Jess seemed to believe that our previous conversation about exes and barely-hidden secrets was over, but I wasn't so sure.

I wanted it to be over as much as he did, but my mind insisted on remaining restless. I kept thinking of all the old girlfriends hidden behind secret corners, biding their time before this relationship eventually went wrong and I departed for childhood home that was still waiting for me. It was crazy, but I couldn't keep these thoughts out of my head. I couldn't keep myself from wondering about all of those bookstore owners and arts newspapers and writers that Jess seemed to know so well.

Was I the first writer to succumb to his charms over late night confessions and too much hard liquor? Maybe. Maybe not.

Probably not.

That old song I kept on repeat on my boombox when I was eleven had a brand new meaning now that I was old enough to understand the lyrics.

I can't believe you had a life before me

I can't believe they let you run around free

Just putting your body whereever it seemed like a good idea

What a good idea

By noon, I had asked Lyle, Eric, and the two writers who had dropped in for business at the press enough leading questions about Jess's past to earn me plenty of secondhand embarrassment for the day. I went home early and tried to write, but I couldn't concentrate. There was too much thinking about the what-ifs and the unanswered questions and trying not to convince myself that the entire press either pitied me or thought I was crazy.

Jess came home by four, and seemed wary of me: he spent half an hour on the phone chatting about work business, puttered around the kitchen, and swept the back patio before sitting down beside me on the sofa and handing me a glass full of a guava smoothie.

I looked back into the kitchen, just now noticing the remnants of his handiwork poking out of the garbage can. I hadn't even noticed that he had been blending anything up for me. "You didn't have to," I told him gently.

"I figure you deserve it before that doctor's appointment tomorrow," Jess said. He nervously ran his hand over his jeans. "Zavino's okay tonight?"

"It's fine," I told him. "Jess, what's going on?"

He sighed. "I think we need a follow-up discussion from what we discussed last night."

I put my glass down. "It's at moments like this that I really miss alcohol," I said. I turned my head in his direction. "I really humiliated myself today with all of the questions, didn't I?"

"Lyle and Eric were concerned," Jess said slowly. He ran his hand through his hair. "I am, too, a little. I think a lot of what we talked about last night bothered you more than you wanted to let on."

"Jess, I've never been ignorant of the fact that you have a past," I told him.

"I know that, Rory," Jess replied. "I just – you're obviously still kind of uncomfortable with some of the stuff we talked about yesterday. And I know I haven't been as open about the stuff that's hard for me to talk about, but you can still ask me anything. You don't have to go and pry my editors for information."

"It was unprofessional, wasn't it?" I asked.

"A little," Jess said. "Maybe that's my fault, because I haven't been as forthcoming as I should have been. But if you want to know, you can ask me. I'm not going to lie to you about anything that has happened."

Maybe not, but he was certainly hesitant to offer me that information first. I still didn't know if I was going to force something out of him that I would regret.

"I don't know where the lines are sometimes," I confessed. "I don't know how much I should know about you and how much I shouldn't."

"I don't know that either, Rory," Jess replied. "But if something is bothering you and you feel that you're too scared to ask me directly about it, that's definitely a problem. And I'm telling you that you don't have to be." He reached over and took my hand in his.

"The Belinda situation distresses me a little," I began. "Well, a lot. Actually."

Jess remained quiet, that chestnut gaze open and trusting. I began to loosen that coil inside of me that had begun to take shape last night.

"I don't know if I'm more concerned that it was more serious than you said it was or that she's one in a long line of women you've slept with that are still working with you," I said. "And if it's the second one, then that's letting loose a whole lot of new insecurities because if that's the case, Jess, then I kind of feel I have a right to know about it. And the fact that it didn't even occur to you to tell me because it's something that happens so often is something that really bothers me. And maybe it's silly and stupid and outdated of me to want to know that, but I do."

I took a deep breath and met his gaze straight on. Jess continued to thread his fingers through mine.

"It's the second one," he said softly. "But Rory, it's not nearly as frequent of an occurrence as you think it is."

"Then why didn't you tell me about what had happened between you two myself?" I asked him. "Because I'm right, aren't I? It didn't even occur to you."

"It didn't," Jess conceded. "I wasn't intentionally trying to keep anything from you. It's like I told you last night. This is a tight-knit arts community, and those of us who have stayed in it instead of getting more practical jobs don't really think of our exes in an adversarial way. Sometimes it's a little strange for an outsider like you to come in and deal with that kind of situation, and we don't always view it the way it looks to you. At least I didn't. And I'm sorry."

"I accept that, Jess," I said. "But if you're working with people you used to be with – I want to be aware of that. I don't think that makes me an irrational, crazy girlfriend. At least I hope it doesn't. But it really concerns me if you can't remember all of them."

"Rory, we're talking about four of five people, not the whole city," Jess assured me. "I wasn't nearly as much of a manwhore as you're thinking."

I giggled at him in spite of myself. "You said yourself that you were a wild kid when you first got here."

"I was," Jess admitted. "Past tense, Rory. Past tense. That was a long time ago."

"Jess, I need to know who those four or five people are," I said. "I don't think that's too much to ask."

He nodded. "There's Belinda," he began. "Janice, one of our illustrators."

I eyed him suspiciously.

"That was before Dodger," Jess clarified.

"I'm not judging," I said.

Jess scoffed. "Right. Gretchen, who owns that antiprofit bookstore in Pittsburgh. And Adelaide, who helps run the Brooklyn Book Festival."

"I know Adelaide," I told him. "Looks like I missed out on the chance for some interesting conversations."

Jess sighed. "Adelaide was the only one you could call a real relationship," he said. "We were together for about four months before I had to shut down the old press. She didn't exactly know me at my best."

I wondered if I had ever talked to Adelaide about Jess if I would be here right now. If she had had as low of an opinion of Jess at that point as he did, would I even wanted to take his advice on the book?

I might have ended up an even bigger mess last fall than I had been already.

I shook off that thought and concentrated on Jess.

"That's all?" I asked.

"It is," Jess affirmed. "There's always the chance that we're going to run into someone else in this city, but professionally, I think that covers it."

"Were you with any of your other authors? Or your illustrators?"

"Not since Truncheon," Jess said quietly.

"Jess."

"Rory, I don't really know how to make you feel much better about it," Jess said. "I don't work with any of those people anymore."

"So was this a repeated pattern, how we got together?" I asked.

"Rory, you know it wasn't," Jess assured me. "I believed in the book before I ever thought we could get together again. If you hadn't wanted to, it wouldn't have mattered."

I scoffed. "It might have mattered a little," I suggested.

"No, Rory," Jess said with conviction, his eyes boring into mine. "It wouldn't. I would have always believed in your project regardless of how you felt about me. But I don't do this sort of thing anymore. You are one hundred percent the only exception. And I need you to trust me on that."

"I do," I told him. "I just have a hard time wrapping my head around all of this other stuff."

Jess nodded. "I know. But have I ever given you a reason not to trust me?"

"No, you haven't," I replied. "But Jess, just so you know where the lines are – I don't really want you spending one on one time alone with your exes. Maybe I'm mostly seeing this from the perspective of being the other woman, but I need some boundaries when it comes to this sort of thing."

"I understand that," Jess said. "I do. I think that's a fair line to draw. If it were the other way around, though, Rory, I think I'd expect the same consideration."

I chuckled. "That's not really something you have to worry about right now," I told him. My journalistic career had been so thoroughly obliterated that that half of the colleagues I called up for book reviews had to wrack their brains to remember my name. My ego might have wanted for the situation to be different with the handful of them that I had slept with, but I hadn't had the chance to encounter that dilemma yet.

Even if it did, I doubt it would have mattered. I hadn't shared anything other than a fleeting connection with any of them. Most of the time I barely remembered them.

I looked sideways at Jess, expecting him to ask the questions that I had so desperately wanted to ask.

He was silent.

Was it fair to be annoyed at him for not being angry at me for being a hypocrite?

I guess he had been telling the truth last night. He really didn't want to know about my past.

"I'm still trying to find out what your ethics are, Jess," I said. "You don't cheat and you won't get involved with someone who's in a serious relationship. Yet you're willing to be with me when I'm in a relationship with someone I'm not committed to. You'll sleep around when you're not in a relationship. You're clearly comfortable with having multiple partners. Both you and April have made that perfectly clear. And yet you're perfectly willing to judge me for the things that I've done."

I breathed a sigh of relief once the words were out. I hated being the kind of person who would say them, but I needed to be that person right now. I avoided his gaze and took another sip of my drink

Meanwhile, Jess seemed to be working his way up to that anger I wanted from him a minute ago.

"I don't judge you, Rory," Jess said, clearly fighting to keep the anger from getting to a point where it would boil over. "I don't want you to think that I did. I may have misinterpreted things, but I didn't judge you."

"What do you mean when you say that you misinterpreted things?" I asked him.

Jess ran a hand nervously through his hair. "I can't believe I'm asking this, Rory," he said in a half-incredulous voice. "I usually go out of my way to avoid ever asking this. But when we first got together, you didn't want to call me your boyfriend. You said you weren't used to relationships. But you also say you don't want me to think of you in that way and that you didn't have one night stands. Before I came along, what exactly was the situation?

I remained quiet as I allowed that question to sink in.

What exactly had I started here? I didn't want to know everything about all of Jess's flings and old girlfriends. I certainly didn't want him to know about all of mine.

Stupid jealousy. Stupid irrational hormones. No wonder I usually went out of my way to avoid all of this.

"I'm not asking to know about every single person," Jess said in a small voice. "Look, maybe I shouldn't – "He ran his hands over his pants legs. "This is a bad idea. This is always a bad idea."

"No, Jess," I said softly, and raised my eyes to meet his. He seemed so nervous. "I asked, so you should get to return the favor. I had a few boyfriends in DC. I was never with anyone long enough to develop any real feelings for them. Since then, I've been moving around so much I never made time for anything more than hooking up with a friend or colleague or someone I knew for a few days or weeks in whatever city I was in. Before you, the last time I was really with someone I cared about was back in college, with Logan."

"And when you had these – "Jess stumbled over the word – "entanglements, were they with people who were single?"

I sighed. "Sometimes they were. Sometimes they weren't. A lot of the time I didn't ask."

I looked up, waiting to see hint of chastisement in his face. There wasn't any.

"Jess, it doesn't seem a lot different from what or who you were doing between girlfriends," I told him. "I doubt you were checking that hard every time you hooked up with someone. If you're going to – "

"I'm not judging you, Rory," Jess replied. "You're right. I was doing the same thing. I didn't always know a lot about the other person. But I always asked. I didn't want to get involved with someone I knew was in a relationship."

"Well, what's your definition of a relationship, then, Jess? "I asked, feeling indignant. "If you're involved with someone in an open relationship, that's still a relationship. How does that work if you had multiple partners? Or if the other person did?"

Jess fumbled with the seam of his pants. "I don't think it's the same situation," he countered. "Now that I'm older and I know better I don't really do the things I used to do, even if I'm not in a relationship. I played with fire a little bit too much when I was younger, and I'm sure whatever April told you about what she remembers is true. But I never wanted to intrude on someone who was seriously involved with someone else. I tried to avoid those situations as much as possible."

"I had a boyfriend when you got involved with me," I reminded him. "I was in a relationship. An open relationship, but it was still a relationship."

Jess groaned. "You hadn't seen Paul in a year," he reminded me. "You didn't seem serious about him. If you had been seriously involved with either him or Logan, I wouldn't have allowed anything to happen. It may be a blurry line sometimes, but it's important to me that it's drawn."

I knew what Jess was getting at, but I still wasn't willing to concede the point.

"Whether you draw that line or not, I'm still not sure that it counts," I argued, even though I only halfway believed that myself. "It was important enough to you that you made it clear we shouldn't be together until I officially broke up with him and Logan. And that was after we had slept together."

"I also dropped the subject when Paul to call you back," Jess replied. 'You were the one who insisted on tracking him down and ending things. I know that was important to you, too."

"It was," I agreed. "But it's still not that different from the kind of things that you were doing, Jess. I just don't think there's that much of a difference between the way either of us approached things. And yet I know you think it wasn't right. You have no problem judging me for involving myself in someone else's infidelity. And I know you don't have a problem judging my mom for her own."

I steeled my eyes on his and thought to myself that maybe this was it all along. A genetic propensity to restlessness and infidelity, passed down from mother to daughter. Jess was as much of a loss to understand it as I was to believe that I could do better.

And yet in the back of my mind, I could hear my mother telling me that was bullshit.

When it comes to love and relationships, I don't want you to be like me.

I had stopped listening. I had told her she didn't have the right to judge me.

Maybe she should have stopped listening to me.

"I don't think it's the same as a monogamous relationship," Jess said quietly. "I know he was technically your boyfriend, but I know you didn't care for him the way that you did for Logan. Or for me. You said he had another girlfriend that he cared for more. I don't judge you for that situation, Rory. I can't. I've been in it myself."

"But you do judge me for the others," I accused him. "For not caring if the people I was sleeping with had girlfriends. Or wives. For knowing that one of them had a fiancé and sleeping with him anyway. And I know you think worse of my mom for being the person doing the cheating."

Why hadn't I cared? Why hadn't I asked? It had all seemed so unimportant back then.

And yet here I was, arguing with my boyfriend about something I didn't even believe in anymore. That I couldn't even fathom believing in.

Jess might have been messy and promiscuous in his own way, but at least he had tried to set some boundaries. I hadn't even bothered.

And why was I bringing my mom into all of this? She and Luke both may have driven their relationship to its absolute breaking point, but I still didn't believe it justified what she had done. I may have judged her less harshly than Jess did, but I still judged her.

And yet I didn't feel Jess had much of a right to consider his actions that much better than mine. And I hated feeling that he did.

"Rory," Jess said softly. He turned me to face him as I stared up at him, feeling defeated.

"I don't judge you for any of that," he said with conviction. "I try not to, anyway. I've screwed up as much as anyone. I'd never want you to feel bad for anything that's in your past."

"Maybe that's the problem," I said. "Maybe I should feel bad for it, Jess. But I can't go back and change things any more than you can. And I'm frustrated right now because part of me wants to admit that you're right, and the other part of me looks at the way you've done things and I kind of want to scream because it's not any better than how I've done them. And I want to make you understand that and it doesn't seem like you do."

"It's not just about what happened with other people," Jess said quietly.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"I've been on the other side of it with you," Jess said. "I know it's stupid to keep thinking about it, Rory. And I don't hold it against you. It doesn't make me love you any less, or make you want to feel bad for the things that happened when we were kids. But I was there when you kissed me when you were with someone else, when you ignored me, when you resented me for wanting something of my own, even though you made it clear you weren't going to let go of Dean and take me seriously. I was there when I wanted to reconnect with you, but you only wanted to use me to cheat on Logan and then changed your mind. All that time I kept waiting, hoping, wanting things to change, but I was always second best. And I know I screwed things up in the middle to make it happen the second time, and I hate myself for that. But part of the reason these things are important to me are because of what happened with us. I may have gotten involved in ambiguous situations as an adult, but I don't want to play the kinds of games that you did with me. Because I remember how it felt to me back then."

If I had felt like a horrible person before, I felt like even more of one now.

Jess was right about it. About all of it. I had taken his young heart and crushed it simply because I was too scared or too vengeful to actually confront the other people in my life. And now it was twisting in on itself along with all of the other stupid mistakes I had made. I knew that the excuse that I was only a kid when it happened didn't mean much because I hadn't changed.

And yet here Jess was, stroking my hair, those chestnut peepers boring into mine, asking if I was okay and saying he never should have started it.

What a mess the two of us were – him constantly trying to keep his old demons at bay, me hating myself for not even noticing that I even possessed mine.

This was a hell of a time to start gaining some self-awareness.

"I'm sorry, Jess," I confessed, finally starting to let myself cry. "I know it doesn't make up for a lifetime of crappy choices, but I am sorry. I just don't – I just think if I start to think about all of the stuff I should have been sorry for a long time ago, I might legitimately go crazy. I just hate knowing that you might look at me and think of me as this horrible person. Because I know in some ways I should think of myself that way, and I just can't. This is not the time to break down over everything bad I've done in my life. And I hate thinking that you might see me that way. This evil person, this interloper. The girl who broke up other people's relationships and didn't care."

Jess reached out and brushed my hair away from my face. "I don't think of you that way," he told me solemnly, his eyes as open and forgiving as they had always been. "Any hurt I had I got over a long time ago. But I have never thought of you as a horrible person, Rory Gilmore. Never. And I'd never want you to think of yourself that way, either. I could never judge you a tenth as much as you judge yourself right now. And you don't deserve that."

"I can understand if you don't trust me, though, "I told him as he handed me a box of tissues. "Do you?"

"Of course I do," he replied. "Do you trust me, Rory? I need to know that you do. That you're not just saying that to smooth this over."

"I do," I told him. "It's just hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of this stuff."

"I'd get a new distributor if I thought it would solve the problem," Jess promised. "I couldn't do it right away. It would take a few weeks at the very least. But it's not going to remove all the Adelaides and Celestes from the world, or keep us from bumping into someone at the drugstore six months from now that I used to know in that way. I can't erase all those people from my past anymore than I can erase those I don't want to think about from yours. Even as much I want to right now to keep you from feeling this way."

"I know," I said. "I don't want you to upend your business to make me feel better. I'm just remembering how easy it was to ignore all of those boundaries when I was on the other side and my mind kind of works overtime now that I'm in a position where I'm the one who could be hurt by it." I scoffed. "Self-awareness really sucks sometimes."

"I don't think what you did or didn't do in the past defines what our relationship is like now," Jess said quietly. "You certainly know enough of my ugly secrets from the recent past, and you still want to be here. I know that you know what happened with Logan or whatever else happened before then that you regret now was wrong, Rory. As long as we don't repeat that behavior with each other, we don't really need to dwell on the people we used to be."

"I didn't know it was wrong at the time," I sniffled. "I was kind of too self-absorbed to think much about it."

Jess sighed. "I have a lot of experience with not wanting to admit a situation is as bad as it really is," he said. "The more you avoid thinking about it, the easier it is to convince yourself that you could be happy staying that way."

The problem was that I had been happy. It was a different kind of happy than I was now. It had been fleeting, selfish, decadent. But I had enjoyed my coddled mistress's life. It let me forget about everything else that was wrong.

Jess's bad habits had emerged out of his loyalty and goodness. Mine had emerged out of my desire to forget.

And a lot of the time I didn't want to think about how I had become the person that I had been.

I set the tissue back down on the table. "What about my mom?" I asked Jess. "Is it as easy for you to not judge her as it is to not judge me?"

Jess winced. "No," he said in a measured voice. "You're my girlfriend and the mother of my child. I love all of you. I can't separate your flaws and the things that you regret from the rest of you. It's different for your mom. She hurt Luke, and put him in a bad place for a long time. I'm protective of him. That's always going to be at the forefront of my mind when I think of what happened between them."

"I feel the same way about my mom," I said. "I know that it isn't any one person's fault, and I could sit here and argue about it with you again, but I'd only believe half of what I was saying." I took a deep breath. "For most of my life, I wanted to be like her more than anything, but she didn't really teach me a lot about how relationships were supposed to work. By the time she was in a place to actually give me advice, I didn't want to hear it."

"I don't think Luke taught me a lot about them, either," Jess said. "I remember telling him off the few times that he tried. I didn't think his track record counted for much of anything. Rachel, Anna, Nicole, this constant back and forth with Lorelai – "He sighed. "I think maybe I did end up following his lead too much in the end, too. Especially when it came to letting the bad ones fester."

I let that thought linger in the air as I took another sip of my drink.

"There's still some other stuff that bothers me, Jess," I said softly. "I still don't like that you didn't tell me that Celeste was pushing for marriage. Or that you continued to sleep with her after you broke up."

"Rory, you can't really – "Jess began.

"Look, I know I'm a hypocrite to have a problem with it," I told him. "But for all of my mistakes, I've been open with you about it. And I'm not accusing you of lying to me about it, because you never did. But some of the information that you don't offer right away – I really think that you should."

Jess grimaced. "That's not one of my strong points," he stated.

"I know it isn't," I replied. "And we're different in that way, but I kind of want you to try harder."

Jess nodded. "Is it the fact that I didn't tell you she wanted to get married and I didn't or the idea that you doubt that I'm interested in getting married in the first place?"

"It's both," I replied. "And I think you should definitely had made things clear about when things ended for good with Celeste."

"Did you draw the line that clearly with Logan this last time?" Jess asked.

I remained silent.

"Don't you think you should have volunteered that information?" Jess asked.

"You said you didn't want to know," I reminded him.

"That's right. I didn't," Jess retorted. "But now I'm wondering if there's some kind of additional reason you held back on this."

"It's because I met you again," I told him. "You're right, Jess. I broke up with him. His fiancé had moved in with him and we were going to have to resort to sneaking around in hotels. He still wanted to take me out in public. I still called him whenever I needed advice or comfort. And I realized it was wrong and I couldn't do it anymore and then he showed up again in Stars Hollow and I was with him one final time, even though he told me he didn't expect that of me anymore. And all of that was after we had started working on the book. It was a little over a month before that night at my grandmother's house. I was starting to wonder if I could develop feelings for you again and I still slept with Logan. Do you really need to know all of those details about the degree to which I backslid?"

I buried my head in my hands, reliving the whole thing. The worst part is that I didn't entirely regret that last night, even now. Logan was largely a fading memory, fading into the recesses of my mind, insignificant next to the strangely new phenomenon of being loved and cared for by Jess on a daily basis. But it still wasn't an entirely unpleasant memory.

"No," Jess admitted, knocking me out of my stupor of self-recrimination. "But those relationship lines are a lot fuzzier than the ones that I had with Celeste."

I lowered my hands and turned to look at him. "I know," I told him. "And for the record, I don't need to know any more details about your situation than I already do."

Jess nodded. "Agreed." He paused. "Logan didn't have a habit of randomly turning up in Stars Hollow, did he?"

I chuckled. "No. He just wanted to say goodbye."

"I don't need to hear any more of that story," Jess declared. "And honestly, Rory, I really didn't need to know as much as you just told me."

"It's different for me," I said quietly. "And it's completely over when it comes to him, Jess. I didn't tell you because I didn't think you'd want to hear it."

"I know," Jess said. "Celeste is still a mess in my head," he added. "Not because I still love her or because I have any lingering feelings for her. It's difficult because I don't think I handled things the way I should have. I thought when I told you that I should have pushed harder on the marriage topic when things started to go wrong, that it was enough. At least for you."

"In this case, it wasn't," I countered. "I think the fact that she changed her mind and you didn't want it anymore is still something I need to know. And I do worry that you're too reticent on the subject."

"Have you changed your mind about getting married?" Jess asked softly.

"I haven't," I said. "I still don't know if I want to, now or ever. But it still kind of holds me back to know that you had a lot more reservations about the subject than I thought you did."

"I haven't changed my mind over the past two months," Jess attested. "I'm farther down the road than you are. I want to get married, but I'm not ready for it to happen now. It's not because I'm afraid of the concept itself. I know you can't force a relationship to happen because you think it's the right thing to do or you owe it to the other person. I want to get married because I want to get married to you, Rory. If we never get to where we're at the same point on that road, that's fine with me. I wouldn't want to do it without you."

I took his hand in mine, feeling slightly chagrined. Not only that Jess still wanted to after all of these raw truths shared between us, but because I knew my faith in his declaration still didn't quite match his own. I might be a jealous, hypocritical mess, but I also knew things between Jess and I weren't ever as simple as he proclaimed them to be.

I squeezed his hand. "It wasn't always just about me," I told him, half-cursing myself for seeing that earnest light in his eyes start to fade. "You weren't always a hard no when it came to marrying Celeste. You wanted all these things with her once."

"I did," Jess agreed.

I took another deep breath. "If she had kept the baby, you would have married her," I told him. "I know that would have pushed you in that direction, no matter how bad everything else was. You would have moved to New York with her if there was no other way. You would have tried to make it work."

Now it was his turn to be silent.

"It doesn't offend me," I assured him. "Jess, I know you would have tried."

"I probably would have," Jess said in a rough voice. "It would have been a terrible idea, but I would have tried to keep things together. But Celeste was never going to keep the baby."

"Did she say that?" I said as gently as possible.

"Afterwards," Jess said. He shook his head. "I didn't put any pressure on her when it happened and I wouldn't have put it on you if you didn't know what you wanted to do. But she said it to punish me because she knew I'd judge her for it. I didn't want to, but I did."

"That's why you still feel guilty," I surmised. Jess gulped and nodded.

"Do you feel that way in general or just because of the situation?" I asked him.

"I'm not sure," Jess said. He looked down at our entwined hands. "I didn't intend to be a person who feels that way, but I am," he added.

I felt my heart start to race, but I managed to calm myself down.

The last thing Jess needed was to make this solely about me. If I could do nothing else, at least I could do that for him.

"That's maybe something we should have discussed at some point," I said. "It's not the same for me, Jess."

"I know," Jess said.

"You know, I've thought about it every now and then," I began. "I almost forgot about it, but there was one time back in D.C. when I thought I might have gotten pregnant. I had already broken up with the guy, and there wasn't even a second thought to me about what I was going to do if that test had turned up positive. It didn't, and I put it out of my mind. But looking back on it I don't know what I would have felt if it had gone the other way. When I took that test again a few months ago, I wasn't thinking about babies any more than I had been the first time. But as soon as I saw that positive sign, I wanted it. I crossed over into being a different kind of person the minute that I knew."

"It was your Kill Bill moment," Jess said.

I smiled, proud of letting my pop culture lexicon sneak into his vocabulary. "I know it wasn't as instantaneous for you," I said softly. "But sometimes you can't help how your gut feels in that moment. But I also can't say how it's going to be for me if it happens again."

"I know that, too," Jess said. "I love you, Rory. You're always going to be the most important person to me. If it happens again, I'll still be here to support whatever you want to do, even if I feel differently. I didn't break up with Celeste because I judged her or because she didn't want to have kids. We were always headed there anyway."

I squeezed his hand. "I don't think if I trust that," I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering and failing miserably. "What if I hadn't wanted to have this baby?" I asked. "Would it had made you change your mind about me?"

Jess turned to face me and gently brushed my hair out of my eyes. "No," he said, his voice full of a conviction I desperately wanted to trust. "Once I knew what it was like to be with you again, I couldn't have walked away," he declared. "If you didn't ever want to have kids, I still would have chosen you over any other possible future. You meant more to me than the rest of it."

"What if the baby had been Logan's?" I fretted. "What if I didn't know? What if we didn't have a choice about tracking him down for a paternity test?"

"It would have been complicated, but I still would have wanted to be with you," Jess maintained. His eyes were shining with that familiar love, and hope, but a shadow of uncertainty was beginning to cross them. "Would you have wanted to work things out with Logan if the baby had been his?"

"No," I declared vehemently. "I cared about Logan, but I didn't love him. I would never have really belonged in his world."

"Would you have wanted to keep the baby if it wasn't mine?" Jess asked.

I nodded. "I think I would have had to think about a little more, but I would still have wanted it," I said. I reached down and squeezed his hand again. "I guess it's a good thing our lives aren't quite as crazy as they could have been, huh?"

"I think I've just about reached my tolerance level with the craziness for the time period," Jess conceded.

"I don't judge you for how you felt about Celeste," I told Jess. "Maybe someday I'll feel the same way about it that you do, but I don't know if that's going to happen. I just want it to be okay between us if we always feel a little differently about it."

"It will be," Jess promised. "I'll always respect what you decide, Rory. No matter what."

I nodded. "Good."

"I do have a few more things I want to ask you, though," Jess said. "I avoided asking you before because I figured I didn't want to know. But as long as everything is out in the open, I kind of think I need to."

I gulped and took another sip of my drink. "Okay," I said tentatively.

"When did it start with Logan?" Jess asked.

"The spring before my grandfather died," I replied.

"Was he engaged when you got together?" he asked.

I shook my head. "I knew they were together, but they didn't announce their engagement until after Grandpa died," I said.

"How did you feel when you found out about it?" Jess asked softly.

"I guess I was a little hurt, but not as much as I should have been," I said. "Logan wasn't really in my life in that sense. I didn't even consider asking him to come with me to Grandpa's funeral. We enjoyed each other's company, but I didn't want to be his girlfriend. I wanted the benefits of being with him without any of the obligations. It suited both of us for me to remain the person he kept on the side."

"What about his place in your life?" Jess asked. "You said that he was there for you when you needed him."

I nodded. "He was," I said. "He knew almost everything about my life. I didn't know anything about his."

"Did he ever spend time with you on his own?" Jess asked. "Did he ever ask to come to New York or to Stars Hollow?"

"No," I stated. "We agreed not to talk about the things that existed outside of our time together."

"Whose idea was that? "Jess asked. "Yours or his?"

"It was his," I said. "Our relationship wasn't officially supposed to exist."

Jess looked slightly dismayed. "And he never indicated that he wanted more?"

"No," I said hesitantly. "Jess, I know what you're thinking. Maybe he did want more out of our arrangement than he was willing to tell me. But I didn't. I was a spinning top, trying to pretend that everything else in my life wasn't falling apart. He kept me spinning."

Jess frowned at me. He looked like he was on the verge of collapsing into laughter.

"I don't mean that literally," I told him.

"Okay," Jess said. "If that was all that remained between you, why are you going out of your way to avoid talking to him?"

"It's not because I still have feelings for him," I protested. "If I did end up hurting him, I don't want to have to face that. I don't want to face how I might have hurt Odette. I don't want to have that Maury Povich conversation with him where I have to tell him my baby doesn't belong to him. I don't want to have to admit that I screwed up by staying involved with him for so long and yet I got rewarded with a great guy who loves me and a baby that I want. Maybe I did screw him over. Who knows? Maybe he did love me. I don't know."

Jess sighed. "Do you think this entire affair was just a form of sleeping with an ex for the wrong reasons?"

"That's an accurate description when it comes to me," I said. "But maybe not for him."

"That's all that me sleeping with Celeste after we broke up ended up being," Jess affirmed. "I need you to understand that, Rory."

"I do understand," I told him. "But my backsliding was an adventure, Jess. I got seduced by it. I think I just don't really understand how you could get to that same place with Celeste when you made each other so miserable."

"I wasn't in that same place as you," Jess countered. "Rory, if you're thinking I was having some sort of intoxicating experience the few times that it happened, let me assure you that it wasn't like that at all. I went to her out of desperation. I didn't have enough mental energy to try to start over. I didn't think it was possible for things to happen for us like they have."

"Neither did I, Jess," I told him. "It was a sort of desperation for me, too. A completely different kind, maybe, but just as unhealthy."

Jess nodded. "I know." He took a deep breath. "You know that you're going to have to have those conversations with Logan eventually."

I nodded. "The same book that brought me to you is going to force me back into his orbit. I'm just not ready yet, Jess. I need time."

"And if he does tell you he loves you?" Jess prompted.

"Then I'll have to tell him that it doesn't matter," I replied. I placed Jess's hand over my belly. "And I'll have to tell him why."

That night, our daughter finally decided to start kicking.

I woke Jess up right away, but she wasn't strong enough for him to be able to feel her yet.