Fic: Alice (6/8)
Title: Alice (6/8)
Universe: Gilmore Girls, next-gen
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Rory/Jess
Summary:Alice Gilmore-Huntzburger's bookshelf had always played host to a collection of books by Jess Mariano
Five: A Sight For Sore Eyes
The sound of footsteps distracted him and he looked up. Upon recognising the figure in front of him he smirked in a knowing way, and leaned back into his seat.
"I can't say I haven't expected you to show up."
The figure nodded. "Hello, Jess."
"Hello, Logan."
The two men stared each other down for several minutes.
Imagine, if you care to, an old western film from the early days of Hollywood. Two lone figures, a long deserted street, a ball of tumble weed blowing through. One mouth lazily chewing a toothpick. Two pairs of eyes narrowing. A twitch of fingers, reaching for a gun strapped to a belted holster.
Multiply that tension tenfold, and you get a sense of the atmosphere in this small alcove. An animal could probably have smelled the testosterone thickening in the air.
Eventually, Jess sighed and kicked the chair across from him out. A high-pitched squeak escaped as the chair skidded across the hardwood and stopped short at Logan's hand. Slowly, carefully, he sat down. Their eyes met again. Simultaneously, they both sighed.
"Look, I'm not here for a fight," Logan admitted finally. "We're all adults here."
"She didn't cheat on you, you know. At least not with me," Jess shrugged.
Logan smiled bitterly. "I know. She's a terrible liar. I'm actually here about Alice."
Jess nodded. "Right." He rubbed his face with his hand.
"Until we have to test results back, we won't know who..." he trailed off awkwardly. "Well, you know what I mean. I need to know that, whatever the result, I can still have access to her."
Jess nodded. "I'm not gonna keep her away from you, man."
"I want to stay with me for some holidays. If you're her father, you get her Thanksgiving, Rory gets her Christmas, and I'll take a week in the summer. Something like that. I don't want to lose my daughter altogether."
"Deal," Jess agreed. "On one condition. If I'm not her father, I want some access anyway."
"That's a big ask for a step-cousin. I mean, I raised her, you've only known her a few weeks."
"Take it or leave it," Jess said calmly.
Logan pursed his lips, evidently deep in contemplation.
"Ok, fine. Deal." He extended his hand and Jess took it. "Do we need to draw up a contract?"
The corner of Jess's mouth twitched. "How 'bout we just take it as it goes for now? Gentlemen's honour."
"Always the cool guy," Logan shook his head. "Fine. I'm hoping you're an honourable guy." He stood up and began putting on his gloves.
"Me too," Jess replied.
Logan turned on his heel and headed for the exit. He stopped suddenly, however. Without out turning around, he addressed Jess again. "Just between us, whose do you think she is?"
Jess smirked, even though he knew Logan wasn't looking at him. "Rory's."
"Smartass," Logan muttered under his breath, and exited.
Jess turned back to his papers. He picked up his red pen, and put it down again. Suddenly, he was feeling much more generous. The line could stay.
_________________________________________________________________
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
_________________________________________________________________
"All right, we all set?"
"Yup."
"Okay. Ring the doorbell."
"What? Why me?"
"You're nearer."
"I don't want to ring the doorbell!"
"Why not?"
"I'm scared."
"That's silly."
"Is it? You ring then."
"Hey, is that a full moon?"
"No, it's only a crescent moon. For someone who went to an Ivy League School you really are stupid sometimes. I really- hey! Don't try and distract me. You're the adult here."
"Exactly. I'm the adult, which means I'm in charge. Which means you have to do as I say. Ha!"
"You can't play the Mom card like that!"
"Here look, it's simple, just press the button. It's sparkly!"
"All the more reason I shouldn't go near it."
Before the two women had time to press the doorbell, however, it swung open.
There was no pretending that the two women wanted to enter this house and endure this evening. They had already made several excuses, developed every possible short-term, highly contagious illness, been prevented by traffic and minor car accidents, babysat every child in Stars Hollow, and attended every possible festival. They ran out of excuses pretty soon however, under the tenacious persistence of one woman. This woman threw open the front door and raised her hands in the air.
"Wahay! My girls are here!" she shouted.
Alice stared in horror.
Rory hung her head in defeat.
She looked up and forced a feeble smile. "Hey, Liz."
Liz ushered them in. To Alice, Liz's house was familiar in the way that most houses in Stars Hollow were. She had spent time in probably every house in the town at some point in her youth, and Liz's love of crafts and TJ's wackiness had delighted her greatly once. She, Doula and Audrey had spent hours at Liz's kitchen table, armed with glue guns, glitter and macaroni. This was back in the days, of course, when all girls between the ages of four and eight could be temporarily united by glitter. Small mementos of those days were present in the house still. Most were Doula's, but Alice knew there was a macaroni birthday card of hers that was kept constantly on the mantelpiece and a horrendous Christmas tree decoration that was dragged out every year.
It wasn't that Liz and TJ weren't kind, or that they were boring. Alice was not looking forward to the evening simply because they were so intense, and she suspected her mother's feelings were the same. Liz was always attacking them with questions and compliments, and getting overexcited and distracted and destroying dinner. Either they would have to order takeout tonight, or be forced to eat burnt roast chicken again. TJ meant well, but he drove Rory crazy with his crazy schemes and conspiracy theories, and when Rory got irritated, she always managed to pass it on to Alice. Doula, while a sweet girl as a child, had been hit hard over the head by puberty, and was moody and self-absorbed the vast majority of the time. Alice knew in advance that Doula would spend most of the time at the dinner table sulking and picking at her nails. Liz and TJ laughed it off, saying that she was nothing compared to Jess in his teenage years. Her mother would shoot grateful looks at Alice, who, though sometimes inclined to sulk and grunt, was the best teenager in the world beside Doula.
She was infinitely comforted, therefore, when she walked into the kitchen to see Jess sitting at the dining table, listening to TJ talk about what appeared to be the Big Bang Theory and demonstratehis theories by smashing fruit together in his face. Jess had his best 'back-off' face on, but it didn't seem to be doing him any good. He looked so visibly grateful to see them that he burst out with a loud, "Thank God!" and made no attempt to disguise his relief.
Inevitably, they were sitting at the dinner table waiting for over an hour as Liz tried to figure out what went wrong with the oven, the grill and the microwave, respectively. This led to a lot of conversation, and a lot of bread. Doula refused to come to the table until there was food on it, and stayed in her room. Nobody could fault her really; she had to deal with this almost every night, after all. Jess had professed a desire to do the same, but had been refused by everyone at the table. In fact, when Liz heard him from the kitchen she went over to him and smacked him on the head with her oven mitt. He rubbed the back of his head, muttered, "Jeez!" and grew sulky and irritable. TJ started asking Rory if about some Pearl Harbour conspiracy he had heard and demanded to know why she wasn't investigating it, being a journalist and whatnot. While at first Rory patiently explained that writing a weekly column was not the same as being an investigative reporter with front page headlines and a hell of a lot of free time on her hands, she quickly became frustrated by his persistence. Sensing danger when it was in the air, Alice tried to distract TJ by asking about his job, a subject which he was happy to engage wholeheartedly with. After a while, she glanced at Rory and Jess, who seemed to have struck up a tentative conversation about books they were reading. It made her very excited to see them getting on for once, and she enjoyed the opportunity to watch them openly. She wanted to know what they were like in happier times, how they interacted as a couple. All she had seen up to now was anger and awkwardness, even in the photographs she had found.
She could barely hear their words, but she deduced they were debating Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky. If there was any hidden meaning to their words, she couldn't hear it. She watched their body language instead, observing how quickly the tension between them seemed to disappear as they conversed. At first they had both seemed unwilling to look the other in the eye. Jess stared at his hands and ran his hand through his hair over and over. Rory kept her hands in her lap, twisting them nervously and seemed to have picked a spot on the wall behind his head to focus her attention on. As time passed, however, they became more comfortable with each other. Their postures relaxed, their fingers shook a little less. Once their eyes met, tentatively.
Oh well, it was a start.
_________________________________________________________________
"Well, was it romantic?" Alice demanded as soon as the door shut behind them.
"Was what romantic?" Rory asked as she unlocked the car and got in.
"Your conversation, obviously! Don't treat me like a child."
"You are a child," Rory said distractedly, buckling her seat belt.
"Mom!"
"Hmm?"
"Was it romantic?"
Rory sighed. "Only if you consider a discussion about the influence of Sofia Tolstoy on Anna Karenina as romantic."
"I normally wouldn't," Alice relented. "But with the two of you, you never know."
Her mother chose to ignore that.
"It was nice. It felt like we were back in high school, sitting on the old muddy river bridge and arguing about books again," she said finally.
Alice worked very hard to suppress a smirk in the darkness.
_________________________________________________________________
Will Danes was the spit of his father. He had the same gruff but unfailingly kind exterior, the same love of baseball (especially the merchandise) and the same ability to cook a great burger. Though, thankfully, he did not share his father's love of flannel. Will was the obvious heir to Luke's Diner, and had worked there since he was a teenager. Now that he was in college, he worked the holidays when he was home. Luke sat behind the counter, barking orders at him and complaining about any changes made, regardless of how small or effective they were. Will was perhaps the only person in Stars Hollow unafraid of Luke's temper and certainly the only one willing to argue with him as vehemently as he did. Their holiday arguments were a standing Stars Hollow tradition, and Alice always knew Christmas was coming when she found them standing in the middle of the dinner, poking each other in the chests as the veins in their necks throbbed dangerously.
Today, however, everyone was being very civil with one another. Alice knew from experience that she had probably missed a real humdinger of a fight yesterday for such a tentative truce to be in operation today. She was really upset that she had missed it. The walls were spattered with something that looked like blueberries, and she surmised that the blueberry oatmeal debate that had been building steam for days now had finally come to a head. The disappointment she felt at having missed what was by all accounts the fight of the year must have been evident in her face, because Will gave her a free ice-cream sundae with extra hot fudge and a cherry.
She couldn't lie; it did help ease the pain.
She took her time eating the sundae, but she was still waiting for her mother to arrive when she finished. Finally she floated in, looking completely distracted. "Hey honey," she kissed Alice on the top of her head and ordered a coffee.
"What's up with you?" Alice asked as she swept her finger along the bottom of her sundae and licked the last bit of fudge from her finger.
"Oh, nothing," Her mother replied. "I was just reading the mail."
Alice felt her heart quicken. "Is it the paternity results? Are they here?"
"Oh, no! Sorry honey I never thought...No, it's nothing like that!" Alice exhaled deeply and slumped down into her seat.
"What came in the mail then?"
"Oh, nothing special."
Alice squinted her eyes at her. "What's wrong with your eyes?"
Rory groaned. "I did the blinky thing, didn't I?"
"It honestly looked looked like a mini, localized seizure."
"Damn." Rory looked up at her daughter from under her hair. Alice was still looking at her suspiciously, and it was clear that she would not be letting the subject drop anytime soon. She sighed. "I got a book."
"A book," Alice repeated flatly.
"Yes. As a gift."
"Ok. Why is that a big deal?"
"It's not," Rory rushed to reassure her.
"What book is it then?"
"Um, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy," she squeaked.
Alice's lips twitched into a smirk. "Huh," she said, and then let the subject drop.
_________________________________________________________________
Alice may have let it go, but Lorelai Gilmore had no intention of doing so.
"You loooove him," she teased as she flapped after her eldest daughter in Hartford Mall. Rory tried really hard to ignore her, and thus far was succeeding.
"At least you finally know, this burning is an eternal flame!"
"I like this scarf. Do you like this scarf?"
"Everything you do, do you do it for him?"
"It's a bit boring, though, don't you think?"
"Is he your first, your last, your everything?"
"I'm not sure about brown. It doesn't go with any of my hats."
"Or is it because it reminds you of Jess' eyes? His eyes are brown, right?"
"But, on the bright side, brown goes with everything except black, so I can't go too far wrong."
"Do black scarves make his brown eyes blue?"
"Blue, now that's a good colour for knitwear. I used to have a blue scarf. I wonder where it is. That's the problem with these things, you put them away at the end of Winter and never find them again."
"Is this the Winter of your discontent? It won't be for much longer because you're in love!"
"Mom!"
"What?" Lorelai's face was the picture of innocence.
"Please," Rory begged weakly. "Give me a break. I don't know how I feel anymore, and it's not an unfamiliar feeling, because I've spent most of the time I've known Jess unsure of how I feel about him!" She spun on her heel and started walking away quickly.
"Denying how you feel about him would be more accurate!" Lorelai called after her.
Rory turned back suddenly. "Yeah," she shouted back. "Well, you're losing your touch! Most of those puns didn't even make sense!"
Lorelai gasped and pressed her hand to her chest. "Unnecessarily mean!" she screamed at Rory's retreating back.
_________________________________________________________________
Rory spent the evening with a large glass of wine and a bubble bath. She read the Diaries. She thought about Jess. She thought about their relationship from the first moment they met until the last time she saw him. She remembered her denial in the beginning of their relationship. Her fear of everything that he represented: danger, charm, spontaneity, uncertainty, electricity. She remembered revisiting those feelings while she sat on the edge of the bath in Stars Hollow, white stick in hand. He was too unreliable, too spontaneous, too Jess.
She knew that she had made a mistake there. He had been living in the same city for five years now. He owned his house. He was a New York Times Bestseller several times over. And even though she had hidden his possible-daughter from him, he was still willing to talk to her. To send her a book. And with Jess, a book was never just a book. He was deep like that.
Slowly, thoughtfully, she got out of the bath, tied her dressing gown at the waist, and sat down at her writing desk. She found her best narrow lined paper and her favourite black pen that didn't rub on her hand when she wrote too fast, and started writing.
Pro Number One...
_________________________________________________________________
"Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals,-all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past-how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life. Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing."
Universe: Gilmore Girls, next-gen
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Rory/Jess
Summary:Alice Gilmore-Huntzburger's bookshelf had always played host to a collection of books by Jess Mariano
Five: A Sight For Sore Eyes
The sound of footsteps distracted him and he looked up. Upon recognising the figure in front of him he smirked in a knowing way, and leaned back into his seat.
"I can't say I haven't expected you to show up."
The figure nodded. "Hello, Jess."
"Hello, Logan."
The two men stared each other down for several minutes.
Imagine, if you care to, an old western film from the early days of Hollywood. Two lone figures, a long deserted street, a ball of tumble weed blowing through. One mouth lazily chewing a toothpick. Two pairs of eyes narrowing. A twitch of fingers, reaching for a gun strapped to a belted holster.
Multiply that tension tenfold, and you get a sense of the atmosphere in this small alcove. An animal could probably have smelled the testosterone thickening in the air.
Eventually, Jess sighed and kicked the chair across from him out. A high-pitched squeak escaped as the chair skidded across the hardwood and stopped short at Logan's hand. Slowly, carefully, he sat down. Their eyes met again. Simultaneously, they both sighed.
"Look, I'm not here for a fight," Logan admitted finally. "We're all adults here."
"She didn't cheat on you, you know. At least not with me," Jess shrugged.
Logan smiled bitterly. "I know. She's a terrible liar. I'm actually here about Alice."
Jess nodded. "Right." He rubbed his face with his hand.
"Until we have to test results back, we won't know who..." he trailed off awkwardly. "Well, you know what I mean. I need to know that, whatever the result, I can still have access to her."
Jess nodded. "I'm not gonna keep her away from you, man."
"I want to stay with me for some holidays. If you're her father, you get her Thanksgiving, Rory gets her Christmas, and I'll take a week in the summer. Something like that. I don't want to lose my daughter altogether."
"Deal," Jess agreed. "On one condition. If I'm not her father, I want some access anyway."
"That's a big ask for a step-cousin. I mean, I raised her, you've only known her a few weeks."
"Take it or leave it," Jess said calmly.
Logan pursed his lips, evidently deep in contemplation.
"Ok, fine. Deal." He extended his hand and Jess took it. "Do we need to draw up a contract?"
The corner of Jess's mouth twitched. "How 'bout we just take it as it goes for now? Gentlemen's honour."
"Always the cool guy," Logan shook his head. "Fine. I'm hoping you're an honourable guy." He stood up and began putting on his gloves.
"Me too," Jess replied.
Logan turned on his heel and headed for the exit. He stopped suddenly, however. Without out turning around, he addressed Jess again. "Just between us, whose do you think she is?"
Jess smirked, even though he knew Logan wasn't looking at him. "Rory's."
"Smartass," Logan muttered under his breath, and exited.
Jess turned back to his papers. He picked up his red pen, and put it down again. Suddenly, he was feeling much more generous. The line could stay.
_________________________________________________________________
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
_________________________________________________________________
"All right, we all set?"
"Yup."
"Okay. Ring the doorbell."
"What? Why me?"
"You're nearer."
"I don't want to ring the doorbell!"
"Why not?"
"I'm scared."
"That's silly."
"Is it? You ring then."
"Hey, is that a full moon?"
"No, it's only a crescent moon. For someone who went to an Ivy League School you really are stupid sometimes. I really- hey! Don't try and distract me. You're the adult here."
"Exactly. I'm the adult, which means I'm in charge. Which means you have to do as I say. Ha!"
"You can't play the Mom card like that!"
"Here look, it's simple, just press the button. It's sparkly!"
"All the more reason I shouldn't go near it."
Before the two women had time to press the doorbell, however, it swung open.
There was no pretending that the two women wanted to enter this house and endure this evening. They had already made several excuses, developed every possible short-term, highly contagious illness, been prevented by traffic and minor car accidents, babysat every child in Stars Hollow, and attended every possible festival. They ran out of excuses pretty soon however, under the tenacious persistence of one woman. This woman threw open the front door and raised her hands in the air.
"Wahay! My girls are here!" she shouted.
Alice stared in horror.
Rory hung her head in defeat.
She looked up and forced a feeble smile. "Hey, Liz."
Liz ushered them in. To Alice, Liz's house was familiar in the way that most houses in Stars Hollow were. She had spent time in probably every house in the town at some point in her youth, and Liz's love of crafts and TJ's wackiness had delighted her greatly once. She, Doula and Audrey had spent hours at Liz's kitchen table, armed with glue guns, glitter and macaroni. This was back in the days, of course, when all girls between the ages of four and eight could be temporarily united by glitter. Small mementos of those days were present in the house still. Most were Doula's, but Alice knew there was a macaroni birthday card of hers that was kept constantly on the mantelpiece and a horrendous Christmas tree decoration that was dragged out every year.
It wasn't that Liz and TJ weren't kind, or that they were boring. Alice was not looking forward to the evening simply because they were so intense, and she suspected her mother's feelings were the same. Liz was always attacking them with questions and compliments, and getting overexcited and distracted and destroying dinner. Either they would have to order takeout tonight, or be forced to eat burnt roast chicken again. TJ meant well, but he drove Rory crazy with his crazy schemes and conspiracy theories, and when Rory got irritated, she always managed to pass it on to Alice. Doula, while a sweet girl as a child, had been hit hard over the head by puberty, and was moody and self-absorbed the vast majority of the time. Alice knew in advance that Doula would spend most of the time at the dinner table sulking and picking at her nails. Liz and TJ laughed it off, saying that she was nothing compared to Jess in his teenage years. Her mother would shoot grateful looks at Alice, who, though sometimes inclined to sulk and grunt, was the best teenager in the world beside Doula.
She was infinitely comforted, therefore, when she walked into the kitchen to see Jess sitting at the dining table, listening to TJ talk about what appeared to be the Big Bang Theory and demonstratehis theories by smashing fruit together in his face. Jess had his best 'back-off' face on, but it didn't seem to be doing him any good. He looked so visibly grateful to see them that he burst out with a loud, "Thank God!" and made no attempt to disguise his relief.
Inevitably, they were sitting at the dinner table waiting for over an hour as Liz tried to figure out what went wrong with the oven, the grill and the microwave, respectively. This led to a lot of conversation, and a lot of bread. Doula refused to come to the table until there was food on it, and stayed in her room. Nobody could fault her really; she had to deal with this almost every night, after all. Jess had professed a desire to do the same, but had been refused by everyone at the table. In fact, when Liz heard him from the kitchen she went over to him and smacked him on the head with her oven mitt. He rubbed the back of his head, muttered, "Jeez!" and grew sulky and irritable. TJ started asking Rory if about some Pearl Harbour conspiracy he had heard and demanded to know why she wasn't investigating it, being a journalist and whatnot. While at first Rory patiently explained that writing a weekly column was not the same as being an investigative reporter with front page headlines and a hell of a lot of free time on her hands, she quickly became frustrated by his persistence. Sensing danger when it was in the air, Alice tried to distract TJ by asking about his job, a subject which he was happy to engage wholeheartedly with. After a while, she glanced at Rory and Jess, who seemed to have struck up a tentative conversation about books they were reading. It made her very excited to see them getting on for once, and she enjoyed the opportunity to watch them openly. She wanted to know what they were like in happier times, how they interacted as a couple. All she had seen up to now was anger and awkwardness, even in the photographs she had found.
She could barely hear their words, but she deduced they were debating Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky. If there was any hidden meaning to their words, she couldn't hear it. She watched their body language instead, observing how quickly the tension between them seemed to disappear as they conversed. At first they had both seemed unwilling to look the other in the eye. Jess stared at his hands and ran his hand through his hair over and over. Rory kept her hands in her lap, twisting them nervously and seemed to have picked a spot on the wall behind his head to focus her attention on. As time passed, however, they became more comfortable with each other. Their postures relaxed, their fingers shook a little less. Once their eyes met, tentatively.
Oh well, it was a start.
_________________________________________________________________
"Well, was it romantic?" Alice demanded as soon as the door shut behind them.
"Was what romantic?" Rory asked as she unlocked the car and got in.
"Your conversation, obviously! Don't treat me like a child."
"You are a child," Rory said distractedly, buckling her seat belt.
"Mom!"
"Hmm?"
"Was it romantic?"
Rory sighed. "Only if you consider a discussion about the influence of Sofia Tolstoy on Anna Karenina as romantic."
"I normally wouldn't," Alice relented. "But with the two of you, you never know."
Her mother chose to ignore that.
"It was nice. It felt like we were back in high school, sitting on the old muddy river bridge and arguing about books again," she said finally.
Alice worked very hard to suppress a smirk in the darkness.
_________________________________________________________________
Will Danes was the spit of his father. He had the same gruff but unfailingly kind exterior, the same love of baseball (especially the merchandise) and the same ability to cook a great burger. Though, thankfully, he did not share his father's love of flannel. Will was the obvious heir to Luke's Diner, and had worked there since he was a teenager. Now that he was in college, he worked the holidays when he was home. Luke sat behind the counter, barking orders at him and complaining about any changes made, regardless of how small or effective they were. Will was perhaps the only person in Stars Hollow unafraid of Luke's temper and certainly the only one willing to argue with him as vehemently as he did. Their holiday arguments were a standing Stars Hollow tradition, and Alice always knew Christmas was coming when she found them standing in the middle of the dinner, poking each other in the chests as the veins in their necks throbbed dangerously.
Today, however, everyone was being very civil with one another. Alice knew from experience that she had probably missed a real humdinger of a fight yesterday for such a tentative truce to be in operation today. She was really upset that she had missed it. The walls were spattered with something that looked like blueberries, and she surmised that the blueberry oatmeal debate that had been building steam for days now had finally come to a head. The disappointment she felt at having missed what was by all accounts the fight of the year must have been evident in her face, because Will gave her a free ice-cream sundae with extra hot fudge and a cherry.
She couldn't lie; it did help ease the pain.
She took her time eating the sundae, but she was still waiting for her mother to arrive when she finished. Finally she floated in, looking completely distracted. "Hey honey," she kissed Alice on the top of her head and ordered a coffee.
"What's up with you?" Alice asked as she swept her finger along the bottom of her sundae and licked the last bit of fudge from her finger.
"Oh, nothing," Her mother replied. "I was just reading the mail."
Alice felt her heart quicken. "Is it the paternity results? Are they here?"
"Oh, no! Sorry honey I never thought...No, it's nothing like that!" Alice exhaled deeply and slumped down into her seat.
"What came in the mail then?"
"Oh, nothing special."
Alice squinted her eyes at her. "What's wrong with your eyes?"
Rory groaned. "I did the blinky thing, didn't I?"
"It honestly looked looked like a mini, localized seizure."
"Damn." Rory looked up at her daughter from under her hair. Alice was still looking at her suspiciously, and it was clear that she would not be letting the subject drop anytime soon. She sighed. "I got a book."
"A book," Alice repeated flatly.
"Yes. As a gift."
"Ok. Why is that a big deal?"
"It's not," Rory rushed to reassure her.
"What book is it then?"
"Um, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy," she squeaked.
Alice's lips twitched into a smirk. "Huh," she said, and then let the subject drop.
_________________________________________________________________
Alice may have let it go, but Lorelai Gilmore had no intention of doing so.
"You loooove him," she teased as she flapped after her eldest daughter in Hartford Mall. Rory tried really hard to ignore her, and thus far was succeeding.
"At least you finally know, this burning is an eternal flame!"
"I like this scarf. Do you like this scarf?"
"Everything you do, do you do it for him?"
"It's a bit boring, though, don't you think?"
"Is he your first, your last, your everything?"
"I'm not sure about brown. It doesn't go with any of my hats."
"Or is it because it reminds you of Jess' eyes? His eyes are brown, right?"
"But, on the bright side, brown goes with everything except black, so I can't go too far wrong."
"Do black scarves make his brown eyes blue?"
"Blue, now that's a good colour for knitwear. I used to have a blue scarf. I wonder where it is. That's the problem with these things, you put them away at the end of Winter and never find them again."
"Is this the Winter of your discontent? It won't be for much longer because you're in love!"
"Mom!"
"What?" Lorelai's face was the picture of innocence.
"Please," Rory begged weakly. "Give me a break. I don't know how I feel anymore, and it's not an unfamiliar feeling, because I've spent most of the time I've known Jess unsure of how I feel about him!" She spun on her heel and started walking away quickly.
"Denying how you feel about him would be more accurate!" Lorelai called after her.
Rory turned back suddenly. "Yeah," she shouted back. "Well, you're losing your touch! Most of those puns didn't even make sense!"
Lorelai gasped and pressed her hand to her chest. "Unnecessarily mean!" she screamed at Rory's retreating back.
_________________________________________________________________
Rory spent the evening with a large glass of wine and a bubble bath. She read the Diaries. She thought about Jess. She thought about their relationship from the first moment they met until the last time she saw him. She remembered her denial in the beginning of their relationship. Her fear of everything that he represented: danger, charm, spontaneity, uncertainty, electricity. She remembered revisiting those feelings while she sat on the edge of the bath in Stars Hollow, white stick in hand. He was too unreliable, too spontaneous, too Jess.
She knew that she had made a mistake there. He had been living in the same city for five years now. He owned his house. He was a New York Times Bestseller several times over. And even though she had hidden his possible-daughter from him, he was still willing to talk to her. To send her a book. And with Jess, a book was never just a book. He was deep like that.
Slowly, thoughtfully, she got out of the bath, tied her dressing gown at the waist, and sat down at her writing desk. She found her best narrow lined paper and her favourite black pen that didn't rub on her hand when she wrote too fast, and started writing.
Pro Number One...
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"Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals,-all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past-how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life. Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing."