Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own DA...but if you want to pay me, like, off the record.....
A/N: Okay, yeah, it took me a while to get this part out...I think I had an emotional breakdown or something. It was pathetic, be glad you didn't see it. Lot's of bawling. Besides that, I've been swamped with school (part of the reason for my small breakdown) and I've been really wanting to start this new fic, but I've promised myself I'd finish this one first!
Wind of Change
Part 4
Logan had no idea why the man from the desk had brought Max so many towels, but he certainly didn't mind taking the credit. Standing alone in the bathroom with the taste of her still lingering on his lips, he felt the highly unmanly urge to giggle. The morning had certainly been more profitable than he'd ever dreamt it would become.
She'd kissed him...or maybe he'd kissed her. Either way, it had been amazing. No, beyond amazing. His entire body still tingled from the contact.
He tried not to concentrate on what had just occurred as he quickly showered, but couldn't seem to push the event out of his head. The tally in his head moved up to four.
When he emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered and brightly happy, Max was nowhere to be found. He wasn't surprised, she was used to running from things she couldn't face. For the brave front she put on, Max was very much a child inside -- not having been able to emotionally move past her tortured time at Manticore. Logan himself had to admit to a low level of emotional maturity. Often, he didn't know how to express to Max how he felt and cared. Indeed, he thought many times he was showing her how much he loved her only to have the whole event blow up in his face.
Humming lightly to himself, he began repacking all of his things. As soon as Max got back from wherever she'd gone, she was going to want to leave, and Logan didn't want her to have any excuse to be mad at him.
He was on his knees, closing his suitcase when she walked in.
"Have a nice shower?" she asked, not looking at him.
"Very nice," he replied. "Are you ready to go?"
"Yeah. You?"
"Yep."
There was a short, slightly uncomfortable pause.
"Are you going to get up off the floor so we can leave?" she finally asked, an edge to her voice. The slight fluctuation was oddly pleasing to Logan -- at least this kiss had effected her. As if her groaning and pressing up against him hadn't been enough to prove it to him, he had to hear uncertainty in her words to believe it.
A little embarrassed, he got up, taking his suitcase with him. Max grabbed her small, compact duffel bag and motioned eagerly for him to walk ahead of her.
"Where'd you go?" he asked.
"To check out," she replied as if she resented him for making her walk down to the lobby while he enjoyed a hot shower.
"Oh..."
Silence fell between them again as they walked down the steps leading out into the wide lobby. The room was carpeted with a rich, dark crimson carpet and had a high ceiling with hanging lights. Every piece of furniture in the entire room was focused toward the fountain in the middle. The comforting sound of the water gently slapping seemed to ease both Max and Logan out of their stiff post-kiss demeanor.
"Do you think maybe he'll still be there?" Max asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
"You mean Zack?" Logan asked, thrown off a little.
"No, Santa Claus," she rolled her eyes. "Of course Zack."
"He doesn't seem like the type to stay in one place very long," Logan shrugged, not really qualified to answer the question. In the limited time Logan had spent with Zack, he'd seen nothing but his rough outer shell. He got the feeling that the man was hiding things, and very adept at keeping them concealed.
"Sometimes I feel kind of sorry for him," Max admitted as the couple walked past the fountain and toward the doors. She opened her mouth to continue, but whatever she had to say was interrupted.
"I hope you two enjoyed your stay!" The tiny man who had brought them the towels waved emphatically from behind the counter.
"Yes, we did very much...thank you," Logan called back. The man's eyes, however, were on Max as he waited for her recognition.
"And the lady?" he prompted when she made no move to respond.
She gave Logan a look that clearly conveyed her distaste, but an elbow to her side quickly wiped the expression away.
"I had a wonderful stay," she smiled, her grin dripping with sweetness. "Thank you so much for all the towels, you were a real life saver." She walked over to the counter and leaned across it, putting her head close to the very excited man's. Logan followed her, interested in what she had to say.
"Well...anything I could do to help," he grinned, his fiery gaze pinning Logan momentarily. He shined with pride, gloating with the fact that this woman was leaning seductively over the counter toward him, the position of her arms giving her instant cleavage.
"You have to do something about those bathroom floors," she said, her voice syrupy. "They're very cold. We spread the towels across most of it, but they kept moving...Logan's quite the animal."
Robert's face -- Logan could read his name tag as he stepped back -- grew bright red.
"We really should get going," Max announced, sending Logan an overly suggestive look, then turned back to the embarrassed employee. "And thank you again."
Logan wasn't surprised at her act, only in that it had for once involved him. He got a sick kind of pleasure out of the fact that she'd never avoided him in such a way. Having her talk to him in that voice would have surely undone him. Maybe she somehow knew that it would push him over the edge, make him do something stupid.
"That work for you every time?" he asked, looking down at the top of her head as they walked to the car.
"Every time," she replied, casting a smile up at him. "My secret weapon."
"You might want to use it more carefully," he retorted, imagining the two of them rolling around on the hotel's bathroom floor.
"I'd teach you, but you already got the flattery thing going for you," she snorted in return. "'Probably the most singularly beautiful face I've ever seen' -- ring a bell?"
Logan was embarrassed at having the event thrown back at him. He hadn't intended to go as far as he had with the flattery he'd used on Max. She was much too easy to compliment, and things had come rushing out of his mouth before he'd realized what they were. Nevertheless, she couldn't accuse him of fibbing, she did have one of the most beautiful faces he'd ever seen, even if he'd only been able to tell her on one flawed occasion.
"Well..." he drawled, "I suppose it wasn't really quite truthful. I mean...'probably' -- that was bad word choice. I should have used 'definitely.'"
The comment got him a firm smack to the chest from Max's free hand.
Smiling to himself, Logan tossed his suitcase in the back of his car. Together, in a friendly silence, they traveled toward Coeur D'Alene.
***
"Early twenties...blonde...seen him?" Max fired off the question by rote. She'd asked almost everyone in the town, and though most had admitted to having seen him, none seemed to know which direction he had gone. The tall woman she was talking to narrowed her sharp blue eyes as she thought.
"Tall? Big guy? New in town?" she finally asked.
"Yeah, that'd be him," Max tried not to get her hopes up. "Know which direction he went?"
"Oh yeah..." the woman grinned to herself. "Guy like that, a girl pays attention, know what I mean? I was kind of hoping he'd stay around since we don't get many new people around here anymore. Tourism dropping and all..."
"Which way?" Max asked, not wanting to hear the woman's life story. Logan was waiting outside the salon in his car, doing his own search on his lap top.
"Which way? You trying to find him?"
"Yeah, which way?"
"Who's he to you?"
Max sighed, tired of all the questions people kept asking in response to her questions.
"He's my brother," she finally replied.
"You two don't look much alike," the woman said, suspicious.
"I'm adopted," Max replied. "Which way?"
"Last I saw, he was going east," she finally relinquished the information. "Don't know why he'd go that way, there's nothing there. Few big cities I guess...Missoula, Bozeman and all."
The woman's definition of big cities was obviously flawed by her upbringing in a relatively small town.
"Thanks for the help," Max smiled charmingly, and spun on her heel, eager to leave the woman behind -- knowing all the while she was more eager to get back to Logan than escape idle chatter with the dark haired woman. Their relationship had taken an interesting turn since their kiss. Casually, Logan's hand would brush her own, and neither of them would pull away. The ties that bound them had pulled tighter, brining them into a new stage. While the new kind of friendship they had frightened her a little, but she also found it invigorating.
"Get anything?" Logan asked distractedly when she got into the car.
"East," she replied. "You?"
"Nothing." A frown marred his handsome features for a moment, causing Max to casually pat his shoulder. The action was almost completely foreign to her. Certainly, she'd never had the urge to do it before. Remotely, she wondered where it had come from.
"I still think he's got to be heading for Canada," Max insisted, leaning back in her seat and taking a moment to look at the people walking idly past on the sidewalk.
"It would have been easier for him just to go strait north from Seattle," Logan replied, biting at his lower lip as his eyes carefully surveyed the screen of his lap top. "He's got to be headed back to Wyoming."
"Why would he go back there? It doesn't make any sense," Max protested.
"Sure it does," he insisted, raising his gaze to meet her own.
"How?" she demanded. "How does it make any sense?"
Logan gave her a look that told her he didn't want to explain and began to fumblingly form a sentence.
"Well....for a guy like Zack...I mean, in his situation...Lydecker and you and all...maybe he thinks its time to...uh...you know...ante up."
She chose not to question the statement and sat for a moment in silence trying to see things from Zack's point of view.
"Okay, say he is going back to Gillette," she finally said. "How long would it take us to get there?"
"Ten, twelve hours maybe," he estimated.
"Which means, he could already be there." She rested her chin in her hand, torn between north and south. "If we could get there in ten to twelve hours...I could scope the place out and find out if he's there. If he isn't, we could try Canada with only having lost a day or so."
"Is that a plan?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Gillette is more dangerous than Alberta...I think we've got to check it out."
Logan nodded and looked back down at his computer. Distractedly, Max surveyed the town around her. Coeur D'Alene was really a very affluent little place. The streets were clean, and the people looked happy in a naive kind of way. Instinctively, she knew few of them had stepped out of their little bubble of paradise. None of the people walking by turned to glance behind them or stepped over people laying in the street. The stark contrast between them and herself was remarkable.
"I can see why he came here..." she muttered, mostly to herself.
"Why's that?" Logan asked, assuming she was talking to him.
"The people here are so...oblivious...in a charming sort of way," she replied, gazing upward as she spoke. "You know, like kids...completely unaware that people all over the world are suffering."
"Ignorance is bliss," he shrugged. "Anyway, I'd suggest that these people's world is vastly smaller than yours or mine. So, to them, no one is really suffering."
"Gillette was that way," she sighed, only faintly remembering the actual town as she fled through it. "Everyone knew about the base, I don't think they knew exactly what was going on though. All the Manticore people though...they were their neighbors, you know? I don't think they could believe that any of them were doing the evil things they were."
"Not everyone at Manticore was evil," Logan reminded her. "Hannah...and I'm sure there must have been doctors who thought they were doing something for the betterment of mankind."
"Like you."
"Are you implying Eyes Only is evil?"
"Depends how you look at it," Max smiled. Logan sent her a look of confusion, but she broke eye contact with him to convey that she didn't want to explain. Thankfully, he didn't ask her to.
There were times when Max hated Eyes Only. Logan could become so absorbed in his job that he saw nothing else. There were weeks when Max was positive she could run through his penthouse naked and he wouldn't even notice. As selfish as it sounded, she wanted for once to be more important than the cause, worth more consideration than people Logan had never even met.
"Do you want to look around here more, or start toward Gillette?" Logan asked, closing his laptop.
There was a part of Max that wanted to turn tail and run. Soon, the land would flatten out into seas of golden grass, bringing them closer to her own personal hell. Gillette was only a few miles from a monument aptly named Devil's Tower. Max herself had never seen it, but she took it as a sign that the entire area was cursed.
"We've been all over this place," she sighed, swallowing her fear. "Guess we might as well go."
"You sure?" he asked, concern shining in his stunning blue eyes.
"I'm sure." She sounded more confident than she felt inside. Coeur D'Alene had held her hopes by the hand. Before arriving, she'd entertained dreams of finding Zack riding his motorcycle down the street. Presently, as she and Logan drove out of the charming town, she found herself wandering through the river Styx for him.
She missed him horribly. There was something indescribable that he brought into her life. No one could replace it, not even Logan. Logan though...he was something else all together. Zack was her brother: an embodiment of safety, unconditional love, and family. Logan, he was passion...all the emotions Max forbade herself.
Smiling softly to herself, she closed her eyes and envisioned Zack -- tall and strong. With him at her back, Max knew she couldn't be harmed. She didn't worry about Lydecker when she was with him, didn't gaze up toward the sky wondering when everything would come crashing down on her. Granted, they didn't have a traditional brother-sister relationship. They'd been through a lot more together than most siblings.
Zack was confused, having mistaken his love for his sister with his love for a woman. Max figured she probably would have made the same mistake at some point in her life had she not met Logan. When he touched her, it sent lightning through her skin. Their relationship was highly charged, but lazily comfortable at the same time. It was the charge that enabled her to differentiate between her love for Zack and her love for Logan.
"Did you want to call Kendra or Cindy?" Logan suddenly asked.
"I suppose I probably should...make sure no one's blowing my cover by telling Normal I'm not sick."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small cell phone.
"Mr. Over-Prepared..." Max joked, taking it from him. He smiled, keeping his eyes focused on the highway opening up before them.
She quickly dialed and listened to the phone ring. Once...twice...three times, then Kendra picked up.
"Hello?"
"Hey, it's Max."
"Max! I'm surprised you called," Kendra replied. "Thought you'd be a little indisposed."
"How's everything?" Max asked, ignoring her comment.
"Fine...and you?"
"Fine."
"Oh really? Just fine...Logan not great in the sack maybe? Calling to ask me to come save you? Or...maybe for tips." Kendra went on in rapid-fire fashion. "Listen, there are a few tricks to the trade, Max. Say, hypothetically, you and Logan are screwing, and it's just not happening..."
"Kendra," Max interrupted her, not needing or wanting to hear her friends sex tips. She was sure that if she and Logan ever did sleep together, satisfying one another wouldn't be much of a problem. Just kissing each other that morning had nearly brought the both of them to their knees.
"I'm just trying to help," Kendra insisted.
"I know," Max rubbed her eyes. "I'm just calling to make sure no one's blown my cover."
"You mean with Normal?" she asked. "Nah, I talked to Cindy the other night, and I think even if someone did he'd probably just think they were just trying to infect him."
"How about my baby?"
"She's fine," Kendra replied, accenting the fact that she knew the ninja was female.
"You're not hanging laundry on her, are you?" Max asked.
"Um...no, of course not!" Kendra laughed. "Why would I do that?"
"Make sure its gone before I get back," Max sighed.
"Take your time," Kendra replied, her voice bubbly. "Logan's not a half bad looking guy...he's no Mr. Multiples...but, who is? Anyway, I expect you to come back when, and only when, the two of you have things worked out. I'm sure you know what I mean."
"Yeah, I know what you mean..." Max rolled her eyes. "I gotta blaze. Laters."
"Bye, Max."
She turned off the phone and handed it back to Logan, who had been listening to half of the conversation with mild interest. Max avoided eye contact with him, images of him laying on top of her, his skin pressed against hers floating through her head.
If things go on like this...I'm going to be finding a hell of a lot more of Logan than Zack...
*I feel like these chapters are all so uneventful...I promise something will actually happen in the next one, I just have so much mental stuff to get past before things can get going!*