In all of the nights that I'd spent on the road, I never imagined a morning where I woke up with an arm slung across Logan's chest and our legs entwined. On the rare occasions when I allowed myself to think of us together at all, it was always in a fantasy from the past. I never pictured a future 'us'. It had seemed too impossible at the time, even for a dream.

I moved my hand up his chest and splayed my fingers over his heart. The warmth of his body and soft fabric of his tank top felt real enough beneath my fingers, but part of me was convinced that it would all vanish as soon as I opened my eyes.

"'Bout time you woke up," Logan said. His voice was deep and rough from sleep.

I kept my eyes shut, not wanting to break the illusion and find myself alone, clutching the sheets of another motel bed. "Are we still in the cabin?" I asked.

"Looks like it." He tapped his fingers on my hip. "Wanna open your eyes and join me here?"

"Not really," I said, and adjusted my position. "Dream-Logan is pretty comfy."

He shifted his legs when he felt me brush his calf. "Mhm, well, Reality-Marie has feet like icicles," he murmured.

I burrowed said offensive feet under his legs, just because I could.

"She also snores like a lumberjack," he added.

I lifted my head and looked at him. "I do not."

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

The cabin hadn't disappeared, but Reality-Logan looked pensive. Maybe I'd left him lying awake too long with his own thoughts, and he'd circled back around to believing he'd made a mistake by getting into bed with me.

"Whatcha thinking about?" I asked, trying to keep the mood light.

"Something that's been bothering me for the past three years." He brushed the strands of hair away from my face with his free hand. "I couldn't understand why..."

"Why it bothered you?" I offered.

"Why I heard you tell me that you loved me."

Well, shit.

I had only told him that because I assumed he was unconscious at the time. Suddenly, examining the ribbing on his tank top was much more important than meeting his eyes. "And, uh, what did you decide?" I hesitantly asked.

"On most days? That I'd made it up. That I'd wanted to hear it so badly, that I did."

Oh. Oh. My eyes once again sought his out. "You didn't."

"You picked a hell of a time to tell me," he said.

"If I had told you any sooner, you would've pushed me away and tried to convince me that I deserved better."

"You d—" My hand shot up to cover his mouth because I had a feeling I knew how that sentence would end.

"In case you didn't notice," I said, "no one else came looking for me. You spent years trying to bring me home. Do you really think that there's someone out there who I deserve more than that?" And if he did, maybe he could introduce me to this mythical man so that I could punch him in the face and tell him that I was already taken.

I removed my hand from Logan's lips and waited for a response, but he remained silent.

"Well, I don't care if you do," I told him in a tone that left no room for negotiation. "You don't get a say in who I love, so deal with it, bub."

He chuckled lightly. "All right, you've convinced me."

"Good," I said, and then rested my head back down on his chest.

I knew that when Logan looked at himself, he only saw the parts that were broken. He saw the quick temper, the violent tendencies, and the fear in other people's eyes when they looked at him. His past was unknown, and he was terrified that he'd done something so unforgivable that he risked losing everything he had if we ever found out.

It was going to be an uphill battle to get him to see himself through my eyes—to get him to see that he was worthy of so much more than he believed. If I reminded him every day of how much I loved him, eventually, I hoped, he would get the message.

I yawned and closed my eyes. Starting the day together in bed was a good start.

He nudged me. "You know it took me a while, right?"

My eyes fluttered open again. "Hmm?"

"When you were seventeen, I didn't— It wasn't until after Alkali Lake that I started to see you that way. You were different when I came back. Confident, tough, sexy..."

"Grown up," I supplied.

"Yeah."

"I know," I assured him. But hearing that he had noticed me as far back as that derailed my thoughts and led them straight into the gutter. "It's a shame that we didn't have this conversation a few years sooner. Think of all the fun we could've been having."

"Such as?"

"Oh, Sugar, I spent a lot of nights dreaming up different scenarios for us. I don't think there was a surface in the mansion that I didn't imagine you taking me up against."

The heartbeat under my ear increased. "Which one was your favorite?" he asked.

"Mmm, the one of us in the locker room after a mission is a pretty good one." I pictured it in my head. "My zipper got stuck, so I asked for your help, and then you used one of your claws to slice my uniform open. Neck to waist."

"I bet I 'accidentally' sliced right through your bra too."

"You did, and my boobs were right there on display for you, nipples all hard..." I said. "And since you still had your gloves on, you just couldn't keep your hands off me now that I was half-naked. Conveniently, you'd sliced down far enough to be able to slip your fingers into my uniform and past the very impractical, but very sexy thong that I happened to be wearing."

"And did I make you cum?"

I didn't know if he meant in the fantasy, or while I was in bed thinking it up, but the answer was the same. "Several times."

Then, out of the blue, he said, "I heard you touching yourself," and my brain came to a screeching halt.

"When?!"

"That last night we went drinking before you left, after we got back from the bar."

Also known as the night that I was so hot and bothered that I gotten myself off a record number of times. Our kiss had added a whole new level of realism to my fantasies.

He continued. "I was pissed at myself for kissing you, and then even more for letting you go, so I went to raid Hank's secret stash of booze. When I walked back, past your door, I heard you. Slick and wet. I stopped to listen, and when you moaned I almost came right there in the hall."

I sincerely wish I had known that. I would put on more of a show, or flung the door open and pulled him inside. Made him witness exactly what his kiss had done to me.

My hand slowly drifted down Logan's abdomen and disappeared beneath the blanket. I listened to the staccato of his heartbeat pick up the pace.

"Marie?"

"As long as we're confessing, I have something else to tell you." I slid my hand to his boxer-brief covered thigh. "The last time I absorbed your memories, I got one of you jerking off." I rubbed my palm up and down his thigh, inching closer to his inner thigh with my fingers. "I used to think about it all the time. When I closed my eyes, I could feel how hot and hard and velvety smooth you were." I ghosted my hand over his hardened length. "How thick you felt in my grip."

I let out a small squeak of surprise. In a split-second move that I hadn't seen coming, Logan rolled me onto my back and settled a delicious amount of weight on top of me. I arched against him when he started trailing kisses across my collarbone and up my neck.

"Do you know what I just realized?" he asked. His breath was hot in my ear, and made me shiver, so I didn't know how he expected me to be able to answer coherently.

"Uhh..."

"It's morning and neither of us is dead."

That was a very good observation.

"Where do you want to take this?" he asked.

I grinned. "I know how you feel in my hand, so maybe you should even the score a little."

"And how would I do that?" He played dumb, but his voice was rough with desire.

"Touch me."

He slid his hand slid beneath my camisole, but stopped with his palm flat against my stomach. He nipped my earlobe. "Where?"

"Everywhere."

"See if you're as soft as I think?" His fingers brushed over a nipple and I felt it tighten in response. Then he tugged the fabric up, and his mouth replaced his fingers.

"Oh god," I moaned in bliss.

"Or maybe I should find out if I can make you as wet as you sounded that night."

"I was thinking about you then," I told him.

"You thinking about me now?"

"I only ever think about you."

He pressed a kiss on my stomach, and then looked up at me. "If you don't want what's gonna happen next, you're gonna have to tell me to stop."

"I want you, Logan."

That was all the encouragement he needed to hear.

After a late breakfast, Logan went outside to work, and I swept up. He caught me standing on the mudroom steps, broom in hand, pondering the side yard, as he passed by, and questioned me with a look.

"I was just thinking that a deck would go real nice here."

"Yeah?"

"Someplace for a table and a grill. We could eat outside now that the weather's warmer."

He gave me an amused look. "Anything else you want?"

I nodded. "A firepit. And some of those solar lights so that we can string them up around the porch."

"I think I can arrange that."

We went to the home improvement store that afternoon and looked at patio sets. I sat in most of the floor models and tried to imagine how they would look in the yard. Logan tolerated this for about five minutes, and then went off to look at the propane grills. We didn't buy either, but we narrowed down the choices.

Logan bought some more nails, and ordered the lumber for the deck. I asked him how he knew what to get without measuring anything, and he said that he just did. I swear the man was a carpenter in his past life. We looked at supplies for a firepit, and then Logan got this gleeful twinkle in his eye.

"Screw the grill," he said, "We're building a brick barbecue."

We went home with enough bricks and mortar to build a firepit and probably an entire outdoor kitchen. I got my solar lights, too. Three boxes of them.

We stopped at a gas station on the way back, and while Logan filled up, I ran inside the convenience store. I grabbed two six-packs of beer and the ingredients for s'mores. We didn't have an outdoor firepit yet, but we had a fireplace in the cabin. I set the basket on the counter so that I could pull out my wallet.

A prickling sense that something was wrong alerted me a half-second before a man put me in a chokehold and shouted at the cashier.

"Hand over the money!"

He had a gun and he sounded scared. I think I must have passed him on my way in, a sixteen or seventeen year old boy in a hoodie. He wasn't holding me in anything that I couldn't easily break out of, but I didn't want the cashier or the other customers to get hurt. His sleeve had ridden up and his bare wrist was on my throat. At least that answered one question. It wasn't just Logan that I could touch.

The girl at the register was terrified. I tried to talk the would-be robber down. "I wouldn't do this if I were you."

He jabbed the gun in my ribs. "Shut up!" Then he pointed it back at the cashier. "The money! Now!"

"And then what?" I asked. "Do you have a plan for getting out of here in one piece?"

The gun was back on me. "I said shut up! I will shoot you."

"Look out there." I jerked my head to the left, in the direction of the doors. "Do you see the tall man in the denim jacket, with the murderous eyes? He's with me. And he's not going to take too kindly to all this."

"I'll shoot him too!"

I nodded. "You could, but if the three bullets that I put in his chest didn't stop him, I doubt yours will either."

"What?"

"And then he'd get pissed off and track you down, and then you'd have to stab him in the throat, and trust me, he really doesn't like it when people do that."

"What the hell are you—shut up!"

The door opened, and the kid whipped us both around, using me as a shield. Instead of keeping the gun on me, he turned it on Logan. "Don't move or I'll blow your brains out!"

Logan, who was thoroughly unimpressed by the threat, ignored him and focused on at me. "Who's your new friend, darlin'?"

"Don't know, Sugar, he didn't introduce himself."

Logan fixed my captor with a stare. "Here's what's going to happen…"

The more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder if I could activate my skin on command. I hadn't actually tried when I touched Logan. I honestly hadn't really cared at the time. I could touch the man I loved, who gave a shit about whether or not I could touch anyone else? But that was just me trying to escape reality again.

I'd never had to do it before, so as soon as I concentrated, and started to think about my skin being 'on', I felt a slight pull. I clamped down on it immediately because it freaked me out. What if I turned it on all the way and then it never went back off again?

I turned my focus back to the standoff. Logan was really good at the alpha stare, and giving commands that left no room for argument. Not a single student at the mansion dared to disobey him, present company excepted.

Thankfully, the kid had more sense than I did, and Logan was able to talk him down and take the gun from him before marching him outside. I wasn't worried for the kid's physical well-being. Logan wouldn't hurt a kid unless he had no other option, and he knew that neither of us had been in mortal danger.

I reassured the cashier that it would be all right, and that she was safe. She didn't look like she quite believed me, but she rang up my purchases and I paid her. Logan was still lecturing the kid by the truck when I exited the store. I recognized those exact poses from when we lived at the mansion. He had probably methodically pointed out the error of the kid's ways. The kid shook his head and then darted off.

"Productive talk?" I asked when I joined him.

He nodded. "Are you okay?"

"Fine. What about him?"

Logan stared in the direction of the fleeing teen. "He's trying to take care of his younger, mutant sister all by himself. I gave him a hundred bucks and the number for Xavier's."

I set the shopping bags in the back of the truck. "That was nice of you. Back in my day, you used to just give the teenage runaways a ride and some old beef jerky."

He scowled. "I know. What the hell is wrong with me?"

"You must be getting soft in your old age." I slid my arms around his neck and went up on my toes so that I could kiss him. I needed the reassurance that I could still touch without losing control.

"You sure you're okay?" Logan knew what having the kid's bare arm on my throat meant.

It was habit to say yes, but I stopped myself. "No."

He hugged me tightly to him and rubbed my back. "Let's get home, and then we can put up your lights before supper."

Later that evening, I was on the porch swing, basking in the glow of my solar-powered handiwork, when Logan joined me. He walked across the porch and lit a cigar.

"Those things will kill you, you know," I said.

A smile tugged at his lips. It was an old joke.

"Why didn't you ever tell me about this place?" I asked.

"Dunno. I wasn't trying to hide it. You never saw it in a memory?"

I shook my head.

"I was always going to bring you up here one day. There was just never a good time."

He stood a few feet away, facing the lawn while he smoked. We watched the fireflies together. New York still weighed heavily on my mind. I missed being part of a team that helped people. And I missed the friends I'd left behind. Maybe it was time to face that particular elephant in the room.

"I wish that we didn't have to leave," I said.

"You saying that we do?"

"You know that we do."

He set the cigar in the ashtray that he kept on the porch railing and then turned to face me. "Yeah, but I didn't think that you realized it."

"Were you going to say anything?"

He shrugged and leaned back against the railing. "I was finally making progress on the damn garage. Seemed a shame to stop."

Translation: no, he wasn't, because he didn't want to leave either.

"You've been quiet since we got home," he said. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Home. There was that word again. It certainly felt like that was what we were building together. It was hard to remember the circumstances under which we had arrived.

"I turned my skin on at the gas station. Just for a second."

A look of understanding crossed his face. "You need answers."

"I don't want to flip that switch again without understanding why it turned off." And then I finally gave voice to the one thought that I had never admitted out loud. "And I need Hank to confirm that I'm not going to age."

Logan stared down at the porch floor, gathering his thoughts, and then finally spoke. "I'm not going to sugarcoat this for you. It's a fucking curse to see everyone around you get older and to know that you'll outlive them all. I don't want you to go through that." He paused and then looked up at me. "But I'm also selfish, and a part of me hopes like hell that it's true because I don't want to live in a future that doesn't have you in it."

I knew what it had cost him to say those words. It was a vow of forever, which for him, had never been a possibility before. It was too intense to think about now, but maybe in the future we would discuss what it meant, and if marriage was something that we wanted.

"You might regret that," I warned. "I'm going to be there, provoking you, giving you gray hairs, throwing out all your expired canned goods..."

He grinned. "Generally keeping my life interesting?"

"Loving you."

He held out his hand, and I stood up and took it. I let him pull me up against his chest and we kissed.

There were a lot of things that were still uncertain about the future. I wasn't sure how the team would react to having me back, or if I'd fit in again. And I didn't know what Hank was going to tell me, or how long it would take me to feel comfortable turning my powers on and off at will.

But there was one thing that I was sure of. No matter what, I wouldn't be alone. Logan would be by my side through all of it.

Perhaps sensing my thoughts, he said, "The next time you feel like running, just take me with you. It would save us both a lot of trouble."

"I promise."

From then on, any running that we did, we did together.

A/N: Thanks for sticking with me until the end! It took much longer than I had anticipated, but the past couple years have been somewhat out of the ordinary.