Chapter 131 – May the Force Be with You
Ross was exactly where Rachel had expected him to be — on the sidewalk across from Central Perk, hands buried in his coat pockets, pacing a short, anxious loop and checking the café window every few seconds with the barely concealed desperation of a man who has sent a monkey with a love letter and is now experiencing the full consequences of that decision.
When he saw Rachel come through the door holding Marcel and the slightly battered rose, he stopped moving entirely.
Rachel crossed the street. She held up the note. "A primate courier service," she said. "Really."
Ross opened his mouth. Closed it. "I practiced with him for forty-five minutes," he said finally. "The animal trainer helped. I used banana chips."
"It worked," Rachel said.
"I know, I just—" He exhaled. "Rachel. I am really sorry. I was jealous and I made it into something it wasn't, and then I kept going when I should have stopped, and I'm sorry."
He said it simply and directly, without the elaborate justifications and qualifications he usually built around difficult admissions. Just the thing itself.
"Yeah," Rachel said. She looked at him for a moment. "You were kind of terrible."
"I was kind of terrible," he agreed.
"Dinner tonight?"
Ross nodded with an enthusiasm that he was clearly trying to moderate and not quite managing.
"Seven o'clock," Rachel said. "Don't be late."
She handed Marcel back — the monkey transferred back to Ross's shoulder with the unconcerned ease of someone who has completed his assignment and is ready to move on — and went back inside.
They met at a small Italian place on Bleecker that Ross had picked specifically for being warm and quiet and not the kind of restaurant where you ran into people you knew. Candles on the tables, soft music, the smell of garlic and good wine. The kind of place where it was easy to remember why you liked someone.
Rachel got there first. She was looking at the menu when Ross came through the door, and she glanced up — and then looked again, because Ross was taking off his coat and underneath the coat Ross was wearing a white karate gi.
A full, proper, white karate uniform, complete with a meticulously tied black belt.
Rachel pressed her hand over her mouth.
Ross hung his coat on the rack with the specific care of a man who has committed to something and is not going to flinch now, smoothed the front of the gi, and sat down across from her. His face was the deep, particular red of someone doing something embarrassing on purpose and trying to be brave about it.
"Jean-Claude Van Damme," Rachel managed. "You wore a karate uniform to our makeup dinner."
"It's a gi," Ross said. "And yes. I thought it might—" he tugged at the collar— "demonstrate that I have a sense of humor about the whole thing."
Rachel laughed — a real, helpless laugh that she had to muffle with her napkin because the couple at the next table was looking over. "Ross. This is the most ridiculous and also the most sweet thing you have ever done."
She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "I have a surprise for you later. After dinner."
Ross looked immediately and completely distracted from everything else. "What kind of surprise?"
"The kind you find out about after dinner." She picked up her menu. "Eat your pasta."
He tried. He genuinely tried. The food was excellent — he ordered the lasagna and it was exactly right — but somewhere around the halfway point his attention started drifting toward Rachel's expression every thirty seconds, looking for clues, finding none, and returning to the lasagna with the distracted focus of someone whose mind is clearly somewhere else.
"You're not going to tell me anything," he said.
"Not a word," Rachel confirmed pleasantly.
"Not even a category? Like, is it an object? An experience? A—"
"Ross." She looked at him over her wine glass. "Eat."
He ate. It was very good lasagna. He was barely aware of it.
Back at the apartment, Rachel pushed him gently onto the couch the moment they were through the door.
"Close your eyes. Don't move. Don't peek." She was already backing toward the bedroom, and there was something in her expression — a specific combination of excitement and shy anticipation — that made Ross's brain immediately attempt to generate theories. "I'll be right out."
The bedroom door clicked shut.
Ross sat on the couch with his eyes closed and listened to the sounds coming from the other side of the door — the soft movements of someone changing, the quiet slide of a drawer, the small sounds of things being arranged. Time did the thing it does when you're waiting for something — it stretched out and became elastic and considerably longer than it had any right to be.
He was approximately ninety percent sure he was not going to be able to maintain his composure regardless of what came through that door.
The doorknob turned.
"Okay," Rachel said. "You can open them."
Ross opened his eyes.
Rachel was standing in the bedroom doorway.
Her hair was up — not just up, but up in two specific, perfectly placed buns, one on each side of her head, symmetrical and deliberate. She was wearing a long white robe in soft fabric that draped to the floor, with wide sleeves and a silver belt fastened at the waist, and she had her chin tilted up at an angle that communicated, entirely accurately, a princess who is used to being the most capable person in any room she walks into.
It was Princess Leia's costume from A New Hope. Exact. Perfect.
Ross's mouth opened and produced no words.
Rachel held the pose for a moment, then smiled — a small, pleased, slightly mischievous smile — and said, "Don't get too comfortable, Master Geller. There's more."
She reached for the silver belt, unfastened it with a practiced movement, and let the white robe slide off her shoulders and fall to the floor.
Underneath was the gold bikini.
The actual, iconic, unmistakable gold bikini from Return of the Jedi — the hard-plate top, the draped fabric panels connected by matching golden pieces, the whole spectacular, era-defining, poster-on-every-teenage-boy's-wall outfit — and it fit Rachel in a way that suggested she had perhaps tried it on more than once before tonight.
She stood there with slightly pink cheeks and bright eyes, looking at him with the expression of someone who has pulled off something significant and knows it.
Ross's brain experienced approximately two full seconds of complete white-out.
Then: "Oh my — Rachel. Rachel. This is — you are — I cannot—" He stood up from the couch. "This is the greatest thing that has ever happened in this apartment. Possibly in this city. I need you to know that every embarrassing, jealous, irrational thing I did this week is completely irrelevant now because this—" he gestured — "this is—"
"Too much?" Rachel asked.
"The opposite of too much!" Ross moved forward. "Rachel, I had a poster of this costume. Not of — of the character, I mean, well, yes, of the character, but specifically this—" He stopped himself. "You are incredible. You know that? You are completely and absolutely incredible."
Rachel laughed, the shyness entirely gone now, replaced by the warm satisfaction of someone whose plan has worked exactly as intended. She reached out and straightened the collar of his karate gi, which had gone crooked sometime during dinner. "So we're good? Jedi Knight?"
"We are so far beyond good," Ross said, "that good is not even visible from here."
"Good," Rachel said.
Outside, the January cold pressed against the apartment windows, and the city continued on without them, as cities do. Inside, the karate gi ended up on the floor next to the white robe, and Jean-Claude Van Damme's ambiguous exit line was consigned permanently to the part of the past that no longer mattered.
May the Force be with you, Ross had thought when he'd tied on that belt three hours ago, slightly desperate, hoping for the best.
It turned out the Force was very much with him.
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