A series by November

Chapter 52: The Long, Long Road

"Pain is the healing
and the tears sting like alcohol.
Just keep on there breathing,
we'll bring you down the long, long road back home…"
--Toad the Wet Sprocket

"Hey Love. Come meet Cody." Marie smiled at Logan. She didn’t want him to be jealous any more than she wanted Cody to flirt with her so she played it up.

Logan wanted to do that like he wanted to push needles into his eye but Cody was thrilled. Logan was his hero. He held out his hand. "Hey man, you saved my life. I owe you."

"It was nothing." Logan tried not to shake his hand too roughly and gave a smile that only Marie recognized as queasy. Cody just thought he was a tough-guy type.

"It wasn’t nothing. Hank said I would have died if you didn’t pull me out of there. And Kayla. You guys literally saved our lives man, and I can’t thank you enough."

"It was my pleasure." Logan said. Oh yeah, he was very very jealous. She realized that this was going to be a problem.

She held Logan close. "He’s a good guy," she smiled up at him. It didn’t seem to help.

That afternoon he disappeared into the danger room for hours. She had an idea of what he was doing and was uneasy with it. It was better than the alternative, however.

He didn’t come to her place for dinner which was unusual. She found the danger room empty and she went to his room. Her heart sank when she heard the radio.

She knocked, knowing that he would smell her anyway. "Logan?"

"Yeah?"

"Would you open the door?" It wasn’t an unreasonable request.

He did. He was shirtless, fresh out of the shower. She tamped her lust down and glanced at his room. He hadn’t slept there in a fortnight and the only thing that appeared to be recently used was his easel.

"Logan. Look at me."

He did, and she saw shame. "I love you."

"I know," he said tiredly.

She felt sudden terror that she would lose him because of this and she dissolved immediately into tears.

"Logan, don’t do this. I can’t lose you."

He wrapped his arms tightly around her. "Hey. What are you talkin’ about?"

"What’s gotten into you this afternoon? You were jealous of Cody?"

"I just-" He couldn’t lie to her. "Yeah. C’mere."

He lead her to the window seat and they sat.

"Before you tell me that I’m bein’ a possessive cretin..."

She smiled. Cretin. It sounded like he was picking up vocabulary from Hank.

"Look Marie, it’s not that I don’t trust you. You promised to be faithful to me and I believe that, just like I’d trust you on a mission. And it’s not that I don’t like him. He seems like a good guy. And it’s not like I’m afraid someone’s gonna fuck with you because I know you can hold your own."

"When I..." she looked at his hand, which was clutching his thigh roughly. He was tense and his fingertips were white. "I don’t know… if it was all that time in the lab being a fucking guinea pig, or if it’s just this animal part of me that comes with the mutation, or both..." He faltered, looking for the right words.

She picked up the hand that was clenched tight on his thigh. She kissed the top, near where the claws came out. His eyes closed weakly at the sweetness.

She put his hand back down and let him finish.

"I know you shrink types would say I have ‘attachment issues’ or somethin'. In my life that I do remember there hasn’t been much to grab on to. There haven’t been many people I could trust. You, John, Chuck, to an extent. So I’m not used to it. It isn’t you or him or any man that I don’t trust. It’s fate. I don’t trust fate to not make you fall in love with someone else. Because it seems like the next logical thing to happen to me."

He couldn’t mention that he also didn’t trust himself to not fuck things up. As it was it was all he could do to channel his angst into the danger room and to painting. And he also didn’t mention that in his heart he wasn’t sure he deserved her. He felt that someday she would realize this and leave him.

But he couldn’t lay that at her feet just yet. He already felt naked and weak enough as it was.

He didn’t tell her that he had already decided to commit suicide if or when she left him. He wanted so much to have a life with her that he couldn’t contemplate it. And he certainly wasn’t going to make her feel beholden to him.

He looked at his hands. "Does that make sense to you, Marie?" He whispered.

She scooted close to him and wrapped her arms around him. "Perfect sense, love."

"I’m damaged goods, baby." he said. The disgust in his voice upset her but she hid it.

"We’re all damaged goods. And you don’t get it, because you can’t see it from where you are. You have absolutely no concept of how strong you are just to still be sane and walking around and trying to live another day. You forget that you were in my head. That I had your nightmares. I know what they did to you. I know, if not all of it, most of it. Things I don’t even have the strength to repeat aloud. For me it was just a nightly horror show, a movie. But you lived it. And you’ve come out of it this beautiful, sweet, loving man. Sometimes I think about it and it blows my mind."

"Keep saying more things like that," he said, laughing. She read the desire behind the joke.

"Okay."

She sat, facing him, scooting into the circle of his legs, throwing her legs over of his. She looked at him for a second, and he was unnerved by her scrutiny.

"I love your hands." she took them in hers. "I love these hands. They’re sexy and strong and I love this little double-jointed thing your thumb does." She flexed his thumb back and forth and he couldn’t help but laugh.

"I love the way you move when you’re fighting. I even love the way your claws can slash through a bad guy. Because they can also hold me, and stroke Maggie’s hair, and make me come so hard I forget my name. The first time you made love to me I thought that you were touching me with the same hand you used in Laughlin City to slice the barrel off that rifle, like it was nothing. And god, that turned me on so much." She shuddered with the memory.

"What?" He had never thought of the metal in a sexy way.

"You heard me. God, that turned me on." He could smell that she was telling the truth but he still couldn’t believe it.

"I think I love the most when you paint. I never watched you paint, and I would love to, but looking at some of the canvases and the way you use your fingers and your claws. You have magic there and it just awes me how beautiful that is."

He was looking at her with an expression that was amused and happy and disturbed and confused. She just kissed him. His arms around her and hers around him, arms and legs entwined.

"I don’t deserve you," he whispered into her ear.

"Bullshit," she said. After a few seconds she pulled back. "Logan, promise me something."

"Anything."

"If you feel like that again I’ll understand if you need to go into the DR and kick ass for a while. Or go paint for a day. I think that’s excellent and I need my own space too, sometimes. But promise me you will always tell me what you’re feeling. Don’t hide it from me. And promise me you won’t run."

"I couldn’t run from you if I wanted to." He pressed his lips to her cheek.