.

.

Chapter 11

Halloween, 2011

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. - Kurt Vonnegut

.

.

Jess got the call from Luke early in the morning. The sun was shining weakly through the fall foliage into his kitchen while he waited on the pot of coffee to finish brewing. He was exhausted, resting his forehead against one of the kitchen cabinets, eyes closed.

"Hello," he answered the phone, his voice still gravelly from sleep.

"Hey Jess," Luke said, weary.

"Did it happen?"

Luke sighed heavily. "Yeah. An hour or so ago. Lorelai's a wreck."

Jess waited. The coffee pot sputtered, steaming up the frosty window.

"The funeral is going to be in a few days," Luke told him. "Lorelai said you should come, if you want to."

"Should I come?" Jess asked, curious.

Luke seemed tired. "It'd be nice for me to have you around. And I'm sure Rory would appreciate it."

"Okay," Jess said. "Hartford?"

"Hartford," Luke confirmed. "Monday afternoon."

Jess hung up the phone, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He glanced at the calendar tacked to the wall. Monday was the 31st of October. Halloween.

Jess took his coffee to his desk and sat heavily in his chair. Chilly, morning autumn air seeped through the cracks in the window pane, and Jess pulled his sweatshirt sleeves over his hands. He held his coffee and looked out at the damp fall foliage. The fog was burning away as the shallow sunlight filtered to the cobblestone streets, but it was a melancholy morning all the same. His pounding headache probably didn't help.

He pushed Slaughterhouse-Five off of his laptop and flipped it open, wincing at the brightness of the screen. Despite brushing his teeth twice and drinking coffee, his mouth still tasted like whiskey.

Fighting with an ongoing writer's block, Jess had fallen into familiar bad habits. He drank himself into a whiskey stupor most nights, staring at the blinking cursor on a blank word document, aggravated and fatigued. It wasn't just his book that was blocked - his nearly completed, close to perfect, almost there book - Jess himself felt like he was detached from the world, from time, from everything. It was like his brain had cut off all connection to his heart, rewired and detoured itself to avoid any sense of emotion. Jess couldn't see into himself, couldn't feel anything.

Vonnegut, in all his wisdom, hinted at the cause of the disconnect. How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Sometimes, late at night, many inches into a bottle of whiskey, Jess would lean back in his chair and close his eyes and avoid Vonnegut's pointed references to Jess' self-imposed anesthesia. Because somewhere in his subconscious, in the parts of his mind that murmured disobediently under the influence of alcohol, he knew that he was forcing himself into an impossible corner. He wanted desperately to pour the necessary emotion into his book to finish it, but he flat out refused to acknowledge feeling anything in his own heart.

So, his brain rewired itself while his heart beat silently, neglected and ignored and isolated, and his book remained stuck in limbo. And the whiskey was never enough.

Jess checked his watch. 8:00 am. He'd have to be downstairs to open the publishing house in half an hour, and then he'd need to tell Chris and Matthew that he'd be out of town again for a day or so.

He picked up his phone and opened his messages with Rory. They had been talking more regularly lately, a steady stream of book and music recommendations and teasing comments and something that tasted like flirting that made Jess hot and uncomfortable and itch for a cigarette. Everything with Rory made Jess feel like he was on edge. He enjoyed their conversations, and would usually find himself swept up in the moment, bantering and bickering, saying things that hinged on risqué, unable to prevent himself from matching her provocative wit and her lingering suggestions. But then he'd find his head, swear at himself, and pull everything back.

Nothing good was going to come out of fucking with his friendship with Rory. Jess was unwilling to think about old wounds and love lost, a stupid episode of his teenage years that sent him reeling into his twenties. Those locks were there for a reason.

Their most recent messages were a few days old. He hadn't heard from her in a while, not since she called him on her way to Hartford, panicked, driving to the hospital. The call only lasted a few minutes, and Jess could hardly get a word in through her Lorelai-esque barrage of worry and rambling, but he understood the basics. Richard was back in the hospital, and it was serious, and Rory was risking her job to try to get to Hartford in time.

The silence in the last few days had felt heavy and strained. Jess got updates every once in a while from Luke, but he had refrained from reaching out.

Now that it was all over, everything felt different. He tried to type a few different condolences, once, twice. But the words seemed inadequate and pathetic.

Sorry, he finally typed, and hit send.

He threw his phone on the desk, drained his coffee with a couple of aspirin, and stood to get ready for work. His headache throbbed, and he felt a pull of sadness for the man who had departed the world that morning.

.

.

.

Sometime during the service, in a high-ceilinged, capacious, echoing church in Hartford, Jess realized absently that he'd never attended a funeral. With all of the loss in his life, it felt odd to him that he'd never attended a formal service.

He sat next to Luke, in a pew a few rows back from Rory and her mom. The church was full of Hartford society dressed in their finest. Jess felt a bit off in a suit, but it was right to be wearing one for Richard's funeral. The service was stately and elegant, much like the man who was now gone.

Of the Gilmore women, Rory was the one to stand and speak. Jess watched, intently, as she stood before the crowd and began telling them about her grandfather. She was sweet and funny, weaving stories in that lighthearted and deeply observant way that Rory always had about her. And though he could tell that her hands were shaking, and a few tears slid down her cheeks, her voice was steady and she smiled as she honored the man who had always been her rock, the sole patriarch of a family of strong-minded women, the keeper of the peace and the voice of reason. Jess, though he tried to ignore it, was impressed, and felt something like pride or admiration or something much more tender tug at his disconnected and cauterized heartstrings.

She returned to her seat, and leaned her head against Lorelai's shoulder. Jess realized he was staring, and looked down at his clenched hands.

The reception was at the Gilmore house. Jess spent most of it in a corner, trying to stay out of the way. People were so crowded around the three women that Jess only saw Rory and Lorelai a few times, besieged as they were by well-meaning well wishers. He often found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Luke, who didn't want to speak to anyone but clearly felt like it was his sole duty to make sure Lorelai never ran out of coffee or snacks. As the evening grew later, Luke switched Lorelai's coffee for gin martinis.

Jess volunteered twice to go to the store, to get more ice, and stayed in his car for a while in the parking lot of the supermarket, head leaning back, eyes closed, swearing at himself that he would not buy a pack of cigarettes. Inside, the supermarket was full of harried looking parents trying to buy last minute Halloween candy, tugging along small, excitable kids in costumes. Jess clenched his fists as he paid, and managed to get back to his car without smokes. But when he got back to the Gilmore house he took the entire bottle of whiskey off the bar cart and slipped into the kitchen for a while, downing a couple shots, relishing the burn.

People aren't supposed to look back. Vonnegut had written. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

After a few minutes, Rory followed him in through the side door to the kitchen. Her slim black dress made her pale, delicate features and her vivid blue eyes seem more shocking than usual.

She grimaced at him. "Hiding?"

"Medicating," he held out the bottle to her. "Need some?"

Rory took it, without hesitation, and downed a gulp. She wrinkled her nose and shuddered. "Oh, god."

He took the bottle back, amused, and set it on the counter.

"Thanks for coming," she said, crossing her arms. "You didn't have to."

"Luke told me I should," he replied.

She just looked at him, her bright eyes sad and piercing. He felt hot, and self-conscious, but after a moment she glanced down at her hands. "It's nice to have you here."

Jess felt an odd twist, internally, a need to wrap his arms around her. The whiskey told him to fuck it, but he stayed with his back against the counter, tense.

"Are you doing okay?" He asked.

Rory looked back up at him, shrugging. "Yeah I'm okay. Trying to be there for Mom and Grandma."

He knew what that meant. "Have you been doing most of the work, putting all this together?"

She gave him a sad smile. "Someone had to."

Before he could respond, before he could offer to help, to do anything, a voice from the other room called for Rory. She raised her eyebrows at him. "Save me some whiskey for later?"

Jess smiled weakly at her and nodded. She disappeared, back into the reception, and he groaned. He downed another shot of whiskey.

He wasn't surprised that Rory was handling most everything. Every time he had seen Lorelai in a crisis, she was scattered, chatty, quick to make snap decisions and equally quick to change her mind. She meant well, and cared too deeply, and couldn't, or didn't, have the capacity to deal with things like flowers or mourners or hymns or caterers. Rory was always too old for her age, too responsible, too used to taking care of her little family of two.

But he knew that Rory was good at putting on a show, good at holding all the pieces together while people were watching and her mother needed her. It didn't mean Rory wasn't also a mess - it just meant Rory put her family first and buried her own grief deep.

Jess toyed with his shot glass, feeling the whiskey in his bloodstream. Then he placed it in the sink and slipped back into the reception, to find Luke. He probably couldn't do much for Rory while she was kept busy by finding napkins and shaking hands and taking care of her mother and grandmother, but he could be there with whiskey and sympathy later, when the night got dark and empty and quiet.

.

.

.

By the end of the night he could tell that Rory was beginning to falter, that her carefully composed exterior was starting to break from grief and exhaustion. Like her mother, she switched to gin martinis, and by the time the last people left he could tell that she was feeling the effects in the careful, deliberate way that she closed the front door and stayed balanced in her high heels. Her hair, which was up in a sleek knot for most of the day, was beginning to fall down, dark tendrils brushing her bare shoulders.

Luke clapped Jess on the shoulder. "Thanks for being here and helping out."

"No problem," Jess said. "How's Lorelai?"

Luke glanced over Jess' shoulder, to the living room, where Lorelai presumably was. "I think she's okay. Needs to go to bed soon."

Jess nodded. "Probably a good idea. It's been a long week."

"It's been a long year," Luke sighed. "You heading back to Philly tonight?"

"Haven't decided yet," Jess said. "Gonna check in with Rory, see if she needs anything."

Luke gave him a short, appraising look, but didn't say whatever Jess was sure he was thinking. Instead he patted Jess on the shoulder once more, and walked off towards the living room.

Jess found Rory clearing up plates in the kitchen, her eyes distracted, eyebrows furrowed slightly with sadness.

"Hey," he leaned against the doorframe. "You busy?"

She made a sort of helpless expression, gesturing around at the messy kitchen. "Grandma fired the maid right before she went to bed."

"Right," Jess glanced around at the dishes, careless. "But are you busy?"

Rory looked confused, but she shook her head no. She wiped her hands on a dish towel.

"Want to get out of here?" He offered.

She seemed hesitant. Jess rolled his eyes. "Rory, your grandmother went to bed ages ago with a massive dose of sleeping medication and a bottle of gin, and Luke's taking care of your mom. Do you want to get out of here? I can offer whiskey and sympathy."

She broke a tentative half smile, and nodded. "Whiskey at least, you're terrible at sympathy."

"Not today," he assured her, and guided her out of the kitchen.

He drove to downtown Hartford, looking for any sort of college bar or Irish pub that wouldn't put them in danger of bodily harm. Rory sat in the passenger seat, her arms crossed, her eyes unfocused. Usually his car smelled like stale cigarette smoke, from years ago, but she made the small space smell like rosewater and coffee.

Eventually, he parallel parked in front of a bar near Trinity. It didn't look like much, but it looked functional enough.

Before they got out of the car he shrugged off his suit jacket and tie, tossing both in the backseat. Rory gave him a quizzical look. "Are we too fancy for a bar right now?"

She was in a dress and heels, and he was still wearing suit pants and a collared shirt, but he shook his head no. "We'll just make everyone else look bad," he promised.

When they walked in the pub, Jess remembered - for what felt like the tenth time - that it was Halloween. There were cobwebs strung up around the bar, and dangling cardboard spiders and ghosts. The bar was full of groups of laughing people, most of them in costume. It felt like a night of lighthearted revelry, of manufactured spookiness and obligatory partying. "Monster Mash" played from an old jukebox in the far corner.

Rory raised an eyebrow at the Halloween partying. "Oh. Right."

"Sorry," he frowned.

"No it's fine," she reached for his shirt sleeve and tugged him towards the bar, "looks like the place has whiskey, it works."

Amused, he glanced at her hand on his sleeve and let her lead him towards the bar. Jess ordered them two short glasses with double shots of a dark, amber liquid, gave the bartender his credit card to start a tab, and then joined Rory against a wall in the back corner of the bar, removed from the uproarious crowds around the pool tables and dart boards. He stepped over the lost and discarded pieces of costumes on the floor, and rolled his eyes. Jess was always game to spend a night drinking too much in a bar, but he never acted like a public idiot. He tended to just get moodier, more internalized, more likely to make eyes at some woman and let her diffuse his simmering tension. The frat atmosphere of Halloween in a college bar made him feel old and irritated.

They found a space below a glowing neon beer sign, with a small ledge at shoulder height to set their drinks on. Jess rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. The blue neon made Rory's skin and his white dress shirt luminescent in the dark of the bar.

"Thanks for getting me out of the house," she said, honestly.

"That's what friends are for," he handed her a glass, and then raised his. "To Richard."

"To Grandpa," she echoed, softly, and clinked her glass against his.

They took a drink. In the harsh light of the neon, Rory looked exhausted. She had dark circles under her eyes, and looked more pale and drawn than usual.

"How's the book this week?" she asked.

Jess felt like his book didn't matter in the slightest, after she had buried her grandfather that morning, but he let her maintain the semblance of a normal day, a normal conversation. "Still terrible," he said. "I can't get it right. It's a miserable wreck."

"It's not a miserable wreck," she disagreed, swishing her whiskey in the glass. "It's beautiful. You just can't bring yourself to finish it."

There was some truth to her words. The fault lay with Jess, and he knew it.

"You know, once upon a time you wrote a book and couldn't end it," she said, lightly. "Sent it off to some girl to edit. Thanks for making me bleed, you told me."

He smiled. "You've been editing it this whole time. There's a difference."

"Send me the whole thing," she suggested. "I've gotten it piece by piece, but I haven't read it in its entirety. I haven't seen the beginning chapters in a year. I'd love to try to visualize the whole arc, the whole story."

She made sense. But Jess felt uncomfortable at the thought of it. He knew it wasn't Rory's editorship that he needed it - this fight was not with a plot, with unruly characters, with uneven arcs or shoddy craftsmanship. This was an internal fight that Jess, at this point, seemed determined to lose. It wasn't a writing problem. It was an emotion problem.

"You're holding yourself back," she observed. He started when he realized that her blue eyes were on him again, too close in the loudness of the bar, too vivid in the bright of the neon sign. She sipped her whiskey.

"Maybe," he acknowledged.

"I don't understand why," Rory continued, gaze still fixed on him. "What are you trying to avoid?"

He felt his heart beating from its solitary confinement, and, like a familiar habit, gave an unaffected shrug. "No idea."

Jess didn't want to talk about this. It was too hard, with Rory a foot away from him. He didn't have the mental capacity to do all of this with her eyes on him, to keep himself locked up, to look casual and careless, to stop his mind from running rampant, to keep his heart rate low and his expression nonchalant. It was too much work.

Fatigued, he sipped his whiskey and changed the topic. "How's the new job?"

Rory gave him a sideways look, fully aware that he was rerouting the conversation on purpose, but let him get away with it. "It's been great. Hopefully I still have a job, after this week, but I've really been enjoying it. I have a few different authors I'm working with right now."

"What kind of authors?" He asked. He didn't have to feign too much interest. He was interested in her life, and felt that odd twinge of pride again. It felt good to hear about Rory's success, and it reminded him of high school, of a young, sweet, gangly Rory, who talked about Harvard and journalism with the confidence of a girl who usually had all the right answers.

"Fiction mostly, a few novellas," she replied. "One poetry anthology - tell Matthew mine actually will be a bestseller."

Jess smiled despite himself. "Tell him yourself. It'd be a good check on his ego."

Rory smiled. But her eyes were still sad. "I will."

He let the quiet stretch a moment, and took a sip of his whiskey. Rory leaned against the wall and looked out over the crowd, watching the revelry and the costumes but not really seeing them. She held her glass in her hand like an afterthought.

"How are you?" Jess asked, after a long pause. "Are you okay after this week?"

She sipped her whiskey. "I'm not sure."

The pauses in their conversation were punctured by bursts of laughter from other tables. As the night grew later, it was as if people couldn't help but shout their conversations. The din swelled around them, infectious, exhausting. Jess waited patiently.

"It's just so hard to believe he's really gone," Rory finally said, biting her lip. "It doesn't feel real. It feels like tomorrow morning I'll wake up and come downstairs and find him reading the newspaper. And he'll raise his eyebrows at me and ask what on earth happened last night to cause such a mess in the kitchen."

Jess nodded, understanding. He kept his eyes fixed on her small hand, dangling the whiskey glass.

"I'm not sure what this will do to Grandma," she continued, as if thinking out loud. "I can't imagine her in that big house by herself."

"It's a lot to manage," Jess agreed.

"It'll be so lonely," she furrowed her eyebrows, concern creeping into the lines of her face. "She won't come to Stars Hollow - it would kill Mom - but I don't know what she'll do."

Jess continued to be quiet, patient. Something about the noise of the bar, and probably the whiskey, made their closeness and the aura of melancholy feel intimate and isolated. He could tell there were groups pressing around them, but as they leaned against the bar, heads close together, nursing their whiskey, it seemed as though they existed in a bubble of quiet inside the rowdy space.

She looked down at the floor. "The last days were terrible, Jess."

"How so?"

Her shoulders moved in something between a shudder and a shrug. "He was so sick. Sometimes it would be like he was there - he'd say things to us, have moments of coherency, smile and laugh over some memory or other, give us some serious bit of advice. And sometimes it was like he was living in a different time, talking to his parents, or to his childhood friends. And most of the time he was asleep, his breath all weak and labored."

She painted a vivid picture, and Jess reacted to it with whiskey.

"I'm so sorry, Rory," he said, his voice low. He really meant it.

She took a drink too. Both of them were nearing empty. And then she glanced up at him with her eyes bright. "I know."

He dropped his gaze, but he felt hot. Jess couldn't look at her, not this close. He didn't want to see the brightness of her eyes, the tears that threatened but did not come.

Smooth as ever, he plucked her glass out of her hand. "More alcohol," he said, like it was the doctor's orders, and headed into the throng by the bar.

There was something deeply wrong with him, Jess decided, as he shouldered his way through the bodies and reached the edge of the bar. He shook his head, experimentally, but it didn't help. His heart was beating quickly, and he felt uncomfortably hot in his dress shirt and slacks. He couldn't handle that kind of closeness with Rory, the shocking blue of her eyes when she looked up at him through her eyelashes. Even when she was devastated, swallowed by grief - when he should be a good friend and perfect gentleman - he felt himself anxiously burying his heart deeper into solitary confinement to prevent the internal racket. He could take the heat, the discomfort, the pain, but he didn't want an interior monologue explaining the reasoning behind his symptoms.

The bartender returned with their second round, and Jess gripped both glasses firmly. She needed a friend, and he needed to get his shit together.

"Here you go," he returned and handed Rory a glass, "answer to all life's problems."

She gave a faint half-smile in appreciation, and took a drink. "Think it'll actually solve life's problems? Or just make more?"

Jess knew whiskey was just causing more problems for him, but he ignored himself. "Whiskey solves everything, haven't you read Hemingway?"

"I might get very drunk tonight," she warned him, but she didn't sound serious.

"I'm planning on it," he said.

Rory clinked her glass against his, and drained half of it. Jess raised his eyebrows. Maybe she did mean it.

The night felt like a broken hourglass, time speeding up and slowing down at odd increments. Rory talked about everything, about her grandfather, about her Mom, about her job, about - Jess rolled his eyes - her latest dull ex boyfriend. She spun little narratives for him, a collection of observations and details and worries. When she mentioned Richard, or her mother and grandmother, she seemed to become quieter, swaying slightly in her heels, eyebrows pinched by sadness. But she alighted into grief for only short periods, meandering through less painful subjects and then dipping back into mourning.

Jess fully intended to switch to water after their second round, conscious of his car keys in his pocket and his responsibility for the woman next to him. But Rory would have none of it. She forced him to keep pace with her, promising to pay for a cab and let him sleep at her grandparents' house, swearing that it was essential that he did this with her. "Whiskey and sympathy only works both ways," she told him, like it was a well-known fact. "It doesn't work if you're taking care of me."

"Somebody has to," he said, amused.

"We'll take care of each other," she insisted. And pushed her glass towards him for a refill.

The night grew later and sloppier. And, as Jess expected, Rory began to let her guard down and slip into her grief. She clung to the edge - she gave him snarky one-liners, she made a few inappropriate jokes and pop culture references - but after their third (or fourth?) round, she began to drop her façade of responsibility. She rested her head back against the wall and looked up at him, devastated in that beautiful, delicate way that only Rory Gilmore could pull off.

He leaned one hand against the wall and looked out into the crowd. A few musketeers playing darts were laughing so hard that they had collapsed onto the floor, and a bachelorette party of Disney princesses were circled in a huddle of outrage after a Power Ranger had spilled a drink on one of them. He heard Rory sigh, only half a foot away from him.

"I can't do this, Jess," she said, tired.

"Do what?" he asked, barely glancing at her. He'd had too much whiskey. He couldn't look at her.

She seemed to hesitate, and then swallowed her response. With great effort, she lifted herself up from leaning against the wall and handed him her empty glass. "Let's do this properly."

Jess forced a slight smile, and did her bidding by going to the bar and collecting the next refill. This night was going to kill him.

The whiskey wore down Rory's self-defensive humor, her weightless, self-deprecating one-liners and references, giving way to a woman who closed her eyes against the loss and grief of her last week, her last year. She tried to explain it to Jess, shaping words to describe the mix of emotions that were festering inside her - grief, relief, sadness, nostalgia, guilt. And he nodded and listened and stayed close, head bowed towards hers in the corner of the bar, providing what sympathy and what support he could.

Her sadness, loosened free by the alcohol and the ending of her day responsibilities, began to suffocate her. She looked up at him, hopeless, a tear or two threatening to escape from the corners of her eyes. "I just can't believe he's gone," she whispered.

"Grief never makes any sense," Jess said, his voice soft.

"Yeah," she said, like an echo.

Jess continued talking to her, murmuring, his voice low beneath the din of the bar. He wasn't saying anything useful, but he could tell she needed the distraction - the sympathy. And she seemed to be fighting with herself, fighting against waves of grief or guilt or god knows what.

Rory turned sideways to face him. Doing so moved her closer to him, only six inches away or so, and he felt that familiar lurch in his stomach at the suddenness of seeing her bright blue eyes. Unfocused and distracted and overwhelmed as she was, she looked directly at him, torn by something different and deeper.

"I've been a mess lately," she told him, faintly.

"We're all messes sometimes," he shrugged. "Some of us more often than others."

She nodded in distracted agreement. "I'm not sure how to compartmentalize."

Of course she was thinking about compartmentalizing. Rory clung to rationality and reason, seeking organization and clarity even as she was rocked by loss. Jess smiled ruefully, "You can try, but you might have more success in the morning. Grief gets ugly at night."

"Grief gets ugly at night," she echoed, slowly.

"I mean that everything bad gets worse at night," Jess elaborated. "it all seems to get more hopeless. And then morning comes, and things get better."

Rory nodded, unfocused. "I can see that."

He could see her processing, see the waves that she was fighting as she swayed in place. If she wasn't leaning against the wall, he wasn't sure how long she'd be able to remain standing for. She seemed precariously close to dropping her glass simply by forgetting she was holding it.

A tear slipped down her cheek. Rory closed her eyes again, squeezing them shut, and another tear or two escaped. She bit her lip.

Jess sighed, and reached for her glass. She let go of it easily. He put both of their glasses on the ledge next to them and then reached for Rory's upper arm, rubbing his thumb in gentle, circular motions on her sleeve.

She leaned forward, one hand pulling on the fabric of his shirt near his hip, and he wrapped his arms around her. Her head buried in the crook of his neck, and he tightened his hold. Rory was quiet, not shaking or sobbing, but just holding on to him. Time felt like a heartbeat. And Jess closed his eyes, briefly, because it was all a bit too much and the whiskey was ruining him.

After a few minutes - or hours, Jess had no concept of time anymore - Rory pushed back, her face only a few inches from his. He felt himself reel, slightly, at being so close to her. He could see teardrops clinging to her eyelashes, her eyes searching him, troubled, distracted, indecisive.

Jess was too caught up in her gaze, too desperate to pull himself together, that he didn't realize what she was about to do until she raised on her toes and pressed her lips softly against his.

He spun - for a brief second, he lost his usual firm grasp on control and caution and reality. All of his alarm bells went off. That locked up teenage part of his heart beat ominously. And though he stood still, frozen, it felt like the floor dropped out from underneath him.

Rory was gentle. She pulled herself closer, both of her hands clutching the fabric of his shirt near his hips. Feather-light, she kissed his bottom lip, the corner of his mouth, his jaw line, his neck. When she returned her head to the crook of his neck, quiet, he could feel her wet eyelashes brushing against his skin.

He wrapped his arms around her more tightly, his thoughts racing. The noise of the bar swelled and pulsed around them. He felt like if he made one wrong step, that locked up part of his heart would break up and wreak havoc. Already it was straining, pressing, furious with him.

Jess wasn't an idiot. He might be overwhelmed by the clanging din of sirens and alarm bells that were going off internally, but he could see past the fight-or-flight racket to the woman in front of him who was searching for any kind of comfort. Although he had refused to think about it, he knew that she had been focused on him lately, knew that she was further than he was, knew that she had been pressing the boundaries of their friendship intentionally and recklessly in the last months. If he really stepped back and drew on the years of experience he had observing people and writing their emotional catastrophes, nothing Rory was doing was out of the ordinary. She was grasping for a lifeline to something real, reaching blindly in the dark for something to push away the grief, or maybe absorb the grief, and keep her feet on the ground. And - despite his rigid denial and whiskey anesthetics - she had been feeling for the cracks in their platonic foundation for months.

But, in this moment, Jess knew what she needed. He felt like he was outside of his body, watching the pair of them against the dark wall in the bar, watching Rory unravel and try to save herself by tangling him up in her loose threads. He saw his own role in this, and he sighed. Nothing about this was going to make his battle against himself any easier.

Gently, he drew his hands back and grasped her shoulders, moving her slightly, pulling her away from his body, creating those few, overwrought inches of space that had nearly cracked him before. She looked up at him, distraught and distant. He let his eyes meet hers, unwavering, even as he burned.

Jess moved his hands up to cradle her face, swiping away one tear with the pad of his thumb. Then he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers, seizing her grief with his kiss, giving her what she needed and ignoring the long term damage it was undoubtedly going to cause him.

And so it goes.

.

.

.

Dear readers, thank you for the reviews! They make my day better, they inspire me to pull up the word document and continue writing. The feedback has been so lovely.

This chapter marks a sharp shift in tone, mood, and plot development. The switch felt sudden, but I imagine tragic events often snarl timelines and expectations. Also, as the premise of this story indicates, every chapter marks a jump a few months or so into the future. I often have to account for how much lives change over the course of so much time. So even though it felt like a leap to take this story into the gloom of tragedy and Halloween, after the lighthearted, dialogue-heavy, midsummer night's dream energy of the previous chapter, it also felt like the right and natural thing to do. This was challenging to write, but I hope you all enjoyed it.

More to come soon . . .