A/N: To clear up some confusion- Logan & Rory met at Yale but never dated, they've always just been friends. Logan doesn't have contact with his parents & they cut off his trust fund (thus the need for a roomie etc.) and since he majored in journalism, that was the only job he could get. Logan never thought he would be engaged, that's why it's such a big deal that Mandy left him. Sorry, I really should have explained this before! Do let me know if it's confusing & I'd be happy to answer questions. Thanks for reading :)
Logan Huntzberger had the perfect life until his fiancée walked out on him. When she suddenly reenters his life again, Logan and his best friend, Rory, come up with a brilliant plan. But, when the plan works better than they ever could imagine, it could mean more than they all bargained for.
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Brian worked most of Saturday and was gone most of Saturday night. Sunday they spent in front of the TV watching the Packers kill the Broncos and then flipping between three other games they happened to be interested in.
By Monday morning, the depression Logan felt the week before had begun to lift. Work wasn't anymore appealing than it was on Friday, but the roommate situation had ironed itself out so nicely that it was difficult to believe the rest of his life wouldn't follow suit.
"Hey," he said, ducking into Rory's cubicle. He held up the small box in his hand. "You need a sugar rush?"
She looked up and smiled. "Sure."
Smoothly he slid into the chair, pulled out a crawler for himself, and a chocolate sprinkled donut for her and held it up. "Peace offering."
"Peace offering?" she asked as she accepted the donut and cocked her head to one side in puzzlement. "What for?"
"For the way the I've been acting," he said humbly. "I was awful last week."
"Not awful," she said and then smiled at the tell-the-truth look he was giving her, "exactly. Besides, what's a friend for if you can't cry on their shoulder once in awhile?"
He watched her bite into the donut.
"Mmm, good."
The smile in his heart spread to his face.
"So, how's the new roommate?" she asked, through the pastry in her mouth.
"Great." He kicked back in his chair still watching her. "It's like finding a brother I never knew I had."
"Cool. So tell me about him."
And he did – the landscaping, the drawings, the future plans. Everything.
"Wow," she said as the description wound around to an end. "You're going to have to introduce me sometime."
"You'd love him. Trust me." He smiled. "You have such good taste."
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"What's this?" Logan asked, walking in from work and pointing at the million tiny pieces of wood and trees spread across the table.
"Sorry," Brian called from upstairs just before he appeared at the top of them. "It's a model I've been working on in my room, so I moved it down here. I hope that's all right."
"All right?" Logan asked as though he hadn't considered it being a problem. "No, no it's great. What is it anyway?" He examined the miniature bridge constructed carefully in the middle of the plasterboard. "This is amazing."
"You like it?" Brian asked, sitting down at the table and laying his chin on his hands to look at the model from ground level.
"How long did that take you?"
Brian shrugged. "Couple hours so far."
Logan looked at him in disbelief and then returned to the model. "What's it for?"
"Nothing really." Brian sat up and picked up the glue and two more sticks. "I just get these ideas in my head, and they're all running around, so when I can't sleep, sometimes I get up and put them on paper or on the computer if I feel like it. Then after I get a design I like, I make a model." Carefully he set the two, glued pieces down and picked up two more. "Then when I can't stay awake anymore, I crash." He set those two pieces down and picked up two more.
"What's that?" Logan asked, nodding at the glued pieces Brian had been working on.
"A bench."
"Oh?" Logan looked back at the model and tried to figure out where the bench would go. After a minute, he sat down to look at it from ground as he had seen Brian do. Although it was barely six inches tall, he could picture the people in the little park – lovers on the bridge, joggers on the outline of sidewalk, painters, picnickers, workers. When he looked, they were all right there. "How long are you going to work on it?"
"Oh, I can clear it out now if you want," Brian instantly prepared to stack it all back together.
"No, hey," Logan said quickly, "it's fine here. Maybe we can make some burgers and eat in the living room or something."
"You don't mind?" Brian asked skeptically.
"No, I think it'll be cool to watch it come together."
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"And then he started whispering and talking to me in some sort of code. Seriously it was like he was on speakerphone at a methadone clinic, I couldn't understand a word he was saying. Why did Elliot want an interview with this guy? When I assured him he didn't have to speak in code he started in about phone call interception. Where do people hear these things? They must spend to much time watching the fear segment of the news and..."
Logan nodded next to her as he stared up through the trees. "You know what would look great in here?"
Her litany stopped. "What?"
"That bridge Brian was building last night."
"Bridge? Don't you need water for a bridge?"
Logan waved her off with one brush. "He can take stuff, little pieces of wood, and make the most amazing things with them. Bridges and benches and little, tiny gazebos. Man, if I had a tenth of his ability…"
Rory put her head down and gathered her pride. "I'm glad things are working out so well for the two of you."
"Yeah, me too," he said as though he too was surprised. "I wish Mandy would've moved out months ago."
She bit her lip to keep from saying she wished that too. Mandy. She'd been the bane of Rory's existence for almost two years. First it was the endless gushing about how wonderful she was and how amazing everything looked with her around, and then when things had gone sour, it was the countless nights spent in the cubicles long after the rest of the office had gone home, trying to console an inconsolable friend.
It took almost two weeks after Mandy had walked out before Logan had been able to go home before ten or eleven. He said that way he could just go home and fall into bed without turning any lights on, and he had looked like it too. Rumpled had never described Logan until then, and as Rory looked at him now, face upturned to the sunlight, she was glad he was back in the land of the living.
"Well we get another round of assignments tomorrow," she said, knowing work was at least a safe subject.
"Oh, no. Don't remind me." Instantly his face fell from the sunlight as he sat up. "You sure know how to kill a nice day, you know that?"
Rory's gaze dropped to the tops of her shoes as she pushed the hurt down with it.
"Well," he said, laying a hand on her knee, which caused her to jump. "Back to the grindstone."
"Yeah," she said as the heat of his hand burned through her gauze skirt.
"The sooner we get back, the sooner we can get the heck out of here."
She followed him up off the little bench, forcing her heart not to hurt. It was silly to get her hopes up. He would never be interested in her. Never, and the sooner she got that through her head to her heart, the better off they would all be.
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"Can I help?" Logan asked, cocking his head as he walked out into the kitchen.
"With the model?" Brian asked surprised.
"Sure. I built a model plane once for school."
"Have a seat."
Logan spun the chair around and sat down.
"Here." With a shove Brian pushed the little pieces of the bench across the table. "You can start with the bench."
"Okay." Logan fingered the wood. He picked up two pieces and put them together, decided that was wrong, turned them over, and decided that was wrong too. "This is some puzzle."
"Here, I'll lay them out for you." Brian examined the pieces and laid them in order in front of Logan. "That should help."
With renewed attention, Logan picked up two pieces and put them together, studied their fit, and then shook his head. "Maybe I should just watch."
"No, wait." Brian held up both hands. "I know what the problem is."
Logan laid the pieces in his hand down. "Glad somebody does."
"You need to see what I see." Quickly Brian pulled a clean pieces of paper off the pile he had to one side.
As Logan watched in amazement, the pencil flew over the paper. Arching and then in straight lines until in just a few short minutes a perfect picture of an intricate park bench was rendered on it.
"There." Brian slid the paper across the table. "That should help."
It occurred to Logan that he should say something, but the gaping of his mouth made that impossible.
"So, you work for the Hartford newspaper?" Brian asked as Logan refocused his attention on the little wooden pieces.
"Yeah." Carefully picked up the same two pieces he had held only moments before, and this time they fit together perfectly. Brian was right. He just hadn't seen the vision.
"I don't think I could sit at a desk all day," Brian said with a shake of his head. "I'd probably go nuts and kill somebody."
"There are days," Logan said, laughing as he glued the two pieces together.
"I can imagine." Brian set a tree down, looked at the model, and picked the tree back up. "You're in the corner office by now, right?"
"Oh, yeah, right. No, I lucked out. I got this great little space – just big enough to be able to beat my head on all four walls at the same time."
"Huh, give me a yard and trees any day."
"There's this little atrium at work," Logan said, looking at the tiny bridge, "I was just telling a friend of mine the other day your bridge would be perfect in there."
"So, they aren't totally without soul then – the big corporate guys I mean."
"Well, I'm not sure I'd go that far." Two pieces were now together, and he could see how flawless the workmanship n the bench was. It was nice to be a part of something beautiful. "How'd you cut this stuff anyway?"
"Very, very carefully," Brian said slowly as he placed two bushes side-by-side next to the model's sidewalk. Then he lifted his hand out and bent to get a better look. "So, tell me about her."
"Who?" Logan asked caught off-guard by the question.
"Her," Brian said matter-of-factly. "Your old roommate. What was she, your sister?"
Logan's gaze focused exclusively on the pieces in his fingers, not daring to look at his questioner or at the apartment itself, knowing full well either one would betray him. "She was just a girl I knew. We had a few kicks, and then it was over. End of story."
"Huh, you must've done a lot of shopping after she left."
"Shopping? Why?"
"For furniture and stuff."
Logan's attention transferred from the last of the glued pieces to Brian's face. "What makes you say that?"
Brian shrugged as though it should be obvious. "Well, when she left, she must've taken all her stuff with her – furniture, kitchen stuff, knick-knacks. Looking around though you'd never know you just redecorated."
The six pieces sat drying at his fingertips as Logan forced the air into his lungs willing himself not to smash them into a hundred thousand pieces. "I'm finished."
Brian looked over his arm at the little pieces. "Cool. Now, we'll let that dry tonight, and tomorrow night we can put it all together."
With a nod Logan stood and spun the chair around before stretching. "I think I'm going to call it a night."
"Okay," Brian said althought his attention was glued to the model.
Hating himself for it, Logan look around at the apartment as the anger and humiliation swelled in his chest. His fists curled as the pain screamed its way through his brain. "Night."
"Yeah, goodnight."
Once in his room, Logan flopped on the bed. Brian was right. In all the ache of losing her, he had never realized how much he had given to the relationship and how little she had put in. It was his apartment when he met her, but in eighteen months she hadn't added a single thing.
A picture of her with her backpack slung over her shoulder as she walked out his door flashed through his mind, and his heart turned over. A backpack, one, single, solitary backpack of stuff. That's all that she took with her. The rest was his, and he had never even questioned that.
Wishing his eyes wouldn't go there, his gaze traveled around the bedroom. He hadn't even had to move anything to make it look complete again. His eyes fell closed as the information flooding through them yanked the pain back on him, and he sank into the pillows, hoping that in the morning life would look better, but knowing all the while that it wouldn't.
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"And then he said I must've done a lot of shopping," Logan said the next morning over donuts.
"What did that mean?" Rory asked, taking a small bite of her powdered donut.
"It means she wasn't there as much as I was. It took her five minutes to pack up her stuff and walk out that door. Five minutes. I couldn't pack up in five hours."
Rory sighed and smiled sympathetically. "You deserve better."
"I already told you, I'm not looking anymore." He reached into the box for another crawler. "Do you mind?"
She nodded as though it made no difference whether she minded or not. "So, you're just going to hold onto a ghost for the rest of your life then?"
He took a bite without saying a word.
"Look," she said, shaking her head, "this is none of my business, I knew Mandy was trouble from the start – everybody knew that but you. I'm just glad you got out when you did."
"I didn't get out," he said angrily. "She did."
"She did you a favor."
The square of his jaw line set as he glanced up at the clock. "I've got work to do."
"Running isn't going to help," she called after him, but he was already gone.
He stalked into his office and dropped to his chair. Once inch at a time his head fell into his hands. The one and only thing life was good for was kicking you in the gut while you were down.
"Don't think about her." He spun his chair and punched the keys to his computer. With two clicks of his mouse, he pulled up his e-mail. What was it Rory had said about "keep walking"? Well, that's what he was going to do. Keep walking – even if it killed him.
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