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Lane lets herself in with the Saturday afternoon sun behind her: a silhouette of a heroine, Rory thinks, and her heart skips half a beat. It’s been too long. (It’s been two weeks.) Lane looks around at the couch, the TV, the bizarre lamp with the floral design, the endtable that began as an old-time sewing machine, the potted plant on a wooden chair, the tub of clean laundry behind the couch, half of it folded (Rory’s half), half of it not.
“I thought you’d take the chance to redecorate,” Lane says, shrugging of her jeans jacket off so slowly it’s like she’s hiding something underneath. She hangs the jacket on the hatrack by the door. “I mean, I’m gone for over two weeks, being grounded and all after Henrygate, and now mom finally lets me leave the tower of ancient sorrow—sorry, the house and the store—and she thinks I’m at the public library and you’re the first place I go. The least you could do is give me something new to see.”
“I thought you’d cherish the familiarity,” Rory says, perky as usual, taking a seat on the lowest stair-step. It’s what Rory does: respond with understatement whenever someone she cares for goes up to eleven.
Or, if not understatement, absurdism. Lane pulls Rory up from the step by the wrist and leads her to the couch, where Rory feigns surprise. “What, no hugs for the ottoman?” The skinny Gilmore girl turns out her hands and pouts. (She has, Lane thinks, the world’s best pout.) “No ‘my friend, how much I’ve missed you’ for this superbly flowery lamp?”
Lane takes the bait. “Oh, lamp, how much I missed your warmth! Oh, peonies on this lampshade, how I have suffered in your absence! O scary clown on your very own scary clown pillow, O dollhouse whose dolls have moved away, I pined without you. And truly I was like Candy, nay, like Stephanie in her veritable Alaska, without you, my own pagoda-topped, slightly chipped floral lamp.”
Rory raises an eyebrow. “You’re like candy in Alaska? You’re a frozen Snickers bar?”
“It’s the Velvet Underground. ‘Candy Says’ and ‘Stephanie Says.’ From White Light/ White Heat. You remember, I played you the whole thing right here. On my Discman. You had one earpod and I had the other so your mom could work. She said we were cute together. She knew the song.”
“She knows a lot of your songs. Not Belle and Sebastian, though.” Rory shifts her weight back on the couch so she can look at Lane, all of Lane, in her house again at least (don't tell anyone), in the Deanless, Lorelai-free time (no interruptions), in the afternoon sun through the side window. Lane’s just a bit curvier than the last time they hung out, Rory finds herself noticing: Lane’s polo shirt’s slanted in places she used to be flat. Her best friend feels just a bit softer. Just a bit….
Rory shushes her unfamiliar thoughts and tries again to remember which one of the hundreds of bands Lane has played her is the Velvet Underground (the last one she remembers was Belle and Sebastian). “White Heat White Heat….that’s the album with the long song that’s mostly feedback, and the one that’s almost as long that’s a monologue about this guy who’s so obsessed with his sorta girlfriend that he mails himself to her in a box, and then her friend stabs him with the box opener?” Rory pauses. “Eugh.”
“I’m such an idiot.” Lane moves her knees up closer to Rory so that her Chuck Taylor sneakers touch Rory’s sandals.
“Because you forgot to take off your shoes? That’s a bit harsh.” Lane bends down to untie them anyway.
“No,” Lane says. “Candy Says and Stephanie Says aren’t on White Light/ White Heat. They're on The Velvet Underground self-titled. Which you liked.”
“That’s the one with ‘I never want to see the day again,’ right? I did like that one.” Rory remembers that’s a song called “Hours.” Or “Morning Hours.” Or “After Hours.” When she’s sad and has a hard time sleeping—and Lorelai is unavailable for midnight conversation—Rory closes her eyes and thinks about Marianne Dashwood singing that song to herself, and Elinor singing it, tired of caring for Marianne, and about Rory, holding Lane’s hand. Sometimes they have a kitten together. Rory’s never had a pet.
Rory lies back so her hair falls across the pillow at the edge of the couch, her feet, now without sandals, in Lane’s lap. Lane pokes her toes, with their perfect pink nail polish: big toe, middle toe, next toe, toe after that. It’s a game they played for years. It seems to get Rory very relaxed.
“I think Dean would mail himself to me in a box,” Rory muses, closing her eyes. “I think that’s just the kind of thing he would do.”
“Would you open it?” Lane’s amused. She peels open a Snickers bar.
Rory opens her eyes. “Yes, since he went to all that trouble. Would you stab him to death with Sookie’s enormous knife?”
“Not on purpose. Not unless you asked.” Lane makes the kind of sound, eating her Snickers, that’s normally heard only in commercials. “You know I’m not officially at your house, right?”
“Of course. You’re at the public library, you walked all the way there—”
“All five blocks. This is Stars Hollow.”
“So noted. You walked all the way to the library and you’ll walk home the minute they close. Which, as your mom already knows, is…”
“4pm on Saturdays.” Lane’s done her homework. Lane and Rory always do their homework. If Rory didn’t have most of her Chilton homework done for Monday already, she wouldn’t have told Lane to come over. Or would she? She did tell Dean not to pop in till after 5, when Lorelai would already be home from the Inn. But she wanted this time for Lane. Of course.
“Free indirect discourse,” Rory says, to herself as much as to Lane. She’s started making mental notes when she’s using a literary device—in this case, casting her thoughts about herself in the third person, as if she were a protagonist. Rory knew what she was getting into. The transcontinental flight bore promise of adventure to come. The home welcomed her. Lane’s buttoned-up polo shirt made her look especially kissable this afternoon.
Where did that last thought come from? Rory came back into the moment fast. “Sorry, was just having literary thoughts. Sometimes I do that.”
“Wrapped Up in Books?” Lane says. It’s her new telephone nickname for Rory, and it goes with a song she’s humming. The tune goes up and down and chugs along in Lane’s head: she’s tapping her fingers, and—Rory leans in to catch the words; the words are new—singing. “’Our aspirations are wrapped up in books.’ Well yours are. ‘Our inclinations hidden in looks.’”
“Am I supposed to recognize that one too? Come on. Am I your best friend or your apprentice music librarian?”
“Both. But you won’t know this one. It’s on this…. this new concert recording. A bootleg. I had to mail order it from Toronto.”
“How?”
“I told my source just what to write in Korean on the outer envelope.”
Rory nods. “Are my inclinations hidden in books?”
“Where else would you hide them?” Lane sits up. “Oh and seriously I cannot ever thank you enough for making sure I got ‘Legal Man.’ It, and I do not say this very often about Belle and Sebastian, rocks.” She runs one hand through her short black hair. “Sometimes I imagine I’m the drummer.”
“I’ll tell Michel. You have no idea what he went through for you.”
“You have no idea what *I* have been through over *you.*” And Lane has shifted position on the couch they share, so that she’s got her feet near Rory’s, her legs parallel to Rory’s, her hips and torso almost squashing her best friends.
“You mean lending me those Belle and Sebastian CDs, so I would hide them for you when you ran out of floorboards? Did that cause Lane pain? Music brain pain?”
“I’ll show you music pain.” And Lane bites down playfully on Rory’s slim wrist, playing the game they used to play when they were in grade school together. The proper move now was for Rory to say “No biting or I’m telling!” and then to pretend to bite back.
Instead Rory kisses Lane. Lightly, softly, but unmistakably. “It hurt not to hang out with you. Not to see you. Let’s not do that again.”
“It hurt me. Were we seeing other people? Was that kissing just for practice?”
“Lane Kim, you wound me.” Rory turns around on the couch so that she’s got her back to Lane. “Lane Kitten.”
“No.” It’s a game they haven’t played for at least a year: neither girl was ever allowed a pet, so they used to borrow Lorelai’s fuzzy alarm clock from Lorelai’s bedroom and pretend to feed and comb it, but when Lorelai put a stop to that game, Rory simply became Lane’s kitten. Lane would comb out her long straight hair and feed her bits of cereal they called kibble, and scratch her back, and sometimes her belly. Rory missed it.
Apparently so did Lane, who pulls out a simple black comb and starts combing and sorting and even stroking her best friend’s hair. Rory purrs.
Lane purrs too. “I am so over Henry,” she says.
“Alas, poor Henry,” Rory not-quite-quotes. “I hardly knew ye.” She pretends to admire a skull, just like in Hamlet, but then she remembers that her hands are still paws, so she starts licking her knuckles, settling back into Lane’s lap as she does.
Then the doorbell rings. “Don’t answer it,” Lane says. “Good kitty.” If it’s Mrs. Kim, Lane needs to Not Be There.
“It’s probably Paris,” Rory says. That Paris Geller won’t leave her alone. Rory meows.
“You know she likes you, right? Like, likes you likes you.”
“The thought had crossed my tiny kitten mind, but then I saw a ball of string and forgot,” Rory answers mildly. “You really think she likes me, like, likes me likes me?”
“She takes every excuse to drive the hour round trip to your house from her mansion or chateau or Martian space satellite or wherever that girl lives, she looks up to you as if you and only you could help get her into Stanford—”
“Harvard.”
“Harvard for you, Stanford for her. I just know it.”
“How do you know it?”
“Because that girl needs to get half a continent away from the disaster parents who failed to raise her.” Rory nods before Lane goes on. “Though maybe Berkeley. I don’t know. But she needs to come out. And she has the biggest crush on you, Rory-kitten, that I have ever seen.”
“How many crushes have you seen?”
“Let’s put it this way: there’s a lot more chemistry between you and Paris than between you and Dean. And I’ve seen you and Dean. I’ve only heard about Paris.”
“You’re awful, Lane Kim. There’s a song about how awful you are.”
“I know. ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’?”
And Rory realizes that for the two weeks and more when Lane’s been grounded, Rory’s been building up to this moment. She’s been waiting and thinking about it without realizing it, closing her eyes and thinking about being Lane’s kitten, Lane’s hand-holder, Lane’s couch-partner, Lane’s CD-hider, Lane’s almost-everything, and now she wants to be, not Lane’s absolutely everything, but Lane’s just a little more. “Seeing Other People,” Rory says.
“Oh my—Oh my Moe Tucker,” Lane says. “You don’t mean.”
She’s memorized the song for exactly this moment. “Kissing just for practice,” Rory says. “You’re gonna have to go with girls. At least we know where to put it.”
Lane withdraws the comb from Rory’s smooth, soft, pretty, straight hair. “Rory Fuzzy-ears Kitten-fur Nimblepaws Gilmore, are you absolutely serious?”
“As serious as the stars of track and field,” Rory says, and pokes Lane on her squared-off, polo-shirted shoulder, and Lane, though it’s barely a collarbone-touch, goes down like a balsa-wood board in a stiff wind. Lane’s on her back on the couch and Rory’s quietly, carefully leaning over her friend, ready to plant a wet, serious, voracious kiss.
Rory looks at her best friend’s new curves, sees the bra strap under the cotton and the smooth bra where it holds her in place, and Lane’s elbows, and Lane’s wrists, and Lane’s fingertips, and imagines a future where Lane’s got drumsticks in her hands and she’s pounding out a Moe Tucker beat and Rory’s in the front row, bouncing, dancing, no, sitting cross-legged with a notebook and a pen, making notes for an essay about how Lane Kim is the drummer who transformed 21st century rock and roll.
And then they’re kissing again, and Rory has her own fingertips on the pressure points on Lane’s wrists, and Rory’s weight—what there is of it—rests on Lane’s, until they roll over slightly so that they’re both on their sides. Rory places two fingers, three, four, gingerly, experimentally, and then firmly, over Lane's breast, around her nipple, through her shirt, and the fingertips make circles through the cotton until Lane closes her eyes and makes those noises that Rory has only heard herself make, and Lane keeps her eyes closed until she opens them and looks at Rory and they're impossibly brown, impossibly lovely, impossibly devoted to her, and anyone else in Rory's life will just have to deal with it.
Then Lane scratches Rory behind her ears, just like a kitten, a kitten she wants to kiss, and keep kissing, and keep on kissing until the fuzzy blue alarm clock goes off and it’s time.
“Lane Kim,” Rory says. “As your official girlfriend, may I walk by your side to the public library, where you will go to check out and bring home a respectable book or two?”
“Mmmm,” Lane says, nuzzling Rory, scratching her backbone through her own cotton-linen vest, almost snapping her own bralette from the back, certainly not getting up yet. Something delightful is happening in Lane’s own body again right now, something involving her nipples and her hips and her thighs. Something she will investigate, later, thinking of Rory, of what they've just done and what they might do, when she gets home. Tomorrow she’ll tell Rory all about it.
Then Lane does get up. If she doesn’t get home on time she won’t get a “library” trip again. She looks in her jeans pocket for her Stars Hollow library card, printed with actual outlines (hollow, get it?) of five- and six-pointed stars, and waves the card in front of Rory as if to entice Rory, too, up from the soft couch. “Any books to recommend?” Lane says. “Can’t be a rock and roll book. Something classic, maybe.”
“Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” Rory says, raising her eyebrows. “Something by Sappho. The Dream of a Common Language. Jenny and the Dream of Horses.”
“That’s not a book,” Lane answers. “That’s a Belle and Sebastian song.”
“My favorite,” Rory says, humming. “I guess it’s my second favorite now.”
“What’s your new fave? If I may ask.”
“Wrapped Up in Books.”
“Why?”
“It makes you think of me.” And Rory gives Lane one more kiss, a big one, an unprecedented one, this time, a wet one, turning into a whole soft shoulders and hips and elbows embrace, and then they separate until they’re just demurely holding hands and Rory opens the door and there’s a big package for Lorelai on the doorstep and Rory lifts it over the threshold before the two girls exit the house.
“Rory Gilmore,” Lane says, her Converse sneakers making a flip-flap sound as they head down the newly repaired front porch stairs. “I am always thinking of you.”