It's a beautiful sin and I'm doing it again.

Intuition was something Lola had always relied on. So when she pulled into her mother’s driveway, she knew that her mother wouldn’t be there. Even before she noticed that Christopher Hayden’s car was the only thing filling it. Lovely.

She didn’t look at Dallie as she got out, no real reason why. Just didn’t want to. It wasn’t because of the foreign feeling twisting her gut around that her mind yelled out to label it as guilt. But she refused to, because she had used guys far worse than she had so far with Dallie. Hell, she’d had sex once with him, and kissed him in the car. It wasn’t any different. It didn’t feel any different.

“Where’s your mom?” Dallie asked, breaking up her thoughts. The damned man noticed everything. Didn’t he know he was a guy, and thus had to be oblivious to everything?

Then it hit her. Dad. Date. Mom. Gone. “I don’t know,” The lie slipped off Lola’s tongue easily. Damn her parents anyway.

“Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Dallie mumbled underneath his breath.

Awkwardness was never a feeling that Rory Gilmore had gotten use to feeling. Unfortunately it seemed to be the most prominent thing in her life for the past twenty-four years. Maybe even more so, she was sure she could trace back the beginning of her awkward moment when she first viewed the male sex as something other than someone who protected her or visited with every holiday or so.

Though life had become one awkward moment after the other ever since Tristan DuGrey reentered her life again when they were in college. For a while they had it good. Nice light study sessions that had included a stolen kiss or two. After graduation, they had grown apart slightly because of the pressure of getting a job and adjusting to the “real world”. Well at least she was. Tristan was being prepared for taking over his father’s business. They had moved in two different circles, but had picked each other up again when both had settled into their new roles. At twenty-five they had married, and a year later had a daughter.

There was Jess and Paris in their lives, but after college the four had drifted apart due to the fact that Paris had gotten pregnant with Augusta, which had made them wrapped up in their own drama. It had been odd that Tristan and her had been having their first child while Jess and Paris were on their third. At the time none of them had realized that it would be their last. Jess and Paris had been having relationship problems since Augusta had been conceived, and had elevated with each child.

It wasn’t until ten years after their marriage had they finally resolved their problems and began a healthier, more loving relationship. A year later hers and Tristan’s had fallen apart. They had tried, probably not as hard as they should have, but in the end the relationship had progressed onto unhealthy and it wasn’t very healthy for Lola to be raised in such an environment.

It was a laughable idea, of course, seeing as the majority of the sex she had had since the divorce was with her ex-husband, of course. It seemed that Rory had inherited her parents’ inability to have a good relationship outside of the other parent to your child. Well first born child in her father’s case. And with the relationship came the inability to be in the same place at the same time.

Nothing had really changed since high school. They argued, they fought and they held a tentative truce until one screwed up and then it was back to the same. The only thing that had seemed to change was that they acted on their attraction in the midst of it all. They really needed to stop.

They had once, a few years ago. Rory had a pregnancy scare and it was enough to wake her up to how screwed up her and Tristan’s relationship was. It also brought the realization that she didn’t want to bring another child into the situation. Lord knew Lola had suffered enough from it.

Lola. Another relationship that had managed to turn so screwed up over the years. When Tristan and Rory had decided that it was Lola’s decision about who she wanted to live with the majority of the time, never would she had guessed that her daughter would have chosen Tristan. Not because he wasn’t a good father or that they didn’t get along, but just because it was normal for a young girl to want to live with her mother in the events to come. But Lola had shrugged and said it was more practical to live with her father considering that her school was in Hartford with him.

Their daughter was something else, all right. When she was younger and she imagined having a daughter, she always thought it’d be someone like her and her mom, but Lola had more DuGrey in her than Gilmore. Not that it mattered because she loved Lola more than anything else in the world, but life hadn’t turned out at all like she imagined it would.

If it had, then she wouldn’t be meeting Tristan DuGrey for dinner at this very moment.

“Hey,” Tristan sat down across from her. “Sorry. Lola called from outside of Stars Hollow and I ended up being late.”

Rory immediately leaned forward in concern. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Tristan shrugged it off. “She was just letting me know that her and Dallie had arrived.”

“So they haven’t killed each other yet?” Rory questioned.

Tristan shook his head, “No they seem to get along fine. Though I only really see them together at breakfast, when they return from school and at dinner. Other than that Dallie reads a lot, and Lola…she does Lola things.”

She hated to ask, “Lola things?”

“Sometimes she reads, sometimes she types on the computer- though that’s mainly for the Franklin, and then the, uh, toilette.”

That was their daughter to a tee, Rory supposed. “When are Paris and Jess returning?”

“Two weeks,” Tristan replied, sipping at his water. “More or less. I’m throwing a Welcome Back party.”

“Oh, are Devon and Augusta returning for it?”

“Yes, Augusta called yesterday, confirming it,” Tristan answered. “Devon’s bringing back a friend with him.”

“Girl? They grow up too fast.”

“Yeah,” Tristan smiled wistfully. “It seems only yesterday Jess and Paris told us that she was pregnant with Augusta. Straight out of college.”

Rory laughed, “I remember when she first considered sleeping with him. She had charts about the percent error of each contraceptive they would use, and a calendar for the least fertile days. She threatened to sue the birth control companies because they had failed.”

“And ended up having two more children,” Tristan mused aloud, “I think they might have wanted to switch brands.”

“Paris didn’t ask about that until after I had Lola,” she told him. “She was holding Dallas in her arms, and she was looking over the top of Lola’s crib. Then she says, as if it just occurred to her, ‘you conceived after marriage. What were you using?’”

“It was hard times back for her then, with Jess gone a lot. In fact, you could tell when Jess came home. A child was born nine months later.”

Rory smiled; sometimes it was just too easy to fall back into old habits. No matter how bad she already knew they were for her.