• •
  I stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom, leaning back against the frame of the bed while you made yourself comfortable nearby. It had been way too long since we’d actually hung out like this.

When you first moved to Stars Hollow about a year ago, we hit it off pretty fast. But then Rory happened, and honestly? I let almost everything else fall to the wayside. You’d watched the whole saga unfold from a front-row seat—from the early days when things with Rory were easy, to Jess showing up and getting in the middle of everything, right up to whatever exhausting loop Rory and I were stuck in now. It felt like we were constantly tipping over the edge of breaking up, only to pull back at the last second.

People kept giving me looks, like there was something obvious going on right in front of my face that I was just refusing to see. But I didn't want to think about that. I just wanted things to go back to how they were.

"Sorry I've been such a ghost lately," I muttered, rubbing the back of my neck as I looked over at you. "Things have just been... a lot. With Rory. And, well... Jess."

I let out a heavy sigh, tossing a baseball up in the air and catching it with a soft clack. "I just needed to talk to someone normal for once. Someone who isn't going to give me some weird, cryptic Stars Hollow speech. Thanks for coming over... how have you even been?"*