Marie couldn't believe Logan had asked for that particular request. His claws on her skin between the ropes? She knew he'd enjoyed their impromptu shibari lesson, but he was never that cavalier about his claws. That he was so open with her now about them spoke volumes. Not only was he finally letting her see a side of his nature that he'd always shielded her from, he was beginning to give her little glimpses of the Wolverine, too.

It was exciting but also terrifying. She was going to have to rise to meet that challenge and embrace things in herself — wild, scary, powerful things, to do so.

"God." He had to hear how fast her heart was beating.

"Don't share that one with anyone else." His voice was low but not soft.

"I won't."

He wasn't particularly thrilled that her other stories were online either. She wrote under a penname, but he still didn't like that other people — strangers — could read her work. At first he'd imagined a bunch of horny guys getting off to her stories and was surprised to find most of her readers were women. He understood it was her exploration of her own sexuality and that was generally a process one didn't undertake alone. It wasn't the typical route, though he knew it was as normal and healthy as fumbling in the dark with boys her own age, but he still didn't like it.

"What about you, kid?"

"What about me?"

"Got any requests?"

Her face glowed. "Yes. But I'm more interested in reading your fantasies, not just something you think I want, you know?"

He did, but her answer wasn't really what he'd been hoping for. "C'mon, baby. Help me out a little here. You know it ain't exactly easy for me."

She thought that over. "Something primal," she said softly.

Shit. Those were the ones that made him the most uncomfortable, the ones he had the hardest time sharing.

"Mmph."

She always pushed.

He was beginning to understand that was her way of moving them forward.

"Those are the ones I like the best."

"Why?" He understood that kind of edgy, intense sex could be deeply compelling, but it seemed a little advanced for someone who'd barely been past first base. She was a good girl. A nice girl. That she'd welcome that kind of touch above all others still didn't seem quite real.

"Because they make me feel like yours." Her answer stunned him. "And I like that you share that part of yourself with me. Let me see something private that you don't share with many people."

"Many? I don't share that shit with anyone, baby. Never have. Some of it I'm still runnin' from."

"Why?"

He just shrugged. "Because some of it's pretty fucked up. It shouldn't get me off, but it does. And when I finally give in and fall into that place, it consumes me. That ain't how I wanna be with you."

Her eyes didn't leave his. "Well, that's how I want to be with you."

"Marie—"

It was a warning she ignored. "You couldn't tell that from what I wrote? You don't think I was scared of you reading it and thinking I was fucked up? Or just plain crazy? Or— or dirty or slutty for wanting it like that?"

His eyes glinted at that. No way was he going to ever let her think that about herself. Such open sexuality was a gift. Few people ever embraced it with the kind of joyful sensuality inherent in her writing.

"There ain't nothin' dirty or slutty 'bout you, baby. You're nothin' but beautiful to me. Whatcha wrote— I kinda thought mosta that stuff was just you workin' through what was in your head. Maybe explorin' some of those ideas in a safe way. More like a 'what if' than a practice run for the real deal."

Marie was taken aback. "And what if it wasn't? What if me sharing that with you was my way of saying I do think about doing all of those things, sugar? And I think about doing them with you."

"All of them?" His voice was sharp.

She backed down a little. "Well, not the ones about— about Jean, obviously." Those she just needed to purge from her head. She ignored his black growl. "And I admit a few of them were just kinda in the 'what if' territory." Logan looked triumphant until she added, "I'm not really into girls, or guys my own age, and threesomes kinda scare me unless it's you, me and the Wolverine."

Logan's eyes widened.

"But the rest of them, yeah."

"In the mud and the blood and the cage?" He came straight after her, swinging hard. It wasn't in him to pull a punch.

"Everything," she said simply.

Her answer made him profoundly uncomfortable. "Fuck," he muttered, taking a healthy pull from the bottle between his legs. He wasn't entirely sure she knew what she was offering.

"You don't want that?" She seemed a little surprised. "Because, sugar, I don't know many men who'd turn down a virgin willing to try just about anything." She might not have much carnal experience, but she was aware of her power as a woman. She was young and fertile and sexually curious…. and on the cusp of being ready to share all of that with a man she loved and trusted deeply.

"Ain't that," he grunted. "You got any idea where this'd go if you're not puttin' limits on it?"

"Whoa. Back that truck up right now, cowboy. That's not fair to put that on me. You need to own your own limits, or lack thereof, and not count on me to put the brakes on to keep this from going somewhere that makes you uncomfortable."

He snorted.

"Ain't me I'm worried about."

"Sugar, between us we got feral senses and deadly skin and deadly claws and half a dozen years of wantin' each other built up like bonfire waitin' for a daggum match. I think a certain amount of collateral damage and 'holy shit, what the hell was that?' is kinda implied, you know? I'm looking forward to it and I hoped you were too."

"Jesus Christ." It was times like this he was reminded she was wise beyond her years. And at the same time, painfully unaware of how far down the rabbit hole they might ultimately go.

"I think maybe you're confusing inexperience with innocence."

"Mmph." She was probably right.

"And when it comes right down to brass tacks, there's nothing you can do to me that I can't heal from."

He remembered overhearing her tell the firecracker that once. It was as difficult to hear this time as it had been before. Raw. Vulnerable.

"Marie—" That was his hard limit, right there.

"Let's face it, sugar. There's nothing you could do that I couldn't stop in a second if I really wanted to anyway." She let that hang there because he wasn't a man used to physical limits, especially those imposed by other people. "So are you really afraid of hurting me? Or are you afraid of letting me see what y'all really want?"

Logan closed his eyes, stripped uncomfortably bare with a few simple words. He'd thought he would be the one pushing her out of her comfort zone, but he hadn't realized that would go both ways, or that her comfort zone was not at all where he thought it was. He was okay with the raw, sexual stuff, but when it came to the Wolverine, that was something else entirely.

His jaw clenched. He'd assumed this was largely about Marie discovering more of herself. He hadn't really considered that he might learn more about himself as well. It stung his pride a little, even as it curled thorny tendrils of needy hunger into dark corners; dragging things out of him that he'd never imagined would see the light of day, much less be shared with someone he cared about.

"Sugar?"

"Big words from someone who's never even had a man."

Marie shrugged. It smarted, but she knew him well enough by now to know why he was lashing out. Any time something hit a little too close to home, Logan's first instinct was to circle the wagons and shut down, closing himself off and then going on the offensive.

"Maybe. But that doesn't invalidate how I feel. Just because I'm a virgin doesn't mean that I don't have a catalogue of crazy dirty stuff in my head."

"Fair enough. But how much of that is really you and how much is—"

"Everyone else?" She tapped her temple unnecessarily.

Logan nodded.

"That's a good question."

It was. "Yeah."

"I'm not sure I have an answer. At least not one you'll like."

"Try me."

"I've been trying to answer that for a while myself."

"Is that what the writin's about?"

"The erotic stories?"

"Yeah."

"No. They grew out of something else."

"Something else?"

She nodded. "When I first came to the school, Charles suggested that keeping a journal might help me focus, to separate everyone out in my head."

"Makes sense. It help any?"

"Yeah." Looking back over her early journals was painful. It was a little scary to see how crazy she'd sounded back then, a confusing swirl of the men who'd poured themselves into her head. David and Erik and Logan and later others, Bobby and John and Pete… It was embarrassing, too. Magneto had forced her to take in his power, but along with that had also come a lot of very private things about his intimate relationship with Charles. Secrets she'd kept to protect the Professor. Things that had taken time to work out and work through.

She had memories of loving and wanting the man who'd raped her mind. It was a complex and thorny situation that had taken years to deal with.

"Kid?"

"Thinking."

"About?"

"About how crazy I sounded back then," she said honestly. He should know what he was getting into, too. "I was a bag of snakes. Still am, kinda."

"Back atcha."

That made her smile.

"But as I worked through all that to find my own voice, some of that included sexual thoughts, too. Mine and theirs. And that felt kinda good."

"Good?"

"Cathartic."

"Hmm."

"After a while, I didn't need the journal so much. I'd made peace with everyone in my head, but I was a hormonal teenage girl with deadly skin and memories in my head that told me exactly what I was missing. The erotic stories helped with that."

"Mmph." He didn't ask if she had his dirty thoughts up there. He'd read her stories. He knew she did. In technicolor. "You still writin'?"

"Less than before, but yeah. I still need that."

"Haven't seen a new one in a while," he commented. "Bother you that I can read 'em in real time now?" He didn't like the idea that he might be limiting one of the few outlets she had.

"No. I wouldn't have shared them if it did." She took the bottle from his fingers. "But I sometimes wonder if you're still reading—"

"Still am."

"—and if you are, what your reaction is."

That drew a dirty chuckle from him. "Don't take a rocket scientist to work that one out." She giggled. "Though sometimes I wonder if you're windin' me up on purpose."

"Sometimes I am."

"That ain't nice." There was a warning in his voice now.

She took a bracing drink and passed the bottle back. "Sometimes I don't feel nice."

That drew an instant growl from him. "You lookin' to push me over the edge?"

It sure as hell felt like she was trying to get a reaction from him with stories specifically designed to push his buttons. A couple of them had been pretty pointed. The last one had been a continuation of an argument they'd had in the garage. He'd been in a shitty mood; fuse already short because of the long wait, compounded by an engine that was refusing to cooperate. Marie had stalked in, hips swinging, and he'd simply not had the patience to deal with her sassy mouth and luscious scent. He'd told her to shove off. She'd ripped a strip off his hide with her sharp tongue. Sparks to a powder keg. It was volcanic. They'd argued loudly, both out for blood. He'd thrown a wrench. She'd stormed off and he'd felt like an asshole.

Marie had gone home and written a much different outcome to the afternoon. One that had ultimately ended with him slicing off her dress with his claws, pulling down his jeans, and fucking her hard and fast over the tank of the bike until she screamed.

Her ending was infinitely more satisfying than throwing a fucking wrench.

Christ. Reading it had sent him into a tailspin that started with a two day bender and ended in a cage in some shitty dive bar. He'd almost killed someone that night. And then he'd come home and fallen into bed, blood still burning under his skin in a way that no amount of fighting could ever fully bank.

She was definitely trying to get a reaction out of him now. "You tryin' to push me?" he growled, when she didn't immediately answer. He needed to hear her say it.

Marie blushed, caught out. "Maybe a little."

"Baby, I like readin' what gets you hot, what gets you off—" he was deliberately crude. "But if you want somethin' outta me, have the balls to say it straight out. This little girl bullshit's got no place here." She sucked in a deep breath and he could tell it hurt. It should, because he was right. His next words were softer, but no less honest. "I'm ready to give ya whatever you need, whatever you ask for. But it hasta be on you."

Her brows drew together and her eyes flashed at him.

"Shouldn't it be something we decide together? It doesn't seem fair to put it all on me."

"I don't give a fuck about right or fair. I've put all my cards down, baby. The next move's up to you."

Up next: Wanted Dead or Alive. This time it's Logan who's after something specific… and Marie's fine with going along for that ride.

Heh. Any guesses?