Multiple high fives to Ghostcat, my tremendously patient kite string of a beta.
Dick comes back from spring break with ten days' worth of stories about bikini clad girls, and a glass Cola bottle of sand which he tosses to Logan as he unpacks his suitcase.
"Figured you could gaze at this while you think your deep, grown up thoughts," he says, clapping Logan on the shoulder, that slippery vulnerability in his voice that for a moment makes Logan want to hug him before Dick taps the bottle in Logan's hand and deepens his voice. "These are the days of our lives and all that shit."
Logan had turned down Dick's offer of Bahamas, beers and babes, choosing instead a week in Neptune doing nothing. Emily went home, and a week without her gives Logan some breathing space. Wallace is supposed to be filming some sort of testimonial about his time in Africa for a benefit Invisible Children is having in a few months, but he is terrible on camera, never able to make it through a take without stuttering or stopping to question whether his words are right. Mac and Veronica and Logan spend their days lying around on his couch, taking turns controlling the camera. They are probably a further distraction, but the others don't have cash to go anywhere and Logan finds peace talking about nothing on the worn Fennel cushions.
Wallace finally makes a decent clip. They all go back to classes without an emotional, in depth conversation about Logan's impending fatherhood. But he is reminded of it once more on Monday afternoon as he goes to pick Emily for her post-trip doctor's appointment. She fills him in on her equally uneventful break as they walk across the grass to his car.
"Okay, so then on Wednesday night, we're all around the table- it's this big oak thing that doesn't really fit in our dining room, but it's from my grandma and it's as intimidating as she was so we keep it around- and my sister Jess invited her boyfriend. We're all sitting around eating our…" she pauses. Logan has found Emily to be a cheerfully terrible storyteller and waits for her recollection of some trivial detail. "Perch? No, tilapia. Bass? Anyway, we're eating our fish, and Mom's doing her twenty paranoid questions game. Finally Jess goes 'Mom, it's not like I'm going to marry him,' and the guy turns to her and he's so hurt, and he asks 'Wait, you're not?'" She bubbles with laughter, and when she starts snorting a little, Logan can't help laughing too.
"Is it just the two of you?"
"I'm one of four. Three."
Logan glances sidelong at her as the smile breaks from her face. His hands nervous in his pockets, he is wondering how to ask about that, if he can ask about that, when there's an impact against his side and he's catching Veronica instinctively.
"Texting while walking." He shakes his head at her as she straightens and tucks her phone into her bag. "You're a hazard, Mars."
"Least of my offenses today. Just got back from stealing lunch money off a couple of fifth graders." They are standing at the intersection of two paths, and Veronica moves so they are only blocking one of them. She can see Emily clearly now, and it is a credit to Veronica's abilities to conceal her emotions that her eyes only stay on Emily's midsection for a brief moment and that when she looks up her voice is clear. "And now that I've shown you my best self, I guess I should tell you that I'm Veronica."
"Oh, you're Veronica! I'm Emily, although," she gestures to her stomach, "I guess this kind of takes away that mystery." There's an awkward pause. Emily looks at Logan uncertainly as if she doesn't know how much she is supposed to know about Veronica. "Um, anyway, for what it's worth, fifth graders are the worst. Or so I've heard."
Veronica smiles. "Well, I guess you two will be finding out soon." Logan almost doesn't recognize her, the firm politeness unfamiliar to any version of their relationship.
"Not that soon," Emily laughs. "Right now it's all about the doctor's continued quest to get me to exercise. And this month is when we're supposed to be focusing on childcare." Logan braces himself a little as Emily gives a tiny, excited gasp. "You know what would be great? When I've narrowed down the options, would you be able to do background checks on nannies? As a job, obviously. I've heard you're a great detective."
"Well, Logan's an easy sell. The shiny magnifying glass dazzles him."
"Actually you solved a case for a friend of mine last year. Klepto roommate?"
"Weirdly the only one of those I've ever had. Lots of sleep eaters, though." Veronica adjusts her bag. "Get me a list when you're ready and I'll do the Mars special on your nannies."
"I thought the Mars special was the extra cheese lasagna, but I guess you learn something new every day," Logan says, shifting in the direction of the parking lot. Emily steps that way as well.
"We do have to go, but it was great meeting you. I'll get that list for you soon."
They're halfway to the car when Logan tells Emily to keep walking. He jogs back toward Veronica.
"Hey," he says as he falls into step with her. "I know Mac's the computer expert part of the team, but try not to accidentally look up Emily too, okay?"
"You were right. She seems nice," Veronica says, her eyes doing a scan of the path in front of them.
"She does. And I swear, if all she wanted was money she should probably just have held my surfboard for ransom."
"Your surfboard? She should have held Dick for ransom. He's been your training kid up till now."
Logan shakes his head. "He's surprisingly good at getting himself out of bad situations. Probably upload a video tour of her underwear drawer to YouTube and reveal his location."
"Well, I'll leave that solve to you." She stops walking and turns to him. "Again, I promise, Logan. Recon only at your command."
"Once again, you adapt the compliment scale." Logan looks over his shoulder to where Emily is just reaching the car. He steps back, lifting his fingers in a little salute. "Thanks, V."
"If she turns out to be less than legit, you might see a video of me uploaded to YouTube."
"'Hot blond takes out preggo chick?'"
"Disturbingly perfect title. Remind me not to look at your search history." He laughs a little. "Logan," she calls as he starts to walk away. "It'll be more like 'Guy has friends in low places.'"
Veronica is one of the best friends Logan has ever had. Something still glows in his chest when she confirms it, a glow that lasts through the drive and into the doctor's office.
Logan likes the ultrasounds. He hates that Emily hangs the printouts on her fridge with cutesy little titles made up of her magnetic poetry words ("A womb with a view," "Life on the inside." It's truly miraculous that he doesn't induce an aneurysm holding in his eye-rolling every time he sees them) but he find himself enchanted by the images themselves. There's something extraordinary about seeing features that he knows, head and ears and fingers, shrunken and existing inside Emily's body. There's something incredibly peaceful about the slow, blurry movements of this small, protected thing. It's just when he imagines the reality of it, when he sees in his mind an actual, tiny human being moving unprotected into the world, into his life, that he runs into trouble.
The day that they find out it's a boy because Emily finally broke down and decided she wanted to know, Logan sees her home, reminds her gently to take her pills, laughs at the overly concerned imitation she does of him, and goes to get drunk. It's the first time he's done that in months, and he's a little disappointed, to be quite honest, to find that everything is so familiar. He had wanted it to have changed, to be a sign that he had changed, but the chill of the glass feels the same, the liquor burns the same way going down, over and over. He loses count of how much he's had, but eventually it's enough that he calls Veronica.
"Hello?" Her voice is foggy, and he realizes that it has grown dark as he sat.
He intends to say, "It's me," to put forth some semblance of normalcy, but what comes out is, "It was only me. It was never Mom or Trina or that damn girl Persian that we had before Mom realized it shed on everything. And I'm so glad that it wasn't them, but it was me and it's going to be a boy, it is a boy, right now, it's growing, and what if it's me again?"
"Logan," she sighs, and for one second he feels like crying because he thinks that it's how screwed up he is that she is breathing out. He thinks it must be pretty bad news if straight-shooting Veronica Mars is hesitating. He tries to gather himself because if there's a step below drunk-dialing your ex to talk about your abusive father, it's crying while doing it. But even as he fumbles for breath, her voice changes, wakes, hardens. "It was Aaron. Back then, it wasn't about you."
"But what if I'm just like him?"
He can hear the shifting of fabric in the background, and he imagines her sitting up, resettling herself against the wall to talk to him. "There are parts of you that are like your dad, Logan. I don't…I don't want to lie to you. You can get violent, you make grand gestures, especially when protecting loved ones. You can hurt people." He presses the phone more sharply against his skull. He is glad that someone is finally saying it aloud. "The difference is that he would never have realized how he hurt you. He never would have realized that he was wrong. You always know."
"Yeah?" Logan rests his head on his closed fist, feeling the bite of his knuckles. "And how does knowing that I hurt my kid make him not hurt anymore? Do I have secret time-travel capabilities now? You'd think that in an alternate universe, I'd get something cooler than that. Or at least I'd be decent enough to travel back and help him avoid having me for a father at all."
"Look." There's a groan in her voice that reminds him that Veronica isn't great at playing therapist. "We've broken up like half a dozen times, and you and Lilly were like the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of Neptune High. Did you ever think to yourself, 'God, it would be so much easier just to hit her to shut her up'?"
Even the most self-loathing parts of his mind know that the answer is no, but he also knows that sometimes his body reacts without consulting his brain. He wonders if Veronica ever stood across from him and saw his hand twitch as if it wanted to arc toward her face. He tosses back another shot and, the question jagged in his throat, he asks her. "Were you ever scared that I would?"
Veronica Mars loves the truth, has spat it in his face enough times that there's a particular tightening in his stomach that he associates with the occurrence, and even she hesitates. "Logan-"
"No, it's okay. I want to know." What will you do if the answer is yes? Run? Finally jump off the Coronado Bridge? his mind teases, and he belts back a little more tequila trying to quiet it.
"I was never scared in the moment, no matter how angry we were with each other," Veronica says finally, voice so gentle that it feels violent. "But there were a couple of times when I wondered what if."
"Then why did you stay?" and there's real panic in his voice, because if Veronica didn't try to save herself from him, then he doesn't know if he can be around her or anyone else.
"Because you never wondered, never even considered it," she tells him, tone factual. "So we never got to if." She gives a muffled yawn and her voice goes taut in a way that makes him think she's stretching. "Are you at a bar? I hear a lot of shouting and glass."
His mind is still caught on her words. He wants to question them. He wants more. But he settles for the comfort of her certainty, and lets her change the conversation. "Yes, Detective. I'm at that new place, The Encounter. Emily had an appointment today and she decided to find out the sex, and I needed to not think about things anymore and this was the closest place." Too late, he realizes that this is the exact kind of thing that will make her want to roll her eyes and say that he would never change.
Without a pause, she says, "Do you need me to come get you? You've probably been getting very friendly with your old pals Jack and Jose tonight, and it must be close to last call."
Logan shakes himself a little and looks up. The crowd is thinning but not gone, and he goes to tell Veronica that her detective skills are slipping when the bartender shouts "Wrap it up," from somewhere far too close to his head for comfort.
"You're scary, Mars," he says, feeling disconnected from his body as he slides himself carefully from the stool and places a few bills on the bar. "You should take that on the road."
"What, you haven't seen my booth at the county fair?" He closes his eyes, trying to capture the wash of pleasure he gets from hearing her sleepily teasing voice. "But really, Logan, do you need a ride?"
"I'll get a cab," he says. "I know how precious the world's attractiveness resources are. I'm not going to squander them by smearing this face across the pavement." It's cool outside, and he leans his forehead against the side of the bar as she snorts, picking at the brick with a fingernail. "And Veronica? I just...you've got to know how much I appreciate everything from tonight."
"Any time," she returns, her pillowcase rustling and settling in the background. "But go call that cab, Logan. It'll put a real damper on my morning if I have to look over my cereal bowl and learn that handsome mug of yours is in less than pristine condition."
"Well, we all know it's really my body you're after," Logan says before he can stop himself. He assumes at this point that getting back together is not going to happen, but he doesn't want to make her uncomfortable or remind her of that. He's doing his best with the friend thing, and if tonight proves anything, it's that it's worth it.
Confusingly, wonderfully, she just laughs. "Go be drunk at home, Logan," she orders. "Good night."
"Night, V," he whispers, and waits until she hangs up the phone before he goes to call his cab.
Early on, Emily suggested meeting every few weeks to have a sort of state of the union. It started off formal, the two of them laying everything out on a calendar, from birthing classes to Emily's graduation in May. But eventually they had just started talking, reminding themselves of the easy comfort there had been during their first meeting. Everything is different now, intensified, but they do actually like each other, and as Logan begins to include details in his picture of Emily- her fanaticism about tennis and that she can read hundred page long science articles but the only fiction she likes is cheap paranormal romances- he finds that easier to remember, easier to consider her a friend.
He is still incredibly anxious when he shows up at her door one Tuesday evening with a handful of DVDs. She has a Guys and Dolls poster beside her bed, and these are all the old musicals his mom used to play on rainy days when Aaron was out of town.
"Hey," he says when Emily opens the door. "I thought since you finished that big paper, maybe we could…?" He holds up the videos.
"Oh my gosh, that would be perfect!" Logan almost starts to smile, finally feeling that he has done the right thing. "But I was actually going out." As she opens the door wider to invite him in, he sees that she is wearing a nice top that he has never seen before, pale pink with lacy sleeves and a ribbon around the waist. She is not as enormous as some of the women in their birthing class, but she is, at nearly six months along, obviously pregnant.
"Sure." Logan fiddles listlessly with a small elephant figurine that decorates her desk. "You deserve it. Have fun with your friends. Don't let them make you play default designated driver."
Emily's back is to him, glancing wide-eyed into the mirror as she applies mascara. "I'm actually going to hang out with the youth minister from the Unitarian church, so hopefully no designated driver needed."
"Are you insane?!" Emily spins awkwardly toward him, makeup slashed across her cheek. She is just as startled as he is by the words and their force but he recovers quicker. "You're going on a date with a youth minister? I thought we canceled your subscription to Pedophile's Monthly."
Emily takes a small cloth and turns back to the mirror to wipe away the makeup. "And I thought you had thrown away your issue of the Daily Jumping to Conclusions...er." She pitches the cloth toward the trashcan hard as if to make up for her weak retort. She takes a breath and turns to face him. "He's a perfectly nice guy, and I don't really see how it's your business anyway."
Logan raises his voice, and it's like he's never been to therapy at all. "Yeah, I'm definitely not involved when you're finding replacement fathers for my baby. I hope you got his nice guy documentation in triplicate because it doesn't count otherwise."
"So when I go out with someone, suddenly it's your baby?" Her voice sounds congested. She is struggling against crying, but just looks at him with eyes squinted in anger as she grabs her purse from the dresser and a cardigan off the back of her desk chair and opens the door for him, glaring until he follows her out into the hall. "Screw you, Logan," she continues, shoving her key into the lock. "We'll talk about this later." He has to step back so her bag doesn't hit him as she flings it onto her shoulder and goes down the hall.
Logan leans against the door for several minutes before he ambles down the stairs to the parking lot. He finds his car and sits with his head bent against the steering wheel for almost an hour. He is finally fumbling to put the keys in the ignition when Emily knocks on the passenger side window. It startles him, but he loosely gestures her in anyway, tossing the DVDs into the back seat to make room as she maneuvers her way inside.
"I shouldn't have yelled at you," he says immediately. She nods, accepting it just as quickly, but keeping her stare out the front window rather than looking at him. He keeps his eyes on his hands, clenched around the steering wheel. Most days he doesn't notice them. They're just his hands; they hold pens and cups, they run just the right amount of product through his hair, and, twirling, punctuate his sentences. But they're also the hands that have broken noses and jaws and ribs, that he once made the mistake of holding up to Aaron to defend himself, the hands that cradled Veronica's head in the parking garage, and that fleet over Emily's knuckles when she gets blood drawn. He wonders what Emily sees when she looks at his hands.
"I'm glad you're sorry. You really shouldn't have yelled like that, no matter what the circumstance." Emily's voice is strong. She fiddles with the bracelet around her wrist. "Maybe it wasn't fair for me to spring the idea of me going out with guys on you without discussing it first, but I didn't like your reaction."
"It was instinct-"
"Then you need to readjust your instincts." She drops her fingers from her bracelet and shifts gracelessly to face him. He suspects they should have done this outside. "Look, it wasn't even a date. I went to discuss something with this guy, and I'm sorry I didn't correct it when you jumped to conclusions, but I didn't like the person you became when you jumped. It's not fair for you to only be the baby's father when you're feeling possessive."
That strikes something in Logan. He should not have yelled, he knows that, but possessiveness isn't the problem. "Hey. I know I've let you make most of the decisions so far, and it's probably been the right choice, but I think I should get a say over who's going to be around my kid."
"Not when he's still in utero." Emily rolls her eyes. "I know they can hear in there, but that's ridiculous. Wait until he's not attached to my body, and then you can start on an approved visitors list. And I feel that people of God should probably automatically make the cut."
Logan almost laughs at the naiveté. "No, and I definitely stand by that. If you paid any attention to current events, you would too." He risks a glance over at her. Although it was only a short time ago that he saw her getting ready to go out, she looks deflated. "Is that something you do a lot? Hanging out with members of the clergy- is that some weird hobby that you don't put in your MySpace profile?"
She laughs, distracted and a little awkward. "No. I mean, a little? But not in a weird way." She shakes flustered hands through the air a bit. "Sometimes I just need someone to talk to."
"About what?" He says the words without really considering them, because he had kind of assumed that other than being knocked up during college, Emily lived the kind of charmed everyperson life he was only familiar with from television.
Emily pauses. She looks at him and then away, thinking, and when she speaks, her voice is simple. "My sister died three years ago." She stares at his face, watching it contract as he considers her words.
"My mom..." His breath catches. Of all the things that have happened to him, this is one he has never really been able to internalize. "My mom died the same year."
There's some bitterness in Emily's voice as she speaks. "Yeah, I know. Them and thousands of other people."
Logan thinks, very suddenly, of the graveyard of their families. "What happened to her? Is it okay if I…" He strengthens his voice. "If it might hurt the baby, I need you to tell me what happened."
She turns and faces out the front again. "My sister was called Dine. It was short for Geraldine, after one of my dad's great aunts or something, but she," she shakes her head. "She hated that." Logan's not a psychologist, but even he can recognize avoidance. She is picking at her nails, breathy pauses between her words. "She was driving home from college and she wasn't paying attention, so she hit a truck and…" Emily shrugs, gathering herself. "I- We were really close. I have two other sisters, but with the age difference, it was always me and Dine, and the two of them. And I hate that I lost her but..." She is crying by this point, not dramatically but with deep sadness as tears cover her face. He reaches into the glove compartment by her knees and grabs out a handful of tissues. "I'm so mad at her, Logan. She was the one who taught me to drive, and it was always 'Don't drive tired, Emily. Always look when entering intersections. Never race against a yellow light,' but when it mattered she didn't listen to any of that. It was such a stupid thing to do." She presses the whole clump of tissues to her cheeks, taking deep breaths. "That's why I still go to church every so often, even if I don't really believe. It's why I go talk to different people every once in a while. I figure they're kind of experts. I just want to see if one of them can help me figure out how to forgive her."
Logan debates suggesting therapy, but by this point he figures she'll get there by herself if she needs it. If she trusts him to figure out how to have his past but not let it rule him, he has to trust her to do the same.
"Do you want to raise him," he nods toward Emily's midsection suddenly, "religious?" Thoughts of religion and the past swirling in his head, it makes sense for his mind to go there, but he hadn't really expected it. Lynn had been a Christmas and Easter church attendee, although Logan suspects, with affection rather than sorrow, that it might have been for the opportunity to wear an elaborate hat more than anything else. Other than that, he has had little engagement with religion, nor any particular reason to believe.
Emily looks a little surprised. It's the first time he has asked about these kinds of details. She quickly reshapes her features into thoughtfulness, but Logan spent his childhood around pretenders and he can see the consciousness of it. "I mean, I was a Catholic schoolgirl for most of my childhood, but I'm not going to put him through that. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that there will be Santa. Every kid deserves Santa."
Logan can't remember a time when he truly believed in Santa or the Easter Bunny as anything more than a dude in a costume at one of the Echolls family seasonal bashes. "First on a list of non-negotiable childhood highlights," he nods. They sit awkwardly for another moment before he adds, "And you should, you know, see whoever you want."
He can tell immediately from the way she is glaring that this was the wrong thing to say. Impatience barely concealed, she says, "Not your decision, Logan. We aren't in a relationship, and at least one of us isn't fooling herself into thinking that we're going to be playing happy family in that way." Logan opens his mouth. She just purses hers and cuts him off. "You have, like, four friends, and I can tell every time Veronica's name comes up on your phone because your face goes through a six act opera."
"You know, I don't think you were this mean when we first met."
"You've been a bad influence on me," Emily informs him. "In more ways than one." She has already begun to turn out of the car, the remark meant as a glib closing line, but she turns back. "I didn't mean that. You're doing fine. I really do think you're a good guy, Logan."
Logan leans his head back against the seat. "Yeah," he says, twitching his mouth. She smiles at him and steps out of the car. He does not tell her how little he believes that.
Emily graduates on the third Sunday in May. They haven't known each other long enough for Logan to sit through three hours of speeches for her, but he does meet her family, in for the weekend. He spends the drive to the restaurant where they're meeting making mental lists of all the thousands of things he would rather be doing than this- swimming during a lightning storm, getting the birds and the bees from Keith Mars- but honestly it is not as bad as he fears. For all his bulk, Emily's father is more teddy bear than grizzly. He is a researcher and part time professor at the state university in Connecticut, and mostly he seems disappointed that Logan knows nothing about chemistry. He spends the meal chatting about it anyway, scribbling diagrams on napkins and peering at Logan hoping for some recognition.
The O'Connells are clearly a case of opposites attracting. Teresa has a controlled black bob and an annotated commencement weekend schedule that she brings around everywhere. She spends dinner sawing nervously at a steak and grilling Emily about maternity leave and hospital ratings and appropriate vitamin intake, as if by this point all she can hope for is a daughter who is the world's best pregnant person. Emily is patient, far more patient than Logan wants her to be, sketching out their month-to-month plan and, in a low voice, the child support they finally agreed on. Logan pretends to be absorbed in a description of oxidation at that point.
One of Emily's sisters is a junior in high school, the other a freshman. They look uncannily like Emily, all with their mother's thin, vaguely curling dark hair, and tiny noses lost on their father's pale face. Logan wonders if their parents ever look at the three of them and ache for the matched set.
Given his experiences with Heather and Lauren, Logan had been half dreading their interest in him, half hoping for them to be on his side if it came down to it. Jessica and Samantha barely spare him a glance as they text on their respective cell phones and alternate between sniping and giggling at each other. Finally their mother snaps at them to put the phones away and focus on the family. Then they join forces, turning cross-armed glares toward Teresa. She doesn't notice, too busy reading off a list of local doctors recommended by her colleagues.
"I already have a doctor, and you work with endocrinologists anyway, Mom," Emily points out as they start hearing a description of the apparently highly respected Dr. Lawrence Martin.
"I went down to obstetrics and asked around. If you're really going to give birth out here, I wanted to make sure you had information from reliable sources rather than the internet or locals who might not be experts on natal care." The criticism is fair, and she doesn't even look at Logan when she makes it, but he feels accused anyway.
"I'm sure Emily has made the right choice," Jim says absently. He is still glancing down at his drawings of covalent bonds, but his perfectly timed remark, the small touch he gives to Teresa's hand, encouraging her to return her list to her bag, makes Logan reconsider his judgment about the power dynamics in this family. "She is our college graduate after all." He seems to have set something up in advance because their waitress comes over at that point with a cake, round and chocolate. It says Congraduations! on top in scrolling green letters.
"That's such a dad pun," Jessica groans.
Jim grins. "We get a handbook. I only pick the best ones." All three of his daughters hide their faces, but laugh even as they do. Logan excuses himself and goes to lean against the hall by the bathroom.
Dinner is not as bad as he feared. He is going to keep breathing. He is going to keep trying. That doesn't mean that there aren't little mines in their normalcy and nervousness that make him want to slip out the rear door and not come back.
As if to rub in the difference between them, Emily is the kind of applied individual who has known for years what she wants to do, and has been involved in her field after classes and over summers. She has had an internship at a small pharmaceutical company in San Diego since the middle of her sophomore year and was apparently useful enough for them to offer her a full time position beginning in October. Until then, through the final summer months of her pregnancy and the early weeks of the baby's life, that is all her life will include.
A lot is already taken care of. Their child support arrangements have been finalized. Emily has been emailing back and forth with her mother, comparison shopping pediatricians. They have a nanny lined up, a woman named Alexandra who has a sturdy, capable hands, a fast, arcing smile, and a BA in Early Childhood Education that excites Emily more than Logan feels it should. Veronica has vetted her, and Logan, out of his depth as soon as he started looking at resumes, defers to their judgment, his only request a private one that Veronica make being a relative of Weevil a disqualifying criterion.
"We're not even going to try giving peace a chance?" she says when he mentions it to her, a rueful admonishment under the quip.
He responds, "I'm saving that for next week's very special episode of The Wonder Years," but really it's just that he doesn't want the possibility of having Weevil around for more than their apparently inevitable annual run-ins. Emily talks with fondness about her former babysitters, whose children she knows and with whom her mother still exchanges Christmas cards. If Logan comes home to find Weevil in his backyard, smirking at him over a burger, he's going to find out if good old Weevs has improved in a fight since high school. He's precarious in this new life as it is. He doesn't need Chatty Carlos over there putting in his two cents.
The next step is finding a place for Emily to live now that her extended time in the dorms is running out. It's a long conversation full of uncomfortable shifting before they decide that Logan will leave his apartment and the two of them will try to find adjoining places closer to her job. They consider sharing a place but the idea is too awkward and they give it up in mutual silence.
She has some money and her parents are helping out but it's not enough to support herself before she starts working, so he will begin child support before the actual appearance of their child. It's not the money he minds, but the investment, the idea that it will go toward diapers and bottles and unfathomably tiny clothes, toward homes for the two of them close enough that he can stumble out to relieve her of a crying baby in the middle of the night.
Emily is picking through a fruit salad as they talk, stabbing a piece of melon until it is more fork holes than fruit. Finally she looks up at him. "I've never done an ultimatum before, but there kind of has to be a point of no return, so here it is: the time where you could leave and just be weekend adventures dad without being a dick is past." The way she tilts her head is probably supposed to look casual and controlled, but she is still scraping at her fruit. "Look, to be honest I don't want to do this without you, and if you become just a check in the mail I'll probably curse you with the good Irish curses my grandma taught me. But before you leave behind your life of bachelor opulence to become my neighbor in the wonderful world of apartment living where the highlight is my secret recipe waffles, I need you to promise that you're okay with being around permanently."
Logan doesn't fool himself. They both know that he could easily leave no matter what his promises to her. Despite all his resolve, bodily fluids and midnight feedings could be too much for him, and if he ever considers violence toward either of them, his comfort about being next door neighbors will be the least of their problems. It would be a lie to say that the idea of leaving the bulk of the child care to Emily and the nanny isn't appealing: the kid would be taken care of with minimal effort or opportunity for mistakes on Logan's part. But Logan has a long memory. He can recall the fear in his small child self every few months when Aaron returned home. Not because he had been hurt already, not yet. Because Aaron was there and gone again so easily that he had been a stranger. So he promises. He forces his eyes from where he is tracing a finger through condensation on their table to look at her face. "How else could I find out the secret waffle recipe?" he asks, and watches as she bites her lip in poorly concealed relief. He reaches for her fruit. "This is a lost cause. I'm just going to get you a brownie," he says, and this time she actually smiles.
Emily considers waiting until July to start their house hunt, hoping for reduced prices on long-standing listings, but Logan encourages her to start right away. "It'll be your third trimester by then, and it'll be hot. The book says your feet might get really swollen," he adds shyly. "I think you're going to want to be bonding with your air conditioner, not beating the pavement searching for your little house on the prairie."
"Right, air conditioning," Emily mutters, smiling distractedly at him as she scribbles the words onto her ever-growing wish list.
Perhaps it's that she wants too much, or perhaps he is too picky, but no matter how many apartments and condos they see, nothing seems right. There are several that Emily will settle for, but every time she meets his eyes and tilts her head in question, Logan pushes himself off from the wall by the door where he always rests while Emily walks around. "If it's not perfect, we'll keep looking," he says, placing a gently guiding hand on her back.
In the end it isn't any of Emily's careful comparison shopping or Logan's refrain of "money is no object" that finds them the place. Logan is vaguely lost in Hillcrest, cursing Dick's ridiculously specific Thai food requests and his own error in giving in to the man who is half brother, half wallpaper. And, three blocks over from the restaurant that Logan never makes it to, near a traffic light that seems to take forever, is the house. It's a pale olive shade and a sign on the picket fence advertises an open house today. Multiple occupancy property. Both units available, it says. Logan squints and notices the two doors that take up the slightly widened front. Sometime in the years it has taken for the tangled vines that cover the arbor over the front path to grow, the house has been altered so that it contains two inside.
He pulls over and calls Emily. He can't stop staring at the house. She sounds cranky when she picks up the phone, which probably means she was asleep because barring the time surrounding naps her hormones tend to run toward tears rather than irritability, but he doesn't even pause at her snappish tone. "I found it."
"Found what?" she asks, voice creaky. "The gateway to Oz?"
"Well, they do say there's no place like home." He starts the car again. "Stay there, I'm coming to get you."
Ninety minutes later they have finished touring the house.
"It even has a guest room, so your parents won't have to live in the hallway when they come," Logan says as they step off the porch. Teresa and Jim are coming for several weeks after the baby is born. To say that Logan will be glad to have them around is an overstatement. To say he is overjoyed not to be dealing with an infant alongside no more experienced a hand than Emily is an understatement.
"I know I'm going to appreciate it when she's here and probably cry from the multigenerational beauty of it all, but just thinking about my mother coming is stressing me out." Emily rubs a little at her collarbone before glancing back at the house over her shoulder. "Every room in there-both units- is a different shade of yellow," she points out. There is a tiny grin worming its way around her practicality. "The backyard is fantastic to have, something we were missing in all those apartments, but I can't imagine one of us mowing it. And the realtor didn't answer my questions about potential termite damage."
"And you worked so hard googling those." Logan slings a teasing arm around her. "This is the place. We'll paint the yellow rooms. I'll hire a guy to do the yard. Come on, Em." The nickname slips out and he holds a breath, hoping that it won't be awkward. She doesn't seem to notice the endearment, just boosts herself halfway into the car before requiring a hand to push herself the rest of the way. Once she is settled, she faces him. Her grin fades, although every time she peeks back up at the house, it twinkles at the corners of her mouth.
"This is a serious investment, Logan. We were looking at apartments because I could kind of afford those if I squinted. I can barely help keep the hardwood shiny here."
He interrupts her quickly. "Don't make this into the hard knock life for us. You've seen my bank statements. Paying for this won't knock a digit off."
The neighborhood is quite midmorning on a Friday. There's nothing to distract her from scrutinizing him. "Look, I know you promised, but I need you to be sure. A house, even broken up like this...it's more than we were planning on."
There's something in her voice that makes it seem like she is making the very difficult decision not to cry. From the things he's read and the stories of the women in their birthing class, all Emily really wants at this point is to hibernate until the baby is born. There's nothing Logan can do about that, but he can give her this. He smiles for her. "I've been waiting my whole life to share a weird half-house with someone. How could you deprive me of that?"
Emily keeps her stare on him for another minute before she unleashes her smile. "Let's go talk to the agent. I can pay for utilities, I guess. And make you waffles."
"Hey, someone's gotta keep the hardwood shiny."
They move in on a Wednesday in June. Most of Emily's friends have already gone home for the summer or have left for their sure to be swell Sex and the City lives somewhere else, so it is Logan's friends who help them. Veronica can't make it (her summer classes have already started) but everyone else shows up. Dick and Wallace don't really talk but manage to get most of the bigger items inside. Rosa is tall with powerful arms and an inability to play well with others, so she takes over the medium sized things by herself, cursing every time she trips over the doorstep. Mac tries to assign herself the job of setting up all the electronics, but she finishes before they do, so, reluctant and long-suffering, she ends up bringing in is put in charge of Emily after Rosa, face dour, informs him that she keeps trying to help even though any idiot would know that heavy lifting isn't good for the baby.
"Everyone's doing something and I'm sitting here. I just feel really bad," Em says, starting to push herself up as Rosa brings in the last of the recently acquired second hand chairs. Logan notes the glass of chilled lemonade by her side, the way she doesn't even move the magazine from her lap as she lifts her torso. He flicks the glossy pages with a finger and raises an eyebrow.
"Liar," he says affectionately, and goes to help move in the dressers.
Logan, having owned a house for a few years now, has more stuff than Emily does, and even he doesn't have that much. They're done by half past one, and Logan orders pizza and passes around the beers that were Dick's housewarming present. There is an awkward moment where they can't figure out which house to eat in, but they end up on the floor of Emily's living room so she won't have to leave her couch.
"My mother always taught me to make sure a woman was comfortable, and that goes double for a pregnant one," Wallace tells Emily, his eye-crinkling smile sprawling itself onto her face as well. As she turns to grab a napkin from the end table, Wallace catches Logan's eye. "Smooth," he mouths, accompanying his self-compliment with a small gliding hand gesture. Logan gives him a sarcastic thumbs up and reaches for another slice of pizza.
"Dude!" Dick's voice is muffled around the chunk of crust sticking out of his mouth. He seems to have forgotten it, staring at Emily's stomach in a way that is half mesmerized, half disgusted. "It's getting Alien in there." Logan looks too and sees, against the tautness of Emily's shirt as she leans over, a distinct shape pressing and shifting.
"It's just the baby moving," Emily says, resettling herself and her shirt quickly.
"Is this the first time?" Mac asks, politely uncomfortable, as if she's not sure exactly what the right thing to ask is. Emily seems to wish she had chosen something other than that.
"No, it's been happening for a couple of months. Mostly at night, though. I think the kid's nocturnal." She looks at Logan. "You're not half owl, are you?"
"Quarter." He presses his lips together in a flat smile and flickers his eyebrows up once, trying for lightness. "On my mother's side." It's an effort to keep his gaze on her face, and it's an effort at which he fails. His eyes keep flickering down to her abdomen, although it is still now.
"That explains his thing for Hooters," Dick says loudly. As Mac groans and Rosa lobs a mushroom at him, Logan wonders, not for the first time, exactly how oblivious Dick is.
Once everyone has left, Emily starts unpacking clothes and books and knickknacks while Logan shifts around the small amount of furniture that she has, ensuring that the table is in the right place and that the television is stable. Eventually she tiredly tells him that it enough, that they'll work on it again in the morning. He goes out her door and through his and begins organizing his own things. Halfway through storing his dishes away in cabinets he stops and goes out again, intending to knock on Emily's door.
He had known that movement was a thing, of course, a milestone. How could he not, when it was printed in every pregnancy book for fathers with exclamation marks, and pronounced with verbal ones every week by Douchehead Dan from their birthing class, as if his kid hasn't been kicking for two months now. But "every pregnancy is different" mantra in mind, he'd assumed it was just going to be later for them. He had trusted that if Emily wasn't worried, he shouldn't be either. And he had been right, but not for the right reasons.
He sees her as he opens his door. She has moved one of her chairs to their shared porch and is sitting wrapped in a comforter. She waves a blanket-covered hand at him as he goes to sit on the step in front of her. It looks sweet. He snorts a soft laugh. They are quiet for a few moments, staring out at their new street, their new yard with its foreign vines.
"Why didn't you tell me about the baby kicking?" he asks eventually, voice soft, curling just at the edges with hurt.
There's a comfort to darkness, to shadowed, indirect faces. Still, she hitches the blanket more fully over her shoulders, nervous but playing calm. "I was scared." She swipes at her face where the hair has slid into her eyes but the blanket just leaves it more fluffed up and flyaway. "You've been so great with the classes and meeting my family and buying me a house." She gestures at the porch roof, voice dazed and wondrous. "All the books say that seeing and feeling the baby is how fathers are supposed to bond, because that makes it real. But that reality...I was afraid it would backfire. I was afraid that if you felt it, how real it is, you would leave."
The night is so calm that it is a moment before he realizes that he is angry about that. Because he promised. Because for all his doubts, he hasn't left yet. Because they are sitting on the porch of their new house, where the only decoration she has put up are those black and white swirls that make up the baby, and he can look at them and not run. He feels that he deserves some credit for that. He looks up at Emily, silhouetted and peaceful in the dim porch light, and realizes that it is not about accusation, but about admitting emotions she can't help but feel.
"I'm scared that I'll leave too," he says. "But I don't think I will. I haven't yet, so my Magic 8 Ball is telling me that outlook is good."
"What about the Ouija board? What's the verdict there?" Emily teases quietly before freezing. She looks down at him nervously, and he can tell what she is going to say before she does. "Um, he's kicking again. Do you want to feel?" She opens the curtains of coverlet over her midsection. Logan doesn't give himself time to doubt. He rests a hand carefully on her belly. He does not realize that he was not fully committed to the action until the baby kicks right below his palm and he is surprised by the force of it against a hand he thought was barely connected.
The baby kicks again, somewhere off to the side, but still hard enough that Logan feels it, and just for that moment his panic fades. He stops thinking about labor and feedings and the right number of breaths. He doesn't remember cigarette burns and broken noses, doesn't wonder if his father ever held his hand against his mother like this. The baby kicks, and he just feels his child against his hand.
Emily has her head tilted back. "It sounds so stupid, but I feel like he has a personality already. Like he has different times and foods that he likes and doesn't like and that make him react in different ways. And I'm terrified, but I can't wait until he's here and we can see what he's like in real life, and not just so I can have my bladder to myself again." She says it all in a streaming breath, as if she has been damming these words, saving them up for when they were ready to talk about it. "I guess we're more than halfway there, though."
"Let's hope we're living on something more than a prayer," Logan says, not sure himself if he is joking or serious. Emily seems to consider it for a minute before she rests a hand in the air before her. Logan wraps his fingers around hers, pulls her up. He can see her through her front window for a moment before she begins making her way up the stairs and he goes through his own door to spend his first night in his new house.
The air conditioning is unnecessary. It's a cool summer, and Logan isn't home much anyway. He takes a couple of summer classes, two week intensive courses that make him want to stab himself in the brain no matter how much Emily says it will relieve the pressure in the long term. He surfs with Dick at the beaches close to his new place, even though Dick spends a lot of the time falling (or being pushed) off his board laughing over voluntary summer school and the ninety-nine ways in which Logan's senior year scoring opportunities are totally screwed. Mac found out a while ago that they share a love for Stephen King, so they spend the off moments of the summer doing an annual re-slog through all his novels and then debating their relative merits over finger-mashing rounds of Gran Turismo.
With Veronica, it is lunch and coffee and mini golf that they both suck at, a light enjoyment of avoidance. They had struggled to become decent at communication before the slow downslide of his life, and he almost wants to talk to her about everything- real estate and parenthood and overwhelming fear- but this is bigger than anything that they have had to talk about since they started trying. It makes him think of tipping points. It makes him think of her leaving.
She doesn't notice the avoidance, which is something alarming on the Veronica scale. He thinks that she is busy hiding something and he hates that, hates the regression, but he doesn't need to look at his calendar to remember the weeks it took him to tell her about the baby, a concept with which she still seems not entirely comfortable.
"If it's a case, you know you can call me if you need backup," he says one afternoon in mid-July, staring down at his Starbucks cup.
It probably says something alarming about either him or Veronica that he is a little concerned by how touched she looks. "It's not, but I'll keep that in mind."
He brings his head up, squints over her. "Is it about the baby?" and he is pleased that he barely pauses, that his voice stays almost steady, as he says the words.
"No. Logan, you're doing really well with it. The whole stand-up man thing, it's really…" she places a hand on his arm. He turns to face her. "I'm proud of you."
"So what's bothering you?"
"I just have the embrace the platitude and say that it's not you." Her voice shifts from sober to sincere. "Really, though. You're doing so well. One might even call you Boy Scout-ish. Some day soon I swear I'm going to see you helping a little old lady across the street."
Sometimes he believes her. Some mornings he wakes up and he thinks he can do it. Some mornings he rolls over and goes back to sleep because he can't imagine doing it right.
"Just keep going through the motions until you get back to the positive," Darcy advises.
Logan tosses a ball toward the ceiling, head resting against the back of her oh-so-typical but actually really comfortable couch. "The good old fake it 'til you make it routine. A standard, but by George, it just might work."
Darcy doesn't care about his smartass tone. She shrugs. "Hey, it's a cliché for a reason."
So he tries to follow that advice. The baby's room, like all the others, was repainted before they moved in, a cream color that Emily adds accents to, pictures of animal and book characters that the baby won't even be able to focus on for months. They go shopping for more furniture than Logan realized a baby would need. Emily was fine picking things up second hand ("all my baby things were Dine's, and all Jess's were mine") but Logan argues splinters and lead paint and termite damage, so they get everything new, and then another set for Logan's place. Emily is going to be the primary parent, but they (Emily) figure it is better that they have stuff there just in case. She rambles on about transitions and boundaries, but Logan mostly nods along. He drives the car. He hands over the credit card when it's time. He moves the new furniture around when it arrives. He keeps the door to the baby's room, in his house painted a shade of pale orange called Marmalade that Emily hates, closed.
One night he comes home to find Emily on his couch with her feet propped on his coffee table. They're neighbors now, so she has a spare key and he sees her a lot, but not usually taking over his furniture. She looks up as he enters.
"I was out of orange juice," she says guiltily, holding up his carton. It's a plausible excuse. She has been drinking it obsessively for the past week, even though it gives her heartburn. Still, he can't help but notice that Wimbledon replays are on one of the enhanced sports channels he gets as part of his cable package.
He sits down beside her, careful not to disturb the command center she has set up on the cushion next to her, a jumble of cell phone and notepads and snacks and remote control seeming to ensure that she will never have to get up again. Something is trapped behind his back as he sits. He pulls out a book, white and heavier than it should be. The Dictionary of Given Names.
"I thought maybe we could pick one." Emily darts her eyes to the TV and back to him. A commercial for salad dressing is playing. He stares at it anyway.
"Sure. Does he feel more like a Tynnifer or a Marzipan to you?"
It turns out to be not much of a joke. Emily actually likes unique names. "I just want him to stand out a little. There were four other Emily's in my class growing up. I always got Emily P.'s invitations to stuff that they hadn't meant to invite me to, and I spent a day crying because someone told me that my boyfriend was going to break up with me when they meant Emily J." She has her notebook in her lap, flipping to the list of names she has already selected. She finds the page and settles back, looking up at him. "Weren't there any other Logan's in your school?"
He looks away, grabbing blindly for the remote to switch off the TV. "The year after I was born, my name went from 177th most popular boy name in the US to 109th." He makes a soft sound in his throat. "Yeah, there were other Logan's in school. But maybe blending isn't a bad thing." He glances at his hands. "Do you want to maybe name him after your sister?" She mentions her every so often, in stories and comments that are always accompanied by a laugh before a sigh settles over her eyes.
"What would we call him, Gerald?" Emily snorts. "Hopefully I'm birthing a baby, not a seventy-five year old British man. Anyway, Dine hated her name. The rest of us were top twenty popularity and she was stuck with the Victorian throwback."
"It's not always fun to be the one of these things that's not like the other."
They compromise in the end. Logan uses Emily's love of statistics to convince her that Matthew is far enough down on last year's list not to be pedestrian for boys his age.
"Middle name is up to you," Logan yawns when he finally breaks her down. "Matthew Cincinnati O'Connell sounds like he'll go far."
Half dozing too, she asks, "You don't want him to have your name?"
"Em, I don't want to have my name." He takes a pillow and hugs it to his chest, pressing his head into the cushion behind him. "Just trying to help him out as much as possible. I think I saw that in the job description."
On the hottest night they've had all summer, Logan is woken from a dream about running beside the ocean by his ringing phone. It is three am. "V'ronica?" he mumbles as he reaches for it, because that's what middle of the night phone calls mean to him: Veronica whispering to him from her place slouched in front of the Camelot.
"No, it's...um, it's me." Emily's voice is shaky. "I've been timing them and they're lasting for a minute or two and they're five minutes apart and the book says that it might be time, so-"
Logan sits up. He has his shoes on before he realizes that he is wearing only his boxers. "You're talking about contractions." He yanks on a shirt, a pair of jeans. It isn't that he wasn't expecting it. It is the second week in August and the thirty-eighth week of Emily's pregnancy. They have taken the hospital tour. They have graduation certificates from their birthing class, and Logan keeps his folded in his wallet even though the ink is smudged and his name was misprinted as "Lohan." The bag Emily packed with clothes for them and a couple of books and her camera is beside where she is sitting on her couch. She has two layers of towels beneath her. She is trembling.
"I didn't want to be that woman who shows up, like, negative dilated, or freaking out over Braxton-Hicks," she rambles as he helps her to her feet. "But they're getting bad now and the TV isn't distracting anymore and I don't want you to have to deliver the baby with a shoelace and my nice towels."
"Well, I guess I boiled all that water for nothing, then," he says. His voice sounds smooth and unfamiliar. Their street looks foreign in the orange streetlamp glow. Emily moans and clutches at her bag as he rolls out of the driveway. They're halfway to the hospital before he realizes that he forgot to lock either of their doors. He looks over at her and doesn't mention it.
The most distressing part of the labor is that nothing- not the books, not the birthing class or the horribly graphic videos- prepared him for the reality of the fear.
"You were right," Emily says. She is crying a little. "I do want my mom." Teresa had been scheduled to arrive two days from now to help with the birth, the house and the baby. She is trying to get an earlier flight, but for now it is just Emily and Logan. He passes her an ice chip because there doesn't really seem to be anything for him to do. They just did a walk around the hall and a bathroom trip. She doesn't want to read or watch TV. She just looks at him with big eyes, halfway to shock, and lets him feed her ice chips. When a contraction comes, longer and very soon after the last, she crunches down on a chunk, moaning.
The Lamaze teacher advised deep breaths, calming tones, focus objects. Logan decides very quickly that, like so many things in his life, that advice was crap. Okay, he thinks. Flying blind.
He puts the ice chips on the table beside the bed, leans over Emily's stark frame until his face is all she can see. "Swear," he tells her, squeezing both of her forearms. "Curse as loud as you fucking can."
"First time I've ever seen a lady in labor who needed to be told to swear," says the nurse, an older woman with deep dimples, who is coming for Emily's blood pressure.
"Hey," Logan starts, because this is something he knows, exactly how to turn fear into anger. He turns to look down at Emily. "You're doing great."
"Shut up, you literal motherfucker," she tries, squeezing her eyes tightly. Logan grins.
She keeps that up for a while, leaves off insulting him for the most part, but switches over to long, groaning strings of shitshitshitshit and inserting curses into her requests for another pillow because her back aches or a washcloth because she is sweating. Eventually she can't talk anymore, the pain coming fast if the way she is squeezing Logan's hand is any indication.
The day blurs by. He does the breathing thing like he is supposed to. Nurses come in and out. They hook her up to more monitors, and the sound of the baby's heartbeat is overwhelming when Logan lets it be. The anesthesiologist who finally gives her the epidural looks like he should be working as a bouncer rather than inserting needles into people's spines, but in the end Logan likes him better than the doctor who breezes in every so often to tell Emily that she's just got to keep going for a little longer.
"I'm really tired," Emily whispers to him after she's been stuck at six centimeters for two hours. The politeness, the absence of the anger to power her through, makes her deflate against the bed. Tears leak out of her eyes.
"I'm sure you can do it. What doesn't kill you and all." The doctor winks and pats her on the shoulder in a way that is probably supposed to be reassuring. It is only Emily's death grip on his hand that keeps Logan from knocking him out.
It is as Logan is trying to figure out how to put Emily's hair into a ponytail that the doctor finally announces that they can get things started.
"Oh good," Logan says acidly. "All this doing nothing was really starting to wear." He circles the elastic around the gathered, sweaty hair one last time, leaving Emily with a loose, lopsided ponytail. He almost goes to fix it but Emily clutches onto his forearm and he moves down to remind her how to breathe as the doctor tells her for the first time to push.
Logan's watch is on his bedside table. His phone is trapped in the pocket of his jeans. He must have been trapped in this closing room for hours and he wants the anchor of time, of reality. Everything in these moments, advertised as the most exciting of his life, blends, and he wants a stable point in it. "You're a model patient," one of the nurses tells Emily in that messy time. "Chin on your chest and keep giving us those nice firm pushes. Good girl."
"Let's pass out the gold stars later," Logan snaps before he can stop himself, but it is lost as the doctor, face serious now, tells Emily to give a big push with the next contraction and Emily screws up her face, giving a long and low moan that ends with a sob, and the baby slithers out into the doctor's hands.
"Would you like to cut the cord?" the doctor asks Logan, and it's him earning the gold stars because he just shrugs at Logan's horrified "No," and starts talking to a breathless Emily about the delivery of the placenta.
"He looks great, sweetheart," the nurse says warmly as the doctor clips the cord. There's a flurry of movement as the doctor uses what looks like a little baster on the baby's nose and mouth and the nurse rubs at him with a blanket. He cries for the first time, a piercing, indignant sound, as they weigh and measure him, but has stopped and just whimpers drowsily by the time they give him a diaper and a cap, wrap him up, and hand him to Emily, who has used Logan's still arm to drag herself back against the pillows and is holding her hands out for him.
They place the baby on her chest and she folds her arms over him. He has a little hair, a brownish shade that doesn't belong to either of them, which darkens as Emily's tears fall onto his head.
"Hi, baby," she whispers, overcome. "Hi Matthew."
Logan's mouth is open just a little, but he does not notice. He feels weak and unstable, like he wants to collapse into the chair beside the bed, but instead he stammers, "I'll- I'll be right back" and goes out into the hall.
There's another man out there, gesturing broadly as he talks on his cell phone and paces a short path beside one of the rooms further down. "Eight pounds, seven ounces," he is saying gleefully. "Absolutely perfect." Logan leans his forehead against the wall opposite Emily's room. He wants it to be Emily's turn now. He did everything he was supposed to, buried his doubt and confusion and disgust during the labor, and with the baby here he wants it to be Emily's turn.
The hospital windows are streaming light. It is just after noon. Logan wants to sleep. He wants a drink or twelve. He wants his mother. He is tense, and when a hand lands on his elbow, he turns and accidentally almost clobbers the woman standing too close beside him.
His first impression is of teddy bear scrubs and a stethoscope. It takes a moment before he recognizes Veronica's face.
"Never had this fantasy before," he says, straightening and flipping her stethoscope.
"Hey, I'm nothing if not creative." A doctor comes striding down the hall, and Veronica takes Logan's arm and tugs him into the stairwell. "As much as I love fulfilling the dreams you never knew you had, I'm really here to let you know that someone wasn't paying attention in their HIPAA seminars."
He just blinks at her. "Would that have made sense before my 3 am wakeup call?"
A smile fleets across her face. "Someone on the hospital staff tipped off the tabloids. Apparently the new generation of Echolls still merits a couple of column inches. The parking lot is crawling with press. This was the only way I could get in without people connecting my face and your name. Kept getting asked if I had seen the baby, but no one recognized me."
He rolls his neck to face the ceiling. "That first amendment. What a masterpiece, huh?"
"Try to keep from availing yourself of the second, okay?"
"You really are a buzzkill." He laughs softly, steps forward and tentatively hugs her. "Thanks for coming to tell me." Her shoulders are suddenly hard beneath his hands and he releases her so he can look at her face. "Of course there's more," he whispers.
"I'm going to Stanford," she says quickly, arms taut over her chest. "I got a conditional acceptance back in March and I didn't think that I would be able to finish my last courses, but with my AP credits and overloading and the summer classes I just finished...Hearst okayed me to graduate early."
Logan knew that Veronica had been looking at Stanford, had even been the one to suggest journalism as a good combination of the criminology major it was too late to change, her love of truth, and her doggedness. But he was not prepared for it to be now. He wasn't expecting her to co-parent his son, but he had pictured cups of coffee, ice cream just when he was reaching his breaking point, not this absence.
"With the tuition costs, it just makes sense," she is still explaining. The teddy bears on her scrubs look ill in the dim light.
"Yeah," he mumbles. Feeling nearly disconnected from his body, he rests a hand on her arm. If he had known that this was what she was hiding, that she was going to leave anyway, maybe he would have talked to her more. "That's great, Veronica. I'm happy for you, really." He summons a smile, pulling it up as if from a great depth. "Although I can't believe you're actually deciding to join the scum sucking hoards."
"A girl's gotta have goals."
"So when do you leave?" He sees it on her face. "Tonight," he says, voice resigned despite all efforts to the contrary.
"Tomorrow morning." Somewhere further upstairs, someone opens the door to the stairwell and starts moving down. Veronica peers upward, although there's nothing for her to see. "I have to get going. Takes a lot to move your whole life somewhere else."
"I know the feeling."
"Right." She says the word crisply, just a little embarrassed, tipping her chin down and looking at the floor by his shoes for a second. "Heard from the scum sucking hoards that it's a healthy boy."
"Yeah." He nods softly, head down. "Matthew Josiah O'Connell. He seems good. Wrinkled."
"Teach him to walk with confidence and he'll still get the ladies."
"It's in his genes." He seems to realize what he said a minute after she does.
"It's going to be fine." The footsteps are growing closer. Veronica opens the door and they step back into the hall, speaking quietly. "You're going to do fine, Logan. Really. I believe that." She grips his hand, and just for that second he believes it too. Then she kisses his cheek, impulsive and quick, and walks down the hall. He watches her go. He knows that he is supposed to go back into Emily's room- he can see her through the narrow window, still cuddled with the baby- but as Veronica gets into the elevator, he turns and rests his head back against the wall. He can still hear the voice of the other father down the hall, fading as he closes his eyes. "This is the best day of my life."
Well, it's been...a while. What can I say? I had a lot of trouble getting in touch with the post season three versions of the characters after seeing the movie, and ended up posting an entire other post movie story before continuing with this one. I apologize for that. But hey, this chapter's pretty long, right?
In other news, there are at least three things that I left in here even though they do not align totally with reality. They are purposeful, and Ghostcat is not to be blamed. There would be a lot more without her.