three words, two hearts, one maybe

Rory wants. She wants and it's strange and scary but not necessarily new. She'd like to think it's at least a little bit new, at least where the subject of her desire is concerned, but she knows that that isn't quite right. She's wanted Paris for a long time, since Chilton even, but she always chalked those odd feelings she had for the blonde up to something else, anything but the truth. First she paid too much attention to Paris because she'd never been so thoroughly disliked before, much less before she'd even had a chance to make a first impression, and simply because she just existed. Then she spent too much time thinking about Paris because they were friends, or quasi-friends- which is basically the same thing where Paris is concerned, and she told herself it was normal to think about your friends a lot and if seventeen year old Rory spent some of that thinking time considering how nice it would be to kiss Paris, wondering if she kissed the same way she argued- intensely and with the goal to make the other person forget everything they were thinking, then it was just a coincidence that Rory didn't really dwell on. And then, at Yale, they were living together and Rory found it nearly impossible to escape her thoughts of Paris when they shared a bedroom.

Now, though, there were not flimsy excuses to hide behind, though briefly considers blaming it on being alone and recently cheated on. She won't, though, because Paris deserves better than that- because Rory deserves better than that. This thing with Paris, it's been a long time coming, and Rory wasn't going to sit around making pro-con lists and watching Paris longingly, not with seven years of feelings pent up and bubbling beneath her skin.

It's nearly five and Rory was just finishing up ordering the last of her patented assortment of take-out, when she realizes that she had absolutely no idea if her feelings were mutual at all. Here she was ordering take-out and rummaging around for their well-loved copy of The Power of Myth, all set to try to woo Paris, and she hadn't the faintest idea if her feelings were returned.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Before she got too far into berating herself, she heard the sound of the middle deadbolt, arguably the squeakiest lock in all of existence, being unlocked and she had a choice to make: Follow through on her plan to tell Paris how she felt about her or play off the obscene amounts of food and Bill Moyers as another pitiful night of wallowing. There really wasn't much of a choice to make here, so continued to arrange the first half of the take-out, which had arrived only a few minutes before Paris had, and make sure that the VHS was in the player and rewound completely. And, if it was a monstrous disaster, there was always the option of playing it off as being a product of her loneliness or something to that effect, because, God knows, she wasn't ever very good with being alone.

The door was finally completely unlocked and Paris was on her way in, "So, how was the thing?" She wanted to sound like she cared about the Operation Finish-Line activity that Paris had gone to, she did care, at least a bit, but she couldn't for the life of her remember what she'd even gone to, all of these workshops and internships and interviews just blended together after a while, honestly.

"The lecture on herbal medicine was shit. Absolute horseshit, I can't believe that people, real Ivy League graduates, believe that consuming some plants and doing sunrise yoga is an actual, legitimate, replacement for modern medicine and treatment. Just be glad you were too caught up in your wallowing to come along." She moved around the room putting her stuff away while she ranted, talking more at Rory than to her, the same way she does whenever she meets someone she deems moronic and needs to get anything that isn't socially acceptable to say to their face out of her system, though that hasn't stopped her in the past from doing the same rant at the person she finds idiotic.

She waited until the whirlwind that was Paris Geller was close enough and then she reached out, grabbed her wrist, and then pulled her down onto the couch with her, making the two of them a heap of limbs on the couch. "I wasn't mopping, and I think you got more out of it than I could've hoped to, being a pre-med major and everything."