Chapter Text
"Jess, wait," Rory called out. "Jess, I'm sorry." Fuck.
He shook his head. "We shouldn't have done this."
"He's just in a bad way lately," she pleaded. It was true that Logan had been off - but he also had a wicked jealous streak, and Jess certainly wasn’t about to back down from it.
"He's a jerk." She watched him say it with such disdain, like he’d written off everything and everyone in Stars Hollow.
"He was. In there, definitely. I'm so sorry." She found herself apologizing, again and again, for Logan, by instinct. Trying to write off the worst parts of the evening, salvage it for something better so she could say it was better off.
"I read that guy the second I saw him. I should have begged off." She was watching his frustration bubble up and out like he was eighteen again. Like always, he looked upset about something else, something bigger than the words coming out of his mouth. His mind was running faster than he could express, and like she couldn’t read him. They were stuck at an impasse. Everything else he’s talked about has been fine , she thought. This can’t just be Logan pissing him off.
"Well, I didn't want you to."
"He better not come out here," he said, pointing back at the restaurant. God, of all the places, we really had to have a tet-a-tet at the Joe’s Burgers outside of Hartford? Surely there were better places for old boyfriends to meet and for her to fail to bridge them.
"Please, Jess. He had a lot to drink. He's tired from traveling. This isn't him. I swear." She’d wanted this to work out - to be able to do the grown-up thing, to be able to look past this and catch up with Jess, and introduce Logan to one of her friends for once. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. What the hell is going on?
"What the hell is going on?"
Guess he can still read my mind sometimes. "I told you. He's tired, and his family's bugging him right now."
"No, no. I mean with you. What's going on with you?"
She furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. I know you better than anyone. This isn't you."
"I don't know,” she said defensively. I don’t, I really don’t.
"What are you doing? Living at your grandparents' place, being in the DAR, no Yale...why did you drop out of Yale?!"
Immediately, without thinking, her guard went up. "It's complicated." Luke got to him, I guess. Which means my mother got to him.
"It's not! It's not complicated."
"You don't know." She felt the words bubbling up inside her, trying to defend herself. He doesn’t know about anything. He hasn’t been here for the last year, year and a half. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t -
"This isn't you. This, you going out with this jerk, with the Porsche. We made fun of guys like this."
That one stung - they had made fun of guys like this, once upon a time, but it wasn’t something she had thought of in terms of her life now. That was high school, when they were both a lot more invested in the Beat poets of the sixties and she was venting about Chilton. "You caught him on a bad night," Rory pleaded. She wasn’t really listening to Jess so much as she was trying to keep herself from breaking down in front of him. I can’t have this conversation now.
"This isn't about him. Okay, screw him. What's going on with you? This isn't you, Rory. You know it isn't. What's going on?"
"I don't know! I don't know," she blurted, the words finally tumbling out of her. As she stood in this burger joint, she felt the opposite of grounded. She felt like she was seventeen again, frustrated and scared and wanting to say so many things but so unsure of what to say about anything.
And just like the old Jess, that softened his resolve. It was as though he had also felt it, too - the rise and fall back into their old rhythms - and it had melted him back down in the face of confusion and softness. "Hey, uh... may-may-maybe we'll catch up at a better time." He started to leave, but stopped and turned around. "Happy birthday, by the way. Wasn't that a couple weeks ago, your birthday?"
Rory nodded, and Jess looked relieved as he smiled and went back to his car.
She watched him leave, not yet ready to go back in the restaurant and tell of Logan. They're both just being jerks , she thought. But he's just being Jess.
The night wasn't supposed to go like this - it wasn’t supposed to be this hard, falling into new rhythms with Jess. She was so happy to see him last night, and this had felt so easy - nothing like before, like the last time she had seen him - god , I don’t want to think about last time. It was supposed to be easy. It was going to be easy. And now it wasn’t.
In some ways, this was almost like last time. Jess showing up at an inopportune time, another guy at present, having to turn away someone in order to deal with the other. If she wasn’t in such a state, she might’ve chuckled. Instead, she took a deep breath. She didn’t have time to run through this. She had to deal with the other new part of the rhythm waiting back inside the restaurant.
Still, it stuck with her. I know you better than anyone . She wanted to react that he didn’t - he hadn’t known her in years at this point, they hadn’t had much of a conversation. But he was the first one to ask it out loud and to ask her directly. God, wasn’t he so good at that. When she thought back to being 15, he did know her then - he could always see right through, and he knew almost everything. Once upon a time, he did know her better than anyone.