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The feel of his hand on her knee keeps her up no matter how hard she tries to think of anything else. It all goes back to how casually he’d just let it rest there in the back of the limo as all of his friends yelled and chanted and poured more drinks. She’d pushed her leg right up against his as soon as the excuse presented itself, they were in a limo with a bunch of raucous, drunk, most likely at least a little high rich guys who all always seemed to do exactly what he wanted them to. Like cheer up a girl who just got dumped by her boyfriend. Again. That is the thing she should be thinking about, right now, awake in bed, it’s how she got publicly dumped for the second time by the same guy. How honestly at this point it wouldn’t even be a surprise if Jess showed up at one of her classes next week to invite her to join the circus, before stomping away like it was her mistake after she turned him down. Instead what she keeps coming back to is how he helped her get in the car and gave her the window seat, so he would be the only one sitting next to her , she keeps telling herself, and then got closer to her than he needed to. And so she couldn’t resist testing just how close they could get, and pressed her leg against his with clear intent, and he didn’t move his leg away either, so they stayed like that all the way from Hartford to Stars Hollow. And then, to add insult to injury, he had, casually, like it was nothing, just let his hand fall to her knee and left it there, just casually enough that it might be meaningless, that reasonable doubt said maybe he didn’t even realize he was doing it, except he had to realize it, if for no other reason then because it definitely at least felt like her skin was burning up under his. She can’t be going insane awake in bed thinking about his hand on her knee under her dress in the back of that stupid limo if he hadn’t even realized he was doing it. If he’d dropped her off and gone on home and forgotten she existed, and that his hand was on her knee for, god, maybe ten minutes on the interstate, at most? Really big news, highlight of the day.
This really shouldn’t be what’s keeping her awake tonight, she thinks again. She shouldn’t be going from feeling upset about being dumped by her boyfriend (again!) to this embarrassing warmth everywhere. This might be the most annoyed she’s ever felt. It wasn’t enough to be trapped in a loop of high school romance, now there’s the added bonus that, if her mind stopped replaying Dean getting in his car and leaving her there without the words to tell him he was wrong about any of what he’d said, because he wasn’t, she would immediately start thinking about every single occasion her body had even lightly touched Logan Huntzberger’s body. Which feels infinitely more pathetic, because at least Dean driving away was a real thing, it happened, it has a context, she can draw a line all the way from their first kiss to this. It’s logical, Dean driving away. Giving this much consideration to whether any time Logan accidentally brushed up against her as he handed her a drink or walked by her, there is no logic to that. It is just her in bed trying to make her body settle down, trying to not feel this flushed, trying to not completely overreact to what amounts to minutes in the back of a limo.
What has led to this is that it isn’t really about just those minutes. It’s the whole night, starting from when he so easily put his arm around her, as though it came out of habit, to rescue her from some other guy she’s already forgotten. He is just so irritatingly smooth, all of the time. Nothing ever throws him. Every conversation they’d ever had he was the one to leave her wordless, it just made everything so much worse, all of this so much worse, that she can’t simply write him off, that it seems like he just keeps hitting all of her buttons and catching her unaware every time. Tonight he’d watched her getting dumped by her boyfriend and, not even knowing it was the second time, she can’t forget it was the second time, walked straight up to her and rallied his friends to give her their attention, as much of it as they could focus, at least. Now while she should be thinking of nothing but heartbreak she gets distracted by how his voice always sounds when he calls her “Ace,” which she should hate, and how he stood so close to her and bent his head down a little so she could feel a phantom of his breath as he spoke there outside her grandparents’ house. She’s supposed to be thinking about how months ago she thought she was correcting a past mistake by getting Dean back, how alone she had been at Yale during freshman year, and how he’d made her feel much better just by being a constant solid presence whenever she needed to feel at home, and how in thanks she had wrecked his life. While he worked his job he needed to pay his bills and live his life, she had parties thrown in her name so she could pick eligible bachelors among heirs to various fortunes. She is trying to think about that, but she can’t make most of her body obey her, and the reason why she’s in bed wide awake right now is that instead she’s thinking about one heir to one specific fortune, and how for a split second she thought about how good his lips would taste while in the back you could probably still hear Dean’s car driving onto the road.
She is sad. It is a sadness for something long gone, for the way she felt when she was 16 holding her boyfriend’s hand. It’s the sadness of realizing that for these last few months what she was feeling wasn’t love, but that she was finally fixing the mistake she made when she’d let a sweet, loving, reliable hard to find boyfriend go, awfully hurting his feelings along the way and for what? It hadn’t even been worth it, except as a huge lesson on red flags. But now Dean leaving her was no longer linked to that high school disaster, and whenever she remembered this breakup she would instead tie it to Logan walking straight up to her and leading her back to the pool house with stolen booze, seemingly genuinely concerned about her feelings. Worried about cheering her up, like her happiness mattered to him. And she’d had a good time! Dean would have felt very validated watching her have fun with all of those Yale legacy students, how she understood all they had to say, never felt like a little small town girl, like that fish out of water, first year in Chilton Rory. She was just another one of them, drinking and joking with them as Logan poured more drinks for her and touched her arms and her shoulders and sat beside her on the couch with his arm on the seat behind her so she could feel his hand touch the back of her neck like it could have been an accident, but it wasn’t. To her it wasn’t, because every time it happened she lost the ability to focus on anything else but that point of contact.
She’d had fun tonight, like she couldn’t remember having fun in ages, like she’d never had this type of fun before, except. Well. With these same people. With him. And she’d just spend the whole night with those guys and none of them had behaved in any way inappropriately, except of course in her head, every time his stupid hand found another way to completely casually touch another completely innocent part of her. They’d brought her straight to her mother’s front door, with a fully sober professional driver, of course, trained in having the loudest least sober (in many different ways) millionaires in the back and keeping his composure. And the whole way Logan’s leg stayed pressed against hers in a way that made her feel more out of it than whatever was in the bottles being passed around. He hadn’t moved his leg even once, she would have felt it if he had, the same way her knee had felt cold after his hand had been there and then gone, so casually, too casually for her. She wishes he’d given her more, given her something , so she would have a reason to lie awake like this. But all she has is the ridiculous feeling of each of his fingers on her right knee, barely moving, not even a bit of thumb rubbing to make it feel purposeful, like it was leading somewhere, or telling her something, but just there, so meaninglessly, to him. While she had to get home and face her mother, full of judgment she didn’t even have to voice. As soon as she walked in and saw her, there was nothing Lorelai would need to say out loud about what she was thinking, about the guys who had, at the end of the day, done what? Taken her home safely? Was her getting a little bit drunk really worth that look on her mother’s face? But it’s just not her, is it, this is all just very not Rory, to behave as though Dean was right when he said he didn’t belong there and she did, that this was where she belonged, with them, not with him, but with Logan , and then to just have mindless fun for hours with people she should rightfully hate for all the reasons Lorelai’s face gave her as she walked in and saw her standing there.
Her mother’s face wasn’t about Rory being drunk, she knows that too. It was entirely about whom she had been drunk with, about the guys she’d seen her leave the limo with, after the kind of party she knew they’d just left. The face was about Rory having clearly had fun when she rightfully shouldn’t have, because Lorelai wouldn’t. So she just told her mom about Dean dumping her, again, and how it was fine she was just a little drunk it was fine to be drunk because she just got dumped and she wasn’t happy she was just drunk because she got dumped and she didn’t want to talk and yes she was upset and no of course those guys weren’t her friends, they were just some of the guys at the party and she just luckily knew them from school so they’d given her a ride home, isn’t it lucky that there were guys there to give her a ride home, and yeah of course they were grandma’s guys, not her guys, and yeah of course she hated them, and no she didn’t want to talk about why Dean had dumped her, yeah of course they were insufferable rich boys as all rich people are insufferable and yes she hated them they were nobody and she was drunk because she just got dumped and yes it was not like her to get this drunk but she just got dumped and can she just go to bed now because she just really needs to sleep it off . Then there was falling into bed and closing her eyes until she heard Lorelai shut the bedroom door behind her and leave after saying something about how she would regret not taking off her makeup when she woke up in the morning. Then almost, just almost falling asleep, then realizing she wasn’t really that sleepy. Or that drunk, not drunk enough to stop thinking about the warmth of his leg right up against hers, all the way from Hartford to Stars Hollow, and his hand on her knee, for what? Maybe ten minutes on the interstate, after he refilled her glass with something she can’t remember drinking. God, is this who she is now? Is she this desperate mess? She needs help. Of course there’s really one thing she can think of that would help her and thinking of it isn’t making falling asleep any easier.
The worst part of it all is imagining what would Logan even think, if he could read her mind in nights like this, nights like these , this isn’t the first night her sleep is delayed by thoughts of Logan. Would he just crack that irritating and smug little smile of his, just another thing about him she absolutely fully and completely hated, despised, truly, one hundred percent, uh-huh. Would he touch her again, but for real now, all the way? Or would he think all her fantasies are boring, and her just a silly little girl not worth his time? A girl on his periphery he could never see that way, and everything she takes as flirting, everything that hits every part of her body when he’s in front of her, it all just comes accidentally. This is just the way he’d talk to anyone, behave around anyone, touch anyone, and he doesn’t think about her at all unless she’s standing right there. Because of course Logan Huntzberger is not in his bed right now thinking about her knee. She has to let out a laugh at how ridiculous that sounds, the idea that he would be awake right now alone in his own bed thinking about his hand on her knee.
But again this isn’t even new, the way she reacts to him, her body reacts to him. It has been happening since the first time he stood in front of her with his hair and stupid brown eyes, leaving her unable to pretend he didn’t make her feel a little silly, too off her feet, entirely too warm. She can’t pretend it doesn’t get worse every time, the more it feels like he knows what he is doing. Like he can sense her temperature rising and her nervous breathing, and it’s all very funny for him. He must get this all the time, from girls, all the girls in the long line, she remembers, the long line waiting for their chance with Logan Huntzberger, the line she is not getting into. Maybe girls quietly losing it in front of him is so normal in his routine that he doesn’t even register it, or maybe, and again, that feels worse, he does register it and still just files her away with dozens of other silly girls, and it is still true that he definitely isn't thinking about his hand on her knee at all, because why would he be? His life is not Edith Wharton, he doesn’t live on the thrill of small stolen touches of backs and shoulders, arms against arms in the backseats of cars, knees touching knees while sitting on tree trunks in the woods at night. It doesn’t mean anything to him, probably, none of it. Not even how the whole way back to Stars Hollow in the back of that limo she had kept her leg pressed against his and he hadn’t moved his, not even once, and that stupid hand on her knee she’s here obsessing over and going back to again and again and again, the hand he had put there and left there and which is driving her crazy and sleepless, well, it’s not only nothing to him, but he’s most likely in bed with some other girl, some girl who was on-call and would show up at his door at any hour of the night, some girl who’s in that long line she’s not getting into. To him there’s nothing else to be thinking about tonight, not about them, not tonight. But what if he is, actually, what if he is thinking about tonight, what if he’s in his bed, alone, thinking about her? Or what if he’s not even alone, if there’s a girl there who’s just fallen asleep by his side, but still he’s awake thinking about her instead, and where he really wanted his hands to go, how he would’ve gone up and up softly and agonizingly against the inside of her thigh, up her dress. She would be putting so much effort into trying not to look at him, an unspoken agreement that it was happening, there, around everyone, but no one else had to know, no one had to look, they could pretend they were alone in this crowded limo. He could continue laughing and occasionally dropping an inside joke about some other night they’d all had that had been just like this, but all the while his hand would be halfway up her thigh and still going further and further and then only just not touching the right spot, as she tried to keep breathing, as she pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window, trying to quiet the fire on her skin. What if she was the type of girl to get him to do that right in front of all his friends as they’d sat there all the way to her mother’s front door, and when they’d said goodbye it had been a promise. And not just a, well. See you around, Ace.
She wishes she could stop getting herself so worked up that she might end up having to do something about it. She wishes that she hadn’t drunkenly given Stars Hollow as her address, that she would have stayed with them, that they hadn’t said good night at all, that he hadn’t gotten her home safe. That, instead of delivering a good girl home to her mother, he’d taken her with him and kept her by his side all night long until the sun rose. That instead of crawling out of her skin in her bed she was wherever the hell he is right now. That instead of the girl dumped by her boyfriend whom he had gotten his friends to cheer up then promptly delivered home at an annoyingly reasonable hour, she was the girl he kept with him until the party ended, until he decided to give up on the party to be alone with her. That he would forget the entire long stupid waiting line and bring her to his room like she was number one. She wanted to be the girl he slipped away from his friends with and took by the hand into his room, held her by the waist and pulled up right against him so she’d feel claimed forever, her hands grabbing his hair to claim him just for that night. His lips would feel just like she imagined, no, they’d feel better, they’d have to feel better, on her lips, on her jaw, down her neck, her hand holding onto his hair tighter and tighter until he moaned against her skin so she’d know he liked this and made a note of it, before pulling him back to her lips, his suit long gone, her pinned up hair long disheveled. His kisses would get slower and softer and she’d try to make them not so, try to keep him touching her hard and grabbing her hard, keep herself feeling him hard against her, try to get him to not think of her as a gentle thing that could be broken but a girl he just wants to do anything with tonight. She’d kiss his neck and softly bite his earlobe, looking to leave some mark, a mark of any kind so he would remember this happened, so that she wouldn’t be just another one. But he’d pull back just a little and give her one soft kiss on the corner of her lips and, unable to pull himself away further, drunk on this too, he’d ask her if this was okay, like he might not have asked any of the other girls, and she’d just nod and kiss him again and again, take off his half undone shirt as he unzipped her dress, and they’d fall in his bed. This time when his hand went up her thigh it would get to where she needed it to go, and there in her bed alone she turns her head to the pillow to try to muffle the sounds she is desperately trying not to make, as she swears she can feel his quick short breaths on her, her skin seems to respond to it, her neck tingling, and she wishes she could really hold onto his neck and his stupid blond hair she can’t stop thinking about, because instead she’s pulling at the sheets with her free hand, while her hips arch off the bed, as she pictures him typing at his computer at the Daily News office, zeroing in on his hands, oh fuck please god let this be quiet, make this be quiet , because she can’t really tell anymore, what noises she is or isn’t making, biting down on her lips as he lifted up his head to look her straight in the eye, wanting to watch her let go, and then she thinks she hears noises coming from the kitchen, right outside, and the momentum is lost and she has to lie very very very still, trying to hold her wild breath in, embarrassment creeping up to think she may have been heard, but no other noises seem to follow until what sounds like a trash can outside. Probably a raccoon or wildcat, but now Logan is just in his own bed with another girl again, not thinking about her, nowhere near here.
The last night this happened, the first night this happened, was after the Life and Death Brigade getaway, obviously. That had been another time she’d had good fun with all the people she has to otherwise pretend are total opposites from her. The whole thing had been so different from what she had expected, and there’s something about being around people like that that just makes it too obvious whether you belong with them or not. It’s about knowing the right cues and the right things to say. How proud would her grandparents be to know she did get all the cues right, even if they wouldn’t be as proud of the rest of it. It was the way Logan talks to her, the way he’s so smart, really smart, the kind of smart that throws her off her game, the kind of smart you don’t become only by reading the right books, but by having the right conversations with the right people. And she is “right people,” apparently, because he certainly loves talking to her, even if it’s just because of how easy it is to get her worked up. But when he had said she looked sheltered she knew he was right, because she is, never too far from under someone’s wing or something that makes her feel protected, and when he’d said she needed an adventure he had looked at her in a way that was too full of gentleness, while she’d tried her best not to look at him at all because she was scared. Not of the fall, well, not just of the literal fall. Looking into his eyes seemed a little intimidating then. Why does he seem to save this soft tone of voice just for her, what sort of powers does he have to make her think that anything coming from him is just for her, even just after he’d also dropped that line about how good an eye he has for dress sizes. Maybe he’s just constantly giving girls expensive party dresses with his great eye for what their bodies look like, which of course goes back around in her head to the obvious, oh, so he’s paid attention to my body . Which was probably where he wanted her mind to go first, really, but there she is, sheltered , not getting it right away. He told her she needed an adventure, to do something that was bad for her. Like jumping from seven stories high, he meant, obviously, that kind of bad for her, which is the only reason she’d said yes. She wasn’t thinking of anything else, really. So when they jumped and her blood rushed she tried to hold him close, grabbed his hand so he could feel how fast her heart was going, and when she kept his hand there she was sure he still had no idea how many things that are bad for her she would have let him done in that very moment, how many bad things she’d wanted him to do. She barely got any sleep that night either, especially not after the little presents at her front door, the champagne bottle that was still in her dorm room unopened and the camera with the pictures of them she kept clicking through, had saved to a special folder in her computer with no intention of any of them ever going to print.
That other night, after tossing and turning the exact same heated way she’s doing now, she did manage to fall asleep and into even more heated dreams, she had found herself back there, right after they landed, but she hadn’t let go of this hand that time. She’d held onto it tighter, kept it flush against her chest, and kept her eyes on him, long enough for him to realize she meant it. Then she had led him away from all the others, somewhere away from the clearing and the tents, where the noise of the celebrations was distant, but still there. She thinks back to the dream now, closes her eyes and tries to remember it all, how it all had felt so real, so real she kept daydreaming the same dream for days, during breakfast, during lunch, and even, sometimes, she’s embarrassed to admit, during class. There would be a lively discussion going on and she’d be staring blankly at empty space for several minutes before snapping out of it. It’s so fresh even now, him grabbing her by the waist and pushing her up against a tree. Remembering the feel of her back hitting that tree brings all of it back, landing her right in the middle of that other dream.
There’s just so much skirt to her dress, they’re up against the tree and he’s kissing her, licking his way inside her mouth, coaxing it open so he can get inside, his tongue softly sliding against hers, a moan leaving her before she can even try to hold it in, not that she would, not right now, when any reservations have been left behind at the top of that platform. She digs her fingers into his hair again, grabbing as hard as she can, wanting to pull at it, wanting him to gasp into her mouth like he’s making her gasp by pressing closer and closer against her, and when he leaves her mouth and goes down leaving open-mouth kisses down her face and jaw and neck she reaches out to take his jacket off. He’s still wearing his bowtie, for fuck’s sake, he’s wearing a bowtie and there’s still just so much fabric all around her she can’t feel him the way she needs to be feeling him, she pulls on his tie and he lets out a little coughing laugh and she guesses she was accidentally choking him, she breathes out a small sorry and he just goes back to her neck like it really doesn’t matter, and hits just the right spot there that makes her lift her leg to try to pull him in even closer, but this stupid fucking ball gown gets in the way again. She wishes she read more romance novels, the ones with the historical looking art on the covers, because how are those ladies doing it with all of this clothing on, why the fuck does she have an underskirt on right now? There’s nothing she can do but try to get his shirt open, start kissing down his neck, biting at his throat, she needs to carve her name on his skin with her teeth like she’d leave their initials on this tree with a knife if she had one. She needs to keep hearing his hard breathing and to know she’s the one getting it out of him. His hands keep holding onto her waist like they’d leave a mark too if only there wasn’t so much on the way and she lifts her head and pulls his lips back on hers. He’s sliding his hands down her body, trying to find skin, trying to find something to lift up to get at skin, and she finally starts trying to unzip this thing, but before she can even get her hands back there he’s somehow torn up some of the fabric of her skirt and she laughs and he says he really hates this fucking dress and they both laugh but he gets his hand on her thigh and lifts it up so he’s pressed right between her legs and her laugh turns into something else. She’s just fully grinding against him right now, trying to do the same for him and open up his zipper, trying to feel anything of his skin, attacking his neck again because there’s nowhere else to go. She can still hear the party going out there in the clearing and they’re all going to see them when they come back, her dress ruined, his neck red from her biting, but together they finally manage to unzip his pants and they don’t even need to get them all the way off, just enough, enough now that his hand can finally blissfully go where she wants it to go. In any other setting this should be going slower, softer, it would be romantic, but his fingers just go inside her underwear and she’s wet and he lets out a little breathy laugh against her own, which is erratic and raspy and she’s not in her head enough to be embarrassed by how eager she is right now, how much she wants this, lets her head fall back against the tree and hooks her leg around him for leverage, to be able to arch her body just right that his fingers inside her are hitting the right spot, as he licks and sucks and bits her jaw and her neck. He slows his hand down and she looks at him, expecting to find some cocky smile, some sarcastic remark, a part of her insanely expecting to look and find that he’s not there at all, that she has imagined him away, that she’s alone. But he’s still there, he’s looking up at her, eyes filled with expectation and desire and something else that feels too much to hope for, and he asks her if she really wants this. Like that’s even in question, right now, but he’s so sincere and if she said no he’d stop all of this right away, and suddenly she wants this even more, somehow, and she says something bad for me, right? , and he smiles the best and worst smile she’s ever seen. He pushes more torn fabric out of the way to lift both her legs so she can be all wrapped around his waist, and he’s holding her up against the tree, she can feel it rough against her back, the one part of her this gown leaves exposed just scratching up against it, extremely inconvenient, and it hurts, and she knows it’s gonna hurt more later, but she can’t focus on it right now, can’t stop this right now. He holds onto her waist to lifts her up a little and moves his and then he’s inside her and moving inside her and she’s never felt quite like this before, she forgets the tree, forgets the sounds from the party, forgets the torn dress, it’s all him inside of her and his breath against her neck and she’s not even bothering to try to be quiet.
She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back but he brushes her jaw with his hand before touching her hair and pushing it back behind her ear, holds her face, tries to get her to look at him, and she does. And that night in her dorm in New Haven she had woken up in a sweat, her sheets sticky, her body sticky, hot all over, having never had come as hard as that, realizing she had never wanted something, someone, this bad in her life, had never in her life understood what it meant to need a guy to just take her. All of the books and the songs and the movies, she thought she understood them all but it was only now that they finally made complete sense to her. She understood what having a freight train running through the middle of your head felt like, now. She had laid there trying to get her breath under control, all of her nerves still tingling. But tonight, in Stars Hollow, it seems like everything is conspiring against her. Just as she looks down in Logan’s eyes, tonight her brain brings her back to her bedroom in her mother’s house.
For a few blissful moments she’d forgotten the whole night, the whole embarrassing public dumping, the whole having to apologize to her mother for the state of her as she got home. She realizes she is really madder about the second, apologizing to her mother, than the dumping itself, in a way. She’d had a terrible night and he’d had his friends cheer up and in spite of it all she’d arrived home (safely and straight to her mother’s front door) laughing, distracted, and just been met with her mother’s judging eyes. There have always been things she’s known she can’t really tell Lorelai, no matter what was said out loud about their relationship. Boys have always been top of that list, and the older she grows the less it seems she can say. Yeah, maybe not telling her mother about having feelings for a married man was because she knew she was doing something wrong and didn’t want to be told it was wrong, but she’s tired of feeling that everything Lorelai would disapprove of is necessarily always the wrong thing for her. Because of course her mother wouldn’t even want to hear about Rory and someone like Logan, and she doesn’t mean all of these late night details, but clearly just the idea that she could have fun with someone like that is already crossing some sort of line. She doesn’t want to feel embarrassed that she’s attracted to a hot guy who goes to her school and who pays attention to her and respects her and watches out for her, has done so multiple times, like tonight. There’s nothing wrong about any of this, Logan isn’t married. Which feels like a very low bar to cross, but shouldn’t “single, around her age, and safe” be enough for her mother, at least? Why is there this voice in her head telling her she shouldn’t feel this way about this guy, it isn’t the right guy, when one situation is nothing like the other, what happened with Dean doesn’t mean she can’t ever be trusted to pick a guy, does it? Why can’t she make that voice shut up and why is it so easy to hear it like it’s her mother’s voice? God, why can’t she just touch herself to sleep like a normal person and deal with the rest of it tomorrow? It would have been preferable to cry herself to sleep over being dumped, which had happened, hours earlier, and she shouldn’t have to keep reminding herself of it either, but maybe she should give herself a break. She would have to rehash the whole thing again and again in just another few hours, she would cry about it and feel bad about it when she woke up, but to wake up she needs to fall asleep and to fall asleep she needs some form of release, any form of release at this point.
She tries to think about where he is again, and how much she wants to be in his mind the way he is in hers. There’s no chance he went to bed alone tonight. Maybe he picked a girl that reminded him of her a little. Maybe he doesn’t want to have her swirling around his dreams but she’s there anyway, maybe he thought about how much fabric her blue dress had and how much he wanted to get it off her. Does he ever find himself unable to stop thinking about her like this, and if he does, does he ever go where she’s going, do what she’s doing. Does he just bury himself in someone else and forget or does he still remember her even then. Why is that second image so appealing to her, that he would find himself with anyone else but it would still be her in his mind, that he would still feel her hands holding his against her chest too, that he would think about them on the backseat of the limo, that a hand on her knee was all he dared to do that night but not all he wanted to do. She wants to call him just so she can hear his voice, wants it to be something she’s allowed to do, for her phone number to be one he’ll always answer. She wants him smiling as he sees the caller id, calling her Ace when he picks up the call. It doesn’t even seem that far-fetched, she can see that smile because she’s seen it before. She knows that smile so well now, even though it’s been no more than weeks since she first saw it. It’s the kind of smile that could make the target think it’s there just for them, that it appears for no one but them. A kind of superpower, to have a smile like that, that can leave nice proper girls sleepless in their beds wishing you were smiling next to them, smiling against their skin, between their thighs.
She closes her eyes and runs one hand down her neck, her fingers against her collarbone, takes herself back to that limo, and they’re alone now, finally, the driver forgotten, invisible. She feels like she’s in a daze, her brain fuzzy from the booze, champagne glasses forgotten somewhere, in a bubble keeping her from anything else that’s not in the back of this limo, but this time he’s all the way on the other side from her, so she turns around to rest her back against the window and stretches her legs all across the seat, to where he is, poking his leg with her toes until he looks at her. She tries to say something with her eyes, doesn’t know exactly what it is, what he ends up getting from them. He scoots closer, though, stretches her legs on his lap, starts massaging one of her calves till her head falls back on the window behind her and she lets out a soft, quiet, almost sleepy moan. She feels him move closer, shift her closer to him, opens her eyes as one of his hands finds her cheek, fingers softly caressing her face, down to her jaw, his thumb going up to touch her bottom lip as his eyes, focused on her now, finally seem to ask the question she’s been waiting for. She nods, slowly, feeling strangely calm now, because all’s right in the world, there’s nothing besides this. She holds his hand and moves her head a little to kiss his thumb, once, twice, looks straight in his eyes as she licks it and sees his throat move as he swallows, she feels heady with the power of it, of having him react to her like that, of knowing she can affect him like he affects her, that she’s not alone in this. So she nods again and he pulls her closer, gets her on his lap so he can kiss her, not softly now, just taking everything she has to give, his tongue inside her mouth, her hands pulling his head even closer, his hand finding her calf again, holding onto her leg and going up. She rests her head on his shoulder, buries her face against his neck, hears him saying he has thought about this before. Then why haven’t you done anything?, she asks, and he says I was waiting for you, Ace. Well, I’m here. You can have me, she thinks, no, she’s said it out loud, he’s heard it. She holds onto him tighter as he touches her, light little touches, I need you tell me that you want this, and she gasps and tries to just nod again but he says no, he needs her to say it, and she does, she says she wants him to, and his fingers start really working her, sliding inside, his thumb rubbing against her just right, her nails digging on his neck, grabbing onto his stupid shirt he still has on, grinding against his hand, he tells her hey, look at me, but she shakes her head, she can’t, she can barely breathe, look at me, she feels like she’s gonna fall apart if she moves, Rory, look at me, and hearing her name pulls a trigger inside of her and she looks up at him and then does fall apart, completely, blanks out of space for a second or an hour or a year and she’s in Stars Hollow in her bed, remembers she has to try and breathe quieter, impossible right now, remembers almost nothing else, doesn’t register how much if any times passes before her relaxed body drifts off to sleep, his brown eyes still shining on her like a memory.
She wakes up the next morning, almost afternoon, with a water bottle and two tablets of aspirin on her bedside table, and a donut, and a post-it saying there’s more food in the kitchen. It makes her thankful for her mother, and a little bad for whatever anger she had against her last night, but that’s before she remembers: oh yeah, she will definitely have to talk about what happened with Dean, and that will definitely bring up the topic of the limo and the boys who were on the limo. She hopes the note means Lorelai isn’t at home, that she’s at the inn, that she’ll have a very busy day, that she’ll stay over at Luke’s. But she know her mother, know she won’t be able to resist her curiosity, knows that at this point Lorelai is so anxious to know what happened that she must be holding herself back from calling, must be looking at the clock every five minutes, wondering how much Rory had had to drink and how hard would it be for her to wake up. The answer is that she really hadn’t had that much to drink after all, or if she did it is just true that the really high quality stuff doesn’t hit you as hard the day after. She’s not at all hungover, which must mean that last night wasn’t drunken feverish insanity but just her, and this is the new normal, this is how she feels, and she just has to live with that. It doesn’t matter, she takes a big gulp of water and reaches for her phone to let Lorelai know she’s awake, to steel herself for that interrogation disguised as conversation.
She has two texts, both from Logan Huntzberger, and when her heart skips a beat then speeds up a little just at the sight of that notification and his name that’s just to be expected, now.
(9:56) hey, ace. if you need morning after recovery tips i can give you finn’s number
(9:58) that was a trick. never let finn know your number
That was it. Nothing dreamlike about it, no sign that he’d been up at any hour of the night thinking of her. He woke up, picked up his phone at some point, maybe drinking his coffee, and must now be going on about his day, presumably, whatever that looks like. She doesn’t know what his regular days look like, she barely knows him, she has to remember that. So she shakes her head, goes to reach for the donut, when her phone vibrates again, quickly, just once.
(11:13) i like your tiara. you should wear it to class.
She smiles, laughs a little, not because she can’t help herself but because she’s not trying, bites her lip staring at the screen, keeps staring at that last text as she takes a bite of the donut. She can see him, attention on his phone, at this same moment, trying to anticipate what she is going to text back, wondering what she’s going to say. Her head falls back to the headboard, and if she feels like she’s spinning a little, for the first time she really believes he might be spinning, too.