Written for the Improv. threw/through week/weak knew/new ate/eight
Jess never wanted to come to stars Hollow. Everyone who knew him knew that. Heck, everyone who talked to him realized. He just didn't want to be there. But he was. Someone else might have tried to make the best of it, but then, Jess wasn't someone else. Rory was the one who threw him off. He never expected to find a girl like her in a shitty town like Stars Hollow. But he did. He was sick of Luke and Lorelai preaching his ass off, the idiotic town traditions, the crappy school. No, Rory wasn't what he was epecting at all. Dean was exactly what Jess expected. Only he never thought Dean would get to him as much as he did. Maybe it was because he was with Rory- Dean was and Jess wasn't. So the two people he was attracted to were together. Things like that always happened to Jess. Nothing new. Only this time, for some reason, he made a decision. Or tried to, which was something that deserves a bit of credit. He gave himself a week. A week to act.

Only that week turned into two. And then a month. During that time, he just talked about books with Rory and had fights with Dean, between skipping classes and mouthing off to people in Luke's Diner. He could have felt guilty for getting Luke's buisness into trouble, but he didn't. He felt he had enough to think about. Like the fact that he was weak and he knew it. Maybe they were all weak. Dean still fought with Jess, and seemed to enjoy it deep down. After all, it couldn't be that Jess was the only one feeling all that sexual tension between them. He thought- no, he knew- that Dean felt it as well. And Rory. Rory was nice to him, she laughed at his jokes, she called him (eight times, he counted, though he'd never let her know). They went out- they read, they ate, they laughed. She visited him in New York. It was more than her being her typically nice self, he was sure of it.

When he came back to Stars Hollow, he made a decision. A new start. He was through being the third wheel (truthfully, he wasn't even that). He'd act. He had to. Either with Dean or with Rory, he wasn't sure, right up until the moment when he saw her, dressed for Sookie's wedding, and the world came crashing down all around him as she kissed him. He didn't have to prove his weakness or act, after all.