SpyGirl426
Cadet
I think every channel should play GG... then no matter what time you could turn on the tv and have your daily dose of Lorelai and Luke 
Java Junkies
- Thread starter luce
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a little misguided
Cadet
I thought it was time for a java junkie quote, i've been watching too much of season one lately and this one is really cute, having Max and Luke fight over Lorelai, sort of Although what he said was true, and the pining begins!
LUKE: Yeah, I 'm gonna get going. I just left my toolbox from when I was here earlier fixing things. I do a lot of little things around here for Lorelai.
LORELAI: Yeah, you're very handy. So Luke, we'll talk later.
LUKE: Yes we will.
MAX: Although probably not tonight. We won't be back until late.
LORELAI: No, I meant not tonight.
MAX: Oh, I misunderstood.
LORELAI: I meant tomorrow. So tomorrow.
LUKE: Absolutely. We see each other most everyday.
MAX: Well sure, you've got the coffee.
LUKE: And she needs the coffee. So I'll see you tomorrow.
LORELAI: Tomorrow.
LUKE: Same time as always.
MAX: I'd count on a little later.
LUKE: Doesn't matter what time it is. I'll always be around.
LORELAI: Bye. (Luke leaves.)
Although what he said was true, and the pining begins!LUKE: Yeah, I 'm gonna get going. I just left my toolbox from when I was here earlier fixing things. I do a lot of little things around here for Lorelai.
LORELAI: Yeah, you're very handy. So Luke, we'll talk later.
LUKE: Yes we will.
MAX: Although probably not tonight. We won't be back until late.
LORELAI: No, I meant not tonight.
MAX: Oh, I misunderstood.
LORELAI: I meant tomorrow. So tomorrow.
LUKE: Absolutely. We see each other most everyday.
MAX: Well sure, you've got the coffee.
LUKE: And she needs the coffee. So I'll see you tomorrow.
LORELAI: Tomorrow.
LUKE: Same time as always.
MAX: I'd count on a little later.
LUKE: Doesn't matter what time it is. I'll always be around.
LORELAI: Bye. (Luke leaves.)
SpyGirl426
Cadet
Oh, that's a good quote.... it's like "Oh!!! In your face Max!" haha
Nat, I LOOOOVE that quote. It was so awkward and terrible, but SO GOOD at the end when he said "doesn't matter what time it is, i'll always be around" GO LUKE!
See, even from Season 1 they set up Luke and Lor, WHY did it have to take 4 seasons for them to get together, and only 2 to tear them apart?! It's SO not fair!
I PROTEST!
SOMEONE FOR GOD'S SAKE (AND MY SANITY) BRING BACK GILMORE GIRLS TO AUSTRALIAN TV!
See, even from Season 1 they set up Luke and Lor, WHY did it have to take 4 seasons for them to get together, and only 2 to tear them apart?! It's SO not fair!
I PROTEST!
SOMEONE FOR GOD'S SAKE (AND MY SANITY) BRING BACK GILMORE GIRLS TO AUSTRALIAN TV!
a little misguided
Cadet
Me too, that's why i used it in my sig
Anyone got any more java junkie quotes that we can swoon over?
Anyone got any more java junkie quotes that we can swoon over?
Oh, I was going to post some before but I got distracted by the TWoP Gilmorian wardrobe thread. But now I'm crabby, so I need to distract myself with quotes. I posted this one ages ago, but I remembered the uber-shippy bit at the end and it works better when it follows from their earlier conversation.
Forgiveness and Stuff
LORELAI: You don’t look so good.
LUKE: Thanks.
LORELAI: That’s not what I meant. You know you always look good.
LUKE: Yeah?
LORELAI: I mean you always look healthy.
LUKE: Ok.
LORELAI: But you don’t look so healthy now. Now you look...
LUKE: Unhealthy.
LORELAI: Yes.
LUKE: Ok.
LORELAI: Oh what? So I said you look good. We’re not in 5th grade. ‘You look good’, big deal. Stop staring at me.
[patient passes by]
LUKE: Ah, jeez.
LORELAI: See that’s what you get for being cocky.
[At the end of the episode]
LORELAI: Hello.
LUKE: Hey, how’s your dad?
LORELAI: Better, though he says that life is not life unless it includes a steak. How come you’re not out with everybody?
LUKE: I had some things to do.
LORELAI: Right, anyways, this is for you. [giving him a bag]
LUKE: What’s it for?
LORELAI: Just thank you, Christmas, whatever.
LUKE: Christmas isn’t for two weeks.
LORELAI: Do we really have to do this again? [he opens the present. It’s a baseball hat] I just thought, you know, God forbid something happens to that one, you might need a spare. Here [put it on forwards] Does that look wrong. [puts in on backwards] There! Oh hey turn out the lights [going to the window]
LUKE: For what? It’s not the real procession, it’s just the rehearsal.
LORELAI: So, it’s pretty.
LUKE: And why do they need to rehearse it? It’s the same thing every year.
LORELAI: Come on Luke, please. [he turns out the lights and joins her by the window] It’s hard to imagine living somewhere else isn’t it?
LUKE: Thanks for the hat.
LORELAI: You’re welcome. Looks good on you.
LUKE: Good how?
LORELAI: Just watch the procession.
All together now: AWWWW!
Note that he has worn that cap ever since. That's kind of an 'Awww!' and kind of an 'Ooookaay. You need to get out more.' As is this display of stalker-like attention to detail:
LORELAI: Hey.
LUKE: Hey. Coffee?
LORELAI: Please, and hurry. I am going to Manhattan this weekend and I need to shop for some warm clothes.
LUKE: You already have warm clothes.
LORELAI: I have nothing.
LUKE: We’re in Connecticut. It gets freezing here same as in New York.
LORELAI: No, it’s not the same.
LUKE: Exactly the same.
LORELAI: Well, I have nothing stylish enough.
LUKE: That’s not true, you got the black cashmere coat.
LORELAI: But it needs cleaning.
LUKE: So clean it.
LORELAI: But I need some sweaters, too.
LUKE: You’ve got the purple, you’ve got the powder blue, you’ve got three shades of red, you’ve got a ton of black, all of which will go with that coat. Plus, you’ve got a dozen scarves to mix and match with any of those tops.
LORELAI: Let me shop for some clothes.
Yeah. Vaguely disturbing...
Forgiveness and Stuff
LORELAI: You don’t look so good.
LUKE: Thanks.
LORELAI: That’s not what I meant. You know you always look good.
LUKE: Yeah?
LORELAI: I mean you always look healthy.
LUKE: Ok.
LORELAI: But you don’t look so healthy now. Now you look...
LUKE: Unhealthy.
LORELAI: Yes.
LUKE: Ok.
LORELAI: Oh what? So I said you look good. We’re not in 5th grade. ‘You look good’, big deal. Stop staring at me.
[patient passes by]
LUKE: Ah, jeez.
LORELAI: See that’s what you get for being cocky.
[At the end of the episode]
LORELAI: Hello.
LUKE: Hey, how’s your dad?
LORELAI: Better, though he says that life is not life unless it includes a steak. How come you’re not out with everybody?
LUKE: I had some things to do.
LORELAI: Right, anyways, this is for you. [giving him a bag]
LUKE: What’s it for?
LORELAI: Just thank you, Christmas, whatever.
LUKE: Christmas isn’t for two weeks.
LORELAI: Do we really have to do this again? [he opens the present. It’s a baseball hat] I just thought, you know, God forbid something happens to that one, you might need a spare. Here [put it on forwards] Does that look wrong. [puts in on backwards] There! Oh hey turn out the lights [going to the window]
LUKE: For what? It’s not the real procession, it’s just the rehearsal.
LORELAI: So, it’s pretty.
LUKE: And why do they need to rehearse it? It’s the same thing every year.
LORELAI: Come on Luke, please. [he turns out the lights and joins her by the window] It’s hard to imagine living somewhere else isn’t it?
LUKE: Thanks for the hat.
LORELAI: You’re welcome. Looks good on you.
LUKE: Good how?
LORELAI: Just watch the procession.
All together now: AWWWW!
Note that he has worn that cap ever since. That's kind of an 'Awww!' and kind of an 'Ooookaay. You need to get out more.' As is this display of stalker-like attention to detail:
LORELAI: Hey.
LUKE: Hey. Coffee?
LORELAI: Please, and hurry. I am going to Manhattan this weekend and I need to shop for some warm clothes.
LUKE: You already have warm clothes.
LORELAI: I have nothing.
LUKE: We’re in Connecticut. It gets freezing here same as in New York.
LORELAI: No, it’s not the same.
LUKE: Exactly the same.
LORELAI: Well, I have nothing stylish enough.
LUKE: That’s not true, you got the black cashmere coat.
LORELAI: But it needs cleaning.
LUKE: So clean it.
LORELAI: But I need some sweaters, too.
LUKE: You’ve got the purple, you’ve got the powder blue, you’ve got three shades of red, you’ve got a ton of black, all of which will go with that coat. Plus, you’ve got a dozen scarves to mix and match with any of those tops.
LORELAI: Let me shop for some clothes.
Yeah. Vaguely disturbing...
a little misguided
Cadet
It's kindda cute, guys never pay attention to what a girl wears so it's a nice change.
Oh, and i got sent this pm/email from gilmoregirls.org right saying that there's this new message board that some member has opened up, i'll just paste it ok, so here's what it said:
"I've created a new Gilmore girls website/message board and I'm looking for members. The message
board has discussion, roleplay, and fanfiction. You can post your fanfiction there directly to
the board . Many characters are still available in the roleplay. The board does contain some
adult content such as M rated fanfiction."
This is the site here
So i went into it and i was like wtf? Have a look at the description in the general thread... I seriously have no idea why people would want to talk about this stuff, it's a little psychotic if you ask me. Imagine if the actors saw it... very disturbing. Maybe it's just me.
Oh, and i got sent this pm/email from gilmoregirls.org right saying that there's this new message board that some member has opened up, i'll just paste it ok, so here's what it said:
"I've created a new Gilmore girls website/message board and I'm looking for members. The message
board has discussion, roleplay, and fanfiction. You can post your fanfiction there directly to
the board . Many characters are still available in the roleplay. The board does contain some
adult content such as M rated fanfiction."
This is the site here
So i went into it and i was like wtf? Have a look at the description in the general thread... I seriously have no idea why people would want to talk about this stuff, it's a little psychotic if you ask me. Imagine if the actors saw it... very disturbing. Maybe it's just me.
Jesus H tap dancing Christ.
What the hell is that site? The Gilmore Girls Adult Message Board.
That is sooo wrong, I cannot even explain it :shocked:
I'm speechless. That's sick. It a comedy for crying out loud, and not to mention, if I was Lauren Graham I'd be so mad. I'd be reporting that site. EW!
What the hell is that site? The Gilmore Girls Adult Message Board.
That is sooo wrong, I cannot even explain it :shocked:
I'm speechless. That's sick. It a comedy for crying out loud, and not to mention, if I was Lauren Graham I'd be so mad. I'd be reporting that site. EW!
a little misguided
Cadet
It's actually very offensive. I don't think i would put up with it if i were her either, it's beyond disturbing. You would think that people would have better things to do than make this kind of stuff.
Ok! Luce has very kindly beta-d it for me, so here is the aforementioned gigantically long JJ oneshot! Sorry I didn't send it to you, Nat, I just wanted to wait until it was edited. I have now decided to call it 'Hide and Seek' after the song by Imogen Heap, because I was listening to it almost constantly when I was writing, and I just love the song.
Timeline: Semi-AU 5.21, Blame Booze and Melville.
And it is LONG, so I'm putting it in Spoiler text. Which might not be working. Hmm.
EDIT: Yeah, it's not working. So, you'll just have to scroll down if you don't want to read it.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything. I almost didn't even own the disclaimer; I was considering stealing the one off Black, White and Read. I make no money off the use of Gilmore Girls characters and situations, or 'Hide and Seek' by Imogen Heap, which is sad, because I would like money. No copyright infringement intended. And I totally stole that off BWR's disclaimer. So I disclaim that too.
It had been a week and a half.
And Lorelai Gilmore was not, by any means, a patient person.
It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t wait for something (coffee, food, an answer) just that she didn’t want to. Waiting made her anxious. She would fidget. Babble. Muse about the logistics of David Bowie’s Labyrinth costume, and socks and freakishly dark eyebrows until she thought she must be insane.
Waiting made her crazy. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t work; she couldn’t concentrate on anything but the damn pink elephant in the room. She had named this one Gwyneth.
God, she needed coffee.
It had been easy at first; the years spent in the Gilmore household - lying, denying, compartmentalizing - had never been put to better use. She should have won a frigging Oscar, she acted so normal those first five days…
At least after the brief, initial freak-out. She still wasn’t sure if Rory had believed that nothing was wrong but Sookie had timed her journey around the mountain very well. It had been doubly successful in getting Rory off her back, and getting it out of her mind. Well, not entirely but it was a very good distraction. She spent her entire phone call to Rory talking about Sookie, and later, Martha, and she acted so normal that Rory was convinced she did just ‘sleep funny’.
She was so good at pretending to be fine that she almost convinced herself.
One am on Day Seven, she woke up in a panic. Tick tick tick tick. What the hell was that? She rolled over and looked at her alarm. ‘1:07’ it flashed at her. Silently. It was digital. Tick tick tick tick. She sat up and scanned the room groggily. For what, (a bomb?) she had no clue except… one am. Tick. Tick. Tick. Groaning, she rolled off the bed and stumbled into the hallway. There! The one stupid, analog, ticking clock in her house. She wrenched it off the wall and glared at it. It was ticking at her. Loudly. Mockingly.
She turned it over in her hands contemplatively. She moved to hang it back on the wall, then abruptly changed her mind and tossed it over her shoulder; and, consequently, the banister. The loud crash of the antique clock breaking made her smile as she stomped back into her bedroom. It was ugly, and probably didn’t even have the right time on it. She wouldn’t know anymore. She flopped back down on her bed with a sigh of relief. The house was quiet but for her breathing and heartbeat. She closed her eyes.
Thump thump. Thump thump.
She almost cried.
She didn’t remember going back to sleep, but suddenly she was awake and it was 9:30 and she was late. After a frenzied bathroom visit, she ran to her closet and dove in without hesitation. The attack was uncoordinated and bloody – she took three coat hangers in the temple, and two shirts, a sandal and one sweater vest didn’t make it out alive – but she was dressed. The mad dash to the jeep didn’t help the state of her clothes, and when she fell through the door of the Dragonfly, guests were visibly frightened.
“Lorelai?” Michel’s voice was mildly surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking back Poland.” She joined him behind the front desk and put down her bag.
His eyes flickered with disgust and he went back to sorting through the mail. “Forgive me, if I do not find your banter amusing this morning. Sookie has ordered the kitchen staff not to make me an egg-white omelette and I am very disgruntled.”
“What a change from your usual, cheery disposition,” she deadpanned, and he glared.
“You have not answered my question,” he said testily.
“Oh, I’m sorry, ‘what am I doing here’?” she asked, opening an envelope. “I’m always here, I own here.”
He sighed, and rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know, but you told me last week that you would not be working today.”
She looked up from the phone bill in confusion. “I did?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I remember because you usually do not tell me when you plan to leave me here alone.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. So you can see why I am so surprised. I mean, usually, you just come and go without saying ‘Good morning, Michel’ or ‘Goodbye Michel’. And you and Sookie, always chat-chatting away in the kitchen while I am here, alone, dealing with imbeciles and people who do not know how to use cologne-”
She held up a hand to stop his rant. “Michel. Relax.” She picked up her bag and a pile of bills. “I will go into my office now.” She turned to go and he returned to writing in the reservation book.
She was almost in the hall when he spoke again. “Your shoes do not match.” She looked down and saw that he was right. “And your shirt is inside out.”
She sighed. “I think I’m going to go home,” she said without turning around.
He looked up and smiled insincerely behind her back. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me when you leave. After all, I am just humble employee-”
“Goodbye Michel.”
The door of the Dragonfly Inn closed with a bang and she walked quickly to her Jeep. Once there, she rested her head on the door. Maybe she wasn’t doing so well at acting fine, after all.
Three days later, she was an emotional wreck.
She couldn’t sleep. Every night she was kept awake by the steady rhythm of her heart, or of a tree branch tapping her window, or Babbette’s screen door rocking in the wind. Every morning was the same sluggish yet frenzied dash to work, where she would have a short, acerbic conversation with Michel before retreating to her office. To sit.
And think.
By now Gwyneth, for Gwyneth the elephant she had become the night before, was the only thing she could think of. She tried to distract herself – working, rearranging her desk, reading books from the library - even playing Solitaire (which backfired, as she had forgotten how to play. She ended up just shuffling the cards over and over. It was the one thing she could do well, because it made her look cool, and it was a great party trick in Junior High). But nothing worked.
Two days ago she had torn her office apart, looking for anything that ticked or made any noise and threw it out. She found her ancient walkman and listened to it loudly to drown out the beat of her heart but it didn’t matter. It was still there, constantly, the tick tick ticking. It was in her head, behind her eyes and in the back of her neck. It was in her toes, and her fingernails. And it was deep inside her body, a sickening timer counting down the seconds tick tick tick until the time came when she couldn’t deny it any more.
She stared at the cold coffee in front of her – she didn’t want there to be more talk than there already was – and the stupid, shiny red apple she had had to take on the way out of the kitchen. Tick tick tick tick. She picked it up and bit into it savagely. Tick tick tick tick. Apples. It figured; she did kind of have a Snow White thing going on, what with her love of conversing aloud with animals and washing dishes; they were both freaking insane.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Two weeks. That’s what he’d said, two weeks. That was four more days, which meant it had been… The past few days had all melded together in her mind, but…
She snapped. Threw down the apple, viciously, and grabbed her bag. She stormed out of her office, the door hitting the wall with a loud thud. “Michel, I’m going out,” she yelled as she stalked past the reception desk. The front doors of the Dragonfly received similar treatment to the one in her office and the garden staff looked after her retreating form in alarm. They scattered when they heard the sound of a revving engine and soon after, a cloud of dust was all that remained of Hurricane Lorelai.
Luke had long since learned to ignore the bell during the lunch rush. For one thing, it was distracting. And secondly, she never came during the lunch rush and there was something disturbingly Pavlovian about the whole thing, anyway.
Besides, she was mad at him.
He didn’t know why. He had long ago given up trying to understand her. It required too much caffeine. Not to mention research. And he had better things to do with his time than watch thousands of movies, and listen to thousands of songs just to keep up with her. Like, running a business. That came with a lot of responsibility.
She had a business too. A new business. The glimpses he had seen of her over the past three days were all of her in her car, off to the Dragonfly. He was proud of her – hadn’t he shown how proud he was at that magazine article party? He wasn’t jealous of a… business. No, that was ridiculous. He was proud.
And that’s why she hadn’t been around for a while; because she was busy running her new business. Not because she was mad at him, right?
He considered this. She had been acting strange, lately. Not just avoiding him (not that she was avoiding him necessarily), but acting a little too careful. Something was bothering her and had been since… the night of the party.
At that moment two plates came through the hatch and he had to stop thinking about it. After he had delivered the plates he went around the tables refilling coffee mugs.
She hadn’t even come in for coffee. She had for the first week, but that was always to go, and she could never stay very long. The last three days, however, she hadn’t come in at all. What did he do wrong? If Lorelai wasn’t coming in for her daily fix, then either she was crazy busy or he had done something stupid.
He couldn’t for the life of him think what.
They had been going so well. They had survived their first fight, after a fashion, and things had seemed to be really good. Really good, he thought with a grin, recalling the aftermath of the party.
“Luke!” Cesar’s shout snapped him out of it and he fixed a scowl on his face, taking the order and bringing it to the table.
God, he was being such a girl.
He was reading too much into things. Lorelai was just busy. She wouldn’t hide things from him, not anymore. He was being stupid. Yes. Everything was fine.
Clang! The bell had never sounded so angry before. He glanced up briefly- then did a double take as the door slammed and he saw Lorelai standing in front of him looking like hell on wheels.
“We need to talk,” she snapped, storming through the diner and up the stairs without as much as a glance at anyone else. The diner fell silent, the fading sounds of Lorelai stomping upstairs and the distant thud of the apartment door being flung against the wall the only noise in the whole place. Then – silence. Cesar dropped a spatula. Kirk sneezed. Luke was fairly certain that the bewildered expressions on the customers’ faces closely matched the one on his.
“Cesar, cover for me,” he said as casually as he could before following her upstairs, ignoring the sudden rush of whispers that erupted behind him then fell silent after a loud ‘shh! I can’t hear them!’. Damn town.
The sounds of cabinets being opened and shut forcibly reached him in the hall. He walked in to see her yank open a drawer with vehemence she usually reserved for her mother or nu-metal, whatever that was.
“Where the hell are your paper towels?” she demanded, slamming the drawer shut.
He walked over and pulled open the drawer next to it. “I don’t have any. They’re wasteful; cloths do the same thing and you can use them more than once.” He offered her a dishtowel and she scowled.
“You have to wash dishtowels, and they smell funny.”
“Only if you don’t wash them.”
She made a disgusted noise at the back of her throat and snatched the cloth out of his hand.
“Why do you need a towel, anyway?” he asked, annoyance creeping into his voice. She had been avoiding him for the last three days, not the other way around. He had done nothing wrong.
“Your bottled water is as misogynistic as your stick-” he smirked “-oh, don’t even go there.”
“Too late.”
She rolled her eyes and knelt down on the floor. “I tried to open it, it wouldn’t, I got mad, I hit it on the edge of the sink repeatedly, it slipped, I dropped, it spilt, all resulting in the kitchen drawer massacre of 2005.” She mopped up the water as she ranted, punctuating her words with angry swipes at the floor.
Luke sighed, grabbed another towel and knelt down to help her. “Why couldn’t you have just drunk water from the tap? It’s exactly the same.”
She groaned. “We are not having this conversation again. This conversation is the reason you even have bottled water in the first place and it lasted hours. Hours! Do you know what I could have done in those hours?” she paused here, and her strained expression as she tried to think of a preferred activity would have been comical if she hadn’t been completely serious. “…Not had that conversation! If you had just agreed to buy bottled water, none of this would have ever happened. Do not make me relive the conversation!” The last part was explosive; at least ten decibels louder than her already raised voice.
“I think the length of your rant about the conversation just eclipsed the length of the conversation itself.”
“Ha, the wit!” she exclaimed. “Luke Danes, ladies and gentlemen, he’ll be here all week! But don’t try the veal, because the wholesale slaughter of defenseless calves is heinous, not to mention the fact that it’s probably not veal, it’s just reprocessed shoes and camel meat, and in any case, red meat will kill you by the time you’re thirty-nine!” She got to her feet, threw the cloth into the sink and yanked viciously at her skirt to straighten it.
“What the hell is your problem?” Luke snapped, mirroring her movements – minus the skirt pull, of course.
She was one of the only people he had ever seen use their whole bodies to gesticulate during speech. She reacted violently, swaying herself back then forward as if reeling from a blow, her face incredulous. “My problem? I don’t have a problem! You’re the one who has to have an opinion on everything, and then share it with the world no matter how much they don’t want to hear it!” She was pacing now as he watched her in bewilderment. “Wait, no, I do have a problem; ranting Luke!”
The words left his mouth before he had time to register how idiotic they sounded; “You said you loved ranting Luke!”
“I know!” she yelled back, hands on hips. She was trembling now, and beneath their angry words she could hear it still, faster and louder.
“Then what the hell is your problem?” he demanded, voice rising with every word. Tickticktickitck. “Ever since that party you have been distant and cold, and I haven’t even seen you the last three days much less ranted at you, so tell me, Lorelai, what? What is it that’s bothering you? Because I sure as hell can’t think of anything I did wrong that night, and as far as I could tell, you couldn’t either!”
“I’m late!” she screamed, her eyes filled with wrath and tears. And there it was.
He blinked. “For what?” he asked, but she didn’t hear him.
“Two weeks, he told me-”
“What? Who told you?”
“-I’d have to wait two weeks, and I was going to. I was there, I had it in the bag, it was the home stretch and then today I realized… I’m… late.” She wasn’t even looking at him now, just at a spot on the wall behind him, eyes wide.
“But…” he was having trouble following her train of thought – more so than usual, because he was pretty sure she wasn’t following it herself.
Then, all of a sudden, her eyes were on him like lasers and he jolted at the intensity. “And the thing is I’m never late, Luke. Never.”
“What do you mean?” he asked stupidly. “You’re always…” He paused. It clicked. His head tilted. His eyes widened. “Oh.”
She would have laughed if this weren’t too damned scary. As it was she gave a strangled, half-gasped “Yeah.”
She knew his every mood like a favourite movie, and when he shifted his stance and unconsciously hunched his head and neck forward, she recognized ‘Super Luke – now with toolbox and more problem solving capabilities.’ “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, right?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. “I mean, it doesn’t have to mean that you’re…” he paused here, eyes unfocused, before snapping back to reality. “It could be just stress, right? Sometimes that can mean you’re just stressed-”
“No,” she replied forcefully. “Not for me. For me, stress just brings it on; because the stress just isn’t stressful enough. In fact, give me money problems, my mother, or any situation that requires pale clothing and I’ll be surfing down that crimson wave. Why did you think I was so crabby on the Fridays the car payments were due?”
He blinked, and shook his head to rid himself of the strange thoughts and mental images she had just given him. “B- but there must have been some times when you were late! Come on, think.”
She looked up and frowned. “Luke-”
“Think!”
She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Ok, there was one time,” she admitted.
He sighed in relief. “Okay, good. How late were you then?”
“Nine months.”
“Lorelai!”
“What?” she asked, throwing her arms out. “That’s the only time I remember! All the triggers were there,” she ticked them off on her fingers, “my mother, mo- ok, not lack of money, but cotillion is a rich people thing, so money, giant white dress and… nothing. That’s actually when I put it all together.”
Luke looked defeated. Numbly, he walked to the table, pulled out a chair and sat on it. “Wow. So… you’re never late?”
She came over and pulled out the chair opposite him. “Sorry,” she sighed.
They were silent for a few moments. Then Luke raised his head. “That doesn’t explain why you’ve been avoiding me. I mean, you only realized today…”
She shook her head. “I thought I might be as soon as I woke up after… the party,” she admitted. “Because we didn’t exactly-”
“Oh, God, you’re right,” he broke in dazedly.
“And then there was the apple,” she continued.
“Apple?” he asked in confusion. “You hate apples. You hate all fruit in general – you seem to hate nutrition in general-”
“Hey, Jan McCracken, let me finish,” she snapped. He complied. “I don’t normally desire to eat fruit, yes, but when I was pregnant with Rory, I suddenly required five apples a day to perform basic human functions. Like standing, and walking and reaching for the remote.”
He considered this. “Huh,” he said after a while. “Makes sense, I guess.”
She frowned. “How?” she asked.
“Well, when you’re pregnant, you’re not supposed to drink caffeine, right?” he asked. “Not that that stopped you-”
“Hey, I may be a junkie, but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” she snapped. “I drank decaf.” She paused and added, under her breath, “Most of the time.”
He rolled his eyes. “I never said you were an idiot.”
“Well, you implied it,” she replied. “But continue. Apples.”
“Right, apples are actually more effective at waking you up than coffee is,” he said.
“You lie!” she gasped.
“Nope,” he replied. “It’s a proven fact.”
“Huh,” was all she said before they once again lapsed into silence.
Well, Lorelai thought in exasperation. This is going fantastically. None of the scenarios she had come up with on the drive over had ended with them discussing the virtues of apples. In her mind, Luke had either run away in terror, sat in stone-cold silence, or – and this was the one she was most afraid of – proposed. None of them went like this; the yelling, the snippiness, her inexplicable remembrance of Jan McCracken. In none of her scenarios were both of them incapable of saying that she might be pregnant.
Wow.
Just, wow. He had never- ok, not never, but—whoa. This was just… this was… damn. A baby. His. His baby. He felt his eyes go wide and his lips curve in a smile. He felt… well, he was freaking terrified, actually, but on another level he felt… content. Right. Hell, he was feeling like the king of the world.
Lorelai saw him smile and her heart skipped a beat. “What?” she asked warily.
He looked up and tried to drop the giddy, slightly cocky grin. He failed. “Nothing,” he replied, his happiness evident in his voice. “I’m just relieved.”
“Relieved?” she cried – well, screeched was more like it.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I mean, this explains why you’ve been so weird lately. I’m glad you told me.”
“Okay,” she said, slightly confused. “Well… good. I guess.”
He had given up trying not to smile now. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner, though?” he asked. “It would have saved the customers from a lot of burnt meals.”
“I was gonna wait until after I took a test,” she answered, absently tracing patterns on the tabletop. “I didn’t want to have to bring it up if I wasn’t sure, but then I realized… well, you know.”
He nodded absently, smiling and picturing a tiny little girl in a baseball uniform. Then the full implication of her answer hit him and he felt the smile suddenly drop from his face. “Wait,” he began. “What did you say?”
“I said I wanted to wait until I took a test-”
“And if that test was negative,” he interrupted, his voice growing louder again, “what would you have done?”
She looked perplexed. “I don’t know-”
“Would you have told me?” he demanded, despite the sinking feeling in his gut telling him he already knew the answer.
“Luke…” she said pleadingly. He didn’t respond. “I don’t know…” she admitted. “Probably not.”
He slammed his hands down on the table and she flinched. “Great,” he snapped. “Just great.”
“Luke…” Her voice was half questioning and half pleading but he wasn’t listening.
“What if you weren’t late, huh, Lorelai? If you had gotten your period yesterday, or whenever the hell you’re supposed to, would you have told me about this?”
She knew what she was supposed to say. She was supposed to say ‘of course, Luke’, but… “No,” she replied, and her frankness startled them both.
He pushed himself off his chair and walked restlessly to the sink. Breathing heavily, he put both hands on the sink’s edge and leant there, trying to calm himself.
“Luke?” she asked hesitantly. “I-”
He just shook his head and kept his gaze firmly on the faucet. He felt… well, now he didn’t know what he felt. Angry – yep, there was definitely anger there. Hurt. Disbelief. The emotions rushed through him in waves, out from the heart and into his fingertips. “Damnit.” It was soft at first. The feeling hit him again. “Damnit!”
She watched him, apprehensively at first. At his first ‘damnit’ she flinched, but annoyance was starting to creep in. No, it had moved in, unpacked all its stuff, taken off its pants and sat down on the couch with a box of Cheezles.
“Damnit!”
“What?” she snapped, eyes flashing dangerously. (Metaphorically speaking as, despite potential radioactive gutters, she had no super powers to speak of.) “Because as touching and eloquent as this is, Tarzan, I need more words over here!”
He spun around to glare at her. “Why not?” he demanded angrily, the force of his question causing his entire body to shudder.
“I already told you,” she returned hotly. “I didn’t want to say anything unless I was sure.”
She could always tell when Luke was really mad – well, anyone could. He would move as he was talking, lean over and shake his whole body with every word, or reach up and clutch at his cap - or head, but the two were practically fused together anyway, so the distinction wasn’t necessary.
He was really mad now. “This is unbelievable,” he seethed.
“Oh yeah,” she interrupted before he got up to speed. “It’s so ‘unbelievable’ that I didn’t want to have to have this conversation. Excuse me for trying to spare you this emotional trauma!”
“But you don’t have to spare me!” he said, emphasizing each word as though he were explaining a point to a very slow person. She bristled. “I’m a big boy, Lorelai-” she snickered involuntarily “- I don’t need you to protect me! I’m not going to run away just because you might be...” and here it was that his voice caught in his throat.
“Pregnant,” she supplied acidly. “Not saying it doesn’t make it any less real.”
He glared. “According to you, that’s exactly what it does!” She looked down at the table, the wind taken out of her argument. He sighed. “We’re in this together, Lorelai,” he said, less angry now. “We can’t keep things from each other, or this will never work!”
She exhaled loudly. “I know that,” she replied, her tone frustrated. This wasn’t going any way she wanted it to. “It’s just… I wanted…”
“What?” he asked gently, recognising her struggle.
She sighed again. “I wanted it to be different this time,” she admitted, her voice catching in her throat.
He came over to her then, and knelt in front of her. He reached out to touch her hair and she flinched; even after a week and a half of no contact it was still too soon. His hand on her cheek brought the situation into a much deeper sense of reality – one that she had been trying desperately not to fall into. She shuddered, muscles relaxing until she was leaning into his palm and struggling not to break down right there. “Lorelai,” he said softly, and she bit her lip. Her mind actually felt as though it were melting. “It is different,” he was saying. “It couldn’t be more different.”
“I-” God, what had made that noise? Was that her? Her voice – so weak, so broken – had never sounded so alien to her before. His thumb brushed her cheek, leaving a trail of moisture – she was crying?
“Shh, it’s going to be okay.”
She wished she could believe him.
“I’m not going anywhere, Lorelai, I promise. I’m not Christopher-”
“No!” that strange, shattered voice cried out, and she realised that she was on her feet again. She blinked. “No,” she repeated, only marginally less hysterically. “That’s not what I- uch, you don’t understand!”
He got to his feet, looking bewildered. “I’m trying as hard as I can, here, Lorelai!” he replied angrily, “You’re right, I don’t understand; I don’t understand a damn thing about this situation, but I am trying so hard, and you’re not helping!”
“I’m trying!” Lorelai cried, “It’s just, god, I- I… Why can’t I say this?!” Her foot stamped the ground. Reflexively, her hands went to her forehead before raking through her hair and coming back to press against her cheeks. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I just – god, this is terrible, but I can’t help… I can’t help thinking that this will ruin everything.”
He was beginning to feel like a broken record. “Lorelai, I’m not him, I’m not going anywhe-”
“God!” she cried out, “That’s not what I’m afraid of! I know you won’t run away from this! I know you’re not Christopher, and I know you’ll be a great dad, it’s just, it was supposed to be different this time!” Her eyes were wide, begging him to understand, and he finally felt as though he were at least at the right station, if not the correct platform for her train of thought.
“I just always thought that when I had a second kid it would be planned,” she laughed shortly. Bitterly. “I thought it would be somewhere, far in the future, I mean, not too far because, let’s face it, this immaturity thing I’ve got going on is getting more and more ridiculous, but later. Not now. Not when I’m starting a business, not when I’ve just started a new relationship, not when I’ve finally started to feel like I’m a woman, not just a single mother…” she blinked back tears. “I know it sounds so incredibly selfish, even for me, but lately… I’ve been feeling like I’m finally free.”
Luke watched her; almost afraid of breathing too loudly and interrupting a confession that was obviously a long time in coming.
“I love Rory,” she continued, “with all my heart, but she doesn’t need me anymore. I expected that to hurt – and it did, it hurt like hell when I realised it, but it’s also so liberating, Luke. And I wanted to enjoy that feeling, I mean, I feel like I deserve it,” her forehead crumpled, and she sat down hard on the edge of a chair.
“Everything was going so well; the inn, you and me… and now-” a sob escaped her “-and now this has come out of nowhere, and I’m scared of it, and I’m scared of me, and I’m scared that you’ll propose and that I’ll accept because I’m so damn terrified, and when you do, I’ll spend the rest of our lives wondering whether you asked because you felt like you had to, and it was the right thing to do instead of asking because-” she choked, and pressed a hand into her eyes, “because you love me, and I- I’m just so-”
“Hey…!” He was at her side now, arms around her, cursing himself for not moving sooner. She collapsed onto him, sobbing into his shoulder, her hands weakly clutching at his shirt.
“And I know that’s unfair,” she continued brokenly, “and I’m sorry, but it’s too soon, Luke, it’s too soon! I hadn’t, this never even oc-occurred to me-”
“Shh, shh,” he whispered – whether to calm her down or make her stop talking he didn’t know. He had known all this, but knowing didn’t mean accepting, and the pain and disappointment was rubbing him raw. He grimaced; he’d broken his rule again. It hurt.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered into his chest. He kissed the top of her head and sighed. His hand rubbed circles on her back as her sobs gradually receded until she was only trembling slightly in his arms. She lifted her head and Luke tried not to flinch at how red and puffy her eyes were. She attempted a smile when she saw him kneeling on the hard, wooden floor in front of her. “I’m sorry, you must be so uncomfortable.”
“Nah,” he said offhandedly, shifting his weight. A sharp pain shot up his left leg. “Ow, yeah, actually.”
She laughed – a waterlogged sound, but a laugh nonetheless. “C’mon, let’s go sit on the bed.”
She stood shakily, shivering from the absence of his body heat, and held out a hand to pull him up. He pushed himself up using the chair, taking her hand at the last second. Hand in hand they walked over to his bed, Luke wincing at the ache in his knees. Lorelai dropped his hand and flopped backwards onto the bed with a sigh. She sat up again almost immediately, shrugged off her overcoat and fell back again, eyes closed. Luke perched beside her on the very end of the mattress.
“Hey,” Lorelai said suddenly, eyes still closed. “Who’s taking care of the diner?”
Luke shrugged. “Cesar, I guess,” he replied.
“I must have looked like a crazy person down there,” she reflected dryly.
“No different to anyone else in this damn town,” he answered flatly – ‘deadpan’ only applied when the speaker was intending their answer to be humorous.
She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said softly and there was no mistaking the utter sincerity in her voice.
He smiled bitterly and flopped backwards to land beside her, exhaling loudly. “Don’t be.” He made it sound like the simplest thing in the world. She moved closer to him and he wrapped an arm around her waist. She was rapidly falling asleep, he observed. She looked so vulnerable; she was, he realized with surprise. Lorelai Gilmore was vulnerable and scared, and it was his fault. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, and she whimpered. That sound seared through his heart – the words ‘I love you’ rose to his tongue, and died there.
It was too soon.
Something was missing. Lorelai frowned. She was exhausted; she was asleep and still she was tired. Or, at least, she had been asleep. She groaned and tried to burrow further into the mattress. It resisted. Damn box-spring. Moaning, this time, she rolled over, expecting to come up against a Luke-Barrier.
She almost fell off the bed.
Blearily, she opened her eyes. The lights were on, making the twilight outside look later than it actually was. Rubbing still-sore eyes, she called out groggily, “Luke?”
Slight movement at the table caught her eye. A hand flew to her chest. “Gah! Luke, you scared me!” she gasped, breathing heavily. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged awkwardly, looking everywhere but at her. “Waiting for you to wake up.”
She smiled sleepily. “Where did you go?” she asked, noticing a plastic bag on the table in front of him.
“Woodbury.”
“Why?” she asked, sitting up and stretching.
“Well, I figured you didn’t want Taylor calling up a price check on pregnancy tests on double-coupon day.”
She paused mid-stretch. “Oh,” she said, dumbfounded. “You drove all the way to Woodbury to get me a pregnancy test.” Her brain felt like mush. There was no other way to describe it.
He looked down at the table. “Yeah,” he cleared his throat nervously. “I just thought it’d be a good idea… you know, to make sure before the town start thinking that one of us is dying.”
“What?” she asked incredulously.
“Kirk was in the diner when I went downstairs.”
“Ah,” she replied. “Ok.”
“You don’t have to do it now,” Luke said hurriedly. “It’s probably better that you wait like that guy told you to…”
“No, I want to,” she hastened to reply. “I don’t think I can wait any longer… Besides, it’s basically been two weeks… It should be fine.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, attempting to be nonchalant. He could feel adrenaline begin to shoot through his veins.
“And I can always take another test later…” she added, trying to hide how her hands were shaking. She cleared her throat. “Can I have-”
“Oh!” Luke cried, jumping up from table and fumbling for the box. “Right, here,” he said, handing her the box.
“Thanks,” she replied, her voice shaking now. She got up slowly and disappeared into the bathroom. The door shut behind her with a snap, and Luke let out a huge breath. Soon they would know.
Apparently ‘soon’ was a relative term. Impatiently, Luke checked his watch. Twelve minutes had passed. How long did these things take? He sucked in a breath and blew out his cheeks exhaling. He tapped his watch. He tapped his foot.
He was starting to get really worried.
Fourteen minutes. He heard a noise from the bathroom. “Lorelai?”
No reply.
Fifteen minutes.
He walked over to the bathroom door and raised a fist to knock. He paused. Abruptly he turned and sat on the edge of the bed. He exhaled loudly again, fidgeting with the zipper on his jacket. He hadn’t bothered to take it off. He stared at the ceiling, resolving to let her take her own time to do it. He checked his watch. Seventeen minutes.
He’d wait three more minutes, and then he’d knock.
Eighteen minutes. Eighteen and a half.
“Oh, for the love of-” He got up jerkily and knocked on the door. “Lorelai?” he called. There was a stifled sob in reply. He knocked again, softer this time. “Lorelai?”
The door began to open and he stepped back, heart in his throat. “Sorry,” she whispered, and he knew it was for more than just keeping him waiting. It was the anguished, sheepish, regretful apology of a humiliated woman. It was the ‘I’m sorry I freaked out and said all those things, and dangled something you wanted in front of your face before I even checked the date today’ sorry. It was the ‘I’m an idiot, and I may have ruined this, and now I have to face the consequences for the rest of my life’ sorry.
There were tears streaming down her face, and, blood rushing in his ears, he knew the answer even before she handed him the box and the stick.
It was negative.
Timeline: Semi-AU 5.21, Blame Booze and Melville.
And it is LONG, so I'm putting it in Spoiler text. Which might not be working. Hmm.
EDIT: Yeah, it's not working. So, you'll just have to scroll down if you don't want to read it.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything. I almost didn't even own the disclaimer; I was considering stealing the one off Black, White and Read. I make no money off the use of Gilmore Girls characters and situations, or 'Hide and Seek' by Imogen Heap, which is sad, because I would like money. No copyright infringement intended. And I totally stole that off BWR's disclaimer. So I disclaim that too.
Hide and Seek
It had been a week and a half.
And Lorelai Gilmore was not, by any means, a patient person.
It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t wait for something (coffee, food, an answer) just that she didn’t want to. Waiting made her anxious. She would fidget. Babble. Muse about the logistics of David Bowie’s Labyrinth costume, and socks and freakishly dark eyebrows until she thought she must be insane.
Waiting made her crazy. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t work; she couldn’t concentrate on anything but the damn pink elephant in the room. She had named this one Gwyneth.
God, she needed coffee.
…
It had been easy at first; the years spent in the Gilmore household - lying, denying, compartmentalizing - had never been put to better use. She should have won a frigging Oscar, she acted so normal those first five days…
At least after the brief, initial freak-out. She still wasn’t sure if Rory had believed that nothing was wrong but Sookie had timed her journey around the mountain very well. It had been doubly successful in getting Rory off her back, and getting it out of her mind. Well, not entirely but it was a very good distraction. She spent her entire phone call to Rory talking about Sookie, and later, Martha, and she acted so normal that Rory was convinced she did just ‘sleep funny’.
She was so good at pretending to be fine that she almost convinced herself.
…
One am on Day Seven, she woke up in a panic. Tick tick tick tick. What the hell was that? She rolled over and looked at her alarm. ‘1:07’ it flashed at her. Silently. It was digital. Tick tick tick tick. She sat up and scanned the room groggily. For what, (a bomb?) she had no clue except… one am. Tick. Tick. Tick. Groaning, she rolled off the bed and stumbled into the hallway. There! The one stupid, analog, ticking clock in her house. She wrenched it off the wall and glared at it. It was ticking at her. Loudly. Mockingly.
She turned it over in her hands contemplatively. She moved to hang it back on the wall, then abruptly changed her mind and tossed it over her shoulder; and, consequently, the banister. The loud crash of the antique clock breaking made her smile as she stomped back into her bedroom. It was ugly, and probably didn’t even have the right time on it. She wouldn’t know anymore. She flopped back down on her bed with a sigh of relief. The house was quiet but for her breathing and heartbeat. She closed her eyes.
Thump thump. Thump thump.
She almost cried.
…
She didn’t remember going back to sleep, but suddenly she was awake and it was 9:30 and she was late. After a frenzied bathroom visit, she ran to her closet and dove in without hesitation. The attack was uncoordinated and bloody – she took three coat hangers in the temple, and two shirts, a sandal and one sweater vest didn’t make it out alive – but she was dressed. The mad dash to the jeep didn’t help the state of her clothes, and when she fell through the door of the Dragonfly, guests were visibly frightened.
“Lorelai?” Michel’s voice was mildly surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking back Poland.” She joined him behind the front desk and put down her bag.
His eyes flickered with disgust and he went back to sorting through the mail. “Forgive me, if I do not find your banter amusing this morning. Sookie has ordered the kitchen staff not to make me an egg-white omelette and I am very disgruntled.”
“What a change from your usual, cheery disposition,” she deadpanned, and he glared.
“You have not answered my question,” he said testily.
“Oh, I’m sorry, ‘what am I doing here’?” she asked, opening an envelope. “I’m always here, I own here.”
He sighed, and rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know, but you told me last week that you would not be working today.”
She looked up from the phone bill in confusion. “I did?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I remember because you usually do not tell me when you plan to leave me here alone.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. So you can see why I am so surprised. I mean, usually, you just come and go without saying ‘Good morning, Michel’ or ‘Goodbye Michel’. And you and Sookie, always chat-chatting away in the kitchen while I am here, alone, dealing with imbeciles and people who do not know how to use cologne-”
She held up a hand to stop his rant. “Michel. Relax.” She picked up her bag and a pile of bills. “I will go into my office now.” She turned to go and he returned to writing in the reservation book.
She was almost in the hall when he spoke again. “Your shoes do not match.” She looked down and saw that he was right. “And your shirt is inside out.”
She sighed. “I think I’m going to go home,” she said without turning around.
He looked up and smiled insincerely behind her back. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me when you leave. After all, I am just humble employee-”
“Goodbye Michel.”
The door of the Dragonfly Inn closed with a bang and she walked quickly to her Jeep. Once there, she rested her head on the door. Maybe she wasn’t doing so well at acting fine, after all.
…
Three days later, she was an emotional wreck.
She couldn’t sleep. Every night she was kept awake by the steady rhythm of her heart, or of a tree branch tapping her window, or Babbette’s screen door rocking in the wind. Every morning was the same sluggish yet frenzied dash to work, where she would have a short, acerbic conversation with Michel before retreating to her office. To sit.
And think.
By now Gwyneth, for Gwyneth the elephant she had become the night before, was the only thing she could think of. She tried to distract herself – working, rearranging her desk, reading books from the library - even playing Solitaire (which backfired, as she had forgotten how to play. She ended up just shuffling the cards over and over. It was the one thing she could do well, because it made her look cool, and it was a great party trick in Junior High). But nothing worked.
Two days ago she had torn her office apart, looking for anything that ticked or made any noise and threw it out. She found her ancient walkman and listened to it loudly to drown out the beat of her heart but it didn’t matter. It was still there, constantly, the tick tick ticking. It was in her head, behind her eyes and in the back of her neck. It was in her toes, and her fingernails. And it was deep inside her body, a sickening timer counting down the seconds tick tick tick until the time came when she couldn’t deny it any more.
She stared at the cold coffee in front of her – she didn’t want there to be more talk than there already was – and the stupid, shiny red apple she had had to take on the way out of the kitchen. Tick tick tick tick. She picked it up and bit into it savagely. Tick tick tick tick. Apples. It figured; she did kind of have a Snow White thing going on, what with her love of conversing aloud with animals and washing dishes; they were both freaking insane.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Two weeks. That’s what he’d said, two weeks. That was four more days, which meant it had been… The past few days had all melded together in her mind, but…
She snapped. Threw down the apple, viciously, and grabbed her bag. She stormed out of her office, the door hitting the wall with a loud thud. “Michel, I’m going out,” she yelled as she stalked past the reception desk. The front doors of the Dragonfly received similar treatment to the one in her office and the garden staff looked after her retreating form in alarm. They scattered when they heard the sound of a revving engine and soon after, a cloud of dust was all that remained of Hurricane Lorelai.
…
Luke had long since learned to ignore the bell during the lunch rush. For one thing, it was distracting. And secondly, she never came during the lunch rush and there was something disturbingly Pavlovian about the whole thing, anyway.
Besides, she was mad at him.
He didn’t know why. He had long ago given up trying to understand her. It required too much caffeine. Not to mention research. And he had better things to do with his time than watch thousands of movies, and listen to thousands of songs just to keep up with her. Like, running a business. That came with a lot of responsibility.
She had a business too. A new business. The glimpses he had seen of her over the past three days were all of her in her car, off to the Dragonfly. He was proud of her – hadn’t he shown how proud he was at that magazine article party? He wasn’t jealous of a… business. No, that was ridiculous. He was proud.
And that’s why she hadn’t been around for a while; because she was busy running her new business. Not because she was mad at him, right?
He considered this. She had been acting strange, lately. Not just avoiding him (not that she was avoiding him necessarily), but acting a little too careful. Something was bothering her and had been since… the night of the party.
At that moment two plates came through the hatch and he had to stop thinking about it. After he had delivered the plates he went around the tables refilling coffee mugs.
She hadn’t even come in for coffee. She had for the first week, but that was always to go, and she could never stay very long. The last three days, however, she hadn’t come in at all. What did he do wrong? If Lorelai wasn’t coming in for her daily fix, then either she was crazy busy or he had done something stupid.
He couldn’t for the life of him think what.
They had been going so well. They had survived their first fight, after a fashion, and things had seemed to be really good. Really good, he thought with a grin, recalling the aftermath of the party.
“Luke!” Cesar’s shout snapped him out of it and he fixed a scowl on his face, taking the order and bringing it to the table.
God, he was being such a girl.
He was reading too much into things. Lorelai was just busy. She wouldn’t hide things from him, not anymore. He was being stupid. Yes. Everything was fine.
Clang! The bell had never sounded so angry before. He glanced up briefly- then did a double take as the door slammed and he saw Lorelai standing in front of him looking like hell on wheels.
“We need to talk,” she snapped, storming through the diner and up the stairs without as much as a glance at anyone else. The diner fell silent, the fading sounds of Lorelai stomping upstairs and the distant thud of the apartment door being flung against the wall the only noise in the whole place. Then – silence. Cesar dropped a spatula. Kirk sneezed. Luke was fairly certain that the bewildered expressions on the customers’ faces closely matched the one on his.
“Cesar, cover for me,” he said as casually as he could before following her upstairs, ignoring the sudden rush of whispers that erupted behind him then fell silent after a loud ‘shh! I can’t hear them!’. Damn town.
The sounds of cabinets being opened and shut forcibly reached him in the hall. He walked in to see her yank open a drawer with vehemence she usually reserved for her mother or nu-metal, whatever that was.
“Where the hell are your paper towels?” she demanded, slamming the drawer shut.
He walked over and pulled open the drawer next to it. “I don’t have any. They’re wasteful; cloths do the same thing and you can use them more than once.” He offered her a dishtowel and she scowled.
“You have to wash dishtowels, and they smell funny.”
“Only if you don’t wash them.”
She made a disgusted noise at the back of her throat and snatched the cloth out of his hand.
“Why do you need a towel, anyway?” he asked, annoyance creeping into his voice. She had been avoiding him for the last three days, not the other way around. He had done nothing wrong.
“Your bottled water is as misogynistic as your stick-” he smirked “-oh, don’t even go there.”
“Too late.”
She rolled her eyes and knelt down on the floor. “I tried to open it, it wouldn’t, I got mad, I hit it on the edge of the sink repeatedly, it slipped, I dropped, it spilt, all resulting in the kitchen drawer massacre of 2005.” She mopped up the water as she ranted, punctuating her words with angry swipes at the floor.
Luke sighed, grabbed another towel and knelt down to help her. “Why couldn’t you have just drunk water from the tap? It’s exactly the same.”
She groaned. “We are not having this conversation again. This conversation is the reason you even have bottled water in the first place and it lasted hours. Hours! Do you know what I could have done in those hours?” she paused here, and her strained expression as she tried to think of a preferred activity would have been comical if she hadn’t been completely serious. “…Not had that conversation! If you had just agreed to buy bottled water, none of this would have ever happened. Do not make me relive the conversation!” The last part was explosive; at least ten decibels louder than her already raised voice.
“I think the length of your rant about the conversation just eclipsed the length of the conversation itself.”
“Ha, the wit!” she exclaimed. “Luke Danes, ladies and gentlemen, he’ll be here all week! But don’t try the veal, because the wholesale slaughter of defenseless calves is heinous, not to mention the fact that it’s probably not veal, it’s just reprocessed shoes and camel meat, and in any case, red meat will kill you by the time you’re thirty-nine!” She got to her feet, threw the cloth into the sink and yanked viciously at her skirt to straighten it.
“What the hell is your problem?” Luke snapped, mirroring her movements – minus the skirt pull, of course.
She was one of the only people he had ever seen use their whole bodies to gesticulate during speech. She reacted violently, swaying herself back then forward as if reeling from a blow, her face incredulous. “My problem? I don’t have a problem! You’re the one who has to have an opinion on everything, and then share it with the world no matter how much they don’t want to hear it!” She was pacing now as he watched her in bewilderment. “Wait, no, I do have a problem; ranting Luke!”
The words left his mouth before he had time to register how idiotic they sounded; “You said you loved ranting Luke!”
“I know!” she yelled back, hands on hips. She was trembling now, and beneath their angry words she could hear it still, faster and louder.
“Then what the hell is your problem?” he demanded, voice rising with every word. Tickticktickitck. “Ever since that party you have been distant and cold, and I haven’t even seen you the last three days much less ranted at you, so tell me, Lorelai, what? What is it that’s bothering you? Because I sure as hell can’t think of anything I did wrong that night, and as far as I could tell, you couldn’t either!”
“I’m late!” she screamed, her eyes filled with wrath and tears. And there it was.
He blinked. “For what?” he asked, but she didn’t hear him.
“Two weeks, he told me-”
“What? Who told you?”
“-I’d have to wait two weeks, and I was going to. I was there, I had it in the bag, it was the home stretch and then today I realized… I’m… late.” She wasn’t even looking at him now, just at a spot on the wall behind him, eyes wide.
“But…” he was having trouble following her train of thought – more so than usual, because he was pretty sure she wasn’t following it herself.
Then, all of a sudden, her eyes were on him like lasers and he jolted at the intensity. “And the thing is I’m never late, Luke. Never.”
“What do you mean?” he asked stupidly. “You’re always…” He paused. It clicked. His head tilted. His eyes widened. “Oh.”
She would have laughed if this weren’t too damned scary. As it was she gave a strangled, half-gasped “Yeah.”
She knew his every mood like a favourite movie, and when he shifted his stance and unconsciously hunched his head and neck forward, she recognized ‘Super Luke – now with toolbox and more problem solving capabilities.’ “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, right?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. “I mean, it doesn’t have to mean that you’re…” he paused here, eyes unfocused, before snapping back to reality. “It could be just stress, right? Sometimes that can mean you’re just stressed-”
“No,” she replied forcefully. “Not for me. For me, stress just brings it on; because the stress just isn’t stressful enough. In fact, give me money problems, my mother, or any situation that requires pale clothing and I’ll be surfing down that crimson wave. Why did you think I was so crabby on the Fridays the car payments were due?”
He blinked, and shook his head to rid himself of the strange thoughts and mental images she had just given him. “B- but there must have been some times when you were late! Come on, think.”
She looked up and frowned. “Luke-”
“Think!”
She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Ok, there was one time,” she admitted.
He sighed in relief. “Okay, good. How late were you then?”
“Nine months.”
“Lorelai!”
“What?” she asked, throwing her arms out. “That’s the only time I remember! All the triggers were there,” she ticked them off on her fingers, “my mother, mo- ok, not lack of money, but cotillion is a rich people thing, so money, giant white dress and… nothing. That’s actually when I put it all together.”
Luke looked defeated. Numbly, he walked to the table, pulled out a chair and sat on it. “Wow. So… you’re never late?”
She came over and pulled out the chair opposite him. “Sorry,” she sighed.
They were silent for a few moments. Then Luke raised his head. “That doesn’t explain why you’ve been avoiding me. I mean, you only realized today…”
She shook her head. “I thought I might be as soon as I woke up after… the party,” she admitted. “Because we didn’t exactly-”
“Oh, God, you’re right,” he broke in dazedly.
“And then there was the apple,” she continued.
“Apple?” he asked in confusion. “You hate apples. You hate all fruit in general – you seem to hate nutrition in general-”
“Hey, Jan McCracken, let me finish,” she snapped. He complied. “I don’t normally desire to eat fruit, yes, but when I was pregnant with Rory, I suddenly required five apples a day to perform basic human functions. Like standing, and walking and reaching for the remote.”
He considered this. “Huh,” he said after a while. “Makes sense, I guess.”
She frowned. “How?” she asked.
“Well, when you’re pregnant, you’re not supposed to drink caffeine, right?” he asked. “Not that that stopped you-”
“Hey, I may be a junkie, but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” she snapped. “I drank decaf.” She paused and added, under her breath, “Most of the time.”
He rolled his eyes. “I never said you were an idiot.”
“Well, you implied it,” she replied. “But continue. Apples.”
“Right, apples are actually more effective at waking you up than coffee is,” he said.
“You lie!” she gasped.
“Nope,” he replied. “It’s a proven fact.”
“Huh,” was all she said before they once again lapsed into silence.
Well, Lorelai thought in exasperation. This is going fantastically. None of the scenarios she had come up with on the drive over had ended with them discussing the virtues of apples. In her mind, Luke had either run away in terror, sat in stone-cold silence, or – and this was the one she was most afraid of – proposed. None of them went like this; the yelling, the snippiness, her inexplicable remembrance of Jan McCracken. In none of her scenarios were both of them incapable of saying that she might be pregnant.
Wow.
Just, wow. He had never- ok, not never, but—whoa. This was just… this was… damn. A baby. His. His baby. He felt his eyes go wide and his lips curve in a smile. He felt… well, he was freaking terrified, actually, but on another level he felt… content. Right. Hell, he was feeling like the king of the world.
Lorelai saw him smile and her heart skipped a beat. “What?” she asked warily.
He looked up and tried to drop the giddy, slightly cocky grin. He failed. “Nothing,” he replied, his happiness evident in his voice. “I’m just relieved.”
“Relieved?” she cried – well, screeched was more like it.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I mean, this explains why you’ve been so weird lately. I’m glad you told me.”
“Okay,” she said, slightly confused. “Well… good. I guess.”
He had given up trying not to smile now. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner, though?” he asked. “It would have saved the customers from a lot of burnt meals.”
“I was gonna wait until after I took a test,” she answered, absently tracing patterns on the tabletop. “I didn’t want to have to bring it up if I wasn’t sure, but then I realized… well, you know.”
He nodded absently, smiling and picturing a tiny little girl in a baseball uniform. Then the full implication of her answer hit him and he felt the smile suddenly drop from his face. “Wait,” he began. “What did you say?”
“I said I wanted to wait until I took a test-”
“And if that test was negative,” he interrupted, his voice growing louder again, “what would you have done?”
She looked perplexed. “I don’t know-”
“Would you have told me?” he demanded, despite the sinking feeling in his gut telling him he already knew the answer.
“Luke…” she said pleadingly. He didn’t respond. “I don’t know…” she admitted. “Probably not.”
He slammed his hands down on the table and she flinched. “Great,” he snapped. “Just great.”
“Luke…” Her voice was half questioning and half pleading but he wasn’t listening.
“What if you weren’t late, huh, Lorelai? If you had gotten your period yesterday, or whenever the hell you’re supposed to, would you have told me about this?”
She knew what she was supposed to say. She was supposed to say ‘of course, Luke’, but… “No,” she replied, and her frankness startled them both.
He pushed himself off his chair and walked restlessly to the sink. Breathing heavily, he put both hands on the sink’s edge and leant there, trying to calm himself.
“Luke?” she asked hesitantly. “I-”
He just shook his head and kept his gaze firmly on the faucet. He felt… well, now he didn’t know what he felt. Angry – yep, there was definitely anger there. Hurt. Disbelief. The emotions rushed through him in waves, out from the heart and into his fingertips. “Damnit.” It was soft at first. The feeling hit him again. “Damnit!”
She watched him, apprehensively at first. At his first ‘damnit’ she flinched, but annoyance was starting to creep in. No, it had moved in, unpacked all its stuff, taken off its pants and sat down on the couch with a box of Cheezles.
“Damnit!”
“What?” she snapped, eyes flashing dangerously. (Metaphorically speaking as, despite potential radioactive gutters, she had no super powers to speak of.) “Because as touching and eloquent as this is, Tarzan, I need more words over here!”
He spun around to glare at her. “Why not?” he demanded angrily, the force of his question causing his entire body to shudder.
“I already told you,” she returned hotly. “I didn’t want to say anything unless I was sure.”
She could always tell when Luke was really mad – well, anyone could. He would move as he was talking, lean over and shake his whole body with every word, or reach up and clutch at his cap - or head, but the two were practically fused together anyway, so the distinction wasn’t necessary.
He was really mad now. “This is unbelievable,” he seethed.
“Oh yeah,” she interrupted before he got up to speed. “It’s so ‘unbelievable’ that I didn’t want to have to have this conversation. Excuse me for trying to spare you this emotional trauma!”
“But you don’t have to spare me!” he said, emphasizing each word as though he were explaining a point to a very slow person. She bristled. “I’m a big boy, Lorelai-” she snickered involuntarily “- I don’t need you to protect me! I’m not going to run away just because you might be...” and here it was that his voice caught in his throat.
“Pregnant,” she supplied acidly. “Not saying it doesn’t make it any less real.”
He glared. “According to you, that’s exactly what it does!” She looked down at the table, the wind taken out of her argument. He sighed. “We’re in this together, Lorelai,” he said, less angry now. “We can’t keep things from each other, or this will never work!”
She exhaled loudly. “I know that,” she replied, her tone frustrated. This wasn’t going any way she wanted it to. “It’s just… I wanted…”
“What?” he asked gently, recognising her struggle.
She sighed again. “I wanted it to be different this time,” she admitted, her voice catching in her throat.
He came over to her then, and knelt in front of her. He reached out to touch her hair and she flinched; even after a week and a half of no contact it was still too soon. His hand on her cheek brought the situation into a much deeper sense of reality – one that she had been trying desperately not to fall into. She shuddered, muscles relaxing until she was leaning into his palm and struggling not to break down right there. “Lorelai,” he said softly, and she bit her lip. Her mind actually felt as though it were melting. “It is different,” he was saying. “It couldn’t be more different.”
“I-” God, what had made that noise? Was that her? Her voice – so weak, so broken – had never sounded so alien to her before. His thumb brushed her cheek, leaving a trail of moisture – she was crying?
“Shh, it’s going to be okay.”
She wished she could believe him.
“I’m not going anywhere, Lorelai, I promise. I’m not Christopher-”
“No!” that strange, shattered voice cried out, and she realised that she was on her feet again. She blinked. “No,” she repeated, only marginally less hysterically. “That’s not what I- uch, you don’t understand!”
He got to his feet, looking bewildered. “I’m trying as hard as I can, here, Lorelai!” he replied angrily, “You’re right, I don’t understand; I don’t understand a damn thing about this situation, but I am trying so hard, and you’re not helping!”
“I’m trying!” Lorelai cried, “It’s just, god, I- I… Why can’t I say this?!” Her foot stamped the ground. Reflexively, her hands went to her forehead before raking through her hair and coming back to press against her cheeks. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I just – god, this is terrible, but I can’t help… I can’t help thinking that this will ruin everything.”
He was beginning to feel like a broken record. “Lorelai, I’m not him, I’m not going anywhe-”
“God!” she cried out, “That’s not what I’m afraid of! I know you won’t run away from this! I know you’re not Christopher, and I know you’ll be a great dad, it’s just, it was supposed to be different this time!” Her eyes were wide, begging him to understand, and he finally felt as though he were at least at the right station, if not the correct platform for her train of thought.
“I just always thought that when I had a second kid it would be planned,” she laughed shortly. Bitterly. “I thought it would be somewhere, far in the future, I mean, not too far because, let’s face it, this immaturity thing I’ve got going on is getting more and more ridiculous, but later. Not now. Not when I’m starting a business, not when I’ve just started a new relationship, not when I’ve finally started to feel like I’m a woman, not just a single mother…” she blinked back tears. “I know it sounds so incredibly selfish, even for me, but lately… I’ve been feeling like I’m finally free.”
Luke watched her; almost afraid of breathing too loudly and interrupting a confession that was obviously a long time in coming.
“I love Rory,” she continued, “with all my heart, but she doesn’t need me anymore. I expected that to hurt – and it did, it hurt like hell when I realised it, but it’s also so liberating, Luke. And I wanted to enjoy that feeling, I mean, I feel like I deserve it,” her forehead crumpled, and she sat down hard on the edge of a chair.
“Everything was going so well; the inn, you and me… and now-” a sob escaped her “-and now this has come out of nowhere, and I’m scared of it, and I’m scared of me, and I’m scared that you’ll propose and that I’ll accept because I’m so damn terrified, and when you do, I’ll spend the rest of our lives wondering whether you asked because you felt like you had to, and it was the right thing to do instead of asking because-” she choked, and pressed a hand into her eyes, “because you love me, and I- I’m just so-”
“Hey…!” He was at her side now, arms around her, cursing himself for not moving sooner. She collapsed onto him, sobbing into his shoulder, her hands weakly clutching at his shirt.
“And I know that’s unfair,” she continued brokenly, “and I’m sorry, but it’s too soon, Luke, it’s too soon! I hadn’t, this never even oc-occurred to me-”
“Shh, shh,” he whispered – whether to calm her down or make her stop talking he didn’t know. He had known all this, but knowing didn’t mean accepting, and the pain and disappointment was rubbing him raw. He grimaced; he’d broken his rule again. It hurt.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered into his chest. He kissed the top of her head and sighed. His hand rubbed circles on her back as her sobs gradually receded until she was only trembling slightly in his arms. She lifted her head and Luke tried not to flinch at how red and puffy her eyes were. She attempted a smile when she saw him kneeling on the hard, wooden floor in front of her. “I’m sorry, you must be so uncomfortable.”
“Nah,” he said offhandedly, shifting his weight. A sharp pain shot up his left leg. “Ow, yeah, actually.”
She laughed – a waterlogged sound, but a laugh nonetheless. “C’mon, let’s go sit on the bed.”
She stood shakily, shivering from the absence of his body heat, and held out a hand to pull him up. He pushed himself up using the chair, taking her hand at the last second. Hand in hand they walked over to his bed, Luke wincing at the ache in his knees. Lorelai dropped his hand and flopped backwards onto the bed with a sigh. She sat up again almost immediately, shrugged off her overcoat and fell back again, eyes closed. Luke perched beside her on the very end of the mattress.
“Hey,” Lorelai said suddenly, eyes still closed. “Who’s taking care of the diner?”
Luke shrugged. “Cesar, I guess,” he replied.
“I must have looked like a crazy person down there,” she reflected dryly.
“No different to anyone else in this damn town,” he answered flatly – ‘deadpan’ only applied when the speaker was intending their answer to be humorous.
She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said softly and there was no mistaking the utter sincerity in her voice.
He smiled bitterly and flopped backwards to land beside her, exhaling loudly. “Don’t be.” He made it sound like the simplest thing in the world. She moved closer to him and he wrapped an arm around her waist. She was rapidly falling asleep, he observed. She looked so vulnerable; she was, he realized with surprise. Lorelai Gilmore was vulnerable and scared, and it was his fault. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, and she whimpered. That sound seared through his heart – the words ‘I love you’ rose to his tongue, and died there.
It was too soon.
…
Something was missing. Lorelai frowned. She was exhausted; she was asleep and still she was tired. Or, at least, she had been asleep. She groaned and tried to burrow further into the mattress. It resisted. Damn box-spring. Moaning, this time, she rolled over, expecting to come up against a Luke-Barrier.
She almost fell off the bed.
Blearily, she opened her eyes. The lights were on, making the twilight outside look later than it actually was. Rubbing still-sore eyes, she called out groggily, “Luke?”
Slight movement at the table caught her eye. A hand flew to her chest. “Gah! Luke, you scared me!” she gasped, breathing heavily. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged awkwardly, looking everywhere but at her. “Waiting for you to wake up.”
She smiled sleepily. “Where did you go?” she asked, noticing a plastic bag on the table in front of him.
“Woodbury.”
“Why?” she asked, sitting up and stretching.
“Well, I figured you didn’t want Taylor calling up a price check on pregnancy tests on double-coupon day.”
She paused mid-stretch. “Oh,” she said, dumbfounded. “You drove all the way to Woodbury to get me a pregnancy test.” Her brain felt like mush. There was no other way to describe it.
He looked down at the table. “Yeah,” he cleared his throat nervously. “I just thought it’d be a good idea… you know, to make sure before the town start thinking that one of us is dying.”
“What?” she asked incredulously.
“Kirk was in the diner when I went downstairs.”
“Ah,” she replied. “Ok.”
“You don’t have to do it now,” Luke said hurriedly. “It’s probably better that you wait like that guy told you to…”
“No, I want to,” she hastened to reply. “I don’t think I can wait any longer… Besides, it’s basically been two weeks… It should be fine.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, attempting to be nonchalant. He could feel adrenaline begin to shoot through his veins.
“And I can always take another test later…” she added, trying to hide how her hands were shaking. She cleared her throat. “Can I have-”
“Oh!” Luke cried, jumping up from table and fumbling for the box. “Right, here,” he said, handing her the box.
“Thanks,” she replied, her voice shaking now. She got up slowly and disappeared into the bathroom. The door shut behind her with a snap, and Luke let out a huge breath. Soon they would know.
…
Apparently ‘soon’ was a relative term. Impatiently, Luke checked his watch. Twelve minutes had passed. How long did these things take? He sucked in a breath and blew out his cheeks exhaling. He tapped his watch. He tapped his foot.
He was starting to get really worried.
Fourteen minutes. He heard a noise from the bathroom. “Lorelai?”
No reply.
Fifteen minutes.
He walked over to the bathroom door and raised a fist to knock. He paused. Abruptly he turned and sat on the edge of the bed. He exhaled loudly again, fidgeting with the zipper on his jacket. He hadn’t bothered to take it off. He stared at the ceiling, resolving to let her take her own time to do it. He checked his watch. Seventeen minutes.
He’d wait three more minutes, and then he’d knock.
Eighteen minutes. Eighteen and a half.
“Oh, for the love of-” He got up jerkily and knocked on the door. “Lorelai?” he called. There was a stifled sob in reply. He knocked again, softer this time. “Lorelai?”
The door began to open and he stepped back, heart in his throat. “Sorry,” she whispered, and he knew it was for more than just keeping him waiting. It was the anguished, sheepish, regretful apology of a humiliated woman. It was the ‘I’m sorry I freaked out and said all those things, and dangled something you wanted in front of your face before I even checked the date today’ sorry. It was the ‘I’m an idiot, and I may have ruined this, and now I have to face the consequences for the rest of my life’ sorry.
There were tears streaming down her face, and, blood rushing in his ears, he knew the answer even before she handed him the box and the stick.
It was negative.
a little misguided
Cadet
I promise i'll read it, looks really long... I saved it as a word document so i could read it later.
I saved it as a word document so i could read it later.a little misguided
Cadet
Ok, i just read your story Betsy and..... ohh... my... god... FANTASTIC!!!! I love it!!! Sooooo speechless right now- consider it a good sign
Thanks! I'm so glad you guys liked it! *does happy dance*Am I going to write more... For this story or for GG fanfiction? Yeah, I posted it on BWR and some people said I should continue the story, and I could but I didn't ever plan it to be more than a one-shot. But I do have an idea of what would happen next, so I might. Maybe. And I have so many more ideas for GG fanfic, so I probably will have more stories in the future.
Yay! I'm so happy I didn't completely destroy the Gilmoreverse!
a little misguided
Cadet
There was no way you could have destroyed the Gilmoreverse with that sotry, you're a fantastic writer! You really have to continue with it, i was glued to the screen while reading it just like Luce.
Pleeeeeeeeeeeaaaaasssssseeeee continue with it.... I'll keep on begging until you do :lol:
Pleeeeeeeeeeeaaaaasssssseeeee continue with it.... I'll keep on begging until you do :lol:
Ok, I thought about it, and I don't think I'm going to continue this story... Sorry! It's just because, in my mind, this either A: wouldn't really affect the ending of Season Five, or B: I would go completely AU and make it crazily depressing. And it would be insanely depressing. And I kind of like the open ending right now. Sorry!
Sorry!