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Veronica could feel the tension in his voice, the surprise and resentment aimed towards her. Strangely enough, she found it easier to handle an angry Logan than a calm, understanding one. Handling an Angry Logan was something she had a lot of experience with. She took a deep breath. When she was ready to speak, she placed one hand over his, and held it there until he lifted his eyes to hers.

"This isn't easy for me to say, Logan, so I need you to wait until I'm done, even if what I say pisses you off." He nodded, but his shoulders tensed, as though anticipating some kind of blow.

"After Lilly's death, trusting people became difficult. For some reason, trusting you was impossible. It took me until now realize that it was because you mattered more than anyone else. You were the only one that could have truly understood what I was going through. Not Duncan. You. But you were such an asshole to me that it became easier to hate you and tell myself that you didn't matter at all." At the word 'asshole', a familiar smirk crossed his face, but he honored her request and remained silent.

"We've been over a lot of this before. What I'm trying to say is that I never really got out of the habit of distrusting you, of giving you the benefit of the doubt. I loved you, and it terrified me. Then, just when I was ready to trust you again, you told me you were leaving. I never stopped to think why. I only thought about the fact that you were leaving, giving up on us. And I've been nursing that resentment for the past five years. Because you hurt me more than anyone could have, and I didn't know how to forgive you for that."

She stopped, unable to continue. There was still so much she wanted to say to him, but suddenly she needed to hear his voice. For several heartbeats, no one spoke. Those moments seemed to last eons to Veronica. Logan turned over his hand and gripped the one that still rested on his. She curled her fingers into his and held on tightly.

"I wasn't giving up on us, Veronica," he said quietly and evenly. "I was doing the only thing I could do in order to have any kind of future with you. Everything you said to me at graduation was true. I needed to grow up. I needed to stop hiding. I couldn't do any of that in Neptune, where I would always have been the son of Aaron and Lynn Echolls, known best for bum fighting, drunkenness, and who knows what else. The way I saw it, my only chance at deserving you was to go and start over without you. So I did."

"But you never…" she started, and then stopped. She didn't want to start up with more recriminations, but Logan wouldn't let her.

"Go ahead. I never what?"

"You never tried to contact me. I assumed that you never wanted to speak to me again."

"I've wanted to hear your voice every day for the past five years. I didn't know if you would let me back into your life. Wallace told me once that you never let anyone mention my name to you. I figured you hated me, and moved on."

Veronica shook her head. "I wanted to hate you. And I wanted to move on. Somehow, I never managed to do either. I just buried it and ran from it. I didn't want to admit that everything you had said to me that last day had been true, because that would have meant that I had been to blame."

"To blame for what, Veronica? There were two of us involved."

She shook her head. Somehow, she had to find the right words, without just making him angry. It was so hard to think about their past, to talk about it, without also feeling the hurt and anger that she'd felt for so many years. How could she look back objectively? But, if she was going to get past this, how could she not try?

"Do you remember why I broke up with you?"

Logan laughed, but briefly and with no humor. "Do I remember why my heart was broken? Do you really have to ask?"

"No, I mean…do you remember what I said to you? In my father's living room?"

"The part about me having fun? Or the part about not being able to stand by me?"

"Both, though I don't quite remember saying it like that. That whole summer, I felt like you were going through this phase, and if I waited patiently and lovingly, you'd turn back into the Logan that I fell for in the first place. But you didn't, and it was tearing me apart. Then I thought that if we broke up, maybe it would be some kind of wake-up call, and then you'd become you again. But it wasn't, and you didn't. You just seemed to go further and further down some dark, twisted path. And I could only watch…"

Her voice trailed off. It suddenly seemed surreal to her, standing on a hotel balcony, holding hands with a Logan Echolls she hardly knew…while discussing the Logan Echolls who had broken her heart. He opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head again, stalling him.

"Wait, please let me try to say this. I don't know if I'll be able to later. I watched you, with Hannah, with Kendall, pretending like it didn't hurt me. But it did. Not only because I still loved you, but because it made me wonder if I had done the right thing. If I had stayed with you, would I have been able to keep you from sliding further? I knew how much you resented me. And I couldn't help but ask myself if I was somehow a cause of it all. If there wasn't part of you that was doing it to hurt me, like I had hurt you. I guess I was pretty conceited back then."

Logan didn't say anything for a moment, but just looked at their linked hands. He appeared to be thinking about what she had just said, mulling it over. Veronica realized how much he really had changed- the Logan she once knew would have spoken first and thought about it later.

"Conceited, yes, but not wrong," he finally said slowly. "I've wondered the same thing over the years. At first, I blamed you. 'If she had just stood by be…'. That kind of thing. After a while, I finally owned up to the fact that I had made it impossible for you to stand by me. Despite your shady investigative habits, you always had more integrity than anyone I ever knew. It was one of the parts of you I had always admired most, even when it pitted you against me. Part of me did want you to hurt as much as I hurt, but I don't think that was really my motive for any of it. It was more that I wanted to prove to you that I had moved on and didn't need you, when all I really wanted was for you to come back. But the more I tried to prove how much I didn't want you back, the more impossible I made it for you to ever come back. Like everything else I did and was back then, it was stupid and self-destructive."

"Most things," she interrupted.

"Huh?"

"Most things you did then were stupid and self-destructive. Not everything. You came charging to my rescue more often than I wanted to admit. I choose to think that saving my sorry ass doesn't qualify as 'stupid'."

"Well, it was such a cute little ass. I couldn't really help myself."

"What do you mean, was? I still have a cute ass, thank you very much!"

"In the name of science, it would be irresponsible of me to simply take your word for that. I would have to conduct extensive research on the subject."

"Too bad you're not a scientist."

Once again, the banter that they fell into so easily distracted them from their conversation. Even that banter could not distract them for long, though. It dawned on each of them, almost simultaneously, that they were standing in close proximity, flirting, on a moon-washed balcony, their fingers entwined and their eyes locked. Veronica flushed, and hoped it wasn't visible in the moonlight. She knew that look in Logan's eye, though it had been so long since she had seen it. She dropped her own eyes, suddenly afraid that he would see where her thoughts had strayed. She knew she needed to find something to say, to start their conversation again, but could not find a single word. Except one.

"Logan…"

It came out as a whisper. With his free hand, he cupped her chin and lifted her head until she met his eyes once more. His fingers grazed her cheek, and she held her breath. Dozens of thoughts raced through her head, but too quickly for her to latch on to any one in particular. Only one question stood out. Was he going to kiss her?