Long Awaited...

Chapter 10

Veronica stepped into the cylindrical door that led into the darkroom, feeling slightly claustrophobic, like being sucked into an MRI machine. She swiveled the door till she was met by harsh red lighting. Logan stood, arms folded, leaning against the counter space on the far wall, with an expression that was hard to read.

"All right, Logan Echolls, you wanted to talk? I've got one hour and a slew of questions, so let's get started."

His mouth went slack at her audacity and the use of his former name.

She leaned forward and unbuttoned her top button and replied with a teasing smile. "Look, Ma! No wires!"

He still stared, a bit awestruck, and then lifted himself onto the counter top and patted the space next to him.

She obliged, trying to hide the nervousness she felt at their proximity. Six years didn't have anything on the fact that their close contact sent electrical charges up her spine.

"So, how about a game of Twenty Questions? Ten questions each, so make them count," Veronica proposed.

Logan let out the air he had been holding in slowly, with his hands steepled like he was praying for mercy.

"Yeah, sure. Let me brace myself, though, it's been quite a while since one of your infamous interrogations."

"You can start, if you like," Veronica offered, feeling prepared that he would ask her to explain why she'd left him, without even so much as a goodbye, after what had been a night of passion that would surely have led to them getting back together for a fourth time if she'd stuck around.

"No, ladies first, I insist," he said with a flourish of his palm. "In fact, I am feeling so gentlemanly, you can take all ten of your questions first."

"And they say chivalry is dead," Veronica smiled.

"No, actually, I am trying to think realistically. Once you get started, I doubt I'll get a question in edgewise."

"Ah, with the jokes, no wonder you're the most popular teacher in PanHigh School. I guess that's the route I'll go first – high school English teacher? Where on earth did that come from?"

Logan, imitating a sports commentator, "And folks, she decides to ease in on her prey with a simple question." He looked thoughtful for a second. "Why not? And, don't even think about counting that as one of my questions!"

Veronica laughed but worried she had hurt his feelings. "There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a high school English teacher. Just ask Mr. Daniels. That is, if he's still speaking to you after what you and Weevil did to his car."

Logan laughed in spite himself, thinking back to his high school English teacher's compact car, skewered on the flag pole in front of Neptune High School. "Actually, it's guys like him that make me glad I am in this profession. He had no passion for what he did. He loved making students miserable because somebody had probably tortured the joy of learning right out of him. Seriously, though, I got into teaching because I had majored in English, and knew it was a viable option for a career. I loved writing and can rattle off big words like 'anthropomorphic', but I never expected to like kids half as much as I do."

"Oh, and they love you, especially the ladies!"

"Have I ever told you, you're cute when you're jealous?" Logan taunted with a sneer.

Veronica scoffed. "Ok, next question. Photography? That's kind of a surprise."

"Yeah for me too! I have dabbled with it since Jake was a baby. I loved chasing him around with a camera, and I used to bring a lot of my pictures in to show off to my coworkers. When they had to make budget cuts in the art department, I was approached to teach a section of photography and agreed because of all the perks. This nifty little dark room, kickass cameras at my disposal, ya know. If I wouldn't have agreed, they would have just sold off all the equipment."

"Hmmm," Veronica said thoughtfully.

"What? Oh, I get it. You think your little hobby rubbed off on me! I've got news for you Mars, I am a man of many talents."

Don't I know it, Veronica thought to herself, feeling a heated blush spread over her pale features.

"You sure you don't want to ask a question of your own?"

"What, when you're going so easy on me?" He folded his hands together behind his head and a slow, sexy smile spread over his face. "I could do this all day."

"Is Aimee your girlfriend?" Veronica blurted out, because, the question on her mind was like a full bladder, she simply couldn't hold it anymore.

Logan started and then stopped. He started again and then stopped. Veronica felt like she was going to hurtle herself off of the counter top and straight onto the floor if he didn't give her an answer in the next three seconds.

"Maybe I will use a question after all."

"The hell you will! You didn't answer mine!"

"Damn, bossy! I was just going to ask what makes you think that?"

"Okay, fine, spend your first question, I'll bite," Veronica relented as she began to tick off the obvious reasons on her fingertips. "She answered your door, she calls you "Lo", she does stuff around your house like helping you with dinner and giving Jake a bath. And," she added conclusively, "You said she wasn't your wife."

"Touché, Remington Steele."

"That's not an answer, Logan," Veronica shot back hotly.

"I just find it amusing that you jumped to that assumption. Because if you stepped back and assessed all the facts, you might have deduced that she is only nineteen, lives next door, and babysits my son daily."

"Oh." That's pretty much all Veronica could say. It was a little embarrassing when he put it like that. "So, Aimee's the babysitter…" It certainly explained their close relationship and why Aimee hadn't exactly acted as though she felt threatened by Veronica showing up on their doorstep last Friday. But Veronica couldn't help but persisting a little further. "The babysitter that you are most definitely not sleeping with?"

"That is seriously going to cost you a question, Mars. I already answered that. No, I am not sleeping with her!"

"Well, shit, I don't know. Even famous actors like Jude Law get caught by TMZ for banging the nanny…" The words just hung there like a wet towel, and it was too late to take them back. It was clear what she had unconsciously implied. Logan was a product of such an actor, Aaron Echolls, who had screwed just about anything that moved and had a penchant for teenage girls.

"I'm sorry, Logan, I wasn't thinking about how that would sound before it came out of my mouth."

"Clearly. You kind of have an uncanny habit of inserting your foot in your mouth." He smiled to show that no harm to their little game or his fragile ego had been done. "For the record, though, I am a completely different man than my father was. I would never do anything that would hurt my son in that way."

"I believe that one hundred percent."

"You're up."

"No, I'm pretty sure I skipped your turn at least five times."

"No, go ahead, I said you could ask all your questions, so let's get on with the game."

Veronica was dying to jump right into the question of how the hell did Logan ended up with a son. Well, that, Veronica thought, feeling a pang of jealousy, is pretty obvious. The real question was how he ended up raising Jake all alone, but she knew it was incredibly personal and possibly a sensitive subject. She thought maybe it was better to wait until Logan broached the topic. Instead she asked, "What happened to you after I left?"

"Well, first I locked myself in a padded room and listened to angry Taylor Swift break-up songs…"

"I mean," Veronica clarified, "I heard that you left Hearst and went to PepperdineUniversity in Malibu. But then you kind of fell off the map."

"And how would you know that?"

"I may have run a background check or two…"

"Naturally. I would expect no less from the girl who traced my cell phone and who considered putting a LoJack on my car."

Veronica laughed remembering how she seriously misused her privileges to all sorts of tracking devices that her father used in his PI business.

"So, I didn't exactly fall off the map, but Logan Echolls sure did."

"This is gonna get weird if you start referring to yourself in the third person. I am curious why you picked 'Stone' as a surname."

"You can disguise your musings anyway you like, but for the record that is still a question." He held up six fingers to show her that she had spent more than half of her questions.

"I guess it was because the last names 'Rock', 'Pebble', and 'Boulder' were all taken."

She shot him a look that suggested he could do better with both his answer and his lame joke.

"Did you know that there are over 175,082 people in the United States with the last name Stone? By the way, that was a rhetorical question."

"Seriously, you know what I am getting at. I did all that legwork to find out why your trust fund was evaporating, only to unearth a half-brother – Charlie Stone – that you and Trina knew nothing about."

"Yeah, after Larry King," Logan answered. "He didn't want a damn thing to do with me. But, then his youngest daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. Neither Charlie or his wife Brenna were matches to provide her with bone marrow for a transplant, so his doctor suggested he reach out to other family members. His mom passed away a few years ago, and Trina is adopted, so that ruled her out as a likely match. Long story short, I ended up being a match. It was kind of hard for him to avoid me after that."

"Wow, Logan. I am sorry to hear about your niece. I hope she is all right. That was incredibly decent of you, by the way."

"Well, having my own kid now really puts it in perspective. Kasia has been in remission for a few years, and Charlie and I got pretty tight during that ordeal. He invited me to come out and stay with him and his family in Sacramento after binge drinking and cutting class tanked my GPA at Pepperdine, and we made up for a lot of lost time. Staying with his family gave me a chance to get a new lease on life. I had the chance to figure out who I wanted to become. And Charlie had great brotherly advice along the way. He's actually the one who suggested dropping Echolls as a surname. When he suggested taking Stone as my last name, it made me feel like I finally had one small shred of a family connection left. I reenrolled in school as Logan Stone, and since I had a lot of respect for the work that Charlie did, I started to think about pursuing a Master's in education once I finished with my undergrad work in English.

"I'm really glad you and Charlie reconnected. I felt awful about how things went down with that Norman Phipps character who posed as Charlie, when really all he wanted to do was scoop a story for Vanity Fair. But, still changing your name to Stone hardly seems like enough to throw off the media. How is it that you're living a relatively normal fame-free life? Don't your students ever make the connection that you are Logan Echolls, Hollywood royalty?"

"It's funny but evading the media wasn't all that hard. It's simple. I have a son, I go to work, I socialize with a close circle of friends that I trust, and that's pretty much it. I'm hiding right in plain sight. If the paparazzi wanted to find me, I guess it wouldn't be that much of a challenge. But society wants stories with shock value. Drugs, scandals, sex, and murders sell tabloids. My life is a boring by their standards; there is no shocking exposé to unearth. It's funny because when I started at Hearst, I couldn't get away from turning on the tv and seeing the True Hollywood story of my family laid right out on cable for everyone to see and judge. But my parents are dead and so is the story. Ask Trina; she's been trying to drum up publicity for years."

"So you went to college in Sacramento, but you still ended up back here near Neptune," Veronica prodded wanting to hear more about the past six years of his life, even though it tortured her more than she ever thought possible that he had grown so much as a person and she hadn't been there for any of it.

"Yeah," a stormy look passed over Logan's face. A short time passed without either one speaking before Veronica cautiously put her tiny hand on top of Logan's, giving her serious déjà vu of a previous day nearly eight years ago when she had tentatively reached up and given him a small token of her appreciation.

"I met a girl there. Her name was Amelie. She was my type, you know, damsel in distress, vulnerable, blonde."

The way he threw the last attribute out there made Veronica want to crack a smile, but she could tell from his apprehension that whatever he was about to say was not going to be easy.

"She was here from France through a study abroad program. It was kind of perfect because she was only supposed to be here for a semester, and I certainly wasn't looking for anything serious, after…" His words hung there for a second until he proceeded. "But, a few months into casual dating, she told me she was pregnant. I totally freaked out. I was twenty-one and was supposed to be enjoying my college years being drunk and finally being legal. But she didn't let my meltdown deter her. She was so excited to have this baby. We only had each other because her entire family was in France, and I, of course, am Lil Orphan Annie."

Veronica wanted to look away because the conversation was getting so intense, but it was like a train wreck. As much as it pained her to hear, she was enthralled.

"When Jake was born, it was pure instinct though. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't read any of the parenting books like she had, but somehow I just knew what to do. We got a little apartment near campus, and we worked out our schedules with work and school so that we could always have someone at home with Jake. It was great because we never had to miss any of his firsts…one of us was always there, with the iphone or Nikon out to capture the moment. She had told me that she had decided that raise Jake here and vacation in France for the summers so Jake could be exposed to both of our cultures. I figured I should do the honorable thing, and so I went out and bought her a ring. I got home that night and found her sitting on the couch with all the lights out. She had the tv on. As fate would have it, she had caught the entire episode of the True Hollywood story of Aaron Echolls, the murderous movie star, and the scandals that surrounded my family."

Veronica took a sharp intake of air. She had not been expecting that. At all.

Logan continued, "She kept asking me how I could have kept something like that from her. It never occurred to me that I should have told her. I had tried so hard to distance myself from that name, from that life. She looked at me with pure contempt and then asked me how I expected her to live a life that was a lie, with the son of a murderer, raising a child who could very well be the spawn of Satan himself." Logan choked the last part out, but as Veronica reached to comfort him, he put his hand up stop her. He needed to get the rest of his story out before he was unable to.

"She left the next morning. If her love for Jake couldn't even change her mind, what chance did I have?"

"I'm beyond words," Veronica murmured. There was literally nothing she could say that would make a bit of difference.

"It broke my heart. For Jake. I had already had my heart ripped out. Countless times. But to do that – to your own child – I still can't even fathom," he whispered.

Veronica felt her eyes well up, which was a rare occasion for her. She preferred to get her crying out in the privacy of her own shower, but Logan's pain for his son was palpable.

"Please, Veronica, don't even think about feeling sorry for me. I've come to peace with it; I just know that one day in the near future, I am going to have a lot of questions to answer to a boy who really got the short end of the stick. For right now, I can't take the pitying look in your eyes, though."

Veronica tried her hardest to shake the shock and forlorn look from her face. How the hell was she supposed to change the subject after that revelation though?

"I would say I have expended my ten questions after that. I have grilled you plenty. I guess I am fair game now. Go ahead, ask me anything. I am an open book, except of course, if it is in reference to this case. I am really not at liberty to talk about that. In fact, divulging my real name to your nanny and son was not the smoothest move on my part. I have already broken so many protocols, I wouldn't be surprised if I am unemployed when I return to Virginia," Veronica mused with a shy smile.

"I don't have ten questions for you, just one," Logan said, evasively.

"Well, go ahead, shoot," Veronica implored.

Logan jumped down from the counter top he had been perched on next to her and turned to face her. "Why is it that when I really should be asking why you left, all I really want to do is kiss you?"

If Veronica hadn't been perched atop the counter already, she would have needed to sit down after that confession. But before she could even fully react to what Logan had said, his soft, sweet-talking lips were on hers. Everything was happening as though it was in fast forward. He stepped between her open knees and pressed one hand onto her lower back and while the other cradled the nape of her neck. Within a matter of seconds, he tipped her head back to deepen the kiss. She felt his tongue dart into her mouth, and a low groan that was primal and instinctual, and that only Logan could induce, escaped from her. She wound her arms around him to pull him in closer. It had been so long, she didn't feel like she could get close enough to him. Her hands found their way into his messy locks, and before long they were both panting and tugging at each other's close in frustration with stupid inventions like buttons and zippers. Everywhere he ran his fingertips felt like he was setting fire to her. There was absolutely no thinking, just reacting, which was evident when she felt him reacting to her right through his dress pants against the scrap of panties she had on beneath her short skirt that was hiked up around her hips. It was rough yet gentle all at the same time and felt exciting yet familiar, as though no time had passed since they had last been together.

Her entire body vibrated with pleasure…Wait, that vibrating…

"OH SHIT!"

"What?" Logan asked, semiconsciously like a junkie trying to get a fix.

"It's been an hour. I've got to go. NOW!" Veronica exclaimed, trying to right her clothing while sliding down from the counter. She slid against his solid body and was tempted to pick right up where they had left off seconds before her phone had gone off. But remembering her promise to Nancy, who had really gone out on a limb for her, was sobering despite her delirium at being back in Logan's arms.

"I'm sorry, Logan. I've gotta go."

"Veronica Mars, you are like Cinder – fucking – ella," Logan whispered, trying to cool himself down, as Veronica slipped through his fingers, yet again, and through the revolving door to the dark room.

Took awhile with this lengthy chapter, because so many important details and LoVe are coming together. (I apologize for any typos; I couldn't wait to post this chapter though). But you know, even if I leave you with a cliffhanger, I usually never take more than a day to update. Reviews please! If you are having as much fun as me, please favorite the story and make my day!