Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, or this show.

Thank you so much for all the support! I truly love and appreciate reviews, they give me ideas and help me figure out where I want to take my writing in the future. BIG shoutout to RedHollowGirlx, who gave me some great ideas for this second part. Everyone should check out her writing, she is the best.

Hollow Spaces – Rory

I sprinting through the town square, away from Jess Mariano. Of all the people, him. I am sprinting (or at least my pathetic excuse for sprinting), and echoing everything he says back at him like a ten year old. God, I am so out of shape. The thing to emphasize here is that I am sprinting. Rory Gilmore doesn't sprint. And I'm starving. I vaguely remember waiting on line for a burger just moments prior, but somehow I ended up here. Why did I get out of line? What is actually wrong with me? Where is this sudden burst of energy even coming from? I am consciously aware of these thoughts I am having, but the most important one involves Jess Mariano. It's that he's standing in front of me and I'm desperately trying to make him go away.

I stop running and I realize that he's still following me. He keeps trying to engage me in some kind of conversation and truly I could do without. My heart is pounding and I'm experiencing this broad range of emotions that I don't want him to know about and I don't really want to explore. The only thing I want him to know is that I'm angry. That's all he's allowed to know. If I focus on being angry, he'll leave. He'll get scared, and he'll say something he'll regret, and he'll leave. He'll leave this town and my mind and my heart and he'll never come back. If I am anything but angry, he'll stay. It'll give him this false sense of security. Good plan, I tell myself. I also feel like I'm watching an episode of myself in Dawson's Creekbecause this is all so dramatic.

He's talking, I think. But I'm not really listening to the words. I'm focusing on the boiling sensation in the pit of my stomach that feels a little like actual emotion and a lot like molten lava. I examine his face and I start to see something in his eyes that I'm not used to seeing. He's not asking me to listen, he's begging me. Anger, I keep telling myself. You're angry. You hate him. Maybe you cared about him once, but that time is over now. You hate him. You hate him. I put him on the spot and demand that he tells me what he came here to say. Make it fast and painless. Like ripping off a band-aid. God, I hate when people say that. I make a note to never say that aloud to anyone, ever again. I also make a note of the fact that I'm thinking about band-aids right now when Jess Mariano is right in front of me and his eyes look so incredibly tired.

For a moment, I see someone who is hurting. For a moment, I see this person who used to be my best friend. I see books, record stores, and leather jackets. I hear The Clash and The White Stripes. I momentarily can remember his smell and his taste and I'm transported to purgatory just by looking into those eyes.

But I hate him. I just need to focus on that. He'll leave and he'll run because that's what he does best.

Lists. I'm good at lists. If I remind myself of all the reasons I should hate him, then actually hating him should be simple.

I think about the first time I meet him, and he's standing in my room poring over my books. He doesn't ask me if he can, he just wanders over to the bookshelf and steals my copy of Howl. He steals it, and fills it with his pointless comments about pointless rhetoric that I could do without. He is the only person I know who instantly knows what I mean when I call him Dodger, and he gives me this idiotic signature smirk that was customized for me.

He jumps onto my carriage ride at the Bracebridge Dinner and has the audacity to question my relationship with Dean. He thinks he has a right to tell me that Dean doesn't get it. Get me. Dean doesn't know Bjork. Surprise of all surprises, Jess is completely out of line and as always doesn't seem to care. Especially when he outbid Dean on my basket, just so he could eat my abysmal chicken salad and talk to me and get pizza and go to the bookstore and convince me to buy Hemingway novels he knows I'll hate. Salt and pepper dip is awful. Bukowski and Austen would have never hit it off. He hates Indian food and after being subjected to it almost ten times in a two week span, I can say with certainty that I never want to see a movie with Kate Hudson ever again. Jess Mariano has ruined Kate Hudson for me, forever. He totals the car that Dean makes me, and then runs away to New York without even saying goodbye, just because he can. I skip school to see this person, to give him the chance to at least say goodbye, and I miss Mom's graduation. For this person who is never even there for me. He kisses me back at Sookie's wedding even though he knows I love Dean.

He turns me into this person that I wasn't supposed to be. Dean was the safe place, and Jess tore me away from it. I develop these destructive tendencies, including, but not limited to: spending time with Jess, not spending time with Dean, falling in love with Jess, falling out of love with Dean, kissing Jess, thinking about Jess, pretending to love Dean, not loving Dean, lying to Dean.

I'm angry because I think that by dating him, I can change him. He's damaged but kind and I think of his good heart and that look that is only for me, and I think that I can change the way he sees the world. I delude myself into thinking I can be the one to teach him how to love. I can make him adore me the way Dean adored me. I'm angry because I depend on him too much. I trust him too much. I let him off the hook when he disappoints me. I accept his horrible excuse for a black eye as a football injury. I'm not hurt because of the black eye, I'm hurt that he thinks he can't tell me the truth. Ignored phone calls are somehow remedied by concert tickets. He isn't able to get prom tickets or graduate or do any of the things I always said he was capable of doing. His dad shows up for the first time in years and I know that he's terrified of him and the future and himself, but somehow those things would have been okay if he hadn't tried to run to California instead of confiding in me. He becomes this angry person I always feared he would become if he stopped believing in himself. He loses the ability to tell me how he feels so he tries to show me with sex in Kyle's bedroom, which obviously can't happen. He gets frustrated and runs, and that's the last real time I feel close to Jess. He disappears off the grid, slowly at first, and then completely and entirely.

He calls me a million times the day I graduate, and I figure it's him and I almost start crying during my graduation speech because I wanted Jess to hear about all the books. I'm angry at him for that too. He calls me after and finally I answer and I tell him that I'm done and that this isn't my fault. I tell him I'm leaving for college and going to Europe and that's that. I think I might have loved you, but I'm just going to have to let that go.

I hate him because he is this person that I miss. I go to Europe and even though I never tell mom, I'm thinking about him constantly. He follows me to Yale. I keep that annotated copy of Howl in my backpack. Which is perfect, because it's tiny and no one knows or questions it if they do catch sight of it. Every time I read his indecipherable scratch I notice something new. I'm 22.8 miles away from home, and I know that because he looked it up and it makes me wonder if he knew he was always going to run.

I spend my time in this fantasy would where Jess and I are together because he apologizes. Because an apology is the only thing that would make this better. But I know Jess doesn't do apologies, so I wonder how it would even happen. I start from the ridiculous, like being woken up in the middle of the night by Jess as John Cusack in Say Anything outside my building with a boombox, and end up at the realistic, like opening my student mailbox to find a copy of Old Man and the Sea, with messy scrawl that offers some sort of explanation and the beginnings of forgiveness. We start over, and he drives to visit me at Yale on the weekends sometimes. We go to the coffee cart and my classes and he blends in perfectly. He sits in on a Chaucer lecture and is mumbling something to me about the Wife of Bath while contentedly flipping through The Bell Jar. We go back to my dorm and watch a movie and he's holding me in his arms and I realize that all the pain we've both experienced make this single moment worthwhile.

This fantasy world is really just a fantasy, though. That's where it stays. Tucked away on my bookshelf somewhere between C.S. Lewis and Hans Christian Anderson is Rory's Gilmore's The Jess Anthologies.

In reality, I lie awake at night, resenting myself for thinking about this person who clearly wasn't thinking about me. I feel like I have been floating around through my freshman year at Yale. Floating from class to class, floating at Friday night dinners, floating through my interactions with people. Everyone wants me to try and meet someone new, but all I can think about this boy I hate who doesn't appreciate Ayn Rand (another thing I hate about him). I cut my hair short, which, in retrospect, is some stupid declaration of independence for me, and I feel guilty when I get a rush of satisfaction in knowing that if Jess saw my hair this short, he would know it was something that I kept from him for a change, not the other way around.

I sometimes go back to Star's Hollow on the weekends (like this one) to visit Mom. No one notices that my heart races when I ask Luke how he's doing at the diner, because I'm hoping that he'll mention anything about Jess. Everyone thinks they're protecting me by saying nothing, but I think not knowing makes it even harder to move on. I want to move on. I'm tired of seeing him everywhere I go. I'm tired of being that girl everyone roots for in the young adult fiction novel, who eventually finds true love after many trials and tribulations. Stop rooting for me. I don't want your support. I don't need it. I tell myself that I am strong, and that I don't need him, but somehow those words aren't convincing enough. I try to throw out my copy of Howl a little bit after my birthday this year, end up sleeping with the book under my pillow.

When I find out the Jess is in town, I have this renewed sense of hope, that maybe he'll have something to say to me. Maybe it won't be John Cusack or The Old Man in the Sea, but some compromise between the two. I would take that. This idea occurs to me where I give Jess (via Luke) this cryptic note leading him to the bridge, where he would find me, and we could finally work things through. Instead, I sat on the bridge the night I saw him sleeping in his car for an hour, throwing rocks into the water, half hoping that if I stayed long enough, Jess would show up out of the blue, like he always does. Like he is right now.

I didn't sleep that night.

Jess Mariano is silently standing in front of me, struggling with words I know he will never actually say. He unnerves me, and it is taking every bit of focus and concentration to hide my trembling hands and knees. I feel powerless in his presence, but this is nothing new. I cannot hide from Jess because he sees right through me when I look at him. No matter what I say or how I say it, he only hears what I mean. He understands me, sometimes in ways that I feel even Mom doesn't. I don't need to explain myself with Jess, the silence usually does the talking for me. I worry sometimes, because I don't want to lose myself. I think of that night in the car when Jess tells me he believes in me, and it was the first time I really truly felt it too.

There is a second that I start to doubt whether or not I'm really angry and more just hurt, but I don't entertain that thought for too long, because I know Jess will see it.

We're standing here and I'm waiting for him to say something and my breath is caught somewhere between my throat and my lips. There are a million and one things he could say but something tells me Jess won't say the right thing. That is his pattern. He says or does the wrong thing, and gets scared, and runs. I want him to stay, and I want him to save me from this feeling of being impaled by a thousand knives simultaneously. I want him to close this hollow space between us that used to be filled with so much. I want to fill it with something good, something that will make me feel like anything but this shell of a person who floats around, wanting her life to be something that it currently is not.

I hate him. How dare he, come back to my town and follow me wherever I go, with nothing to say. After all he's done to me, I have nothing to say. He is worthless. He has nothing to offer me. He is nobody. I am more than it ever was, and am more than it would have been.

But then he opens his mouth and tells me he loves me and everything goes out the window because they are the truest words he has ever spoken to me because his voice and his eyes tell me so. It feels like that moment in a cartoon when the wrong person walks into the party and the disc jockey scratches the record and everybody and everything stops and is just staring at that person. Jess is that person.

I think I might have loved you, but I'm just going to have to let that go.

I'm standing here, and even though he just told me he loved me, I'm waiting for him to say something more and I don't know what it is and my breath is still caught somewhere between my throat and my lips and all I can think about are my words to him at my graduation and how I was so incredibly afraid all this time that maybe they weren't entirely accurate.

I love you, and I don't want to let that go.

But I didn't say that, and then he was gone.