Fic Previews Meme
I gakked this one from the deliciously sexy queen_haq and, what do you know? I actually did some pruning and writing on all of these extracts as I went. It did work. As per my usual, these extracts of future chapters/one shots are quite long as extracts go (but, come on, they're teeny weeny in comparison to the huge ass chapters I write). I hope you like them!
When you see this, post a little weensy excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
Title: Jailhouse Rock
Ship: Logan/Veronica, Logan/Hannah, Veronica/Duncan
Snippet Rating: PG-13
Summary: Logan confronts Veronica at Java the Hut about why she inexplicably dropped his case, now that his inside connection with the PCHers has fallen through.
Notes: I started this LV fic right before my thesis went crazy. It was originally meant for the karaoke smutathon at loveathons. Set between 2.12 and 2.13 (though it includes some spoilers from 2.17). Originally it was meant to be a fun spot-the-Elvis lyric game but I put them in italics so it's pretty obvious now. I hope the LV readers on my list like it, as I read through it before I remembered how much I used to love this ship even though it's set in a time and about a subject that eventually made me give up entirely on Veronica (and this fic). The summary is pretty pointed about what that issue was. The fic most likely won't be continued but I thought some of you might like to read what I have which was the best part of the concept IMO anyway, who needs smut?
Jailhouse Rock
The last thing a girl wants to do after her boyfriend flees the country with his dead ex-girlfriend’s baby is listen to some Lloyd Dobler wannabe sing about how they’re so lonely they could die.
It was Karaoke night at Java the Hut and Veronica Mars was in the unenviable position of working a double shift through All-Elvis-All-Night. Everywhere she looked were bad wigs, white spandex, peanut butter and bacon sandwich specials and Elvis impersonators cementing her opinion that the King was really dead (or at least, he’d want to be if he had to work this shift). After all, Veronica thought as the lanky boy on stage went into a trademark quasi-epileptic arm swing, if it were her songs being massacred one after the other she’d come out of hiding to karate chop the guy with the microphone. Alas, there’d been no signs of the King so far, just a bunch of hapless fans checking their audience into the earache hotel.
“So Weevil stopped returning my calls.”
The voice was not a welcome reprieve from her hunka-hunka-burning nightmare.
“Aww, did you boys break up? And I thought you were M.F.E.O.”
“I told that boy that I’m the only one allowed the pleasure of punching him out and would you believe Dick saw him getting off the school bus today with a couple of brand new shiners? He’s been cheating on me. It’s not exactly a new experience, I grant you, but I thought it would be different this time.”
“Did you come here looking for romantic advice? I’m sorry Tuesday is Karaoke night; Monday is ‘Romantic Help for Loveless Louses’ night.” She clicks her fingers. “Double check the schedule next time.”
“So I should come back on Wednesday when you help the helpless?”
“You’re off that list too; I stopped trying to help the hopeless. I’m more concerned with helping Java the Hut customers get plenty of coffee. Maybe a good energy boost is all the motivation they need to beat Elvis out of the building,” Veronica observes Lars’ rendition of Teddy Bear with a frown, “Oh, to run far away from nightmare visions of musical theatre.”
“Unless you want me to sing a special rendition of the cell block tango, I could really use your help.”
“How does that song go again? He had it coming, he had it coming, he only had himself to blame . . . ? I think those are my lines, not yours.”
“Sure, I deserve to be convicted. Every time I’m standing around on a bridge, thinking about how my girlfriends love to stab me in the back I deserve to get my ribs broken and charged with another murder I didn’t commit. If justice is that ironic, Alanis Morisette must truly be God: an angry, bitchy woman scorned. Kevin Smith is my prophet.”
“Community soap isn’t so bad, it’s all a jailhouse rock; don’t you believe the word of Elvis will deliver you from . . . well, you?”
“If by the word of Elvis you mean: ever since the world began, a hard headed woman’s been a thorn in the side of man?”
Veronica made a breathy sound of insult, grinning at his audacity. She pulls her tray to her chest and turns to leave.
“Somehow I don’t think that facial expression means you want to do the jailhouse rock with me.”
“But I do want to do something to you, preferably something long and painful.”
“Kinky but I’ll try anything once.”
“Wow, you’re odd numbered days aren’t nearly as convincing as they used to be. I think I’m growing immune to your particular combination of puppy eyes and bullshit.”
“Look, I’m running out of ideas and time - the PCHers found out Weevil was helping me-”
“I told you, you should have borrowed my horse’s ass costume; I had it specially made just for you.”
“And I appreciate how often you think of me so it would be nice if in my hour of need you could actually pretend to, I don’t know, care a little.”
“But I don’t want to lie to you, Logan, I’m working on a relationship of distance and honesty with you here. Distance being the most important part.”
“Would San Quentin be distance enough for you or were you hoping they’d reopen Alcatraz just for me?”
Veronica shrugged, though the humour on her face drained away to blankness. He leaned closer over the counter between them.
“You know I didn’t do this. Are you going to let me take the fall just because you love to hate me?” He stares at her steadily until she sighs and looks away, then his lips quirk. “Or is it hate to love me? I can never remember.”
Her walls come up just as quickly and she snaps at him: “You’re not my responsibility and if you spent as much time working at being an upstanding citizen as you do being a psychotic jackass, then maybe karma wouldn’t slap you around so much.”
“What’s that? Justice according to Earl Hickey?”
“What do you want me to do, Logan? Hire some thugs and make sure Dr. Griffith doesn’t say anything? In case you haven’t noticed Dr. Griffith works for the meanest Jets in Neptune so unless you can find your all singing, all dancing Sharks hiding amongst our karaoke patrons, I don’t know what to do for you. Bashing someone’s head in is your area of stupidity, not mine.”
“So there’s nothing you can do! You’re trying to tell me you don’t know more than me about digging through dirt?”
She turns to walk away but he follows her whispering fiercely.
“Both of us may have been raised by super dicks but it was in very different senses of the word. I don’t buy for one second that you’d lose your super sleuth powers at the exact moment I needed them. I’m about THIS close to doing the old threaten his daughter’s virtue routine.”
“Whose daughter?”
“Nip/Shmuck.”
“You’re unbelievable.” She glared.
“Her hair is soft and her eyes are oh so blue, she’s all the things a girl should be . . . but she’s not you.” He sighs. “I’d prefer if you had another way but - if there’s nothing else - I have full faith that my backup plan will work.”
“Why? Was she lobotomised? Because if you’re planning on pretending to be a sweet, charming suitor she’d have to be a special kind of stupid to fall for it - all evidence to the contrary.”
“I’m standing here telling you I’m going to seduce her and you think I’m going to play it sweet?” He laughs, “We both know that’s not what gets girls hot. I’m hoping she takes after daddy and wants to play doctor with me, making her even less like you and more fun for me. So? What do you say? Save a girl’s innocence, you know you want to.”
“Whoo, when they said you was high classed, well, that was just a lie.” Veronica grins sardonically. “So, what’s the plan? You get her to fall in love with you and then threaten to steal her crown if he doesn’t withdraw his testimony?”
“You’re euphemisms are so quaint it’s almost like you and Duncan never varnished each others crowns at all.” He grins. “You shouldn’t be surprised how protective daddies can be of their daughters; hey, if Aaron Echolls can get a little cave man over a tart like Trina, I’m sure Doc. Shlock will play right into my very capable hands. After all, he doesn’t want me to use them to varnish anything on his daughter’s person.”
“You are such a catch. Why did I throw you back again?”
“Because I’m an endangered species,” he puffed up, “and you’re environmentally conscientious.”
“No, it was either because you were too small or too poisonous . . . let me ruminate on that while you go far, far away.”
“Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true.”
Veronica glares at him. “Your knowledge of Elvis Presley lyrics is both frightening and enlightening.”
“The King and I have a lot in common.”
“Womanising jerks with drug problems destined to gain 500 pounds in later life before dying on the crapper?”
“Pretty, charismatic and doomed to die young after being abandoned by the love of our lives; you can’t have it all.” He sighed despondently. “Plus, I’m hoping when I’m dead you’ll continue to see me lurking around the Neptune Grand wearing spandex and sparkles.”
“You’ll be dead sooner rather than later at the rate you’re going.”
“I’ll pay you, Veronica, you don’t have to put up with me for free,” he says bitterly.
She shook her head; he just didn’t get it.
“Three thousand.”
“No!” And now she’s glaring.
“Four thousand!”
“This isn’t an auction!”
“Okay, five thousand, and for that price there better be a poll and a dance involved.”
“And in my capacity as your employee I’m supposed to advise you on where to shove said poll after you’re done dancing around it?”
“You said you’d take my case and you’ve been avoiding me for weeks, what is the problem? Since when do you slack off on the job? You’re supposed to tell people when you decide not to help them any more! I thought you were investigating Dr. Griffith!”
“You’re an inconsiderate jackass-”
“So I deserve this?”
“If I say ‘yes’ will you scamper away in emotional distress and let me work?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Uh, check your transcript; you’re the one who only comes to me when your tail is between your legs and you want something.”
He smirked, preparing to latch onto the double entendre in her own sentence but she raised her hand and glared. Cutting him off at the pass, he shrugged, it was too easy anyway.
“So what will it take for you to give me the something that I need this time?”
“Humiliation or begging. Or humiliating begging. Here’s my platter,” she holds it up with a grin. “Cough it up.”
“I didn’t realise humiliation came in solid form. Is this a Ten Things I Hate About You moment? Should I pour out my soul in iambic pentameter?”
She sighs, leans forward and intones seriously: “As long as every word rhymes with unicorn.”
“Should I write it in blood too? Wrap it around my kidney and ship it to you? Or should I wait for you at the bleachers with the Neptune High marching band?”
“I doubt your Heath Ledger impersonation is up to scratch.”
“Veronica!” Her boss snaps at her and points to the register where four customers are waiting. Veronica starts backing away from Logan.
“They won’t convict you. Why don’t you just try your luck in court?” She doesn’t mean it, only half believes it but she doesn’t have time to spend any more time thinking about this.
“Did you give that advice to Duncan?” He says bitterly and she glares, storming away from him through Java the Hut and away from the spluttering, indignant customers.
“Veronica!” Her boss snaps, striding after her.
“I’m going on my break, it’s two hours overdue!” Veronica glares fiercely over her shoulder stopping her boss in her tracks, even while she glares impotently back.
Logan’s eyes narrow on the bristling line of her shoulders. The ‘employees only’ door slams shut behind her and his mouth twists while his body pivots toward the stage.
“Who’s up next?” The MC shouted, offering the microphone up to the horde of Elvises like it was their next peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Logan pushed past the chick with her hair tucked up under an obscenely large Elvis wig and charging right up into the MC’s face.
“Um, actually, I think-”
“Always on My Mind,” Logan grits out menacingly as he snatches the microphone; his eyes were focused unwaveringly on the Employees Only door, stomach churning with her indifference and his own venom. He doesn’t notice the MC hesitate, nor turn and finally capitulate to his order, he only waits until the music starts and glances down at the monitor to make sure he got the words right.
“Here’s to public humiliation,” he raises his hand in faux cheers as a sardonically wide grin sparks across his face. Laughter sputters through the crowd and coffee cups rise to meet his toast.
“Maybe I didn’t treat you, quite as good as I should have,” he choked on the words, glaring at the door and almost shouting the tender lyrics as he willed her to hear him through the panneling. “Maybe I didn’t love you, quite as often as I could have. Little things I should have said and done, I just never took the time. But you were always on my mind…
Title: Cocktails and Dreams
Ship: General, Logan, Parker; Veronica, Mac (The extract is Veronica, Mac and Parker)
Summary: New years' resolutions between new friends.
Extract Rating: PG-13
Notes: This was meant to be a friendship fic, acting as a bridge for what I assumed would be a future romance between Parker and Logan. There would be no romance between them in this story but it deals with a lot of issues I had in regards to Logan, Parker, Mac and Logan/Veronica. I still intend to finish it and it's actually on my list of scheduled updates. The extract is going to read freakishly similar to what happened in Show Me The Monkey but it was written wayyyyy before that episode aired (check my LJ if you don't believe me). It actually made me happy for a tiny pocket of time that I'd got Parker's characterization so right....alas, that bubble burst soon after when they made Parker just as neurotically psycho as Veronica. Can't Logan ever date a normal person with normal expectations? Anyway, this fic is fun and light hearted, I can see why it got harder to write as season three went on but I still really like the dialogue in this fic and I hope you like it too.
Cocktails and Dreams
Two Weeks Earlier
This wasn’t the first time Veronica Mars’s eyes had been glazed over with horror but it was the first time she actually wanted a psychotic mass murderer and/or rapist to be the cause. Anything but facial products, pedicures and Spice Girls lunch box bonding.
At the moment she was sitting next to Cindy Mackenzie, both faces glowing with equal amounts of horrified incredulity as they stared at each other. Matching pink towels were wrapped around their heads, their toe nails were doubly oppressed - speared open with fluffy cotton buds and smeared with a sweet layer of baby’s breath nail polish - and their faces were ironed expressionless beneath an avocado based mask.
“Kill me,” Mac managed to wheeze out once she’d plied her lips apart.
“I’ve got no weapons on me and if I did . . . you’d be on your own. I’m far too selfish to let you go into the good night and leave me here, suffering alone.”
Mac glared. “See if I let you use my gadget know-how for free anytime soon, treacherous skank.”
“Free? Since when have your favours been free?”
“Since you set the example!” Mac peevishly whispered back, kicking Veronica’s foot with hers.
“Hey-hey-hey! Mac!” Parker appeared out of nowhere, causing Veronica and Mac to tense up in fright. Her blue eyes blazed out a fierce glare at her cowering roommate; both sets of eyes moved simultaneously to where Mac’s friendly toe jab had smeared her pearly white nail polish across her toe and Veronica’s ankle. “Now I’m going to have to start all over again!”
“Sorry…” Mac mumbled. “Bad girltime form. I haven’t had much practice. Footsies after painting nails is bad. I’ll make a note of it for next time.” This was said with another pointed look at Veronica who sent her a bubbly look back over Parker’s fussing head.
“Anyone would think girl bonding was an unnatural and unpleasant torture to both of you!” Parker shook her head in disbelief. “How else are we meant to vent about our communal romantic tragedies if not with each other?”
“We don’t . . .commune,” Mac’s lip curled as if the very thought was disturbing on a level she hadn’t contemplated yet.
“Clearly.” Parker’s deadpan annunciation made Veronica bristle when the girl’s eyes flicked condescendingly in her direction. She breathed in deep and tried to ignore the fact that Parker was back to the obnoxious bubbly personality she’d first encountered in Mac’s room all those months ago. She was starting to remember why she hadn’t missed this version of Parker at all, as terrible as that thought was.
“If you’d had a girl talk or two in your life maybe you’d realize that guy you were dating isn’t the only fish in the sea, and he wasn’t that great a fish to start with. All you did was bitch about him.”
Parker didn’t see Veronica’s glare narrow to the point her mask cracked in the corners of her eyes and across her forehead; she was too busy cleaning the messed up polish off Mac’s big toe nail. The pungent scent of alcohol singed the air between them for a moment as Veronica remained stonily silent in the background.
“She did not,” Mac said weakly.
“Well, she would have,” Parker continued on blasé, “but she doesn’t commune.” Finally noticing the unamused expression on Veronica’s face, she blushed and covered. “I’m not saying you wouldn’t have a right. The guy’s no catch, he was best friends with a . . .,” she breathed in, a coolness smothering and depersonalising her next words. “He basically forced you to release a serial rapist, Veronica. You can tell a lot about a person by the friends that they keep and by that standard he’s no catch.”
At that comment Veronica’s eyes seemed to deaden, soothed by some old weight that Parker knew to be accordance. The energy around Veronica’s formally happy self seemed to be entirely black now; Parker would have sworn on the record that she could see all the scars through the paste drying on her face, if she didn’t know they were all-but faded already.
Parker sent a guilty look to Mac, who smiled reassuringly back. Parker reached to clasp Veronica’s hand apologetically but as Veronica sensed the movement, she moved her hands and pointed at the box Parker had dumped in her haste to ream Mac about her reckless indifference to her freshly polished nails.
“What have you got there?” Veronica asked in her regular falsely enthused tone. Parker was used to it by now and she never said a word about it because she knew Veronica was trying to enjoy something she’d moved beyond years ago. Indulging Parker. That’s what friends do.
“Well,” Parker smiled, glad for the change of subject. “Since our love lives officially suck, and I have deemed myself our group’s designated hero,” at this comment Mac let out a scoff but Veronica laughed with relief and agreement that the title had been temporarily stolen from her. “My new mission will be to get us all back into the saddle.”
“I’m guessing when you say ‘saddle’ you aren’t talking about riding anything equestrian.”
“There are so many fun loving guys out there and we’re sitting in here wasting away because we got burned. Are we going to let them win?”
Veronica and Mac looked at each other, considered, then Mac turned back. “We’ll call it a draw.”
“Come on, girls! No one’s asking you to find the love of your life, just try the dating game. Ride that saddle! It’s fun!”
Veronica and Mac must have checked their enthusiasm at the door because they didn’t so much as blink at Parker’s encouraging grin.
She sighed in exasperation. “You may be more familiar with the word funk, located near our destination in your standard dictionary. You guys need to jump out of the latter and into the former, pronto, and I’m your guide.”
Parker giggled, grabbed the suggestion box Mac had once ranted to Veronica about and pushed it into the middle of their little triangle.
Ever since Parker had saved Veronica’s life two weeks ago, Mac had fallen into the routine of doing whatever Parker said: life was easier that way. It was too hard to avoid the ‘but I saved your best friend’s life card,’ she might as well capitulate before it was pulled and save herself some pride. In the spirit of this resolution, she sighed and picked up the box, then pulled out one of the questionnaires Parker had placed inside.
“Your Dream Guy…” she read with a frown. Her face contorted into a sarcastic expression of joy. “You mean all this time all I needed was this handy dandy check list and I could be marrying the love of my life by now? Oh, oh what joy is this!”
Parker snatched the questionnaire from Mac’s hand, whom was all too eager to relinquish it. Veronica was less inclined to take it when Parker offered it to her. She’d had enough loves of her life, thank you very much.
“I told you it’s not to find love, it’s to find fun.”
“Because we can’t have any kind of fun without the male species.” Veronica smirked as she took the list, perusing the options with amusement as she saw the questions ranged from ambitions to failings, from eye colour to toe length.
Mac picked up the box again, recognizing the pink glossy paper covering the box. “Isn’t that your sugges-”
“It’s our wish box,” Parker sent Mac a shut-up look and Mac smiled, nodding seriously at her friend. “You answer every question as honestly as you can and then you put it in the box-”
“But we know each other’s hand writing, it’s not like it will be anonymous-”
Parker gave a long suffering sigh and tossed the box over her shoulder. “Fine, you fill out the answers as honestly as possible and then we read them and see if any of our guy friends fulfil the criteria. Blind dates can be disastrous if you don’t do any recon first. It’s all about the research. Right, Veronica?”
Veronica looked horrified at the implication that she’d have any knowledge about blind dates one way or the other. “You’ve met all my friends. Wallace. Piz. See anything you like? If not you could always make a Willow of our friend Mac here.”
“You must have more friends than that.”
Mac and Veronica exchanged another look. After an extensive period of lip biting, Veronica bounced on her backside and let out an excited sound. “Ohh! Three! I got three! You don’t like bald, rugged, kinda stocky biker types do you? He wears leather like it’s skin.”
Parker wrinkled her nose with a frown while Mac grinned encouragingly, tossing in a thumbs up for comedic value.
“I don’t think so,” Parker said with distaste.
Veronica mock-sighed with disappointment. “And theirs could have been a special love,” Veronica pressed her pen against her lips as she tilted her head back in feigned wistfulness.
“So, this is a point form for future blind dates?” Mac asked, elbowing Veronica in the ribs to make her behave. “And you’re going to set us up with other people you know.”
“Exactly.”
Veronica and Mac exchanged another look for barely a second, before bursting out into laughter. “Pass!”
Title: Love Isn't Good Unless...
Ship: Hannah/Logan
Summary: Dr. Griffith doesn’t come barging into the Presidential Suite. Hannah’s perspective.
Extract Rating: R18+
Notes: Not much to say, er, almost smut? It's set during the infamous almost oral scene. This fic will be finished too and it's on my schedule.
Love Isn't Good Unless...
He looks up at her. She’s standing between his legs and leans down as he arches up to kiss her mouth. She kisses him twice, one short and sweet the second lingers a little longer and when she pulls back Logan’s eyes are shut and he trails her forward for a moment before blinking his eyes open and looking up at her again.
She wants to tell him she’s as entranced by his expressive face as he seems to be by her lips but the nerves in her throat clamp down on her giggles instead. She’d not bold enough for the words but she’s brave enough to act on the urge.
When she straddles him she slides one knee next to his right leg and moves her right over his waist. Sits down. It’s a sliding moment that brings their chests an embrace almost as intimate as the grip their lips currently have on each other.
They move simultaneously when she straddles him, his hands come up to her waist, she wraps her hands around his neck and kisses him firmly. He rocks backward with the force and kisses her, sliding his hand up the back of her singlet top.
Then he touches her face.
Their kiss breaks apart in the meaning of that touch.
She aches.
He stares at her intensely while she smiles sweetly down at him, rocking in an eager, impatient squirming motion. Logan pushes her shirt over her shoulder but doesn’t really remove it, just slides it down a bit. He’s distracted by those undulating hips - a former ballet dancer, he’s almost sure - and then she’s arching backwards and biting her lip. He moves forward to kiss her, helpless beneath that sweet lure.
She ends up getting his shirt off first. As she rocks back into the kiss above, she slides her hands under his shirt and yanks it up. Their kiss breaks so the cloth can wash away from them like a wave stripping the shore back to dampness. She dumps the shirt beside the couch and they grab each other’s faces straight away again, her hands twisting up into his hair, his tongue twisting around her mouth until she fears she’ll get knotted to him, never to be parted. Not tonight anyway.
Title: Straight Shooters: Story Five
Ship: Logan/Evie (OFC). Extract: Pacey, Logan
Summary: Poor little rich boy meet spoiled little heiress. This could be a match made in hell.
Extract Rating: PG-13
Notes: This extract is from a future story in the series of one shots (the first and second of which are on my update schedule). You'll find out Evie's character lives in New York and, since I know certain characters from DC moved to New York at the end of the series I saw this as my opportunity to work out issues I had with both shows. In this extract you'll see one of the more settled moments in my contrived Pacey/Logan friendship. I can't wait to write that and explore all these two boys could teach each other about growing up and learning that you can leave love behind.
Straight Shooters
Pacey is the first real friend he’s had since his friendship with Duncan evaporated. He feels like they’re strangely in sync despite the fact there is a world of experience, economics and social ladder climbing between them.
The one problem in their arrangement was Pacey’s background. Logan was convinced he must have come from the only backwater town in America that encouraged boys to express their innermost feelings. Every hour, on the hour in polysyllabic words. Logan has been tempted to punch him in the nose more times than he can count because he was not planning on becoming someone huggable to anybody but his girl.
“How long are you planning to mooch off other people’s dreams?” Right on cue, Pacey brings out the big questions, the ones Logan’s defences have been lax in protecting because his friends have always been indifferent or wilfully ignorant of their existence. He sends Pacey a surprised, hunted and annoyed glance.
After a moment of brown disdain glancing off blue chips of cheer, Logan says, “I like to think of it as making dreams come true. But I can always pull out if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“I’m going to ignore all homo-erotic subtext to that statement because I know you have certain suppressed desires that my brother is all too familiar with - I should give you his number, by the way-” Logan punched him in the arm and he sniggered, “and I’m not one to cast aspersions on my wealthy benefactors should they choose to waste their well earned coin on me.”
Logan snorted on that note.
“Fine then, dubiously inherited coin.”
They smack their beer bottles together with matching smirks, rocking with the waves that thrummed against the side of Logan’s yacht.
“But what about you?” Pacey continued.
“What about me?”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
Logan was silent for a long moment, peeling the label off his beer as a pensive frown settled on his face. In another moment Pacey might have warned him about the signs of sexual frustration - surely Evie wasn’t holding out on him - but then Logan breathed in and said, “I had dreams but...”
“Such is life.”
Logan rolled his eyes, enough aphoristic dialoguing.
“Now all I want to do is dance like a dervish,” he coos with a fey twirl of his wrist. Pacey grimaced and Logan chuckled, turning his wrist again until he was chugging from his bottle, trying to stem his laughter so he didn’t choke.
“Then you have some work to do my friend, I’ve seen you and Evie, and that’s not dancing. That’s something else entirely.”
Logan raised his eyebrow. “Your failure to identify that something else makes me wonder if the stick up your girlfriend’s ass is some kind of chastity plug.”
“There’s a line, Logan.” The warning in Pacey’s close was clear and crisp.
“And I leapt like the dazzling dervish I am right over it,” Logan beamed, relaxing back in his seat. “Keeps you on edge, doesn’t it?” Pacey, unable to maintain his pensive glare, returned Logan’s easy going smile. “See? All my dreams have come to fruition. There is nothing left to do but eat, drink, dance and be merry.”
“Don’t forget the importance of spreading your wealth.”
“I’m rethinking that one by the minute.”
“Come on, you know I’m only here for the money,” Pacey shook his head pityingly, “without me you’d have no one to espouse your thoughts on the meaning of life to and then where would you be?”
Logan kept staring at Pacey’s teasing smile and then he turned back to his view of the setting sun. “Like I said, I’m rethinking it.”
Title: When You Were Mine
Ship: Michael/Liz (Extract: Rath/Liz)
Summary: The Pod Squad dive across time and space to uncover the history of the royal four. When Antar turns out to be more than any of them expected they will all make mistakes and change the past that led them to their futures.
Notes: Okay, so the cliffhanger I left you guys on was a cruel, cruel tease. Here's the kiss you were waiting on!
When You Were Mine
Her hands automatically shifted and clenched, running up into his hair and pulling him into her, his arm wrapped around her waist lifting her into his chest and everything in two bodies felt drawn inwards toward the friction of one fantastic knot. His tongue swept inside her mouth and her eyes slid closed, hearing the thrum of an approaching invasion humming and heating her lips through his. She gasped and tried to breathe and then gave up and couldn’t care less as something opened and crackled and shortened the distance between them until she could feel herself flying out of her skin, more than naked, more than air, more than power and lightning and she wanted to laugh but that would take moving and this pleasure was unreal in its intensity, like a fantasy, a dream-
Title: Divided Loyalties
Ship: VM: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars
Extract Rating: R (More for what's alluded to than actually in the chapter)
Summary: Veronica’s reality in Neptune was poised to implode long before Lilly Kane’s head was smashed in. The clock is winding back to that final week but this time Lilly Kane will survive. Who says Veronica’s world would have been a better place if her best friend was still alive? Bad blood will out, secrets will surface and the Fab Four as they know it will disintegrate. The end starts now.
Notes: This extract is two chapters away from being posted. It's the part I was most looking forward to writing and had written before most of the filler chapters were done. It's also the part of the chapter I think most people were most desperate for. Just in case I do decide to never take up writing this story again, I wanted to post part of this chapter, and I'm glad this meme gave me the chance to. I hope you like it straggling LVers who haven't defriended me yet ;)
Divided Loyalties
“Everything is falling apart,” she said, legs still twitching anxiously on the cool plastic of the familiar hospital chair. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
She didn’t look at him and he didn’t look at her; both stared fixedly at the anonymous faces in the waiting room. No place was more aptly named for it’s all that they could do. It seemed that they were always waiting for Lilly to wake up, out here in the darkness on their uncomfortable seats together.
“Lilly and your dad, and Duncan and you and . . . my mom!” She continued mumbling, mostly to herself since as far as she could tell Logan wasn’t listening.
But he looked at her when she said that and she tentatively returned the gaze, tears starting to roll down her cheeks. His gaze was calm and centred and heavy and she felt like he was pressing her down, closing his fists about her jaw to force those forbidden words up and out of her grasping throat.
“She’s gone, Logan . . . ” Veronica choked. “She just left . . .me. My dad . . .” She swallowed, shaking her head against an embarrassed laugh.
What did he care? His dad fucked his girlfriend before trying to kill her. Then said girlfriend almost got herself killed again and her inconsiderate best friend had called him to act as an impromptu ambulance. He was the last person in the world she should be whining woe-is-me to.
He said nothing for a long moment and regret welled up with her embarrassment, defences stiffening her back against the scathing refutation of her own issues she was expecting. But he just continued to look at her until she blushed, and broke on a laugh, trying to escape from the moment that was suffocating her. Willing him to say something.
“Did I ever introduce my dad to your mom?”
Veronica snorted. “I think she’s a little beneath his dignity.”
“Dignity? I’m an Echolls that word isn’t in our family dictionary.”
Veronica sighed, too exhausted to hold up her end of the banter at this juncture. No matter, Logan was well versed at quipping with himself.
“Pity. They’re so perfect for each other; maybe they would have fallen in love…” She glared at him, disgusted, but he just smiled and continued, “we could have moved in together like some wacky sitcom family.” His arm stretched behind her on the chair, a mischievous grin lighting up his face as he tugged her into his chest and nuzzled her head while she feigned squirming away. All the time he whispered through giggles. “Every few nights I could sneak into your room and teach you to run through the bases backwards. Teach you the wonders of forbidden love while mom and pop are busy being bad parents. I’ve always wanted to explore what that Brady really would have done to Marsha in the era of free love.”
She was glaring but as he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, laughter split open and dissolved some of those tears. “And maybe we could crawl up into the attic and plant some flowers,” she indulged.
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“That would never happen,” she said seriously, arching her neck to look up at him as she rested on his shoulder. “You’re not my type.”
He smiled at her widely in appreciation, then turned away and pulled his face into a faux displeased frown. “That means this whole set up Lilly staged to play matchmaker was for nothing and the date is officially over.” He swung up to his feet abruptly and held out his hand as if he was offering to take a burden he’d do anything to be without. “Come on, Veronica Mars, I’ll lug your ungrateful ass home.”
“No, I’m going to stay. Someone should be here when she wakes up; she needs me.”
“No, she doesn’t. She’s unconscious and back amongst those hot doctors who can’t wait to pamper her again. She doesn’t need you. I need to get you home before that tracking device your dad attached to your ass kicks in and he finds you with me looking all dishevelled.” His hands hovered over the proof of that dishevelment from her ragged, alcohol crusted hair to the dress that was so askew it was veering on indecent. “Maybe he’ll get the wrong idea and think I’m your type.”
Veronica looked down to conceal her amused smirk then finally placed her hand in his. “Okay, I’ll go with you, but if anyone asks it was my idea.”
He squeezed her hand, tilting his head in wait for the punch line he knew was coming.
“I don’t want anyone to think I gave in to one of your arguments. They might direct me to the pscyh ward.”
“I always knew I made you crazy, Mars,” he drawled with relish, tugging on her arm as he walked backwards.
She made a protesting sound when his pace almost yanked her shoulder out of its socket but he didn’t slow down merely laughing and pulling harder until she jogged to match his pace, following his lead through the halls and away from the bland, clean smell of the hospital corridors.
The ride was awkward with a new strange energy neither recognized suffocating the air inside the XTerra. They barely spoke to each other, or looked at each other, all the way back to the club.
They pulled up in the alley entrance way, about twenty feet from her LeBaron and fifty from the VIP line. Veronica glared when she heard their laughter through the glass, running disdainful eyes over the bouncer as he pressed his large, sausage-fingered hand to the hip of a girl flashing a coy smile his way, gold hot pants glinting beneath his fingers. For a moment the pulsing sounds of R’n’B whispered a siren call to those still shivering in wait in the public cue, then the doors closed trapping the music and smoke inside again.
“I can take you home,” she flinched at the sound of his voice, “you can pick up the car tomorrow.”
“I didn’t drink anything,” she whispered back in confusion.
“Wow, a blonde with a brain. You’re the eighth wonder of the world, Veronica Mars.”
She looked over at him seriously; he was staring at her car through his windsheild, hands resting laconically against his door and the steering wheel. He moved slightly and - fearful that he was about to look her way - she skittered her gaze, focusing on the shivering bare legs in the line outside her window once more.
“Just because you’re not drunk doesn’t mean you should be driving.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she gritted.
“Okay.”
She still didn’t move from the vehicle and Logan let her continue to wait and breathe until he couldn’t talk the stasis any more.
He opened his door, walked to the passenger side, holding her anxious gaze the entire way until he opened her door.
“It was very impolite of your escort to leave a lady waiting; doors are heavy things, and are meant to be dealt with by men.”
“Should I sit here and wait for one?” She returned with a wobbly smile.
Relieved that she wasn’t as shaken as he thought she was, he grinned. “Get out.” He flicked his head, gesturing toward her car.
She slid to her feet, lowering her head when he reached out to steady her by the waist.
“You okay?” His voice was soft, softer like all muted illusions often gendered by the night.
She nodded and looked up from under her lashes to reassure him with a steady gaze.
He grinned, rocked back on his legs, closed her door and shuffled a few steps away. The quiet between them was awkward once more. With a breathy laugh, he gestured to her outfit. “I like this new look.”
“Lilly dressed me.”
“Must be why I like it,” he said bitterly.
In the ensuing pause, she stared at the curve of his cheek trying to find the courage to lift her eyes that extra inch.
“I wouldn’t worry, Mars, you’ll get the hang of dressing yourself one day; one leg at a time, one arm at a time but you won’t have to worry about laces,” he gestured to the strappy shoes still strangling her feet. “Sassy girls are all about buckles and slip ons, laces are for geeks.”
Veronica’s face twisted in confusion. “I’ve never heard you babble before. I mean, you never shut up, but I’ve never heard you babble so . . . redundantly.”
He blushed. “Sorry to disappoint you. I won’t say another word if my lady doesn’t want me to. I’ve already rescued you with my noble steed, why stop being chivalrous now when I haven’t even got any under the bra action?”
She shoved him hard, causing him to stumble two steps backwards before he steadied himself again, laughing at the fierce spark in her eyes.
“Chivalry just rolled over in its grave and now silence would be good!”
He grinned and zipped a line across his lips, feigning locking them tight to mute that displeasing mouth.
“If I keep the key does that mean I won’t have to listen to your inane excuse for conversation any more?”
He pointed to his mouth and smirked as if to say ‘come and get it’. Coyly, she tilted her head and then pretended to slowly extract the key from the closed line of his mouth, brushing his lips with her fingers as she went. Logan stilled, meeting her eyes with a strange fearful glint that made Veronica nervously draw her hand away and wipe it on her skirt as if he’d moistened those digits with a mouth that had never opened.
With shaking hands, joke long evaporated, Veronica continued the mime by placing the key in her clutch purse and snapped it shut theatrically. “I dub thee monkey Speak No Evil.”
Logan said nothing even though she waited expectantly for his reply. When the laughter started to enter his eyes, she finally sighed; well, it was officially no fun when she won a battle of wills with Logan Echolls. He waved his hand in front of him for her to precede him, keeping his mouth tightly closed as their game dictated.
She walked toward her car and he followed her closely, glaring over his shoulder when a whistle seemed directed at Veronica. It wasn’t, but Logan stepped closer to her nonetheless, causing Veronica to bristle with indignation. She wasn’t helpless and she wasn’t drugged, if she wanted to clutch on to him like some pathetic damsel in distress, she’d do it.
When they arrived at her car, Logan automatically opened the front door for her. He hadn’t looked at her since the errant whistle had struck across his nerve endings like a whip, hard eyes still focused on the straggling PCHers that had failed to follow their leader home.
Veronica rolled her eyes but said nothing, tonight was not the night to say things like that didn’t happen in Neptune. She chucked her purse on to the passenger seat and the thud caught his attention, finally brining him back to her from whichever violent place in his head he’d been visiting. He smiled down at her, acting as if he’d never been distracted from her, acting as if he’d never perceived a threat of any kind (make believe or not).
“Are you going to visit her tomorrow?” She whispered for wont of anything better to say to break the silence.
Logan said nothing.
She sighed and bounced back against the door with boredom causing Logan to laugh silently.
“Okay, stop submitting to my rule, it’s disturbing.”
Logan pulled a puppy face, holding his hands up in an innocent, pleading gesture.
“Your halo is slipping quickly past your forehead and will be strangling you any moment now.”
He crossed his chest quickly, praying to save himself from such a horrible fate. She punched his shoulder again, causing laughter to spill from his lips, loud and crackling in the air. She sent him a smug smile, pleased to have a noise at least to keep her company. A grin broke, uninhibited across his face, eyes skittering over her features as if he had found something infinitely entertaining in that defiant sparkle. Veronica felt something inside her lurch at the sight of that shining stretch of teeth; teeth that had seemed like an alligators jaws only a week ago, now seemed anything but.
Her smile melted away, guilt centring heavily in her gut. They should not be smiling so brightly - not a care in the world! - when she’d said only moments ago believed she’d never had so many of these things adults called ‘cares’. She’d never felt so burdened, so alone and so disillusioned. The more he made her laugh, the more she knew she’d hate herself tomorrow because she was forgetting second to second all that had happened in the hours preceding.
Most of all she wanted to thank him, for doing something she should have never asked him to do, for being there when it wasn’t his responsibility, when it should have been anyone’s but his responsibility.
She stiffened and opened her mouth, hand kinetically stuck to her hip as if she was halfway to grasping his arm. Her courage failed, words tied up in knots above her tongue. She looked up at him looming above her, leaning now with a hand on her door, framing her in and trapping her against the open driver side door. He was leaning, into her space, and it made it that much harder to say words of gratitude to someone she’d never spoken them to before. She supposed it shouldn’t be this hard when they’d been friends for two years, but it was.
“Logan . . . ” Thank you, was the thought but instead the words jumbled and translated on her lips into action. She jerked forwards and pressed a quick, chaste and awkward kiss to his lips when she tripped mid-action and fell against his face. Her hand barely touched his shoulder to steady herself, fingers brushing the side of his face and then sliding away - jerking bodily back - as she stared wide-eyed up at the boy’s equally stunned face.
She’d never been so grateful he’d let her steal his right to speak.
He stiffened, still leaning over her, and she watched his fingers curl into a bloodless fist against the top of her door. A second passed in which she blinked and might have started to do something-but then he ducked closer, pulled her in to him by the small of her back and bent down smoothly to kiss her with intention purely shining from his open eyes.
Veronica stiffened, but made not a sound, not even a breath, for nothing was getting into his lungs save Logan’s exhalations as they panted into her open lips. Her hands clenched awkwardly by her side then moved behind her, twisting to grip the rubber lining of her door, then shooting up to wrap behind his neck, over his shoulders because it was more comfortable that way. She could collapse and have him bear her weight, melt her torso into his and just drift away on a kiss that was nowhere in the vicinity of platonic.
He blocked her in with no escape except to lose her legs and collapse backwards onto the driver’s seat (and who said that wasn’t an option?). He kissed her, really kissed her, kissed her in that deep untamed way she’d always found so utterly disgusting when she saw his lips welded against Lilly’s.
But no-a supernova of no.
Their teeth clacked against each other and their hands awkwardly moved against each other: through hair, around waists, up backs. Their bodies bumped and jagged trying to adjust to the alien height difference; this wasn’t the body they’d trained themselves to kiss with instinctive precision. But then Logan bent his knees and pressed up against the small of her back, lifting her slightly into his chest while his other hand firmly clasped her neck and pulled her into a kiss that was perfectly deep and slow and rhythmic.
She was concentrating so intensely on this new perfect pattern being drawn by his lips against hers that her forehead frowned in an effort to memorialize this feeling while staying in them so she could experience every second. She let her body melt into the ridges of his, tangled a fist into his hair and held on, rocking with his whole body. Her hips seemed to meet the right contours of his, everything clicking into place, everything hot and smooth and wonderful at the same time their mouths found the right rhythm and the perfectly wrong place to enjoy it.
“You’re not going to call me are you?”
“Woman, we have unfinished business; why would I leave myself high and dry?”
A high pitched laugh pierced through the rushing silence pounding past both their ears. Their lips broke and it was like a sound proof bubble bursting, the busy cacophony of the night rushing in from all sides as they gazed at each other wide eyed and fearful.
Logan still hadn’t said a word and she didn’t want to hear one word, not a syllable. She wanted to lock her own lips, swallow deeply and forget this hormonal accident.
“I-I have to go.”
Logan moved as if to intercept her, but this time she told her knees to bend and she collapsed back on to the driver’s seat behind her, swinging her legs into the car. She reached out to pull the door shut but Logan was holding it again as if he’d robotically began to close it for her. Except it wasn’t closing, he’d paused halfway through it and was now keeping the door locked open in his grasp. Veronica was left hanging out the door, gripping the handle and looking up at him from beneath her wildly tussled hair pleadingly with those big, fearful eyes.
After a moment, he let go.
When you see this, post a little weensy excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
Title: Jailhouse Rock
Ship: Logan/Veronica, Logan/Hannah, Veronica/Duncan
Snippet Rating: PG-13
Summary: Logan confronts Veronica at Java the Hut about why she inexplicably dropped his case, now that his inside connection with the PCHers has fallen through.
Notes: I started this LV fic right before my thesis went crazy. It was originally meant for the karaoke smutathon at loveathons. Set between 2.12 and 2.13 (though it includes some spoilers from 2.17). Originally it was meant to be a fun spot-the-Elvis lyric game but I put them in italics so it's pretty obvious now. I hope the LV readers on my list like it, as I read through it before I remembered how much I used to love this ship even though it's set in a time and about a subject that eventually made me give up entirely on Veronica (and this fic). The summary is pretty pointed about what that issue was. The fic most likely won't be continued but I thought some of you might like to read what I have which was the best part of the concept IMO anyway, who needs smut?
Jailhouse Rock
The last thing a girl wants to do after her boyfriend flees the country with his dead ex-girlfriend’s baby is listen to some Lloyd Dobler wannabe sing about how they’re so lonely they could die.
It was Karaoke night at Java the Hut and Veronica Mars was in the unenviable position of working a double shift through All-Elvis-All-Night. Everywhere she looked were bad wigs, white spandex, peanut butter and bacon sandwich specials and Elvis impersonators cementing her opinion that the King was really dead (or at least, he’d want to be if he had to work this shift). After all, Veronica thought as the lanky boy on stage went into a trademark quasi-epileptic arm swing, if it were her songs being massacred one after the other she’d come out of hiding to karate chop the guy with the microphone. Alas, there’d been no signs of the King so far, just a bunch of hapless fans checking their audience into the earache hotel.
“So Weevil stopped returning my calls.”
The voice was not a welcome reprieve from her hunka-hunka-burning nightmare.
“Aww, did you boys break up? And I thought you were M.F.E.O.”
“I told that boy that I’m the only one allowed the pleasure of punching him out and would you believe Dick saw him getting off the school bus today with a couple of brand new shiners? He’s been cheating on me. It’s not exactly a new experience, I grant you, but I thought it would be different this time.”
“Did you come here looking for romantic advice? I’m sorry Tuesday is Karaoke night; Monday is ‘Romantic Help for Loveless Louses’ night.” She clicks her fingers. “Double check the schedule next time.”
“So I should come back on Wednesday when you help the helpless?”
“You’re off that list too; I stopped trying to help the hopeless. I’m more concerned with helping Java the Hut customers get plenty of coffee. Maybe a good energy boost is all the motivation they need to beat Elvis out of the building,” Veronica observes Lars’ rendition of Teddy Bear with a frown, “Oh, to run far away from nightmare visions of musical theatre.”
“Unless you want me to sing a special rendition of the cell block tango, I could really use your help.”
“How does that song go again? He had it coming, he had it coming, he only had himself to blame . . . ? I think those are my lines, not yours.”
“Sure, I deserve to be convicted. Every time I’m standing around on a bridge, thinking about how my girlfriends love to stab me in the back I deserve to get my ribs broken and charged with another murder I didn’t commit. If justice is that ironic, Alanis Morisette must truly be God: an angry, bitchy woman scorned. Kevin Smith is my prophet.”
“Community soap isn’t so bad, it’s all a jailhouse rock; don’t you believe the word of Elvis will deliver you from . . . well, you?”
“If by the word of Elvis you mean: ever since the world began, a hard headed woman’s been a thorn in the side of man?”
Veronica made a breathy sound of insult, grinning at his audacity. She pulls her tray to her chest and turns to leave.
“Somehow I don’t think that facial expression means you want to do the jailhouse rock with me.”
“But I do want to do something to you, preferably something long and painful.”
“Kinky but I’ll try anything once.”
“Wow, you’re odd numbered days aren’t nearly as convincing as they used to be. I think I’m growing immune to your particular combination of puppy eyes and bullshit.”
“Look, I’m running out of ideas and time - the PCHers found out Weevil was helping me-”
“I told you, you should have borrowed my horse’s ass costume; I had it specially made just for you.”
“And I appreciate how often you think of me so it would be nice if in my hour of need you could actually pretend to, I don’t know, care a little.”
“But I don’t want to lie to you, Logan, I’m working on a relationship of distance and honesty with you here. Distance being the most important part.”
“Would San Quentin be distance enough for you or were you hoping they’d reopen Alcatraz just for me?”
Veronica shrugged, though the humour on her face drained away to blankness. He leaned closer over the counter between them.
“You know I didn’t do this. Are you going to let me take the fall just because you love to hate me?” He stares at her steadily until she sighs and looks away, then his lips quirk. “Or is it hate to love me? I can never remember.”
Her walls come up just as quickly and she snaps at him: “You’re not my responsibility and if you spent as much time working at being an upstanding citizen as you do being a psychotic jackass, then maybe karma wouldn’t slap you around so much.”
“What’s that? Justice according to Earl Hickey?”
“What do you want me to do, Logan? Hire some thugs and make sure Dr. Griffith doesn’t say anything? In case you haven’t noticed Dr. Griffith works for the meanest Jets in Neptune so unless you can find your all singing, all dancing Sharks hiding amongst our karaoke patrons, I don’t know what to do for you. Bashing someone’s head in is your area of stupidity, not mine.”
“So there’s nothing you can do! You’re trying to tell me you don’t know more than me about digging through dirt?”
She turns to walk away but he follows her whispering fiercely.
“Both of us may have been raised by super dicks but it was in very different senses of the word. I don’t buy for one second that you’d lose your super sleuth powers at the exact moment I needed them. I’m about THIS close to doing the old threaten his daughter’s virtue routine.”
“Whose daughter?”
“Nip/Shmuck.”
“You’re unbelievable.” She glared.
“Her hair is soft and her eyes are oh so blue, she’s all the things a girl should be . . . but she’s not you.” He sighs. “I’d prefer if you had another way but - if there’s nothing else - I have full faith that my backup plan will work.”
“Why? Was she lobotomised? Because if you’re planning on pretending to be a sweet, charming suitor she’d have to be a special kind of stupid to fall for it - all evidence to the contrary.”
“I’m standing here telling you I’m going to seduce her and you think I’m going to play it sweet?” He laughs, “We both know that’s not what gets girls hot. I’m hoping she takes after daddy and wants to play doctor with me, making her even less like you and more fun for me. So? What do you say? Save a girl’s innocence, you know you want to.”
“Whoo, when they said you was high classed, well, that was just a lie.” Veronica grins sardonically. “So, what’s the plan? You get her to fall in love with you and then threaten to steal her crown if he doesn’t withdraw his testimony?”
“You’re euphemisms are so quaint it’s almost like you and Duncan never varnished each others crowns at all.” He grins. “You shouldn’t be surprised how protective daddies can be of their daughters; hey, if Aaron Echolls can get a little cave man over a tart like Trina, I’m sure Doc. Shlock will play right into my very capable hands. After all, he doesn’t want me to use them to varnish anything on his daughter’s person.”
“You are such a catch. Why did I throw you back again?”
“Because I’m an endangered species,” he puffed up, “and you’re environmentally conscientious.”
“No, it was either because you were too small or too poisonous . . . let me ruminate on that while you go far, far away.”
“Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true.”
Veronica glares at him. “Your knowledge of Elvis Presley lyrics is both frightening and enlightening.”
“The King and I have a lot in common.”
“Womanising jerks with drug problems destined to gain 500 pounds in later life before dying on the crapper?”
“Pretty, charismatic and doomed to die young after being abandoned by the love of our lives; you can’t have it all.” He sighed despondently. “Plus, I’m hoping when I’m dead you’ll continue to see me lurking around the Neptune Grand wearing spandex and sparkles.”
“You’ll be dead sooner rather than later at the rate you’re going.”
“I’ll pay you, Veronica, you don’t have to put up with me for free,” he says bitterly.
She shook her head; he just didn’t get it.
“Three thousand.”
“No!” And now she’s glaring.
“Four thousand!”
“This isn’t an auction!”
“Okay, five thousand, and for that price there better be a poll and a dance involved.”
“And in my capacity as your employee I’m supposed to advise you on where to shove said poll after you’re done dancing around it?”
“You said you’d take my case and you’ve been avoiding me for weeks, what is the problem? Since when do you slack off on the job? You’re supposed to tell people when you decide not to help them any more! I thought you were investigating Dr. Griffith!”
“You’re an inconsiderate jackass-”
“So I deserve this?”
“If I say ‘yes’ will you scamper away in emotional distress and let me work?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Uh, check your transcript; you’re the one who only comes to me when your tail is between your legs and you want something.”
He smirked, preparing to latch onto the double entendre in her own sentence but she raised her hand and glared. Cutting him off at the pass, he shrugged, it was too easy anyway.
“So what will it take for you to give me the something that I need this time?”
“Humiliation or begging. Or humiliating begging. Here’s my platter,” she holds it up with a grin. “Cough it up.”
“I didn’t realise humiliation came in solid form. Is this a Ten Things I Hate About You moment? Should I pour out my soul in iambic pentameter?”
She sighs, leans forward and intones seriously: “As long as every word rhymes with unicorn.”
“Should I write it in blood too? Wrap it around my kidney and ship it to you? Or should I wait for you at the bleachers with the Neptune High marching band?”
“I doubt your Heath Ledger impersonation is up to scratch.”
“Veronica!” Her boss snaps at her and points to the register where four customers are waiting. Veronica starts backing away from Logan.
“They won’t convict you. Why don’t you just try your luck in court?” She doesn’t mean it, only half believes it but she doesn’t have time to spend any more time thinking about this.
“Did you give that advice to Duncan?” He says bitterly and she glares, storming away from him through Java the Hut and away from the spluttering, indignant customers.
“Veronica!” Her boss snaps, striding after her.
“I’m going on my break, it’s two hours overdue!” Veronica glares fiercely over her shoulder stopping her boss in her tracks, even while she glares impotently back.
Logan’s eyes narrow on the bristling line of her shoulders. The ‘employees only’ door slams shut behind her and his mouth twists while his body pivots toward the stage.
“Who’s up next?” The MC shouted, offering the microphone up to the horde of Elvises like it was their next peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Logan pushed past the chick with her hair tucked up under an obscenely large Elvis wig and charging right up into the MC’s face.
“Um, actually, I think-”
“Always on My Mind,” Logan grits out menacingly as he snatches the microphone; his eyes were focused unwaveringly on the Employees Only door, stomach churning with her indifference and his own venom. He doesn’t notice the MC hesitate, nor turn and finally capitulate to his order, he only waits until the music starts and glances down at the monitor to make sure he got the words right.
“Here’s to public humiliation,” he raises his hand in faux cheers as a sardonically wide grin sparks across his face. Laughter sputters through the crowd and coffee cups rise to meet his toast.
“Maybe I didn’t treat you, quite as good as I should have,” he choked on the words, glaring at the door and almost shouting the tender lyrics as he willed her to hear him through the panneling. “Maybe I didn’t love you, quite as often as I could have. Little things I should have said and done, I just never took the time. But you were always on my mind…
Title: Cocktails and Dreams
Ship: General, Logan, Parker; Veronica, Mac (The extract is Veronica, Mac and Parker)
Summary: New years' resolutions between new friends.
Extract Rating: PG-13
Notes: This was meant to be a friendship fic, acting as a bridge for what I assumed would be a future romance between Parker and Logan. There would be no romance between them in this story but it deals with a lot of issues I had in regards to Logan, Parker, Mac and Logan/Veronica. I still intend to finish it and it's actually on my list of scheduled updates. The extract is going to read freakishly similar to what happened in Show Me The Monkey but it was written wayyyyy before that episode aired (check my LJ if you don't believe me). It actually made me happy for a tiny pocket of time that I'd got Parker's characterization so right....alas, that bubble burst soon after when they made Parker just as neurotically psycho as Veronica. Can't Logan ever date a normal person with normal expectations? Anyway, this fic is fun and light hearted, I can see why it got harder to write as season three went on but I still really like the dialogue in this fic and I hope you like it too.
Cocktails and Dreams
Two Weeks Earlier
This wasn’t the first time Veronica Mars’s eyes had been glazed over with horror but it was the first time she actually wanted a psychotic mass murderer and/or rapist to be the cause. Anything but facial products, pedicures and Spice Girls lunch box bonding.
At the moment she was sitting next to Cindy Mackenzie, both faces glowing with equal amounts of horrified incredulity as they stared at each other. Matching pink towels were wrapped around their heads, their toe nails were doubly oppressed - speared open with fluffy cotton buds and smeared with a sweet layer of baby’s breath nail polish - and their faces were ironed expressionless beneath an avocado based mask.
“Kill me,” Mac managed to wheeze out once she’d plied her lips apart.
“I’ve got no weapons on me and if I did . . . you’d be on your own. I’m far too selfish to let you go into the good night and leave me here, suffering alone.”
Mac glared. “See if I let you use my gadget know-how for free anytime soon, treacherous skank.”
“Free? Since when have your favours been free?”
“Since you set the example!” Mac peevishly whispered back, kicking Veronica’s foot with hers.
“Hey-hey-hey! Mac!” Parker appeared out of nowhere, causing Veronica and Mac to tense up in fright. Her blue eyes blazed out a fierce glare at her cowering roommate; both sets of eyes moved simultaneously to where Mac’s friendly toe jab had smeared her pearly white nail polish across her toe and Veronica’s ankle. “Now I’m going to have to start all over again!”
“Sorry…” Mac mumbled. “Bad girltime form. I haven’t had much practice. Footsies after painting nails is bad. I’ll make a note of it for next time.” This was said with another pointed look at Veronica who sent her a bubbly look back over Parker’s fussing head.
“Anyone would think girl bonding was an unnatural and unpleasant torture to both of you!” Parker shook her head in disbelief. “How else are we meant to vent about our communal romantic tragedies if not with each other?”
“We don’t . . .commune,” Mac’s lip curled as if the very thought was disturbing on a level she hadn’t contemplated yet.
“Clearly.” Parker’s deadpan annunciation made Veronica bristle when the girl’s eyes flicked condescendingly in her direction. She breathed in deep and tried to ignore the fact that Parker was back to the obnoxious bubbly personality she’d first encountered in Mac’s room all those months ago. She was starting to remember why she hadn’t missed this version of Parker at all, as terrible as that thought was.
“If you’d had a girl talk or two in your life maybe you’d realize that guy you were dating isn’t the only fish in the sea, and he wasn’t that great a fish to start with. All you did was bitch about him.”
Parker didn’t see Veronica’s glare narrow to the point her mask cracked in the corners of her eyes and across her forehead; she was too busy cleaning the messed up polish off Mac’s big toe nail. The pungent scent of alcohol singed the air between them for a moment as Veronica remained stonily silent in the background.
“She did not,” Mac said weakly.
“Well, she would have,” Parker continued on blasé, “but she doesn’t commune.” Finally noticing the unamused expression on Veronica’s face, she blushed and covered. “I’m not saying you wouldn’t have a right. The guy’s no catch, he was best friends with a . . .,” she breathed in, a coolness smothering and depersonalising her next words. “He basically forced you to release a serial rapist, Veronica. You can tell a lot about a person by the friends that they keep and by that standard he’s no catch.”
At that comment Veronica’s eyes seemed to deaden, soothed by some old weight that Parker knew to be accordance. The energy around Veronica’s formally happy self seemed to be entirely black now; Parker would have sworn on the record that she could see all the scars through the paste drying on her face, if she didn’t know they were all-but faded already.
Parker sent a guilty look to Mac, who smiled reassuringly back. Parker reached to clasp Veronica’s hand apologetically but as Veronica sensed the movement, she moved her hands and pointed at the box Parker had dumped in her haste to ream Mac about her reckless indifference to her freshly polished nails.
“What have you got there?” Veronica asked in her regular falsely enthused tone. Parker was used to it by now and she never said a word about it because she knew Veronica was trying to enjoy something she’d moved beyond years ago. Indulging Parker. That’s what friends do.
“Well,” Parker smiled, glad for the change of subject. “Since our love lives officially suck, and I have deemed myself our group’s designated hero,” at this comment Mac let out a scoff but Veronica laughed with relief and agreement that the title had been temporarily stolen from her. “My new mission will be to get us all back into the saddle.”
“I’m guessing when you say ‘saddle’ you aren’t talking about riding anything equestrian.”
“There are so many fun loving guys out there and we’re sitting in here wasting away because we got burned. Are we going to let them win?”
Veronica and Mac looked at each other, considered, then Mac turned back. “We’ll call it a draw.”
“Come on, girls! No one’s asking you to find the love of your life, just try the dating game. Ride that saddle! It’s fun!”
Veronica and Mac must have checked their enthusiasm at the door because they didn’t so much as blink at Parker’s encouraging grin.
She sighed in exasperation. “You may be more familiar with the word funk, located near our destination in your standard dictionary. You guys need to jump out of the latter and into the former, pronto, and I’m your guide.”
Parker giggled, grabbed the suggestion box Mac had once ranted to Veronica about and pushed it into the middle of their little triangle.
Ever since Parker had saved Veronica’s life two weeks ago, Mac had fallen into the routine of doing whatever Parker said: life was easier that way. It was too hard to avoid the ‘but I saved your best friend’s life card,’ she might as well capitulate before it was pulled and save herself some pride. In the spirit of this resolution, she sighed and picked up the box, then pulled out one of the questionnaires Parker had placed inside.
“Your Dream Guy…” she read with a frown. Her face contorted into a sarcastic expression of joy. “You mean all this time all I needed was this handy dandy check list and I could be marrying the love of my life by now? Oh, oh what joy is this!”
Parker snatched the questionnaire from Mac’s hand, whom was all too eager to relinquish it. Veronica was less inclined to take it when Parker offered it to her. She’d had enough loves of her life, thank you very much.
“I told you it’s not to find love, it’s to find fun.”
“Because we can’t have any kind of fun without the male species.” Veronica smirked as she took the list, perusing the options with amusement as she saw the questions ranged from ambitions to failings, from eye colour to toe length.
Mac picked up the box again, recognizing the pink glossy paper covering the box. “Isn’t that your sugges-”
“It’s our wish box,” Parker sent Mac a shut-up look and Mac smiled, nodding seriously at her friend. “You answer every question as honestly as you can and then you put it in the box-”
“But we know each other’s hand writing, it’s not like it will be anonymous-”
Parker gave a long suffering sigh and tossed the box over her shoulder. “Fine, you fill out the answers as honestly as possible and then we read them and see if any of our guy friends fulfil the criteria. Blind dates can be disastrous if you don’t do any recon first. It’s all about the research. Right, Veronica?”
Veronica looked horrified at the implication that she’d have any knowledge about blind dates one way or the other. “You’ve met all my friends. Wallace. Piz. See anything you like? If not you could always make a Willow of our friend Mac here.”
“You must have more friends than that.”
Mac and Veronica exchanged another look. After an extensive period of lip biting, Veronica bounced on her backside and let out an excited sound. “Ohh! Three! I got three! You don’t like bald, rugged, kinda stocky biker types do you? He wears leather like it’s skin.”
Parker wrinkled her nose with a frown while Mac grinned encouragingly, tossing in a thumbs up for comedic value.
“I don’t think so,” Parker said with distaste.
Veronica mock-sighed with disappointment. “And theirs could have been a special love,” Veronica pressed her pen against her lips as she tilted her head back in feigned wistfulness.
“So, this is a point form for future blind dates?” Mac asked, elbowing Veronica in the ribs to make her behave. “And you’re going to set us up with other people you know.”
“Exactly.”
Veronica and Mac exchanged another look for barely a second, before bursting out into laughter. “Pass!”
Title: Love Isn't Good Unless...
Ship: Hannah/Logan
Summary: Dr. Griffith doesn’t come barging into the Presidential Suite. Hannah’s perspective.
Extract Rating: R18+
Notes: Not much to say, er, almost smut? It's set during the infamous almost oral scene. This fic will be finished too and it's on my schedule.
Love Isn't Good Unless...
He looks up at her. She’s standing between his legs and leans down as he arches up to kiss her mouth. She kisses him twice, one short and sweet the second lingers a little longer and when she pulls back Logan’s eyes are shut and he trails her forward for a moment before blinking his eyes open and looking up at her again.
She wants to tell him she’s as entranced by his expressive face as he seems to be by her lips but the nerves in her throat clamp down on her giggles instead. She’d not bold enough for the words but she’s brave enough to act on the urge.
When she straddles him she slides one knee next to his right leg and moves her right over his waist. Sits down. It’s a sliding moment that brings their chests an embrace almost as intimate as the grip their lips currently have on each other.
They move simultaneously when she straddles him, his hands come up to her waist, she wraps her hands around his neck and kisses him firmly. He rocks backward with the force and kisses her, sliding his hand up the back of her singlet top.
Then he touches her face.
Their kiss breaks apart in the meaning of that touch.
She aches.
He stares at her intensely while she smiles sweetly down at him, rocking in an eager, impatient squirming motion. Logan pushes her shirt over her shoulder but doesn’t really remove it, just slides it down a bit. He’s distracted by those undulating hips - a former ballet dancer, he’s almost sure - and then she’s arching backwards and biting her lip. He moves forward to kiss her, helpless beneath that sweet lure.
She ends up getting his shirt off first. As she rocks back into the kiss above, she slides her hands under his shirt and yanks it up. Their kiss breaks so the cloth can wash away from them like a wave stripping the shore back to dampness. She dumps the shirt beside the couch and they grab each other’s faces straight away again, her hands twisting up into his hair, his tongue twisting around her mouth until she fears she’ll get knotted to him, never to be parted. Not tonight anyway.
Title: Straight Shooters: Story Five
Ship: Logan/Evie (OFC). Extract: Pacey, Logan
Summary: Poor little rich boy meet spoiled little heiress. This could be a match made in hell.
Extract Rating: PG-13
Notes: This extract is from a future story in the series of one shots (the first and second of which are on my update schedule). You'll find out Evie's character lives in New York and, since I know certain characters from DC moved to New York at the end of the series I saw this as my opportunity to work out issues I had with both shows. In this extract you'll see one of the more settled moments in my contrived Pacey/Logan friendship. I can't wait to write that and explore all these two boys could teach each other about growing up and learning that you can leave love behind.
Straight Shooters
Pacey is the first real friend he’s had since his friendship with Duncan evaporated. He feels like they’re strangely in sync despite the fact there is a world of experience, economics and social ladder climbing between them.
The one problem in their arrangement was Pacey’s background. Logan was convinced he must have come from the only backwater town in America that encouraged boys to express their innermost feelings. Every hour, on the hour in polysyllabic words. Logan has been tempted to punch him in the nose more times than he can count because he was not planning on becoming someone huggable to anybody but his girl.
“How long are you planning to mooch off other people’s dreams?” Right on cue, Pacey brings out the big questions, the ones Logan’s defences have been lax in protecting because his friends have always been indifferent or wilfully ignorant of their existence. He sends Pacey a surprised, hunted and annoyed glance.
After a moment of brown disdain glancing off blue chips of cheer, Logan says, “I like to think of it as making dreams come true. But I can always pull out if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“I’m going to ignore all homo-erotic subtext to that statement because I know you have certain suppressed desires that my brother is all too familiar with - I should give you his number, by the way-” Logan punched him in the arm and he sniggered, “and I’m not one to cast aspersions on my wealthy benefactors should they choose to waste their well earned coin on me.”
Logan snorted on that note.
“Fine then, dubiously inherited coin.”
They smack their beer bottles together with matching smirks, rocking with the waves that thrummed against the side of Logan’s yacht.
“But what about you?” Pacey continued.
“What about me?”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
Logan was silent for a long moment, peeling the label off his beer as a pensive frown settled on his face. In another moment Pacey might have warned him about the signs of sexual frustration - surely Evie wasn’t holding out on him - but then Logan breathed in and said, “I had dreams but...”
“Such is life.”
Logan rolled his eyes, enough aphoristic dialoguing.
“Now all I want to do is dance like a dervish,” he coos with a fey twirl of his wrist. Pacey grimaced and Logan chuckled, turning his wrist again until he was chugging from his bottle, trying to stem his laughter so he didn’t choke.
“Then you have some work to do my friend, I’ve seen you and Evie, and that’s not dancing. That’s something else entirely.”
Logan raised his eyebrow. “Your failure to identify that something else makes me wonder if the stick up your girlfriend’s ass is some kind of chastity plug.”
“There’s a line, Logan.” The warning in Pacey’s close was clear and crisp.
“And I leapt like the dazzling dervish I am right over it,” Logan beamed, relaxing back in his seat. “Keeps you on edge, doesn’t it?” Pacey, unable to maintain his pensive glare, returned Logan’s easy going smile. “See? All my dreams have come to fruition. There is nothing left to do but eat, drink, dance and be merry.”
“Don’t forget the importance of spreading your wealth.”
“I’m rethinking that one by the minute.”
“Come on, you know I’m only here for the money,” Pacey shook his head pityingly, “without me you’d have no one to espouse your thoughts on the meaning of life to and then where would you be?”
Logan kept staring at Pacey’s teasing smile and then he turned back to his view of the setting sun. “Like I said, I’m rethinking it.”
Title: When You Were Mine
Ship: Michael/Liz (Extract: Rath/Liz)
Summary: The Pod Squad dive across time and space to uncover the history of the royal four. When Antar turns out to be more than any of them expected they will all make mistakes and change the past that led them to their futures.
Notes: Okay, so the cliffhanger I left you guys on was a cruel, cruel tease. Here's the kiss you were waiting on!
When You Were Mine
Her hands automatically shifted and clenched, running up into his hair and pulling him into her, his arm wrapped around her waist lifting her into his chest and everything in two bodies felt drawn inwards toward the friction of one fantastic knot. His tongue swept inside her mouth and her eyes slid closed, hearing the thrum of an approaching invasion humming and heating her lips through his. She gasped and tried to breathe and then gave up and couldn’t care less as something opened and crackled and shortened the distance between them until she could feel herself flying out of her skin, more than naked, more than air, more than power and lightning and she wanted to laugh but that would take moving and this pleasure was unreal in its intensity, like a fantasy, a dream-
Title: Divided Loyalties
Ship: VM: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars
Extract Rating: R (More for what's alluded to than actually in the chapter)
Summary: Veronica’s reality in Neptune was poised to implode long before Lilly Kane’s head was smashed in. The clock is winding back to that final week but this time Lilly Kane will survive. Who says Veronica’s world would have been a better place if her best friend was still alive? Bad blood will out, secrets will surface and the Fab Four as they know it will disintegrate. The end starts now.
Notes: This extract is two chapters away from being posted. It's the part I was most looking forward to writing and had written before most of the filler chapters were done. It's also the part of the chapter I think most people were most desperate for. Just in case I do decide to never take up writing this story again, I wanted to post part of this chapter, and I'm glad this meme gave me the chance to. I hope you like it straggling LVers who haven't defriended me yet ;)
Divided Loyalties
“Everything is falling apart,” she said, legs still twitching anxiously on the cool plastic of the familiar hospital chair. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
She didn’t look at him and he didn’t look at her; both stared fixedly at the anonymous faces in the waiting room. No place was more aptly named for it’s all that they could do. It seemed that they were always waiting for Lilly to wake up, out here in the darkness on their uncomfortable seats together.
“Lilly and your dad, and Duncan and you and . . . my mom!” She continued mumbling, mostly to herself since as far as she could tell Logan wasn’t listening.
But he looked at her when she said that and she tentatively returned the gaze, tears starting to roll down her cheeks. His gaze was calm and centred and heavy and she felt like he was pressing her down, closing his fists about her jaw to force those forbidden words up and out of her grasping throat.
“She’s gone, Logan . . . ” Veronica choked. “She just left . . .me. My dad . . .” She swallowed, shaking her head against an embarrassed laugh.
What did he care? His dad fucked his girlfriend before trying to kill her. Then said girlfriend almost got herself killed again and her inconsiderate best friend had called him to act as an impromptu ambulance. He was the last person in the world she should be whining woe-is-me to.
He said nothing for a long moment and regret welled up with her embarrassment, defences stiffening her back against the scathing refutation of her own issues she was expecting. But he just continued to look at her until she blushed, and broke on a laugh, trying to escape from the moment that was suffocating her. Willing him to say something.
“Did I ever introduce my dad to your mom?”
Veronica snorted. “I think she’s a little beneath his dignity.”
“Dignity? I’m an Echolls that word isn’t in our family dictionary.”
Veronica sighed, too exhausted to hold up her end of the banter at this juncture. No matter, Logan was well versed at quipping with himself.
“Pity. They’re so perfect for each other; maybe they would have fallen in love…” She glared at him, disgusted, but he just smiled and continued, “we could have moved in together like some wacky sitcom family.” His arm stretched behind her on the chair, a mischievous grin lighting up his face as he tugged her into his chest and nuzzled her head while she feigned squirming away. All the time he whispered through giggles. “Every few nights I could sneak into your room and teach you to run through the bases backwards. Teach you the wonders of forbidden love while mom and pop are busy being bad parents. I’ve always wanted to explore what that Brady really would have done to Marsha in the era of free love.”
She was glaring but as he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, laughter split open and dissolved some of those tears. “And maybe we could crawl up into the attic and plant some flowers,” she indulged.
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“That would never happen,” she said seriously, arching her neck to look up at him as she rested on his shoulder. “You’re not my type.”
He smiled at her widely in appreciation, then turned away and pulled his face into a faux displeased frown. “That means this whole set up Lilly staged to play matchmaker was for nothing and the date is officially over.” He swung up to his feet abruptly and held out his hand as if he was offering to take a burden he’d do anything to be without. “Come on, Veronica Mars, I’ll lug your ungrateful ass home.”
“No, I’m going to stay. Someone should be here when she wakes up; she needs me.”
“No, she doesn’t. She’s unconscious and back amongst those hot doctors who can’t wait to pamper her again. She doesn’t need you. I need to get you home before that tracking device your dad attached to your ass kicks in and he finds you with me looking all dishevelled.” His hands hovered over the proof of that dishevelment from her ragged, alcohol crusted hair to the dress that was so askew it was veering on indecent. “Maybe he’ll get the wrong idea and think I’m your type.”
Veronica looked down to conceal her amused smirk then finally placed her hand in his. “Okay, I’ll go with you, but if anyone asks it was my idea.”
He squeezed her hand, tilting his head in wait for the punch line he knew was coming.
“I don’t want anyone to think I gave in to one of your arguments. They might direct me to the pscyh ward.”
“I always knew I made you crazy, Mars,” he drawled with relish, tugging on her arm as he walked backwards.
She made a protesting sound when his pace almost yanked her shoulder out of its socket but he didn’t slow down merely laughing and pulling harder until she jogged to match his pace, following his lead through the halls and away from the bland, clean smell of the hospital corridors.
The ride was awkward with a new strange energy neither recognized suffocating the air inside the XTerra. They barely spoke to each other, or looked at each other, all the way back to the club.
They pulled up in the alley entrance way, about twenty feet from her LeBaron and fifty from the VIP line. Veronica glared when she heard their laughter through the glass, running disdainful eyes over the bouncer as he pressed his large, sausage-fingered hand to the hip of a girl flashing a coy smile his way, gold hot pants glinting beneath his fingers. For a moment the pulsing sounds of R’n’B whispered a siren call to those still shivering in wait in the public cue, then the doors closed trapping the music and smoke inside again.
“I can take you home,” she flinched at the sound of his voice, “you can pick up the car tomorrow.”
“I didn’t drink anything,” she whispered back in confusion.
“Wow, a blonde with a brain. You’re the eighth wonder of the world, Veronica Mars.”
She looked over at him seriously; he was staring at her car through his windsheild, hands resting laconically against his door and the steering wheel. He moved slightly and - fearful that he was about to look her way - she skittered her gaze, focusing on the shivering bare legs in the line outside her window once more.
“Just because you’re not drunk doesn’t mean you should be driving.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she gritted.
“Okay.”
She still didn’t move from the vehicle and Logan let her continue to wait and breathe until he couldn’t talk the stasis any more.
He opened his door, walked to the passenger side, holding her anxious gaze the entire way until he opened her door.
“It was very impolite of your escort to leave a lady waiting; doors are heavy things, and are meant to be dealt with by men.”
“Should I sit here and wait for one?” She returned with a wobbly smile.
Relieved that she wasn’t as shaken as he thought she was, he grinned. “Get out.” He flicked his head, gesturing toward her car.
She slid to her feet, lowering her head when he reached out to steady her by the waist.
“You okay?” His voice was soft, softer like all muted illusions often gendered by the night.
She nodded and looked up from under her lashes to reassure him with a steady gaze.
He grinned, rocked back on his legs, closed her door and shuffled a few steps away. The quiet between them was awkward once more. With a breathy laugh, he gestured to her outfit. “I like this new look.”
“Lilly dressed me.”
“Must be why I like it,” he said bitterly.
In the ensuing pause, she stared at the curve of his cheek trying to find the courage to lift her eyes that extra inch.
“I wouldn’t worry, Mars, you’ll get the hang of dressing yourself one day; one leg at a time, one arm at a time but you won’t have to worry about laces,” he gestured to the strappy shoes still strangling her feet. “Sassy girls are all about buckles and slip ons, laces are for geeks.”
Veronica’s face twisted in confusion. “I’ve never heard you babble before. I mean, you never shut up, but I’ve never heard you babble so . . . redundantly.”
He blushed. “Sorry to disappoint you. I won’t say another word if my lady doesn’t want me to. I’ve already rescued you with my noble steed, why stop being chivalrous now when I haven’t even got any under the bra action?”
She shoved him hard, causing him to stumble two steps backwards before he steadied himself again, laughing at the fierce spark in her eyes.
“Chivalry just rolled over in its grave and now silence would be good!”
He grinned and zipped a line across his lips, feigning locking them tight to mute that displeasing mouth.
“If I keep the key does that mean I won’t have to listen to your inane excuse for conversation any more?”
He pointed to his mouth and smirked as if to say ‘come and get it’. Coyly, she tilted her head and then pretended to slowly extract the key from the closed line of his mouth, brushing his lips with her fingers as she went. Logan stilled, meeting her eyes with a strange fearful glint that made Veronica nervously draw her hand away and wipe it on her skirt as if he’d moistened those digits with a mouth that had never opened.
With shaking hands, joke long evaporated, Veronica continued the mime by placing the key in her clutch purse and snapped it shut theatrically. “I dub thee monkey Speak No Evil.”
Logan said nothing even though she waited expectantly for his reply. When the laughter started to enter his eyes, she finally sighed; well, it was officially no fun when she won a battle of wills with Logan Echolls. He waved his hand in front of him for her to precede him, keeping his mouth tightly closed as their game dictated.
She walked toward her car and he followed her closely, glaring over his shoulder when a whistle seemed directed at Veronica. It wasn’t, but Logan stepped closer to her nonetheless, causing Veronica to bristle with indignation. She wasn’t helpless and she wasn’t drugged, if she wanted to clutch on to him like some pathetic damsel in distress, she’d do it.
When they arrived at her car, Logan automatically opened the front door for her. He hadn’t looked at her since the errant whistle had struck across his nerve endings like a whip, hard eyes still focused on the straggling PCHers that had failed to follow their leader home.
Veronica rolled her eyes but said nothing, tonight was not the night to say things like that didn’t happen in Neptune. She chucked her purse on to the passenger seat and the thud caught his attention, finally brining him back to her from whichever violent place in his head he’d been visiting. He smiled down at her, acting as if he’d never been distracted from her, acting as if he’d never perceived a threat of any kind (make believe or not).
“Are you going to visit her tomorrow?” She whispered for wont of anything better to say to break the silence.
Logan said nothing.
She sighed and bounced back against the door with boredom causing Logan to laugh silently.
“Okay, stop submitting to my rule, it’s disturbing.”
Logan pulled a puppy face, holding his hands up in an innocent, pleading gesture.
“Your halo is slipping quickly past your forehead and will be strangling you any moment now.”
He crossed his chest quickly, praying to save himself from such a horrible fate. She punched his shoulder again, causing laughter to spill from his lips, loud and crackling in the air. She sent him a smug smile, pleased to have a noise at least to keep her company. A grin broke, uninhibited across his face, eyes skittering over her features as if he had found something infinitely entertaining in that defiant sparkle. Veronica felt something inside her lurch at the sight of that shining stretch of teeth; teeth that had seemed like an alligators jaws only a week ago, now seemed anything but.
Her smile melted away, guilt centring heavily in her gut. They should not be smiling so brightly - not a care in the world! - when she’d said only moments ago believed she’d never had so many of these things adults called ‘cares’. She’d never felt so burdened, so alone and so disillusioned. The more he made her laugh, the more she knew she’d hate herself tomorrow because she was forgetting second to second all that had happened in the hours preceding.
Most of all she wanted to thank him, for doing something she should have never asked him to do, for being there when it wasn’t his responsibility, when it should have been anyone’s but his responsibility.
She stiffened and opened her mouth, hand kinetically stuck to her hip as if she was halfway to grasping his arm. Her courage failed, words tied up in knots above her tongue. She looked up at him looming above her, leaning now with a hand on her door, framing her in and trapping her against the open driver side door. He was leaning, into her space, and it made it that much harder to say words of gratitude to someone she’d never spoken them to before. She supposed it shouldn’t be this hard when they’d been friends for two years, but it was.
“Logan . . . ” Thank you, was the thought but instead the words jumbled and translated on her lips into action. She jerked forwards and pressed a quick, chaste and awkward kiss to his lips when she tripped mid-action and fell against his face. Her hand barely touched his shoulder to steady herself, fingers brushing the side of his face and then sliding away - jerking bodily back - as she stared wide-eyed up at the boy’s equally stunned face.
She’d never been so grateful he’d let her steal his right to speak.
He stiffened, still leaning over her, and she watched his fingers curl into a bloodless fist against the top of her door. A second passed in which she blinked and might have started to do something-but then he ducked closer, pulled her in to him by the small of her back and bent down smoothly to kiss her with intention purely shining from his open eyes.
Veronica stiffened, but made not a sound, not even a breath, for nothing was getting into his lungs save Logan’s exhalations as they panted into her open lips. Her hands clenched awkwardly by her side then moved behind her, twisting to grip the rubber lining of her door, then shooting up to wrap behind his neck, over his shoulders because it was more comfortable that way. She could collapse and have him bear her weight, melt her torso into his and just drift away on a kiss that was nowhere in the vicinity of platonic.
He blocked her in with no escape except to lose her legs and collapse backwards onto the driver’s seat (and who said that wasn’t an option?). He kissed her, really kissed her, kissed her in that deep untamed way she’d always found so utterly disgusting when she saw his lips welded against Lilly’s.
But no-a supernova of no.
Their teeth clacked against each other and their hands awkwardly moved against each other: through hair, around waists, up backs. Their bodies bumped and jagged trying to adjust to the alien height difference; this wasn’t the body they’d trained themselves to kiss with instinctive precision. But then Logan bent his knees and pressed up against the small of her back, lifting her slightly into his chest while his other hand firmly clasped her neck and pulled her into a kiss that was perfectly deep and slow and rhythmic.
She was concentrating so intensely on this new perfect pattern being drawn by his lips against hers that her forehead frowned in an effort to memorialize this feeling while staying in them so she could experience every second. She let her body melt into the ridges of his, tangled a fist into his hair and held on, rocking with his whole body. Her hips seemed to meet the right contours of his, everything clicking into place, everything hot and smooth and wonderful at the same time their mouths found the right rhythm and the perfectly wrong place to enjoy it.
“You’re not going to call me are you?”
“Woman, we have unfinished business; why would I leave myself high and dry?”
A high pitched laugh pierced through the rushing silence pounding past both their ears. Their lips broke and it was like a sound proof bubble bursting, the busy cacophony of the night rushing in from all sides as they gazed at each other wide eyed and fearful.
Logan still hadn’t said a word and she didn’t want to hear one word, not a syllable. She wanted to lock her own lips, swallow deeply and forget this hormonal accident.
“I-I have to go.”
Logan moved as if to intercept her, but this time she told her knees to bend and she collapsed back on to the driver’s seat behind her, swinging her legs into the car. She reached out to pull the door shut but Logan was holding it again as if he’d robotically began to close it for her. Except it wasn’t closing, he’d paused halfway through it and was now keeping the door locked open in his grasp. Veronica was left hanging out the door, gripping the handle and looking up at him from beneath her wildly tussled hair pleadingly with those big, fearful eyes.
After a moment, he let go.