Fic: The Other Shoe Dropping (Logan/Veronica) PG-13
Title: The Other Shoe Dropping
Author: sadiekate
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 2862
Rating: PG-13
Summary: This is what happens when I inform Ti that Logan and Veronica could never get married and have babies and be happy, because it would all end in tears and recriminations and snark. I wind up writing a fic proving myself both right and wrong simultaneously, because I am just that good at at multi-tasking.
Spoilers: None, really. Just, you know, that whole thing where Logan and Veronica have an adversarial relationship.
Warnings: General emotional warfare.
Author's Note: As always, this is for __tiana__, who handles my general insanity with aplomb. Also, for bijal who graciously tolerates my dabbling in other fandoms, while gently urging me to keep my Logan/Veronica love alive. X-posted to veronicamarsfic and fic_from_mars.
“Marry me.”
“Okay,” Veronica said, without really thinking about it.
It didn’t occur to her until later that she had said it like he had asked if she wanted pancakes, and she had agreed, even though she really wanted waffles.
Logan noticed immediately though, and laughed a little. It was too thin, too quick.
“You don’t have to sound so enthusiastic,” he said, attempting for jocularity and missing, and she rolled over and pressed up against his warm, solid body.
“Yes,” she said against his mouth, pressing her own lips firmly against his.
“Yes?”
“Yes,” she said again. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Okay,” he said contentedly, rolling with her across the bed, and brushing her hair out of her eyes.
* * *
It was a small ceremony. The bride wore jeans and a veil, and the groom wore a t-shirt airbrushed to look like a tuxedo. Elvis presided over the proceedings, and only the father of the bride wore appropriate wedding clothes.
“I can’t believe you’re getting married on Halloween,” Keith said out of the corner of his mouth as he walked her down the aisle. “I had to leave a bowl of candy on the stoop with a sign that says, ‘Please Take Only One’. That is so uncool.”
“It seemed appropriate,” Veronica whispered. “Marriage is scary.”
She pretended not to notice that Keith was looking at her concernedly.
“It could be worse,” she pointed out pragmatically. “We could have decided to go bungee-jumping tied together. Or get married underwater with one of those shared air tanks.”
“I bet those weaselly kids down the street emptied the bowl already. Now I won’t have any leftover candy. And by the way, if my house gets egged, you’re cleaning it up.”
Veronica smiled up at him, and he kissed her on the cheek before presenting her to Logan, who was fidgeting nervously and beaming.
When Elvis asked Logan if he took Veronica to be his lawfully wedded wife, Logan winked at her and said, “Okay”.
* * *
He didn’t ever ask her to sign a prenup, and she never offered. She didn’t want him to take it wrong, to think that she was already mapping her escape routes.
* * *
House shopping was a bit of a production, because Veronica refused to step into any giant McMansion monstrosity of concrete and glass, and Logan was unclear on the distinction between “charmingly funky” and “ghetto”.
“We don’t need a place this big,” she protested without even getting out of the car. “There are two of us. We’d have like, 10,000 square feet apiece.”
“Maybe it won’t always just be the two of us,” Logan murmured, and she looked at him in mock horror.
“Please tell me you didn’t tell Dick and Luke they could live with us.”
“Look, does it really matter if we have too much space? We can afford to be a little extravagant.”
“You can afford to be extravagant,” Veronica corrected him.
“No, we can,” he erupted. “Everything I have is yours, now.”
She took a deep breath, steepling her fingers underneath her chin.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. Everything I have is yours, too. Unfortunately, what I have is a lot of very expensive surveillance equipment, a really old car, and a profound dislike for this house.”
Logan exhaled, and it sounded enough like a laugh that she felt a little better.
“I’m afraid,” she admitted. “That if we get a house this big, we’ll lose each other in it.”
He grinned then, and it was definitely for real this time.
“Okay,” he said, drawing her closer to him, tucking his arm carefully around her. “We’ll find something smaller. I still want to live on the beach though.”
“Works for me,” she shrugged. “That way if Luke and Dick do try to move in, they can sleep and shower outside.”
“They can even hunt for their own food,” he agreed, giving her one last squeeze before he started up the car.
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
* * *
“It’s blue,” she breathed, staring at the stick.
“What does that mean?” Logan fretted, pulling the directions out of her hand. “How can you expect me to remember what color means what at a time like this?”
“It’s okay,” Veronica laughed. “I’m not pregnant. My oven is officially bun-free.”
“Oh.”
He stopped pacing abruptly and dropped down to the edge of the tub. She looked at him incredulously.
“You’re disappointed?”
“A little,” he said faintly.
“Have you been smoking crack? This is good news, Logan.”
“I know. I just … wow. Huh. How accurate is this thing?”
“I don’t know! Pretty goddamn accurate, I would hope.”
“Oh.”
“Logan?”
“I don’t know why I suddenly feel like I just lost something,” he blurted out.
Logan swung his legs into the bathtub, and then the rest of his body. He sat there in the empty tub, still fully-clothed, right down to his ridiculously expensive tennis shoes. Veronica stayed on the counter, her legs dangling uselessly as she watched him warily.
“We’re not ready for kids,” she reminded him. “I don’t know if we ever will be. We’ve talked about this.”
“I know.”
“I mean, we lost the cat.”
“He wasn’t really our cat, though,” Logan pointed out. “He was a stray that you left food out for. Probably his owners found him.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know that for sure. And anyway, I mean, look at our role models. We don’t have a lot of good parenting experience to draw on.”
“If you really thought all that mattered, then why did you marry me in the first place?” he asked, a little bitterly. “We’re not them, Veronica.”
“I know that,” she said, surprised.
“Do you?”
She bit her lip and looked away. The silence stretched across the room between them, and so she hopped off the counter and curled up in the tub next to him, her head pillowed against each breath that moved through his chest.
“I’m not saying never,” she said quietly. “Just not now.”
“Okay,” he said.
When he shifted his legs a little, one foot hit the faucet, and it started to drip a little. The sound of water intermittently hitting the tiles echoed in the silent room, but neither of them moved.
* * *
When they went to bed every night, they slept under two separate blankets. Neither of them was very good at sharing things with the other.
* * *
He worked a series of jobs, but none of them lasted, because he hated them. She worked one job steadily, writing fluff pieces for the local weekly. She hated her job too, but she stuck with it at least.
“You should quit,” he told her one night, when she had come home late for the sixth day in a row.
Her rubbed her shoulders, which were so tense they seemed to hover somewhere around her ears.
“You don’t quit something just because it’s not everything you hoped for,” she sighed.
“You don’t stay with something if it’s making you unhappy,” Logan said quietly.
“I might not be unhappy forever,” she said helplessly. “It might just be a phase.”
“So what are you going to do? Wait it out? Hope that things get better? Because your whole life can go by like that, without you even realizing that’s what’s happening.”
Veronica twisted around to look up at him, but he avoided her gaze.
“You’re the one who asked me to stop running away from things,” she reminded him. “I’m trying, here.”
“That was different.”
“I can’t not have a job,” she said, her voice rising in frustration. “I mean, work sucks. That’s why it’s called work and not Magical Pony Time. But what’s my alternative? I sit around all day and be a trophy wife? That’s never been me.”
“Yeah, well, you never used to be such a martyr, either,” he griped.
That night he fell asleep long before she did, even though he’d been between jobs for weeks now, and she had to be up early. A month’s worth of want ads sat untouched on the coffee table.
* * *
Veronica told herself it was because of work that she hadn’t seen it sooner. That if she hadn’t been busy, it would have all been clear.
She had never liked to admit it when she was deluding herself.
She presented Logan with the evidence when he got home from surfing with Dick. He was still sun-warmed and languidly half-drunk. She watched him walk up to the kitchen counter and freeze up as he took in the proof he had so carelessly left around. Hotel bills. Receipts for jewelry she had never received.
“I thought you would figure it out much sooner,” he said quietly.
Her gut twisted up in knots at the finality in his voice.
“I don’t understand how you could do this,” Veronica managed to gasp.
“Do what?” he asked bitterly. “Try to move on from someone who never wanted to be with me in the first place? Dammit, Veronica. I wanted us to have some kind of good life. But you never thought it could happen. You’ve been biding your time for five years now, waiting for me to let you down, to hurt you.”
“Well, congratulations,” she said numbly. “You did a really spectacular job.”
“I’ll stay in a hotel tonight,” Logan said wearily. “I’ll come back in he morning to get my things. Just let me grab some clothes.”
He ran his hand through his hair as he walked towards their bedroom, taking a shuddering breath as he walked past her. Veronica sat frozen in place, her eyes glued to the doorway until he reappeared.
“Why did you do it this way?” she asked brokenly. “If you wanted to end it, why didn’t you just leave?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” he asked, smiling sadly. “You’re the one who wanted out. I could never leave you. And I knew you wouldn’t leave me unless I gave you a concrete reason.”
He pressed a firm kiss against her forehead, and before she could stop him, he was gone.
She curled up alone in their bed that night, and wondered how it could hurt so badly, the other shoe dropping, even though she had been waiting for it since the start.
* * *
The divorce was a remarkably smooth proceeding. They signed the papers in separate rooms. Afterwards, their lawyers went out to lunch and marveled at how the trickiest part was getting the rich husband to give up on the idea of the pretty young wife accepting a hefty settlement, because it wasn’t going to happen.
That wasn’t the usual order of things.
* * *
It was surprisingly easy for them to avoid one another.
Veronica wasn’t sure what surprised her more - that she had stayed in Neptune, or that he had finally gone.
She supposed it was too much to expect that he would stick around just for her. Especially since she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to stay.
* * *
“Of all the coffee shops in all of the world, she had to walk into mine,” Logan said, sweeping his arms out grandly.
Veronica sized him up. She looked uneasy, but not openly hostile. It was more than he would have expected.
“You know, technically, I was here first,” she pointed out. “The argument could be made that you walked into my coffee shop.”
“Ah, but I come here every day, so I’ve already staked my claim. And I think I’d remember if I’d seen you in here at any point in the past three years. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but you tend to make an impression. Oh well, enough small talk. I’ll take a hazelnut latte.”
Veronica rolled her eyes, but she was smiling tolerantly.
“Just because I worked in a café fifteen years ago, it doesn’t mean I devoted my life to perfecting frou frou coffee drinks for yuppies, so you might want to update your image of me in your mental Rolodex. Oh, and incidentally, I don’t work for the paper anymore, either. So, before you ask, no, I won’t be doing an investigatory piece on why your hairdresser apparently hates you.”
Logan touched his highlights self-consciously. Veronica approached the counter to place an order for a coffee of the day, and a hazelnut latte.
Logan’s bravado seemed to melt at that, and he fidgeted nervously with something in his pocket while she paid for their drinks. He picked up both cups and followed her to an outside table, joining her after a moment’s hesitation.
It was early in the day, but the sun was already bright enough that the sidewalk and the sand were whitewashed in light. A brisk wind whipped across the boardwalk, ruffling the awning overhead.
“Will it destroy my carefully-cultivated façade of a moment ago, if I admit that I’m hoping you turning up here isn’t a mere coincidence?” Logan asked, sipping at his drink.
Veronica smiled wryly.
“Will it destroy mine if I admit I’m just glad you didn’t hold up your fingers like a cross, throw coffee in my face, and flee screaming?” she returned.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he admitted, and she laughed a little.
“I’m here to apologize,” Veronica said. “Only, I’m not usually very good at that sort of thing. So, try and let me get through it, and then, by all means, feel free to throw scalding beverages at me, when I’ve inevitably made things worse.”
“Are you making amends?” Logan asked suspiciously. “Because I would have thought if either of us was a likely candidate for AA, it would have been me.”
“Nothing so fancy, I’m afraid. Just your standard, garden-variety apology.”
“Veronica,” he leaned forward, gingerly took her hand. “Believe me when I say you have nothing to apologize for.”
“You were right,” she protested. “I never gave our relationship a fair chance.”
“Yeah, well, I could have done a lot of things differently, too,” he said ruefully.
“Fine. So, we were both jackasses.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he countered, and she laughed again, and he really liked hearing her laugh.
“So, what brings you here with this now,” he asked, emphasizing the last word a little.
“The urging of my therapist?” she half-joked.
He looked at her warily, and she sighed.
“I’ve been trying to move on with my life,” Veronica admitted. “But it’s hard, with this really horrible gaping wound lurking around in my past.”
“So, this is closure, then,” he said coolly.
“I’m just trying to understand,” she said. “And I know that my compulsive need to know everything can be kind of a problem, but I just … I want to know why.”
“Why I cheated?” he asked, curling his fingers open and shut against his leg.
“No. Why you let me believe that you cheated.”
He looked up at her in surprise.
“How long have you known?”
“The whole time,” she admitted. “I found the hotel bills, but I didn’t stop there. I staked you out. I talked to the hotel clerks, checked surveillance videos. There was never anyone else with you, not once.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I figured if you wanted me out of your life that badly, that you would set me up, I may as well give you what you wanted. For once.”
“But you’re here now.”
“I am,” Veronica said, with mild surprise, as though she had only just realized that fact herself.
“Does this mean … that you wouldn’t be averse to … keeping the gaping wound open?” he asked finally.
“That’s a way to look at it,” she said, smiling shyly. “I mean, I’m not saying we should go out and get married again or anything. But, you know. Maybe we could have some coffee.”
“We’re doing that right now,” Logan reminded her.
“Lunch, then,” she continued, undeterred.
He checked his watch.
“I could go for a sandwich,” he shrugged.
“Logan, it’s eight in the morning! I was sort of thinking we’d take this slow.”
He raised her hand and brushed her knuckles against his lips.
“The advantage to taking it quickly is that we’ll know much sooner if this is still a giant mistake.”
“You are so easy,” she said, shaking her head in mock disgust.
“Yes, but I still don’t put out until after dinner. Which, at this rate, will be around noon.”
“Yeah, I could eat,” Veronica said, with only the slightest hesitation, and he smiled.
“I know a great place up the street,” Logan said. “I’ll take you there. But we’ll finish the coffee first.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
Vacationers were starting to arrive at the beach already, scoping out their spots, and settling in for the long day.
The wind tore an umbrella out of the sand, and it cartwheeled down the sidewalk. Bit by bit, the brightly colored fabric tore away from the pole until the whole piece had torn free.
They both watched the canvas rising up on the wind, until it was nothing but a speck on the horizon.
Author: sadiekate
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 2862
Rating: PG-13
Summary: This is what happens when I inform Ti that Logan and Veronica could never get married and have babies and be happy, because it would all end in tears and recriminations and snark. I wind up writing a fic proving myself both right and wrong simultaneously, because I am just that good at at multi-tasking.
Spoilers: None, really. Just, you know, that whole thing where Logan and Veronica have an adversarial relationship.
Warnings: General emotional warfare.
Author's Note: As always, this is for __tiana__, who handles my general insanity with aplomb. Also, for bijal who graciously tolerates my dabbling in other fandoms, while gently urging me to keep my Logan/Veronica love alive. X-posted to veronicamarsfic and fic_from_mars.
“Marry me.”
“Okay,” Veronica said, without really thinking about it.
It didn’t occur to her until later that she had said it like he had asked if she wanted pancakes, and she had agreed, even though she really wanted waffles.
Logan noticed immediately though, and laughed a little. It was too thin, too quick.
“You don’t have to sound so enthusiastic,” he said, attempting for jocularity and missing, and she rolled over and pressed up against his warm, solid body.
“Yes,” she said against his mouth, pressing her own lips firmly against his.
“Yes?”
“Yes,” she said again. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Okay,” he said contentedly, rolling with her across the bed, and brushing her hair out of her eyes.
* * *
It was a small ceremony. The bride wore jeans and a veil, and the groom wore a t-shirt airbrushed to look like a tuxedo. Elvis presided over the proceedings, and only the father of the bride wore appropriate wedding clothes.
“I can’t believe you’re getting married on Halloween,” Keith said out of the corner of his mouth as he walked her down the aisle. “I had to leave a bowl of candy on the stoop with a sign that says, ‘Please Take Only One’. That is so uncool.”
“It seemed appropriate,” Veronica whispered. “Marriage is scary.”
She pretended not to notice that Keith was looking at her concernedly.
“It could be worse,” she pointed out pragmatically. “We could have decided to go bungee-jumping tied together. Or get married underwater with one of those shared air tanks.”
“I bet those weaselly kids down the street emptied the bowl already. Now I won’t have any leftover candy. And by the way, if my house gets egged, you’re cleaning it up.”
Veronica smiled up at him, and he kissed her on the cheek before presenting her to Logan, who was fidgeting nervously and beaming.
When Elvis asked Logan if he took Veronica to be his lawfully wedded wife, Logan winked at her and said, “Okay”.
* * *
He didn’t ever ask her to sign a prenup, and she never offered. She didn’t want him to take it wrong, to think that she was already mapping her escape routes.
* * *
House shopping was a bit of a production, because Veronica refused to step into any giant McMansion monstrosity of concrete and glass, and Logan was unclear on the distinction between “charmingly funky” and “ghetto”.
“We don’t need a place this big,” she protested without even getting out of the car. “There are two of us. We’d have like, 10,000 square feet apiece.”
“Maybe it won’t always just be the two of us,” Logan murmured, and she looked at him in mock horror.
“Please tell me you didn’t tell Dick and Luke they could live with us.”
“Look, does it really matter if we have too much space? We can afford to be a little extravagant.”
“You can afford to be extravagant,” Veronica corrected him.
“No, we can,” he erupted. “Everything I have is yours, now.”
She took a deep breath, steepling her fingers underneath her chin.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. Everything I have is yours, too. Unfortunately, what I have is a lot of very expensive surveillance equipment, a really old car, and a profound dislike for this house.”
Logan exhaled, and it sounded enough like a laugh that she felt a little better.
“I’m afraid,” she admitted. “That if we get a house this big, we’ll lose each other in it.”
He grinned then, and it was definitely for real this time.
“Okay,” he said, drawing her closer to him, tucking his arm carefully around her. “We’ll find something smaller. I still want to live on the beach though.”
“Works for me,” she shrugged. “That way if Luke and Dick do try to move in, they can sleep and shower outside.”
“They can even hunt for their own food,” he agreed, giving her one last squeeze before he started up the car.
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
* * *
“It’s blue,” she breathed, staring at the stick.
“What does that mean?” Logan fretted, pulling the directions out of her hand. “How can you expect me to remember what color means what at a time like this?”
“It’s okay,” Veronica laughed. “I’m not pregnant. My oven is officially bun-free.”
“Oh.”
He stopped pacing abruptly and dropped down to the edge of the tub. She looked at him incredulously.
“You’re disappointed?”
“A little,” he said faintly.
“Have you been smoking crack? This is good news, Logan.”
“I know. I just … wow. Huh. How accurate is this thing?”
“I don’t know! Pretty goddamn accurate, I would hope.”
“Oh.”
“Logan?”
“I don’t know why I suddenly feel like I just lost something,” he blurted out.
Logan swung his legs into the bathtub, and then the rest of his body. He sat there in the empty tub, still fully-clothed, right down to his ridiculously expensive tennis shoes. Veronica stayed on the counter, her legs dangling uselessly as she watched him warily.
“We’re not ready for kids,” she reminded him. “I don’t know if we ever will be. We’ve talked about this.”
“I know.”
“I mean, we lost the cat.”
“He wasn’t really our cat, though,” Logan pointed out. “He was a stray that you left food out for. Probably his owners found him.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know that for sure. And anyway, I mean, look at our role models. We don’t have a lot of good parenting experience to draw on.”
“If you really thought all that mattered, then why did you marry me in the first place?” he asked, a little bitterly. “We’re not them, Veronica.”
“I know that,” she said, surprised.
“Do you?”
She bit her lip and looked away. The silence stretched across the room between them, and so she hopped off the counter and curled up in the tub next to him, her head pillowed against each breath that moved through his chest.
“I’m not saying never,” she said quietly. “Just not now.”
“Okay,” he said.
When he shifted his legs a little, one foot hit the faucet, and it started to drip a little. The sound of water intermittently hitting the tiles echoed in the silent room, but neither of them moved.
* * *
When they went to bed every night, they slept under two separate blankets. Neither of them was very good at sharing things with the other.
* * *
He worked a series of jobs, but none of them lasted, because he hated them. She worked one job steadily, writing fluff pieces for the local weekly. She hated her job too, but she stuck with it at least.
“You should quit,” he told her one night, when she had come home late for the sixth day in a row.
Her rubbed her shoulders, which were so tense they seemed to hover somewhere around her ears.
“You don’t quit something just because it’s not everything you hoped for,” she sighed.
“You don’t stay with something if it’s making you unhappy,” Logan said quietly.
“I might not be unhappy forever,” she said helplessly. “It might just be a phase.”
“So what are you going to do? Wait it out? Hope that things get better? Because your whole life can go by like that, without you even realizing that’s what’s happening.”
Veronica twisted around to look up at him, but he avoided her gaze.
“You’re the one who asked me to stop running away from things,” she reminded him. “I’m trying, here.”
“That was different.”
“I can’t not have a job,” she said, her voice rising in frustration. “I mean, work sucks. That’s why it’s called work and not Magical Pony Time. But what’s my alternative? I sit around all day and be a trophy wife? That’s never been me.”
“Yeah, well, you never used to be such a martyr, either,” he griped.
That night he fell asleep long before she did, even though he’d been between jobs for weeks now, and she had to be up early. A month’s worth of want ads sat untouched on the coffee table.
* * *
Veronica told herself it was because of work that she hadn’t seen it sooner. That if she hadn’t been busy, it would have all been clear.
She had never liked to admit it when she was deluding herself.
She presented Logan with the evidence when he got home from surfing with Dick. He was still sun-warmed and languidly half-drunk. She watched him walk up to the kitchen counter and freeze up as he took in the proof he had so carelessly left around. Hotel bills. Receipts for jewelry she had never received.
“I thought you would figure it out much sooner,” he said quietly.
Her gut twisted up in knots at the finality in his voice.
“I don’t understand how you could do this,” Veronica managed to gasp.
“Do what?” he asked bitterly. “Try to move on from someone who never wanted to be with me in the first place? Dammit, Veronica. I wanted us to have some kind of good life. But you never thought it could happen. You’ve been biding your time for five years now, waiting for me to let you down, to hurt you.”
“Well, congratulations,” she said numbly. “You did a really spectacular job.”
“I’ll stay in a hotel tonight,” Logan said wearily. “I’ll come back in he morning to get my things. Just let me grab some clothes.”
He ran his hand through his hair as he walked towards their bedroom, taking a shuddering breath as he walked past her. Veronica sat frozen in place, her eyes glued to the doorway until he reappeared.
“Why did you do it this way?” she asked brokenly. “If you wanted to end it, why didn’t you just leave?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” he asked, smiling sadly. “You’re the one who wanted out. I could never leave you. And I knew you wouldn’t leave me unless I gave you a concrete reason.”
He pressed a firm kiss against her forehead, and before she could stop him, he was gone.
She curled up alone in their bed that night, and wondered how it could hurt so badly, the other shoe dropping, even though she had been waiting for it since the start.
* * *
The divorce was a remarkably smooth proceeding. They signed the papers in separate rooms. Afterwards, their lawyers went out to lunch and marveled at how the trickiest part was getting the rich husband to give up on the idea of the pretty young wife accepting a hefty settlement, because it wasn’t going to happen.
That wasn’t the usual order of things.
* * *
It was surprisingly easy for them to avoid one another.
Veronica wasn’t sure what surprised her more - that she had stayed in Neptune, or that he had finally gone.
She supposed it was too much to expect that he would stick around just for her. Especially since she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to stay.
* * *
“Of all the coffee shops in all of the world, she had to walk into mine,” Logan said, sweeping his arms out grandly.
Veronica sized him up. She looked uneasy, but not openly hostile. It was more than he would have expected.
“You know, technically, I was here first,” she pointed out. “The argument could be made that you walked into my coffee shop.”
“Ah, but I come here every day, so I’ve already staked my claim. And I think I’d remember if I’d seen you in here at any point in the past three years. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but you tend to make an impression. Oh well, enough small talk. I’ll take a hazelnut latte.”
Veronica rolled her eyes, but she was smiling tolerantly.
“Just because I worked in a café fifteen years ago, it doesn’t mean I devoted my life to perfecting frou frou coffee drinks for yuppies, so you might want to update your image of me in your mental Rolodex. Oh, and incidentally, I don’t work for the paper anymore, either. So, before you ask, no, I won’t be doing an investigatory piece on why your hairdresser apparently hates you.”
Logan touched his highlights self-consciously. Veronica approached the counter to place an order for a coffee of the day, and a hazelnut latte.
Logan’s bravado seemed to melt at that, and he fidgeted nervously with something in his pocket while she paid for their drinks. He picked up both cups and followed her to an outside table, joining her after a moment’s hesitation.
It was early in the day, but the sun was already bright enough that the sidewalk and the sand were whitewashed in light. A brisk wind whipped across the boardwalk, ruffling the awning overhead.
“Will it destroy my carefully-cultivated façade of a moment ago, if I admit that I’m hoping you turning up here isn’t a mere coincidence?” Logan asked, sipping at his drink.
Veronica smiled wryly.
“Will it destroy mine if I admit I’m just glad you didn’t hold up your fingers like a cross, throw coffee in my face, and flee screaming?” she returned.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he admitted, and she laughed a little.
“I’m here to apologize,” Veronica said. “Only, I’m not usually very good at that sort of thing. So, try and let me get through it, and then, by all means, feel free to throw scalding beverages at me, when I’ve inevitably made things worse.”
“Are you making amends?” Logan asked suspiciously. “Because I would have thought if either of us was a likely candidate for AA, it would have been me.”
“Nothing so fancy, I’m afraid. Just your standard, garden-variety apology.”
“Veronica,” he leaned forward, gingerly took her hand. “Believe me when I say you have nothing to apologize for.”
“You were right,” she protested. “I never gave our relationship a fair chance.”
“Yeah, well, I could have done a lot of things differently, too,” he said ruefully.
“Fine. So, we were both jackasses.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he countered, and she laughed again, and he really liked hearing her laugh.
“So, what brings you here with this now,” he asked, emphasizing the last word a little.
“The urging of my therapist?” she half-joked.
He looked at her warily, and she sighed.
“I’ve been trying to move on with my life,” Veronica admitted. “But it’s hard, with this really horrible gaping wound lurking around in my past.”
“So, this is closure, then,” he said coolly.
“I’m just trying to understand,” she said. “And I know that my compulsive need to know everything can be kind of a problem, but I just … I want to know why.”
“Why I cheated?” he asked, curling his fingers open and shut against his leg.
“No. Why you let me believe that you cheated.”
He looked up at her in surprise.
“How long have you known?”
“The whole time,” she admitted. “I found the hotel bills, but I didn’t stop there. I staked you out. I talked to the hotel clerks, checked surveillance videos. There was never anyone else with you, not once.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I figured if you wanted me out of your life that badly, that you would set me up, I may as well give you what you wanted. For once.”
“But you’re here now.”
“I am,” Veronica said, with mild surprise, as though she had only just realized that fact herself.
“Does this mean … that you wouldn’t be averse to … keeping the gaping wound open?” he asked finally.
“That’s a way to look at it,” she said, smiling shyly. “I mean, I’m not saying we should go out and get married again or anything. But, you know. Maybe we could have some coffee.”
“We’re doing that right now,” Logan reminded her.
“Lunch, then,” she continued, undeterred.
He checked his watch.
“I could go for a sandwich,” he shrugged.
“Logan, it’s eight in the morning! I was sort of thinking we’d take this slow.”
He raised her hand and brushed her knuckles against his lips.
“The advantage to taking it quickly is that we’ll know much sooner if this is still a giant mistake.”
“You are so easy,” she said, shaking her head in mock disgust.
“Yes, but I still don’t put out until after dinner. Which, at this rate, will be around noon.”
“Yeah, I could eat,” Veronica said, with only the slightest hesitation, and he smiled.
“I know a great place up the street,” Logan said. “I’ll take you there. But we’ll finish the coffee first.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
Vacationers were starting to arrive at the beach already, scoping out their spots, and settling in for the long day.
The wind tore an umbrella out of the sand, and it cartwheeled down the sidewalk. Bit by bit, the brightly colored fabric tore away from the pole until the whole piece had torn free.
They both watched the canvas rising up on the wind, until it was nothing but a speck on the horizon.