Chapter Text
He had prepared himself for disappointment, had known she wouldn't say it back because there's no reason for her to still feel that way about him - but he lingered anyway because there was a fleeting memory of fumbling fingers holding tightly to his own and kissing her on Luke's couch until their mouths went numb.
She had told him over the phone that she could have loved him but she needed to let him go, and she has. He knows she has, because Dean's marriage crumbled after his affair and Rory dropped out of Yale, and Jess is back, now, when he shouldn't be because he knows it's just another check on the list of everything going bad in her life right now.
So, he had prepared himself for disappointment, but it didn't stop the crushing wave of hurt when she just blinked at him.
He tells himself when he walks away from her that he'd done it for himself, that he needed to say it to make it real. It's stupid and selfish because he gets to drive wherever the roads lead him and she's the one that has to stay and deal with whatever his words have left behind.
He'd been selfish before. Everyone chalked up his abrupt departure the last time to him being selfish. He'd ruined a good thing with the best girl because he was selfish.
And he was.
He was selfish for wanting the father he never got as a kid. Selfish for thinking it'd work out. Selfish for staying even when it was obvious it would never work - not after all this time.
They'll chalk up his abrupt departure this time to him being selfish.
He can handle that because he doesn't have to handle it.
Luke hadn't told her he was here for a reason, Rory knows this, but it doesn't stop it hurting any more than it does. As she watches him walk away she remembers how much she liked making him smile and the way he would laugh freely when they were alone. She thinks back to walking blindly through the street because they never stopped kissing long enough to see where their feet were falling - the same street he's disappearing into now.
She'd tried so hard to understand it from his perspective. Tried to put herself into his shoes and see what he saw. She found she couldn't because she had seen it all along through her own eyes but had ignored it in favor of forming a friendship with Dean (which did the opposite of good) and trying to keep the peace between people who had wanted anything but that. She had seen the way he struggled with assignments, not because he didn't understand it, but because he just knew it wouldn't matter. She'd seen the disapproving glances his way, had heard the whispers about him, known he had seen and heard them too but shrugged them off much like she had. Knew he'd been getting them longer than he'd been in Stars Hollow, and she'd ignored that ache of guilt in her chest the entire time.
Her feet carry her without her realizing it. The leather of his jacket is warm against her palm and he looks surprised and hopeful and guilty when she meets his eyes. His car, still in need of a paint job and probably a decent heating system, is just beyond their reach, and his keys jingle in his hand.
"Where?"
She knows he needs to leave.
"Anywhere with a bit more noise."
He'd always hated how quiet Stars Hollow was. She remembers that.
"Okay."
He seems to know that she needs to leave, too.
He waits in the car when she disappears into the house to pack a bag. They'd yet to really say anything to each other, but there's a comforting level of familiarity when she slides back into the passenger seat and he starts the engine again.
Memories of late-night drives when they couldn't sleep, a drive-in movie once that they didn't pay attention to in favor of making out in the back seat, fumbling hands unbuttoning jeans and exploring bodies but going no further. All in this very car. It's a bit more tense, now, than it used to be, but once they pass the Connecticut border Rory turns to face him and she smiles at him for the first time in a little three years.
When he faces the road again he can breathe a little easier.
It's stupidly late, so he turns into the first B&B they see a sign for. Jess can't read the name of it on the signs, but they have a room with two beds and that's all that matters. The pad of paper in their room says New York, though, so that's at least one sign that they know where they are. The novelty isn't lost on him that Rory had ditched school once to find him in New York. He had tried to convince himself that their story started before that, but that was just Rory and Jess. Rory and Jess started then - when Dean was still around but just a distant thought, and she'd called it fate finding Belinda and when he'd teased her about not wanting to take a hotdog onto the subway.
They started this all off in New York the first time. It's kind of fitting that they start to try and reconnect here too. Sure, it's no Washington Square Park, not even close, but it's the right state and Jess will take whatever he can get.
He gives Rory the bathroom to change in; because she has makeup to wash off and all he needs to do is change into sweats and a new shirt. There's a brief memory of her telling him she can't sleep with the breeze on her face, so he takes the bed closest to the window once he's done. There's a crappy TV on the wall and the only channel that isn't interrupted with grey static every few seconds is playing some Spanish soap opera. He'd learned enough Spanish to get by in California, only because Jimmy's neighbors would pay him to fix their taps every few weeks when they broke and they only spoke Spanish, so Jess lets it play just for something to listen to.
He's done this before. Tolerating shitty TV in a shitty motel room. There's never been Rory, though. She slips back into the room and puts her bag down beside his, sits on her bed but faces him and crosses her legs. He leaves the TV playing when he mirrors her position, but he does turn it down a bit.
"How does this normally work, then?" Rory asks and gestures to their bags. He'd left one of his in the car, under the back seat so no one would see it and want to steal it, but the bag he did bring up is still bigger than the one Rory has. He thinks she might not have unpacked from Yale yet, because there's no way she would pack that sparkly top peeking past the zip. He tries not to think about Rory at a college party, wearing that sparkly top and having guys watch her.
"I don't normally have a plan," He shrugs, "Just kind of drive until I don't want to anymore. Get a job that pays cash in hand for two weeks, start it back up again."
"Even Kerouac had a plan," She raises an eyebrow, but it's teasing and light like they're falling back into their same old routine. They're not, he knows because that'll take time and he's just dropped a pretty big bomb on her a few hours back that they'll have to discuss at some point.
"Even Kerouac fucked it up at the beginning."
"Is this what this is?" Rory asks and there's a silent, invisible gesture between them, "The beginning?"
There's a lump in his throat when he nods slowly, just barely, but there's a glow to her cheeks when she spots it, "Yeah. This is the beginning."
Jess leaves Rory to hand the keys in early the next morning so he can go get gas a few minutes down the road. They'd decided to head out as soon as possible because the entire stretch of road they're on feels like something out of a Stephen King novel - neither of them were ever big King fans anyway. Rory knows that the tension from the room will follow them in the car and that the only reason Jess went for gas now rather than after they check out is to give them both some time to gather their thoughts separately.
She needs to get out of that room, sits down on the edge of the sidewalk after handing in the keys. The ice machine clunks occasionally behind her and there's a couple arguing on the second floor, muffled from where Rory's sat but clear enough for her to be able to hear. She tunes it all out and turns her mobile between her fingers. She should phone her mother or even Paris, but then she'd need to explain everything and she doesn't understand it enough herself to try and get it out into words.
Rory shouldn't have come. She should have let Jess drive away, should have tried to get over him all over again. She'd told him what she wanted to say at graduation, listened to his uneven breathing on the other end of the phone, eleven states and 2,988.8 miles west, convinced herself she was over him. It was easy to push him to the back of her mind when she was in Europe, and then she was a college freshman and her assignments were distraction enough. She tries to think, now, if she was ever really over him or just good at providing distractions from him.
Her copy of Howl still sits on her bedside table, and she could never ignore his notes in the margins when she reads it - can't ignore his notes in any of her books. She has one of his sweatshirts and one of his band tee shirts in her wardrobe. She hadn't thought twice about packing them for college, because the sweatshirt was good for sleeping in when the heater stopped working, and the band tee shirt was soft against her skin after a shower. It was nothing different from what she'd been doing since they first got together and she'd never stopped to think that maybe that was part of the problem.
Dean was a moment of weakness in a bigger moment of weakness, and her skin prickles at the memory of that night. She'd cried when he'd left because she knew that wasn't how her story was supposed to go. She'd never thought about handing Dean her virginity when they were dating but remembers one stilted dinner with her mother when she said she was thinking about with Jess. That was how she'd wanted it to go, but just days later Jess was sitting next to her on that bus and Rory was pretending that she didn't see his bag tucked under the seats.
There's so much she wants to think about and dissect, but at that moment Jess pulls into a parking space a few feet away. He joins her on the curb and lights a cigarette. She'd always hated that he smoked but hated even more how he made it look cool.
"We're not too far away," Jess says gently, slicing through the silence, "If you want me to drive you back."
They don't have a plan and it would make sense for Rory to head back to Stars Hollow. She knows Stars Hollow and what waits for her there. It's news of Dean's divorce, questions about why she's taking time off Yale, her grandmother pretending not to be disappointed every Friday night. Rory doesn't know what lies ahead for her if she tells Jess to keep driving. She can guess - motel rooms just like this, stretching pennies every now and again, conversations they don't want to have but know they'll need to - but she does know, with complete certainty, that there's Jess.
She sighs and tucks her phone into her jacket pocket, "If you want to pull a Kerouac, you'll have to put up with New Jersey."
"I think I can handle that," He meets her eye and the small smile he gives her looks relaxed but vulnerable.
Rory gets to drive for a little bit, but they switch again just outside of New Jersey lines. She mans the radio, instead, and toes off her boots when they pinch at her heels.
Jess parks them outside a Target an hour into the state, gets them snacks and drinks whilst Rory finds a pair of comfy trainers and a few jumpers. She hadn't looked at what bag she'd picked up back home, just threw in some toiletries and her phone charger before heading back out, so there's not a large selection of comfy clothes on her right now.
Jess grumbles a little when Rory hands the cashier some notes alongside his change, but she just gives him a smug little grin and takes two of the four bags off of him.
They sit on the hood of the car in the corner of the car park and watch the highway on the other side of the fence. She pinches his thigh as a yellow car speeds past and he swats at her wrist half-heartedly. Rory's lacing up the new trainers onto her feet once Jess speaks again.
He'd pulled the tag off one of the jumpers for her, and he's using his lighter to burn off the few frayed stitchings at the hem, "I was going to say something."
Rory doesn't reach for the jumper, just leans back against the car next to him. Their shoulders knock together but neither of them moves away. If she closes her eyes she thinks back to sitting just like this with him one night, right outside Luke's diner, watching Taylor and Kirk try and set up Christmas lights on the gazebo and laughing when Taylor wobbled on the ladder.
"When you graduated," Jess continues, hands fiddling with the lighter now but not igniting the flame, "I phoned with a whole speech prepared but then you answered and... I just couldn't get it out."
"What were you going to say?"
He sighs and closes his eyes, rests the back of his head against the glass behind him, "That I was stupid." She huffs out a laugh, can't keep it in, and even Jess's lips curve up a little. "There was more, but that was the main theme."
"You had to leave." Rory understands that now. She didn't, before, but she thinks she learned along the way why he did it.
"I should have gone about it better."
"You didn't know how to."
"Still don't."
Rory can't think of anything else to say. This is a topic he'll have to find the words for, something he'll have to start without her help, and if he needs more time to talk about it then she can give him more time.
Her fingers lace with his at his thigh and the way his hand squeezes hers reminds her of the look in his eyes when he said he loves her. That's a conversation she'll have to start, but she doesn't want to until she can say those words back. It's on the tip of her tongue but she doesn't want this to be like with Dean. Where she says it the first time because she feels like she needs to.
She wasn't lying - on the phone - she knows she could have loved Jess if they had more time. She loved parts of him when they were together, loved the other parts of him when they were separate but never had the chance to combine them.
They both need a little bit more time, and that's why she won't even entertain the idea of going back to Stars Hollow just yet.
"You need a haircut," She says, instead, and his shoulders shake when he laughs.