AN: I added a scene to the end of chapter 2. Not much, but if you're interested, check it out.

A couple days later, having failed once again at organizing the apartment, but having succeeded most thoroughly in entertaining themselves, Jess left a settled Cady to her own devices. Jess was just in time to meet Rory at the bus stop.

As Rory stepped off the bus, with a smile, she made a beeline for Jess's arms. After their savory greeting, Rory muttered, only slightly serious, "I've got a bone to pick with you Mariano."

With a studied pout, Rory turned from him and started off towards her street. Jess snorted in amusement and followed along after her.

"I was thinking about it all the way home," she went on, herself somewhat amused also. "I can't believe you didn't tell me Cady's last name was Danes." It was just like Jess to leave out a detail like that, she thought. Rory tossed her backpack over her left shoulder to give her right shoulder a break from the burden of final-exam-preparations. Rory was toting a year's worth of notes in just about every subject these days.

Jess laughed. "You're still on that? It's been five days! Rory, you're making much too big a deal out of it."

"But, I didn't know!"

"So?"

Jess walked alongside her as they navigated some very pleasant, very quaint, tree-lined, fruit-named streets. Adding to the pleasantness of the afternoon, the leaves were just beginning to bud, responding to the warming of the weather.

"So? I called her Cady Mariano."

"Again I say, 'So?'"

"Because I made a social blunder."

"Why?" Jess teased. "'Cause you highlighted the fact that she was raised fatherless?"

Rory balked, realizing the full implications of what she'd done. "Well... Yeah, there's that."

Jess pulled the backpack off her shoulder and hoisted it himself. "Oh yeah, 'cause me bearing my father's name sure kept him around. It doesn't matter. I'm a bastard anyway. A name is just a name. It's just a method of identification."

"Yeah," Rory conceded hesitantly. "Thanks," she added, referring to the backpack. She stretched her arms a bit.

Jess put his other hand around her shoulder. "You said yourself, you have your mother's maiden name. Technically, you're a bastard also. But you're a good person. It doesn't matter if you're raised by one person or two. People make such a big deal out of it."

"I guess," Rory said as they turned up the Gilmore driveway. "You're right, a name is just a name. We can drop it now."

"Can we? You're the one who keeps bringing it up."

"Yes, we can definitely drop it." His arm slipped off her shoulder as she led him up the porch stairs. She dug around for her key and unlocked the door. "Besides, I've got a much more interesting topic of conversation on my mind."

"Oh yeah?"

The house was quiet as Rory led him inside and he closed the door behind them. She turned then and, pulling the backpack off his shoulder and discarding it in the corner of the foyer, she drew him into a slow kiss.

Jess wrapped his arms around her waist. As he pulled her snugly against him and strengthened the kiss, his palm slid across her lower back and hitched up her Chilton-issue skirt slightly.

"I've always said you were an excellent conversationalist," he murmured against her lips.

"Then you'll really enjoy this. Tell me. Have you heard that—" Rory's fingers slid up into the hair at the nape of his neck. He yielded to her pressure and they were kissing once more.

"You know, your mom's car wasn't in the driveway," he murmured between kisses.

Rory grinned devilishly. "She's at work."

"Interesting."

"I think so."

"I really appreciate what you're saying. But tell me, what do you think of this?" Jess supported her head as he traced an outline of her lips. His kiss skirted the fine line between tenderness and ravage.

'You've raised some excellent points."

"I'll raise another one..." he hinted. She giggled as she ducked out of his grasp and led him to her bedroom.

"So," Rory said as she backed up against the door, shutting it behind them. As Jess took her into his arms, she drawled, "The first time you ever had sex was with me..."

Jess rolled his eyes. "Yes."

"You've never had sex with anyone but me..."

He shrugged. "Never," came the solemn reply.

"So that means you've never done it like this."

Jess raised an eyebrow, an expression so delicious her eyes gobbled it up. She pressed him backwards onto the bed. He fell easily, willingly before her, with a slight bounce upon her mattress, to land propped up on his elbows. He looked impishly up at her as she pulled a secret treasure box, in the guise of a book, off her shelf and retrieved a small packet from inside it.

Returning, she kicked off her saddle shoes, eying her captive with an impish smirk of her own. It was her turn to hitch up her skirt, so she did so and removed the undergarment beneath, surprising him once again and earning with much delight the reward of a dazed, dopey grin on his normally dauntless features.

Rory tossed the undergarment to the floor on the far side of the room, its path sailing, observed, above him. He fumbled with his belt buckle as she released the hem of her skirt and crawled upon the bed towards him.

Some time later, Jess crushed folds in the seat of her skirt with trembling fingers. Rory smiled down on him, taking in his features with delight. She savored a deep, steadying breath, surprisingly satisfied considering what she hadn't done. Leaning forward, she kissed the daze from his lips and then collapsed beside him, her heart beating fitfully from endurance and full of love, her desire stoked but her knees far too weak to be of much use. She snuggled her nose into the side of his neck for a good long while.

"That was poor planning," she suddenly moped, propping herself up.

Jess quirked an eyebrow at her. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I finished you but didn't finish myself! Now you'll be all flaccid."

He smirked. "Just give me a minute. I'll gladly go again," he said as he delicately tidied himself.

Rory smiled.

Then they heard the front door open. Both of them froze.

"Rory! Your devastatingly beautiful mother is home!" Lorelai sing-songed.

"Hide!" Rory hissed. The two of them scrambled off the bed and she smoothed her skirt and the blankets while he tended to his near-nakedness. "Give me a chance to lure my mom upstairs and then go out the window." In a second, she was out the door and greeting her mother in the foyer.

She'd left the bedroom door mostly open, which surprised Jess at first, until it occurred to him that a closed door would probably have been a red flag to streetwise Lorelai.

Jess did up his jeans and then ducked down behind her bed. His legs were still pretty shaky. If he tried going out the window now, he would be liable to trip on her desk and plant his face directly into the porch. He hoped Rory would buy him enough time to calm down.

He heard Rory outside her room, talking to her mother. He caught the frantic timbre of her voice, although, thankfully, the tone seemed to go unnoticed by Lorelai.

"Did I lend you my Pretty Girls Vote T-shirt last election?" Lorelai was saying. Then, to Jess's discomfort, it seemed the voices got louder instead of quieter as he'd expected. They were coming this way!

"Oh yeah," Rory said. "It's in my closet. I'll get it."

Lorelai's next words sent Jess into a panic. She said, "That's OK. I'll get it."

It was too late to make a break for the window. The closet was obviously off-limits. Besides which, both those destinations were much too far away from where he crouched behind her bed. Jess had to settle for the only viable option. He flipped her bedspread up and lay down, intending to slide under the bed. To his terror, he saw the underside of the bed was loaded with several stacks of books. But he didn't have time to find another hiding spot. He pushed on the books—hoping there'd be space in behind them—and he'd never been so grateful as when he discovered there was.

Rory kept a lot of books in amongst the dust-bunnies. In order to hide his body, he had to really cram himself in there. He pushed and contorted and hoped that the books weren't sticking out on the other side of the bed as Lorelai's loud, perky voice and footsteps announced her presence in the room. Jess used his heels and fingertips to slide himself closer to the wall and deeper under the recesses of her bed and hoped he wasn't sticking out anywhere.

Rory trailed after her mother, having been unable to surpass her mother's strides. Though Rory's mind was working slowly, the world spun along at a high speed. Everything was happening faster than she could comprehend. As the two entered her room, Lorelai was unaware of Rory's panicked eyes darting around the space. She was also unaware of Rory's sigh of relaxation as the girl decided that Jess had gotten away.

Then Rory's eyes fell upon her window. Her closed window. Her locked window. Her window that could not be closed and locked from the outside. Jess was still in her room!

Please don't be in the closet! Rory pleaded silently.

"It's election day in Argentina and I guess you could say I've been inspired," Lorelai was saying as she opened the closet door. Jess could see her shins as he heard the rifling of coat hangers. She went on to tell a story that involved voting booths and I Just Voted stickers and suffrage and big bustles on turn of the century skirts, which evolved into the garb of the flappers. She went on to mention parenthetically that, under Prohibition, coffee sales had boomed, which led to a mention of Luke's coffee and a few quirky asides and digressions that Jess could barely follow, especially given his current state of mind.

Keeping as quiet as he could, Jess attempted to straighten the bed skirt around him but a lot of it was simply out of reach in his contorted state. That was when, in a heart-stopping moment, he saw Rory's panties crumpled on the floor close to his head. Jess quietly and uncomfortably twisted until he pulled them under the bed with him.

Jess turned the panties over in his hands and leaned back against the floor. From the feel of them, they were satin, he decided. He bit his lip. Though he was looking up at box springs and lint, what he really saw was the image of Rory astride him. He envisioned her tossing her hair back over her shoulder, against a backdrop of the ceiling. He recalled the pressure of her hands around his wrists and the rapaciousness on her face.

Jess drew a shaky breath. He really had to stop thinking about such things because he couldn't reach his pants to adjust them. Knowing he should stop thinking about it, however, was not the same thing as actually shielding himself from his thoughts.

Rory was thinking a mile a minute. If Jess was still in her room, she should make his eventual escape as easy for him as possible. "It's stuffy in here," she mumbled. "Do you find it stuffy in here?" she asked her mother.

"No not really," Lorelai answered. She'd found the Pretty Girls Vote T-shirt but now she continued flipping through Rory's closet. Every once in awhile she pulled a shirt out of the closet to drape it in front of herself.

Rory ignored her mother's response and unlatched and opened the window. She surveyed the yard, pointlessly. She knew he wasn't out there.

Rory turned back towards the centre of the room and watched her mother appraise herself in front of the mirror. "Hey that's my shirt."

"And you're my daughter. Ergo this is my shirt by extension." Lorelai went back to her story-telling without missing a beat.

Meanwhile Rory was thinking that since Jess wasn't in the closet, and she was sure he hadn't had enough time to go out the back door, then that left her bed. She caught a glimpse of denim under one upturned corner of her bedspread which confirmed the theory. Rory casually kicked the blanket down straight, while silently calculating how much cubic space a teenage boy and 350 pounds of hardcover books took up. Rory could barely contain the empathetic grimace as she pictured the tangle of books and human limbs under the bed.

Rory casually went across the room to her bookshelf and peered at the shelves. What she had really come for, however, was to check that there were no tell-tale books peeking out from beneath her bedspread. In another moment she'd gotten the opportunity to surreptitiously glance downward. There was one stack poking out. Feeling thoroughly guilty, she delicately pressed her toes against the stack to push it back under the bed. It didn't budge. Instead Rory decided to sit down on the bed, in front of the bulge. Sitting down on the bed freaked her out too though, as she wondered how much her bed would shift with her weight on it.

She had to get her mom out of her room quick.

Her mom spoke first, "You want to watch a movie tonight, Hon?"

"Um. Sure. You want to rent? I'll come with you to the video store." As long as we go right now, she thought.

"No. I've got my eye on an old standby. What about Brazil?"

"Sure. Sure."

"You want to invite that James Dean of yours?"

"Oh, yeah. I will. He'd like that one," she said, referring to the unofficial adaptation of Orwell's 1984. "The ending is hilarious. It's like propaganda itself."

Her mother hadn't moved from the mirror and Rory had to hide her disappointment. But then she thought of a new sure-fire tactic. "If we're gonna do a movie. We'll need pizza."

At the mention of food, her mother quickly disentangled herself from Rory's clothing and headed for the door. "I'm on it! But I might need your help finding the phone. I think we left it in the living room."

As soon as her mother had cleared the doorway, Rory was enroute to the opposite side of her bed. She peered under the bedspread and found a sorry sight.

"Are you all right?" she whispered.

"Yeah."

"You've been under there for a long time."

"Once my ass fell asleep it was no big deal," he griped lightly as he attempted to coax his body out of confinement.

"Come over later?"

"When?"

"In a few minutes. Just as soon as you go out the window."

Jess smirked. "Sure."

With that said, she was out of the room again, in search of the cordless phone. In virtually no time, Jess was ringing the doorbell.

"I'll get it," Rory called as her mother sorted through couch cushions. Rory breathed a sigh of relief as she opened the door and found him there. Everything was under control again. "Hey," she said warmly. "I was just going to call you," she added, a bit too loudly.

"Hey yourself."

She fell into his arms for a good, long kiss. Then she led him into the living room and he watched as her pleated skirt hypnotically bounced. Jess smiled to himself at the thought of Rory commando.

"Hey, James Dean," Lorelai said casually as they entered the living room.

Jess was prepared for her comment. "Hey, Rochelle Hudson," he replied, referring to the actress's role in Rebel Without a Cause. The comment earned him a strange look which he took great pleasure in receiving.

But the conversation was dropped as Lorelai unearthed the phone. "Ah hah! Eureka! I've found it! And now to find the pizza flyers."

"Oh, yeah," Rory said to him, as though he hadn't already been privy to their previous conversation. "We're having a movie night tonight, complete with pizza. You want to join us?" Once her mother had proceeded into the kitchen, Rory's face melted of all polite conversation. "That was close," she breathed, turning to peer into the kitchen.

"I want to join you..." he suggested smarmily as his fingers snuck forward and tugged up on her skirt's hem.

"Hey!" Rory laughed as she spun around towards him and pressed her skirt down in all directions. "Not here! I'm feeling decidedly breezy," she confessed.

"Missing something?" Jess pulled her panties from his jeans pocket and showed them to her.

"Oh, thanks," she said, reaching for them as she stole another worried glance back at the kitchen. Jess, however, pulled them out of her reach and stuffed them back in his pocket.

"Oh. They're not for you."

"Jess! What are you doing?" she hissed.

"I'm keeping your underwear," he explained, as though an explanation were completely unnecessary.

"You can't do that! Give 'em back!"

"But I really like your underwear," he said slyly, "When they're in my pocket."

"Jess!"

"You need to find a different place to keep your books, if I'm gonna be hiding out under there."

"You're not..." She shook her head in frustration. "That was a one-time thing."

"Hey I'll live down there if I have to. You can just take me out whenever you want to have your way with me. It'll be a hard life, but you'll allow me brief periods of flaccidity."

Rory freaked out a bit as Jess turned around. There were dust-bunnies all over the back of his head and backside. She started to frantically pat the back of him.

"Hey! What are you doing?" he cried.

"Dust-bunnies."

"What's going on?" Lorelai said as she returned from the kitchen.

Rory was making her deer-in-head-lights face so Jess jumped in. "Oh. I was cleaning the store-room today. I guess I got a little dusty. Rory's taking it upon herself to pat my ass clean."

"Boys will be boys," Rory joked, blushing straight to the roots of her hair. Lorelai frowned and Rory immediately decided it was a poor choice of words.

Lorelai cleared her throat, but if she suspected that anything untoward was going on, she didn't let on. "I ordered the pizza. Jess, I hope you like pepperoni."

"Pepperoni's fine." Jess idly wandered past the table by the window and around the far side of the couch. After a glance at some framed photographs, he dropped down into the corner of the couch.

Lorelai nestled into the opposite corner. "So how are things going at home with Cady? Luke freaking out yet?"

Jess smirked. "Well..." He paused somewhat uncomfortably, as though trying to think of something to say. "He said something about jam hands but I set him straight. She actually does like Frosted Flakes so the box that Luke bought for me, way back when, is finally getting eaten."

"Oh that's good." Likewise, Lorelai's side of the conversation was strained. "That means more cupboard space."

"It makes up for the lack of space everywhere else. Liz shipped her stuff."

"Oh. I can just imagine." Lorelai smiled at the thought of Luke tripping over himself in their apartment for two. "I don't suppose there are any more walls to knock down."

"I don't think so. Not unless we want the roof to cave in also."

"But things are good?"

"Yeah," he replied honestly. "It's nice to have her around again."

Rory plopped down on the couch between them, careful not to jostle her skirt too much but pleased at the conversation occurring around her. She once again paused to be grateful that two of the most important people in her life had begun making an effort to be nice to one another.

"I like her!" Rory enthused about Cady to no one in particular.

"Yeah," Lorelai chuckled. "So do I. She does these bits, you know? She does a great impression of you, Jess."

While Jess rolled his eyes, Rory laughed along with her mother and added, "Yeah she does. She idolizes you."

"She does not."

"She does."

"Well she shouldn't," he urged, effectively stalling the conversation.

AN: I hope you liked this chapter. I hope it wasn't too much for the rating. Let me know if it is.