Everything comes back to you -J.MARIANO

[1.05]

Taryn lay on her bed, surrounded by forgotten screwed up balls of paper and broken pieces of charcoal. She preferred to sketch in charcoal and not pencils as she thought it gave the drawings a better feel, she simply adored the aesthetic. She'd been trying to figure out what to do with a specific piece of fabric she had been given by a random Stars Hollow grandma who 'thought she could create something beautiful with it.' It just seemed incredibly impossible to form any sort of garment with it.

Jess found himself minorly amused by the sight that befell him when he opened the door to Taryn 's bedroom, after having knocked at least five times. He found himself further confused when she didn't look up as the door creaked loudly as it swung open. She wasn't wearing any sort of headphones, as he had assumed beforehand. Unsure of what else to do, he slowly walked across the room and towards her.

Slowly, as she noticed the top of a shoe out of the corner of her eye, Taryn 's gaze flicked up from her current sketch and towards the person that had entered her bedroom. She smiled and sat up, reaching towards her nightstand where both of her hearing aids had been placed. "Jess...why are you in my bedroom?"

"I knocked...like eight times," he replied whilst stuffing his hands into his pockets.

"Didn't hear you," she laughed softly, fixing the positioning of the wire into her left ear. "You gotta turn the light off and on to get my attention."

"Sorry... I didn't know."

She looked up at him and guessed he wasn't just talking about the light switch but about the entire situation within her ears. "You're telling me you didn't notice?" He shook his head in response, feeling rather awful for not noticing such a big thing in her life. She didn't blame him though, her curls often hid them and people were too scared to even talk about the subject in fear that they would offend her in some way. She, instead of being annoyed as he had suspected, smiled but found it falling as she looked him up and down."Why are you soaking wet?"

He shrugged as if it was rather normal, "Luke pushed me in the lake."

She laughed abruptly, "He what?"

"We had an argument," he replied with yet another shrug as Taryn climbed up from her bed and walked out of her bedroom. Before he could get too confused, she returned with a dark gray towel from the hallway cupboard.

"Why'd you argue?"

"Thanks," he almost muttered as he took the towel, glad to have something to remove the water still within his hair even if he had attempted to dry himself off before going to her house."Minor conflict."

"Mh," she hummed as she sat back down on her bed, crossing her legs underneath herself. "Sense there's a story there."

"There's not," he replied a little too quickly, adding to her intrigue as he pulled a box of cigarettes out of his back pocket. How they weren't soaked through from just being in his pocket, she didn't know. "You mind if I smoke in here?"

"I'd rather you not. My dads will kill me for the smell."

He, whilst pushing the box back into his pocket, turned towards her and asked, "Plural?"

She raised a brow, sending him a look of distaste as she wondered, "You got a problem with that?"

"No, just curious," he emphasized subtly whilst walking over to her bookshelf. The conversation faded out as he dried his hair and face with the towel, using the time to glance over the contents of her floor to ceiling bookshelf. He noticed the well loved and well worn copy of Dante's Inferno first then let his gaze fall onto the dozens of copies of vogue magazines and various other fashion magazines, all of which had post its sticking out of the top with writing scrawled on top of them. She had returned to sketching as he glanced over the magazines, having come up with an idea she thought would work. When it didn't compute onto paper the same way it looked in her head, she sighed and screwed the paper up. The ball of paper landed at his feet and he sarcastically commented, "You're wasting an awful amount of paper here, what about the trees?"

"I just can't figure out what to do with this fabric," she sighed frustratedly. The fingertips that weren't' covered in charcoal glazed over the frayed edges of the orange cotton laid atop her bed. He walked over, lay the towel down on top of her covers and sat just opposite her. They both stared at the fabric in silence for a moment, her mind turning with lacking ideas whilst he struggled not to make a joke. "It's just..."

"Garish," he opined, having sensed that she absolutely hated it too.

She laughed without a hint of it being fake. "Exactly. It'll look like a traffic cone no matter what I do with it."

"Maybe you should set it on fire," he infrared with the gentleness of shrugs, instantly picturing the two of them setting the fabric alight in the back garden.

"See I would but the flames would only make the orange worse, blind everyone."

He nodded and hesitated slightly before he responded, "Maybe that would be beneficial."

She chuckled softly and for a moment he laughed too, finding that the action relieved some of the frustration still within his chest. As that conversation came to a close, she sought another topic to keep her focus away from the difficulty of the garment for a second longer. So, without hesitation and rather abruptly, she asked, "What did you need anyway?"

He frowned, reaching a conclusion that was the complete opposite from how she truly felt. "What?"

"Well I assume that you came here for a reason, not just to see me fail to use this piece of fabric," she smiled and hoped it would convince that flicker within his eyes that she actually wanted to talk to him.

"Seeking shelter from Luke."

"Right. And what did you do to earn being pushed into a lake?" she repeated yet again, wondering if this time she would get an answer. He, instead of responding, just looked at her. "Mariano."

He shook his head, not quite ready to divulge that part of himself to her quite yet. "It's not important."

"Alright if you don't want to tell me that's fine," she smiled whilst pushing the notebook away from herself completely. She had quickly reached the conclusion that there was no hope for that specific fabric, it was just too garish. Now he had her complete attention, she noticed the goosebumps on his forearms and wondered why he hadn't covered them with his rolled up sleeves. Her gaze trailed up the surface of the damp gray shirt he was wearing, her focus drawing to how the fabric accented every curvature of muscle underneath. She cleared her throat, forcing herself to remember the cold and not the heat flushing her cheeks, "Do you want a jumper or something? I have one I made a while ago."

He shook his head as she draped one of her blankets over her knees, beginning to feel a chill herself. "I'm fine, it's weirdly warm in here."

"Warmest room of the house. It's very necessary for the winter, I get cold quick," she revealed whilst looking around her bedroom. Despite the huge windows on one side of her room, she had in fact been given the warmest room of the house since birth. Her Dads, upon bringing her home, decided to move all of their stuff out and to give their child the best room of the house as a huge gesture of the care they already felt for her. Taryn, as a three year old who had never had her own room, couldn't have been more elated. She loved every inch of the gable roofed room, from the creaky wooden floorboards to the constantly cobwebbed beams above her head that still had fairy lights twisted around them from when she was small. She loved her bookshelf, the corner in which her desk sat and her thrifted wardrobe which had been the perfect find at the perfect time. She adored her hand made curtains made of scraps of fabrics from failed projects. They were the first sewing piece she had ever finished. She loved the cluttered space of her second desk, where her sewing machine and everything else needed to create was housed. It felt like the safest place on earth and she only ever let certain people enter. She didn't mind his presence, surprisingly. "So are you going to go and apologize or hash it out with Luke?"

He cocked a brow, smirk falling onto his lips, "You trying to get rid of me Lewis?"

She smiled softly. "Not at all, I'm just making conversation from concerned thoughts."

"Concerned?" he echoed with that same smirk.

"For Luke mostly, shoving you must have hurt his hand."

The two of them descended into subtle laughter at her joke and Jess let himself forget all the things that he felt were currently wrong. Instead he just focused all attention on his current situation, the now over the past.