"I didn't say you were a gentleman. I said you happened to perform a gentlemanly act. You're going to need more than that to wear my token at your next joust."
"Not your daughter's?"
"What?"
"Isn't the theoretical worry my wearing your daughter's token, so to speak?"
She looks up. He is straddling the stool, something cocky about the position of his legs (she looks for a second, at the line of the thigh, god, he is so young) and the sun's hit just the right side of his face and his eyes are glinting in the funny yellow light and her eyes flick up and down and she looks away.
"Well, Jess, my daughter's token's quite something different to work up to."
"Oh?"
"Yes," she says, "Mine's much cheaper. Not much market value at this point."
-
She hasn't fucked anyone since Max and she is a woman, after all, and she does have a certain needs and it gets tiring, you know, those days when you have the ache in between your legs for hours that won't go away, when you touch yourself at night and feel sixteen, the heat, the frustration--she might as well be a virgin.
She supposes she understands why her daughter got bored.
(At night, her finger traces over her clit and Chris becomes Max who becomes Luke who becomes Jess and Jess again, always the young one, always the fool.)
-
There has been a history of problems with emissaries. Oh, you know. A man sends a messenger to convey his love for a woman, a court ordered reporter has to admit the oracle's said something ill fated and a mother says to a boy--off my daughter. They are incidental. They aren't meant to be part of the actual turn of events.
And sometimes the woman fucks the messenger and the king beheads the messenger and Lorelai finds herself looking the wrong direction.
She's always been shit at these things. Always.
-
Men used to beg for virgin brides. The trouble is, they can't really enjoy them. Sweet young girls are better as an idea than in practice and she knows this and Jess knows this, they all know this, and only her daughter doesn't seem to.
This is all very elaborate code for she fucks him upstairs when Luke is gone, on the mattress on the floor, this is code for she has bruises afterward, marks running up and down her thighs, this is code for his fingers pressing down on her clit and him pushing her downward, hard, and this is code for her eyes shut, her head back and this is code for Lorelai Gilmore, the good woman you can't keep down, being taken down and this is code for her slapping him when she comes, hard, across his face, and this is code for him having the fucking nerve to laugh.
"You got what you wanted, then?" she says, "You can leave my daughter alone?"
"You think I'm some kind of medieval score settler who needs entrance in a Gilmore woman's cunt before I get out?"
"Oh, go to hell."
"One Gilmore isn't as good as another," he says, and she's realized she's been called a whore.
"Fuck yourself," she says.
She's as good as any teenager at the expletives.
-
They don't talk for a week after that.
Rory calls her, talks about getting senators coffee and Paris' antics and everything else she's supposed to tell her and at the end she sort of adds, a touch reluctant:
"I miss Dean."
Lorelai is excellent at calling out liars.
-
Her daughter has it, will have it, has had it, it not being our famous sexual euphemism but whatever kind of ambitious drive forward Lorelai didn't have and pushes on her daughter instead--of course, it helps that Rory really wants it all, wants Harvard and Columbia journalism and after that, Tel Aviv and Tehran and Pulitzers and the brownstone back in New York. That her daughter misses things too, misses drunken nights and taking hits on someone else's bed sucking in the smoke with your head on their pillow and sex that's cheap and doesn't have the rest of your life pinned on it, hasn't escaped her.
She just--
After all this time, Lorelai knows what's worth it and what isn't.
It's martyrdom, in a way. She's taking her place with the boy.
(Except it really, really isn't.)
-
She's turning into her own mother, too, don't think she's missed it. Lorelai Gilmore does things with more abandon, though--it's been that from the beginning.
-
"This is all about how you got pregnant, isn't it?"
She is naked on his mattress. No sheet, no anything, just her and the stretch of her thighs and her pointed breasts and the thick mess of hair between her legs--she doesn't bother shaving for him.
"Don't be an idiot."
He is smoking.
"You know, you'd think experience would make you less judgmental."
"Or maybe it gives me a right to be."
"It's why you love her seeing your friend Ned fucking Nickerson so much. It's why you don't want me within five feet of her."
"You don't know anything about my motivations."
"I know how to put on a condom. You should well know that."
"Oh, of course. Because of your tactical demonstration sticking your cock into me I should let you turn around and take my daughter and--"
"I know how it is, you know," he says quietly.
"Why? Gotten someone pregnant?"
His mouth quirks to the side a bit. He looks for a second like he's considering not saying anything.
"No."
"I really don't have patience for this."
"My mother sent me here because I overdosed, you know. They thought I was going to die, apparently, but they pumped my stomach and here I am."
"Oh, Jess."
"I wasn't going to change my life around, like some kind of goddamn found Jesus moment. But in that second--you know, you feel like Lazarus. And even if that doesn't change anything else, you're still there and you realize you've got some kind of sickness or you had one--you have this moment of disgust. You sit there and you wonder who the fuck you are. You know how that is."
She does.
She leans her head back and closes her eyes.
-
In the end, he doesn't impregnate her daughter. He doesn't even get the chance. He runs while slow, romantic Rory still has barely let him put his hand down her bra and instead, her daughter ends up fucking some married version of the boy Lorelai adored.
The irony isn't lost on her.
-
She'd like to become her daughter, imagine stepping into the youth, the virginity. Of course she loves Rory but she envies her too, make no mistake and once, just once, she has invited Jess over to the house during the summer and he is leaning over her and her lips part and she says (it is difficult)--
"Be gentle."
Jess gentle turns out to ache as much as anything, the lack of the smirk and him moving into her slowly and the slow, rocking movement of their hips and afterward, she kicks him out of the house.
-
With Rory, she thinks, maybe it was never about sex.
With her, it always was.
(That hurts more than she expects, really.)
-
One night a lady walks into a diner and looks across at the man behind the counter and realizes he sees her not as a whore or a mother or a cunt or an obligation, but as a woman. Just a woman.
And she knows she's never quite appreciated that.
-
Rory admits, all guilt, that she kissed Jess at the beginning of the summer and the innocence, the childishness of the statement makes her want to take her daughter away someplace, somewhere without danger and without men and without anything and hide her. She wants it to stop, this motion that carries her daughter forward without anyone having any idea what they are doing or where they are taking. She wants to pull her off the ship.
-
She is a ruined woman.
Funny, how certain standards never change.
-
There are seconds with Jess, just seconds, and sometimes he stays, sometimes he doesn't just fuck her but he stops the fidgeting long enough for her to pull some kind of leftover out of the refrigerator and he sits and taps his foot and they are more alike than he will ever be with her daughter.
"What are you rebelling against, Johnny?"
"What have you got?"
-
The real irony--
He marries her daughter. No, she isn't joking. The boy who was supposed to derail the whole thing, the boy who was supposed to ruin her life and leave her with labor complications or possibly herpes and a drug addiction, turns around, steps in after both the supposed suitable boys have done the actual ruining, and marries her daughter. She is the famous correspondent and he is the celebrated author and they are cited as a brilliant couple and even Emily doesn't take too long to get over her reservations based on old memories.
So. Lorelai Gilmore is always wrong. We all knew that already, didn't we?
Dinner conversation is always a little stilted.