Chapter 2: A Morning After
Three Days Earlier…
Logan blinked dispassionately at the early morning light streaming through the Venetian blinds. Thin, pale yellow bars were crawling across the room, from the hastily discarded piles of clothes littering the carpet up and over the edge of the bed to the rumpled white sheet tangled around the bottom halves of Logan and his companion. Staring into the dim light, trying not to think and wishing he could sleep, Logan struggled with warring emotions—namely, arousal and guilt, both associated with the warm naked body curled against his under the sheet.
Hoping to ease at least one of his mind's preoccupations, Logan ran his hand down his companion's naked back in a long, firm stroke.
Kurt groaned, less than pleased at being woken up.
"Unnn… What time is it?"
"Good morning to you too."
Kurt groaned again in response, rolling over onto his stomach and gripping the pillow under his head like a life preserver. Not to be deterred, Logan swept his hand through the dishevelled waves of Kurt's blue-black hair and down the back of his neck, following the subtle grain of his fur all the way to his lower back and then, to seal the deal, under the base of his limp tail before sweeping firmly downwards.
That secured Kurt's attention, though not the desired response.
"Hey!—" Kurt jerked his tail out of Logan's grip and rolled back over onto his side, facing him with a tired scowl. "I was barely in adequate shape for what we did last night, let alone to wake up after half the sleep I need for more. Not everyone has your healing factor."
Logan smiled coyly. "You might surprise yourself. And I'm usually pretty good at talking you into things."
Refusing to be baited, Kurt rolled away from Logan once more, pulling the sheet over his head and contracting into a loose ball, tail coiled protectively around his leg.
"I won't be talked into anything while I am asleep."
"Besides," he said after a moment. "I feel like a pet when you do that."
"But you like it."
Kurt didn't answer, which Logan chose to accept as a victory. His slid his body down next to Kurt's, brushing his rough face against the back of Kurt's neck through the sheet as he spooned him.
"You smell filthy."
"Danke," Kurt's muffled voice ironized.
"Like sex and—"
"If I'm offending your sensitive nostrils I could easily replace myself with a mouthful of brimstone."
"I don't think that'll be necessary."
"Then leave me alone and let me sleep."
Logan knew from experience that, with a little effort, he could probably still turn things around into something they'd both enjoy. But he wasn't in the mood. He'd been hoping for an easy lay, something to reaffirm the power of his physical connection with Kurt as protection against the guilt he felt about all the things he was keeping from him, things that, if revealed, might very well sever their connection forever. And while they still hadn't decided exactly what their relationship was, when Logan considered life without the possibility of reaching for Kurt in the morning after a night of passionate lovemaking, it didn't seem like life at all.
It had been going on for several months now. Twice, sometimes three times a week, they'd spend the night together, either at the mansion or wherever their missions happened to take them. It wasn't something they'd discussed with anyone, and no one had seemed suspicious, which either meant ignorance or nonchalance. Whatever the case, their semi-regularly dalliances continued without the interference or advice of their friends complicating things.
At first, Logan had little difficulty convincing himself it was a series of chance encounters; after all, it had happened before. Logan could still remember the first time, though it wasn't distinct; mostly, it blended into irrelevance because it had seemed so natural and borne so few consequences. He didn't remember, for instance, the specific context, the details that might have shed some light on why it happened that day, that time. All he remembered was that Kurt had walked him back to his quarters after a workout, and ended up inside. Logan had come up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder with a heavy intent he hadn't really analysed until after he noticed Kurt's scent change under it. Then he was sliding his hand down the front of Kurt's body, over the taught curves of his muscles beneath his sweat-damp latex uniform, like a package ripe for unwrapping. And then like a package demanding unwrapping.
Kurt had mostly allowed it that time, though the way he twisted his tail around Logan's inner thigh as he came with sputter of ecstasy should have alerted Logan that the idea had been brewing in both of them for a while, and that it wouldn't be a one-time occurrence.
Sure enough, there were other sporadic incidents over the years, inevitable, Logan had reasoned, amid all the stress and loneliness. Logan remembered most of those encounters, at least hazily. Out of everything, though, his most vivid memory was not the first time they had anal sex (Kurt pressed up against the locker room shower wall, Logan holding Kurt's hands above his head in one first and his cock in the other, Kurt's tail pulling him closer), or the first time they woke up together (three days after Mariko called off the wedding). Those memories were present, but vague—more like muscle memory. But the first time they kissed—that was different.
For that memory, Logan knew the context well. It was after his reunion with Kurt following the team's supposed death, when Kurt and Kitty, thinking themselves the only surviving X-Men, helped form the England-based superhero team Excalibur. Logan had already been back (or, from Kurt's perspective, "undead") for weeks, but during all that time, he hadn't contacted Kurt. As he was wont to do, Logan chose the hardest option; rather than pick up a phone, he met up with Kurt in Germany, where he was helping out his old circus with a monster problem.
Their meeting didn't exactly go smoothly. At first, it seemed like anger, especially on Kurt's end. But when Logan saw how hard Kurt was working to stay angry against a painfully obvious desire to forgive him, his heart broke a little, and he felt guiltier than he'd ever meant to. It was at the end of their painful mission there, bag packed and resting at his feet, that Logan reached up for Kurt's image-inducer-disguised face and pulled it down toward his. There, under the sputtering orange light of a deserted motel hallway with red-patterned wallpaper, Logan tasted Kurt for three long, deep seconds before releasing him, turning blindly away from the unreadable emotions on his stranger's face, picking up his bag, and leaving. The next time they met in person, Kurt was studying to become a priest.
So: it had happened before. But the assertion that it was all a series of chance encounters was becoming increasingly impossible to support. Sex with Kurt wasn't quite routine, but it was becoming a habit, which Logan knew because he was experiencing symptoms of addiction, the increasingly few nights he spent alone becoming more and more crowded with memories of his nights with Kurt. He found himself craving the long, firm softness of Kurt's body pressed against his, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night missing Kurt's tail like an amputee with a phantom limb. He missed the passionate abandon of Kurt's face thrown forward or back in the ecstasy of orgasm, exaggerated to ridiculous proportions if Logan managed to run his hand against the grain of Kurt's fur at the back of his neck or grip the base of his tail at the point of climax. He found himself dwelling on little things, too, like holding Kurt from behind and dipping his middle finger into his bellybutton, a dark, soft crevice stretched taught, brain and body awash with emotion as he thought: this is where Kurt's body was attached to and within the body of a woman he'd once ludicrously thought he could love, realizing he was thankful, almost did love her, because she'd brought him Kurt.
The problem wasn't that Logan didn't trust Kurt, but rather that he couldn't. In theory, Logan believed in X-Force's necessity and secrecy precisely because of Kurt: because he and others like him, the best and most persecuted of mutantkind, needed protecting now more than ever. Yet while Logan was more than willing to sacrifice his soul for Kurt, his body tended to complicate matters. If he was genuine about protecting Kurt, Logan knew he shouldn't be where he was, knowing that every increase in intimacy only ensured the totality of their inevitable estrangement. The true source of Logan's preoccupying guilt was that even as he kept secrets meant to protect Kurt, by loving him he was destined to hurt him as much as anything else ever could. Though Kurt had forgiven Logan for many horrible things in the past, forgiving a friend was very different than forgiving a lover. And as much as Logan wanted to believe that their relationship hadn't changed with the addition of semi-regular sex, he knew in all of his head, heart, and gut, that it simply wasn't true.
Suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that he was crushing the blue velvet body in his arms, Logan disengaged his hold on Kurt and slipped out of bed, walking naked over to the side of the window to gaze out through the blinds at the building sunrise. Kurt, sensing something wrong in Logan's failure to push the issue of some early morning passion, crawled out from under the sheet, bleary golden eyes blinking tiredly.
"Logan? I'm sorry about… But I really am tired and I know it's been affecting my—"
"I know, I know. It's not… Don't worry about it."
Kurt pulled himself upright into a sitting position. "What's wrong?"
"Not something I can talk to you about."
"Can't, or won't?"
"Both."
There was a long minute of silence as Logan continued to show his back to the golden eyes he felt boring into him, demanding the acknowledgement he denied. He heard rather than saw Kurt leave the bed and begin to pull on his uniform.
"Where are you going?"
"Away," Kurt said bluntly. "I don't know. Back to my quarters to sleep until sunrise."
Logan turned halfway, just in time to see one of his favourite sights: Kurt slipping his tail effortlessly, magically through the hole in the seat of his uniform as he tugged the unstable molecule latex up over his narrow indigo hips.
"Don't go."
"I don't want to fuck and you don't want to talk," said Kurt, pushing his hands through his sleeves. "What good would my staying be?"
"Stay. Go back to sleep. I'm leaving anyway." Logan began to gather the scattered pieces of his own uniform up off the floor.
"Oh?" Kurt was twisting his fist into one of his white gloves, arm raised as he pulled the fabric down his forearm. His jumpsuit was still unzipped to just below his navel. "And where are you off to at this hour? Wait, let me guess—you can't tell me."
Logan gritted his teeth as he jammed his feet into his boots. In the past, Kurt's acceptance of Logan's secrecy had been one of the tenants of their deep friendship. His new tendency to challenge it proved more effectively than anything else how much things had changed.
What Logan didn't know, however, was how much Kurt also hated the sound of his own voice reciting such lines, so much like the girlfriends whose incomprehensibility Kurt and Logan had always commiserated about as friends. Yet sounding like a neglected wife, Kurt knew, was nowhere near as bad as the pain of feeling like one. Not for the first time, he hated Logan for making him weigh such humiliating options. But he hated himself more for knowing that he, too, desperately wanted to lose his uncertainty in sex. More than anything, he wanted Logan to peel the latex back off his body and stroke him to climax under his warm, firm hands.
As he always did when trying to convince himself he wasn't in love with his best friend, Kurt thought back to their first kiss. He forced himself to remember as a physical sensation all the anger and hurt of that encounter. Especially, he forced himself to remember how trapped he'd been, and how surely Logan had known it—trapped by his image-induced face, by the risky public space, and especially by the fact that within hours there would be a whole continent of distance separating him from Logan. Kurt remembered like it was yesterday how, numb with over-feeling and unable to react, he had watched wordlessly, motionlessly, as Logan released his lips, pulled away, turned, picked up his bag and disappeared into the elevator. He might as well have been falling off the face of the earth. The next time they saw each other, Kurt was wearing a priest's collar.
Kurt finished dressing by wrenching his zipper decisively from his navel all the way up to his atom's apple, assuring himself that his favourite reminder of the all the myriad reasons why it would never work had steeled him against any similar outpourings of emotion in the present. He was reaching for the door when Logan, himself now fully clothed, grabbed his shoulder, stopping him.
"Wait." Logan listened for a moment, and then released Kurt's shoulder. "Okay."
Golden eyes met blue in a fatal flash of recognition. Kurt spoke tonelessly: "You don't want anyone to see me leaving your quarters."
A silent standoff began, Kurt's eyes burning with a fiery anger that met its match in Logan's practiced resolve. After a long, tense minute, the standoff ended with Kurt closing his eyes and slumping his shoulder wearily against the wall.
"What are we doing, Logan?" he asked, not demanding but rather exhausted, knowing full well the impossibility of an answer.
"I thought I was doing you a favour," Logan mumbled, staring sightlessly at the "X" on Kurt's chest. "I thought you'd want… that you didn't want…"
"Logan," Kurt opened his eyes and drew Logan's in. "What is this?"
Logan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "It just… It is what it is."
"So why can't we walk out of this room together?"
Their second silence was tense with awkwardness rather than anger, eyes lowered and elusive on both sides. Once again, it was Kurt who spoke first.
"I'm not… I don't even know what I'd tell them. What would I say to Kitty or—God forbid—Scott, if one of them saw me stumbling out of your quarters at 5:30 in the morning, wearing the same uniform as yesterday and reeking of sex?" He uttered a small, humourless laugh. "What would they say to me?"
"Does it matter?"
"You were the one listening for footsteps," Kurt reminded him dryly.
Logan was just mustering the courage to reply when the door chime broke the silence like a gunshot. They both listened to a second buzz as Kurt, too, tried to find the courage to speak, lips forming tentative words that ultimately died in his throat. As the door buzzed a third time, Kurt was already backing away, about to do what they'd both known was inevitable since the first buzz, hesitating only to make a show of denying that knowledge. As Logan finally reached for the door handle, Kurt disappeared in a puff of smoke, his scent and substance long gone by the time Logan had fully opened the door to Scott Summers.
"Bad time?" asked Scott.
"'Course not. I was just leaving."
Logan glanced back once at his bed's still-rumpled sheets and then followed Scott into the hall, closing the door behind them.