Chapter Text
The bedroom is quiet. It shouldn’t be with the way music is still blasting in the other room, thumping through expensive speakers, but the door is shut and the noise from the party is muffled, far away. It fades with every breath, because Rory is pressed against him like there’s nowhere else she wants to be. Heart shuddering against his ribs, he lets himself sink into it: the warmth of her mouth, the smell of her perfume, her arms looped around his neck and holding him close.
Her mouth opens beneath his and just like that, all the spiteful, frenetic energy that’s been crashing through his veins since he tried to pick up the tickets just dies away, settles into something distant he can shove down and ignore. They need to talk about it, but for now he kisses her instead.
It’s only a few steps to the bed. The room is hazy, lit by the glow of the streetlight as it filters in through the curtains. It paints everything in muted tones; if he could stop kissing Rory long enough to look at her, he knows she’d look like a Degas. Soft, desaturated. Vibrant all the same. It’s a stupid comparison—he’s seen her dance—but it doesn’t really matter, because he can’t pull away.
She moans a little as he presses kiss after kiss to the hinge of her jaw and the strawberry-sticky corner of her mouth, dusts them along her collarbones, writing in every margin he can find. He wants to spend the rest of his life chasing those sounds, wants to catalogue and index and study every shiver he coaxes from her body, wants to crawl inside these moments and live in them forever. She cards her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck and god, he just wants her. Wants everything, even though it’s already out of reach.
Rory rolls her hips against his, a sigh catching in her throat, tremulous, all breath. He’s good at this. The night’s a mess, but that sigh cracks him in half, splits him open. It hurts, feels like pressing on a bruise that’s still dark and tender, but mostly it’s a relief. Her breath ghosts out against his temple as he strokes a hand over her hip, settles in between her thighs like he was made to be there. He’s a fuckup, but he can make her feel good. He can give her that.
He breathes her in, lungful after lungful, like he’s sprinting and can’t catch his breath. Like he’s drowning and can’t come up for air.
“Jess,” she whispers, and Christ, maybe he is. “Jess—”
Let me, he thinks, a little desperate as her pulse beats wildly beneath the press of his lips, just let me make you feel good. There’s an ache rising in his chest, flooding up his throat and into his mouth. He can practically taste it, needy and bitter and awful. He can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything except kiss her through it.
“Jess,” she says again, louder this time, almost angry, and then the rest of the words hit him like fists.
The impact sends him reeling. Shame licks at his bones like a fever, blistering and immediate. He rips away from her, biting down on his tongue as she scrambles up from the bed. His heartbeat is loud and ugly in his ears. She’s all silver and blush in the glow of the streetlight, all confusion and concern and—
Fear. Just the barest hint of it, but it’s there. And it’s there because of him.
Abruptly, all he can see is his mom. Liz, staggering as her latest piece of shit boyfriend slaps her. Liz, a bruise blooming high on her cheek. Liz, wild-eyed and anxious, a worn smile doing nothing to hide it as she reassures him over and over it was a one time thing, baby, he’s not gonna hit me again, he loves me—
Bile surges in his throat. He chokes it down, wincing at the taste of acid and blood, and forces himself to meet Rory’s gaze.
“What was that?” she asks, snappish, shaken.
He swallows again. Her eyes are vividly, painfully blue. “Fuck.” The word comes out of him like broken glass, jagged, bloodied at the edges. “I’m sorry, Rory. God, I’m so sorry.”
“Jess—”
“C’mon,” he says, reaching for the door, but of course that isn’t the end of it.
“What’s wrong?” she asks him again. “And don’t say nothing, because I know something’s wrong! You were so excited about tonight and now this—”
The shame just keeps burning hotter. He’s a breath away from crumbling to cinders.
“Let me get you home,” he says, cutting through her protests. He sounds raw. Desperate. Rory bites back the rest of her plea. Silence swells between them like a bruise. She crosses her arms, some emotion he can’t parse drawing her brows together, curling at the corner of her mouth. He looks away. He doesn’t want to see pity. Doesn’t want to see more fear. “Or we can find Lane,” he tells the patch of floor to the left of her shoes. “You two can stay and I’ll just—”
He stops. Swallows. “I’ll just go.”
When he risks a glance at her, he still can’t read her expression. Can’t even tell what his own face is doing, because it’s like he’s got double vision, the past layered over the present, each one bleeding into the other until he can’t tell them apart. I did that, he thinks, sick down to his bones. I did that.
“Okay,” she says. “Yeah.” The word lands like another blow. He doesn’t let himself flinch. “Home sounds good.”
He holds the door open and follows her out through the throng of wasted teenagers. Dean watches them as they go, eyes narrowed like he knows something is wrong, but Jess is numb to it. He doesn’t spare him a second glance. Rory doesn’t either, just pushes her way through the crowd. Finally, the front door slams shut behind them and they’re out, they’re gone, they’re done.
It only takes them ten minutes to reach her house. They walk in silence down the empty streets, and he watches the ragged shape of his shadow stretch out in front of him every time they pass a goddamn streetlight. His hair is wild, jacket hanging askew. Ten minutes ago, Rory was pulling the zipper down and slipping her hands inside. Ten minutes ago, he thought he could make her feel good.
She’s just a few steps ahead of him, close enough to reach out and touch, but she’s miles away. Maybe she always has been.
Another streetlight. Even their shadows are separate. His mouth tastes like her strawberry lip gloss, cloying, sticky-sweet, and he wants a cigarette so badly his teeth ache. There’s a pack stuffed in his coat, but he doesn’t reach for it. He won’t, maybe, or he can’t. It doesn’t matter. He just puts one foot in front of the other and tries not to think.
The night is cool but not cold. Leaves rustle in the breeze as they come to a stop in front of her porch. The moon is out. It’s picturesque and utterly suffocating. Stars Hollow is a snow globe no matter the season. It’s spring and here he is, slamming into the glass no matter which way he turns. Here he is, ruining the scene.
He opens his mouth to say— say something, but he keeps reliving it: Rory with that tiny seed of fear in her eyes, her voice breaking on a question he still can’t scrape together the courage to answer.
I flunked out and I can’t take you to prom and I scared you; he has the words. He just can’t say them.
The porch light is on. Her mom is inside. Rory doesn’t seem to care. She reaches across the distance and laces their fingers together, tugging him toward her until they’re almost nose to nose. The touch races through him like lightning, shocking and painful. He wants to pull away, wants to fucking run, but her face starts to fall, half worry, half heartbreak, and the last thing he ever wants to do is hurt her. He stays right where he is.
Rory’s hands are cold in his. Embers flare in his chest, burning between every rib, words stuck in his throat like smoke.
“So,” she tries, slow and measured. Practically glacial, considering the pace she usually babbles at. “I’m home.” She’s being careful with him.
“As promised,” he quips, voice intentionally light, doing his best to breathe through the fumes. “I’m gonna go.”
He has to, because he’s going to burn up in front of her, and she’s going to hurt herself trying to hold the ashes together because she doesn’t even know he’s burning and he can’t fucking say anything—
He tries to pull away but she just tightens her grip, clinging to him.
“Jess, wait—”
Stop echoes in his head like a car crash, like the sound of a bone splintering, but their fingers are still tangled together and she’s found her stride now, talking and talking like she can make up for all the words trapped useless and smoking in his throat.
“You haven’t said a thing since we left the party and I know you, I know you didn’t think it was going to happen like that, okay? Something’s wrong. Please,” she says, and her voice turns fragile, turns tender. “Sad boy,” Rory tries again, “please, just tell me what’s wrong.”
He tries. God help him, tries. He's done nothing but try since she turned those big Bambi eyes on him in her room that first night, since she smiled and lit him up from the inside out, raw sunlight in his veins, and offered to let him borrow a book that might as well be inscribed on his bones, permanent and ruinous. It rushes through him now, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, and he feels like laughing. Feels like crying.
No broken hearts, but here she is looking at him like he’s cleaving hers in two, leaving it in shards, in pieces. Words scrape his throat, but all that comes out is: “I have to go.”
So he does.
—
Luke’s truck smells like lake water and cheap pine air freshener.
Jess turns the key, numb, and exhales shakily as the Chevy rumbles to life. He eases it out into the street—first gear, nice and slow—and then he’s gone.
He’s two towns over before he realizes the stereo is playing. Low and scratchy beneath the road noise and the growl of the engine, it takes him a moment to place it: Springsteen, guitar wailing through the last shreds of “Adam Raised a Cain.”
The song fades out and applause filters through the speakers, raucous and profane. A bootleg. He watches the dirty beam of the headlights slice through the darkness, rushing over sleepy houses and well-kept lawns, postcards from a life he’s never had.
The audio cuts out, cuts back in. Bruce’s voice picks up mid-verse, hushed, confessional. Well you’re born with nothing and son, you’re better off that way…
His hands tighten on the wheel as the song keeps playing, slow and brutal. He can’t make himself reach over and turn it off. A sign flares green in the headlights: interstate, two miles ahead. It feels like the lyrics are reaching into his chest and pulling his guts out. We tried to pick up the pieces and get away without getting hurt. The instruments have all died away, and it’s just Springsteen, raw, desperate, running burned and blind—
He’s a spring, coiled and twisted until it’s ready to snap. He’s nine years old, cold and hungry and forcing himself to stay awake because he doesn’t know when Liz is coming home. He’s fourteen and scrawling in the margins, pressing himself line by line into a permanence he can’t find anywhere else: Jess Mariano was here.
The exit flashes by.
He’s telling Rory he doesn’t want to hurt her. He’s walking away and refusing to look back because he can’t stand to see the way her face crumples when he hurts her anyway.
His hands are shaking. The song ends. Another one starts up.
He drives until the tape ends, all hissing static and abrupt silence. It scrapes over him like a knife, like something heavy and dark. Something he doesn’t have words for yet. He guides the truck to the shoulder. Flips the hazards on. Flips the tape. Traces the chicken scratch label, Philadelphia, Darkness Tour ‘78, and doesn’t let himself think too hard about the choice he’s making.
He presses play.
It doesn’t fix anything. He feels worse than he did when he climbed into the cab, unspooled, like he’s bleeding out, but he turns the Chevy around anyway.
—
It’s an hour and change back to Stars Hollow. He stops for gas and puts twenty bucks’ worth in the tank, watching the numbers tick steadily upward and thinking about how the sight would have Rory ragging on Bush if she were here with him.
Eight gallons is all his money buys him. He scoffs. Thinks about his car, about gas prices, about 22.8 miles and you looked it up. The memory of her delight is all cool clear water, as blue as her eyes. He wants to hear it again as badly as he wants a goddamn cigarette. Worse, maybe.
He scoffs at himself. There's no maybe about it.
He’s trying. He’s been trying. Whether that matters or not is something else entirely. Jess’s guts twist at the thought, but he climbs back into the truck and refuses to waver.
Blue eyes, he thinks as Springsteen starts back up, a shorthand for everything that's carved him up and left him like this, for everything that's daring him to keep going anyway. He leaves the cigarettes where they are.
Still: the nicotine itch gets harder and harder to ignore the closer he gets to town. He’s jittery with it by the time he parks and makes his way back to the Gilmore house on foot, all that awful tension wound through him again like it never left. Knuckles on glass, three soft raps, and he’s rocking back on his heels, ready to wait—
The window slides open in a rush. It was 2:51 when he left the truck at Luke’s, but Rory doesn’t seem to have slept at all. She looks the way he feels: hesitant, wrecked. Worse, there's something soft and vulnerable underneath all the hurt. Tenderness, maybe. It fissures through him, splits him down to the marrow. Her eyes are red from crying. He can hardly stand to look at her.
“Hi,” he says, forcing the word out before he falls to pieces, before cowardice gets the best of him. Before he can fuck it up any more than he already has.
“Hi, Jess.” Her voice is small, crushed. It kills him.
“Can we— can we talk? Somewhere?”
She nods, jerky and fast. “Give me a sec,” she whispers, and disappears into the darkness of her room. She’s only gone for a minute, but it feels like an eternity.
He wants to cut and run. Wants to light up and just fucking burn away.
The window is open, curtains fluttering in the breeze, brushing the stacks of books she has piled everywhere, some he’s written in and more that he hasn’t, and he wants Rory more than he cares about any of his own bullshit, no matter how much it makes him ache. He stays rooted to the spot. The relief in her eyes when she comes back and finds him there makes him feel like his ribs are too small, a cage for a feeling too vast, too painful to ever contain.
Still: he lets her steady herself against him as she clambers out the window, graceless but determined. The sight humbles him. Rory doesn’t sneak out, doesn’t break curfew, yet here she is, creeping out at three a.m. to meet a boy who’s already made her cry once tonight.
She fiddles with the window until it’s open just a sliver, then turns to him. “Okay,” she says. “I’m ready.”
And she isn’t, really, and neither is he, but he takes her hand anyway. She holds tight, lacing their fingers together the way she always does, and walks in silence with him to the dock.
The water is still. No sign of the swan. It’s quiet: just the creaking wood, just the soft rush of the wind, just the heavy pounding of his heart. Cross-legged on the weathered dock, he can't bring himself to look at the blue of her eyes, red-rimmed and so horribly tender. Instead, he stares at the freckles dusted across her cheekbones and tries to find the words. His throat burns; he doesn’t know where to start.
Rory saves him. “You know,” she says, light, conversational, all Gilmore glib. “I’ve heard Ernest only has lovely things to say about me—” Christ, what a line,“—but so far he hasn’t actually said anything.” Her voice is soft enough to break his heart.
He swallows. Stares down at his hands, shaking again. Nerves, nicotine. He can’t hold out any longer. Jess pulls the pack from his coat and starts talking.
“I was six the first time I remember my mom getting blackout drunk.” He fumbles for his lighter. The words already taste like smoke. “I was eight the first time she left. We had a box of saltines and half a block of Velveeta. Some apple juice. WIC-approved drunk food.”
As if Liz ever bothered with WIC for more than a month or two, even when they were eligible. Too much of a hassle when they changed addresses at the drop of a hat. Still, she liked to buy from the approved list when she could be bothered to buy real groceries instead of picking up some prepackaged junk at a bodega when she stopped for cigs. Habit, probably. He used to wonder if it made her feel like she was trying.
Rory is quiet.
“It didn’t last very long. Four days, maybe.”
He remembers that apartment. It’s burned into his brain: the thin walls, the faded linoleum, the saggy couch with mismatched cushions. A yellow fridge that hummed anemically and never had much in it. The droning whine used to keep him up at night, louder than the noise of the city around him, louder than Liz’s crying jags, louder than his own heartbeat. Sometimes he dreams about it and wakes up feeling young and hollow and alone.
“How long was she gone?” Rory asks eventually, when the silence has stretched out too long, buzzing in his ears like the sound of that empty yellow refrigerator.
“Nine days.”
“Jess,” she says. Just his name, soft, like he’s the one breaking her heart.
“I ate at school. Scrounged some stuff from a neighbor one night. And then she came back with a new boyfriend and pretended it never happened.” He laughs, a rusty, broken sound. “I don’t know if she even knew how long it was, really. She was using.”
He looks away, staring out across the lake. He half expects her to pepper him with questions—using? like, drugs? hard stuff?—because this is Rory, and the worst thing about her childhood was a garden shed. He loves her, fuck, he loves her, but she’s so sheltered that it scares him sometimes. He doesn’t want to hurt her.
But she stays quiet, waiting for him to keep going.
So he does. It pours out of him like water from a broken pipe: in spasms, in torrents, in bursts. He can’t control it. He tells her about the boyfriends, the ones who were okay, mostly, and the ones who slapped her around, who hit him, about the blur of apartments and park benches and even that one terrible shelter he doesn’t like to think about. Huddling on stoops or riding aimlessly on the subway, tearing through books like if he just tried hard enough he could vanish inside them and pretend away the hours and hours spent waiting until he could risk coming back to whatever shithole apartment they had that month, hoping she would be sober, hoping the boyfriend would be gone, hoping there would be food in the fridge. Liz getting falling down drunk and crying about everything she couldn’t give him. Getting blitzed and raging that she should have walked into a clinic and spared herself the fucking trouble, slurring shoulda just bled you out and been done with it.
There’s some good sprinkled in there, the handful of moments that make it so hard to hate her: days where she made breakfast, lumpy Bisquick pancakes because I’m trying, okay, baby?, his first library card, the way she’d sing 10,000 Maniacs when she was in a good mood, hey Jack Kerouac, all lilting voice and jaunty melody.
He loved Kerouac before he ever read him. He doesn’t say it, but when he risks a glance at Rory, the knowledge is written all over her face. She’s listening. She’s trying.
Pieces of On the Road rattle around inside his skull. There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go, and I wished I was on the same bus as her.
“I can’t take you to prom.” Out loud, it’s a non-sequitur. A frown wrinkles the skin between her brows, the little eleven he’s coaxed out so many times with corny magic tricks and contrary opinions. It guts him.
“Because… you don’t want to go?”
I wished I was on the same bus as her.
“Because you have to be a student to get tickets.”
“What?
He lights a fresh cigarette. The cherry glows an obscene red in the darkness. He takes a long drag, letting the heat simmer in his lungs; breathes it out in a wash of smoke. “I flunked out.”
The cigarette burns and burns. Ash drifts down into the water. Rory sucks in a shaky breath, like she’s about to start crying. He can’t look at her.
“How?”
“Missed too much class. Didn’t turn in enough work.” It sounds so fucking stupid. It is stupid. He doesn’t even care, really, because school has never mattered to him the way it does to Rory, but prom matters to her and she matters—
“I know you don’t like school,” she says, her voice cracking, something delicate starting to shatter. “I know I don’t really understand it, where you come from, what it was like. But I don’t get why you didn’t ask for help. Why you didn’t try.”
“Fuck, Rory, I did try. I am trying. What do you think this is? Me spilling my guts for shits and giggles? A sob story to make up for the fact that I scared you—”
“You don’t scare me, Jess.” She’s crying. He can hear it in the way she’s breathing. “And I would have helped. Me, Luke, probably your teachers if you’d talked to them.”
“And told them what? ‘Sorry, I have to miss class for a shift at good ol’ Walmart because I break out in hives if I don’t have my own food money?’” The words come out sharp and mean, but he can’t make himself stop. “‘Sorry I can’t take this group project seriously, it’s just that it’s a little late for D.A.R.E., you know?’”
“No,” she half-shouts. “I don’t know! Maybe! Some of them might have been more lenient about things if they’d had context—”
“The context doesn’t matter,” he snaps, cardboard crumpling as he reaches for another cigarette. His hands are shaking again. “It never has, okay?”
“It does, Jess! You matter! To me, and Luke—”
“Enough about Luke, alright? He’s gonna kick me out as soon as he gets wind of all this.”
For a moment he's back in the truck, guitars wailing, a raw, furious voice telling nothing he doesn't already know: nothing is forgotten or forgiven—
Rory cuts through the memory, incredulous, disbelieving. “What? Why? He wouldn’t do that.” The dock creaks as she shifts closer to him. “Jess, look at me. Luke wouldn’t do that.”
There's a laugh building in his throat, caustic and awful, but he swallows it down. She doesn't know. Even if she did, Rory Gilmore doesn't fuck up her second chances. Not the way he does: one after another after another, burning through them like they're cigarettes. He sucks in another lungful of smoke. Breathes it out. He still can't fucking look at her.
“It was conditional. If I came back, I had to try.”
She goes horribly, terribly still.
“Oh,” she says. Her voice is thick, like it would be a sob if she’d just let it. “That’s why you didn’t want to tell me.”
“Rory…” he starts, but he trails off. It’s true. There’s nothing else to say.
“You knew that’s what I would think, what I would ask, but—” her breath hitches, and fuck, she really is sobbing now. “But you tried to tell me anyway. You did tell me,” she says, and then her small cold hands are cupping his cheeks, tilting his face up until he’s looking at her, all blue eyes and tear tracks. “I’m sorry, Jess.” It’s a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he says, even if it isn’t. He hates seeing her like this, hates that she’s hurting because of him.
“It’s not. It’s not okay.” She leans into him, presses her forehead to his like she wants to seep through his skin and hold him where it hurts. “Can I kiss you?”
His throat is so tight. “You can always kiss me.” Then: “I’ve been smoking—”
She kisses him anyway, kisses him and kisses him, apology and benediction and a thousand other things he’s too torn up to really feel, ripped open and ribs still pressing painfully against his heart somehow, too small, too small, too small.
Eventually, she subsides. Sits shuddering in his lap, face hidden against his neck. Her skin is wet with tears.
“I don’t care,” she says, and she means the cigarettes. “We’ll figure it out, okay?” And she means— everything else, maybe. Prom, Luke, all the shit that’s been chasing him since he left New York.
“Okay.” The word leaves him raw. Vulnerable. Rory kisses him again, soft and quick against the corner of his mouth, right where his smile inevitably turns crooked, and helps him to his feet.
—
They walk back to her house in the hazy predawn light, close enough that their shoulders bump with every step, hands tangled together, for saints have hands that pilgrims' do touch.
He’s expecting the window. Instead she squeezes his hand and leads him to the porch, tugging at him when he balks until he gives in and sinks down onto that godawful floral couch. The cushions are surprisingly soft.
Rory tucks herself against his side, curled around him like a comma. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere: a breath, maybe, or a rest. A continuation. He’s too tired to make it work. He just lets himself close his eyes, shoulders easing down into a boneless slouch as exhaustion smothers him like a tide.
He’s dimly aware of Rory stroking through his hair, scratching gently at his scalp like he’s some kind of overgrown alley cat. At one point, the front door swings open and voices filter in through the haze that’s settled over him. The sounds rise and fall, almost angry, but Rory’s hands never stop moving.
Jess sleeps.