Disclaimer: Don't own the girls.
A/N: This was supposed to be short. Like drabble short. Oh, the best laid plans, right? Maybe I'm crazy, y'know, shipping a ship that wasn't seen on screen very long, but people still ship Trory, so it's cool, yeah? Shutting up soon, promise. Rory's point of view mostly, timeline: Jess' departure onward, sometimes jumping forward or back, heavy on the Lit implications.
Read, enjoy, please let me know what you think.
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Jess never had a box.
She never bothered packing him into one of her mother's cardboard boxes, sticking him into the back of her closet and calling it a done deal.
Maybe she should have.
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I think I may have loved you…
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He didn't leave a lot when he went. His entire world fit into his duffle, so all that was left behind was for her to keep.
A handful of CDs and dozens of margins—not enough words that were theirs and too many that were his. His spidery writing crammed into white borders, spilling out of the text, an extension of the work. Too many margins, bold black letters she couldn't do away with. So she let them stay.
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She went to Yale and the margins there were new and empty until she filled them herself, but her words were out of place and awkward—pink gel pen that didn't mesh with Richard Hoggart—made it easy to revert back to her legal pads. It was comforting almost, because that at least was easy.
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But now I'm not sure…
Liar.
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She took Luke the CDs and he tried to apologize. She just shook her head and told him it was fine, that she was fine, tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and smiled.
"I kinda knew he wasn't going to stay." She confessed, because Luke would never make her say more than she was ready to say, because he knew what it felt like better than her mother or Lane or anyone because Luke was probably the only other person in the whole town who hurt because Jess was gone.
"But you wanted him to." It was quiet and out of character, and she couldn't see Luke's face as he scrubbed down the counter—he couldn't see hers—"Yeah, I did."
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Dean wasn't the sort of guy who read for reading's sake. Logan read and ranked, the Yale boy who knew he was smart, who didn't mind flaunting the fact. But Jess, Jess was a creature like her when it came to the written word. It was a part of them, a key piece of their existence. Like oxygen and caffeine. Jess read with the same ease that he wrote and if there was ever a grace to him—and there was, though she doesn't truly see it till it's gone, across the country on the sun drenched fronts of California—it was in that.
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She erased an entire page of him the night he told her he loved her and ran away. Again. (He had always complained about the predictable and the mundane but in retrospect, the experience was both).
She rubbed him out of the end scene of a Tim O'Brien and didn't flinch when the page wrinkled and paper started coming away with rubber.
Because they weren't a love story, they'd never been a love story. It had been a war story from the start with the bombs and mines disguised as books and promises. So she tore him out of place and looked down at the impressions—indentations—left on the paper.
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The next morning she filled them in with O.7 lead and the words were back in place.
It wasn't right though, the words seemed lopsided and spineless in her writing, sad and out of context.
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He asked her to run with him. (That was new)
She said no. (That wasn't)
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The day things ended with Dean for the second time she piled all of the books Jess had ever wrote in into a single box and told her mother to give them to Andrew's used book bin.
It was almost closure.
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She couldn't write in the pool house. She kept trying, but the words were stuck in her fingertips, swelling and pulsing and aching yet stagnant despite the fact. She remembered how it felt, typing articles and term papers and essays, twelve pages on why the Petrarchan sonnet was superior to the Shakespearean sonnet. She remembered short stories and formulaic poems.
"Stop forcing it, Ace. Que sera, sera. Remember?"
She remembered all the words she ever took for granted
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She finished his book long before her grandmother came to knock on her door, the margins cramped and shrinking with the tiny words she etched there, graphite smudges that left marks on the side of her pinkie.
She read it cover to cover, flipped back to the parts that caught her attention, underlined and filled in empty spaces with every thought that crowded in her head.
She wrote beneath the small paragraph at the back, about the author. Filled the page with everything she knew about him. Everything he'd done that wasn't included in the 150 words printed. She wrote all the things he'd missed and all the things she never wanted him to know.
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He yelled and she stood there with her shoulders hunched, listening as he listed all the things she already knew were wrong with her life. "This isn't you."
She tried to tell him he didn't know her anymore. She tried to say she'd grown up as much as he had, that she was allowed to be different from the eighteen-year-old who'd been too embarrassed to kiss him in public after things ended with Dean (the first time).
But she was standing there in a tweed jacket her grandmother had picked out for her, her hair in loose curls she'd taken an hour to do that morning, her lips cracked and dry beneath the thin layer of lip stick—all the words she couldn't write throbbing in her fingers—and it was too much of a lie, trying to explain herself to him, this new Jess who asserted himself and walked away from fights and spoke more than two words at a time.
"What are you doing?"
And everything he was saying was sharper than the truth, because someone was finally saying it, because she couldn't deny it.
"I don't know."
Because she didn't want to.
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He didn't fix her life that night anymore than she'd set him on the right path all those years ago.
They did that on their own.
But they liked to give each other credit because, underneath it all, they were both romantics who liked the way the whole idea worked out on paper. They just never admitted it.
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She called him the day she got Logan home from the hospital. Her thumb dialed each number with extra force, as though that would translate into an apology even before he answered the phone. Because answer he did and she was mute for a second, wondering if she couldn't just let this go, let sleeping dogs lie and go back to pretending they didn't live in the same universe.
But the lump in her throat was tight and she remembered missing him—wanting him—the summer before Yale, and hating him the summer after Freshman year and admiring him just a few short months ago. She remembered shame and regret from just days before and the feeling that lingered in the pit of her stomach, like possibility, the feeling she could return to him and find shelter. That wasn't hers to abuse.
"I'm sorry." She said, and the words were well worn between them, too often needed in the course of their history, even if they were seldom used. "I'm sorry, Jess, I shouldn't have—"
"No you shouldn't." A labored sigh that made her realize the novelty of growing old was already wearing off. "You deserve better Rory. I don't mean me. Don't think I mean me. Just better than him. You should be happy."
"You too." She said, because it was true. "I'm really sor—"
"Bygones and bridges Gilmore." He said, and it was his way of saying there was nothing left to apologize for. They'd had their chance and now, now they couldn't go back to it. They were impressions on the other, engravings and smudges, a collection of memories that couldn't be brought up to the sunlight anymore.
She pressed the phone against her ear a little harder and bit the inside of her cheek. "Think you've mixed your metaphors."
And there was a chuckle, like static pops, and something in her chest eased at the sound. "You understood the point."
Then there was silence, everywhere. She could feel her heart beating and the electric hum of the phone in her hand and feel the weight of Logan's presence in his apartment. There was nothing up the static buzz on his end of the line and she was tempted to call it to an end now, amicable and safe.
"So I read a book the other day." He said, causally, and she could practically see him, on hand thrust in his pocket, shoulders hunched, lopsided grin. "I think you might like it."
"Yeah?" She couldn't say where the smile came from, just that it did, and she couldn't help the bow of her head as she prompted him to continue.
"Yeah."
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It's what it is. You. Me.
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End
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Feedback is Love
A/N: And they totally lived happily ever after. What? Don't believe me? Dude, why do you think she broke up with Logan? Exactly, so she'd be free to go back to Jess who was living the double (triple?) life of publisher/author/hospice nurse. Yeah, I know, I watch too much TV.