Chapter 20: Absolution - Part VII
Logan
"You want boobs or a cock and balls?" Veronica holds the cup full of pancake batter poised over the griddle.
"Surprise me."
"Vibrator it is, champ."
How she's going to get the vibration aspect of the pancake clear, I'm not certain, but I don't doubt her. On the few mornings she's not flying out the door already late to the ten thousand different detective tasks she's set for herself, Veronica's specialty is adult-shaped pancakes. Last week, she made me a pair of pancake nipple clamps that I really should have gotten a picture of. They were barely a bite in terms of food, but the texture of the chain between the clamps was really impressive.
She spins away from the sizzling griddle and pops a pineapple and a cutting board in front of me, then adds a kiss on the cheek. This is the Veronica version of a polite request. I don't take orders particularly well, even now, but I take kisses pretty well, so I pick up the knife and start to chop the fruit. Except when she goes over to the fridge, she's moving funny, and by the time she makes it back to the stove, I'm frowning.
"Scale of 1 to 10?"
"Four," she answers instantly and I set down the pineapple and come over to the stove. "No tickling, no tickling!" She holds up the spatula between us as if this will somehow protect her from the inevitable tickle-consequences of lying to me. "Okay, eight."
I slip my arms around her from behind, and she's stiff and tries to squirm away from me until I promise, "No tickling." Then she melts back against my chest, letting me trail kisses up the back of her neck until the messy knot of her hair starts itching at my nose. "You're getting a night off whether you like it or not, young lady."
She pouts. "No fair. I was good."
"You were very good," I purr. "How do you think you ended up at an eight?"
It's been a week since she managed to solve the glitch in my head that was ruining our sex lives, and despite my dread that it might return to screw us over at any moment, everything's been fine. More than fine, if her eight out of ten soreness is any indication.
It's how she did it, bless my wife's brilliant mind. I can still feel the nagging guilt about my part in what happened to her. But it's impossible to entirely freeze up about it now when I can see the proof every time we're together that she needs me. That whatever I did back then, I'm the thing now that makes her feel safe and loved, and nothing else will do the trick.
I still hate my teenaged self every day for what he did, for drugging Duncan and then giving into frustrated horniness and disappearing into a downstairs bedroom at just the wrong moment. But even I can admit I would have stopped Cassidy and even Duncan if I had known what was really going on with her. And I'm ferociously grateful to all the versions of myself that I've become since then, because she feels safe with me.
I earned that.
She pokes at the pancakes with her spatula and I kiss her hair, glancing down at the griddle to see how long until we can eat.
She added a clit stimulator attachment to my pancake. Ah, so that's how she was going to make it from a plain dildo into a vibrator. I tilt my head, getting a little hard. This might be the most Logan pancake of all time.
I smirk and pat her bottom when I let her go. "Mandatory night off. If you can't make it through cold turkey, anesthetizing methods will be provided."
She bites her lip. "That might make it worse. I kind of like…the whole turkey."
"Way to make it weird, Veronica."
"Maybe we should go to Wallace's, just to be safe. So I have to behave. Well, if I'm done at work by dinnertime, that is. Tonight might run late." She shifts her weight, wincing. "Actually, today so wasn't the day to ratchet it up to an eight."
I pause in my work on the pineapple, my shoulders tensing.
She points at me. "No guilt! You tried to go slow with me, and I wasn't having it." She grins. "And if you're not proud you've fucked your wife into almost needing to call in sick, you're not the Logan I know and love."
"A little proud."
"A little?"
"I'd be all the way proud if you actually did take the day off work."
"If I was home all day, we'd make it to a ten for sure. And today's no good. I'm really hoping to close the Torres-Camacho case tonight."
She deposits the pancake on my plate and I bite off the clit stimulator attachment, holding her eyes while I do it.
She flushes. "Foul! I call foul!"
"I'd call it a couple of other things, if you had an extra hour."
"What happened to making me take a night off from sex?"
"It's still morning?"
She beams. "In that case, I've got an hour."
"No, you don't." I take another bite. "You never have an extra hour. What's up with the Torres-Camacho case? Isn't that the chick with the blurry fish paintings?"
She fills her own plate with half a sex shop full of pancakes and grabs a stool next to mine at the kitchen bar.
"Blurry fish and flamingos. Actually, I meant to ask you. How busy are you with Safe Drinks stuff today?"
"Not busy," I lie. There's nothing that can't be moved, though. "Why, you need me to distract some ladies for you?" I give her my best steamy, fuck-me eyes and she misses her pancake with the fork and stabs her plate instead. She's used me as bait before, and though I don't love how handsy a lot of her suspects tend to get, I do love how fiery and indignant she gets afterward.
"We've got a lead." She slurps up the last of her coffee. "Hoping to catch the perp at this cabin where I happen to know he's storing some very incriminating evidence. Sheriff's loaning me a guy in case we get there and I can turn it into a probable cause situation. Except I've got a feeling we're gonna have a runner and we all know the cops in this town don't have a gear faster than granny-in-a-crosswalk." She gives me her best beguiling smile, which is truly very beguiling. "I happen to know you do a mean flying tackle…"
"Done. Just let me slip into my crime fighting lycra and cleats and I'll be there."
She fans herself. "If you had crime fighting lycra, I'd never get any crime fighting done at all."
"What if I only caught that other guy because you shot him to slow him down?" I propose. "You probably better bring a gun, just in case."
"You're just trying to get me to shoot somebody again."
"Stop it, I'm getting hard."
She laughs and reaches over under the table to give the evidence of that a little squeeze. "You're twisted, you know that?"
"I would think me having a kink for ruthless private investigators in pigtails would only be a benefit to our particular situation."
"Mmm, until you tempt me into non-bedroom kinds of sin, that is." She pops the last bite of her pancake in her mouth and takes both our empty plates to the sink.
I watch her, partially because her ass is doing severe justice to that pair of jeans, and partially because it's not that weird that she asked me to come for backup, and suddenly it strikes me as weird that it's not that weird.
In college, she asked me to come along a couple of times, but rarely for important stuff like this and never when it meant admitting the perp was too big or too fast for her to want to tackle him herself.
She once told me she wasn't built to let people help her. She's changed, and as crazy as it is to think about, I think it might actually be…because of me. Because I trust her to do her thing, I don't get in her way, and I don't make her feel like a damsel in distress just because she wants a little extra muscle to knock some douchebag down. Instead, I just put him on the ground and make sure he stays that way, while she takes care of all the hard stuff.
She never would have done that before. I prop my elbows on the counter and stare across the kitchen at her, thinking about how many ways our years together have been good for her, and warmth starts to unfurl in my stomach that has nothing to do with the pancakes. I might not have started out as the best person on earth, and I was a straight-up rotten kid. But I think I've turned out to be a pretty good husband.
I push back my barstool and cross the kitchen, gently crowding her away from the sink. "I'll take care of the dishes. You need to get to work."
"My hero," she drawls in a terrible southern accent and tilts her head back to kiss my jaw before she flits away to gather up her stuff.
I let the water run warmly over my hands and the plates while I think things over.
I used to think I changed just because of Veronica, but that can't quite be true because I still pretty much sucked the first few times we dated. At some point, I can't remember really when, I started to give a fuck about doing better in all of my life, not just faking it enough to get Veronica to put up with me. Even after Dr. Lev kicked Veronica out and she gave up entirely on the idea of therapy, I kept going even though I hated basically all of it. Maybe the turning point was all the way back when I met Heather, but how I've changed has expanded beyond all those women's influence now.
I rinse the plates and think about Safe Drinks, and my surfing that's grown way past a drinking-adjacent hobby and into the precision of some kind of meditation. My friendship with Mac and Wallace and Heather and my father-in-law, who was not an easy sell when it came to trusting me. I think about our modest house and the single car I own, and how I spend my money, even now that I have infinitely more of it than I ever inherited from my narcissistic father.
I'm not going to be up for a Nobel peace prize anytime soon—I've been in two bar fights just this month, once with Weevil and one with a guy who called my favorite bartender a faggot. But I kind of think I'm…not a piece of shit. And that sure hasn't always been the case.
I did that. Just me.
I shut off the water and put the clean dishes away in our cupboards, and somehow they feel a little less breakable than they used to.
#
"So what's the play?" I ask.
Veronica's driving and I'm relaxing in the backseat of her car, the plainclothes deputy playing online poker on his phone in the passenger seat.
"You and I go to the door," she answers me. "Lay out some of the evidence, though with a trump card or two up our sleeves. Wait for him to freak out and break and run, or try to attack me. Basically anything incriminating enough that Jerry here, listening carefully from the front seat," she says pointedly, "has probable cause to make the collar. Bada bing bada boom, we're home having celebration sex by tea time."
"What?" Jerry's head comes up at the word "sex". "I thought you were just going to show him some art pictures or some crap. If you're going inside to seduce the guy, I can't listen for probable cause without listening devices, which we don't have a warrant for."
She sighs. "Just pay attention when we get to the house, Deputy, and there'll be fresh baked cookies in it for you."
I smirk. "And here I thought greasing a few palms was a metaphor for money, not unsalted butter."
"Whosoever desires constant success must change her conduct with the times, grasshopper."
"How am I not surprised that the only inspirational quote you know is from Niccolo Machiavelli?"
Her mouth curves wickedly and she winks at me in the rearview mirror in a way that makes me very interested in wrapping this whole thing up by tea time. Whenever the fuck that is.
"So why am I here for an art thief?"
"Art forger," Veronica corrects. "Who was a soccer and a track star in college, and a slippery one. If he runs, we don't get the collar and the client won't pay for being proven right if she doesn't also get her revenge on her ex-boyfriend. I'm betting he'll be a runner. But either way, he's on the hook for a few hundred grand in forged paintings once we get the good deputy a legal look inside his cabin, so with that kind of dough on the line his flight might turn into fight, too."
She gives me another look in the rearview, this one more chiding than steamy.
"Do we need to go over the rules again for what constitutes legally protected self-defense?"
"Yadda yadda, they can't just look at you funny, they have to actually touch you before I break their arms." I sigh. "I'll never understand your obsession with the legality of things. It's so tedious to pretend you can't tell from a look what some dirtbag is about to do. Dirtbags fight dirty. It's why we don't call them Hoover bags."
"Hoover like the president?" Jerry emerges from his phone again.
"Ten points for knowing history beyond the last Kardashian sex tape." Veronica parks in front of a tree-fringed cabin at the end of a dirt road. "But he meant the vacuum cleaner kind. Hey, look, is that girl topless?"
"Where?" Jerry straightens up, and while he's distracted, I swipe his phone. "Hey! Give that back!"
"I'll be sure to return it at the end of class, deputy." I flip it up in the air, catch it, and tuck it in my pocket. When I get out of the car, I bend to tug my jeans down and subtly flip open the catch on the ankle holster Veronica told me not to wear.
She shrugs into her jacket and slings her bag over her shoulder, full of freshly-charged taser and freshly-obtained, completely in admissable evidence she got by lying her way into the cabin we're now approaching. Probably the gas leak con, maybe the can-I-call-a-tow-truck con. Which appears to be out of sight or hearing range of any other human beings. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle and my shoulders go hard beneath my jacket as I scan the trees.
"Plenty of privacy with that rustic curb appeal," I mutter.
"That just means nobody will hear when we make the dirtbags cry." Veronica pulls her hair out of the collar of her leather jacket. "And easy on the trigger, killer."
"10-4."
Of course she didn't miss seeing the bulge of the ankle holster. Why do I even try to hide things from my wife? I try to pretend that's not a little hot, but clearly I fail because she lets out a low, soft chuckle.
"I should take you on more of these if it gets you revved up like that."
Well, I guess that answers how she got to be such a pro at spotting inappropriate bulges.
Movement flickers in the window and I murmur, "Two-o'clock."
"Got it. There's a teenaged son and seven-year-old daughter but the perp's only got partial custody so I don't know if they'll be in the house. Watch your line of fire, just in case."
"Shoot the kid first, then the parent, noted."
She shoots me some adorable nose-wrinkled disapproval for that, but she knows I'm a little right. Kids make the most dangerous soldiers, as any third-world dictator worth his salt could tell you.
She knocks on the door and it's answered by a short, balding man in an artistic scarf he's really not pulling off.
"What?" His round face creases as he recognizes her. "Is there another gas leak? But you're not…in uniform."
"I don't really work for the natural gas company," Veronica says. "I'm a private investigator, Mr. Icarus, and I have reason to believe you've been forging paintings in a very particular style. Your ex-girlfriend, Ms. Jasmine Torres-Camacho's style, to be clear."
"What?" he sputters. "We broke up years ago. I might still have a painting or two of hers around, I don't know. She painted all the time, left her stuff all over the place. So what?"
"You paid for painting lessons from Paint n' Stuff from January until September, the year you two split up. Care to explain your sudden interest in creative self-expression?"
He blurts half-cooked excuses while I watch the empty room behind him, the quiet woods around us. The wind picks up and long grass whispers against the boards of the porch. There's an open duffel bag by the couch that I don't love. I touch Veronica's wrist, then tap her bag and extend my thumb to point into the house. Quickly, like I'm just stretching my hand. She nods without taking her eyes off Mr. Icarus, so she must have already seen the evidence that somebody was already preparing to take a little trip to fugitive-ville.
She's deep in her interrogation routine and it's fun to watch her tease out one piece of evidence after another, letting him believe there's still hope, while crushing it slowly enough that he has all the time in the world to panic and give us probable cause.
She shifts her weight onto her back foot, closing off the right side of the doorway so if he breaks, he'll flee my way. Then she goes in for the kill with a stack of glossy 8x10s.
"These are all paintings that you have in your possession in Ms. Torres-Camacho's signature semi-post-impressionistic fish-and-flamingo style. Give me one good reason I shouldn't go to the cops with this evidence today?"
"I was just practicing! She got so much joy out of her paintings, I thought I would try it for myself. I knew how she built her images, so that's what I practice on. It's a homage, nothing illegal about that."
"It is when you sign the canvases as her and put them up for sale in backroom auctions in San Francisco."
He's starting to visibly perspire and I'm poised to tackle when he makes a run for it, but before that happens, two kids appears in the room behind him. A little blonde girl and an emo-banged teenager with a serious eruption of neck acne.
"Leave my dad alone!" the teenager demands. "It's not his fault that bitch hates us. He paid all her bills while she'd sit at home and paint those stupid fish and then boom, when she starts making real money she doesn't want to share a penny. She's just trying to get back at him for asking for his fair cut."
"Well, lucky for little old me, it's not illegal to be a bitch just yet." Veronica gives a bright trill of false laughter. "But you know, it is still illegal to revenge-auction fake art when you're threatened by your ex becoming more successful than you."
"You're not supposed to say the b-word, not even about Jasmine," the little girl says, stuffing her hands into the kangaroo pocket of her miniature hoodie while she watches her dad and brother from across the room.
The son takes another step forward, coming up beside his dad, and Veronica's posture changes. Becomes electric and alert. My eyes sharpen and rake the suspects, the room, the forest, but I'm not catching whatever's setting her off.
I touch the small of her back, a silent ask for her to work a clue into the conversation that I'll get and they won't. We've never sorted out an official code for this kind of stuff because Veronica's always able to toss out something in the moment that I'll understand.
She takes a breath, but before she can speak, Mr. Icarus breaks and runs. He's fast as fuck, off the end of the porch before I even get a hand out. I pivot on the ball of my foot to go after him but Veronica blurts, "Son not father!"
It's all I need. I whip around and launch myself for the son.
Veronica turns, taking the dad, and bellows, "STOP OR I'LL SHOOT!"
I'd stop, drop, and beg for my life if she laid down that ultimatum in that voice, and I know she doesn't even have a gun. But I don't have time to snicker about it, because the son is halfway around the back of the door, going for something, and my leap only catches his legs. It takes me a second to get a hold on his wriggling form and flip him face-down. I've got his wrists securely, but only now do I realize I should have brought some cuffs instead of a gun, because now I'm stuck here with this kid for the duration. According to Veronica, he's the real perp, so I can't let him get away. Except I really want to be elsewhere, making sure the rest of the collars go smoothly.
"Hands behind your head," Veronica barks from the porch. "Do not turn around or I will shoot. The deputy is going to cuff you now, and I promise at the first sign of a struggle I will fire."
This time I do snicker, because I love that the deputy is the one who's armed and bringing the cuffs, but in order to intimidate the suspect into surrendering, he had to outsource all the balls in the situation to my wife.
"Daddy!" the little girl wails, and then small fists whack my back. "Leave my brother alone, you meanie!"
Ugh. I haven't been called a meanie in a while, and apparently it's the one word in a million that makes it past my alligator-thick skin for insults.
"It's going to be all right, sweetheart," I tell her in my best voice from Chapter 3: Soothing and Comforting, taken from the Care and Feeding of Veronicas manual. This kid could be named anything from Alexis to Zena, but she's blonde, shorter than an elf, and beating the crap out of a clearly dangerous stranger, so she must have more than a little Veronica in her. "Your brother and I are just wrestling, okay? He's not hurt."
"Don't listen to him, Sophie!" the punk kid squeaks. "Do like I showed you."
Veronica comes inside, her boots thumping with authority on the wooden planks. She steps over the body of the perp I've got on the floor, dropping a set of plastic zipties on his back for me.
"Hi, Sophie." Her voice has changed from I-will-gut-you-with-my-fingernails to conversational-friendly-babysitter, but she doesn't go into that high pitched tone some adults have that immediately makes kids suspicious.
She kneels down in front of the little girl. "Your dad and brother are in trouble right now. I'm going to put them in time out and we're going to talk about what they've done wrong, but nobody's going to hurt them, okay?"
"No? Promise?" Sophie's small voice is uncertain, and it cranks on my heart.
I grit my teeth and let Veronica field that one, because I've got my plate full trying to fidget a zip tie around this guy's wrist one-handed while he struggles and flops with the strength of a meth-binging salmon. Around the time I get the second zip tie in place, I notice the colorful residue of acrylic paints under his fingernails that must have clued Veronica in to who the real art forger in the family was. Damn, my wife is quick.
"Sophie!" Emo-Art-Forger Kid barks. "They're the bad strangers! Remember what I told you about bad strangers."
I look over, and Sophie's blinking big blue eyes at Veronica. "Want to see my toys while Daddy's in time out?"
"Sure, honey." She takes the kid's hand. "Maybe after that you could show me how to call your mom? We need someone to stay with you while I talk to your Daddy about why he was bad."
The kid leads her to the duffel bag and Veronica kneels down to appropriately admire whatever toy she's got in there. Something in my belly goes a little wonky, watching the two blonde heads together and Veronica's gentle hand clasping the much smaller fingers.
Fuck, I've never thought much about having a family before. Mostly because I figured with a fucked up brain like mine, coming from a Superfund site of a family like I did, I had no business trying to be a father to some poor unsuspecting tyke. Especially not one who might have Veronica's eyes. Or her too-smart trouble-making brain. But right now, in one comprehensive rush of impressions, I realize that's all changed.
I can figure out how to be a good father, just like I figured out how to not be a piece of shit anymore. Hell, I know I'd try hard enough I could probably write my own Care and Feeding of Little Veronicas manual by a few years into the whole thing. Any kid of hers would be dangerously quick, but if I can keep up with her on cases like these, I bet I could learn to pivot and anticipate our offspring just as well. So I could be there to catch them before they knew they were falling, just like I do for her.
My belly twitches again, in a darker way than it did before. This time what I realize is that the criminal below me isn't fighting anymore. He's gone silent, almost like he's waiting for something.
"Veron—"
I don't get the full word out before Sophie turns around with a small canister of mace in her hand. My wife deflects her arm with the knife-attack defense we learned in Krav Maga, and the kid hoses the entire, innocent couch with mace.
"Don't breathe!" Veronica orders, and I don't know if she's talking to me or the girl, but I was already on the out breath of shouting her name, so I just lock down my airways and haul the art forger to his feet, shoving him out of the cabin. A second later, Veronica barrels out behind me, Sophie held in her arms with the little girl's hoodie flipped up over her face in a makeshift mace shield.
Veronica gasps a breath and shucks off her leather jacket, which is probably covered with the mace oil. She rips the contaminated hoodie off Sophie and reaches to take off her own shirt.
"Don't. I've got it." I slam Emo Forger face-first against the side of the cabin and hold him there with my shoulder while I strip off my shirt and toss it to Veronica so she can cover up the kid.
"And they say fighting crime doesn't pay." She catches the shirt and gives me an admiring once-over and the curve of a smile. Then she turns back to gently take care of the little girl who just tried to mace her.
Awe punches me right in the stomach, and Emo Forger feels me waver and tries to get away again, so I'm forced to turn all my attention back to him.
It takes hours for the cops to show up and sort out the whole thing, even though Veronica pretty much had all the perps collared and the case wrapped up in a red, glittering bow within five minutes of us arriving on the property.
When they finally release us, she takes my hand and smiles up at me, flying high on her favorite I-just-solved-a-crime mood.
"I can't decide if I should admit I keep spare clothes for you in the trunk, or if I should continue enjoying my karmic rewards here."
Her free hand runs down the ripple of my abs and I flex for her because hey, I'm not above enjoying my wife panting over me.
"Up to you," I say, "but I'm starting to get a little nervous about the idea that Officer Baxter has access to handcuffs."
Veronica sends a murder-eyes look past me to Neptune's first female officer, who hastily rethinks her ogling of my shirtless state and looks away.
"C'mon, honey, let's get you decent." She leads me away from the crush of police cars and around the back of her car.
"If that's the end goal, I hope you've got holy water and a packable priest in that trunk."
"Mmm, forget it. I like my Logans with a side of sin. The end goal I have in mind is more like Amy's for celebration ice cream. My treat, since I owe you for another flying tackle well done."
She reaches to unlock the trunk, but as soon as we're in the relative privacy behind her car, I sweep her off her feet and into a spectacular kiss that leaves her panting for breath.
She blinks. "Wow, what's the occasion?"
"You are so fucking…good." I lean my forehead against hers, trying to pretend I'm not panting, too.
"I am pretty awesome." She does her patented jokey hair flip. "Maybe you should be buying the ice cream around here."
"With pleasure." I set her back on her feet, but I still can't stop staring, and she tilts her head at me.
"What's that look?" she asks in a lower voice. "You had that look this morning over pancakes, too."
"You're just…" Now that we're away from the mob of cops, it's hitting me all over again. "I've known you a long time, Veronica. The person you've grown into being…you're so scary goddamn smart. With those kind of brains you could have been a PhD, or a bank robber, or made more money than I've ever dreamed of having. But instead you use it to help people, to create a little justice in a messed up world that can barely remember the meaning of the word."
She squirms, flushing a little. "Okay, crazy. Maybe we'd better go to the hospital before ice cream, make sure you didn't bump that pretty head of yours."
I touch her arm. "No. I'm serious. You could have turned out a lot of ways, with all the shit that happened to you, and instead you're kind and sexy and un-fuckwithable, and I just…" I shake my head, reeling today with how much my life has changed and the extent of it all that I'm just starting to clue into.
A smile tugs at her mouth. "I think 'un-fuckwithable' goes down in the hall of fame as the hottest compliment ever." She pushes up on her toes, her kiss giving away how pleased she is, despite the flippant response.
When she pulls away, she's still studying me like a puzzle she knows there's one more piece to.
"I don't know what brought all this on, but if it turns your crank just to watch me take down a two-bit art forger, then consider it Take Your Husband to Work Day. No, month."
"It's not just how you ran down the forger, or how you handled the little girl, though that's part of it. I guess it's that…I can't imagine you turning out any better than this."
I stare at her, the words seeming to grow bigger as I realize exactly how much I mean them.
"Not if Lily had lived, not if the town and I hadn't turned against you. Not even if you'd never gone to Shelly Pomroy's party."
Her eyelashes flinch a little at the mention of the party that's been fucking up our world all over again for the last few weeks.
I step forward and cup her face in my hands. "I never would have chosen for any of that stuff to happen to you, no matter what," I tell her baldly, my voice scraping out of my tight chest. "But this is the best Veronica. You're the best Veronica. If I failed you and it made you this, how sorry can I be?"
She blinks, swallows shakily.
Then she steadies again because she's been getting better at that, and a smile broadens across her face as she swats me in the arm. "That's what I've been telling you this whole time! Men."
She kisses me, hot and fierce, but I can feel her relief in the way her hands clutch my bare sides.
Vaguely, I hear an officer's voice saying, "Nah, leave 'em alone. They always make out like that after a case. That blonde chick keeps our arrest stats high, so boss says not to give her any shit."
I pull away, chuckling against her mouth as I say, "Only you would answer a guy's big romantic declaration with 'I told you so.'"
Her nails dig into the back of my neck, pulling me closer. "Never mind that. Say 'un-fuckwithable' in your sexy voice again."
Author's Note: In case you missed it, I wrote a Christmas LoVe fic! It's called CHRISTMAS IN PARIS and it's the best I can do for a gift from afar for all of you wonderful readers who I appreciate so much. Spoiler alert: it totally contains a naked Logan under the Christmas tree.
Also, we're having a vote, dear readers! I have a one-chapter happy fluff piece based on the scene on the beach in 4x01 with Logan's gloriously tiny blue swim trunks. However, it isn't really a necessary part of the emotional journey I've got going in this fic. Should we have a one-chapter random happy interlude before the next episode, or should I post this separately, as a one-shot standalone story?
Please vote your preference in the comments!