Work Text:
1. you don’t know what people do on a date. you have some idea - eating, maybe, and calculated touching. jokes, but those aren’t your strong suit. a shame, really, because you have so many strong suits: archery and fencing and field hockey, physics and grammar and portuguese, piano and cello, winning. when you start dating a boy you’re ready to make that your strong suit, too. like most things, you expect it’s a ten thousand hours kind of situation, and you’re willing to put in the time, if it means being the best.
2. rory gilmore knows what people do on dates. she’s been on a hundred of them, probably, with that tall boy you refuse to learn the name of and then with jess who you almost sort of like except that he’s cocky and complacent and doesn’t want anything he doesn’t already have, and also,
3. he has rory.
4. except! maybe he doesn’t. because here’s the thing. the thing that keeps you up at night: they haven’t slept together.
5. you know this because you have a boyfriend and his name is jamie and he’s very nice but in the way that people mean when they say “nice is different than good.” and he’s smart, like you, and he tells you this all the time: you’re so smart, paris. i hadn’t thought about it like that, paris. and he lets you win arguments so often you start losing them on purpose, forcing him to concede that the league of nations was an effective governing machine, or that degas was more important than monet.
6. and when you’re figuring out what people do on dates, when you’re eating with him in an expensive restaurant, or when you’re sitting next to his grandmother at jamie christmas, or even mostly when you’re kissing him, you can ignore it, the voice in your head that is telling you the same thing over and over, but
7. suddenly it’s a monday night and you’re sitting on his carpet and you say “i just don’t think the movement has legs anymore, it’s all corporate hr-“ and he looks at you the same way he did before he kissed you the first time, a little bit shy, a little bit younger than he is (because he’s in college, he’s a grown up, he votes in elections) and says “do you want to?” and you say something that, stupidly, you don’t remember later.
8. and then he’s pulling your shirt over your head. and then he's kissing your neck. and then he’s whispering something stupid in your ear, something like “is that good?”
9. and all you can think about is rory gilmore.
10. and g-d, there are so many mechanics to this. you think maybe it’s been going on for an hour, but that can’t be right. and you’re thinking about the stupid c-span contest. and you’re thinking about rory. and you’re thinking about you and rory rooming together at harvard next year, and you’re thinking she’s going to borrow one of your dresses to go to a party, and that you’ll do something strange and spontaneous, dance on a table like julia stiles in ten things i hate about you and you’ll catch her eye and she’ll laugh.
11. you are thinking, i wonder if i’ve ever made her laugh before?
12. this is what you are thinking about while you lose your virginity to jamie from princeton.
13. and thirty minutes later, you’re on a bus to stars hollow.
14. and fifteen minutes later than that you say “do you want to work out here or in the bedroom?” and she says “we can work here” but you go into the bedroom anyway. you sit down on her bed. you think about brushing her hair behind her ear, which, it occurs to you
15. is something jamie has done to you before.
16. so instead, you say this: “jamie and i did it.” like a shield. like an alibi. like a thing the two of you have in common.
17. but you don’t. and here the story comes full circle: rory has not had sex, either with what’s-his-hair or jess the new one.
18. “you’re lying”
19. “no! the timing just hasn’t been right”
20. and you weren’t thinking about timing, you were thinking about marxism, and then you were thinking about rory.
21. and that scares you, for some reason. so you write your speech and then you call a cab home because there’s only so much indignity you can take in one day, and when you get there, this:
22. the small envelope.
23. a monday made of sentence fragments.
24. and when you get it you aren’t thinking about the way your dad’s face is going to fall when you tell him. and you aren’t thinking about visiting harvard when you were seven and sitting by yourself in the gazebo and looking at all the red-brick buildings and thinking, yeah, alright, this is destiny. and you aren’t even thinking about jamie from princeton, and how he will say nice things and you’ll know he thinks just a little bit less of you.
25. it’s a terrible thing. it makes you feel bad. it makes you feel creepy. it makes you feel like if she knew, she’d hate you. it makes you feel like less of a person. but:
26. you’re thinking about you and rory at that party you won't go to.
27. you’re thinking about making her laugh.
28. and something inside you that has been pulled taut for eighteen years snaps.
29. and at the speech the next day you are looking at her on stage and it snaps all over again. she smells like little-kid shampoo. like all the fruits there are. like pink.
30. people at school say you lost control but you didn’t. you know you didn’t because you came so so close to telling her something big and scary, right there in front of everyone. but instead you told her she’s going to harvard because she’s a virgin. so, great. wonderful.
31. but afterwards she comes and finds you and she puts her arm around your shoulder and she tells you nice things about destiny and
32. from jamie they’d sound like lies but from rory they are the truth.
33. and her eyes are so big and so blue and you dig your french tips into your palms because you want to-
34. you don’t.
35. you lost your virginity to jamie.
36. you aren’t going to harvard.
37. her head is on your shoulder. for the next minute, that’s enough.