a/n: the grand finale. I wrote this is strange fragments, then went back and connected them with additional detail...which is NOT how I usually write, but it just came to me like that. Sigh.

please leave a review! Hearing from you all has made this a fantastic experience.
MUCH LOVE :)

It only took four days.

Jess had assumed it would be a week at least, if not more. A very defeatist portion of his brain had suspected he'd never see her again. It was hardly a sure thing, this vulnerable expose laid out so plainly for her to pick apart; he imagined she'd sit in some artsy SoHo coffee shop and crease that delicate forehead in derision as she skimmed a page full of dismal mediocrity, turning back to her pretentious blueberry scone when she couldn't bear to read another sentence of his melodrama. He had been in a harried state for 96 hours straight, swiftly disintegrating into a nauseous disquiet with each tick of the second hand on his wristwatch. But that was until now.

"Hi." It came out too clipped, too obligatory. She wasn't smiling.

"Hi. Welcome to Truncheon Redux." The heaping sense of de ja vu nearly suffocated him. Her showing up like this, an interloper in what had served as his only place of solace, throwing him off kilter with that withering stare..

"You were beaked by a swan?!" Maybe he should have taken the withering stare a little more seriously.

Jess let out a long groan. "How did I know that was coming? In more than three hundred pages, that's the first thing out of your mouth."

"A swan! Really, you couldn't have told me that?"

"No. And now I'm wishing you still didn't know." He scanned the store, relieved to see the place was rather empty. The escalating hostility in her vocalized protests would hardly be good for business.

A vein bulged in her otherwise faultless forehead. "That was worth the fight we had? Your precious dignity always came first, didn't it?"

"Would it be insensitive for me to point out that this incident has been over for more than seven years? The statute of limitations must have kicked in by now." Jess shoved away from the front counter and ambled through the nearest row of bookshelves.

She huffed after him. "God, you are infuriating."

"I know." He spun around when he felt they had delved far enough in to claim a smidgen of privacy. " I'll let you give me a new black eye if it'd make you feel better."

"Hold on, you might want to save that offer for my opinion regarding page…" the familiar cover swiveled before him as she yanked her copy free from her purse and flipped indiscriminately through the novel. "Ah, yes, page 191."

He winced in agonizing expectation. "Which is?"

"Our incidental meeting on the bus. You know, the cozy ole bus you rode all the way to California."

He clung to his shield of sarcasm as dim awareness poked at his gut—this was not ideal. "To be fair, I did have to switch busses at a terminal once or twice."

"Jess." The fuming heat in her glare made him squirm.

"Right, sorry." He propped himself against a section of pompous poetry that Matthew had insisted upon stocking. "Um…what would you like discuss?"

She was raging fury from head to toe. "How about the part where you just sat there and let me flail around idiotically while you stashed that pathetic duffel bag under the seat and said nothing about your impromptu decision to bolt across the country?! I mean, some part of me realized that after the fact…that…that the last time I saw you doubled as some caustic overlap in your journey out of my life. But to read it like that, to know it for sure…you said nothing!"

"I know. I couldn't." He shook his head forlornly, coveting a more substantial defense. Too bad he didn't have one.

"Why not? Why freaking not?" Her tone had lessened into something that rang louder with desperation than it did anger. Jess wasn't sure which scared him more.

But he didn't flinch. "You know why. I was a coward. I couldn't bear to watch your face crumple with the crushing disappointment that I had personally placed there."

"Did you just quote your own book?" She blinked down at the page before her.

"Not verbatim. But the book is autobiographical. Meaning it quotes me, not the other way around."

She blasted him with a threatening look. "Thanks Webster, you're really helping your case by correcting me."

"Look I'm sorry, Rory, I am. I wasn't in a good place then and unfortunately, you ended up being the collateral damage in my repulsively foreseeable descent…but you are also the catalyst for everything good that's happened since then." His level of desperation was rising to match hers.

Her chin whooshed upward through the stilted air. "That was another quote, wasn't it?"

He shrugged. "I already told you, the book is me."

"Well the book is full of crap and so are you." Her vehemence was more intimidating than he'd admit aloud.

"Does that mean you didn't like it?" he asked, playing off the significance of that question with a smirk.

Rory narrowed her eyes into precarious slits as she shifted her stance. "I'm sorry, but there is no way you had feelings for me from the moment I called you Dodger. That's absurd, soul mates at barely seventeen."

A taut contraction in his lungs sent him reeling. "Huh. That part wasn't supposed to make you mad."

"Jess, it was only the second time I'd ever spoken to you. We didn't even know each other."

"I knew enough." His tone left no space for argument but apparently that wasn't deterring her crusade.

She studied him with scrupulous surveillance. "Honestly? That whole time…despite Dean and how much you hated the town and my mom and the fact that I was a total goody two-shoes geek? I thought I bugged you."

An exhaled snort of laughter stumbled out of him. "Oh, you bugged me alright. You bugged me because you were with Dean and you loved that appalling town and defended your mother and tried to covert me to your goody two-shoes ways. And the feelings…they bugged me the most."

Jess was relieved to finally witness a softening in those vast blue eyes. He tugged on her free hand, holding it hostage against his chest. She staggered closer in a chain reaction, astonishing him when she didn't fight his grip. "What else, Rory? Tell me everything."

She shivered as his warm breath sifted through the curtain of her bangs. "Your portrayal of Miss Patty had me laughing so hard I was crying."

"If only I could eradicate those traumatic encounters from my memory." He spoke quietly, his muscles tensing involuntarily at the sensation of her slanting chestnut curls skimming over his arm.

"The stuff about Logan was…harsh…yet accurate. I couldn't see it then, you know?" Her abridged admission of regret washed over him with a bittersweet reverence.

"I know," he nodded with a dour smile. "Trust me, I fully understand the aching clarity that comes with hindsight. That was undoubtedly the book's ongoing theme if we must apply some literary deconstruction."

"Jess…is this true?" Rory pulled away slightly with a creasing frown, her other hand weakly flapping the novel before her. "Every word in this book is absolutely, one hundred percent, inescapably and undeniably true?"

"Every last word." He stubbornly clasped her hand with a fierce persuasion. She held his very soul, had spent four crucial days with his bleeding heart defenselessly splattered through those pages. This was it.

A flurry of panic-stricken words flooded out of her. "Don't lie to me, please, I need to know. Was there a part of this that was amplified, blown up for the sake of readers or critics or—"

"Come on, Rory, you know I don't give a damn about any of that. All of it is authentic, even down to the placement of the friggin commas. Every last scribble was mine, every paragraph, each and every bit of it…just you and me, no embellishment necessary."

"You changed my name." Her chastened expression seemed to acknowledge the irrelevance of that particular objection, yet she offered no retraction.

Jess tried to retain a straight face but his quirking lips wouldn't cooperate. "Parts of it are a little…raw. It seemed wise to take proper measures and avoid a potential lawsuit. Just in case."

"Just in case I stormed in here trying to slap you?" She was virtually smiling back now.

"Hey, I knew there'd be trouble if I unlocked the Pandora's Box of previous sins…"

Her eyes momentarily dropped to the floor. When that glimmering set of cerulean dynamite came back to examine him, he was surprised to observe a film of tears welling there. "Jess…the ending…you really meant it all? About waiting? You said it's been 'the chisel that's ruthlessly carved out your worst parts.' And…that you'd…that you'd keep waiting until…"

"Until they put me in a pine box. It's all true. Every last word, Rory." His voice box splintered with the enormity of everything he'd ever wanted standing right there in front of him.

She inched forward. "If I was in a nursing home and I called you and asked you to be with me…"

His eyebrows danced higher. "Well I'd be disappointed that we missed out on the prime of our sex lives—not that such a small fact would keep me from making a pass at you—but I'd still come."

A sniffling chuckle erupted from her enthralling pink mouth. "You're ridiculous."

"You're worth it."

Rory sighed heavily. "What if we don't work out? If we give it a real shot and we end up hating each other and—"

He pressed a thumb to her lips, the rest of his hand cupping her quavering chin. "Now what's happened to your reading comprehension, Gilmore? I've tried to hate you, remember? I think that glorious stage of despondency dominates all of Chapter 26 and most of 27. It won't happen. I've never been able to hate you, not even when I've wanted to. And you're here, aren't you? Shouldn't you hate me by now?"

Her eyelids drooped shut as a singular tear glided along her porcelain cheek. "I have one more question."

"Anything you need," he whispered raggedly.

She sought out his eyes again. "Will you please sign my copy?"

He smirked, his hands fisting her sweater as he drew her body against his. "In a minute."

A bursting smile shaped her countenance before her lips rose up in a culminating deluge against his. Jess ravaged her with frenzied kisses, a smile of his own shaping the long-awaited clash of bumping foreheads and open mouths. Rory's indulgent whimper fueled his yearning desire. He backed her against the adjacent shelf, books shuddering and tumbling in reply.

Her mouth parted from his. "As remarkable as death by book impalement would be, I have to say that I'm not quite ready to meet my demise."

He grinned at her breathless confession. "Too much to live for?"

"Yeah, like the sequel. And coffee. In that order."

"So you think there is a sequel in the works, huh?" His grin broadened.

She let her lips ghost along his jaw. "I'm betting on it."

"Good," his hand snuck below the hem of her shirt and skated along her spine. "Me too."

Rory's electric gaze swept over his face with a solemn affection. "It was absolutely flawless, Jess. I can't believe you wrote about us."

He watched her keenly, his whole being marvelously aflame. "I wrote about you. I had to. It was inevitable, really."

"The book? Or us?" Her fingers smoothed back the dark hair around his ear.

"Both," he murmured as he recaptured her mouth.

And just like that, the ending was already under revision. That old relentless spark crackled, pleading for another shot of evoked ecstasy. Like a comet flashing beneath his closed eyes, Jess recalled the New Years kiss that had catapulted them ahead to this moment—the impact of that second, just a brief tick of the clock on the first night of the year. It was all he had needed to know.

"I love you, Rory. I always have."

She beamed up at him. "I love you too, Jess. I always will."

That girl with Howl in her bedroom and "Dodger" on her tongue was the girl he'd never get over. Now he'd never have to.