49So, this was limbo, it resembled the wavy distorted image seen in a funhouse mirror.
It had been weeks since day of tacit agreement and she was lost. Rory didn't know where they were, where they were going or even really what she wanted the destination to be. Her internal compass was spinning and couldn't seem to find true north. She was without a guide and without a clue as to how to regain that balance and direction that had once been such an integral part of her approach to life.
They drank coffee, lots of coffee, nothing new in her existence but an act that was now magically imbued with a certain dangerous adrenaline laced edge that had little to do with caffeine content and a great deal to do with the sinuous rise of newly awakened hormones. They ate lunch and the sentences spoken in the silences between casual words were revealing, challenging, the tiny jabs with which they goaded each other to ever-greater heights of folly. Dinners were an exercise in seduction and banter in the newsroom had taken on all the heart racing characteristics of foreplay. Late night ice cream dates were nothing but sheer dance on the edge of reason tightrope walks. Then there were the trysts at all hours of the day, stolen seconds, brief interludes of time captured from the hum drum of everyday life and made into something golden and perfect and evanescent. That transient bubble of elation protected them for that shining moment and they drowned in each other but inevitably the sea of reality rushed back in and toppled all their fancy castles built in the sand. A fitting fate for those dream domiciles built on the ever fluctuating and fluid landscape of limbo.
Rory had always been more of a close the blinds and turn out the lights kind of girl but he made her reckless, made her tingle in broad daylight simply by standing within touching distance as if his force field caressed her even when his hands were behaving themselves. As if that naughty smirk had a power all its own to reach out and set her insides to quivering with a velvet soft stroke of awareness.
It was disconcerting, to say the least, to have her concentration torn to shreds the moment she heard his voice, that throaty little laugh of his that tickled its way up her spine and wiped all but images and sensations of ravishment from her brain, like running an eraser over the blackboard and leaving nothing but smudged indistinct memories of what had once lain there in stark white against black.
She was still quick on the comeback, able to meet his lazy suggestive smiles and that heat in his eyes with a lightening fast turn of phrase and just the right amount of droll wit, luckily that habit had long ago been ingrained at the unconsciously automatic level and came as easy as breathing or walking or drinking coffee...life's other nonnegotiable activities. The games, the innuendo and half voiced feelings hadn't changed...just the rules had.
She just wasn't sure how much longer she could live like this. The thrill of a roller coaster ride was just that for a while, a thrill unsurpassed by every day life. Eventually though even the most avid roller coaster lover wanted to disembark and stand on solid ground. To let the world around them stabilize and crystallize into something that could be seen and touched. Or so she had believed. Logan Huntzberger seemed determined to prove every one of her theories about human nature wrong. He seemed content with their half realized emotions and the push and pull of their interactions. He didn't seem to have any need to stand still and see where they were. He didn't appear to care and therein lay the rub because she was beginning to realize that she did care...too much to continue to ignore the pangs of her heart for the mere promise of short term fulfillment.
She was lost in thought, staring blankly into the dregs of her coffee cup as if she were an old time seer and an explanatory pattern would somehow become apparent in the abstract scatter of muddy grounds that remained against that ivory porcelain. All she had wanted in the heat of that first kiss was to know what it would be like, to jump into the deep end without a life jacket, live reckless, without charts and graphs and color-coding. Her life had long been almost compulsively safe with a few notable exceptions. She liked it that way, cozy, familiar, everything, every thought in it's correct place. No surprises, no murky motivations or uncontrollable endings. Then one day she had found herself missing the surprises, bored with the comfortable and the familiar and yearning to just once have the daring to be the bull in a china shop to buck the yoke of perfectionism that she herself had slung on her shoulders. So she had taken her own self-imposed dare, she had reached out and grabbed that shiny, tempting forbidden fruit, like Eve in the garden, and taken a big bite out of it, willfully ignoring all thought of tomorrow or really anything past that moment of seductive freedom.
Then tomorrow came with all the grace and subtlety of an elephant trying to dance the ballet, and what had seemed clear and bright and etched in brilliant detail faded into ambiguous shapes and vague shades of grey that formed an amorphous fluid, ever shifting landscape of reality that quickly became a maze of confusing firsts. Regrets, mistakes and self-incriminations mixed in equal parts with the highs of adrenaline induced giddiness, unsurpassed euphoria and those few rare moments of surety that for a split second at a time brought some slice of calm to her chaotic life.
Those moments of surety were become fewer and farther between in the past weeks as they grew ever closer and yet with every breath ever farther apart as if some insurmountable yet invisible barrier expanded between them holding them at a constant distance.
She had considered ending it many times. She wasn't stupid, she knew the odds of walking away from the venture unscarred but the nearly palpable energy that flowed between them like a living thing, the way her heart shuddered in her chest for a split second when he touched her before the normal rhythm of her pulse resumed had become addictive. Time and again she had neared the verge of that ultimatum but she had shied away.
When he had shown up at her door looking for the entire world to be a repentant sinner, a career gambler who had tossed in his chips for her and wanted to start fresh with a clean slate. She had seen it as a chance to make this unnamed thing between them into something real. She had denied the thought even as it echoed in her mind but there was a chance that it was the first step on the path to reformation.
She should have run the minute that ill-fated sliver of hope had slid into her consciousness but the old Rory had reared her head, the Rory that wanted to see the good in even the unredeemable, the same Rory that had slid willingly into the morass of Jess' neurosis and self destructive tendencies, the Rory that had listened to Dean's empty promises and heard the depth of emotion that existed only in the recesses of her own ill-conceived hopes. She had known what Logan was when she offered him a no regrets pact that promised that both of their hearts would stay clear of the wreckage. She had truly believed that she could do it, that she could be that carefree, explore the world and learn the lessons it has to offer her kind of girl for all of about five minutes.
Then she had kissed him. She should have turned around after the jolt had all but knocked her clean off her feet but she hadn't she had wanted to walk on that ledge, look down at the abyss of danger and the realm of the illicit she had wanted to play at the high stakes table...it all sounded great, the adrenaline rush of a lifetime until you considered the flip side of a high which was the pit of despair... or worse this purgatory trapped halfway between worlds with no clear escape. She had realized to late that the only people who could successfully play at the high stakes game of love were the ones with nothing to lose.
He was supposed to have met her twenty minutes and two cups of coffee ago and yet she still sat here alone with nothing but the dregs and the crumbs and the new biography of Dr. Seuss as company. It was a group of playmates that had become all too common of late.
He lost track of time, he ran into someone he knew, he had to drag some blonde into a back hallway and have his way with her, his excuses and her mental extrapolations were legion at this point. She took a deep breath, what was she doing here? Waiting, pining, like she was some lonely desperate social outcast who had nothing better to do with her life than wait for him to recall that she existed. She felt the beginning of a slow burn that worked its way up to a simmer in mere moments as she slammed the cup down on the table with more force than was strictly necessary and put her hands on the table to push herself up. She was done waiting. She was done playing by his rules. She was done with him if he didn't change his errant ways.
A hand landed on her shoulder and held her in place not allowing her to rise. "Leaving so soon Ace?"
The look she gave him would have withered the most vigorous of vines. He widened his eyes slightly in mock fear silently damning himself and the fact that he had forgotten to wear his watch again. That look did not bode well for what was supposed to have been a nice lighthearted little study break. "Usually angry works for you but now I'm going to have to say that's not a good look."
She seethed silently but set her teeth and valiantly struggled to keep her voice to cutting and dry, better to slice clean and leave him to bleed once she had walked away "Probably because angry was a milepost I passed about ten minutes ago and it was nothing but a blur."
He nodded in understating. "Ah. Then I'm guessing more coffee right now would not be a good idea for my health then?"
She barely heard the teasing words "What was it this time Logan?"
"What was what?" he asked it with a nonchalantly blank expression despite knowing full well where this conversation was veering.
"The excuse for why you left me sitting here for the last twenty minutes?"
He shrugged and sent her his patented sheepish little boy look complete with puppy dog eyes that had been known to reduce most girls to a giggling pile of mush, it didn't bode well that her only reaction was to cross her arms and increase the tempo of her foot tapping surreptitiously under the coffee table. "Would you believe I ran into Finn and Colin?"
"Did you?" Her tone spoke of patent disbelief and he felt his jaw tighten slightly in defense.
He removed his hand from her shoulder and dropped into the seat across from her. He
didn't like to be questioned, liked even less the voice in the back of his mind that was speaking in louder and louder tones of late and saying that perhaps she had every right to be angry. Just because none of his previous female companions had taken exception to his rather fluid concept of time didn't mean that she was wrong. In fact there was a sneaky little corner of his psyche that thought perhaps he was doing it on purpose. Keeping her at arms length, perpetually on the edge of irritation or frustration rather than letting her get close, get comfortable in his life, in his heart.
More importantly he was coming to suspect that it was his own level of comfort with her that had him running scared. There had never been a girl in his experience who had so quickly and completely gotten to him. And she had gotten to him, he was past being able to deny that, he kept throwing up barriers and somehow she slithered around them within the blink of an eye. He had always been an accomplished escape artist when it came to emotional entanglements but now he found himself in a unique predicament. Tied neatly and securely with bonds made by his own hand. Desire had at last won the battle against fear and now he was plagued with an entirely new form of terror as he looked at the darkening blue of those laser eyes.
All his life he'd been looking for something, never satisfied with all that he had, all that glittered and was gold but left nothing but bitter ashes in his mouth. He hadn't known what it was until she kissed him. He had come to crave the honeyed taste of her, sweet and clean and real on his tongue. For once he held something fragile in his hands that he wanted to protect, something that he didn't want to see twisted and destroyed. Someone that he wanted to keep whole even at a cost to him self.
It gave him pause. He had never been an altruistic person. He had long ago placed his own well being on the top of his list of priorities and hadn't wavered despite obstacles thrown in his path to keep that one shining goal of self-preservation in his sights. Then one fine day he had awakened to a stark new reality and found his world inhabited by a stranger. She was there, in his thoughts, in his mind's eyes, in that secret place he denied with all his might that held the vulnerable piece of himself that most never got close enough to see. She was there and she was holding that crystalline shard in her hands, she could break him.
He dropped his eye to the wreckage of her vigil; an empty coffee cup, crumbs of some unidentified pastry. Then he looked up at her, saw the flicker of tiny muscles in the tightly clenched jaw and he knew with absolute certainty the thing that he had feared now for weeks. She would break him, one delicate inch at a time she would crumble his barriers until he stood naked and unprotected before her and then she would see him as he truly was without the pretty window treatment. His fear, his real nightmare began at that second, the moment when she saw the reality of his weakness, his faults, his insecurities, the secret things that made him tick and kept him running, never satisfied, always looking for that thing that was missing... that thing that she had shown him and that now he feared he could not live without. He feared above all that she would see what he saw, that he didn't deserve her, that she should run as far and as fast as she could away from him and thank her lucky stars that she saw the truth before it was too late.
It was only a matter of time before that bitter culmination and he thought it was better to walk away now, to let it become a might have been rather than a tale told to the wary to warn them from the gates of the garden of Eden, that deceptive illusion of perfection that up close brought only heartache and sorrow.
The only problem with this little mental journey of his was that despite all the warnings screamed by a well honed self preservation instinct he wanted the illusion, he wanted what might reside beyond the illusion. That very tiny chance that there was something to be gained by putting your heart on the line and that the quicksilver slide of happiness that beckoned might in fact be worth the risk.
He looked down at his hands trying to formulate some sort of response to her question but she beat him to it.
"Nothing to say? No new half-truths and feeble excuses to feed me? Well good, I've got a class to get to anyway." With a look of mingled disgust and disenchantment she rose from her seat turning half away from him and began to put her books back in her bag with quick jerky movements.
His words stopped her "Wait Rory. Just sit down, have another cup of coffee...preferably decaf and we'll talk. " He tried for a light note but fell substantially short.
Her shoulders slumped slightly and she looked at him over her shoulder. She looked at him for a long moment that seemed to stretch in interminable length between them across that ever-widening chasm. Her eyes had lost their angry sheen and his heart clenched a little as he saw them fill with a sort of sad acceptance. "Why?" it was a half whispered question.
"I don't want you to leave." It was a bigger truth than even he was ready to admit. He didn't want her to leave him...ever.
She shook her head slightly as if debating silently with her self and then in one smooth motion she slung her bag across her shoulder and leaned across the coffee table towards him. Her lips brushed his cheek and then she spoke with a lingering regret. "Despite what your daddy tells you, even you can't always get what you want."
He watched her go and he felt a little drop in his chest. The fall of another brick from that wall inside him. He cared about her and he wasn't ready to lose her not this easily, not without a fight. Only he didn't know how to fight himself and win. He muttered to himself as he slumped back in the chair and lay his head back to stare at the ceiling berating himself for another stupid move.
"So, now what genius?"