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One of those hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer had come to Stars Hollow, and not a minute too soon.
Lorelai and Luke had both been working long hours - it was the middle of wedding season at the Dragonfly, and Caesar had been out with mono for two weeks - and some days they had barely had time for interaction beyond a mumbled “I’m heading off” in the morning and a whispered “It’s just me - go back to sleep” late at night.
So, when their schedules finally aligned to take a day off together, it only made sense to spend most of this unexpected day of leisure in bed, making up for lost time.
Now, they lay basking in the golden rays which filtered through the blinds and fell across the sheets. Their bare skin was almost touching as they lay side by side, but the late afternoon heat made closer contact an uncomfortable proposition - although it hadn’t been a problem a few moments before.
(“Don’t stop, don’t stop” she gasped. “Oh god, don’t stop.”
“Why would I stop?” he grumbled against her neck.
She had never laughed through an orgasm before.)
He splayed a warm hand over the barely-visible swell of her stomach. “Do you want a boy or a girl?” he asked, his voice languid and warm.
“Unless you’re hiding some kind of wizardly wiles, I don’t think we can really influence that.”
He flared his nostrils in good-natured exasperation. “I know that.”
Her first inclination was to tease him further, but she stopped herself. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Luke so relaxed, so willing to swim for a moment in make-believe. So instead she said: “Do you really want to know?”
He nodded his head, eyes still closed, and she answered without hesitation: “Two little boys who look just like you.”
“Two?” He opened his eyes and lifted his head from the pillow, bemused, then suddenly smiled and let his head fall back down. “Oh, the ‘dream twins’.” He stretched out in the sunlight contentedly like a cat. “Well, who knows? Wait ’til the scan on Tuesday, you might get your wish.”
“I suppose I could make do with one, in a pinch,” she said, rolling onto her side to face him. “What about you?”
He folded his hands under his head. “I don’t care, as long as it’s healthy.”
“Oh, come on,” she cried indignantly. “You can’t play me like that.”
“Like what?” he said, all innocence.
“You trick me into giving a straight answer, then you sit up there on that fluffy white cloud, polishing your halo.”
He chuckled. “Okay, okay. I think I’d like a girl.”
“Well, how do you like that for symmetry?” she exclaimed approvingly. “I want a little boy that looks just like you, you want a little girl that looks just like me.”
“I never said just like you,” he mumbled, barely able to suppress a smirk as she threw him a scowl.
Getting to her feet and padding across the bedroom, she pushed the blind aside to open the window as far as it would go. He shifted onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow to admire her from behind as she stood there, letting the warm air wash over her body.
“Like what you see?” she said, her back still to him.
He laughed. “The mattress squeak got me.”
She turned to face the bed, grinning. “Dead to rights.”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s too early for it to be some kind of hormonal thing. Could just be a placebo effect. But I think this,” he gestured up and down in the vague direction of her midsection, “is really working for me.”
“This,” she mimicked, waving a hand over her stomach, “didn’t exactly have that effect last time, I can tell you. Pregnancy isn’t exactly calculated to drive the average 16 year old boy wild.”
“Probably for the best.”
“Probably. And I can’t say a baby was much more of a guy magnet, either”
He was quiet for a moment, and then bunched up a fistful of sheet in his hand, looking down at it thoughtfully. “When Rory was little, when you guys were living at Mia’s place, did you ever…”
As she watched him hesitate, scrunching and unscrunching the sheet between his fingers, suddenly her expression shifted from mystified to knowing. “Did I…?” she prompted, a gleam in her eye.
“Did you… date?” he said, the euphemism evident.
“Not really,” she shrugged, coming to sit on the edge of the bed, her shoulder against the headboard. “There was this waiter up at the inn, Pablo. The summer before he went to college, we used to… date.”
“Pablo,” Luke repeated to himself. “Wait,” he looked up. “Pablo Wasserstein? You kidding? I went to school with that guy!”
“He was kind of a fast dater,” she said, winking broadly. “If you know what I mean.”
“I know what y—“
“— like, ‘asking for the check while I’m still on my appetizer’ kind of fast.”
“I get it.”
“And there was…” she hesitated for a moment, and then said with a sort of defiant frankness, “there was Chris, sometimes.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Luke said, his posture performatively relaxed as he lay gazing at the ceiling.
“I never wanted for us get back together, together. For one thing, Chris and my parents always had this weird, creepy, mutual admiration society going on, and I knew he would have wanted to smooth things over with them, and I just wasn’t anywhere near ready for that, you know?” She glanced towards Luke and he nodded. “So it was just, when he was in town and he’d come and see Rory, you know, it would sometimes end in… well, the proverbial blast from the past.”
“What was that, a ‘thanks for showing up’ prize?” he sneered. The words left his mouth without thinking, and he turned to her instantly, ready to apologise.
He had expected her to be looking indignant, offended, hurt. She certainly looked hurt, but there was something else, too, something more like guilt or shame than anger.
“Lorelai, I’m sorry,” he said, firmly. “That was a cheap shot, but it was aimed at him. I didn’t mean anything about you, or...” He paused, his eyes trying to tease apart her expression. “What? What is it?"
“It’s… argh,” she dipped her head into her hands, and then lifted it again. “I’ve never admitted this to anyone. Not even myself, I don’t think.”
He sat up against the headboard, cautiously, his concerned eyes never leaving her face.
“You know that when Rory was little, Chris was really in and out of our lives. And I didn’t mind if he was out, and I tried to make it so that Rory didn’t mind, either. But what really hurt her was when he would promise to come for something and then flake out at the last minute, let her down, you know?”
He nodded. She took a deep breath, her gaze directed steadily at her lap. “Okay, so after a while I noticed that when I asked him to a Rory thing, if I was a little flirty he would pretty much always show up. And then when he came, we would - you know. And so I knew that if I really needed him to show up for something, if I just…”
Luke leaned forward. “Lorelai, what are you saying?”
“It’s not...” she jumped in, anxious to quell the unvoiced dread within his question. “It’s not like I did anything I didn’t want to do. I was lonely. Really lonely. And Chris definitely didn’t… I mean, trust me, he would be mortified if he knew.”
She was starting to chatter, which in moments like these was an early sign of an impending spiral, so he took her hand in his and gently pulled her down to lean against him. The sun was setting now, and their heads were in shadow, the last golden rays of sunlight streaking across the sheets she had dragged up to her chest.
"I didn't mean to get you onto this stuff," he said, running a hand up and down her arm. "It's all in the past."
“You're telling me. I look back now, and it feels like that girl was a completely different person.”
“She was. You were a kid, Lorelai.”
“The older I get, the more that hits me.” She let out a deep sigh of relief, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I can’t believe how different it’s going to be this time.”
“You bet it is," he said, emphatically. "But you’ve always been an incredible mom. I could see that even before I knew you were an incredible anything-else.”
“‘Everything else’, please,” she joked.
They were quiet for a moment, their fingers intertwined.
“I can’t believe my kid is gonna have you for a mother,” he said softly, his voice full of unguarded wonder that almost brought tears to her eyes. "I tell you, that kid's starting from third base."
She butted her forehead affectionately against his chin. “Lucky boy.”
“Lucky girl.”
“We’ll see.”