Chapter Text
Jess does not say much when he is on the phone with Rory Gilmore.
He sits on his half-deflated mattress, surrounded by the scattered detritus of Nicorette wrappers and sticky-note-bookmarks, and he grunts a little, and he mashes his hand over his mouth to smother a flared smile before it catches. Sometimes he says “Yes,” or “Uh hm,” or “Not in your lifetime,” and she thanks the magic eight ball rattling in his head for its wisdom. He hooks a finger in his sock, tugging it away from his ankle, or he pulls on the phone cord until it almost seems straightened out, or he lies flat on his back and studies the water stain above his bed which bears a stunning resemblance to his mother’s old boyfriend Ralph.
Rory tells a story or four, and then she brightly says, “Okay, gotta go! Let’s do this again sometime,” and Jess says “Good night, Doogie,” and her soft breath is the last sound before the line clicks dead.
Jess may or may not press the silent phone against his chest for a second before he clips it to the wall, but if no one sees him do it, it can’t be held against him.
“Hi,” says Lane. She drops her backpack on Jess’s desk with such an epic thump that he startles from The Descent of Alette, then looks accusatorily up at her as she snorts. Her black turtleneck and tie-dye Dead shirt are hard on his morning eyes. “Mama made you more sandwiches.”
“Great,” says Jess. “Hand them out to the homeless.”
“It’s your fault, you complimented her food. You deal with them.” Lane has now unpacked three bursting tupperware of soy and lettuce and spelt onto his desk.
“I was trying to be polite.”
“Mama doesn’t need you to be polite. She needs you to stand your ground. She needs a sandwich smacked across her face.” The last is muttered, mutinous. At Jess’s cocked brow, Lane explains: “She found Eight Arms to Hold You in my pillowcase and, even though I told her it was Rory’s, she smashed it with her garlic pounder. Bad influence! Punk-pop is for girls who sell their bodies to the devil!”
“Youch,” says Jess.
“Thus saith the Lord.” The second bell rings; their teacher enters the room in a flurry of chalk dust and stale perfume smell. Lane pats the lid of the last tupperware with the disgust of a guest in the house of a yapping, scrawny but beloved, dog. “Enjoy your low cholesterol.”
Jess will not. “Enjoy your Psalm 84.”
Lane scoffs and says, “I will not.”
Rory’s room is pink and frilly, and it is a local library, and it holds a decade of her life in picture and memory, it is speckled with a conclusive and selective secondhand CD collection, with magazines and rolls of ribbon and duct tape, with black platforms and dainty dresses and a dozen cardigans, with college posters and a dirty mug and a pair of socks balled up on the bookshelf, it is so alive and so Rory which is to say Jess feels like a gum-stain when he is in here.
“Really,” Jess says, and then he groans a little, her mouth has learned so quickly which places he likes it best, “that stuffed rabbit is staring at me.”
“Shh,” she says. “I’m trying to be in lesbians with you.”
“Me too, but its eyes move when we move.”
She tries very hard to flip them over, so she’s on top. Jess helps with the rotation. “Ah,” she says, satisfied, shifting her weight to line them up in a way that makes him throw his head back into a lace-trimmed decorative pillow. “What do you see now?”
“You, you, you, you, you,” he murmurs, sliding his palms along her thighs, and she kisses him soundly for his song. She likes sticking her hands up his shirt. He likes fingering the waistband of her pants. And he likes when she pokes her tongue towards his, unpracticed but wholehearted. And he likes the little sounds she makes when his hands stray lower. And bites her lip. And cradles her throat, thumb skimming the spot that bobs when she swallows, which turns into her fists knotting in his hair, and when he moans into her mouth, she startles a little. “Oh,” she says. She slips her hands through his waves, then pulls again, almost experimentally, a smile shifting her pink lips like crescent moons when he curses brokenly and goes hot enough that she can surely feel it through his cargos.
“Gilmore,” he says weakly.
“Yes?” she says, innocent.
“Screw you,” he says, flipping her down flat, shoving them together, his hands pushing loose hair off her forehead, her legs looping around his waist. She hums against his lips; he rakes against her hip and she gasps. “Mm.”
“This is fun,” she says. Her face is so flushed. “Can I put my hand here?”
It’s in his back pocket. “Yes,” he says, thumbing the corner of her lip. “Oh my God.” His thumb is in her mouth. “Rory.”
She hums around it, coy.
“Your mom is home. That’s the set-up of a joke I know the punchline to.”
“Okay, okay,” Rory sighs, grabbing his hand so she can kiss the palm, like consolation. “Drats. Just when it was getting exciting.”
He blows a raspberry into her cheek and she laughs loudly, squeezing her arms around his shoulders, sloth grip.
“You make me want to eat you,” she says beamingly. “Like, mm, like a caramel cream.”
“Yuck,” he says, but he finds himself smiling a little.
“The best part is the gooey center.” She pokes his cheek. “Kidding. The best part is your great rack.” She pokes his tits and he snorts a little, hides it in her cheek. “Hey, I like you lots.”
“Yuck,” he says again, and kisses it home.
“Dumb and dumber,” she suggests.
Jess does not bother writing that one down.
“Beatlejuice and Lydia. Sonny and Cher! No? What, you prefer Nick Cage and PJ? Fine, pencil that in. Gomez and Morticia. Brad and Janet (you’re Janet, obviously). Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown. Peppermint Patty and Marcie. Peppermint Patty and Woodstock. Dexter and Dee Dee. No, that wouldn’t work. Peppermint Patty and Dexter. Peppermint Patty and the Duck Tales kids.”
“And I’m all three of them?” Jess clarifies.
“Mhm.”
He mouths along as he finishes writing out and Louie. “Next?”
Rory slumps. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“Ferris and Sloane?” he suggests. “Lane can be Cameron.”
“Max and Roxanne!” She bursts upright as she says it, then bops her head as she sings, “After today I’m gonna be snoozing, if I don’t faint I’ll be fine!”
Jess pencils it down. He lifts the list and brushes a palm over the sheet, dropping eraser shavings onto the kitchen table. “We’re working with variety.”
She snags it from his hand and peruses. Strangely, her face falls the more she reads. Then she almost wails, “We’re too good at this! How are we supposed to pick?”
Lorelai, who had just walked through the door with her hands around a mug and the phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, plucks the paper from Rory’s hand. “Ooh, do Veronica and Jason Dean. It’s just on the nose enough.” Then into the phone, “No, not you, Sook. Yes, the short ribs would benefit from the essence of Christian Slater. Yes, I will break into Christian Slater’s house to steal his tightie whities with you, who do you think I am?” An eye roll, then she hands their list back to Rory. “No, Sook, that’s Matt Dillon. No, that's John Cusack. No, that’s Rob Lowe.” As she leaves the room, her voice muffles. “No, that’s Tony Danza. No, that’s Robert Downey Junior. No, that’s Judd Nelson.”
Rory leans over the tabletop conspiratorially. “We’ll save Cusack for next year.”
“Everybody loves Menudo,” Jess replies.
“You never talk when my mom is around,” Rory notes, shoving her foot into his waist. He holds onto it under the throw blanket, one finger hooked into the neck of her sock, and she sighs happily, curling up on her side so she can keep watching Steel Magnolias while she nags him. It is all very domestic. “I think that’s part of why she still doesn’t trust you. If she heard your funny jokes and cute giggle—”
“I do not—”
“—then she wouldn’t be able to help but love you. I’m just sayin.”
“She doesn’t like me when I talk.”
“Oh, poo. You’ve exchanged five words and four of them were over a beer you took from our fridge.”
“She has no interest in sharing more. I have no interest.”
“Poo, I say.” Jess huffs. “Now you’re frustrated.”
“I’m not frustrated,” says Jess.
“That teeth-grinding and hand twitch tell a different story.”
“Finally, you’ve put a diagnosis to my symptoms. However can I thank you, Doctor Gilmore.”
“I didn’t mean to frustrate you.”
“You didn’t. You don’t.”
“But the topic of conversation does.” She sighs a little and pulls this pouty face. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “I wish it didn’t have to frustrate you. That would make all aspects of my life positive values. All four quadrants would be above the point of origin.”
“I don’t even want to start on how that would work mathematically,” Jess says, and Rory hides her smile behind the throw blanket. It’s a very thick, very itchy thing in a hundred shades of brown. He does not understand why she loves it, but he still finds himself wearing long sleeves in preparation for his inevitable exposure to it. “Your mom needs someone to hate. I’m great at being hated. We don’t have to get along. Everything is copacetic.”
“You’re verbacious tonight,” Rory muses.
“Because I’m not frustrated,” he says.
“You seem…” she studies him, “smushy.”
“Smushy,” he repeats.
She nods. “You look good on my couch,” she says.
Jess is quiet. He wraps both arms around her foot and hopes that gets the point across well enough.
“Lane needs your help studying for that John Dunne test on Friday,” Rory tattles, leaning over the front counter to kiss him. After she pulls away, he leans in to kiss her again, and once more on the brow for good measure. She is all cold-flushed and bundled, and she glows as she recites, “Good morning, starshine, the earth says hello.”
He pinches her cheek a little. Inamorata. “Tell Lane to meet us after movie night.”
“Mm, we’ll have to push movie night to tomorrow because if we’re studying with Lane, it has to happen at Lane’s house.”
“Mama,” they say together, explanatory.
Jess slides a blueberry muffin before her. “You’ll need your strength.”
She breaks off a piece of streusel and offers it to him. He opens his mouth; she drops it in. “You, too.”
“No,” Jess says, and wipes the crumbs they’ve already made. He holds a shushing hand in Kirk’s direction to stop him asking for more marmalade packets (“Well, I’ve never,” says Kirk). “Mama digs me. I’ll be fine.”
“You may think Mama digs you, but she digs only one thing: the Holy Ghost.”
“Call me Lazarus.”
“Because you’re so full of spirit?”
“That was funnier than my punchline.”
“Now you have to tell me anyway.”
“Destined dead man walking.”
“You’ll be the cutest zombie in town,” Rory promises. Another kiss, then she’s off, plaid skirt bouncing and scarf whipping over her shoulder in the wind.
“Excuse me,” Kirk says, leaning close, “but I’d appreciate you grabbing me that marmalade now. My waffles are already cold.”
“Ah, eat dirt, Kirk,” Jess says, locking the register. He shucks his apron, then he’s off to school, which is bad except for when he sits out of gym with Dave—who sprained a finger closing it in his mother’s car door—sporting the excuse of low blood sugar. Not that Coach Donahue believes him, but it must be easier to just let Jess do as he wishes than the alternative (stealing all the baseballs was a fine collateral when Donahue last told Jess no). By the time the period is over, Jess has managed to finish rereading the photocopied Dunne anthology put together by their Lit teacher.
“It’s pathetic,” Jess says. “And boring.”
“Don’t be too smart in front of Lane,” Dave warns. “I don’t want to have to fight you for her.”
Jess gamely avoids a pointed look at Dave’s casted hand. “My sights are set firmly and permanently elsewhere.”
Jess decides it’s a great day when Dean storms by, presumably having heard.
“You’ve upset the giant,” Dave says.
“What do I have to roll to escape with my life?”
“Nat 20,” Dave says solemnly.
“See you on the other side,” says Jess.
He and Lane walk home together at the end of the day, both steaming in the snow and parsing the complex joy-misery that comes with finishing school but having to return to the land of family supervision. Jess turns one of his headphones so she can hear Fight This Generation better.
“Texas Never Whispers next,” she says.
“I’m not a radio broadcaster,” he says.
She looks imploringly at him.
He plays Texas Never Whispers.
Mrs. Kim greets them at the door. She does not like Jess as much as she likes Dave, but Jess is like the greatest dish of low-calorie snacks when compared to Rory (a peach ring. Sinful).
“I reread the poems, so I’m ready to be reference expert,” Jess says as he and Lane lay their work out on a table that wears a sticker: 20% OFF IF YOU TAKE ME HOME NOW!!! :-) :-) :-).
“You do your homework twice?” Mrs. Kim interrupts from the other room. When her face bobs past over the edge of a stack of rocking chairs, she is impressed; Jess hasn’t the heart to correct her.
He and Lane have annotated four poems with a series of Kurt Cobain caricatures and seagulls with human arms by the time Rory arrives with her two backpacks and gym duffle slung over her shoulders. When she puts them down, she crumples to the floor, all “Tell my mother I love her. And my will is inside my copy of The Thin Man. And I want Justin Timberlake to sing at my funeral.”
“You should be more like Jess,” Mrs. Kim tells Rory as she bustles through the room, swapping lampshades around. Whatever her vision is, Jess does not follow. “If you study hard, you become smart. Then you will succeed. Then you will marry a good man who loves God.”
“Yes, Mrs. Kim,” Rory says, garbled through her hardwood-squished cheek.
They study an unfortunate amount, with Rory to supervise.
“You have to admit it’s a good drawing though,” says Lane of her prized Kurt (floral muumuu, bowling a strike).
“Oh, for sure,” says Rory. “The MoMA actually paged me while I was on the bus—they were looking for you. So I knew ahead of time I would be entering Kim’s Antiques to find the two darlings of American neo-post-classical-modern-grunge-alt-rock art.”
“Sandwiches,” Mrs. Kim says proudly, dropping them directly before Jess. They look slimy and dry at once and smell faintly of dust and tofu water.
Across the table, Lane mouths Stand your ground! and pulls a Rosie the Riveter arm. Jess looks from her to Mrs. Kim, who is so expectant, and then at Rory, whose mouth twitches.
“Thanks,” Jess says, “Mrs. Kim. Looks… great.”
Lane shakes her head in disappointment. Rory cranes almost 270 degrees to hide her snuffling laughter. Mrs. Kim glows.
“And then squish it,” Jess says, mashing his palms together. “Like so.”
“And this is how she eats it at home?” Luke says, squinting. “You’re sure?”
“Squish,” Jess eggs.
So Luke smushes the sandwich down. The Doritos layered above the turkey but below the provolone crackle. “Really?”
“No, Lucas, I made it up to embarrass you.”
Luke points very close to Jess’s face. “If you’re pulling my leg, it’s your head.”
Jess bats Luke’s finger away. “Jab that thing at me again and I’ll bite it off.”
Luke brings the sandwich to the table of Gilmores cum Lane and Dave. Lorelai squeals something at a frequency meant for dogs, but seems happy enough, so Jess has earned his four dollars per hour well.
He continues aimlessly clicking buttons on the register. He doodles in his notepad, spiny and hooked creatures curled around 3 EV BAGEL ETHamC SPK, 1 OATS & FRUIT, KIRK WEDNESDAY USUAL. Six eyes, three tails, ribbed chest. One holds an umbrella. Another rides a skeletal horse, javelin in hand.
“You may make a Gilmore outta me yet,” Luke mutters into Jess’s ear as he passes behind ferrying Lane’s fries and Rory’s dinner omelette.
“A fate worse than death,” Jess calls at his back.
It’s Lorelai at his shoulder, then.
“Just stealing the farty ketchup bottle,” she says, sifting under the counter. “It’s a crowd-pleaser. Hey, you really have an eagle eye. A sniper’s gaze. Creepy, some might say, especially when locked like so on one’s well-meaning yet naive teenage daughter.”
Jess has nothing to say to Lorelai Gilmore.
“You have nothing better to do?” She pokes his hand as he sketches, and his line goes jagged, beheading a fanged fish-creature. “Go wipe tables. Make yourself useful.”
“You’re the only ones here,” Jess says. “Mind your sandwich.”
“Mind your attitude,” Lorelai says. “One thing my parents taught me that stuck? Never forget who you’re talking to.”
“Never could.”
“I’m just that striking.”
“Like a smack across the face.”
“I don’t get you,” Lorelai fumes. “You have the sweetest girl in the world drooling over you. You have a really great man trying to give you a home. You’ve got a whole town of people who would have your back, if it wasn’t covered with poisonous spikes. Hey, like that guy! Is this a self-portrait? The resemblance is uncanny.”
He snatches his notepad back before her finger can smudge the drawing. “Why are you here,” Jess says.
“If I fits, I sits,” Lorelai replies.
Jess scoffs.
“You want honesty? I can do honesty.” Lorelai thumps the ketchup bottle onto the counter. She can say what she wants about Jess’s eyes, but hers are chilly, fierce. “I want to know you’re working to earn her company, and I want you to know I don’t think you’ve earned it yet.”
“I do know,” he says. And then, when his teeth have stopped grinding, “I’m trying.”
Lorelai looks at him and keeps looking though he does not look back. “Good,” she says.
“Mom?” Rory calls from the table, wary.
“Coming, kid,” Lorelai says, her gaze still burning Jess. “Luke hid the ketchup behind the napkin boxes, probably because he knows I tend towards incorrigibility when it comes to humor of the flatulence flavor.”
When she’s gone, Jess can breathe again. And he wants, oh how he wants, a cigarette.
“There are also some with cinnamon, and some with peppermint icing, and some that look like boots but I promise they’re made of chocolate, not leather,” Rory says, shifting some of Sookie’s purportedly famous sugar cookies aside with her fingertip to show the true variety of the array to their first customer.
“What flavor is the snowboard?” Morey asks.
Rory consults the reference list Sookie sent them off with. “Fresh powder, winter sunburn, and marshmallow.”
“I’ll take three,” he says.
Rory merrily grabs a stack from the red wagon. “That’ll be six dollars! All going towards what Miss Patty promises will be the best Christmas pageant ever.”
“Didn’t someone trademark that already?” says Babette. Her new infant cat, Cardamom, mewls in her arms. “Name’a Barb Robinson, perhaps?”
“Patty does what Patty wants,” Rory says.
“These are totally tubular,” says Morey, fascinated with the cookies. He tilts them in the light. “Brings me back to my days on the slopes,” he pumps his arms like he’s skiing, “slipping and sliding.”
“And falling hard on your cute rear,” Babette says. She pats Rory’s cheek. “Thanks, sugar.” Then she turns to Jess. “You too, stud.”
“I’m not part of this,” Jess says.
“Yeah, sure,” says Babette knowingly. “Say goodbye to Cardamom.”
“Goodbye, Cardamom!” says Rory. She pinches Jess’s butt.
“Bye,” grunts Jess, trying not to rock onto his toes with the shock. He can feel Babette’s grin on his back all the way down their driveway.
“She should use binoculars at this point,” Jess mutters.
“Give it another half of a block,” Rory says. “The opera specs always come out eventually. Pull faster.”
“Why, are we rushing?”
“No,” she says, grinning, “I just want to fall into step behind you naturally so you can’t accuse me of having a fixation on your cute tush.”
“Don’t call it a tush,” Jess begs. “It makes me sound like a diaper baby.”
“Tush! Tush! Tush!”
Jess rolls his eyes but struts a little faster so Rory can whoop and holler 50s-era racy-adjacent comments at him as the wagon tilts and swerves and catches on the crooked sidewalk tiles at his heels.
It’s a cold day, but bright. Stars Hollow seems springing with twinkle lights for the floaters in Jess’s eyes, all sun-bright and spacious in a way he can’t get used to. He misses noise like garbage trucks and ferry horns and pedestrians cursing, and this place barely rustles. There is the moan of wind through bare boughs and not much else, just the red wheel / barrow / glazed with snow / water and Rory’s stomping boots, splashing slush and skidding on slick corners.
“So nice of you to help Rory and Miss Patty,” someone simpers.
“Lovely to see you taking part in community activities,” says another.
“Young man get back here with that inflatable reindeer,” says Taylor.
“Don’t kick over that snowman,” warns Rory.
“Did you steal those cookies?” says Bootsy conspiratorially.
“Did you poison them?” says Gypsy.
“I’m just the donkey who got roped into manual labor against his will,” Jess says.
“The Italian Christmas donkey,” Rory says, poking his waist.
He catches her hand before she can tickle him. “Hee-haw,” he says.
Gypsy squints at him. “Keep your sticky paws to yourself,” she says. “Rory, I’ll take a mitten and a star of David.”
Rory references their list. “The mitten is flavored like slate-grey afternoon, an empty but warm fireplace, and smoked almonds. And the star of David is golden hour, fleece blankets, and apple skin. Wow, Sookie.”
“That woman,” says Gypsy. “I don’t know how she does it, but she always hits the mark.”
“She’s an artist,” Rory agrees, then she shuffles money hand to hand, then she climbs into the wagon with the last remaining cookies and spurs Jess on, “Faster, faster!” as he long-sufferingly pulls her along.
They don’t even stop by the diner. Luke sees them passing through the windows, runs outside, and accosts Jess in the street. They end up inside only so that Taylor won’t fine them for public displays of emotion or something, but then Rory grabs a black and white from a display dish and Luke’s got a hazelnut coffee in the machine, so they sit at the counter while Luke declares his betrayal, that Jess was meant to have his back in all this, the capitalist blah of blah and blah, and are you even listening to me Jess Jess you’re meant to be my guy, what happened to sticking together, snowflake blah cookie enemy blah Jess falls asleep, or pretends to until Rory jabs a piece of cookie into his lips. He eats it, chewing cow-slow and glazed as he looks up into the harassed face of his uncle.
“We don’t celebrate Christmas,” Luke kvetches. “Jess, don’t do this to me. Your grandma is rolling in her grave, watching you do this to me. She’s saying, Jess, why are you doing this to Luke. And me. But mostly Luke.”
Jess does not comment on the miserable sad sack of holidays he’s had until this point (his mother’s drunken attempt at Halloween, or the smattered Yom Kippurs they’d sneak into the back rows of temple for, her smacking wrinkles out of her one pantsuit and Jess struggling to keep on his kippah). If Rory wants to rope him into cookie delivering, he’d do it for any reason at all. He’d swing full pagan and dance naked under the moon with her, if it gave them something to celebrate.
Rory cares so well and makes it look so good. Part of him wants to see what the fuss is about.
“I asked him to come with me,” Rory tells Luke around a mouthful of cookie. “Blame me for turning your straight-laced nephew away from the noble anti-capitalist cause.”
Luke deflates. “Well, if you asked, that’s different.”
She nudges their wagon with a foot. “Sookie made one shaped like a baseball cap for you. Should I pretend I gave it to you or tell her you say Christmas and all its adjacent festivities can eat rocks?”
“Eat rocks,” Luke confirms. “And mention the thick-bottom pot I gave her to borrow which she hasn’t given back yet.”
“Eat the rich, curvy pot, got it.”
Kirk waves a hand and calls across the diner, “Can I please get some service here?”
“No,” Luke and Jess say together.
Lorelai bursts through the front door of the diner in a swirl of frigid wind and artfully layered outerwear. “Luke,” she gasps, “I need you. I am having an emergency, and I need you and your very, very tall height and your bulging biceps and triceps and deltoids.”
Luke already has his cleaning rag away and his arm in his coat. “What fell? Are you okay?”
“I can’t reach to put up my creepy haunted tree angel!”
Luke freezes. “Your—what?”
Lorelai comes in now, rubbing her pinked hands together. “My creepy haunted tree angel.”
“November of 1998, we came into the diner and Mom was crying,” Rory says, setting the scene with a sweeping hand. She dumps cookie crumbs all over her lap.
“When isn’t she crying, you may say, but this was a special cry,” Lorelai says, brows lifting for emphasis. “Our poor hero had just come from her mother’s Thanksgiving soirée, you see, daughter in tow, and was feeling particularly deficient in joie de vivre.”
“That wasn’t helped by the three martinis she’d had at dinner,” Rory asides.
“This much is true,” Lorelai says. “But then, there he is: Luke’s coffee. As close to a true love as I’ve ever found.”
“How does this relate to the angel?” Luke squints.
Lorelai straightens. “Your coffee gave me renewed life. I used said life to go shopping.”
Luke rolls his eyes heavenward. “You speak, and I lose my health.”
“Just come help me put it up, help me foster the Christmas spirit for myself and my poor spiritless child,” Lorelai says, seizing Luke by either forearm while Rory bats her lashes at him, “please please please—”
“Yeah, fine,” Luke says, “I’m right behind you.”
“I thought Daneses don’t celebrate Christmas,” Jess calls after him.
The door’s bell chimes in sentiment with the finger Luke shows Jess before he disappears around the corner, Lorelai tugging him along by his scarf.
Rory sighs, dropping her head on Jess’s shoulder. He wraps an arm around her as she says, “That guy.”
“Yeah,” Jess says.
“They’re both idiots,” Rory says.
“There is something about you Gilmores,” Jess says. “It drums up something real wacky in the heads of Daneses.”
“Hey, hey, klutz,” Rory says, just her frowning eyes and curled fingers poking out from the end of her comforter and thick-knitted throws. “Don’t bump your head, it makes my head hurt. Are you freezing? Why are you shaking?”
Jess closes her window behind him. The latch takes three tries. “My mom’s in town.”
“No use beating around the bush, huh,” Rory says, and then, “come here.”
Jess does. She collects him like loose change. He drops his head on her stomach and wraps his arms around her hips and shuts his eyes. Her fingers play with his hair. “Does Luke know?”
“Yeah,” Jess says. She was so happy to see him, frantic with it, until he left, when she pulled his sleeve to make him stay and yelled how it’s just like him to go without kissing his mother goodbye. “She’s in his place.”
“So she’s in your place, too.”
“Semantics.”
“Nuh uh.” When Jess does not reply for minutes, Rory says, “We should talk about it.”
“Absolutely shitting not.”
“I know, I just missed your voice. How about I paint your nails? Will that distract you?”
But all Jess has an hour later are navy blue fingers and toes and a hole in his guts.
“I could kiss you,” she offers. She wags her brows. “I could diddle you a little.”
“Sounds enticing when you put it that way.”
“Aw,” she says, squishing his cheeks in her hands, “sad boy. You have these soulful eyes that make me want to cry too when you’re not happy.”
“Sorry,” he says.
She shakes her head, linking their fingers together. She is very careful with his wet nails; it makes him feel miserable and choked-up. “I know the answer is always no, and I know that asking you a hundred bajillion times isn’t getting me anywhere but the doghouse, but I don’t care: Are you sure you don’t want to talk about your mom?”
“No,” Jess says. “Yes. No. Can we go back to the part where you said diddle.”
“Har har,” says Rory. “Sorry buster, that was a one time offer. Anyway, you sort of look like you’ll get weepy if I try.”
“That—was more honest than I might’ve wanted you to be.”
“The sadness doesn’t take away from the prettiness.”
“Gee, thanks,” Jess says. “Glad to know you like em pathetic.”
“So that’s what people mean when they talk about having a type.”
“Yep.”
“Pathetic is definitely mine.”
“Seems so.”
“Jess,” she says.
“Just,” he says, “can you. Hold me.”
Rory looks a little heartbroken. “Yes,” she says. They curl together on her pillows, under her sheets, like limpets. “Thanks,” she whispers. “For giving me something productive to do.”
“Thanks,” Jess replies. “For offering in the first place.”
Rory’s eye is twitching.
Jess wants to smack the book out of her hand. It’s a very new sensation for him.
Rory knuckles the offender, but keeps reading, keeps taking notes with her other hand.
“For the love of God,” Jess says.
She shushes him emphatically.
He puts down her plate of sweet potato fries and can’t even stay to watch her hoover them while blowing through her sixth hour of studying, it’s giving him chest pains, he can’t look. On one side of the tracks Rory reads historical accounts and hates life, on the other side of the tracks is a fat F on her history test, Jess’s hand is on the lever and his maxima culpa is Atlasian until he plugs his ears and shuts his eyes and goes LA LA LA.
Her eye is twitching, and she continues to read.
Jess couldn’t. He doesn’t know if it’s dedication or naivety or obedience that makes her chug onwards; whatever it is, he doesn’t have it.
But when he closes out his last check for the night, counts the register, wipes the menus and the glass doors and windows, fiddles with the ice maker, and takes the nozzles off the soda machine, he does sit with her, accepts her dirty shoes in his lap, and reads a little on his own. To commiserate, or whatever.
Though he’d rather read his Koch anthology repeatedly and incessantly until he dies than read The Life of Charlemagne once. And by the jealous and twitchy look she shoots him, so would she.
Jess avoids Lorelai. Life is easier this way. Pleasant this way.
“Blow it out your ass, pal,” Lorelai steams, then stomps away.
That is why, mostly.
Jess slouches in the kitchen chair. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know,” Rory says, pressing her sock-foot to his. “She didn’t even like that lamp. It was from her mom. She used to hide it in her closet, but then she needed the room for her boots.”
“Yeah,” Jess says. He knots his fingers together. “I really didn’t mean to.”
“If you’d meant to, you would’ve made that clear.”
“Mm.”
“C’mon,” Rory says, then leads him gently to her room. She leans the freaky staring rabbit over. Without its blank eyes trained on him, he relaxes a degree, our aspirations / are wrapped up in books, and so is Rory’s room. “Ugh. Ugh! I’ve really had enough of this. I’m not Gumby.”
Jess sits in her desk chair—an old, floral thing to match all the other old, floral things. To the left of the seat is Rory’s current to-be-read stack, which spans from desktop to floor, and to the right stands an equally comprehensive tower of those which she has recently finished. He sees some Russians and, beneath Persuasion, a small stack of Sabrina comics circa the seventies. Muse and Le Tigre pose threateningly on the walls beside a novelty calendar (a new wiener dog every month). He smells her perfume, he smells her Teen Spirit, he smells the bag of half-melted Starbursts on her windowsill. Rory, Rory. He could get drunk just sitting here.
Rory boosts herself onto the desk before Jess and plants her feet between his knees on the chair. He rubs his knuckles along her shins as she says, “It hardly bothers you. You’re mad when you fight with her, but after, you look like, I don’t know. I don’t want to be all poetic because I’m serious. But you look like a chalkboard. With dust all over the little chalk shelf. And sad, sad erasers that haven’t been clapped in weeks. Just… blank.”
Jess shrugs a little.
“She’s not like this normally,” Rory whispers. Her eyes are bright. “I’ve never seen her act like this towards anyone who wasn’t Grandma.”
“I just bring it out of moms,” Jess says. “I’m gifted.”
Lorelai materializes in Rory’s bedroom door.
“By the pricking of my thumbs,” Jess says.
Rory kicks his knee. He tucks it to his chest as it smarts. “Hi, Mom. Do you have something to say to Jess?”
“Does he have something to say to my lamp?” says Lorelai. She is no longer mimicking Saint Michael, and Strawberry Shortcake beams BERRY NICE! from the wall behind Lorelai’s head, so Jess finds it in himself to say, “Sorry.”
“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Rory says. She is holding onto his ankle very tightly. “We were bringing in the takeout and he tried to carry it all to be a gentleman. You know how much food we put away combined. It was a haul worse than any trip to Nordstrom Rack.”
“You already gave me the story,” Lorelai says. She looks right at Jess, whose insides shrivel quite on command, like a magic trick or Greek myth. Rory’s blunt nails are now digging into the skin over his malleolus, so Jess takes her hand and pancakes it between his. “Sorry for telling you to blow it out your ass.”
“And?” says Rory.
Lorelai scoffs and rakes a hand through her hair. “And for throwing the lampshade at you. And for calling you a homewrecker. I thought that last one was funny,” Rory angrily chucks a stuffed mouse at her mother, who catches it, “but hey, it seems my sense of humor has finally gone out of style. I never thought the day would come. Speaking of days I never thought would come, when I went to complain to Luke,” Jess manages to shrivel even more, “he was very cagey, kept skittering towards the stairs, sweating like a pizza guy with a poker cave in his back room. What’s up with him?”
Jess scrubs his fingers over his face. “Rory,” he says when her elbow jangles into his, “you are about to squeeze my hand off my wrist.”
“Whoops.”
“I’m gonna talk to your mom,” Jess tells her. “Alone.”
“Alone?” she says, big eyes falling wider. Marbles.
“Your nerves give me secondhand arrhythmias.” He tucks a loose hair behind her ear. He scoots off her chair. “The usual spot?” he says to Lorelai.
“Should I bring my dueling pistols or my broadsword?” Lorelai deadpans.
…
From here, the lawn is picturesque in an overgrown, unkempt sort of way. Some sort of big flowering bushes strain halfway up the outer walls, bare in January’s ceaseless chill. Snow clumps at the driveway edges in great heaving drifts, shoved aside by Lorelai and Rory’s half-hearted shoveling, an endeavor reportedly abandoned for hot chocolate an hour in, which explains the icy streaks. The porch swing and benches are damp, seem to shiver, bony without their shabby floral cushions, but Jess cannot help remembering sitting there and seeing fireflies, hearing crickets, feeling Rory breathe against his side.
“My mother,” Jess says, “is locked in Luke’s apartment right now, two days into a detox she’ll quit by day four. Luke will ask her to go to rehab. To get serious. He’ll convince me to ask her, too. Then she’ll skip town, and I’ll still be living in the space between Luke’s asscheeks.”
“Jesus,” says Lorelai.
“He’s been silent in this matter,” says Jess.
“Luke cares about you,” Lorelai says. She leans her elbows on the porch railing, looking older than her age in the low, purplish light of weak dusk. “Someone in your life loves you like family, like blood. Someone who’s supposed to care about you does. Why are you brushing that off?”
Jess looks at her. He cannot speak, really, to feelings. Facts are good; when he gives facts, Rory can call him garrulous. But feelings have a way of clotting his throat. Feelings have a way of making him run.
“Are you about to—?” Lorelai says. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a novelty packet of Kleenex printed with Santas and reindeer. They are the approximate texture of sandpaper, so instead of doing something stupid like blotting his eyes, Jess balls one up and hurls it into the lawn. “You’d better—”
“Pick that up,” he finishes with her. He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Yeah. I don’t litter.”
“That’s one thing going for you,” she mutters.
Evening has started to howl between them, mournful.
“Whatever your mommy issues are,” Lorelai says quietly, “don’t push them onto Rory. Her and I… we’ve got a good thing going. I had to work for it. I had to learn. She makes it easy, but I didn’t have any example worth following, you know. You’ve met the examples. I ran the other way from the examples screaming bloody murder, and you would’ve too.” She cranes her neck to stare at the sky. “Which is what I don’t get. We both run from that. And yet we can’t get along.”
Jess isn’t so sure it’s the same. Lorelai ran from bad love. Jess runs from all sorts.
Still, “It’s not like I’m not trying.”
“Try, try, you told me you’re trying, you continue to tell me. And yet I see nothing.”
“Are your eyes shut.”
“Har har. Hey,” she says. “You’re the one who brought me out here. Say what you meant to say before my fingers freeze off.”
Jess removes one of the clumsy mittens Rory knitted him. He offers it to Lorelai.
She considers it, then tucks both hands into it. “You’re not going to say a thing, are you?”
Jess shakes his head a little, watching a pair of headlights reflect on the drive as they pass.
“Thank you,” Lorelai says quietly.
Jess shrugs, the scuff of his sleeves against his coat serving as reply.
They’re halfway to her bus stop when Jess pulls a flower out of her ear.
She gives him a very grave look. “Oh, oh God. It took me so long to notice, I can’t believe it—” he starts kissing on her, “—but, ah, Jess, Jess, you’re lame as hell. You’re as lame as everyone else here, you fit r-right in! Holy cow, do that again.”
He wraps his arms around her, happy as a clam. Then he tackles her into the snow. She shrieks, but there’s a laugh in it, and she smushes a handful of powder into his cheek, so he sticks his damp mittens up her jacket, her sweater, her two shirts, and clings to her ribs like a good meal. Her legs loop around his waist, with the power of attraction or whatever she manages to get on top and when she steals his hat and his neck and head and ears scream with cold, his curses are broken by her kisses, so it’s really moot.
Rory and all she brings into Jess’s life has made him come to terms with something he might never have, if he’d stayed that second time in the city.
“What are you doing?” Luke says, suspicious. “Is that—homework? Are you doing homework right now.”
“O me, o life,” Jess mutters, rolling over in bed to put his back to his uncle.
“I’m just checking, because I like to know when I stepped through a wormhole to another dimension.”
“It’s not homework. Leave me alone.”
“Yep,” says Luke. “Definitely not a new dimension.” He ballcaps his bald spot and heads down to the diner, muttering under his breath.
Once he’s gone, Jess rolls back onto his stomach and starts to write. He feels clumsy, it’s probably redundant and baby-soft, but something resonates: speaking has always felt like a second language to him. He can’t tell Rory a thing, even when he tells her things. He can’t really explain to Lane why Marquee Moon makes him shut up and close his eyes and ooze around his heart, though he tries. He can’t say an honest sentence to Luke all the way through, God fucking forbid that, he has all the words primed and ready and they just won’t come out.
This is different. Squeaking mechanical pencil to paper, and Jess’s brain is connected to his arm to his hand to eternity or whatever, it sounds stupid as he thinks it but he feels like he sees himself taking shape as the sheet fills, then the next, then the next. He skims his thumb along the page edges, then flips them fast, and the body moves.
Jess mumbles to himself, holding the journal to his chest, “Boy, there’s a poet in you, after all.”