Fic: Somewhere In Between (Logan, Veronica, Duncan) PG-13
Title: “Somewhere In Between”
Author: em2mb
Pairing/Character: Logan, Veronica, Duncan.
Word Count: 2,607
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Logan wondered if Duncan noticed how his girlfriend’s eyes started to fill with tears, how she bit her lip to keep them from falling. He can’t help that he’s living in the Grand now. Or that she’s always there.
Spoilers: Season two, sometime between 2x06 and 2x08. Logan’s living with Duncan at the Grand, but Veronica and Duncan are still together.
Warnings: Discussion of Shelly Pomroy’s end-of-the-year party, one use of the f-word.
Author's Notes: The characters might belong to Rob Thomas, but I’ll require their use if my claim is accepted at 100_situations. The title is from the Lifehouse song of the same name, as I kept listening to it while I worked. Special thanks to jayiin for the beta, especially since he knows next to nothing about VM and comes along willingly anyway. Prompt: insomniac.
Logan stood paralyzed, back pressed against the wall, staring out over the flames licking at the mansion on the Echolls estate. Perspiration dripped down his face. In the distance, someone was screaming. A woman. He didn’t want her to burn, and he certainly didn’t want to burn either. But he couldn’t even move to save himself because something held him back-
The screaming stopped.
He woke up drenched in sweat, not in his burning house, but in a hotel room in the Neptune Grand. It was the same nightmare he’d had every night since the fire. Sometimes he escaped. Sometimes he burned. Usually, he stood frozen, in sharp contrast to the heat surrounding him.
It reeked of symbolism and metaphor and other bullshit terms Logan left behind in fifth period English. His subconscious trying to tell him he needed to face the fire and the murder charges and everything else that was wrong in his life? Really? He actually had to deal with those things at some point? No kidding?
Though the woman was new. That also probably meant something.
Logan held out as long as he could, but he finally threw the sheets back and got out of bed. His throat felt swollen, and as much as he wanted to roll over and continue to sleep fitfully till morning, he needed something. Water, cough drops, whiskey-he wasn’t feeling picky. Anything to make the scratching stop. The last thing he needed now was to come down with something.
Cool air hit his bare chest as he opened the door of his bedroom. He was still trying to rub sleep out of his eyes as he dug through the mini-bar for a bottle of water. It took him a moment to register quiet sobs coming from the other side of the room.
Sitting on the sofa was one of the many things wrong with his life.
“Veronica!” He practically sung her name, stretching out its four syllables and smirking.
Her blonde head jerked up, and Logan toyed with the cap on the water bottle as he approached her. He took a generous swig. This should be fun.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said conversationally. He arched his eyebrows suggestively. “Don’t tell me I’m keeping you up at night, too.”
“Go away, Logan.”
Her voice was small and flat and even hoarser than his. She spoke just as moonlight from the window hit her face. She looked terrible. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were streaked with tears, and her tangled hair was pulled back in extremely messy pigtails.
“Veronica?” His tone softened, and he sat his water bottle down on the counter, and leaned forward against the back of the couch. He touched her shoulder lightly, but she drew away. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said testily, wiping hastily at the back of her eyes. She pulled her knees tighter to her chest. Logan hastily pulled his gaze away from her bare thigh. Usually, he wouldn’t have minded the show as the boxers she slept in rode up, but tonight he felt bad peeking. She was already too exposed, too emotionally bared, and Logan knew it wasn’t his place to get involved anymore.
Walk away, Echolls. You don’t want to go there, not with Veronica Mars, you don’t.
He’d been there before, after all. But apparently Logan wasn’t a fast learner, because his legs had carried him around the sofa and plopped him down at the opposite end from her.
“If you were fine, you’d be curled up with Duncan right now. Tell me-” Logan tried but failed to keep the harsh tone out of voice “-what did you do to end up on the couch?”
“I had a nightmare.” Veronica’s voice was flat.
Logan’s heart sank. He knew all about her nightmares. And as hurt as he was that she had just gave given up on him all those months before, he knew she was hurting, too. He sighed. “Want to talk about it?”
Veronica shook her head.
“Come on, Ronnie.”
She glared at him. “Don’t call me that.”
But at least she said something. Logan waited, tapping his fingers lightly against the arm of the couch. Five minutes passed, then ten. A fresh round of tears started down Veronica’s cheeks, and she started to shiver. Logan grabbed the throw off the sofa behind him and awkwardly reached over to drape it around her shoulders.
He tried again. “Which one was it?” He scooted closer. “My dad?”
“No.”
“Shelly Pomroy’s party, then,” Logan said knowingly. He could tell he hit a chord when Veronica said nothing, turning her head in the other direction. “Duncan didn’t understand?”
“Duncan has to take the SATs tomorrow morning.”
“Celeste wins again, eh? He’s more worried about National Merit and whether or not he’ll please her than he is about you.” Logan watched her flinch. “What is this, Veronica? The third time I’ve caught you out here since I moved in? Three out of three times you’ve slept over?”
“Shut up, Logan.”
“Hit a nerve?”
Veronica sprang up, glaring ferociously. But she was shaking as she whirled on him. “Yes. You hit a nerve. Happy now?” She started to storm back to Duncan’s room.
Logan whistled. “You won’t be able to sleep if you go back in there.”
“Maybe not, but you won’t be there.”
“Veronica,” he said her name slowly, deliberately. “Am I really the problem? Because I think the problem-” he pointed in the direction of Duncan’s room “-is behind that door.”
“What is your problem?” Suddenly all five-or-so-feet of Veronica was in Logan’s face. “I thought moving in here meant you and Duncan were BFF again. Are you? Because you’re implying things aren’t very friendly.”
She was starting to rattle him, now that she was giving as good as she got. And Logan felt himself softening. This was more about helping her than hurting her, anyway. “Maybe I’m trying to be your friend.”
He started to touch her shoulder, but she wriggled away the second his fingers made contact with her bare skin. “We aren’t friends, Logan.”
Suddenly, he didn’t have anything to do with his hands, and he tucked his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers as he stared at the ground. “That’s all you, Veronica.”
“Is it? It’s all me when you come out taunting?”
“I came out here because I can’t sleep, either.” He glanced at her. Her arms were still folded across her chest, eyes accusatory. “It doesn’t have to be the only thing we have in common.”
Veronica snorted. “All the common experiences in the world couldn’t make us friends.”
“Yeah?” Logan glared at her. “Then why can you tell me what has you upset when you can’t tell Duncan? Can’t talk about Shelly’s party to him, can you? Not when you still feel like you were rape-”
Her open palm connected with his cheek. Logan barely registered the sting of her small hand. “How dare you pretend to know what I feel.”
Duncan’s door swung open. He stuck his head out, one hand in his hair, which was sticking out wildly in all directions. Like Logan, he was only wearing a pair of boxers. He didn’t look happy.
“Veronica,” he said, injecting about twelve kinds of irritation into her name. Logan found himself staring at the ground again. “Just come back to bed, already, will you? I never said you had to sleep on the couch. I just asked if you could stop tossing around so much.”
Logan flinched in reaction to Veronica’s movement. He wondered if Duncan noticed how his girlfriend’s eyes started to fill with tears, how she bit her lip to keep them from falling. Veronica nodded.
“In just a minute, Duncan,” she said softly, without a hint of the spark she’d had when she was fighting with Logan not a minute before.
Duncan shot her a smile as he slid back into his room, but even in the dark, Logan could tell how veiled it was, how fake. He waited until the door clicked shut, started counting slowly to himself. He would walk away. He would let this one lie. He would-
Logan didn’t make it to three before he had Veronica crushed against his chest. He held her close, murmuring a meaningless apology as she cried. His hand tangled in her hair as he led her awkwardly to his room, out of Duncan’s earshot. He sat her on the edge of his bed and went to grab a second water bottle from the mini bar.
Veronica accepted the drink without question, and before Logan could warn her to slow down, she’d taken a huge swig and started coughing. He sat down next to her and rubbing her back through the thin material of her tank top.
He didn’t look at her.
“Thanks,” Veronica said finally.
“No problem.” Logan knew this was the moment were he was supposed to let go, where he drew his hand away and let her get on with her life. But his hand kept moving in slow circles down her spine, and he didn’t want to send her back to Duncan. Not yet.
Not ever.
He pushed the thought from his mind and told himself he was overreacting. He would have been, if he were dealing with the Duncan of two years ago, the Duncan before dead sisters and murderous fathers and drinks laced with GHB. They’d all changed when Lilly died, and in himself, Logan knew what that change meant. He knew what it meant in Veronica, too, because her changes had been outward and obvious, an entire personality overhaul.
But in Duncan, he’d never been sure what Lilly’s death had actually done. There was a different Duncan, sure. He was volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes unfeeling.
Part of Logan wondered how much of that was really a change at all. He stopped his hand moving across Veronica’s back.
“We fought earlier,” Veronica said in a small voice. “I-I woke up. Screaming. Actually, Duncan woke me up. Because I was.”
Screaming.
Pieces fell into place. If she’d really had a nightmare loud enough to wake Duncan (the Kane heir took industrial strength pills every night to avoid his own demons), then it certainly made sense her screams had worked their way into Logan’s subconscious.
“And?” Logan prompted.
Veronica sniffled. “I didn’t want to tell him about my dream. He gets so upset when I talk about what happened at Shelly’s.”
When you talk about the rape. Logan corrected silently. He knew he shouldn’t, not when he was responsible for the GHB in Duncan’s drink. But there were also the parts he didn’t tell her, about all the times Prince Perfect in the next bedroom had done drugs with him and Luke and Dick before, about the dosage he’d given Duncan, which probably wasn’t even half of what she’d been slipped.
“Uh-huh,” Logan finally murmured, realizing she was waiting for some kind of response before continuing. Veronica took a shuddering breath.
“He didn’t mean to hurt me, Logan, I know he didn’t. But he doesn’t know what that was like for me, the next morning, waking up with bruises on my arms and stomach and blood on my dress and my thighs and-”
She stopped abruptly, realizing what she was saying. Logan tried to stop, too, tried to stop the stark, brutal mental image she’d painted, tried to keep himself from standing and throwing a fist at the wall, but he failed on all accounts. He stood there guiltily, completely oblivious to the pain shooting through his hand, dying inside all over again because now she was recoiling from him in fear.
He dropped down on the bed next to her again, but this time, he afforded her space to draw her knees to her chest and avoid his gaze. “I’m sorry,” Logan said. “I’m so fucking sorry, Veronica.”
Bruises on your arms mean he held you down, Veronica. Bruises mean you fought back. Bruises mean-
And of course there was blood. To be expected, since she’d been a virgin. But even Duncan Kane couldn’t get away with leaving a girl alone like that. Or shouldn’t, as it appeared he had.
“I should go back,” Veronica said. Her voice shook ever so slightly.
“No.” Logan reached over and tentatively placed a hand on her knee. She looked at him questioningly. “Stay.”
“I’m not going there with you, Logan.”
“I’m not asking you to,” he said. He tried not to let her words sting. He just wanted to be there for her. All he’d wanted to do was be there for her, make up for the pain he had once caused her. He withdrew his hand and ran it through his hair.
He hadn’t cared about revenge before, even when he was certain the PCHers had planted the knife that put him on trial. It was only after they’d taken a shot at her, that night in the XTerra, that he began to care. He would have walked away if not for the fact that she could have been hurt.
“Duncan’s already in a bad mood. He’s sleepy and drugged and doesn’t mean to take it out on you, but he is, and I don’t think you need that right now.” Logan exhaled, unaware he’d been holding his breath. “I’ll take the couch.”
He stood, but Veronica reached up and tugged him back. “No, you can stay, too.”
“Are you-” he started, but he didn’t want her to change her mind, so he didn’t ask. He just waited for her to lie back on the king bed before turning off the light and crawling in on the other side. At first, they faced each other but didn’t touch. Then, Veronica’s hand snaked across the sheets and gripped his.
“Thank you,” she said again. Logan imagined she was avoiding his eyes, even in the dark.
“Any time,” he said. Break up with him, Veronica. He doesn’t deserve you. He barely knows you anymore. Let go of him. Move on. You don’t even have to pick-
But before Logan had finished the thought, Veronica had nestled in closer to him. She pressed her back against his chest, and he instinctively wrapped an arm around her. “Night,” she said sleepily.
He didn’t reply, but he closed his eyes experimentally. He’d take the dream with the fire, anything but the old nightmares he could feel creeping up on him again, the ones he’d had last spring after she’d told him she was raped. The ones without the happy ending, the ones with the worst of the 09er boys having their way with her.
Logan tried to push the thoughts away. He tried to think of Kendall, of something interesting and fun. Instead, he could only think of her and how dry his throat still felt. Veronica slept soundly in his arms.
No, he thought, finally feeling unconsciousness slide over him. I change my mind. I don’t trust anyone else, not with you. I still don’t want to do anything but protect you.
Pick me.
He wasn’t surprised, but it still hurt when she wasn’t there in the morning. It hurt more when Duncan came through with takeout in the afternoon, whistling and proclaiming to his mother he’d aced his SATs via cell phone.
“Hey man,” Duncan said, passing a carton of Kung Pao chicken across the counter to Logan. “Sorry if Veronica kept you up last night. I don’t even know what is going on with her sometimes.”
No. You really don’t.
Logan didn’t bother excusing himself before stalking back into his room.
Author: em2mb
Pairing/Character: Logan, Veronica, Duncan.
Word Count: 2,607
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Logan wondered if Duncan noticed how his girlfriend’s eyes started to fill with tears, how she bit her lip to keep them from falling. He can’t help that he’s living in the Grand now. Or that she’s always there.
Spoilers: Season two, sometime between 2x06 and 2x08. Logan’s living with Duncan at the Grand, but Veronica and Duncan are still together.
Warnings: Discussion of Shelly Pomroy’s end-of-the-year party, one use of the f-word.
Author's Notes: The characters might belong to Rob Thomas, but I’ll require their use if my claim is accepted at 100_situations. The title is from the Lifehouse song of the same name, as I kept listening to it while I worked. Special thanks to jayiin for the beta, especially since he knows next to nothing about VM and comes along willingly anyway. Prompt: insomniac.
Logan stood paralyzed, back pressed against the wall, staring out over the flames licking at the mansion on the Echolls estate. Perspiration dripped down his face. In the distance, someone was screaming. A woman. He didn’t want her to burn, and he certainly didn’t want to burn either. But he couldn’t even move to save himself because something held him back-
The screaming stopped.
He woke up drenched in sweat, not in his burning house, but in a hotel room in the Neptune Grand. It was the same nightmare he’d had every night since the fire. Sometimes he escaped. Sometimes he burned. Usually, he stood frozen, in sharp contrast to the heat surrounding him.
It reeked of symbolism and metaphor and other bullshit terms Logan left behind in fifth period English. His subconscious trying to tell him he needed to face the fire and the murder charges and everything else that was wrong in his life? Really? He actually had to deal with those things at some point? No kidding?
Though the woman was new. That also probably meant something.
Logan held out as long as he could, but he finally threw the sheets back and got out of bed. His throat felt swollen, and as much as he wanted to roll over and continue to sleep fitfully till morning, he needed something. Water, cough drops, whiskey-he wasn’t feeling picky. Anything to make the scratching stop. The last thing he needed now was to come down with something.
Cool air hit his bare chest as he opened the door of his bedroom. He was still trying to rub sleep out of his eyes as he dug through the mini-bar for a bottle of water. It took him a moment to register quiet sobs coming from the other side of the room.
Sitting on the sofa was one of the many things wrong with his life.
“Veronica!” He practically sung her name, stretching out its four syllables and smirking.
Her blonde head jerked up, and Logan toyed with the cap on the water bottle as he approached her. He took a generous swig. This should be fun.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said conversationally. He arched his eyebrows suggestively. “Don’t tell me I’m keeping you up at night, too.”
“Go away, Logan.”
Her voice was small and flat and even hoarser than his. She spoke just as moonlight from the window hit her face. She looked terrible. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were streaked with tears, and her tangled hair was pulled back in extremely messy pigtails.
“Veronica?” His tone softened, and he sat his water bottle down on the counter, and leaned forward against the back of the couch. He touched her shoulder lightly, but she drew away. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said testily, wiping hastily at the back of her eyes. She pulled her knees tighter to her chest. Logan hastily pulled his gaze away from her bare thigh. Usually, he wouldn’t have minded the show as the boxers she slept in rode up, but tonight he felt bad peeking. She was already too exposed, too emotionally bared, and Logan knew it wasn’t his place to get involved anymore.
Walk away, Echolls. You don’t want to go there, not with Veronica Mars, you don’t.
He’d been there before, after all. But apparently Logan wasn’t a fast learner, because his legs had carried him around the sofa and plopped him down at the opposite end from her.
“If you were fine, you’d be curled up with Duncan right now. Tell me-” Logan tried but failed to keep the harsh tone out of voice “-what did you do to end up on the couch?”
“I had a nightmare.” Veronica’s voice was flat.
Logan’s heart sank. He knew all about her nightmares. And as hurt as he was that she had just gave given up on him all those months before, he knew she was hurting, too. He sighed. “Want to talk about it?”
Veronica shook her head.
“Come on, Ronnie.”
She glared at him. “Don’t call me that.”
But at least she said something. Logan waited, tapping his fingers lightly against the arm of the couch. Five minutes passed, then ten. A fresh round of tears started down Veronica’s cheeks, and she started to shiver. Logan grabbed the throw off the sofa behind him and awkwardly reached over to drape it around her shoulders.
He tried again. “Which one was it?” He scooted closer. “My dad?”
“No.”
“Shelly Pomroy’s party, then,” Logan said knowingly. He could tell he hit a chord when Veronica said nothing, turning her head in the other direction. “Duncan didn’t understand?”
“Duncan has to take the SATs tomorrow morning.”
“Celeste wins again, eh? He’s more worried about National Merit and whether or not he’ll please her than he is about you.” Logan watched her flinch. “What is this, Veronica? The third time I’ve caught you out here since I moved in? Three out of three times you’ve slept over?”
“Shut up, Logan.”
“Hit a nerve?”
Veronica sprang up, glaring ferociously. But she was shaking as she whirled on him. “Yes. You hit a nerve. Happy now?” She started to storm back to Duncan’s room.
Logan whistled. “You won’t be able to sleep if you go back in there.”
“Maybe not, but you won’t be there.”
“Veronica,” he said her name slowly, deliberately. “Am I really the problem? Because I think the problem-” he pointed in the direction of Duncan’s room “-is behind that door.”
“What is your problem?” Suddenly all five-or-so-feet of Veronica was in Logan’s face. “I thought moving in here meant you and Duncan were BFF again. Are you? Because you’re implying things aren’t very friendly.”
She was starting to rattle him, now that she was giving as good as she got. And Logan felt himself softening. This was more about helping her than hurting her, anyway. “Maybe I’m trying to be your friend.”
He started to touch her shoulder, but she wriggled away the second his fingers made contact with her bare skin. “We aren’t friends, Logan.”
Suddenly, he didn’t have anything to do with his hands, and he tucked his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers as he stared at the ground. “That’s all you, Veronica.”
“Is it? It’s all me when you come out taunting?”
“I came out here because I can’t sleep, either.” He glanced at her. Her arms were still folded across her chest, eyes accusatory. “It doesn’t have to be the only thing we have in common.”
Veronica snorted. “All the common experiences in the world couldn’t make us friends.”
“Yeah?” Logan glared at her. “Then why can you tell me what has you upset when you can’t tell Duncan? Can’t talk about Shelly’s party to him, can you? Not when you still feel like you were rape-”
Her open palm connected with his cheek. Logan barely registered the sting of her small hand. “How dare you pretend to know what I feel.”
Duncan’s door swung open. He stuck his head out, one hand in his hair, which was sticking out wildly in all directions. Like Logan, he was only wearing a pair of boxers. He didn’t look happy.
“Veronica,” he said, injecting about twelve kinds of irritation into her name. Logan found himself staring at the ground again. “Just come back to bed, already, will you? I never said you had to sleep on the couch. I just asked if you could stop tossing around so much.”
Logan flinched in reaction to Veronica’s movement. He wondered if Duncan noticed how his girlfriend’s eyes started to fill with tears, how she bit her lip to keep them from falling. Veronica nodded.
“In just a minute, Duncan,” she said softly, without a hint of the spark she’d had when she was fighting with Logan not a minute before.
Duncan shot her a smile as he slid back into his room, but even in the dark, Logan could tell how veiled it was, how fake. He waited until the door clicked shut, started counting slowly to himself. He would walk away. He would let this one lie. He would-
Logan didn’t make it to three before he had Veronica crushed against his chest. He held her close, murmuring a meaningless apology as she cried. His hand tangled in her hair as he led her awkwardly to his room, out of Duncan’s earshot. He sat her on the edge of his bed and went to grab a second water bottle from the mini bar.
Veronica accepted the drink without question, and before Logan could warn her to slow down, she’d taken a huge swig and started coughing. He sat down next to her and rubbing her back through the thin material of her tank top.
He didn’t look at her.
“Thanks,” Veronica said finally.
“No problem.” Logan knew this was the moment were he was supposed to let go, where he drew his hand away and let her get on with her life. But his hand kept moving in slow circles down her spine, and he didn’t want to send her back to Duncan. Not yet.
Not ever.
He pushed the thought from his mind and told himself he was overreacting. He would have been, if he were dealing with the Duncan of two years ago, the Duncan before dead sisters and murderous fathers and drinks laced with GHB. They’d all changed when Lilly died, and in himself, Logan knew what that change meant. He knew what it meant in Veronica, too, because her changes had been outward and obvious, an entire personality overhaul.
But in Duncan, he’d never been sure what Lilly’s death had actually done. There was a different Duncan, sure. He was volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes unfeeling.
Part of Logan wondered how much of that was really a change at all. He stopped his hand moving across Veronica’s back.
“We fought earlier,” Veronica said in a small voice. “I-I woke up. Screaming. Actually, Duncan woke me up. Because I was.”
Screaming.
Pieces fell into place. If she’d really had a nightmare loud enough to wake Duncan (the Kane heir took industrial strength pills every night to avoid his own demons), then it certainly made sense her screams had worked their way into Logan’s subconscious.
“And?” Logan prompted.
Veronica sniffled. “I didn’t want to tell him about my dream. He gets so upset when I talk about what happened at Shelly’s.”
When you talk about the rape. Logan corrected silently. He knew he shouldn’t, not when he was responsible for the GHB in Duncan’s drink. But there were also the parts he didn’t tell her, about all the times Prince Perfect in the next bedroom had done drugs with him and Luke and Dick before, about the dosage he’d given Duncan, which probably wasn’t even half of what she’d been slipped.
“Uh-huh,” Logan finally murmured, realizing she was waiting for some kind of response before continuing. Veronica took a shuddering breath.
“He didn’t mean to hurt me, Logan, I know he didn’t. But he doesn’t know what that was like for me, the next morning, waking up with bruises on my arms and stomach and blood on my dress and my thighs and-”
She stopped abruptly, realizing what she was saying. Logan tried to stop, too, tried to stop the stark, brutal mental image she’d painted, tried to keep himself from standing and throwing a fist at the wall, but he failed on all accounts. He stood there guiltily, completely oblivious to the pain shooting through his hand, dying inside all over again because now she was recoiling from him in fear.
He dropped down on the bed next to her again, but this time, he afforded her space to draw her knees to her chest and avoid his gaze. “I’m sorry,” Logan said. “I’m so fucking sorry, Veronica.”
Bruises on your arms mean he held you down, Veronica. Bruises mean you fought back. Bruises mean-
And of course there was blood. To be expected, since she’d been a virgin. But even Duncan Kane couldn’t get away with leaving a girl alone like that. Or shouldn’t, as it appeared he had.
“I should go back,” Veronica said. Her voice shook ever so slightly.
“No.” Logan reached over and tentatively placed a hand on her knee. She looked at him questioningly. “Stay.”
“I’m not going there with you, Logan.”
“I’m not asking you to,” he said. He tried not to let her words sting. He just wanted to be there for her. All he’d wanted to do was be there for her, make up for the pain he had once caused her. He withdrew his hand and ran it through his hair.
He hadn’t cared about revenge before, even when he was certain the PCHers had planted the knife that put him on trial. It was only after they’d taken a shot at her, that night in the XTerra, that he began to care. He would have walked away if not for the fact that she could have been hurt.
“Duncan’s already in a bad mood. He’s sleepy and drugged and doesn’t mean to take it out on you, but he is, and I don’t think you need that right now.” Logan exhaled, unaware he’d been holding his breath. “I’ll take the couch.”
He stood, but Veronica reached up and tugged him back. “No, you can stay, too.”
“Are you-” he started, but he didn’t want her to change her mind, so he didn’t ask. He just waited for her to lie back on the king bed before turning off the light and crawling in on the other side. At first, they faced each other but didn’t touch. Then, Veronica’s hand snaked across the sheets and gripped his.
“Thank you,” she said again. Logan imagined she was avoiding his eyes, even in the dark.
“Any time,” he said. Break up with him, Veronica. He doesn’t deserve you. He barely knows you anymore. Let go of him. Move on. You don’t even have to pick-
But before Logan had finished the thought, Veronica had nestled in closer to him. She pressed her back against his chest, and he instinctively wrapped an arm around her. “Night,” she said sleepily.
He didn’t reply, but he closed his eyes experimentally. He’d take the dream with the fire, anything but the old nightmares he could feel creeping up on him again, the ones he’d had last spring after she’d told him she was raped. The ones without the happy ending, the ones with the worst of the 09er boys having their way with her.
Logan tried to push the thoughts away. He tried to think of Kendall, of something interesting and fun. Instead, he could only think of her and how dry his throat still felt. Veronica slept soundly in his arms.
No, he thought, finally feeling unconsciousness slide over him. I change my mind. I don’t trust anyone else, not with you. I still don’t want to do anything but protect you.
Pick me.
He wasn’t surprised, but it still hurt when she wasn’t there in the morning. It hurt more when Duncan came through with takeout in the afternoon, whistling and proclaiming to his mother he’d aced his SATs via cell phone.
“Hey man,” Duncan said, passing a carton of Kung Pao chicken across the counter to Logan. “Sorry if Veronica kept you up last night. I don’t even know what is going on with her sometimes.”
No. You really don’t.
Logan didn’t bother excusing himself before stalking back into his room.