A/N: I'm not being prolific, according to my page numbering system this is the first thing I wrote back when. Thought it would be a longer story, but I like it as a oneshot.

"Hey Ace."

Rory's pen faltered for a moment before rushing on to finish the note on the short speech Senator Obama had made before he and his wife headed in to the night's fundraiser dinner. The last eight months had made the task automatic, which was a very good thing as her brain had donked out on her. The pen stalling was the only clue she'd finished, but she wasn't sure what to do next, except probably it should be something because unless all the time on the road had led to hallucinations, she was going to look very silly. Or very rude. It wasn't clear which would be preferable.

"Logan. Hi." He looked good, he looked the same, a little more West Coasty and Lorelai would say something funny about surfing the web because that's how completely surprised Rory was: her emotional response was to summon her mother into her head to banter it out.

He'd started out serious, remote even though they were only a few feet apart. But during her silence his face had warmed, not much, but enough for her to stutter out "what- what are you doing here?"

Hands in his pockets, his hips swayed towards the door and she acquired a few more butterflies. "I paid for a dinner, figured I should show up to eat it, food waste being such a massive issue in this day and age."

"We got the rundown on the menu earlier," she didn't know why she was suddenly flipping back through her notes, then actually reading off the details. She got to the salad before she could stop herself. "-I guess you'll find out, I'll let the entree be a surprise. Well- enjoy!"

In utter mortification, she kept her eyes on the ground and plotted the best and fastest route around him. Until this moment, she swore she'd been feeling all adult.

"Why don't you come in with me?" How could he be so calm? "Finn begged me to come to this thing with him, but then he found out how young their daughters are and ditched me for a strip club."

The thing was, it was still too soon for her to be completely over him. They'd been really together and it was such a big thing that had happened, but the waves were so much smaller and so much more infrequent and she'd been completely fine with not seeing him or hearing from him ever again.

"Thanks, but you know we're really not- reporters aren't allowed in."

"I meant as my guest. You file, you're off the clock and even the free press is allowed to eat, aren't you?" He was using his teasing voice, and it was making her butterflies nervous.

"And there begins the slow decline in journalistic ethics. I have to go, we're camping out at a bar down the street." She started to follow her colleagues when he stopped her with a brief touch on her arm.

"I don't recall any ethical rules that would stop me from joining you there? Promise I won't steal a scoop." He paused for a beat. "Anyway, those appetizers sound too much like what I had for lunch."

Logan was baiting her, and if he kept doing that she might explode. No call, no note, nothing after he said goodbye and walked off at her graduation. The only way it would be okay for him to be acting like they were okay was if he'd- he'd walked all the way to California with no cell service and then forgotten what year it was.

"Rory, come on. I just want to talk to you."

A couple of her friend were hovering nearby, clearly waiting. "I'm working right now."

"You're mad at me. I get that."

He couldn't possibly get it. "I'm not mad Logan." The entire time she could feel him searching her face and now she looked him in the eye, a little satisfied and a little sad when he flinched. The first few months, she'd sometimes hear her phone buzz and find herself breathlessly expecting it to be him. The past few months, she hadn't.

"Then what's the big deal? Two people meeting in a weird place catching up, for old time's sake."

"I'm happy without you." Well, that just came out.

His pause was just long enough. "I'm glad to hear that. I always knew you'd be great." The ambiguous phrasing was not amusing.

Rory was, suddenly, tired. The stragglers had departed, to the bar or the bus, and she was left there, standing with an ex who'd disappeared on her, feeling nostalgic for when she was younger and awkwardly running away was an option. This not currently a path in line with her sense of self, she blinked, waiting him out.

Finally his eyes closed and he let out a shuddering breath. "You're not going to make this easy, are you?"

"I don't know what this is," she pointed out.

"And I wish I had a good answer for you." Shoulders held in a shrug, he was looking tired too. "But I don't. I missed you, I wanted to see you, when the opportunity came up I took it. Clearly it's not going well."

She'd been fighting it off, but curiosity, as she knew it would, won the day. She was a reporter, after all. Flipping her pad to a clean page, Rory poised her pen. "What, Mr. Huntzburger, would constitute a satisfactory outcome for you?"

What could she say? She had always enjoyed bantering with him. And he was still hard to resist, especially when she had the upper hand.

"You're making me go on the record? Now I really regret not preparing remarks."

"I'll have to write my memoirs one day, it's basically a requirement, and I like being prepared."

"I know you do." He swung a little closer, distracting her with a smile, and pinched the tools of her trade off her.

"Hey," she made a grab. "I have wifi passwords in there."

"Can't leave state secrets like 'wifi passwords' just lying around like that. No telling what someone might do with those." He wrote something, closed it up, and handed it back.

"You can joke, but since the death of the payphone, internet access is worth more than gold."

He gave her another small smile, this one reaching his eyes. With that, banter over. "I guess I wanted to apologize. I put you on the spot at your party, and I shouldn't have done that. I was being selfish. And I should have said that a long time ago. It hurt, I-" his mouth tightened, blinking eyes darting everywhere that wasn't her. "I was in a lot of pain and didn't know what to do so I packed it all away and couldn't let myself look back. You deserved better."

As apologies went, it wasn't a bad one. Logan had always been good with apologies. She wanted to touch him, but it had been too long and the last break up too final to slip back into a semblance of what they'd had. This was eulogy with a closed casket, not a deathbed.

"I understand. I'm still so sorry too. I kept thinking: what if I'd been more prepared? Or at least waited on job offers so I'd know what my options were. Or at least-" she smiled sadly, "checked in. I wanted you to be okay, I hoped you were."

"No apology needed Rory. I know if you could have, you would have." His hand lifted, stopping halfway to hers before changing his mind. And then he turned and walked away.

There was a lot to process, and of the many things that had changed in her life, there were many things which hadn't.

"He didn't even go inside to shake hands with our next president?" Lorelai gasped through the phone.

"Nope. Senator Obama will never know how close he came to being able to say he shook hands with a Huntzburger."

"That'll teach him to serve substandard food to the rich and flighty-" The mood shifted as her mom realized what she'd said.

"No, it's okay. It was okay. It was a talk we'd needed to have, I think. It was good."

"You're really fine? Him showing up after all this time and springing it on you like that?"

"I'm a little sad. It made me remember how it felt. We could have been happy, but it wasn't the right time. I like- I love where I am, what I'm doing. And I couldn't have any of this if we'd gotten married."

"You really do sound okay."

"I am. I will be. I'm still going to eat all the junk in the vending machine, but it was cathartic. I don't have to regret not talking to him, after he left."

They sat in comfortable silence, until a thought popped into her mom's head.

"Hey, so what did he write in your notebook? Was it Barak's private phone number? Because you know he probably has it."

"Oh, no, I forgot about that. Give me a sec." It took a couple tries to find the relevant page; it was still a fresh book and the pages were stiff, spirals still spiraled. Then there it was, his familiar handwriting: It still hurts as much as it ever did.

Empty junkfood wrappers make noisy and slightly icky bedfellows. The notepad, open to his page, lay near what used to be a yummy pack of Oreos. Thing was, while perfectly capable of over-analyzing and driving herself into a oscillatic frenzy between euphoria and agony, she knew Logan too well to wonder on one point. Over the course of their relationship he'd become vastly better at opening up to her, but the tendency to let the really hard truths skim along under the surface like a shark, only occasionally raising a dorsal fin, remained.

And now she was incredibly sad. Dealing with her own feelings had taken all her energy. It wasn't that she'd never thought of his after he walked away. But it wasn't her right, and would do nothing. Now, she was confronting all of it, the neat timeline of productive recovery she'd created was a narrative toppled as fiction. A man guilty of ever minimizing his feelings, especially the bad: if he said it, he felt it.

Rather than a swooning heroine in a romance novel, Rory felt sick. A man she'd loved so greatly was trapped, and there was no solution. It would be lovely if she could run outside into his waiting arms and take back the last months with a frantic kiss and the promise to never let go. But the past cannot be recaptured, she'd learned that, and even if she could solve all his problems, it wouldn't solve her own.

The ink was long dry but her fingers felt stained when she ran them over the words. Caressing the shallow indents to feel the echo of deep cutting wounds exposed.

Her mother had respected her need to reflect on her own, promising to be up late with her phone by her side. Ever since the carriage ride their relationship had shifted. Not in a bad way. They were almost – but not quite – the same. Except now her mother had anointed her as an adult, nearly fine with her leading her own life. Maybe this was how other Mother-Daughter relationships worked. Maybe they had always been too co-dependent, and maybe this was them both growing up.

At any rate, as they were finding their new footing, she knew what Lorelai would say, and it would be cautiously supportive. Rory was too confused for support.

Lane was busy with her new family, but would still always pick up the phone. That conversation, too, Rory could almost hear. Echoes of squeals at the reveal, wait is this good, bad, how do we feel about this, tempered by emotional maturity and her new place as the more romantically experienced of the pair. But Rory didn't need to share. Not yet.

Paris. When her butt needed kicking, the world bludgeoned into logical harsh relief, it was always Paris. Well aside from Paris' refusal to be shaken loose, Rory was glad they'd remained tethered. It was, after all, Paris who had cut out the need for hours more worth of pro-conning with that one question: The New York Times, or Logan.

They were so alike, the two of them, even as they were so different.

"Can you believe Messenger is flying by Mercury right now and my anatomy professor can't locate his own office hours?"

"Hello Paris, it's good to hear you too."

"Whatever. You must have his ear by now, ask the Senator what he plans on doing about stem cell research. Do not accept the same old wishy-washy answer about how-"

"I saw Logan."

Paris' ability to turn on a dime had not been blunted by love.

"What did he want? Did you sleep with him? Is he in your shower?"

"No."

"Good. Your mind isn't addled by oxytocin. Give me the rundown."

Rory gave her the short version. She could swear she heard Paris taking notes.

"Mmhmm. He didn't ask to meet up, no idea where he's staying?"

"I think he was catching a flight? He's gone."

"Oh, trust me, he's still there. And easy to find."

"You think I should?"

Paris paused. "If you want sex tonight."

"You know I don't want to just hook up with him."

"Well, has anything changed?"

"Now I know.."

"That he's pining? Of course he's pining. You're the only non-bimbo who'd give him a second look, never mind a second chance. Look, there are three possibilities here. One: marriage is still on the table. I'm assuming the taste of the road hasn't sent you screaming towards gilded confinement planning baby showers and society shindigs?"

"Definitely not." The thought actually made her shudder.

"Two: you have a shot at a casual thing, take advantage of his long goodbye and tear his heart to shreds again once you get it out of your system."

"Let's move on to number three."

"Three: he's come to his senses and is willing to try the long distance relationship."

"It would be hard. We knew that. Probably harder, now. But if he wants..."

"One and Two are strikes against. The odds are grim. Would you like my unvarnished observation?"

"As only you can give it." Paris was still the only person Rory had ever met who would take feelings off to a lab bench and poke them with a scalpel. She pitied any patient unfortunate enough to cross paths with Paris when she was on her psych rotation.

"You want to get back together. And if you see him again, your Facebook relationship status will go from crickets to The Planets faster than Usain Bolt brings in his newspaper. But you don't want anything else to change. Not being an idiot, you know that's a tautological impossibility, so you need to decide exactly how much compromise you're willing to make."

"But I never wanted to break up. And look at Luke and my mother. Things kept happening and they kept thinking they'd gotten over one another, but they're more in love than ever."

"Yes, Lorelai. Posterchild for passionate disfunctional drama. Why did you call me?"

"Because we're friends, and I need to process."

"Why not your mother? Or Lane? Or Madeline and Louise? I was there for those three years. Every time he did something stupid you crushed like an empty soda can, and every time he came crawling back you acted like you'd gotten a pony for your birthday. I don't hear whinnying in the background."

It was true that at some point, she seemed to have outgrown the whiplash need to be coupled. Upon reflection, it all came back to graduation. To choosing the wide world over the safety of the known, putting herself and her career first, because she knew she couldn't have it all. "I'm confused so I shouldn't talk to him? Just ignore the whole thing?"

"Oh, I think you should see him. He's at the Marriott on 3rd Street, room 213."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"Their concierge has a chat function."

"If you think it's a bad idea..."

"Listen, I know you, you're going to go. Just remember you have the upper hand, and go in with a game plan. Don't lead him on, be clear about what you want. If he thinks this is you going all in, well, getting stomped on the first time was his own fault, this time it would be on you. Even a Huntzburger doesn't deserve that."

She was wrong, love had mellowed Paris.

Fifteen minutes later and a sheet of paper was marked with incredibly straight lines, "Pro" and "Con" printed in her neatest handwriting. Stretching out the process had excused five of those minutes, the last ten were becoming an embarrassment as the page remained otherwise pristine.

The problem, she came to realize, was that she couldn't decide what she was debating the pros and cons for. For going to see him? For potentially getting back together? For even considering a relationship while the pace of life for a reporter on the campaign trail was picking up beyond belief? Each of those birthed branches of choices, intertwined and doubling back, a snarled shoelace forcing the consideration of which bits of knot to pull at first, knowing any wrong choice – even a right choice – would have cascading effect.

The best way to tackle a shoelace was to gently tug at everything, loosening the mess until the heart of the problem was revealed. Or at least until ends could be tugged through loops, one at a time, a brute force solution.

Focus on one thing first. A mantra that had gotten her through Chilton, through Yale, through so many of her most challenging times. What did she feel? And that could work: it turned the ProCon list on its head, but it might work: what were her positive feelings, what were the negatives?

There was curiosity, a flattering sense that she still mattered, and she didn't want to let that go. There was irritation, that this was happening now, when her life had been going so smoothly. There was pain, old wounds reopening that had never quite healed over a glowing little seed housing feelings that had never died.

And there was fear. Fear that making the wrong choice would derail her career. Fear that making the wrong one would lose her a chance at the great love of her life. Fear that maybe she didn't have the choices she thought she did.

Finally, there was hope. That however this played out, everything would be okay.

She did check at reception that the room was correct. Not surprisingly the concierge answered in a stuttering, terrified affirmative. Paris did that to people.

It took a few moments for him to open the door, footsteps pausing halfway. Hoping it was her and afraid it was, she supposed.

"Rory." After a split second flash of relief – mixed with something else – he stepped back just far enough to give her access, without exactly inviting her in.

This not being a talk to have in a hallway, she slipped past, careful not to brush him. Shutting the door with a quiet click, he followed her into the room. His nervous energy brought back their final conversation, where he'd rambled breathlessly to fill the void, worthy of a Gilmore Girl.

This time he kept silent, jaw clenching and unclenching.

Paris had been right. Face to face, what she wanted was to wrap her arms around him, until he relaxed into her and smiled into her neck and pulled her so tightly she was lifted off the ground. Which might be inviting promises she wasn't sure she could keep.

"Logan," she began, wincing as his eyes latched onto hers. "I'm sorry you're having trouble moving on. I'm so sorry." Her game plan, hasty as it had necessarily been, was to play out the conversation she wished Dean had had with her. The one that might have prevented their devastating rehash of a relationship, and go from there. "If I couldn't help you, I would, you know I would." His mouth tightened, and her chest pinged. "But what has changed?"

The question was half-rhetorical, knowing he'd answer anyway.

To his credit, he took the time to think.

"I thought staying in limbo we'd drift apart anyway, and it wasn't worth the risk. Anything could happen."

When he didn't continue she prodded him, voice neutral.

"And?"

"And I found out that gambling 40 years is what makes living worthwhile, even though it also really, really sucks."

Her first instinct was to bring up "The Gift of the Magi." A story of mutual love and sacrifice canceling itself out in a manner that built up, rather than broke down. The Twilight Zone embraced tragedy and the bittersweet and it was so easy to romanticize those things that she had convinced herself the two stories were interchangeable. But while she would happily give up her hair for the one she loved, she couldn't, she didn't let the world slip her by for the dream of romance.

But her objection to his chosen theme would stray from the matter at hand. It was immaterial what her take on the female role was, when the bulk of the narrative, the story playing out, was Logan's.

"Even if we think we still want something-" she did, she'd figured that much out and didn't care if he knew now. "Going backwards doesn't work. It feels like it should be safe, but it's just trying to hide."

"From what?"

"From growing. From learning life doesn't always work out like we hoped, but that it also doesn't always work out like we expect."

"I never thought you would put your life on hold for me." Neither, she had to admit, had the astronaut. Maybe the ending of that particular story wasn't so important after all.

"Look at you. You based your whole life off the expectation you'd be absorbed into The Huntzburger Group when you graduated college. But here you are, out from under your father's thumb and creating your own path."

"I wouldn't be here without you."

"And I wouldn't be where I am without you. You taught me to take risks, and I'll always be grateful for that."

He was nodding too slightly, too quickly. "Why do I feel like you're rejecting me all over again?"

Childishly, she wanted to blame this on Paris.

"Logan." He'd been staring at a lamp, but his name brought his focus back, and with it the old pain in his eyes. "I never rejected you. We needed different things, we both made choices, the choices that were right for us at the time."

"Is there someone else?"

She hesitated, and she felt him slipping away as his face hardened. "It's not like that." This wasn't something she'd wanted to admit. "It's not like I'm completely over you either. I still wish I could go back and find a different way."

"We still can."

It didn't hurt as much as she thought it might, reopening her heart. "Paris was right."

"If it involves Paris this can't end well for me."

"She said if I came over, we'd get back together."

His eyebrows shot up. "I never thought Paris would be on my side."

"She's on mine. Though notably, she did advise me to not break your heart."

"For that, I'm willing to overlook the time she threatened to Krav Maga me."

They'd been inching closer, and her gaze drifted to his top button. "I think that's still on the table if you break mine."

"I don't think there's any chance of that. Where you lead, I will follow. Anywhere that you tell me to."

That gave her pause. "Did you just quote Carole King?"

"Maybe. Did it work?"

"Logan, maybe you didn't expect me to stop everything for you, but I never wanted you to give up your life for me."

"You know my company is doing well. That's actually why I'm out here, I had a meeting with a consultant. We're considering a satellite office."

She raised an eyebrow at the odd segue, but her breath gathered into a hard knot in her chest.

"I offered to head it up. No rush. A year, two years. But it means I'd be in charge of location scouting. And meanwhile, I can do most of my work on the road."

She liked where this was going. "Any place stand out?"

His grin was devilishly dashing. "You tell me."

"Well now that's a horse of a different colour." It wasn't a complete plan or answer or guarantee, but it was Option Three. She'd liked Option Three. "Are we really doing this?"

Logan's teeth shone in the lamplight. "You tell me."

"I think, right now, our clothing needs to relocate."

She did want sex tonight.

She'd call Lane in the morning.