Author's note: Thanks for the patience, y'all. I've been babysitting. When your friend calls and is all- IKnowIt'sLastMinuteButOMGIHaveAHotDate! What's a girl to do? We gotta stick together! Unfortunately, I can't smut it up and babysit at the same time, however I do realize that lots of one might eventually lead to one of the other. Heh. I am actually trying to slam up this chapter and run back over for yet more babysitting. Because nobody should have to wake a two year old up at 4AM to take hubs to the airport by 5AM. Onward. (with coffee) (and bourbon).
"Hey. Open up."
Marie damn near jumped out of her skin when he pounded on the truck's window.
"God!" Seeing that it was just Logan, she took a few calming breaths and reached across the driver's seat to pop the door. "Sweet baby Jesus! You tryin' to scare a few years off my life?"
"S'my truck," he pointed out, sliding into the seat with a grunt as he slammed the door and put his hands on the wheel. The nights were growing cooler as summer edged towards fall, but the cab was warm. Mississippi girl that she was, she'd started the truck first. The idea of her having to wait to shove a hand down her pants until the interior lights winked out amused him. Girl had about as much patience as he did.
The scent was killing him, though. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was breathing through his mouth, dragging in slow, deep breaths to take in as much of the luscious scent as he could. Christ, he could damn near taste her on the back of his tongue.
One of her hands was naked, too. He could see her pale skin, a beacon in the dark. Her fingers were wet. Her lips, too.
Jesus, fuck.
"Screw that. You gave me the keys and a dadgum order to hightail my fanny out here, so feel free to piss the hell off if there isn't enough room in here for me and your fucking ego." She waved that bare hand at the door. "I brought my bike and unless you want me to break my neck on the way back, I'm gonna chill here a minute and catch my breath."
"Put your damn glove on," he rasped, feeling the world grow hazy around the edges as the Wolverine rose sharply, dragged from his lair by this fierce creature who clearly had no idea how close he was to the edge. He closed his eyes, struggling for control.
The metallic purr of her zipper was painfully loud in the silence.
Holy hell. She must have just finished when he pounded on the glass. Hadn't even fixed her pants yet. Maybe just finished licking her fingers. He was going to lose his mind.
"Why are you even here?" He could hear the distinctive rasp of suede on skin as she wriggled those damp little fingers back into her glove. "You so eager to come and gloat now that you're done puttin' it to Little Miss Voodoo that you couldn't even stop to wash your hands after? You stink of her, you know."
Everything was wrong. They'd both come, and yet there were none of the softer notes of satiation in their interaction. Just words that were more like bullets than actual communication. The kick. The recoil. Pain and blood. Only the kind of wounds Marie left didn't heal up right after.
"Had to catch you before you lit out for The Big Easy, didn't I? Maybe I don't feel like waitin' a week while you pout, princess." Bang. Bang.
"You have no idea where I go or what I do," she snapped, crossing her arms over her chest defensively. A direct hit, then.
"Lemme guess. Hit the city and head straight for a bar. Ya get drunk in the French Quarter on overpriced drinks and kill some hours fendin' off fratboys and fuckheads who think that place is just about tits and beads and king cakes and throwin' up on Bourbon Street."
"So you've been there."
He nodded. "Lotsa good fight bars out towards the swamps."
"Yeah." Her easy agreement made him twitchy. The bars — and the people — it was a whole different world down there. Made the Church look, ironically, like a preschool filled with choirboys on a Sunday morning.
"But then you get tired of that shit and light out across the lake. Bayou, I'm guessin'." From Slidell it was a straight shot up 59 to Meridian. Maybe she had kin somewhere along the way.
Her face registered her shock. "How—"
"Muddy boots."
"Damn," she returned quietly.
"Yeah."
He always noticed everything about her. Everything. Case in point, her legs were still trembling. Whether that was a lingering result of her recent orgasm or a response to his rude intrusion in the afterglow, he wasn't quite sure.
She slumped down in the seat, resting her head back and closing her eyes. For a moment, he had a flash of her as a child, hiding her eyes and imagining that nobody could see her because she couldn't see them. She obviously wished she was invisible. At least, to him. A rare moment of weakness and one he knew wouldn't last.
Logan couldn't quite work her out. He wasn't sure what was up with this erotic game they were playing. Maybe it was all she could stand to give. Maybe she was just trying to re-live or rewrite her past sexual experiences. Whatever the hell it was, it clearly made her resentful, despite the unfettered eroticism.
He'd thought maybe she might be more open to him in the moments directly following her own release — before she'd had time to build her walls back up — but that didn't seem to be the case. She was as prickly, and as closed, as always.
That was really beginning to piss him off. It fed the rage simmering just under the surface. What the hell had made her this way?
"Stop looking at me like that," she murmured without opening her eyes.
"Like what?"
"Like a broken thing. I don't want your pity. I'm not a mystery to be solved, or an obligation, or a failed fucking promise."
That was a deep cut.
"Is that what you think I see?"
"Sugar, I stopped givin' a shit what you see a long time ago."
The movement was minute. A slight jerk he couldn't quite control, despite his stoic resolve. It was a blow that would have left any other man reeling — and damn her, she felt it across the bench seat and smiled. Smiled. Never even opened her eyes. He was thankful for that small mercy, and scrubbed a hand over his face tiredly.
The frown was immediate. His fingers reeked of sex. Marie was right. He'd missed it, as focused as he was on her scent. There was no where to run though, confined as they were in the cab. No place to hide. Just the painful truth, and a lot of it. He put his hands back on the wheel, glad the pitchy darkness hid the spatters of blood.
She turned on the radio, desperate to put something, anything, between them.
He turned it off.
"Keep talkin'," he rumbled. "S'your turn."
"I guess you really are as much of a masochist as they say."
"Takes one to know one." He fired that straight back.
She sighed, picking at the seam on her glove.
"I wasn't always like this, you know. I was better for a while. After Bobby and the Cure— after…" She stopped then and it was all he could do not to physically shake the words from her.
Logan just nodded instead, impatient for more but unwilling to interrupt even a halting flow of words.
"Just after," she finally pushed out, "While you were in Japan, I-I met someone. We had a good run. For a while." She shrugged. Logan thought she looked lost. Not at a loss for words, just… lost.
"A while?"
"Eighteen months."
"Tell me about him."
"Well, it wasn't love at first sight, if that's what you think." She smiled then, eyes sparkling and alive in a way they hadn't been in a long time. Years. "Jubes saw him first. We were dancing and she was all: Oh. My. God! Get a load of him, chica! You can't tell me he doesn't look like the kinda man who fucks hard."
Logan made a face. That sounded exactly like something the firecracker would say.
"He was smooth and charming… delightfully dirty and way too hot to be totally straight. Or single." Logan felt his blood pressure rise. "I pretty much hated him on sight and told him that to his face when he tried to pick me up with some bullshit line."
"Heh." That sounded like her.
"He wouldn't give up. I wouldn't back down. It was pretty brutal." Logan had experienced the sharper side of Marie's tongue enough times to know first hand what she meant. "Round and round like two wet cats in a burlap sack. Jubes practically wet her pants. You know how she gets." He did. "It was hilarious. But you know me an' Jubes, and when there's alcohol in the mix, well…" Their nefarious adventures and close brushes with the law were legendary. "Eventually the mojitos got the better of us and the cops showed up because even for a dive like that, two half naked girls dirty dancing on the bar in a shower of fireworks eventually gets out of hand…"
"Goddamn."
"And when the shit went down and the cops rushed in, using us as excuse to bust something else goin' down in one of the back rooms, I suddenly saw a very different side to him. I got a real good look at what was under that smooth mask and I liked what I saw."
"And that was?"
Marie smiled a true, real smile for the first time in longer than he could remember.
"That scoundrel was a wolf in sheep's clothin', sure 'nuff. Dangerous. My favorite kind."
Logan grunted. "You always did have shit taste in men, darlin'."
"Yeah," she said, a little wistfully.
"He one of us?"
"That depends on what you mean by 'us'. A mutant? A survivor? A wanderer?"
"You know what I mean."
"Sugar, the Wolverine is the yardstick I measure by." That knocked him for six. "When I say dangerous, I mean it. Wild as all hell. Mean as a cut snake when crossed. A true Son of the South right down to his stubborn, Cajun soul. Courageous. Reckless. Seasoned. You know I like my men with some miles on 'em."
"Deflectin'," he grunted, feeling more uncomfortable with each revelation.
"Fine," she snapped. "A mutant, yeah, but not one of us."
Logan didn't know what to make of that. "What the fuck? Not one of us?" Not X-Men material? Not a white hat? Not the kinda man who knew how to take care of what he had? Definitely a survivor though, that much was clear.
"Not a joiner, sugar."
Logan snorted at that. "Mmph."
"Some horses run better in a harness. Some don't." She shrugged. "Even you do better with a pack."
He ignored her personal commentary, not wanting her interpretation of his emotional needs to derail the conversation.
"Feral?" Her tastes had always run to the wilder end of the spectrum.
"No. He manipulated energy, changed it from one form to another. He could charge things with kinetic energy and the results were…" She shivered, and the look on her face said the results had been pretty damn explosive.
"So you shacked up with the Unabomber, or what?"
Marie laughed. "Bite your tongue! He was not the kinda man you saw comin' or goin'! Definitely not someone who could be found unless he wanted to be." There was an unspoken challenge implied in the words. Her man had been someone she considered dangerous, even compared to him. Someone she thought he probably couldn't track, even if he wanted to. The feeling of being pushed off the top rung was swift and painful. He lashed out before he could stop himself.
"And what did this Cajun dickhead think of a girl who was so scared of her own power that she shot herself full of the Cure and ran away like a scalded dog?"
He heard Marie's gasp and could almost see her circling the wagons as she bristled.
"He seemed to enjoy wakin' up naked with me every mornin'." He knew she wasn't done. That was just the first shot across the bow. "And puttin' his hands and mouth on every touchable inch of me, inside an' out." She took a breath and he thought the worst was probably still to come. He was right. It wasn't in her to pull a punch. "He didn't treat me like a child, or like I didn't know my own mind, and when he fell, he fell hard — and you know what? He had the guts to tell me to my face. The truth, straight up, no chaser. And he listened when I told him how I felt. He didn't run. He kissed me and told me he loved me and what came after that was damned good."
"For a while," he spat, eviscerated by her words.
"For a while," she agreed, and he was struck by her response. No fire there— just acceptance. Old pain, entrenched so deeply she didn't even flinch anymore. So broken she just accepted the lash. That bothered him.
"And then?"
"And then what? It burned bright and hot before it flamed out in a shower of regrets and what-ifs. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing."
He grunted at the jaded cynicism that rolled so easily off her tongue. "You're too young to talk like that."
"Spare me the lecture, huh? I've got decades stacked up like snowdrifts in my head. Besides, you of all people should understand that much, at least."
"Me?"
"Sure, sugar. You're gonna outlast everyone and everything you ever love." He sucked in a sharp breath, wounded and bleeding freely now. The truth cut deeply. "But what the hell, right? It's all just dust and ash in the end."
For a moment, he was so stunned he couldn't even form a response beyond a whine, not unlike that of a wounded animal.
The Rogue said nothing. She just pushed open the door with cold, flat eyes and disappeared.
Up next: Heat. In which they both take a blazing leap out of the pan and into the fire.