Dinner was good. The s'mores were better. Logan was definitely a fan, though that had more to do with the way Marie's scent changed when he sucked her sticky fingers into his mouth and licked them clean with his strong tongue than it did with the dessert itself. Her impertinent little tongue sucking on his fingers had him riding the edge of something he wasn't sure he could rein in if it got loose.

There was something about the combination of the meat and the open fire and the cocoon of darkness with his woman's soft warmth pressed close that drew the Wolverine perilously close to the surface. He enjoyed her company too and it felt good to be with her in a place without walls and doors.

After dinner, Logan removed the cooking rack from the ring of stones and built the fire up higher. It popped and crackled, sending vermilion sparks into the night sky. Marie was sitting next to him on the bench, a beer dangling between her fingers with her legs straight out in front of her. Her feet were just a shade too close to the fire so she could feel the heat on her soles. He liked that. Marie might be cautious with her skin, but she didn't exercise much caution in the rest of her life. Case in point, her taste in men.

Logan nodded. "I like to feel the heat too, darlin." She looked over at him. His feet weren't near the fire. Electricity crackled between them. She thought he might kiss her and she was surprised when he sat back and lit a cigar instead.

She inhaled deeply, soothed by the sweet tobacco. She liked it. The scent was as quintessentially Logan as the crisp smell of the outdoors that always seemed to cling to his hair and clothes and the minty spice of the shaving cream he used.

When he tucked the lighter back in his pocket, he pulled out a piece of notebook paper folded in quarters and handed it over with an unreadable expression.

Marie accepted the crinkled dog-eared page with a curious smile. It looked like a page from the notebook he used when working on projects for the house. She wondered if it was a sketch of the kitchen table or maybe a supply list. The loft and the bathroom hadn't been painted yet. He hadn't built the floating shelves he wanted along the walls or hung the shoji screens he'd built to section off the loft. He hadn't decided what kind of bed he wanted yet and he still didn't have a couch or the leather chair he'd been making noises about.

"What's this, sugar?"

"An attempt at levelin' the playin' field," he said cryptically, blowing smoke up into the night sky.

"What does that mean?"

"Just read it, darlin'."

Marie opened the crinkly note and smoothed it out on her lap, smiling at Logan's bold blocky scrawl. She sat closer to the fire, the orange glow backlighting the thin paper and throwing the black writing into vivid relief. It wasn't a list. It was three quarters of a page of solid text. A word in the middle caught her attention and dragged her gaze up the page.

Cock.

Her eyes flicked over to him but he remained impassive, waiting for her to read it.

She felt hot and dizzy and the feeling intensified after she read the first line and realized what he'd written. There were no euphemisms, no pretty words. It was a man's fantasy, uncensored. Crude and graphic but not explicit. It was simply honest. It wasn't in him to say it any other way.

He noted with some satisfaction that her hands were shaking slightly by the time she'd finished reading it. She'd pressed her legs together too, and her scent had gone from warm and sultry to creamy and wanting. It made his blood throb.

It had started out as just an idea to break the ice tonight, but as he put pen to paper, he found that it was harder than he realized. There was something uncomfortably revealing about taking something so personal and shaping it to be seen and understood by a wider audience. Even though he knew only Marie would ever see it, it was still damn difficult to write. He couldn't seem to make it come out the way it felt in his head. It was more than just wanting. There was lust and passion and tenderness…. and probably far too much possession for it to be right. But it was what it was, and he wouldn't apologize for it.

"Really? In the truck after you picked me up?" her words were shy and soft, with just a touch of wonder.

"Yeah, kid." It sounded worse put that way. More stark. More like taking advantage. That's not how it felt inside the confines of his own head and heart. It was rough and wild but it meant something profound. A feeling so big he didn't have the words to articulate it. "It ain't as good as yours."

"I disagree." The style was different — less softness, less polish, but it was devastatingly honest and incredibly erotic. Not despite its crude simplicity, but because if it. It was raw and powerful and reading it had turned her insides to jelly.

He ignored her protest. "I was thinkin' maybe if it wasn't just you out there, then talkin' about whatcha wrote might not be so hard." He was glad of the steady drag and exhale of the cigar's rich sweet smoke. It calmed him. And he was very grateful to whatever wild hair had given him the idea to write down a fantasy for her. He understood her reluctance now in a way he wouldn't have before unless he'd done it himself. Make no mistake, he still wanted that intimacy, that conversation, but he could appreciate now the magnitude of the private glimpse she'd given him into her head.

"I don't mind the hard conversations. I actually kinda like those the best."

"You do?" That put a new spin on things. He usually felt like he was pushing her too far too fast. That she might welcome his intrusion had never once occurred to him.

"Yeah." Marie's heart went out to him. She couldn't believe he'd done that for her. He wasn't the putting pen to paper sort of man. "You're really a good guy, you know that?"

A black smile lifted the corner of his sensual mouth. "A good guy wouldn'ta thought about a single one of the things on that page."

That was the unvarnished truth.

That irresistible mouth of hers on him, right there on the bench seat of his truck. His jeans open but not off. The scent of him on her hands and breath. His mouth between her legs after, with her foot on the ceiling next to the cab's interior light and her fingers in his hair, pulling hard. Something about her had made him want to sink to his knees in front of her and press his face into her belly right from the beginning, but that sweetness hadn't lingered long.

Soon it was her lush young body bent over the counter in his camper, her hands gripping the faucet for leverage as he pounded into her. The scent of her virgin's blood on his body, on his cock and fingers and lips. The scent of his come on her, trickling down the inside of her leg. No cleaning up after. Rubbing it into her skin so his scent would be all over them both while they curled up together in his nest of downy blankets and furs. The mark of his teeth on her throat and at the nape of her neck, a red stinging weal to match the ache between her legs so she'd go to sleep feeling like his. Waking up with her burrowed into him, arms wrapped around him tight, so he'd feel claimed in the same way.

"Is that what you thought when you read what I wrote? That it was wrong?" Her breathing was shallow and there were two spots of color high in her cheeks. Her own first response to him had been similarly primal, and she hadn't been adept enough of a writer for it to sound much different than his first effort.

"No. 'Course not. That's different."

She had written a lot. More than a hundred stories. The first ones were the most revealing. She didn't yet have the skill to make them anything other than what they were; wish fulfillment and the burgeoning sexuality of a young woman lost in a sea of foreign minds, desperately trying to come to grips with being untouchable. They were wild and raw and achingly revealing.

Logan had recognized himself in most of them, especially those first ones, though she'd never used any names. The woman was different from story to story too, though he recognized little glimmers of her in most of them as well.

There was one where he took her over the bar, fresh out of the cage, her green cloak shrouding them. Another where she came to his room and woke him from his nightmare only to be impaled by something other than his claws. There were darker ones, ones where she was wild for him and he took her like an animal, hard and rough and made her bleed and shake and scream his name. Others where she made him submit and took her pleasure from his prone body, torturing him with her silky flesh until he burned. There was even one where she fucked him in the cage in front of everyone so they could all see that she was his.

Several centered around her curiosity for one particular part of his body, one might even call it worship. Her hands, her mouth, her breath and touch driving him wild until he begged her to release him.

She seemed to have touched on almost everything. Soft and sweet. Romantic. Tender. Playful. Dirty. Being restrained. Spanked. Teased. Sex while on her period, when she was drunk, when she was high. On her back, on her knees, on her belly, on her side with her leg wrapped around her lover. In a bed, on the floor, against the wall, in the shower, outside in the rain, rolling in the dirt. Even a few where she welcomed her lover deep inside while she was heavy with his child, round and full of life and love.

It had blown his mind.

There were some with no actual physical sex at all; ones with phone sex or watching her lover stroke himself to orgasm or inviting him to watch while she did the same. There was one where they watched another couple making love. Heat pooled low and heavy at the memory. That one called to his blood, growling deep and low in places best left silent.

Some he recognized as his own fantasies. She'd written a handful of his personal fantasies about her. The rest were his fantasies about Jean. The style there was different, disturbing and painful. She'd clearly been punishing herself, delving into private places and showing the beautiful redheaded goddess in a way that was — to him, at least — obviously fantasy. No woman was that perfect, though he understood from her words that she truly believed he saw Jean that way.

Those had changed over time, too. The last one in that series had been dark and twisted; about how the man had never truly known the redhead or ever allowed her to know him, and how she'd never really wanted all of him, just the violent wild parts untempered by his tenderness and honor. It had only been the animalistic parts of herself she hated and feared that had chosen the darkest parts of him. That series of stories had disturbed him deeply on many levels.

There were some that were clearly not him, boys her own age or mutants with powers obviously not his own. Though she'd changed the details, he'd recognized both Scott and Hank. She even had a few with two partners or partners of the same sex. Most young people her age had the ability to explore their sexuality in the real world. Marie had explored hers through the written word. It touched him deeply that she trusted him enough to let him see that journey - even the parts she probably felt were ugly and sordid.

Not everything had turned him on. A lot of it he read simply to understand her better. Some of it had made him laugh aloud. She was quirky on a good day, and painfully innocent about the mechanics of some things, despite the memories in her head. Some had made him angry, had sickened him or disturbed him enough to push away the laptop and the bottle and go and find a bar with a cage so he could bleed off a little of the blackness.

Most of it had aroused him to some degree, sometimes so sharply that he'd opened his jeans right there and masturbated to orgasm with his head thrown back and her images playing behind his closed eyes as he spilled over his clenched fist like an excited kid.

The breadth and depth of the content had shocked him, as did her taste for a rougher sort of joining than he imagined a young girl might fantasize about. While he felt guilty because that was probably due in no small part to the sheer amount of him that she'd had in her head, he couldn't quite bring himself to wish it away. They were very suited. Perhaps she'd always had that propensity within her, but she seemed to have a taste for what he liked and how he liked it.

There was a primal thread running through most of her work. Sometimes it was unspoken, or simply a line or two that indicated something deeper instead of a whole story devoted to the subject, though there were plenty of those as well. Taste and scent featured heavily. Oral sex, usually her mouth on her lover and not the other way around. There were several times she'd mentioned tasting herself on her lover's body.

Those got to him every single time, as did the ones where they marked each other, either with scent or something more tangible; marks left by nails or teeth or bruises from hands that gripped too tight. Even ribbons of come, painting her body like starlight. Nothing seemed taboo in her sexual imagining. Biting featured quite prominently, the full gamut from playful nips to stinging bites that broke the skin and made copper bloom in her lover's mouth.

Not much of it was hearts and flowers. There was almost nothing that was traditionally romantic. No red roses and champagne and soft, staged seduction. It was real. Honest. Sweaty and gritty and emotionally revealing. Sometimes brutally so. From sweet and tender to raunchy and dirty. But nothing contrived. Nothing fake. It was compelling and hot as fuck.

Over time, her stories had become more complex, more sophisticated. He got the sense what she wanted hadn't changed so much as her ability to imbue the story with a certain feel; artistic license that put another layer between the reader and the real truth. The themes were less obvious but her work still retained the same sense of raw sensuality.

A lot of it seemed to center around the intimacy between the two people in the moments preceding or directly following the sex. The build up. The aftermath. Those after-moments featured heavily, and Marie rarely shied away from those things that in his experience, most women were eager to gloss over or pretend didn't exist.

The wet spot. The vulnerability. The openness. The trickle of a man's ejaculate running down his woman's leg when she got up from his bed. The scent and feel of the previous night's lovemaking the following morning, slick thighs and a little gush that eased a slow push into sore flesh. Conversations about birth control. The way a man felt a woman's eyes on him as he peeled off a spent condom. A thousand little intimacies she'd never thought she'd have. Things she clearly dreamed about experiencing for herself.

She was sensual by nature, but the body always longed for that which it could not have. She craved touch and companionship and the very idea that those things might never be hers only drove the fire higher, made her more desperate to experience them with every sense left to her.

On some level, he'd always been aware that her plural memory was there, but he'd never really considered how much it had changed and influenced her. In a lot of ways, she was much less innocent than he'd imagined. Her body might not have physically performed the act, but she had the memories. Not just of casual sex, but of love. Intimacy. A thousand private details people only ever learned sleeping in the same bed over time. He wasn't the only one in her head.

On one hand, it was disconcerting. On the other, it balanced them, balanced the weight of what he carried in a way that nothing else ever could.

Up next: Broken Wings. They've been dancing around it for the better part of a year. Logan and Marie finally talk about what she's written…