He opens the door to Luke's apartment and nudges it the rest of the way open with a soggy shoe.

Luke looks him up and down from his spot on the edge of the bed, where he's messing with his alarm clock. "I hope Kate Winslet made it out okay."

"What?" His head is buzzing with the damp tendrils of hair stuck to Rory's face and her restrained, polite little responses (God, he missed those). He's trying to estimate how long Dean will spend crouched in the sprinkler spray-if Rory will take pity on him and help, or if she'll let him keep his dignity along with getting soaked. Or maybe Dean has the brute strength that gets it fixed in a second.

"Too bad about DiCaprio, though."

"Huh?"

"Ya look like you're fresh off the... nevermind." Luke waves the bit away with the screwdriver in his hand. "So why're you trackin' water all over the place?"

Jess feels his shoes squelch as he shifts his weight. "Reasons. Fixing a sprinkler."

"Ah. Well Shane's lookin' for ya."

"Whatever." He rubs the tracks of water on his forearms off on his sweater, like it's not already waterlogged.

"I told her you were out, but she camped at a table for a while anyway. I think I saw her put on her lip stuff about four times." Luke digs into the inner workings of the clock with his finger, like this, not makeup, is the only way anyone should spend their free time.

"I'm gonna take a shower."

"Yeah, sure, that makes sense." Luke shakes his head and gives the clock another look, but turns in time to catch him with his hand on the bathroom doorknob. "If she comes back I'll tell her you'll be down in a bit, or...?"

Jess shuts the door and wrenches an arm out of his sweater, then the t-shirt, the collar of which stretches and pops a seam. They're probably making out right now, in the arc of the sprinklers like some Disney couple. No, Rory would hate that. She mentioned once that standing in wet clothes makes her feel trapped, like she's suffocating. Something about a water balloon fight gone wrong when she and Lane were kids. But while he'd stood drenched in that guy's yard, he was so distracted thinking about her damp skin under her school sweater that he couldn't blame Dean if he got there and couldn't keep his hands off her.

He steps into the shower and turns it on, not bothering with soap or shampoo. He spends so many hours showboating with Shane, making it look as PG-13 as possible, and he hadn't expected to have to do it this long. There's a limit on the fun to be had in a potential health code violation. Kissing Shane, talking to Shane, looking at the bridge of her nose to avoid committing her eye color to memory on accident-it's exhausting. It takes monumental effort to listen to her talk about Usher's six-pack all day, which is an impulse he thought most girls with a regular makeout partner would try to curb. And he's known all that on some level for a while now, but seeing Rory today made it obvious.

In the second before her pager went off he'd wanted to say, "I miss you," and "I'm sorry," and any thousand other hokey Hallmark sentiments (hokey, but still true) that would get her to stay for five more minutes. He may not have said any of those things, but he doesn't get why she can't see how much he wants to.

He would run twice as many blocks to fix double the sprinklers for her, and sacrifice his paperbacks to the spray, and do the right thing and re-break everything so her boyfriend could get a chivalrous victory. Every time. Always. It doesn't matter but maybe it does.

He gets out and ties on a towel. What happened at the wedding wasn't a fluke. He'll die if it was. If Dean wasn't a factor Rory would be the one sitting through four rounds of lip gloss just so he could go down there and ruin it all. Still, the day he sees Rory with a compact mirror he'll read Faulkner to her until she comes to her senses.

So no lip gloss maybe, but the waiting part he can picture. He's seen her lots of ways: balancing a fork in one hand and a textbook across her knees, rushing off to go make sure Dean's not mad about something, distracted enough by Lorelai that he can glance at the curve of her cheeks while he stacks dirty dishes at the counter. At least one of those Rorys has to be missing him, too.

He figures he'll brush his teeth now, since he can still hear Luke rattling around and swearing under his breath. While he puts toothpaste on his brush he thinks about running those little braids of hers under his thumb like cards in a deck. Taking her to bookstores and letting her lead him through the aisles by his watchband. Kissing her for longer than one miraculous moment, feeling her delicate hums of delight reverberate in his mouth, making it so much better for her than it ever was with Dean.

He spits and rinses, and then he runs the hair dryer, because Shane hasn't shut up about the upside-down Spider-Man kiss in weeks. The last thing she needs is encouragement.