A/N: I keep finding one-shots languishing on my hard-drive that were never posted. This one was written a month ago, checked and betaed, but never shared, so here it is. It is not what I intended to write when I started. Of all freakish things, by the end of writing this, I had made myself feel sorry for Huntzberger! lol

Disclaimer: All recognisable characters from Gilmore Girls belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and other folks that aren't me.

Ex Appeal

"I was a lousy girlfriend."

Rory said this whilst falling face first into the cushion's of the pool house couch. She hadn't really done the whole getting drunk thing before, but so far it had been pretty cool. Logan, Colin, Finn and their assorted associates (because that was just fun to say, but increasingly difficult the more she drank) were good fun to hang out with, and they sure had helped Rory feel better about Dean dumping her. Right now, she really wasn't thinking about him at all.

"Hey, no friend of ours is a lousy anything," said Logan, helping her back up to a sitting position as he dropped down beside her on the couch. "Maybe Dean was just a lousy boyfriend, you ever think of that?"

"Lousy, stinkin' Dean!" Finn chimed in from his position on the floor, arm raised in a toast though the glass he held was disappointingly empty.

"I'm not talking about when I dated Dean... either time" said Rory, wagging her finger. "I'm talking about Jess," she sighed, leaning into Logan's side more by accident than design - his arm went automatically around her.

"Jess?" he echoed.

"Ooh, is this a girl-on-girl story? Has our little Rory been experimenting?" asked Colin, waggling his eyebrows.

Rory bust up laughing and simply couldn't stop for a while.

"Noooo!" she told him as the giggles dissipated. "I never... well, Paris kissed me once but that was nothing," she waved away the thought as soon as it appeared. "Jess was a guy. A man. My man. All man," she said just a little dreamily.

Logan was intrigued by her expression and the way she sighed when she spoke of this specific ex. He wasn't about to admit he'd like Rory to be thinking about him when she looked and sounded that way, not at all.

"So, this Jess was, what?" asked Finn, pulling himself up to lean against the table and hunt for a full glass at the same time. "Your one true love?" he asked in a girly voice, eyelashes fluttering.

"I don't know," Rory shook her head. "Maybe. It was so messed up, he... he wasn't good with relationships, he would just run away when things got tough, but I... I never fully let him in, I couldn't trust him, even though he tried to be better, I just, I always blamed him, even when it wasn't his fault," she said sadly. "And the last time he left, it was because I told him to. Why? Why did I do that?" she asked Logan, as if he could possibly know.

"Don't ask me about relationships, Ace," he told her, fingers toying with her hair as she leaned lazily against him. "I'm strictly a love 'em and leave 'em type."

"It's the only way to be," agreed Colin, practically saluting those words.

"No, no, no," Finn surprisingly protested, shaking his head violently back and forth. "That's fine for a while, but when it's love, fairytale, happy ever after, true love... It'll conquer all men, and women, in the end," he smiled at Rory.

She smiled too, though there were tears in her eyes. Blaming the booze would be easy, but what she was feeling was all too real. Letting Jess just drop out of her life, it seemed easy to the outside world, but inside, her heart was breaking every time he walked away, doubly so that last time when she actually she told him to go.

"Jess could've been my true love," she said thoughtfully. "He made me laugh, and sometimes cry, but... but he did love me. We had everything in common, everything, and he was so smart! We would talk about music and movies, but mostly books. Jess loved books, the way that I loved books. We could talk for hours about them, and he would argue for Hemingway and against Rand. I'd get mad and he would too, but it was never a real kind of mad just... just the fun kind of mad," she almost laughed at her own phrasing.

Drunken giggles that she couldn't help soon gave way to melancholy when her thoughts turned to the bad times.

"When we fought, I... I wanted to cry all the time. He could be hurtful when he lashed out, when he was hurting himself. I should've been different, more understanding, I just didn't know how. We were both supposed to be so smart but the way we treated each other was so dumb. He acted like he didn't care about anything, but he cared for me, I know he did, and I... Why did I let him go away?"

She started crying into Logan's shoulder then, and he just held her closer and absently kissed the top of her head. So much for cheering the girl up. Turned out she could be both a happy and sad drunk at the same time.

Logan would remember this drunken night, more than a year after it occurred, and with unpleasant consequences. It took him a while from the moment Rory introduced Jess, to quite recall his significance. They were sat in the bar when he asked if they had dated. Then he got onto books, quizzing Jess' intelligence and knowledge of the things Rory loved. Before long he was certain that this was the guy Rory had cried for and called her one true love the night she broke up with another boyfriend.

It made his blood boil in his veins and his heart break in a way Logan never knew his heart could. Here they were, their relationship fracturing a little more each day, when suddenly a knight in shining armour appeared. One true love.

Logan had no way to compete with this guy, and he knew it. The problem was, Rory was oblivious to the fact that her current boyfriend even knew what her ex had meant to her. She had been so drunk that night, she remembered not one of the confessions she had made, not one.

For the life of her, Rory couldn't understand Logan's attitude. He would explain it to her if he could, but admitting to petty jealousy and caring as much as all that, it wasn't in his nature. He loved her, of course he did, but in the few brief moments he had spent with her and Jess tonight, he already knew it wasn't enough. So he lashed out, he did those things she once complained of her other boyfriends doing, hurting her because he was hurting himself, accusing her when he had no real solid basis for it.

"Oh, I'm not going off with Jess!" she protested when he suggested she might.

Logan almost laughed. Maybe she wasn't going now, but one day she would. He just knew on some level, from before they ever started dating, that they were on borrowed time. If this guy ever came back, they were done, and here he was. Sure, he wasn't in the pub anymore, but he was around, he was back in Rory's life.

They parted ways that night, and Logan truly believed they were over. Whether Rory went to Jess or he came to her didn't matter. Some day they were fated to be together, and Logan always knew it. He was just a fool who thought for a moment he could out do destiny. That wasn't possible for anybody, and he should've known better.

The End