Title: When She Cries
Book: II
Chapter: Four
Chapter Title: Curse His Name
Rating: R.
Coupling: Ultimately: Dallie/Lola, Aggie/Fin, Devon/Ashley,
Thalia/Ethan, Paris/Jess, Meggie/Zander, Aurora/Tolly. Now aren’t you glad
you’ve spoiled yourself in that way?
Disclaimer: Aye, captain. I hold no
deeds to Gilmore Girls. And I don’t own matchbox twenty’s Unkind.
Author’s Note: I’m going to have a million of Ashley’s babies. So I
shall dedicate this to her.
*
Say the hell with my name and say the hell with my picture/Yeah
but swear for the one/ Time you need me around to be around/Well I'm around
right now/
And here I'll stand like it matters/Only once gets through/
And then gets scattered by the rain/But pain gives me the
right to be unkind/
And it sets me here.
Little Mary Phagan went to work
one day…the chant was permanently stuck in her head, it was now official,
Lola decided. It was heading up the list of her major problems; possibly
surpassing the twenty minutes spent looking for her reading glasses (she never
wore them unless reading gave her a headache. Which it was now, in a major
way), that she had been wearing them for so long that the back of her ears
itched from the contact, but it hadn’t yet passed the fact she could no longer
blink after staring at her computer screen for seven and a quarter hours. She
no longer cared about ‘Little Mary Phagan’ or whether it was Leo Frank, Newt
Lee or James Conley. Nothing matter other than taking off the damned glasses,
working the crick out of her neck and beating the little children’s tune out of
her head. Really.
She heard the phone ring. Lovely, now
she was suffering from auditory hallucinations. As if she hadn’t developed
enough problems in the past eight hours. Why had she decided to take AP 20th
Century History was a mys…oh, yeah. She was a history major, that’s why. And as
a history major she had wanted to take all the possible history classes,
because at one point in time, namely eight hours earlier, she had loved
history. The phone rang again.
Lola picked up, because there was a
fifty-fifty chance that the phone was actually ringing. “Hello?” Her voice
sounded scratchy, most likely from dehydration. She hadn’t consumed any food or
water since whenever it was that Haley had dropped off the lunch tray. She
couldn’t help but wonder if this was a hint that if she ever got a career that
she’d become a workaholic.
“Lola?” The voice at the other end
sounded a little unsure of the person who had picked up.
“Who else would pick up on my
private line?” Lola returned, trying to place the voice. Oh, right. How could
she have forgotten? “So what’s gone wrong before school’s begun, Mariano?”
“Nothing yet.” Oh, so that meant
that they were going to take preventative measures to ensure nothing could
go wrong. “But we’re holding a Franklin meeting before the start of school as a
preventative measure to ensure that nothing could go wrong.”
Sometimes, it was scary how well she
knew Dallas Alden Mariano. “Tomorrow?”
“No,” Dallie replied. Which was a
twenty-five percent shock, since Dallie did everything almost the day after he
called to inform. “The day after.”
“Good,” she told him, leaning back
in her leather desk chair. “I have plans tomorrow.” Which included her and an
aqua massage over at Marguerite’s house.
“I know.”
Lola paused; she hadn’t pegged
Dallie for the mind reader type. If he were, he wouldn’t schedule so many
damned Franklin meetings. “You do?”
“Uh, yeah,” he answered, and then
hesitated. He was probably waiting for her to say something; in that case he’d
probably be waiting a long time. She was still trying to wrap her head around
the mind reader thing. “Aurora’s dinner party tomorrow night? It’d be foolish
to schedule something when half the staff is going to be in attendance over
there.”
Shit. She had completely forgotten,
which left her pretty screwed and a horrible friend. “Oh, hell.”
“You don’t mean to say that you’ve
forgotten about it?” Dallie had the audacity to sound shocked. As if she didn’t
have a life outside of society’s gatherings. She was gregarious, for certain,
but not to the point of having no life outside of it.
“Well right now I’m having trouble
remembering it’s 2028, and not 1913,” Lola snapped at him, he was just
irritating. Even more so when she had a pounding headache. “Forgive me for
forgetting a party.”
“O-kay,” it was always better when Lola
got like this to ignore it and move onto the next subject. “I’ll see you
tomorrow then.”
Lola blinked, her brain must be more
fried by the computer than she thought. “Jamison invited you?”
“Yes, it does happen sometimes. Me
getting invited to society gatherings,” Dallie replied with a sigh. “I have
several more calls to make, and then I must keep the phone lines open incase
Dad calls.”
“Where’s Jess?”
“New York,” he replied. “Dealing
with more of the business side of things with Fin.”
“Oh,” Lola’s eyes drifted back to
the Word document on her computer. “Bye, then.” And then she heard the dial
tone on telephone. Back to 1913 it was, then.
*
Shoelaces had to be the worst
invention in the history of inventions. Despite the fact that Augusta had
learned to tie them nearly two decades ago, she still was fumbling with the
‘rabbit’s ears’ portion of the tying process. She had barely tackled that task,
and pulled her hair into a ponytail when the knocking came. The knocking always
came when one was feeling guilt. The question was whether or not to answer. It
was not, after all, her hotel room. Then again she didn’t know if Fin had left
with his key, so it could be him. But she wasn’t above letting him stand
outside of his own hotel room for a while. Augusta sighed; she’d answer the
door. Then immediately saw why it was a bad idea.
“Hey Dad.” There really wasn’t a
chapter in her psychology textbook that talked about ramifications and
consequences of opening the door to your lover’s hotel room and finding your
father on the other side. Though all the other aspects of her relationship with
her father problem could. Unfortunately she was not harboring any deep and
abiding resentment towards him today. It made her feel sort of lost.
“You’re not Fin.” Jess stated
simply. Her father was the complete opposite of her mother in the way that most
things simply did not fluster him. Except of course when he gets stuck alone
with his three children and shuts off his seven year old daughter’s light and
she freaks out on him. If she didn’t still have her fear of the darkness the
whole episode would be rather humorous.
“Neither are you,” she returned
dryly.
Jess tilted his head to the side.
“Can I assume then he’s not in the general vicinity of this spot, then?”
“If I said you’d assume correctly,
it wouldn’t be completely honest,” Augusta replied, seeing as she, herself, had
no idea where Fin had gone off.
Well she was his daughter, no doubt
about it, if you also included her hair and her eyes that she also got from
him. Evasive and honest all at the same, time, there were only two people in
the world that could pull that off and they were standing in this hotel room.
However, being alike wasn’t exactly going to help him in this situation nor was
it going to erase a decade or so of being a bad father. And he had been one; in
fact he was quite sure the low point of his career had been the day he had
asked Tristan DuGrey for advice. Tristan of the one child, a daughter who had
worshiped the ground he had walked on, a successful marriage at the time, and
employed a nanny. In his defense, at the time of the said asking of advice, he
had had a hysterical Augusta, a hyperactive Devon, and a toddler Dallas on his
hands. Not exactly the ingredients for sanity there.
One option was asking himself the
question, ‘what would Paris do?” but then again, he didn’t happen to have any
videos or packets on the dangers of unprotected, premarital or any other evil
associated with the three letter word of sex. Besides, Aggie should already
know about all of that. She was, after all, the result of one of the ‘evils’
mentioned above. Then again he could take his mother’s approach to parenting
and ignore it, since it didn’t directly affect him. The more appealing, safer
approach, to be sure, but he didn’t really want to be like his mother. The
third option was to be like Uncle Luke and yell at her about, yet still leave
everything unresolved and nothing changed. That one, at least would, show that
he cared. Alas, none were realistic options for him. So he was forced to do
what Jess would do, except he wasn’t quite sure what that was.
“Been here long?” Of course this
would have to come out sounding like a bad pick up line. He should have never engaged
in sexual activities until he had a vasectomy. He made a horrible father.
Augusta shrugged. “Awhile.”
Monosyllabic-ness apparently ran in
the family. Now, the next step would be… “I didn’t know you and Fin kept in
touch outside of the house.” Great, now he sounded like an episode of Dawson’s
Creek.
She shifted slightly, “Yeah, well,
he was new to the city.”
“And you wanted to show him the
interior of his hotel room?” Yeah, now that sounded like something Jess
would do. Say something sarcastic, possibly destroying any civility in the
conversation. Normally it didn’t bother him, but, well, this was his daughter.
It bothered him. “Scratch that.”
Augusta studied him for a long
moment, “Done.” She grabbed her jacket. “You’re welcome to stay and wait, but I
have to get back to the apartment.”
“Dinner later?” Jess offered as he
watched her get her jacket. Because really, what could he do?
“Uh, sure,” Aggie replied. Before
she left, however, she paused, smiled at him. “Bye Dad.”
“Bye,” Jess answered softly as the
door closed. He wasn’t sure what kind of women were more confusing- the kind
you loved, or the ones that were your daughter.