A/N: Not a fan of the title, really, but I was sitting for like ten minutes, staring at my computer and trying to think of something and this was the best of what I came up with. I don't know why I insist on one word titles. I just like them. So, this will have more parts, I think. It's sort of a conglomeration of a bunch of stories I had been trying to work out until I realized that they would work nicely together. I can't lie, I love angsty Rory/Jess. So. Review and make me smile.

She is falling asleep to the warmth of this bed and the warmth of his voice, traveling miles and miles to her ear. To the sound of her mother in the kitchen, tiptoeing around for a midnight snack, thinking she is already asleep. She is falling asleep to the way things have reversed and she is suddenly seventeen again. Not twenty-one. But, it's not the same. He's not the same. He's whispering over the phone and she isn't sure why. He's telling her about writing his book. The months that blurred together, filled with snapping pencils and cold, dank city days. He's telling her about the loneliness of New York. That's why he had to leave. And she turns this thought over in her head, He was lonely.

He says her name and her eyes snap open once more. He says, "Rory, are you asleep?" She doesn't say a word. She wants to hear him confess something to what he thinks is her sleeping ear. "Rory?" And he decides she is asleep and he sighs into the phone, "I miss you. All of you. Not just…Goodnight, Rory."

She smiles, feeling the plastic of the phone against her cheek. "Goodnight, Dodger." And she carefully hangs up the phone.

This is not the first phone call.

She called him after her reunion with her mother. She slipped into her old bedroom with the cordless phone, like she had so many times before when she called him. She sat on the bed with her legs folded under her and dialed the number he had given her.

"Hello?" His voice sounded tired and she realized it was late. Two o'clock.

"Sorry, I didn't realize what time it was. Were you asleep?"

"Only a little." He was smiling. "How are you?"

"Good…"

"You're calling from your mom's house."

"Yes, I am."

"And the world spins once again."

"Jess…Thank you."

Then there had been a pause before he responded, "Yeah, well…Just returning the favor."

She fell in love with him. Who he had become. This is what she had seen then, years ago when he was a different person. She saw this beneath his exterior. She had tried to tell them, everyone. She tried to tell him. No one would listen to her, though. But, here he was. She felt validated, justified, happy.

She fell in love with his strength, his life. He had lived, truly lived. She fell in love with all that he had been through. He had been across the country. He had traveled the way she wanted to: Without a destination, without arrival dates, without any formulated plan. He had been on his own for years. He had searched and found: himself, her, family. He had been wounded and he had recovered. He had lost and he had gained. He was everything, she thought, but not in the clichéd sense of the word. He was everything that life was. He had seen both ends of the spectrum and everything that was in between.

She fell in love. And it was simple. It was easy. No, it wasn't easy. The falling was easy, sure. It happened in the span of five, maybe ten minutes. From when he first approached her that night to when he left that night. Somewhere in that time, she was trying to decide if she had been in love with him before, maybe just on the edge of things. Yes, she decided. At seventeen she had been on that frightening precipice of love with him and he jumped while she stepped back. Because it was different from the first time, when she had willingly thrown herself from that cliff. The first time she wasn't aware of what it meant. The first time was safe and perhaps not as genuine. It was innocent and formative. And the second time she found herself on that edge, there was something more. It was fear, lust, the confusion of what was real and what was simply in his eyes. She wanted to listen to his hands. They told her to jump, that he would catch her, that the feel of his palm was enough. But, something kept her from doing it. Now, though. Now she was letting herself fall. Maybe it was in his shoulders. The way they stood now, the weight having been lifted from them. Maybe it was in his smile, genuine and full for one of the first times. The smile of a completed life, of fulfillment. Maybe it was in his entirety. The way he stood in front of her, the way he spoke, the way it was just like it had been before yet completely different. She missed him. She let herself admit that she had missed him since he left years ago.

That was the easy part. Letting him affect her like he had when she was younger. Letting him bring her back to a time when she was so completely happy that life seemed to stretch on in front of her for endless miles. Not like it was now, with a stifled sense of the future, her own stunted growth, her self inflicted sadness. She let him bring her back for a second, who she was, who she was going to be. She let his presence overtake her, succumbing to it. She let him tell her the truth.

Now, all she is left with are these phone calls. Because he isn't willing to give up his newfound life for her. Stubborn, just like she had been when he had asked her to do the same for him. And like him, she doesn't understand this. She remembers how she had begged him. How he had laughed and made a remark about switching bodies.

That particular phone call had been made just two weeks after the first. She was sitting in her parked car somewhere in New Haven, coming from a date with Logan. She leaned her head against the steering wheel and called him.

Her breathing was heavy and the first thing she told him was, "I love you." She dove head first. Easier, she told herself. She added, "I've been….These last few weeks I've…." Start and stop and start over again, "Come home."

She heard him breathe through his nose. "I can't."

"Yes, you can. Jess…" The car was suddenly freezing, her fingers turning numb as she brought her knuckles to her mouth. This was not how she had been imagining this. In her mind, there was a pause and then a soft, "Okay." from him. And then smiles heard over telephone lines.

He had a life now. A life he had made for himself. He needed to stay where he was. "It took me a long time to get where I am. I can't just drop it all right now."

"Yeah. I understand." She was somewhere else now, in her head. She was nineteen again. Standing in the darkness of a doorway, watching a shadow spill out his insides on a hardwood floor. Watching the stiffness of his face as it remained unchanged even as she felt the word shattering like a window. She was there, watching that shadow walk away, suddenly feeling everything he had been feeling. Feeling like both of her lungs had suddenly collapsed. She tried to hold her breath so he wouldn't hear the short, gasping sound of it.

Before she hung up the phone, she asked him, "Jess, God. How did you get through this?"

His voice was strained, "I don't know that I did, Rory."

And that was the hard part.

He calls her, though. At least three times a week. Always late at night. He calls her and talks to her, something he hadn't done then. He calls her and tells her anything she wants to hear. And this is how she sustains herself. This is how she makes it through. How she manages to ignore distance and history and the burning behind her eyes.

Sometimes there is silence on each end of the phone and she tries to focus her ears on the faint sound of life. His breathing, the soft sound of parting lips, the beginning of a word that is soon forgotten and put away again. It is then that she needs to feel him, that she says, "This is hard." And he always replies with more silence. "Jess, I don't know if I can do this….Talk to you and not be able to…."

His reply comes bitterly, "Are you still with him?"

"Yes." A syllable drenched in something that is part guilt and part panic.

"That's what I thought." And then a sigh, "Do you want me to stop calling you?"

"No." Another syllable soaked in her patented solution. An afterthought, "Maybe…"

She hears his breath catch in his throat. "Well, which is it?"

"Do you think you should stop calling?" The phone is shaking against her ear.

"I don't….I don't want to."

"Okay."

And this is the hardest part. (The wanting, the longing, the hope that is taunting her each time the phone rings, the love she hears in his voice when he is falling asleep against the receiver.)