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“Stay off Park,” Jess barked, “get a fuckin life. Fuckin psycho.” He slammed his horn, stuck his head out the window he’d fought open to tender the sweltering breath of the busted heating system. His poor car. “Hey, shit for brains, you don’t take fuckin Park at six o’clock on a Saturday!”

“You’re fuckin turning onto Park next, douchebag!” the driver of a fucking Subaru yelled.

“Yeah, at least I know how to fuckin drive!” Jess honked some more. “You’re blocking a fuckin thoroughfare!”

“Fuck yourself!”

“You fuck yourself, in the lizard-green Crosstrek telling me to fuck myself.” Jess briefly took his foot off the brake so the Ambassador lurched forward, causing several drivers locked around him in the standstill to lay on their horns. Gasoline breeze, unconscionable mounds of grime-veined snow banking the shoulder, half-slush, boiled onions. “You’re all fuckin sheep, this city has gone to the fuckin dogs!”

Home.

He parked in a shitty little lot he remembered, the crowd of Camrys, Tauruses, and Impalas necessitating what conservative estimates would call a fourteen-point turn, and tipped the attendant first thing to keep a close fucking eye. “I’ll only be a few hours,” he threatened.

“Noob,” the attendant said, “d’you think I want to deal with theft? Imagine the paperwork.”

“Good man,” Jess said. He pocketed Nabokov’s Gogol and the medal to St. Anthony he’d lifted from Jimmy’s junk drawer—the valuables—then stepped onto the street, vaulted enormous skylight of cirrus fibratus on cotton-blue, immediately clamor, building brilliant rhythm of engine-purr and honk and caterwauling alarm, somewhere the buttered stink of pretzels and buns, hot breath from vibrating grate-cover, bodies, cell phone calls, broken stilettos, cyclists and scooters, Broadway, 42nd, crumbling shit-stained gridblocks. In his pocket the money from Luke, which he had truly intended to return, thumped against his thigh. He ducked into five apartment complexes before finding a cheap enough communal studio the building manager seemed embarrassed to show. There were two guys inside of disparate age, Bo faintly snoring in a weather-tech sleeping bag, Paul applying eye drops in slow motion—a deep state of stoned Jess was unsure they were reaching him through—but agreeing readily to another roommate, only informed Jess it was BYOAM (Bring Your Own Air Mattress). So Jess used Luke’s money as a deposit for one fifth of unit 1F, which stunk of burning black tar and stood right beside the clanging mailboxes so was always unbearable. This was good: he picked up two jobs to keep himself busy, sold his skateboard and some books he could do without, got a bike and grinded himself skinny as a courier for the lazy upscale law firms, then bussed at a little Italian place in Hell’s Kitchen, where he convinced the shift manager to let him move up to tending bar after a month, then sporadic extra hours on the line to fill time. He quickly became the only resident of 1F who made rent reliably.

And the work was endurable. He didn’t have to talk much. He spritzed disinfectant and coasted cursing in bike lanes for twelve hours, then went comatose for ten, then did it again. He kept a weird schedule, so could usually take a decent shower without interruption, even if he had to wear flip flops to protect from the idea of diseases. One with the soap, swirlied, slipping down the drain’s clogged throat.

He met at the bar some chick barely older than him, mid-twenties per her ID, who came in like clockwork every Friday around six o’clock to nurse one beer for two hours. It took weeks for Jess to recognize and remember her—she wore tortoiseshell Lennon glasses that became her face in his mind. Her name was Olga, a hearty old-fashioned type of inheritance-knighting. She had a kid, at home and under watch of a neighbor, who was addicted to calling the restaurant number, specifically the bar extension, and asking for “Mamma.”

“What’s her name?” Jess had said the first time, paying only partial attention while spying a booming group of new arrivals, the start of the post-COB fintech rush. Suit jackets balled under their arms, taking a tally for vodka Red Bulls and kamikaze shots.

“Umm,” the kid said. “It’s Mamma.”

Jess pulled the phone from his ear and shouted out, “Somebody’s idiot child is calling.”

Olga had surfaced from her red ale to say, “Oh, goddamn me.”

And the kid called weekly after, asking for Mamma. Jess started taking the message himself to save time. “He wants the pretzel again,” he said, lapping the bar with a wet rag. Olga lifted her glass so he could wipe the ring from under it.

“Did I get it last week?” she said, making a face.

“Nah, last week it was just the fucking High Life.”

“When are you going to let that go.” She threw her hands. “A High Life isn’t for the palate. It sticks to the ribs of the soul. Like Sly & the Family Stone. It’s a medicinal tincture to me.”

He leveled her with a look. “God created clocks with His infinite wisdom,” he said, “and with His good sense He chose to omit Miller Time from the final draft.”

Olga rocked because she tipped cash and only spoke to say bitchy things about the suits’ orders or request mugs of hot water (she brought her own spearmint tea bags). For two hours every Friday she sat at the farthest, darkest end of the bar and from beneath massive headphones read Larry Mitchell and Sharon Olds or added mileage to some grand manuscript she was hand-writing on yellow legal paper.

“Okay, I give,” he said, surfacing in murky depressing February, knocking the headphones askance to draw her attention. She flailed like he’d shot her. “Hi. You’ve got to tell me what you’re fucking chronicling here.”

She blinked twice, then wrinkled her long nose. The bags beneath her eyes quirked, pinched. “A book,” she said.

Jess pulled the notepad away from her, flipped it around to read the freshest line: ”My god,” Joan said. Only she saw the world as it was: The assembled patrons were hyenas, spitty teeth sparkling as they threw their heads in dizzied laughter, hair-raising cacophony, jumping jazz quartet with sixteenth notes rising, firecracker sacrifices to amethyst Dionysus.

He looked up. She had her lip so tightly pinned between her teeth it had turned white.

He said, “You wrote this. Just now.” As if he hadn’t watched the mechanical pencil move. Orange, sparkly plastic.

Starting to gnaw a hangnail, she said, “I guess.”

The crooked lighthouse-keeper. Salt-beaten jetty rock struck dove-tail palm. Jess pillaged the surrounding pages, dart-eyed. Tasted The Roches, harmonies like ecosystems. Said, “Have you ever met someone who’s so good at the thing you love to do, the difficult, aqueous thing you invest all your time into getting even mediocre at it, that it scares you.”

“It’s a first draft, it’ll be cleaner eventually. I over-write, then take away.”

“Who’s publishing this?”

“No one,” she said, “yet.” A bit morose. “It’s my fourth book. Nobody wanted to bet on one through three, I don’t know why I’m still going.”

“What the fuck,” he declared.

“It’s something stupid, just for me.” She shook her head while Jess flipped back through the pages of smudged mechanical pencil, words catching his attention at random, bloodtrust a baseball bat and plucked-string of her spine, bow of lip, telepathic Aeolian lingo. “It’s about how everything is terrible, no matter how good things are.”

“Who the fuck are you,” he said, skin crawling. He couldn’t think of a joke to crack. “You're freaking me out.”

“Hey,” called someone down the bar—blonde woman, silicone double-Ds and a comb-overed seventy-year-old noisily mouth-breathing beside her—“can we order, please?”

“Hold on,” Jess said to Olga, who had started to resemble a small shooting star someone nonetheless found good enough to wish on. “Sorry,” he said to the other drinkers. Shook his head, trying to clear it. Threw another twitchy look along the counter. Firecracker sacrifices. Jesus Christ. The blonde cleared her throat, drawing Jess’s attention. “Fuck, my bad. What can I get you.”

And in March, clambering onto her stool with exhaustion too deep for her scraps of mascara to distract from, chalk drawings on the collision site, “Does it always have to be brick in here?” she said. She had shucked her coat upon entry—a single-breasted, shapeless black number that swung around her ankles—but was now fighting her way back into the sleeves, impeded by a turtleneck sweater that licked up over her chin, thick-knit and itchy-looking, her typical Bugs Bunny-grey.

Jess held out his arms to show off the henley and hoodie he had on under his uniform tee, then pointed at the vent over their heads. “Yes,” he said.

“Fuckin world,” she said, vicious. Scowling hellfire. “Fuckin America with its thin walls and year-round air conditioning and no-smoking signs. Don’t piss me off. Hey, I published that one poem, by the way.”

“The one with the egg roll?” He moved to pour her a pint. She was on a kick of letting him choose for her. He took this responsibility seriously; he almost never served her the gross IPA of the week anymore.

“Nah, the ode about that woman I saw on the subway who looked like Julia Roberts.”

“The sexy one?” He was impressed. He put her glass on a cardboard coaster and slid it her way. “Where?”

“This independent place in Philadelphia,” catching it between her fingertips. Jess appreciated that she sprung for the extra vowels; something about indie made his teeth set. “They’ve got a quarterly magazine, a blog, and a physical press. Weird as shit, but not too pretentious about it.”

Jess grunted his approval. Hefting a tray of clean glasses, he paused to say, “Get me a copy.”

“Get it yourself,” she said, smiling like she’d never frowned. “Hey, thank you. For being nice.”

“I’m not nice, that’s hearsay. You’re a fuckin freak visiting from another galaxy. What’s the name of the press, I’ll look it up.”

She wrote it on the coaster in her shapely cursive, then rapped a fingernail on it, like Remember. “I moved here from around there a few months ago.”

“You’re a transplant?” Jess demanded, dropping the tray back on the bar with a thump and chorus of rims tinkling so he could put his hands on his knees and really stare at her. “Get the fuck out of here, you’re not a transplant, you look like you grew up three blocks from me, Astoria Boulevard.”

“Newark,” Olga said, then took a wincing sip of beer. “Yum, what is this? I dig stout.”

“How did I not sense that you’re a fuckin transplant,” Jess said, aggrieved. “I’m all fucked up. I used to be good at this. I used to know city when I saw it.”

“Maybe you’re not so city yourself anymore,” she said, deep-set, unsettlingly dark eyes magnified, new moons in a white sky. “Maybe your heart’s in San Francisco.”

“Fuck, you’re old,” he said sourly. “That ruined my day. I have to go do work now, to cleanse the flavor of fuckin Newark from my palate.”

The first friend he’d had since—God, since Lane, probably. He pocketed the coaster.

Maybe six months in, Olga brought the kid for Jess to watch, came right behind the bar and set him down like some kind of fucked-up stork. “Two hours,” she swore, crossing herself. “Amo’, you be good.”

“Si, certo,” the kid lisped dismissively. Jess repented giving him shit when he’d first rung, because he looked all of five years old. A sense of kinship budded; he’d made his share of calls to bars in search of Liz, back when. At least Olga was always where she said she’d be.

Replica of his awkward mother, down to the pipsqueak off-brand Chucks. “Okay,” Jess said. He pulled a stool behind the bar and sat the kid on it. “What’s your name.”​​

While rubbing his dripping nose on the back of his hand, profile painted with purple and red from neon signs and lit lists of specials, he said, “Alfie.”

Jess, who had started hunting a napkin for the kid to blow into, stilled. “Tell me it’s not Alfredo,” he said. “Your mother is a fucking nut, but tell me she didn’t name you Alfredo.”

“My name’s Alfeo, I’m six years old,” he said, holding up as many fingers.

Jess shot a look down the bar—it was convenient that Olga kept the hours of the senescent, because the place was a ghost town. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said, squatting in front of the stool. He rubbed his hands together, familiar catch of callus and old burn. “I’ve gotta slice up some oranges and shit for people’s drinks. I’m gonna get you a cup and I’m gonna put, like, eight maraschino cherries in it, and you can just go to town. Sound good?”

“What’s a marshy cherry?” Eerie goddamn disposition. Striking contrast of pale skin against shock of dark hair, and a thick-striped rugby shirt in disparate shades of blue. “Can I have some oranges?”

Jess glanced into the restaurant. Only one table taken: by the front windows, a couple shared antipasti, octopus salad and fried anchovies, crocche and marinated eggplant, a basket of their house bread, a pitcher of their house red, bowls cured olives and pickled squash flowers and pools of balsamic-painted oil. “Alright,” he said, “you can have some oranges.”

But that only took a few minutes, so Jess moved onto his plan. Alfie’s eyes bugged out of his head when he tried his first syrup-drenched cherry. He started kicking his feet and dancing while sitting down like a Sesame Street puppet.

“Pretty good, right?” Jess said.

“Really good!” Alfie said. “Do you know cherries in Italian?”

“I don’t know anything in Italian.” Jess planted his feet, stuffed his hands in his apron pockets, cracked his neck. “I know si, no, cazzo, and frizzante, per favore.”

“Cherries in Italian is ciliegie,” Alfie said. His pronunciation, not that Jess knew, sounded pretty legitimate. “Ciliegie are rosse.”

“Red,” Jess deduced with his line-cook Spanish.

Alfie nodded. “Bravo,” he said. “That’s good job.”

“Amazingly enough, I knew that one myself.” Jess leaned over the bar again, wary, but they were patronless. His wallet would suffer. “Alright,” he said, and pulled a second stool around for himself, sat beside the kid, who had red forty-stains all around his lips. “I’m gonna teach you a trick.”

When Olga came bustling back inside the promised two hours later, plasticized gift bags hooked over either elbow, mouthing “Birthday,” and pointing at Alfie, the kid was too busy tying cherry stems into knots with his tongue to notice. With effort, she stuck a hand into the gut-pocket of the pullover slicker that had replaced her goodly winter coat come gross wet spring, removed what Jess could identify as a disposable camera only by its signature wasp-print body. The din had built; waiters circled noisy tables sidestepping discarded purses; it provided solid cover.

She snuck closer, but the bags totally gave her away, thunderclaps when they bumped the chairbacks. Alfie looked and illuminated completely, sprung straight, mouth stretching with a smile as he called out to her.

“Happy birthday,” Jess said, lifting him off his stool and passing him over the bar to Olga, who snapped photos of each step, cursed while she wound the film, somehow began juggling the kid, the bags, the camera, and the massive suede tote she used like a fucked-up Mary Poppins pocketbook. Once, Jess had seen her take an entire box of saltines out of there. Alfie lurched to grab up his empty glass and spit a mouthful of soggy, un-knotted cherry stems into it. Apparently he’d had a little trouble following Jess’s directions.

“Gross,” said Olga, taking a picture of them.

“Gimme the Kodak,” Jess said, holding his hand out, “sit down,” he pushed a bowl of salted pistachios down the bar, then patted the space he’d cleared, “put that shit down, that bag is crowning.”

“Allora,” craning on her toes to reach, “I brought us hats.”

“Who’s us,” he said, suspicious. Beaming, she pulled out three, homemade by the looks of them, construction paper cones with embroidery floss chin-straps. “Nope,” he said. “I’m in uniform. I can’t sully my uniform.”

“Sully your fuckin ass, dirtbag,” she said, “the kid’s six. Put on a hat.”

Jess put on a hat.

Alfie tore his way through paper and twine while Jess puttered around refilling drafts and collecting damp receipts. When he had a second, he mixed up two Shirley Temples, spiked one, and set them down before Olga and the kid. “My treat,” he said. They pulled the glasses close and attached themselves to the straws like twin limpets.

Whenever he could, Jess swung around to their end of the bar to give his two cents on the bulky primary-colored wooden garbage trucks and sleeves of dominoes that were beginning to populate, to drop new cherries into their drinks, to make discarded tissue disappear. During one such respite, Alfie said to Olga, “I teached Jess Italian.”

“Surely with a last name like his he knows some Italian,” Olga said.

Jess instinctively checked the tag pinned to his chest. “You don’t know my last name,” he said. He made a face. “Did you look me up?”

“Of course I looked you up,” she said, “I left my fuckin kid with you, you think I didn’t look you up? You had a nice headshot in the paper, by the way. When was that, ‘ninety-seven? You must’ve been the itty bittyest point guard in town.”

“Jesus help me,” Jess said.

“Did they have to lower the basket for you? I didn’t know Nike made Jordans small enough for Pollicina’s WOP sidekick.” As he walked away, she started calling after him, “Did the other players need a microscope to find you? How could they possibly avoid stepping on your head while running man-to-man D?”

“I’m cutting you off,” he said, pointing at her. It didn’t impede her look-drawingly-loud laughter.

The next time Jess came over, Alfie was starting to snore on his haul, and Olga was eating crystallized ginger from a plastic bag. “How the mighty do fall,” he said, collecting their sticky glasses. “The fuck are you doing, are you hungry? We do sell food here. It’s edible, even.”

“Nah, the ginger keeps me from getting hurly on the subway,” she said. With a wince, she swallowed, then breathed through her teeth. Her birthday hat had plastered her cowlicky bangs to her forehead like a bad bowl cut; she looked stupid as hell. “When I turned nineteen all automotive motion started making me sick as patient zero. It’s my cross to bear.”

There was something about her that floored him. Her reflexive, complete honesty, no matter how it made her seem. She was who she was, and who she was got hurly on the subway. To Jess, she was the epitome of cool. Especially when she left the bar, still wearing her hat, the bag lady, Alfie snoring over her shoulder. Her world was unfathomable.

So he had something to depend on, some shimmering comfort promised on Fridays to dissect interminable, indistinguishable stretches of sun baking his hair hot while he pedaled and oil splatters scarring the backs of his hands; sleepless nights tensed listening to the junk-dreams of his roommates with a canister of pepper spray closed in his fist; the hollowness of his body, a single spotlight dyeing hovering dust into shavings of silver; and then Luke showed face, teed-up and swung with “going nowhere in life,” and it flew towards left field from there. Stars Hollow was having a little wedding. Instantly, a chemical reaction, Jess felt like such shit. And for what, TJ? The OED entry for ignorance being bliss?

But because Luke had come to him, asked in person, gave tangible proof this blue period hadn’t lasted since fertilization, how it felt, he fought with both his managers for time off, drained his spend account for gas fill-ups and smokes, packed everything he cared about into his fraying duffel, and went.

Small towns were so fucking scary. Their strip joint had a mud-wrestling pit in it.

Jess was trying to keep his Henry Farrell clean, his beer and his Pibbs full, when TJ asked him to walk Liz down the aisle, and he was looking at Jess, not the women or his friends or the Yankees flashing on TVs behind the bar. Lucid. Intent.

Jess’s face must’ve done something, because TJ flipped the book out of his hands; the illusion broke; he was precisely the same as every other boyfriend. Jess sprung up before TJ could plant a defensive, but Luke tore him away, smacked him up the back of the head, and steered him out of the building like a snarling pitbull. Ranted the whole walk back to the diner. Called it a fight, like TJ wasn’t pushing forty, and waxing poetic about the serenity that came from knowing nothing he could do would get through to Jess, that Jess was not only a hopeless recipient of hopeless assistance but was thoroughly stupid and objectively peccant.

Jess gave at that. He didn’t hate Liz, and he sure as shit didn’t hate Luke, not in any meaningful way. The Ambassador was one thing, but he’d dragged his corpse body to this circus because it was important to Luke. Why else. And the way hearing it changed Luke’s whole temperament—Jess was a crack baby to it. His mouth unfurled. He admitted he’d told Rory he loved her.

Now Luke looked pained. Told Jess he had done it wrong and started reciting gross platitudes about emotional wellness. Picked up a God’s honest book and put it in Jess’s hands. The cover read You’re Not Alone.

The sick snake voice in Jess spoke up. It said, You just watch me prove you wrong.

Liz’s childhood friends were a bunch of squawking, handsy cougars. This was new; most of her crew in Astoria had been hexagenarians without a lick of English or tall, quiet men with stale bodies and a case of the nods.

Luke’s book told him his unfaced fears would become his limitations. He went for a walk without a pack of Camels, testing this theory, and returned to the apartment trembling, cagey. Prey instinct. The smoke he stuck his head out the window for tasted like yesterday.

Then he ran into Dean, who was a church-honest married man (there wasn’t even a teenage pregnancy situation—Dean was just that corn-sucking stupid! Jess laughed for a full minute, beautifully, chiropractically aligned.). Though, shortly after, he was cut off at the knees: had to borrow a nice shirt from Luke, and it was huge in a way that could not be massaged into punk or debonair. He just had to roll the sleeves to his biceps and bear it.

“You look like a pilgrim,” Luke said, glimmery behind the eyes. He clapped Jess’s arm. “Need to borrow anything else? Loafers, and enough pairs of socks to make em fit you?”

“Easy,” Jess said, “Jesus,” flipping him off.

The door squeaked open in harmony with a shout from Liz: “Knock knock!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Luke said. Jess locked TJ in the bathroom; she’d had fits in the past when fiancées saw her before the nuptials, clung like a regretful jumper to the concrete facade of bad luck to explain away her failures. Like a smearing wisp, she slipped inside, wearing the dress, makeup done, hair back, glimmering.

“Hi,” Jess said, a little lamely.

“Hubba hubba,” TJ yelled from the bathroom. “Helloo, my smokin-hot bride.”

“You don’t know I’m smokin if you can’t see me,” Liz said, swishing her skirt, watching it flare and fall.

“I can sense the smokin-ness of your aura. It’s very appealin.”

“Well, thank you,” voice pitched low and velvety, texture of lifelong-smoker’s fry. Liz glanced, finally, at Luke, then Jess. “My God, how good you two look,” savoring. He blinked and she was in his face, studying. Dragging her thumb along his under-eye. “You’re tired, my boy.”

He sniffed.

“You’re not sleeping again?” Petting his cheek, then rubbing his shoulder in that way that made him shut his eyes and forget to answer. The same perfume. Not quite right without weed-smell underneath. “Huh? Talk to me, squirt.”

He huffed, said, “I’m fine, Ma,” catching her wandering hands. “I sleep.”

“Never was easy for you,” Liz murmured, “hm.” Louder, “My brother, tell Jess he looks run down.”

“In a room full of normal people, yes,” Luke said, leaning against the counter with his thick arms crossed, “he is almost comically bedraggled.” Jess tossed him a look of offense. Luke said, “You look harrible,” in that way he had, hands spread, plumb honest.

“Alright, wise guy,” Jess said.

“Man,” Liz said, “even the way you guys talk is the same. You have the same cadence, the same choppy rhythm, like you learned to sing from the same teacher.”

Luke and Jess pulled matching faces in reaction.

Liz laughed, big and bright, hunted down Luke’s old Polaroid, and shoved them together for a photo. They let her; they had to. She was weather.

“So,” Luke said as they peeled apart, the moment over, shoving his fingers into his hip pockets, “everything’s in order? The rings, the music, the officiant?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Liz said, like a caricature of a cheerleader. “Every single thing is copacetic, baby.”

“Yeah,” TJ contributed from the bathroom.

“Just one last thing,” Liz said, grabbing onto Jess’s elbows while doing some sort of swaying side-lunges of excitement. “For me, on my wedding day.” Five golden rings. “Will you please wear some tights?”

Jess left. Swiftly.

After a grand but brief conflict over a tear in the dress Liz had made while skipping circles of the diner, everything was, once again, copacetic, baby: all of it very fucking hokey with her on a flowery cart and viney tendrils embroidering the chuppah, a literal minstrel, Lorelai and Luke in stitches at Jess’s back. His face and neck fried with embarrassment. The reception offered escape until he sat to wolf down free food and knock his head against Punk Planet and Duras and Luke’s third-life crisis, when a freak found him and latched on. Talked incessantly about the ‘Niners and fermented cheese and Streisand, didn’t flinch when Jess in his most agreeable tone said, “Hey. You. Shut it.” Even the coffee was fucked up. He got up to hound Luke about it, accusatory, “The coffee is fucked up,” and Luke, around a mouthful of salmon, said, “I put nutmeg in it,” so Jess was obligated to reply, “Okay, gay boy.”

“Is that supposed to be offensive?” Luke said.

“No,” Jess said, with heat. He held his mug further away from his body so he didn’t have to smell the fumes. “What am I supposed to do with this. It’s sewage.”

Lorelai, sitting comfortably at Luke’s side with her endless legs crossed at the knee, held her empty mug out. Jess made a face, but still poured the contents of his into it. She sipped. “No sugar,” she said, squinting at him. “Shockingly respectable.”

“Jess!” Liz’s voice poured over the square, warm wind. She was flushed, flyaway hairs bouncing, summer’s perfect bride as she waved at him. Even the shape of her forearms was familiar. “Come dance.”

Jess mimed hanging himself. She gave him begging eyes. “Fuck you,” he mouthed at her, setting his mug on the nearest table. He shoved the cuffed sleeves of the godforsaken borrowed shirt higher, rubbed his fingers through his hair—rolled his eyes because it was The Band playing, and not only that, it was “When I Paint My Masterpiece”—said, as he approached, “You owe me, big time.”

She threw her arms around his neck, said, “Oh, don’t I know it.”

Her restless grip scaled his spine until he dropped his face into the crook of her shoulder. She cupped his skull. They swayed like clumsy drunks. Someday everything is gonna sound like a rhapsody.

He noticed, over his mother’s shoulder, Luke and Lorelai all but waltzing, entangled. Though he felt ready to leave the moment Sam Phillips came on, he waited so he could say goodbye. Milled and ate cake around the grout of buttercream. Stood near the bench where Rory had first whispered in his ear, hand fisted in his shirt, the moment that robbed him of peace for life. He’d wanted her before, needed her then. Metaphorical splitting of the knuckles. A fucking year. How.

Eventually he retreated to the apartment. He had amassed in his duffel and messenger bags his various and sundry, was recording the number for his brand new cell phone on a sticky note to tack to the fridge, when Luke arrived, unbuttoned his suit jacket, told him he could stay. Jess withered from the idea. Zipped himself into leather, never mind that it was June, because it was his skin. Once he’d accumulated the nerve, he said, “I want to pay you back. All the money.”

“You don’t have to,” Luke said easily.

“I want to,” said Jess, “and I appreciate it. Everything. The money—living here—”

“Well, it’s good to hear, but I kind of knew that,” Luke said.

Dimly, this shocked Jess. To keep the twinkle in Luke’s eye, he spouted some more bullshit from the book. Adrenaline junkie, Jackass to his bitterness and pride.

“You’re hoping for reciprocation?” Luke said. Jess’s stomach contracted. Luke said, “You got it.” Tingling relief. The comfortable months in Luke’s studio weren’t false memories. “I’m here, Jess. I’m always here.”

“Thanks,” Jess said. A handshake that quickly became a hug. The first that made him feel small, enveloped. When Luke told him the tie he’d helped with was perfect, he even smiled.

For all intents and purposes, he had no remaining loose ends. He'd left everyone with a fond, dutiful idea of him.

He collected his bags and headed downstairs. No artificial light beyond what bled from the square, which gifted nine o’clock the impression of dusk. Chairs and stools overturned, empty donut and pie displays casting long shadows. Coffee machines snoozing. Distant Labi Siffre, Mary Margaret O’Hara. He was shifting his grip on canvas straps to yank the door open when the phone rang.

Jess nearly didn’t stop. The machine picked up.

“Hi,” came the voice, the dovefeather, “Mom,” mouth a dead river, “I assumed you’d be at the diner after the reception, but I guess you’re not?” Milk-spill floor shining like eyes, like having been caught. “And Luke isn’t there either? I’ll try your cell next, but, uh, in case you get to this first during the post-dancing hunger pangs, I’m calling from location number one of the pub crawl, where I still am, because these Ivy League barons are addicted to stupidity. They’re drunk driving, so I didn’t get in the car, because I’m your beautiful and perfect daughter.” A breath kicked from him—disfigured, scraped—a laugh. “And now that I have acted so responsibly, as you would wish, your punishment is that you have to come and pick me up. Soon, preferably, because I did not bring the Prius and these wooden chairs are making my ass fall asleep. Hellooo… hello, hello, hello… I’ll call your cell. Bye.” Jess, with panic opening in him like an umbrella, lunged to the landline, scrambled clattering the receiver to his ear, said, “What, what’s going on.”

Sliced, beaten, cold silence.

“It’s me,” he said. One hand and his forehead and his hammering heart against the cool wall. He shut his eyes. “I was in the diner, no one else is here.”

He could barely hear her breathing. Muffled conversation and Hoobastank.

“I just—I need my mom,” she finally said. The vowels long and low. Dewy. “I need her to pick me up.”

“Okay,” he said. “Where are you? How far is it?”

“I don’t know the address, I’ve never been here before. It’s this place called Hung Traitor, the sign has shamrocks on it. Um, New Haven, near campus, probably thirty minutes or so from Stars Hollow. Maybe thirty-five.”

“Got it,” he said, a pen plucked from Caesar’s apron flying across an order slip he’d ripped off its nail. “See you in twenty,” and in one fluid motion hung up, pocketed the paper, and hurdled the counter. The moon had risen in his chest. The rest of him, caustic seawater, was dragged towards her.

He smoked the whole way, sped eighty or higher with music playing at ear-busting volume but for the times he had to pull over to ask directions. On high-alert as he was, lit like an emergency, he found her immediately, slumped at a table near the door, Kubrick-staring into space. Tasting chamomile, black licorice, he moved into her sightline. Waited, bare as if naked, until she blinked, spine flicking straight, pocketknife. Her eyes porcelain saucers, fire-blue.

“Jess,” she said. “Oh my God.”

“Rory,” he said. Suddenly alive.

“What are you—?” She gracelessly stood, the whole awkward swan of her, bare legs honeycombed from the air conditioning, hair tucked behind her ears, beat-up sneakers he remembered from their picnic on the bridge. Couscous, then pizza. She said again, “Oh my God.”

“Can I—?” He set his hands on the squared shoulders of the chair across from hers. She looked at them. “Can I sit,” he clarified.

She dropped into her seat—the picture of drama, calling to mind six-layered skirts of taffeta and silk, springing rolls of blonde curls—and said, a little miserable, “I told you where I am so you could tell my mom.”

“I know,” he said. Taking her avoidance as an affirmative, he turned the chair around, sat with the back of it between them. Pyramus, Thisbe. “Are you okay? The, you mentioned barons.”

Her gaze shifted to the depths of her drinking glass. “The barons from the voicemail,” she said, “yeah, they left.” Pulled and twisted at her fingers, Freudian. “I’m fine, I’m just—oh my God. Jess.”

“There are other words. I’ve even heard you use them.” He chanced a glance at her and found her eyes had taken on a glint.

“Excuse me for being—I don’t know, flustered,” she said, tone lifting, collecting steam. In her lap like a pelt lolled her unzipped purse and, within it, he identified the corner of a tatty-spined paperback. She hadn’t taken it out. “It’s not like I haven’t seen you in a year—technically,” she butted over his complaint, “because I don’t count our previous interaction as anything more than a sighting in the wild. Excuse me for feeling knocked off-axis. You didn’t have to do this.”

They spoke at once. Fell quiet just the same.

Flush. He turned his face away, chin pinned back by shoulder. “You first,” he said.

“No, you,” she said, audibly cringing with discomfort, which was not the idea.

He shifted. Murmured to the beads of condensation on the table, “I said I feel like this isn’t happening.”

Felt her gaze on him as she said, “Me too. I said I feel like I’m going to wake up any second.”

For a moment, they looked at each other. Then he broke away, knee hammering, mouth full of blue, and couldn’t manage it again. She kept on, tilt of her head somewhere between alert and flinty, like a doctor whose instructions he'd ignored. Phlogiston from fire—a sensible derivation. Eventually she said, “If you’re about to pull a quarter from my ear I’ll kill you,” and he realized he was fidgeting his fingers with echoes of old pastimes.

“I’m not,” he said, and laid his hands palm-down on his thighs to make sure.

“Or a paper flower,” she added, “or a rabbit, or a dove.”

“I will not do that.”

“Or a playing card.”

“Even three of spades?”

“Even the beautiful vintage three of spades from the Treasure-Island-themed pack you carried around. Even a three of spades signed by the Blake Babies, God bless them.”

“I’m glad to see you,” he said.

There is shadow under this red rock, his mind hummed, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock).

“See,” dry-tongued swallow clicking, “this is where you say it back.” At her staunch silence, stubborn pouted mouth, “Are you glad to see me?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “It depends.”

“On?”

“What you’re here for.”

“You need a ride,” he said, “that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Then, “Hey,” leaning away from the table and curling a finger at a passing waiter to draw them over. “What’s good here? No,” when the waiter made a face like they were queuing up for Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, “not the most expensive dish prepared the most expensive way with the most expensive add-on. I wanna know what’s good here.”

A little light came to the waiter’s eye. “Honestly,” they said, which was promising, “I could plow three orders of the spinach artichoke dip. The tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons, the nachos, and the cheesesteak egg rolls are in my rotation. The shrimp cocktail is usually good, too.”

“We’ll take everything except the shrimp,” Jess said.

“Bring the shrimp, I want them,” Rory said. He made a face meant to convey We are in a single-dollar-sign establishment, where is your common sense? “Two orders of shrimp,” she valiantly said. “If they stink a little, even better.”

“We’re pretty close to the coast,” the waiter said, writing it down. “They don’t usually stink, but I’ll sniff around for some nasty ones. For the sport of it.”

“Perfect,” Rory chirped, in what Jess considered her pinkest tone. As the waiter left, she stared blankly at their retreating back, then ducked her head. A curtain of honeyed hair hid her face.

“What, those were normal questions to ask,” he said hotly.

“No, I know.”

“This is what we do in the business.”

“I know, I know.”

“I don’t want to eat fucking—a bowl of blackened mahi with a clump of avocado-beef tartar because some asshat following a script told me to.”

“No, of course not.”

“I want us to eat and like it.”

“Such is your right.”

“Then what is your problem,” he said, whinier than intended.

She looked like she’d lost her copy of the assigned reading and the teacher was going round-robin. “I’m not glaring, stop freaking out.”

The shakes had caught in his knees. They went, running in every way but literal. He reached to pinch a paper napkin from the dispenser at the center of the table. “Just tell me I didn’t say something wrong,” he said, tearing it. “I don't know what to say. I don’t know what not to say.”

“No, you’re not—” sighing, passing a hand through her hair, pushing it back, exposing pleated brow and tight cheek, light through linen, “you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It feels like I did. Your face.”

“What about it?”

“It’s doing the thing, the face.” He gestured vaguely with a piece of napkin. “And you were trying to hide it.”

“I’m not doing a face, I’m not doing anything.”

“You are, Rory.”

“I’m not,” she said, now certainly glaring, “but your whole polyhistor-libertine-Bourdain thing really did it for me just then, and I’d forgotten how that feels.”

Like Dave Jennings had got to it, his heart shot high, high, high. Common crane. Cirrus ice crystals. Her face and chest blotchily reddened. She laid her hands on them. They’d always run cold.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she said, eyes scrunching shut, minutely shaking her head. Looking pained. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

“Why did you,” he said.

“Because I have problems, I don’t know. God, Jess. You make me—I’m so sorry.”

He said, “Did you mean it.”

Her mouth screwed sideways. Rain-drenched cherry blossoms, Ezra Pound. She said, “I’m keeping you from something, aren’t I? The wedding’s over.” The farthest thing from his mind. “You were going home, you were leaving.”

“What’s home?” She looked at him blankly. Regretting the Petrarch of it all, rubbing knuckles over the growing scruff on his neck, “I have time before I have to hit the road, that’s all.” She scoffed and uncrossed her legs hard enough that the table, when she bumped it, jolted into his lower ribs. He grabbed mindlessly at the pain. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t work until after noon mass lets out.”

“Fine,” she said, and collected her purse, her cellphone, dropped her unused napkin on an empty plate.

“No, I don’t—” in a rush, “—the second I heard your voice on the machine I couldn’t move.”

She didn’t pause.

He said, “You needed help. And I needed to come, I needed to see you. I needed to, I need you to know that I’m still, I’ll still help you, I’ll always want to help you, I’ll always want you.” Any piece, take any piece, he tried to say.

She looked down at him.

He said, “You know how I think, you know me better than anyone. But sometimes, I hear, you’ve gotta… you’ve got to say it anyway. Even if someone knows.” Studying her. Hoping for some twitch, some sigh, any fucking thing, but she was the twin of clean canvas ready for the frame. “I’m here to help you. Alright? And to tell you that what I think is, if we want each other, then we should be together. No logistics, nothing else matters. If we want each other, then we should be together.”

At length, she sat. From rubbing her eyes, a lash had fallen to her cheek. He reached out, and she moved away on instinct, so he said, “Will you just stay still?”

She did, squinting as he lifted it with the pad of his thumb. He showed it to her. “Oh,” she said, happier. She leaned in—he balked—she grabbed his wrist, eyes rolling—he felt it in his fucking teeth—said, “Will you just stay still?” then blew it away.

In her grip again. Cold sweat and heart sticking, knowing, dreading, that it would end. He dared to move his lips. “Good wish?”

“Great wish,” she confirmed. Then, sharper, “It was never that I didn’t want to be with you anymore.”

Shock of adrenaline.

“You’re right,” she said, pale, eyes like mouths, like piercings, “I do know you better than anyone. So I knew better than anyone that you’d leave me again, and it wouldn’t be about me, it would be about you, so I couldn’t stop it. And I couldn’t—I can’t stomach saying goodbye to you. I’m really—tired,” and her voice didn’t crack so much as it gave, “of saying goodbye to you.”

“You won’t have to,” tore from the pit of his pelvis. “I’m a fuckin washup, Rory. I don’t wanna feel like this anymore.”

Her eyes shut. Pinched corners.

“It’s like,” he said, knees drilling, “you make me—when nobody else is looking at me, you’re looking at me. And I only know it because I’m looking back.”

“You took yourself away,” she said. “For your peace.”

“It’s not peaceful. It’s torture.”

She pressed a knuckle against the table until it cracked.

“I mean it,” he said, “I just need you to believe me. You don’t have to say anything. Just know I mean it.”

And he stood, because he knew how this went. He said his piece; now he would drive her home in silence, miss her even in arm’s reach, spend the night in the Ambassador nursing convulsive pains.

What he didn’t account for: her body threw itself after his; she stood too.

Time hung. Wood and Beymer on a polished court. Either she’d eked out a final inch of height or he’d fucking shrunk, but they were eye to eye.

“I have, like, four of your plates,” said their waiter, swooping towards the table, tripping the world back into color, motion, neighboring diners, silverware shrieking, stirrers singing in glass mouths, hearthy smell of shepherd's pie, regional flags and framed photos watching on from the wood-planked walls, Mona Lisa’s smile, “and the rest are on the way as soon as I put these down. Woah, sorry, am I interrupting something?”

“Yes,” Rory and Jess said.

“I can hold these,” the waiter said with a wild shift of their weight, one of the dishes nearly slipping from their elbow. It balanced.

“What are you, a Ringling brother?” Jess said, sticking his hands under his arms to hide the dogged shaking.

“I’ll go,” the waiter said at a stage-whisper, “keep doing whatever you’re doing here.”

“Leave the grub,” Rory said.

They sat, clearing their throats, pulling their chairs in, awkward honking drags of wood on wood. He looked at her, then set his teeth, grabbed the edge of her seat and dragged her closer, knocked a knuckle against her pink kneecap. Handed her paper napkin back to her, then watched her tuck it into the neck of her shirt. Without any further stupid ado, they started shoveling down screaming-hot globs of choke-striped dip on just-fried tortillas and shattering provolone-filled egg rolls like their lives depended on it. Everything greasy, so their lips and fingers gleaming. When the waiter returned with their soups and two goblets of shrimp and cocktail sauce, Jess ordered a round of Cokes, Diet on instinct, then looked at her, wondering if her taste had changed.

She replied by crunching a steaming tortilla laden with beef spiced chipotle-red, beans, poker-chip jalapeños, cotija, raw red onions, gems of roasted corn, bursting tomatoes. “Oh my God, Jess,” she managed around it, sliding the nacho tray towards him.

He plucked a dripping mouthful of his own. Rich and acid. Firmly salted. Cut of clarifying sweetness from the produce. “The Platonic nacho,” he mumbled back.

They ate full-tilt for nearly fifteen minutes, speaking only to exchange plates or pass Tabasco, pausing only to loosen their belts. She ravaged the shrimp, littered her near-polished soup bowl with discarded shells. They drained glittering glasses of water, she threw back the DC like altar wine, and they devoured on. Imperators.

He tugged his napkin from his neck, tossed it onto the table, when he had to surrender. Sitting back, legs splayed, he said, “So. You have to get back to your dorm, I presume.”

She was sucking dripped cocktail sauce off her thumb. He watched. “I, no,” she said, then, watching him lay a palm on his chest, “I don’t have anywhere to get back to. I had my last final, so I’m done.” A dial turned; spark, heat. “My stuff is back at my dorm packed in boxes, I just need to load up my car.”

“Well, you’ll have extra hands,” he said. HEY STUPID, his brain cried out. “You’ll—so you’re going back to Stars Hollow tonight. Wait, you have a car?”

“Yeah, my grandparents,” she said, barely audible, glass at the edge of the counter. “This grey little—Prius.”

“The Prius from the voicemail.” Then, when his head caught up, “Your stuff is in boxes. All your stuff is in boxes?”

“Jess,” she said, clueing in. Sitting up. Turning on. Behind her face, supernova.

“It’s perfect,” he said. “I, you’re packed, and I have a bag with my stuff—”

“Oh my God,” she said.

“—and you’re ready, and I’m ready. I’m ready for this.” He said, insistent, “You can count on me now. I know you couldn’t count me before, but you can now. You can.”

“I can count on you?” she exclaimed, gaze flicking from one of his eyes to the other, all of it on her face, brows shifting, hands folded against her mouth. A clatter—their waiter, hunched like they were sneaking, stacking sauce-smeared plates to collect.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry,” they said, “actually, quick question, while I have you. Is this all going on the same check we have open at the bar? With your group?”

“Yes,” Jess said, like he wasn’t glued to her, “the very same.”

“Sick, okay, have a good night, go back to your thing,” the waiter said, bowing and gesticulating and retreating.

“What the fuck was I saying,” Jess said, but it came back to him, had been waiting on his tongue all along. “You know we’re supposed to be together.” Tone sure, pounded straight from his breast, almost accusatory. Caught her red-handed. Like he was possessed by the spirit of someone stronger. “I knew the first time I saw you two years ago, and you know, I know you do. Yeah, you can count on me. I have steady work, I have a savings account and a cell phone and an apartment, a real apartment with walls and a lease, and okay, it’s a sty, but it was temporary, anything is temporarily survivable when I know eventually, the light at the end of the tunnel, it’ll be perfect, it’ll be with you.” She kept gaping. “Close your mouth, there are probably flies in here,” he said. “Just, only say no if you really don’t wanna be with me.” Electric buzzing in his ears. “And only say yes if you really do.” Fingers twisting in her lap, he could tell by the jerky shift of her shoulders. “Say something,” he begged, and the honest keen of it like a miracle broke a hole in the stupid wall, so her voice poured forth, the first morning.

“Yes,” she said.

A quivering heartbeat. She didn’t take it back.

“Yes?” he echoed.

“I think about you, all the time I think about you, because I know you, and because I still want to know you. To the point that I look for you everywhere. And—and, yes, I will leave this restaurant with you, in your car, and I will… I don’t know what I’ll do after that yet. I can’t believe I’m—but that was—” She inhaled sharply through her nose, blinking fast, waking up. Suddenly alive. “Jess,” she said, exactly how she always had, “I missed you, I missed my friend terribly. And you said—”

“It’s all true,” he said quickly, leaning towards her, grave and small and scared. “Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” She gave a tense, crumpled laugh while looking sidelong away, shoulders rising, curling in on herself. “No, never. I’m just bad at letting you go.”

“I’m bad at going,” he said, laughing back, hacking barks. So long without it that it had come around as something altogether new. “But,” his father’s son and her mother’s daughter, her father’s son and his mother’s daughter, they grabbed hands and beelined it out of the restaurant, speed-walked down the busy sidewalk shooting each other increasingly buoyant glances parting the crowd by nature of their radiance and then threw caution to the wind, sprinted full-out with arms pumping loudly laughing to his parallel-parked wonderful shitter car, threw themselves exhilarated into their respective seats like they had terminal diagnoses.

Which, Jess supposed, they did. They were born and bred to die fucking runners.

“Okay,” she said, “okay. Now.” He couldn’t make his hand turn the key. “Now.” Still nothing. “Maybe we need a pump-up song.” This sounded so belittling that it gave him the strength through embarrassment to start the car. Then he was ghost-pale and paralyzed again, so she clicked the radio on.

Elvis Costello, boomingly loud, untimely, She may be the reason I survive / The why and wherefore I’m alive. He smacked the volume down, but she was starting to smile like a menace. “Not tonight,” he said, “cut me one freaking break.”

“You are disgusting,” she said, perversely elated. “That was the song you drove here to? Jess!” She cranked the knob back up, skipped to the next track, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and the next, “Transatlanticism,” then “Sweet L’il gal (23rd/1st),” Squeeze’s “Satisfied,” and Lou Reed’s dirge-jig take on “This Magic Moment,” but she mercifully stopped there; if she’d flipped to the next cassette, it would’ve been “How to disappear completely,” “A Design for Life,” The Animals doing “It’s All over Now, Baby Blue,” “Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone,” Zeppelin’s “Tangerine,” “Love Burns,” “Cry, Cry,” and eleven tooth-grinding minutes of “Spacegirl.”

“I’ve got to kill myself,” he said, mortified.

She kept laughing like it was funnies fodder, like he was Garfield. As it petered to snorts that sent her rocking over her lap, merriment and heavy meaning bursting from her, she touched his arm and said, “‘To Bobby’ was mine. Over and over, Joan Baez trilling. Woodpecker-singing. And ‘Forget Her.’” He took her hand, her face in his hand, and kissed her. “And Tidal, Fiona Apple,” she added, eyes open, smiling that way that made flowers grow. Another kiss. “Slowdive.” Another. “Liz Phair.” Each a gift. “The 6ths. Sophie B. Hawkins. Jewel.”

“‘You were meant for me,’” he sang at a murmur.

“Drive,” she whispered, “I don’t know where, don’t ask me where. I don’t want to think. Just drive.”

He kept their fingers loosely linked as he batted the St. Anthony medal swinging from the rearview for luck and steered out of his spot. With each press of the brake he felt she would change her mind; his body was equally certain that this was precisely how their stories went, the pivotal moment he’d been enduring for. He fitted the Ambassador into the passing parade of traffic ahead. Rattled. Needing a smoke.

The light changed, so he drove. Shot peripheral glances at her, fear in every one, as he squinted to follow poorly-lit street signs. Slowly but surely, staggeringly, they picked their way out of the city. The buildings got shorter, shittier. The state of the pavement deteriorated. Fewer sports cars, windows tinted less. Strip malls began to crop up. It all gave him the willies.

“If we’re doing this,” she said, and then made him pull over so she could lurch car still rolling into the shoulder towards the wild wily trees and shifting shadow-licked creeper to grip between her bone-pale hands the guardrail and hurl chunks at a velocity and volume that made Jess’s blank brain say righteous.

He turned the car off, locked it, searched for a moment through the dark for cryptids, but found none besides a passing Buick Rendezvous, so jogged to scoop her hair off her neck and say, “Big Chief got you bad.”

“Ugh.” She spit. “Ugh.”

He pointed to her clean shoes. “Good aim.”

“Do you have water?” she said, croaky.

He went to check the car and found only Red Bull. He brought it over. The look she gave him, still hunched in half, was totally La Llorona. “Something about beggars and choosers,” he said.

She took the can, cracked it, sipped and swished and spat a few times, rubbing her nose. “Itches,” she complained. Her shirt had come untucked at her lower back; he laid a hand there. After a slight startle, she leaned against his hip. “Okay, I’m good now. Steady as she goes. Do you still bring mints everywhere?”

He could do her one better: dug a spare toothbrush from the glove compartment, plus the Crest and Listerine from his shaving kit. “The whole world is in this car,” he said, holding them out.

She greeted the Ambassador with a fond pat of the grimy hood and its full Christian name, “Otto von Bismarck,” dropped her haul onto the passenger’s seat, then sat, facing out the opened door, bleached in waves by passing headlights, and dry-brushed. He stood on the lip of the driver’s side, folded his arms on the roof, to watch Escapes and Explorers rumble. It still didn’t feel real.

“Hey,” he said.

Garbled by bristles, she hummed in question.

“Are you sure,” he said. She climbed off her seat and mimicked his position, scrubbing at her molars. “Obviously you don’t want to run away for real.”

“I don’t know, it sounds enticing,” she said, paste spilling rabid from the corner of her mouth.

“No it doesn’t. It obviously doesn’t, you just puked about it. Because you don’t have a life that you want to leave behind.”

She cocked her head, as if that hadn’t struck her before. “I don’t. You’re right.”

They returned to their seats, but left the doors open. Sometimes night threw a breeze their way, sidelong, cool and dry.

“We need to be back in Stars Hollow for the inn test-run,” she said, now just holding the toothbrush, twirling it. He didn’t process the prospect of returning tail between his legs to town when she said it like that, we. “I missed my mom’s college graduation for you, and I will not be forgiven if I disappoint her again.”

“I think you mean I won’t be forgiven.”

“I won’t be forgiven by me,” she clarified. “And you won’t be forgiven by anyone.”

He raised his hands. “We will get you home early.”

“It’s tomorrow.”​​

“That,” he said, “is a major freaking bummer.”

“We have time,” she said. “We have all summer. You want to be with me.”

He smiled faintly. “You wanna draw up a schedule?”

Her eyes started shining like a zealot’s. “Yeah, I do,” she said.

His grin widened. “You really do.”

“I really really do,” nodding, laughing. He felt spastic. “Hey,” she said, “for me. There’s one thing.”

“Name it,” he said.

“Don’t go back to Walmart,” she whispered. She rustled the front of her hair, then pulled her knees to her chest, the heels of her sneakers planted on the edge of her seat. Frayed laces coming loose.

“I had good standing there. If I’m not going back to the city—it’s good money, reliable money. Stop making that face,” she’d opened her mouth and gulped a breath like she was on a tightrope-edge over a tirade, “people like me don’t go to college, we don’t do well in college.”

“You are so smart,” she said, each word delivered like a stab. “You are—completely infuriating.”

“I know that’s how you have to think. That smart equals college equals degree equals safety.”

“Doesn’t it, these days?”

“For one, I’d be paying that shit off the rest of my life. Or I’d be forced to do ROTC and go postal, then shoot up a frat basement and kill myself.”

“Why are those the only options?”

“Because I’m not a Rockerfeller or descended from Rockerfellers?”

“Drat,” she said. It worked like a steam-vent.

He said, “Most of the time I don’t even like reading what people tell me to read.”

“Because you are a contrarian like no other.”

“Yes, in my bones.” He knocked on her knee. “To my genetic code, I am a contrarian like no other.”

“You are,” she agreed, taking his hands, “and you’re completely unique in this world, and it is a shame of quasi-theological proportions not to share it—your tremendous mind, the way you think, the way you talk,” he averted his eyes, and she followed him, slid her grip up to his shoulder and squeezed, “your peculiar tastes, your instincts, your personal dogma, Jess. You. The hours I’ve spent thinking I should’ve just written you an admissions essay.”

Shaking his head, exasperated, he raised their joint hands to his mouth, leaning her knuckles against the bow of his lip. “You know what it really is, the problem. I wouldn’t go to class. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to focus. It’d be paying people to stress me out with no reward, God fucking knows I wouldn’t finish a degree.”

“You could.”

“But I wouldn’t.”

“Objectively, I know that,” she said. “But you could.”

“Objectively, I know that,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose at him, moved their hands to her lap, shifted to make herself comfortable. Colorless dark, her cheek melting wax against the headrest. “What I mean is that you have to do what you love. You can’t set up your life now in ways that will make you miserable forever, you just can’t.”

He shut his eyes. “Not everyone has the luxury to do that.”

“What do you mean,” she softly said.

A little heaving and weary, he said, “The prewritten story of my life leads toward destitution. I’m not—nothing will be easy. But Walmart is solid. Walmart is the unsinkable cargo cruise of consumerism. Walmart is benefits. It’s the same place every day, and they won’t fire me as long as I keep trucking. As long as I, I don’t know. It's easier for me to stay awake when I’m doing things with my hands. Stocking, unloading.”

She turned to face him, dropped one foot to the weather-proof mats, where her sneaker squeaked. “And your soul will atrophy,” she said.

“Yes, that’s implicit,” he said. Abraham to his soul’s Isaac. His soul. A word borrowed, a foreign jargon. “I’m everyman. You’re not. You get to be the star.”

“And you?” she said.

“Night,” he said, “for you to hang from.”

“Please write,” she said. He barked a laugh. She scowled at him, swung a knee under herself to sit taller, and got louder. “Please write something brilliant. Please give yourself enough time and grace and, and respect—please write something.”

“I’ve never written a word,” he said. “School essays don’t count, there’s no self in them.”

“No soul in them,” she said, throwing off beams of celestial agony, one A.M.’s tortured saint, “no life in them. Write something alive. Write something to save yourself.”

“Rory,” he said. “I don’t have my own words. I have other people’s words, and those are good enough. Those can be good enough.”

“They’ll never be,” she said, because she knew him. “You just have to find a way to—”

“You give me too much credit.”

“—let it climb out of—I give you credit, yes, I give you credit because I’m investing. I’m getting in on the ground floor of something that makes me feel my heart, blood pushing through it. It’s fine if you don’t, but I believe in intuition. I believe in gut feelings. I believe in grey truth, warm grey, grey with hearth-flames billowing just behind it. I’m the version of you that wants you to live.”

His pulse was dizzying, feverish.

She had begun to frown, to shift to kneel. “Are you—”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“—crying?”

“No,” he said, “I’m not fucking crying.” He could hardly feel his lips. “I have no idea what’s happening to me,” he said, and it sounded wind-torn, wild. He felt like she’d planted seeds beneath his skin, tended them, fed them, pruned them, sung to them, harvested, cleaned and cooked and ate of him, in the space of a minute. “I have no idea how to, I don’t know what to, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t even….” He shook his head. Waterlogged.

“Speechless,” she said. “So I’ll keep talking.” Stubborn as time. “You take terrible care of yourself. I don’t think you know how to do it right.” He wondered if anyone had cared before her. “You don’t trust yourself, you don’t trust anything. You don’t trust that the world won’t fall apart under your feet. You keep talking about safety, about reliability, but you don’t believe in either of those things, or you don’t trust them, so I don’t know why you keep chasing them. Quit rattling your brain. Quit chewing your cheek. Wake up to the fact that this is your life, your one life, and that in forty years this will be what you were doing forty years ago. What did you imagine you would’ve done by now, when you were a kid? When did you stop trying to do it? Why?”

He’d imagined himself the same—hungry, quiet, wandering. When he’d have heat, he’d have no lights; with lights, no heat. Walking his laundry six blocks, ten bucks to clean and dry it, then unforecasted rain would soak it on the way home.

“Jess,” she said.

“I don’t know what to say,” he blurted. “I have no idea how to—I can’t, um.” He sniffed once, hard, tried to breathe out slow. “Yeah. I don’t—I don’t know.” He couldn’t have prepared to hear it. Would’ve had to, to achieve a semblance of grace. It required five-to-seven business days to determine how it made him feel. Or for the feeling to subside into something bearable. “I don’t, uh. We should put something in your stomach.”

She blinked owlishly. “What, you’re deflecting to me?”

“You did just,” he cleared his tight throat, “you painted the roses red, Alice.”

“Only a little.”

“It was a significant amount of puke. You puked for like a full minute.”

“Maybe it was the shrimp cocktail.”

“I told you not to get dive bar shrimp like that, but you don’t listen to sense. What do you want, what’s around here? Fast food-wise.”​​

“Everything. The whole world. Up to a, let’s say a reasonable hundred-mile radius.”

“I think we could manage two.”

“Not with you driving, tough guy,” she said, clapping his arm like she’d spent the past year subsuming the aura of a linebacker. Weirdo. “Over my dead body.”

“Alright, smartass,” he said, turning the key. As the engine warmed, he jabbed his elbow onto the lid of the center console to pop it open; all he kept in there were Camels, CDs, and Chapstick, and he lusted after all three. “First thing we see is where I’m pulling in, even if it’s KFC.”

“Well, I wouldn’t stoop that far,” she said, starting to flip through the fabric book his disks were stored in, squinting and studious.

“We could find a Wendy’s.” Magnanimously, he didn’t request consultation on her choice, just waited for the laser to start reading, the band to take their first breath, buzzing under his skin, the Operation board game. Tensed to scream. Duster began twinkling and beating, “Moon Age,” an album he’d forgotten about. Synths like microphone feedback. Melody-line like confusion. “Can I have a smoke,” he said.

“Aww, you’re really bugging out.” She grabbed him a pack nonetheless. Past waving trees and exit signs, he drove at approximately thirty miles-per-hour. “How adorable. Open up.” He parted his lips so she could stab a cigarette between them.

“Light me? It’s in my pocket.” He lifted his ass off the seat so she could, rolling her eyes, grope around for it, while he tried to keep the gas pedal steady, mostly failing.

“Be careful,” she threatened, but then she pinched his butt, so really she deserved it when he swerved a bit with his touchdown. “Hail Mary,” she threw out, “full of grace.” Pause. “That’s all I know. I’m turning it into a round. Hail Mary, full of grace; hail Mary, full of grace. Hail Mary fullofgrace,” rising in tone, lifting a hand, like it were Shakespeare, “hail Mary fullofgrace,” bowing her head, tone falling.

“If it’s not too much to ask,” he said, aware he was white-knuckling ten and two, “light me.”

“Needy.” She tripped the sparkwheel a few times before it caught, threw orange, pine-needle lash-shadows spilling over her cheeks. Her knuckles bumped against his chin as he started it. He inhaled good and hard. Exhaled with relief. “That good?”

“Unfortunately.” Sparkling. Easier breath. “S’unfortunate that I don’t just need it, that I love it so much.” He saw eyes reflecting his high beams and had a brief cardiac episode, but recovered well. Two bucks, deep into a roadside field. “Jesus, okay, scared the fuck out of me.”

“That could’ve been my third critter-related car accident,” now applying lip gloss, so seemingly back to her whole health, “with honors for two being in the subcategory of deer.”

With the craving sated, holding his cigarette out the window, the thought struck him again: food in her stomach. So he stared the road down like the crocodile hunter, gave Von Bismarck some gas, and nodded his head along to “Gold Dust.” It was only another minute until they spotted the neon bell, Polaris interrupting the chasmic dynamo of night. Like a true gentleman, he leaned bodily out of the car to announce their order, asked no questions, was simply her mouthpiece. In this domain she was the pro play-maker. While they waited idling between the windows, she braided her barely-there hair back in twin messes.

“I’m ready,” she said, and, literally, “Hoo-ah.”

“I need a camera bad,” he said. “In the subcategory of video.”

Their spoils required three bags, plus a drink-tray. When they’d balanced it all, dash and console and floor mat and cup holder depending on urgency-rated rankings regarding which items would still be edible when lukewarm, he moved to pull into one of the shrub-lined parking spots, but she said, “No, let’s drive,” in a way that was like a kiss to the heat in his gut.

“Your wish is my command,” he said, coasting toward the exit. His cigarette was spent; he flung it out the window. “If you’re sure.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” she said, shaking her head. The CD started skipping; this pissed her off further, made her throw her hands up and jab the eject and slap through the book for a new disk, insert it with a roll of her eyes. It was all charming. “Hey, devil’s loyalist advocate, maybe you’ll feel better if you prove to me why I should stay. Why you’re worth staying for. I dare you.”

“You can have my enchirito,” he said.

“Now we’re cooking with gas,” she said.

He coaxed Von Bismarck to a comfortable gallop. Focused on navigating towards a highway for a stretch. The whole cabin smelled like delicious grease. When he made a turn, the soda cups sloshed their ice. Confident they’d found a state road, he cruise-controlled them at a cool fifty-five and shot a glance her way. Reflected on the windshield, mouthing along to The Knack, radical awkward bony air-drum fills, good girls don’t / but I do. He wanted to stop the car, to better look at the leaves of streetlight dappling her.

“Are you ever gonna open a bag?” he said.

“Are you ever gonna answer my question?” she returned, still drumming.

“Yes,” he said, “as soon as I think of a reason.”

She didn’t reply. The quiet made him turn to her, too plucked for surreptitious, but she was only soft. Pretending to caress a cymbal. “Because I want to know you, remember?”

“That’s a cheap answer. It’s about your goodness, not mine.”

Ahead of them, indistinguishable domino tree line. Behind them, nothing. Churned dust and crunk pebbles of pavement rubble.

“Say something about yourself you like,” she said, hands falling to her lap.

“I like that I like to read,” he said.

Bug chorus, tinnitus.

“Rory,” he said, and waited for her to look at him. “Are you sure.”

“Why wouldn’t I be sure?” she said, overtly bitchy now.

“Because you don’t have a life you want to leave behind.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with it as is.”

“You don’t need anything else.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “I needed you.”

He shook his head.

“Pull over,” she said, and he felt slapped. Couldn’t pry his hands off the wheel, even with the car powered off. Eyes faraway, hueless in the dark, shelved porcelain doll. “Taylor put up all these posters of me at the end of the summer,” she said. “You would’ve taken care of it.” Like he was her hired muscle. “Some trucker hick jerk stole my tree. And this really old guy joined Lane’s band, and he totally shredded. I needed you to be there, to see it with me.”

“Like a hole in the head,” he said, “you need me.”

“You’re wrong. You’re so wrong.”

“But you looked like you just had to take it. Seeing me. Like a spoonful of castor oil.”

“No,” she said, then, bewildered, “what? My whole body wanted to see you. But you were going to leave again. That’s what I had to take.” Then, a little traincrash, inelegant, “The night of the firelight festival I went to this amazing fancy dinner for a rare manuscript society with my mom and her weirdo boyfriend and my grandparents had to fill eight seats but they couldn’t find eight people and all I could think about was how interested you would’ve been. You could’ve talked King Richard’s ear off about Chaucer and Lord Byron and tuberculous Keats.”

“Those aren’t rare manuscript authors,” he said, to be annoying.

“My gran died. I got a D on an essay on game theory.”

“You got your first D? Jesus, how long was the stint in the psych ward?”

“And Lane got kicked out of her house.”

“Lane got kicked out?” he said, heart catching. “Is she okay?”

“Paris and I kissed at a motel called the Sea Sprite on spring break in Florida.”

“Hold on, what are you—”

“There was this guy there who was like a Billabong iteration of you and I tried to, you know, flirt a little.”

“—talking about, what happened to Lane?”

“Unfortunately the version of me he was interested in was the version with Paris’s tongue in her mouth, so the romance ended there. Sorry, what did you say?”

He grasped her head firmly between his hands, a tactic he was accustomed to using on Liz. “What happened. To Lane.”

She mindlessly brushed fingertips over his knuckles. “She’s okay, she got this crusty little apartment with the band.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said thoroughly. “But she’s okay? She’s, like…?”

“Yeah, she’s okay,” she said, voice pitched quiet, holding onto his wrists. “She’s actually great. She dropped out of Seventh Day Adventist college and eventually her stomach got used to processed grains and aqueous cheese, and her mom met the guys, and Dave Rygalski came back from Stanford for winter break, so they spent two weeks really awkward and stiff and then one week rolling around on every horizontal surface they could find. Everything’s aces.”

He took her hands in his. Same short nails, unpainted, and long, chapped fingers.

“But you’re good?” she said. “You have a life you want to leave behind, but are you okay, are you happy?”

“Oh yeah, I’m well-adjusted now.”

“And honest.”

“I have no compunction with lying.”

“Sure, when you’re so good at it.”

“It would’ve been a waste of practice. Liz is a fucking lunatic,” he said.

She sucked too hard on her straw and briefly choked on Seven Up, which was, summarily, a sissy soda. “A lunatic, huh,” she said, scratchy.

“Well, she’s not an asshole,” he said, “just an idiot. Pardon my reach." He grabbed the grease-grey bags up, started lobbing whatever he pulled out into her lap. “Eat, what’s wrong with you.”

“I think we should talk about tonight’s accommodations,” she said, “because your upholstery is going to smell like beef for a week.”

“Accommodations,” he said, floored.

“I’m not sleeping in this stink,” she said, finally opening a burrito. She took a bite, then a second, like she’d forgotten how good food was. “And where would we go otherwise?” This was an excellent point for several reasons: certainly she would need sleep, and certainly they were not going to part. “I’m thinking a motel,” around her mouthful, the sexiest thing that had ever been said to him.

“Implications be damned?” he said.

“Are you kidding?” she said, pinching some damp, dangling lettuce-like shreds and dropping them onto her tongue. “I haven’t seen you in a year. I’m going to have somewhere between seven and eighty solid hours of questions about what you’ve read since then.”

It rubbed his heart raw. “I missed my friend like hell, Rory,” he said.

She smiled, dimples, then darted to peck his lips. With that, he grabbed his Mountain Dew and took a long, strong pull, then broke into a chalupa, if not calm, at better ease.

The cassettes flipped and clicked like cicadas as she turned on Low. Warm true moonlight bled over the parking lot as if it were a spotless shoreline; its beauty seemed to predicate shifting water. The piercing lament of gulls.

“Why did you go,” she said.

“If you cry,” he said warningly.

“Jess. Of course I’m going to freaking cry.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s going to make me lose my shit, I can’t fucking—it feels like I’m watching a play, it feels like you’re following a script that I didn’t get to learn. It feels like—” Like he’d been living a different genre, since he’d left. Maybe since Liz made him go. Or maybe since the start. He was filmed in tight angles, handheld camera, rasping breath. And she was meant for silks and furs, low lighting, a lingering shot on her glistening eyes. He put his face into his hands. His heart was angry with him. Righteous and black. In a corner. The only way out, offering up alms, burning a sacrifice. He said, “People who disappoint you. You shouldn’t have to be around them.”

“I could have helped you,” she immediately wept. “We would have figured it out.”

“Luke.” He glared at the windshield, permed boughs and pavement reflected on it as one. “I broke the agreement. I fucked it all up.”

“I’m not talking about Luke,” she said. “I’m talking about me. You did the one thing to me that messes me up. The unbearable, unforgivable thing.” She was shaking her head before she’d finished saying it. “You’re not unforgivable. Not telling me was unforgivable. Not warning me. Letting me look for you in the crowd at my graduation. Letting me hope.”

“I ruined everything. The reason I picked up those shifts was so nothing could ruin everything, so I’d have the cushion. Mea maxima culpa.”

“Nobody would have let you starve.” She impatiently wiped her eyes. “Are you touched in the head? None of us wanted that.” It cut. “We would’ve done anything,” she insisted.

“I know,” he said, “I know that, Rory, don’t you think I freaking know that.”

She unwound his fingers from their twisting tangle. With one thin hand, she pressed on his chest, and he realized he had folded over his lap. He flinched fighting the urge to rip away from the shock of warmth, then let the crown of his head hit the steering wheel. A long, droning honk made a fist of the night.

She climbed over the center console, knees and elbows jabbing, and his gaze got caught on her collarbone shifting, moonlight on pearl, so when she grabbed his face and lifted it to hers and bit his upper lip like she was trying to take it off, when she settled with legs spread warm on his lap, when the storm in his guts swelled with hundred-foot curls smacking crashing and spitting foam up into his cheeks pins-and-needles fuzzy, he wasn’t ready, wasn’t acclimated to the ferocity of feeling she roused in him. He released a massive mounting breath into her open mouth. Grabbed at her shirt and unraveling braids but couldn’t kiss her. She swept his hair off his brow and smeared his cheeks and neck with swatches of cherry lipgloss. He found the door handle but, before he could catch it, she snatched up his hands, said, a tumbled sheet of her hair blocking his view out the window, “You don’t think you deserve it.”

“Stop,” his muscles tightening plaster casts around ashen remains, his joints aqueous ice-pack sludge, “Rory, please.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. It’s okay. I won’t push.”

The gasps kept coming, like puking from nothing. “Stop,” he begged. “Please stop.”

“What’s happening, what’s going on?” She released his hands. They went to fists, stinging nails. She tried to hug him, but the body, his, didn’t let her, head bowing, getting in the way.

“I don’t know,” thin, a lie, but it felt every time like the first, “I don’t kn—” ugly hitch, shaking, whimpery exhale, “make it stop.”

She pressed his crown to her chest. “Okay, it’s okay.” Urgent, guilty. The only heart he heard was his own. Fingers curling around his ear, in the overgrown ends of his hair, like fascination. The stress abated. This was typical; the tank explosively bursting, quickly emptied. It left him feeling ashen. Purged. Like maybe he could sleep. “I think nobody ever made you feel good,” she said. He turned into her hand, pressed his face into her palm, wanting it. “Or—respected, listened to. I don’t know how you’ve made it this far with no one else looking back at you.”

He said, needless, “I think I haven’t.”

“What did you do in New York? Since I last saw you—you went dark. Luke didn’t know anything, we didn’t know anything.” He rubbed his eyes. Tingling, static. “I know about the car, we all heard about that.” Talking felt impossible. “Hey.” She nudged his temple with her shoulder.

He scraped for something. “I told you. A few jobs and a lease. I’ll need to deal with that. At least it’s monthly.”

“That’s—awful, why monthly?”

“It’s what was available.” As if he hadn't been able to taste her while penning his name.

“I had a job,” she said, wrinkling her nose. Her fingers had picked up playing with the ends of his hair, resting against the back of his neck, which prickled. It felt so good. He felt so sick. Baby’d got the fucking bends. “I scanned student ID cards at the dining hall.”

He managed a strung laugh. “That’s dweeby.”

“I can’t believe you burned Low onto a cassette,” she said, infused with light, humor, spring. His hands, unsteady with aftershocks, skimmed her legs. What he remembered of kissing her: muggy coffee breath; the sound she made when she thought he was pulling away; how even the bump of her kneecap into his thigh had turned him on. “That’s dweeby. They’re so CD to me.”

“When did this album come out? How old were we.”

“God, I don’t know. Was it ‘ninety-two?”

“‘Ninety-four,” he remembered. “New Year’s Day, ‘ninety-four.”

“You’ve got stupid encyclopedias in there,” she said, prodding his temples. Frankenstein’s studded monster. She had once said, in one of the dopier moments, laying on an old, ink-stained twin sheet in the park, sunburnt but not feeling it yet, Snapple bottles sweating on their sides in the grass, One of these days I’m gonna send you to Jeopardy. He’d said something stupid, probably Oh, yeah? Eyes shut, a streak of sunblock melting down her cheek with sweat, she’d said, We’ll buy Taylor out, put up a bookstore. He’d thought, I love you; he’d said, Huh. “I doubt I knew them at the time. My mom wasn’t much for dream pop. Too angry.”

He picked at a frayed edge of her skirt’s hem. “No clue where I learned about them. Probably—”

“Lane,” they said together. It made them grin.

“Did I ever tell you,” he said, “obviously you got her in the divorce, but I was sad about it. Am sad about it.”

“I know you are,” she said, eyes bright. “I loved how much you like her. Paris, too.”

“God, I love Paris, she makes me feel so regular,” and she laughed, head falling back, exposing long neck, sinew and stretched skin, some freckles, all of her there in his lap, “she makes me feel so normal. I love that broad.” He put his mouth to her pulse.

The muscles of her thighs tightened against his hips. He looked up at her through his lashes, feeling slack-jawed. Wanting her chemically. The pleasure of tonguing the filter while killing a smoke. “Damn you,” she murmured. Then, “No, please don’t stop.”

“Don’t stop?” he echoed, just as quiet. Please. He was so fucked.

“I don’t know,” she said, expansive, overwhelmed. The car filled with it like a lung. “I don’t know. But I don’t want you to stop, um, doing that.”

“Okay,” he said. Rubbed her arms until her shoulders dropped. Slipped the useless ties from her braids, set them in the cupholder, and unwound the lingering twists. From that alone, she got splotchily red, began to breathe through her open mouth. Hints of gapped teeth and, behind them, of tongue. Mosaic. “You tell me,” he said. His heart thundered. “Tell me what to do, what you want me to do. This is all—for you to choose.”

Her thumb pressed against his lower lip. “I wouldn’t know what to ask for.”

“Have you ever,” he said.

“No,” eyes cutting away, “no one’s been… right enough. I don’t—” Huff of breath. Because behaving wasn’t cool enough, rebellion wasn’t good enough, and abstainers were the same class of stupid as vegetarians.

“Okay,” he said. Took her hand in his, unfurled her fingers, pressed a kiss to her palm. “It’s been a long fuckin time, for me.”

“Yeah?” He hummed. After Rory, he hadn’t wanted much. “I want to, though,” she said, watching him through distant, thinking eyes. “I’ve wanted to. You’ve been in my dreams.” It made him want to punch walls, said like a shameful secret. “I’m—I know it’s stupid, to be scared.”

“You think I’m not gonna be fucking scared? You make me forget everything I’ve ever known.”

“You’ll have to be gentle,” she whispered.

“Of course,” he said, burning. He tilted their brows together. “Of course I will.”

“And patient.”

“I promise.”

“And,” voice wavering, “I’m not gonna be good at it this time, because I haven’t learned yet.”

He said, hands to her jaw, thumbs lightly pressing into the give of her cheeks, seriously, “Don’t you fucking worry about me. All you have to do is be there.”

Her lips skewed rightwards, and that eye scrunched shut. “Gross,” she said, pleased.

“You just don’t go quiet. Don’t just take it. You tell me when something’s not working. You liking it is all you have to worry about.”

“Okay,” with a relieved, bobbing nod, “I can do that.” Having explained herself, her eyes shut, peaceful, fan of lashes. Smudgy bits of black liner and mascara starting to crumble. He bent to kiss her throat again. Light, glancing brush. She leaned her cheek atop his head and tentatively shifted her weight, aligning his Levis to her spread legs, lifted skirt, Hanes. The tip of his tongue to an opalescent-blue vein. I guess the secret’s out, sang Low, like a river flows / it's never overdone, lilting, haunting, out of control. “That’s,” she said, breath catching, birdwings in it.

He slid open palms down her back. She made a sound. “Slow,” he said. “And you tell me,” voice strained, “if you want me to stop. Loud. Fuckin—bite me, if you have to. Okay? Rory?”

“Okay,” she said, hands settling at the top of his chest.

“No, I fucking mean it,” he said, leaning in, heart banging. “Rory.” He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Look at me.” Her downturned eyes shocked to meet his. “If you want me to stop,” he said. “If you even think you want me to stop. If you change your mind. If it hurts. If you’re scared. If you don’t fucking like it. No questions asked. We stop. Make me hear you.”

“You’re shaking again,” she said.

“No.” Firmly. “Stop doing that. Tell me that you’ll stop me.”

“I will.”

“Tell me like you mean it. You have to mean it.”

“I do, I will,” she said. Her gaze was dark, stuck on his mouth. “I’m having a hard time imagining wanting to stop you.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, sitting back, not comforted much. He raked a hand through his hair.

“You are, though,” she said. At his blank look, “Shaking. You’re shaking.”

Part scoff, part ugly laugh, he managed, “I’m fucking petrified.”

“I’ll stop you.”

“I don’t know if you will.”

“I’m telling you I will.”

“You need to stop me like I’m not me. You need to stop me like I’m Paris pissing you the fuck off.”

“Jess,” she said, “tell me what you want to do with me.” He shook his head. “Will you just go along with something for one minute? Or is that beneath you?”

“It’s not beneath me, it’s not—”

“I know, God, I’m sorry,” she whispered, leaning in to kiss him. “I know. Just tell me. For the sake of the exercise.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Try.”

Unspooling. “I just wanna kiss you everywhere you’ll let me,” he said, “I wanna show you everything that feels good.”

“See,” she said. “That’s why I’m not—convincing you, about stopping. Because I know that.”

“Oh,” he said, and made a face, because he was fucking shaking. Of all things to be doing around her, who was the one thing.

“I’ll stop you,” she said, with wind behind it. “I promise I’ll stop you. Reason or no reason.”

“Okay,” he said, believing her better.

“Thank you,” she added, unfathomably. He shook his head, moonsick, and kissed her. She sighed, settled into it, her fingers finding his hair, his cheek. She had, it seemed, swallowed the world.

With mouth slack, he dragged towards the corner of her eye, a catch of glitter at her temple, of sweat, auburn stuck to it. Flax-shell. Her ear made her gasp and straighten. He hummed, hands sitting at the folding, worn-soft waist of her skirt, smiling a little. “I like that too.” She exhaled thinly. He took a tiny hoop earring between his teeth. She slumped forward, seizing a fistful of his shirt from under his jacket. Sweet soda breath against his neck. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered, following it.

She pushed up onto her knees, trying to get closer. Mess of limbs and lyrics of tongue. Doves in the dark. Down her neck, her chest, the cardigan peeled off, top rucked and skirt lifted. Starting to shift her hips in fits and starts, like each time she caught herself at it was a new horror. “What the hell,” she said, wild-eyed. “Take off your shirt, Jesus,” pulling at it.

“Inside I will,” he said. Caught every kiss she aimed at exposed fractals of his clavicle and shoulders. He pinched between his fingers the fabric of her top, careful not to grab skin, right over her breast.

“Oh my God,” she said, legs snapping tight, grabbing his hair.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, and, “oh my God,” and “what the hell.” He pawed her top aside and put his lips near her nipple—blew on it first to piss her off—then kissed it. She inhaled sharply through her nose.

“So fucking pretty,” he was compelled to tell her, dragging a thumb along the translucent-pale underside, the bow where it met her ribcage. Really he had no choice but to take it into his mouth and flick his tongue and look up at her and suck. Moaned with her, remembering his dick as she rocked against it and it fucking throbbed. His brows lifted, jaw softened. Disoriented. “Did you say something?” he said, lips catching against her skin. Like he had water in his ears.

“Inside,” she rasped, “I said let’s go inside,” and her hands were tugging his hair so perfectly his tongue fell and again he moaned, skull knocking back against the headrest, “now, please.”

“So much for the implications,” he said. Heart busting, full-out. “Who am I kidding. I can’t get up, I need a minute.” He swept in for another kiss. Another.

“I feel like I’m dying. I get it, the, the French.”

“You haven’t even heard of French yet.” She gave a beset laugh. He had to lean away, chest heaving, to stare at her. Flush everywhere, and neck starting to bruise. “What’s in that lipgloss, crack?”

“Yeah, or something,” she said grandly, returning her boob to her shirt. “Do I have to get up? Are your legs asleep? I don’t want to get off of you yet, I like sitting here.” He pushed a hand up her thigh all the way to her back pocket, worked his fingers into it, watching every flick of her expression, cataloguing proof, maybe. “Oh my God,” finally a bit of the overdue crisis-glint came to her eyes, “we’re at a motel, to—”

“Catch up,” he said, while she said, “—pop my freaking cherry, I’m a total sell-out, a cliche, derivative.”

“Classic,” he suggested.

She ducked her head, shadows turning her eyeless. Ivory. “It’ll be boring for you,” she said, self-deprecating.

“Hey,” he said, and smoothed down her hair. She looked at him and it was ‘oh-one, her open window between them. “I can’t say it without being a sell-out cliche derivative.”

“Totally,” she said, starting to smile.

“No place on earth I’d rather be,” he said. “Fuckin… honest.”

A wrinkle of her nose. She tossed a glance out the windshield at the spotlit street sign, the long, boxy building, three floors, red neon signs searing stars from the skyline. A few other parked cars—they’d driven past two barren Siestas before settling here, the clueless-sheep tactic. “We just have to go in and ask for a room.”

“I’ve got cash.”

“I’ve got card.”

“I have my stuff, you can go wild in my bag if you need anything.”

“I keep emergency pajamas in my purse.”

“You keep—” he said. “You—”

“I like to be prepared,” she said. “Underwear and socks, too.”

He said, “You are something out of the science fiction double feature.”

Wide, toothy smile. Exhilarated. “So come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab,” she drawled, vocal fry like an electric drill.

“A mental mind-fuck can be nice.”

“They need to put Meatball in more movies.”

“Great heavens, that’s a laser.”

“Meatball would’ve been great in Clue, for example.”

“My vheels! My God, I can't move my vheels!”

“You could just keep going all night, couldn’t you.”

“Say goodbye to all of this… and hello to oblivion.”

A laugh, kept close, quiet. “How many times have you seen it now?”

His mouth curved. “Yes,” he said. “And his name is Meat Loaf, and he was in about a hundred movies, FYI.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I’m certain his name is Meatball.”

“Sometimes,” he said, and paused to kiss her. “Sometimes, your mother needs a fact-checker.”

“That bitch,” she said severely. “No, she did this on purpose. It’s not the first time. She convinced me Billy Joel was blind because he wore sunglasses on Sesame Street once. I was almost crucified by my ninth grade gym teacher when I said how amazing it was that he could play ‘Piano Man’ without seeing the keys, like Beethoven composing without his hearing.”

“You’re joking.” In response to her glare, “You’re serious? Oh, my God,” laughter bubbled from him, and he reeled her in close, said, “what are we gonna do with you, Doogie.”

“Howser?” she demanded.

“Too smart too young. Sweet little face. Connable forever.”

“Unconnable!”

“Connable due to your lack of worldly experience.” He nudged her out of his shoulder so he could look at her. “You shoot to tier one without making stops on the lower rungs, everything you do. And then you feel like an alien to your peers.” He brushed her hair off her cheek, her pout terribly endearing. “You believe, instinctually, that people tell you the truth. You can’t fathom a world where everybody’s lying all the time, because you’re not.”

“I lie plenty.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t feel normal to you. You feel like you’re supposed to get caught for every lie. Nobody else is. There’s no repercussions. It's not a crime.”

“You’re just jaded,” she said. “Miserable little loner.”

“And how,” he said.

She made a face—dejected. “You’re not supposed to agree.”

“I lie, but I don’t deny the truth.”

“Sure, because that would be immoral.”

“Exactly, now you’ve got it,” he said, patting her thighs. Most of the tension was gone; she looked like herself again, one muttered judgement, one wink, one bar of Momus away from a smile. “Alright. I think now’s the time.”

“To go inside,” she guessed, lashes lowering.

And, like that, they were conquerors again. She opened the door, climbed off him and into the neighboring parking spot, took a mewling stretch while he tried to stomp feeling back into his legs and ass. They shoved into the atrium in matching step, brilliant and unstoppable. “Yo,” Jess called as she tugged him towards the counter. When no one came, he dumped his duffel and messenger bags to the floor, smacked the bell around a bit. She flung her purse onto a squatty plaid couch, rocked onto her toes to peer at a pixelated screen overhead, their faces on black-and-white security footage.

“Yes sir,” said a harassed-looking worker as he emerged from an office, shutting the door behind himself, pocketing a key. Muffled from inside, a radio played news, the week’s weather forecast, Martha Stewart, Dow Jones. “Yes sir, hello.”

“Hi,” Jess said. Was shocked to discover there were things as menial as night shifts in a world where Rory’s fingers were twisting between his. “A room. Two beds, or a bed and a couch.”

“One bed is fine,” said Rory. A wave of delicious terror crashed upon his head. She touched his elbow, like she could tell.

“All rooms have a couch,” said the concierge, clicking at a clunky desktop computer. Jess looked sideways at her. She mimed something so foul he shouted with laughter, had to turn away and cover his mouth. “So one room, one bed. Name and a card, please sir.”

While she wheeled off wandering towards the breakfast room, slinging the strap of his bag over her shoulder, he pulled out his wallet and squared them away, but his eyes were on her. She crouched to read the cereal offerings, to open the mini fridge and sift through milks and yogurts. Adjusted her sleeves, then touched her fingers to her lips and smiled.

“Thank you very much, sir,” the concierge said, sliding Jess’s fake ID across the counter. “It’s on the third floor. Best view.”

Jess reached out to shake his hand. “Of what, the raccoons copulating in the dumpster out back?”

“Hey,” she said, appearing at his elbow with that odd silence despite her lank (“Jesus fuck,” he said, seizing his chest), “hi. Are we ready to go?”

Catching his breath, squinting at her, “Uh huh. Here,” and put the room key in her hand, because she liked so much to press elevator buttons and pedestrian-crossing buttons and vending machine buttons. Her expression brightened. “Lead the way,” he told her.

With fingers looped into his hip pocket and the key held close to her nose, squinting to make out the number inscribed upon it unaided by the dimmed fluorescent lights, she pulled him towards the end of the dingy, carpeted hallway to the elevator. There was no lobby music, but when she moved her bracelets clattered, and when she peered at him it was with a conspiratorial smile. They entered the cart with an air, After you, No after you. When the doors shut, they were on each other like dogs. Bouncing off the mirrored walls, moaning filthy and swearing, knee fitted between her legs, her thumb tugging at his lower lip, then dragging over his chin, catching the ball of his throat.

When the doors opened, she backed him down the hall, pulling at his jacket with these little huffs of frustration, not trying to get it off him, just bemoaning its existence. He wanted to feel her skin, got his hands up her shirt to grab the meat of her lower back. She made a noise like it was something devilish.

“Okay?” he said, tearing backwards, suction slip of suddenly open mouths, red all over, spit trailing lip to lip. He batted at it impatiently. “You’re okay?”

She was looking at him like she’d never seen him. “Oh my God,” she said, “I need to have sex with you. These aren’t strong enough words, but I don’t know how else to say it, I’ve never, I don’t know—” and she tipped into him, all her weight put behind her mouth, kissed him stupid, senses without sense, just babbling, blathering fire. “Find the door,” she slurred, but she was groping him, so he was useless, at a panting standstill with only the presence of mind required to hunt her mouth again. “We need to, we need to get inside,” with her hand trying to sneak down the front of his jeans. He realized he was moaning, pushing hard into the cup of her palm, that a peeling-papered wall was at his back only as his skull knocked against it. “Careful,” she whispered, feeling into his hair for the bump.

“Rory,” he said, wrecked. Crawling electric overload from scalp to soles.

She kissed him, running a hand over his head, then tore her eyes away to once again study the key. “Three-oh-three, okay. Easy. Three-oh-three.” She looked at him. Her lips parted. “I forgot,” she said.

He wrapped his arms fully around her, breathing. Still trying to kick the trembling, the stupid hands, the useless knees. She dropped her chin over his shoulder. He said, “I’m done for.” That fucking throat. Sweet pea perfume on his tongue. Reality was sinking.

“So much for sweeping me off my feet and carrying me over the threshold.” He groaned. “You are so slutty, it’s unreal. You can make anything look depraved. It’s not fair.” A calmer kiss. She sucked on his tongue—he crumpled closer, sighing into her mouth, tightening his hold, as if there was anywhere to go—to be subsumed—“We need to stop,” she said, hurling herself away from him. Cold rushed in. “Okay. Three-oh-three. This way.” With a final covetous look, she marched down the hall, his messenger bag swinging in time with her steps.

By the time he’d tucked his hard-on into his waistband and caught up, limping, she was inside, checking the sheets for bed bugs—nightstand drawer open and flashlight flicked on, keen Scully. She straightened when she saw him, rubbed her palms against her skirt. “Let me wash up,” she said, “like in the movies.”

“I want to wash up too, I’ve gotta be stale as all hell,” he said. The room was small, but it didn’t stink of anything, and the white duvet looked impressively clean. Not a honeymoon suite, but—foully, he said, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“What?” she said, peering at him over her shoulder in the full-length mirror as she adjusted her hair.

“I watched my freaking mother get freaking married today. This day has lasted nineteen goddamn lifetimes.”

A slow nod. Weight shifting. “Your lunatic mother.”

“Yeah, getting lunatic married.”

“You need a bath,” she said, imperious.

“In a public tub? No chance.”

“Come on,” taking his hand between hers, backing from carpet towards laminate.

“You better have bleach in that purse of yours.” She didn’t, but she did have travel-sized soap liquid, silky pink. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” he said.

“Come, come.” She urged him nearer as she gave the tub a perfunctory rinse, then flicked warm water to make him flinch. White porcelain all around, matching subway tiles on the walls. Towels hung waiting from hooks and handles, looking rough, unappealing. Bubbles built in droves, powdery perfume hanging in the steam. “I’ll be right back. You sit here and watch it fill.”

“Ascetic,” he said, sitting, watching it fill. She left to audibly fool around with the air conditioning and drapes. He removed his sneakers, chucked them out the door. They bounced off the shut closet, dropping dirt. “When the fuck did I step in mud,” he called, but quickly remembered her ralphing. “Oh, right.”

When she didn’t answer, he got twitchy. Found her sitting on the bed with legs crossed, the landline phone to her ear.

“Hi Mommy,” she said into it, “just wanted to let you know I’m running away for the night and the reasons are nefarious and it’s all total dish. This is what happens when you don’t answer your cell. Your daughter gets a freaking life. In my mind, you just cheered. Don’t tell me if you didn’t. I’ll call you tomorrow when I’m on my way home love you byeee,” then hung up. Shoved the phone away. Hugged herself. Looked at him.

His mouth quirked. A fucking year.

They took a bath. And all the rest.

Panties and a Swirlies tee she’d liberated from his bag, sensible white below-ankle socks, damp hair scooped back. Mindlessly dragging her hands across the walls, then the squared edge of the bathroom countertop. She eyed the soap dish and lime-stained faucet, then the drain in the bathtub, which had finally bubbled, emptied. She closed the toilet lid and sat with a brief wince upon it, tucked a knee to her chest, then plucked the deodorant from his shaving kit, traced her finger over the label, and mouthed to herself the name of the scent: Norway Spruce. Said, “I wondered. I could never tell. God, it’s so CNN. Did Luke buy this for you?”

“Nah,” he said. “Liz is like that too, guess it runs in the family.” She hummed the start of the Addams family rag, snapped twice in time. He scoffed. “Like you have room to talk, Constance.”

“Merricat,” she shot back, pointing the deodorant at him like a switchblade, Give me everything you’ve got. He remembered the horrible picture of her wearing fencing garb in her junior yearbook, helmet held under an arm, mid-gesticulation and shouting at the photographer. She’d looked like Gumby. “Put it on, I like how it smells.”

He followed the instruction. “Why are you staring at my pits like that,” he said.

“I’m admiring the passing of time,” she said loftily. “Hey. You’re gonna need to wear a lot less clothing around me from now on, as a rule.”

He raised a brow. “A rule, for the future.”

“Yes, for everything after this night ends.”

“Right, for that.”

“You look happy,” she said.

“I am happy, you nut,” he said. She pressed a kiss to his hip, then unfolded her limbs and loped towards the dim jewel tones and tossed throw pillows of the bedroom, the untucked sheets and used towels and all the books from his duffel, which she’d sorted and stacked for perusal of his annotations. Sparing a glance back at him, she dropped the shirt, her underwear, and traded them for a pair of his clean boxers, then the pajamas from her purse. He rushed through flossing and brushing, unwilling to be out of reach. The fear that she’d change her mind was no quieter. His heart had grown accustomed to baying. Had no instinct for what to do now that she was puttering around the other room. He dragged his fingers through his hair to dislodge knots, brushed his wrists along his shoulders to displace any lingering damp—they’d soaked twice, before and after, until she started looking semi-calm, even undressed, and let him hold onto the arch of her foot under the water.

“How are the sheets, how’s the mattress?” he called, drying his hands, then “sorry,” since it had come out demanding.

He found her tucked into bed with his copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She slit her eyes, then curled up and sighed, looking like she was made of magic. Halo of hair and half-moon hands. “I’m impressed. I’m snug as a pig in a blanket.”

“It’s Pillsbury-level?” he said, incredulous. “Looks scratchy.”

She ran a nail over the convoluted trim on the sheet. “No, not bad. But I like scratchy things.”

“Are they starchy.”

“If I say yes, will you get in?”

He pointed at the slumped couch. Horrible shade of heathered grey. Like concrete. Rory’s brows climbed her forehead.

“I can’t,” he said. “Too many things happened today.” He was so drained, the truth slipped out. “I’m gonna roll all over you and hog the duvet and fuckin hump your leg in my sleep or some shit, with the way my luck runs. I’m gonna snore at a bizarre decibel and recite limericks.”

“Please,” she said.

Well. “Okay,” he said, “yeah.”

She watched as he shedded his undershirt and kept on his socks. She said, scratching her ear, “You don’t have to.”

He turned away to change his boxers, then approached the bed, body ready to give but mind firing at a velocity he could tell outran the encroaching vignette of exhaustion. “Shut the fuck up,” he said fondly. She scooted to make room for him, situated their limbs for maximum comfort, bodywarm and clean-smelling, everything soft. “Okay?” as she laid her head on his chest.

“I love when you do that,” touching with tentative fingertips the outline of his mouth, “when you talk sideways.”

“What in the world does that mean.”

“When you talk with your lips screwed over, when they go crooked. Like you’re telling secrets.”

“I didn’t even know that was a thing I do.” He ran a hand over her shoulder, pads of his fingers skimming waves of pointelle pajamas in periwinkle-blue, wrinkled as could be. “Why the purse-PJs?”

“Mm, I met this kid named Marty,” flicking at a chunk of her hair that had caught on her chapstick, “first real party of the semester. He got wasted and fell asleep in the hallway ass-up, naked as a babe.”

“Talk about fucking the freshmen,” he said.

She huffed a laugh. He stuck one of his legs between hers. They’d laid like this before, but he felt mechanically wired. He inhaled to ask her again if she was sure.

“What happened to knowing each other better than anyone else?” she said, not giving him the chance. “You were so confident two hours ago that we’re meant for each other, cosmically and karmically, and now you look like you don’t know how you got here. Are you all mouth?”

“Like Corey fucking Feldman,” he said. “I just don’t fucking want you to wake up tomorrow to a faceful of my morning breath and think to yourself, Oh, God, I ruined everything, why did I do this, why did he let me do this?”

“Stop asking,” she said firmly, rolling onto her stomach, folding her arms across his chest, resting her chin between them. “I promise if I have regrets I’ll only blame myself.” As if he didn’t know that. “Can we talk more? I want to hear about you.”

“Seriously, there’s nothing to hear.” He slid his hand over the back of her head, resting it at the nape of her neck. “Not one thing has happened to me until tonight.”

“I’m not tired,” she announced. “My sleep schedule is all janked up from school, I’m not going to pass out until, like, four, and—what time is it?”

He grabbed the alarm clock off the nightstand. “Well, that can’t be right,” he said.

She turned it towards herself. “Three sixteen,” she read faintly.

“I’m not sleeping,” they said at the same time.

“I have like eight other sex moves to show you,” he said, “eleven if I shotgun a Red Bull first.”

“Might I suggest an alternative?” She bit her lip as if it was even hotter.

“Another list?” he said, to be annoying, but she mashed her palm over his face. He laughed into it like a lottery-winner. “I was right? Another list?”

“Yes, for the future, for everything after this night ends,” she said loudly. Glowering like a two-pint lapdog. “We can’t do this again, kiss instead of hammering out the details.”

“Hammering,” he said.

“I want to keep you,” she said. “I’m not taking parts, pieces. If we’re doing this, I get to keep you.” Vigorous, and starting to flush.

He returned the radio to the nightstand, then took his Tom Wolfe up from the duvet, flipped to the blank inner back cover. The pale wrist. Asked, “Was there a pen in this?” She groped around under the sheets until it surfaced, then held it out. He closed the cap between his teeth to bite it off, then spit it somewhere beyond their purview. As he wrote, with the book leaned against her arms, an easel, he recited: “Oh-six, oh-two, two-thousand-and-three. A proposal for the rejoining of clans Gilmore and Mariano in friendship.”

“With no resentment,” she added.

“With no… resentment. Okay. Statement one is yours, you’ve always loved a thesis.”

“Screw you,” eyes glimmering, disbelief. “The second you’ve got the pen in your hand you know everything about me.”

After a moment, he said, “You just make words come to my mouth, I don’t know.”

Her laugh, and the shape of her chin. His favorite Bourdain quote was on the subject of his first oyster, how it ruined him. With her tongue skimming his, he got it.

They were up all night listing. Hammering. With the receiver to the room’s landline held between their heads, they called Lane, who picked up mostly asleep but quickly woke when Jess said, “Hi,” instigating a lot of hushed girlish screaming and giggling.

“I’m going outside, this is a full-volume call,” she hissed, floorboards audibly creaking, worn-soled slippers scuffing. “Oh my God, I can go outside to take calls now. I can go outside in general!”

“You’re so free,” Jess said. She sounded breathtaking. “It suits you.”

The squeak of a door on weary hinges. “What about you, wild man?” she said. “How’s the life unfettered?”

“Not free,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, in Schrodinger's box on Foot’s experimental trolley tracks.”

“He’s coming back with me,” Rory said. She was chewing her nails, sitting cross-legged with a pillow in her lap. The lamps around them wore ochre shades with dainty, dangling beads around the circumference, warming the wall paint and bedsheets and drawn curtains. More enthusiasm, yippeeing.

“Oh my God, where will you stay?” said Lane, gasping. “Is Luke letting—?”

“Nope,” he said. “I’ll look for a room somewhere.”

“Here, there’s room here,” Lane said. Quickly. Reflexive. “You can move in with the rest of Stars Hollow’s rejects and scum.”

He looked at Rory, whose eyes had gone bright. “Can I take the phone for a sec,” he said.

With her lips pressed together around a smile, she nodded. He put it to his ear to tell Lane, “I would have offered the same to you if I could. If you ever need it.”

“I know,” Lane said. This was something they hadn’t had sufficient stakes to vocalize before. Anything they could, they had said through pointed looks and shared headphones.

A familiarly charged silence fell. They broke it with awkward laughter. “Are you sure,” he said. Rory flicked him. He moved the phone from his mouth to say, “It’s allowed, I’m not asking you.”

“Of course I’m sure,” Lane said. “I’ll check with the guys in the morning, obviously, but they always dug you. They’ll just be happy to dip into your music stash.”

This raised Jess’s spirits. “Okay,” he said. “Then yes. Just until the fall semester. Then I’ll scram with Rory to stupid New Haven.”

“New Haven’s nice, you’ll like it eventually,” Rory said, examining her nails, like agreeing to him until then was no sweat. “You just need to find your decrepit little delis and thrifts to shoplift batteries from, then you’ll feel right at home.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Lane said. “The love story. You could make some really sweet porn of this. It’s every girl’s wet dream come true. Rory, how are you feeling right now, what the hell happened since your final?”

“A lot,” Rory said in a tone that made Lane exclaim, “Oh my God, I was joking, that was a joke! Are you serious? You’re totally serious. You guys did it.”

Jess handed the phone back to Rory, starting to flush. He did not have to be part of this particular conversation.

“Can I go gossip in the bathroom?” Rory said to him, then, “What are you, my mom? I’m not asking, I’m telling you. I’m going to gossip in the bathroom. I’ll return in three to five business days.”

Jess rubbed a hand over his smile. “Go,” he said, reaching to swat her thigh as she crawled off the bed.

“Lane, I’m calling you right back on my cell. Say bye to Jess.”

“Bye, roomie,” Lane called.

“Bye, biblically-accurate samaritan,” Jess said, which made Lane say, “Well, now I changed my mind, you can sleep chained up in Taylor’s basement for all I care.”

While Rory dug her cell from her purse, he stared at the duvet, found his mouth still upturned.

“Are you happy to go back?” she asked.

“This is like a humiliation ritual for me,” he said. “But Lane sounds good.”

A laugh that tapered to something tearful. “I know, right?” she said.

Then she closed herself in the bathroom, stuffed their towels around the door-gaps to save him from the gory recollection. He appreciated this, as the gory recollection had the potential to ruin him. By the time she hung up it was five thirty—he’d reread a good chunk of The Electric Kool-Aid… and a few passages from the nightstand drawer’s Book of Mormon they’d found while hunting a legal pad or note paper—and she emerged from her confessional ablaze. “Second wind,” she said, “I just washed our underwear in the sink, and now I’m going to give myself bangs.”

“Do you need lithium,” he said, disoriented. She moved through his vision like a spotlight. “Woah, you went straight from sex into washing my whities. What are you, fast-tracking me?”

“Yep,” she said, in his duffel, digging for something, “I’m making up for lost time.” She found his pair of scissors in their frosted plastic sleeve, held them aloft, the demon barber of Peach Street. “When I mess up, you’ll come fix them?”

“Duh,” he said. More of the Book of Mormon. “What the fuck,” he said of it.

“Hey,” she called.

He found her sitting on the counter over the sink to get close to the mirror. The damage was definitely fixable. It just needed some layers and a different angle of approach. He stepped up behind her, pressed a kiss to her shoulder, then patted her hips to urge her to turn around. She swatted some cut hair off her nose and cheeks, then did, linked her ankles behind his knees. He messed around for a few minutes, ruffling and parting, adding texture. Liz had been a hairdresser for a while when he was young and had cut his hair right up until she kicked him out. Kept it short and tight, like a fucking lice kid. Aqua Net still made him wistful.

“Close your eyes,” he said. She did. He blew and wiped snipped strands from her purplish lids. With his fingers, he rustled the bangs, then gave some final snips. “Done.” She bobbed close to kiss him. Nerves churned like sloshing rapids. “Go on, look.”

She shot a perfunctory glance at the mirror over her shoulder. “Perfect,” she said. “Thanks, Vidal.”

“Wash your face,” he said. “You’ll be eating hair all day.”

“Afternoon snack.”

“Elevenses.”

“Part of a complete breakfast.”

“Per the food pyramid.”

“I think it’s time,” she said.

“Ominous,” he said.

“To go pick up my stuff,” she clarified. “And my car.”

“And then to Stars Hollow,” he said, “for my drawing and quartering at high noon.”

She grinned. “Yeah, for that,” she said. “No, everyone will be fine. Don’t worry about other people, they’re all kooks and cranks.”

“I’m not worried about them,” he said. “I don’t give a shit if they like me. I just don’t want it to be a whole thing again.”

“It won’t,” she said, “because I won’t make it a thing. They’ll follow my lead.” Heartening. “Okay? No second thoughts?”

“No, not real ones. I would eat way worse shit, if it meant—I’d move to Chernobyl.”

“Can I come with you to Luke’s? Or should you take him alone, and I go see my mom?”

“I said Chernobyl, not the Twilight Zone.”

“Alone it is.”

For a moment, he just looked at her. When his courage had mounted, he said, “Okay. Break.”

So they rinsed the hair down the sink, collected their crap and bagged it, pulled the sheets off the bed, left the towels on the floor, turned off the lights and the air, put some tissues over the condoms in the trash, left cash with notes: TIP THANK YOU!! read one, and the other, IN CASE YOU NEED DRAIN-O. After a pit stop for stale continental breakfast, for her rubbermade eggs and piles of Lucky Charms with chocolate milk and gasoline-coffee, a cocktail of the juices on tap, cran-orange, blush pink, and for him peach yogurt with annatto the precise color and texture of Velveeta and therefore inedible, so just an apple, offseason red delicious like biting into a sponge, they hit the road while the morning was still frank with waking. She directed him to her dorm, and they ferried her stuff in silence to the trunk of her silver ‘03 Prius, a sloped and characterless hybrid monstrosity, truly hideous, and, when the trunk filled, to her backseat, passenger seat, and eventually Von Bismarck for overflow garbage bags of clothes. The sun quickened. She and the Prius led the way like he was riding in the Popemobile parade with no music on because he was, God help him, beginning to feel hurly on the highway.

She gave him a quick little honk goodbye as they approached the main drag, the high school and Doose’s crimes against humanity and the diner, where she peeled off and he pulled up. A few earlybirds were perched on stools inside, a tableau through the front windows, familiar faces plowing familiar orders against shades of blue straight out of the seventies.

He smoked three cigarettes top to toe out the window, felt worse. Before he could do more damage, he said, “Fuck. Shit,” and threw himself out of the car, marched with head ducked to the stoop, up the step, through the door, to the counter.

“You’re back,” Luke said. He looked much the same.

Jess was a different man entirely than he’d been twelve hours before. He said, “Can we talk?”

“Yeah,” Luke said, fixing him with a grave look along the length of his nose, drying his hands on a rag, “we can talk.”

“Upstairs,” Jess clarified. The back of his neck itched like ember-burns.

Luke’s brow creased. Weary. “Fine,” he tossed the rag under the counter, “but if you’re here to kibitz me some more, you can turn right back around and screw off.” Jess stared at him. It was Luke who took his kibitzing on the road. “Go, up,” Luke said, shooing him towards the curtain, the stairs. It was stupid, but Jess shot a look over his shoulder as he disappeared himself—every eye hung on him. A bitching bright red moon. Luke shoved him. It worked to break the spell. This rotting dumb fucking chestnut again.

Jess stepped aside so Luke could unlock the door, cramming his hands into his pockets. Rattling nerves. Warm wood and navy and cognac leather, the wink of a mirage. When he turned to face Luke, he found him with arms crossed, stance wide, brows low. “I have to ask you something.” The grizzled glower. Jess said, “I want to come back.”

Splayed forefinger and thumb rose at half-speed to press into Luke’s eyes. “What, one moment of humanity and you want me to forget everything? Jess. No. It doesn’t work like that.”

Jess removed from his pocket and unfolded his copy of the plans he and Rory had sleeplessly scrawled. He heard so loud this one clock on the wall that ticked the cicadas incessant. From downstairs, embedded in the concrete and rugs, wafted cinnamon, egg-smell, and joe. A few blinks, trying to focus, smoothing out the notepaper. “A proposal,” he read, “for the rejoining of clans Gilmore and Mariano in friendship, with no resentment.”

“A rejoining,” Luke said, and then, “Gilmore like Lorelai?”

“And the other Lorelai, yeah,” Jess said. He cleared his throat. Staring into his own handwriting, his vision swam. Deja vu to his nightmares. “Rory, I talked to her, I went to see her.”

Luke went pallid. “You did what,” he said.

“I went to see her,” Jess said, louder but with no less ferment. Feverish pulse. “We talked, we—we came back here together.”

Luke’s gaze went thousand-mile. After a long moment, he ripped himself out of it, grabbed one of the mismatched dining chairs by its scruff, scraped it across the hardwood to Jess, and told him, “Sit.” Then he went to the fridge, where he acquired two Blue Moons. A brief pitstop at the counter, a fat orange from his fruit bowl smacked onto a cutting board, paring knife making segments, one for each of them to squeeze. Eruption of hops, crystalline taste, wickedly cold. Luke finished half his beer before he said, fingers pressed against his eyelids, “You did what.” Jess got busy downing his own. Luke drank some more. They slammed their bottles empty to the table in tandem. Jess went to pull another pair from its soggy cardboard carton. Bigger orange slices, and fuck the rind, scalped them. ”You,” Luke said, “did what.”

Jess passed the paper over, leaving sticky fingerprints. Luke huffed, leveled him with a look, then rose muttering under his breath about finding his readers, which weren’t in his pocket, on his desk, in his nightstand, by the phone, on the lip of the bathroom sink, between the couch cushions, or under the recliner. “Can’t you just squint like a normal person,” Jess said.

“No, it gives me headaches,” Luke said, now in the closet digging through his jeans. Jess had sort of imagined Luke as impervious to the human condition. “Aha.” They were in his suit jacket, still from the wedding. “Manifesto,” Luke remembered, and came over to pluck it up, glasses perched low on his nose, mouth near-silently moving as he read. “GED,” approvingly.

A compromise. Jess didn’t particularly want to get a GED, and his jobs wouldn’t require one, but he’d always standardized-tested excessively well. It was a point of resentment between him and his teachers and his peers. Closed him into the crystal center of the cat’s chicken-wire cradle.

Luke lifted his face, paused reading to scratch his neckbeard and return heavily to his seat. “Why now?” he said. “Why not months ago? Why not years from now? What gave you the courage to uproot yourself? To quit playing shunned Romeo?”

“You,” Jess said, soldiering on as Luke rolled his eyes, “and Lorelai, at the wedding, sitting in your chairs not even looking at each other, her jabbering at some strangebody and you listening in but pretending not to, with your shoulders touching the whole time.”

Now Luke seemed wary.

“I want out of the small town nightmare,” Jess said. “Rory doesn’t. Okay. One summer. Then she’s back in New Haven. I’m quitting my jobs in the city, I’m not re-upping my lease.” It struck him he wouldn’t get to say goodbye to the kid, to Olga. “And you read the rest. I’ll take shifts with you to pay you back, at the auto shop for my savings.”

“Community college?”

“Off the table.”

“The smoking?”

“I’ll eventually quit smoking,” said Jess, meaning When I die you can use my lungs as two beautiful lumps of coal to slow cook a rack of nasty sticky-glazed ribs. “And I’m gonna live with Lane and her band. So that’s that figured.”

Luke’s shoulders fell. “Why are you asking me, then.”

Jess’s ire, too, had chipped enough to fit a fucking cap over it. Gusty, “Guess I just feel like I’m supposed to.”

“What the hell did you two talk about that it made you write this,” Luke said, shaking the paper. Then, after a moment of reflection, with the correct conclusion all over his face, “No, I don’t want to know.”

“I have some of her stuff from school in my car.” Jess tried not to throw some sauce on it, tried not to nurse that resentment. THIEF, his brain supplied. As if it had any right to be choosy. “I’ve gotta go bring it to her house.”

“Oh.” Luke scrubbed his face with his hands. “Oh, that is not going to go well for you.”

“Probably not.”

“I guess, Godspeed,” said Luke, “and welcome to town, neighbor?”

“Don’t, I’ll kill myself,” said Jess.

So the walk of shame downstairs and through the diner, through the door. When he hit the sidewalk, he realized he was insufferably pissed off. He wheeled around and back inside, all eyes on the conductor, said, “I’m back. To stay,” then stormed to Von Bismarck, keys, tunes, livid roaring engine, slammed on the gas, went to her.

Thatches of flowers unfurled in front yards, waving lavender and delphinium, buttercups and foxglove ringing porches with rockers and swings meant for crystal pitchers of iced tea, morning light like melting margarine. Suffocating silence pressed upon the windshield, staved by willful Swervedriver. Lorelai was waiting on their bottom step, crossed arms tightening a cardigan around herself, mouth pinched shut. When he cut the engine, he went wooden. Stared at the steering wheel, his hands on it, until she said, “Hey,” standing. Pajama pants unfolding down her legs, creased, and flip flops.

Jess ducked out of the car. Kept his head down. Said, “Hi.” They never spoke each other’s names when they could avoid it. “I’m just dropping off bags.”

“Mhm, oh, I heard. So,” Jess lifted his face a hair, wincing, "I've been presented with a proposal for the rejoining of clans Gilmore and Mariano in friendship, with no resentment.” Sunbeat stare. Impossible. She said, “You made documentation with her? You let her do her whole thing?”

Jess didn’t respond; the questions were rhetorical.

“Okay,” she said, dismayed. Fists on her hips, superhero stance, then thrown down at her sides, a foot-stomping toddler fit translated for film. She said, “We’re going to have to make this work. And I can do that, for her.”

“I can too,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, one shoulder falling, Mount St. Helens’s shrug.

“I’m not trying to take her away,” he said. “I’m just trying to go with her. To stay with her.”

Lorelai huffed at this, looked down. Shook her head. Said, “Grab some bags, come inside. I need you to change the water bottle.”

For a moment, all Jess could do was watch her mount the stairs, disappear down the hallway into the kitchen. Then he grabbed the bags, went inside. Changed the water bottle. Sniffed to detect a shift of wind.