TROUVAILLE ... l.danes (REWRITE)

chapter ten; the present

YOU'RE NOT MEANT TO TOUCH BROKEN GLASS WITHOUT GLOVES

two-thousand-and-two

SHELLEY SWINGS one leg over the other as she watches Luke storm about the diner, one hand taking off his cap so the other can run through his hair and tug at the roots. He's been doing the same thing since he was young, hands running through his hair, smoothing it away from his face, squeezing his eyes shut as if all the stress will just sink away with his fingers. The diner is almost completely empty apart from the few usual customers who don't have jobs to go to, like her and Kirk, so she's not entirely sure what he's got to be stressed about.

She's also not going to ask him. He gets somehow grumpier when he's stressed.

She watches him grab the deep yellow mug and sit it in front of her, not even bothering to raise his eyes from the coffee pouring into the mug. He's still silent as he tears open two sugar sachets with his teeth and shakes them out into the swirling liquid, eyes narrowing as it continues to swirl. And swirl. And swirl. And– Shelley quickly takes a hold of the handle and pulls it towards her, forcing his eyes to snap to her.

Whatever heat had been dancing behind those blue irises quickly fans out.

"Jess isn't going to school," he mumbles, picking at the edge of his counter.

"What?"

"He's hardly going to class, he doesn't do his homework, he's either hostile or indifferent to his teachers, and he stole all their baseballs!"

Shelley blinks a few times. "What?" Luke nods, pulling off his cap yet again to tug at the light roots of his hair. "When you say baseballs do you–"

"They've been using tennis balls."

Shelley cringes without meaning to but quickly schools her face into sympathy as she leans across the counter to pet Luke's hand that is on the counter softly. His fingers clench into a tight fist beneath her touch. Tense. They meet eyes yet again and pull away from each other slowly. She runs her thumb over the fingers that touched the back of his hand, not noticing the way that he uses his other hand to trace the gentle feel of her fingers on his knuckles. Something beneath her skin sparks, like an electric shock in her vein. Even Shawn's touch wasn't enough to cause every hair on her body to stand up on edge, instead, after a while, his touch just seemed to force ice down her back and every night she would turn away from him, staring at the wall across from the bed, wondering where that spark had disappeared to.

She should have realised sooner.

Luke's voice cuts into her thoughts. "I tried talking to him but he doesn't care." He's still running his thumb over his knuckles. When he was younger, he'd do that just before a fight, like trying to prepare them for the onslaught of split skin and strangers' blood. Now, it seems more like a grounding technique. When did they all grow up? "He's gonna have to resit this year and I know Jess, he doesn't want that. He hates school enough as it is, having to retake the year would be torture."

"Maybe you could get him a tutor or something?"

Luke shrugs. "Do you know how expensive those things are?" In Stars Hollow, nothing is expensive, not even a tutor. Especially not when you've got the smartest kid in the whole town coming to you for her caffeine addiction. Shelley sits up a bit straighter.