a/n: If I owned a single bit of GG, this fic wouldn't be necessary ;)
Forever mourning Literati.

The sharp pitch of his hopeless pleading rang around the bare room, reverberating with a bitter clanging of desperately blind promises. None of it made any sense. It was as if the alphabet had been warped and twisted into meaningless combinations of sound, void of purpose. Her mind felt jammed with swirling cries for action, for decision, for affirmation.

But she couldn't give him any of those things. He had never given her any of them, had he? Too little, too late. She didn't love him, she couldn't.

But maybe she did.

And then throw Dean into the mix. Things had certainly turned around with him. It was comfortable again, it felt right. Being with him was like putting on her favorite old sweater, like reading a book for the hundredth time.

But book analogies seemed more fitting for the more recently dismissed of her two ex-boyfriends.

Running away…that would be the offer he sweeps in on. Running was his specialty. As if a clamoring appeal to escape like two fugitives would win her over. Rory pictured some remote life on the lamb with Jess, living off of odd jobs, stowing away in overflowing bookshops, roaming New York, settling on park benches late into the cooling night. They'd be marauders, vagabonds. Maybe she'd find a real use for that withering stare of hers.

Her lips curled up at the memory of her rash trip to a New York that belonged uniquely to Jess. It did have an alluring appeal that she hadn't quite allowed herself to entertain during his unbearably urgent pleas. The ghost of a life she had previously shelved seemed to float obtrusively around her white walled future. Here she sat in her gleaming new reality, a folded up year of academia. She was living her ivy-covered dream, a rich expanse of new textbooks among the stone walls of old money. Yet the ragged edges of something darker drew her in, something that smelled like leather and tobacco and a hint of indiscernible and unrestricted wildness.

She couldn't run away. Not like this, because she wanted both. She wanted to be a sophomore, to come back to what she had worked for her whole life. Her dream had not vanished into the inky night with Jess Mariano—she still wanted to be a journalist, to report from faraway lands, to see it all and put words to the melody of politics and war and culture.

But she could never envision that particular future with someone like Dean next to her. Even if things were bad with Lindsey…even if he got a divorce…there wasn't room for him in her daydreams of Dubai, of Istanbul, or Cairo. She squinted in an attempt to picture him walking along the cobblestone streets in some ancient wonder of the world, eating exotic foods, laughing his way through some horrible version of the native tongue. It didn't work. It never would. It wasn't even a whisper of a possibility.

That was Jess. The boy, or the man, who drifted coolly into town like the reincarnation of James Dean with a profound taste for literature and a perpetual smirk. He would fit in some hole-in-the-wall café and he could navigate the pressing crowds of a metro station. He knew what it meant to impulsively fade from the stream of normalcy into a place where you just begin again.

And for all of her hometown love and glory, that was the person Rory Gilmore wanted to be. To eagerly devour all that she could grasp, to search and find and search some more—she wanted to experience every last bit of it all. To wander.

Her feet carried her without her head fully on board. The dim corridor of her once lively building seemed to beckon her ahead. He was probably long gone. How much time had passed since she sent him on his way? Hours? Minutes?

Seconds?

She broke into a sprint. She was always running when it came to him, but the direction seemed to change more often than the seasons. Running toward him, running away, always running.

Her eyes searched the desolate lot. He was gone, he had to be. A strange recipe of relief and dread took root. She had no idea what she was even going to say to him. It was better this way.

"Rory?"

She spun on her heels, swaying with the branches of the trees in the spring air. There he was, his dark hair in his eyes, his lean frame propped carelessly against the aged brick. His demeanor had reshaped into casual nonchalance, which oddly consoled her. She knew this Jess, the Jess who wore his indifference like a suit of unbreakable armor. It was much more familiar than the heated panic that had blazed in her common room; that has been a Jess she hardly recognized.

"Hi." It popped out of her mouth in that embarrassingly off-guard manner that she always found herself trapped in when he was within hearing range. She offered no other explanation. Not that she had any prepared.

"You seemed to be in a hurry." His face was a mask, impenetrable. He gestured vaguely toward the pavement, giving his ambiguous permission for her to continue on her way.

A stubborn thread of past hurt kept her from revealing a single utterance of her true purpose. "That's funny, because you sure don't."

He shrugged. She hated him for it.

"Where is your car? Assuming you have one, that is?" She picked at a loose hangnail, tragically incapable of eye contact.

He ignored her thinly veiled dig. "I'm parked a couple of buildings away…I wasn't sure which one was yours."

"That doesn't explain why you are standing here." She had dropped any last vestige of anger in her voice. She had forgotten why it was even there in the first place.

He shrugged again, but this time it was accompanied with an actual answer. "I prefer not to drive right away after I've made an ass out of myself. It seems like a poor life choice. And I can't afford one of those right now."

"Jess—" she trailed off, directionless.

"It's okay, Rory." Her pause had stretched on into an enduring standstill. "You don't have to say anything. I got what I came for. I have my answer."

She shook her head, impatient with his easy tone. He dismissed her rejection like it barely registered on his radar. As if it had no consequence to him, like she had been the one begging him to come away with her.

"I lied."

"What?"

"I lied, Jess. I shouldn't have said no like that." Her speech wavered, but her determination was concrete.

He quirked his brow, and pushed off the wall. He took a cautious step toward her, his head cocked to the side. "Are you saying that it isn't a no?"

She wrapped her arms tightly around her middle, as if trying to hold herself in one cohesive piece. "I—I am saying…"

"Rory…" The tenor of his voice was so uncharacteristically gentle that it inflicted a peculiar physical pang in the depths of her tremulous heart. His hands tentatively reached to brace either side of her, and when she gave no protest, he gripped her elbows. "Just talk to me here."

"I just can't right now."

He drew a fragile breath and released it an instant later. "Can't do what?"

"Run away." Suddenly her eyes focused on him with such unyielding earnestness that he nearly shrank under their arresting gaze. That otherworldly shade of cerulean blue lived within the recesses of his warped memory, haunted him in the coldest and loneliest nights, mocked him all the way to California and back. He was momentarily struck dumb and mute with them in such close proximity, reflected in the soft lamplight and petitioning for his acceptance.

"Then what? Why are you out here?" There was no trace of harshness in his words, just frank curiosity.

She swallowed the invariable lump lodged deep in her throat. "I said I can't right now."

The weight she had placed on those final two words made him dizzy with possibility. As if the nearness of their bodies were not enough to make him lightheaded and the scent of her perfume was not already intoxicating his senses. Jess took another wary step forward, the distance between them rapidly evaporating.

"Right now, huh?" His voice climbed an octave higher.

She nervously tucked a wayward strand of short hair behind her ear, her eyes still glued to his. "I don't know what you expected coming here like this, Jess. You know I can't just pick up and leave like you asked. And it isn't because I don't…because I don't love you. It's because the timing is wrong."

He nodded as if this had already occurred to him.

"Even if the timing was right," she went on slowly, "The way things happened last spring, the way you left without saying goodbye…I can't pretend that never happened."

His head bobbed up and down again, shame passing through his amber eyes. "Rory…I meant what I said in there. I wasn't ready before, but I am now. I couldn't make the same mistake twice…the last year has been hell without you, knowing how badly I screwed it all up. I'm sorry. I really am sorry."

She felt tears build behind her eyes, but she willed them back. This was a lethal combination, his rare show of sincerity combined with an unfamiliar gravelly tone that tugged violently on her heartstrings.

Sensing her inability to respond, Jess went on. "Not that I currently have the right to ask, but…am I still up against your lumberjack ex? I see he's sporting a scruffy look these days."

"Well he's kind of married."

Both of his brows skyrocketed. "You didn't answer the question. Is he in the picture? At all?"

"No. I thought I wanted him to be, but he isn't." Her lashes fluttered involuntarily.

"Because he's married?"

She pulled out of his hold and took a step sideways. "No. He doesn't fit in the picture."

"Because he's so freaking tall?" That trademark smirk carved itself back into place.

"Jess!" Her attention was immediately back on him as she swatted at his arm.

"What?! You made it too easy!"

She shook her head as a small smile formed on her pink lips. "I want to be with someone adventurous, someone impulsive and a little reckless. Someone who pushes me to do things out of my comfort zone. And I want to be free to go and do all of the things that I've always planned to do. I want to explore and plan and argue and…that wasn't with him."

His eyes had been trained to her with a brilliant gleam of formerly extinct hope, but as soon as she stopped talking, he diverted his attention to a nearly invisible scuff on the sidewalk. Without warning, her slender fingers sought the hint of stubble on his chin, tipping his eyes back to hers. "But you are all of those things, Jess. You asked me to run away with you tonight. And I can't say yes right now, but I can say yes to someday."

Someday. It sent him right over the yawning chasm of desire. He closed the remaining sliver of moonlight between them and met her lips for a breathless eternity. His arms snaked their way around her waist, pressing her tightly to the hard planes of his chest. She ran a hand through the roots of his hair, marveling at the feeling of the longer strands slipping through her fingers. Rory gasped as Jess deepened the kiss, his tongue finding hers with ease. He felt his frayed control quickly dissipating into the night's quiet breeze.

As he gradually pulled away, Rory blinked several times with a bemused expression. "Well that was something."

"I'd say so," he murmured as he sought another kiss.

Someday. It rang louder than the demands of now. It was the potential for more, when life brought them back to the place where the next chapter was one they had in common. When Rory finished school, when Jess wrote a novel, when the future they both needed blossomed into the present they deserved.

And the promise of tomorrow—along with some memorable reunions in the indefinite stretch of years to come—was enough for the now.