Fic: "... To Dream" (Logan/Veronica), pg-13, 1/?
Oh, look! It's another series! I was writing this sequel for my fic "Sleep, Perchance...", when it was pointed out to me that it's going to be a huge mofo and going to take a long, long time to finish. So it would be infinitely preferable that I post it in chapters, rather than letting it get to a 22,000+ word monstrosity like the original. Ergo... postage.
Title: "… To Dream".
Sequel to: "Sleep Perchance…". I really recommend reading that first; otherwise things get kinda lost. Although, it is 22,000+ words, so you might wanna bring a packed lunch and a thermos of coffee.
Author: Jacqui wily_one24
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica.
Word Count: 8,625.
Rating: pg-13.
Summary: She doesn’t know how to tell him no, how to explain exactly how much this is a bad idea
Spoilers: Pre-series, but some season one stuff.
Warnings: None, not really.
Disclaimer: Oh, they’re not mine. I just take them out of their boxes, play with them, muss there hair a bit, and put ‘em back when I’m done.
A/N: This picks up the very morning of the previous fic, in case anyone is confused.
A/N #2: Don't worry, Paranoia is being written. My muse is just being very stubborn and unrelenting. I am plying her with Tim Tams as we speak. Cross your fingers.
*~*~*~*
…TO DREAM, part one.
*~*~*~*
The leather sticks to the backs of her thighs as she stares out the window, toes curling inside her shoes, right foot, then left. Her mouth feels sticky and she wants to stop for water, but she’s not going to be the first one to speak, to break the deafening, heavy silence.
So the car drives on.
Outside, the streets and houses have fallen away to reveal never-ending highways and trees. Inside the car, Veronica thinks it would be easier to throw open the door at full speed, tuck her knees up and just dive out, hitting the road at a roll and hoping for minimal injuries along the way.
“I know where we can go!”
She jumps at his voice, if not the intention.
It sounds too loud and too sudden inside their close, self imposed suffocating quarters, even if she’s been expecting him to say something for the last thirty minutes. Even if she’s known exactly where he’s been headed since he first turned onto the highway.
The Xterra pulls onto the exit ramp and Veronica grips the edges of her seat even tighter, wishing she’d had the good sense to push him out of her apartment earlier and just go to school anyway.
Not that she wants to be there, either. The very thought of walking into the school and looking at the same multitude of faces who either taunt her or ignore the taunting is just wearying in ways that leave her listless and unable to move.
Unable to walk away from the one person who has bothered to look twice at her in the last few months.
“Okay.” It blurts out of her lips like an accident, like she should be following it with ‘excuse me’ in polite company. “Sure.”
She doesn’t know how to tell him no, how to explain exactly how much this is a bad idea. Especially when he’s spent the entire morning with his face pinched up into a worried expression that makes it look like he’s going to crack into a million fragile pieces if she even frowns too much.
Her eyes stay resolutely on the edge of the dashboard, not looking up, not searching the landscape for the telltale bumps and whorls and multicolored signs that indicate their destination. A place she hasn’t been in eight months.
Two months before all their lives went to hell.
She knows what he’s trying to do. He’s made it the day’s mission to Make Veronica Happy At All Costs and he’s playing the part to perfection, all excitement and enthusiasm. He’s working so hard at it, that she’s willing to settle for Letting Herself Forget For Just A Day.
Perhaps she should get used to the taste of bile if she can’t tell him to turn the car around any second now.
“Is it even open today?” His face falls so far at her words that she has no choice but to immediately backtrack. “I mean, why wouldn’t they be? It’s close enough to Spring Break, right?”
The sun is beating down hard through the windows and the skin of her knees is turning pink. They’re nowhere near summer just yet, but it’s already hot enough to notice.
There’s sweat trickling on the inside of her elbows.
“I just saw one move!” His cry is loud and sudden and triumphant, bursting with so much excitement and expectation that he sounds about ten years old. “It’s open!”
She angles forward toward the windscreen, stretching her eyes up and finally looking at the monstrosity that is far too close now to turn back from. Sure enough, as she’s looking high into the sky, one of the roller coaster cars rockets by.
They’re close enough to hear the sound of it rumbling, as if the very air around them is rocked.
Veronica doesn’t trust Logan Echolls enough to leave him alone with a caged rat and yet she’s there with him now, about to let him drag her into Magic Mountain and onto rides specifically designed to excite her terror-death responses as they pass places that are still tainted by memories of Lilly and forms of themselves that they’ll never be again.
And she doesn’t know how to look into his eyes and tell him that scares her beyond anything.
So she plasters on a smile she hopes is mildly believable and turns to him.
“Yay?"
***
It’s not like she’s a stranger to this.
Her dad does it, not always to this magnitude, but she knows the routine.
After the weeks following Lilly’s funeral, those weeks Veronica can barely remember in any true detail beyond the blur of existing, the sluggish way of moving that wasn’t really moving as hands pushed and pulled her where they wanted her to go, the numbness that had couched her, her father had taken her to the San Diego Zoo.
Since then, with every subsequent set back, her dad’s removal from office, her mom leaving, leaving their house for a smaller apartment, ostracism, the father-daughter activities have gotten a little less showy and lot more heartfelt.
They’ve got a definite schedule down now, set movies on DVD, standard orders at the local Italian take out, everything down to the timing of who does what and how and when. It’s comfortable, the two of them, together in ways that they’ve never been before.
She’s learned a lot about her father now that he’s at home more, now that they’ve both lost so much. They share loneliness, a love of fine foods, the care of Backup, a guilty indulgence in goofy movies and the occasional wistful glance at her mother’s photo sitting in a frame on the shelf.
This sudden enforced camaraderie, though cherished by them both, came at a high price. Too high, she thinks sometimes.
And not just her father, either. It comes in many forms, such as jokes shared with her father’s lawyer. Cliff helped Keith set up the business and from the very start laughed with and at her, jovial in ways that made her breathe easier, even if she could see past the light humor into the pity behind his eyes.
It’s a survival technique, one they’d all had to learn quickly, a legacy of being friends with Lilly Kane: how to ignore pity. She thinks even Logan has that one down. She also thinks they’re both reaching the end of their tether on it.
Which is why her fingers itch and curl as she watches him step up to the front gate.
She’s familiar with the sentiment, this desperate attempt to bring her up and out of herself, her bedroom is full of stuffed toys and her belly full of bags of sweet pastries and Italian cuisine bought in guilt, but it is still Logan Echolls.
And Logan Echolls is not the adorably mischievous boy who once held her down so Lilly could tickle her until she choked on her own laughter, coming up purple faced and breathless as they suddenly let go and backed away, splitting up and running in opposite directions so she couldn’t follow them both.
All she really needs to do is grit her teeth and remember the ugly words in his mouth, the brutal ways in which he’s tried to tear her down and it becomes easy.
He flinches when her hand slams down in front of him, slapping the fifty clearly on the counter.
“Veronica…”
But she glares and it’s painful. It’s hard won money she can barely afford to be pissing off on spur of the moment days when she should be at school. It’s pride she knows he can barely swallow, but really has no right not to.
“Fine.” He curls the note into the palm of his hand and continues pressing the credit card forward. “Two, please.”
She knows he’s going to slide that note back to her sometime during the day, but that’s hardly the point of the exercise.
***
She honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see a large ball of thistle tumble down the path ahead of them. It’s not just the heat, even if it’s really too early in the year for the air to be the kind of thick, arid vacuum that sucks all the color and energy out of everything, it’s that there’s so few people around.
They live in California and there’s mostly perfect weather all year round and somewhere in the world it has to be a holiday, so there’s always bundles of tourists and enough random stragglers dotting the park to make their presence un-noteworthy to everyone else, but the absence of eighteen hour long ride lines and shoulder to shoulder jostling just highlights their awkwardness.
Logan talks big, he always has, and she remembers finding it exhausting when she was just an observer, quietly clutching Duncan’s hand as they smiled at him trying to wheedle Lilly into whatever next big adventure he’d had planned.
But now it’s just her and Logan, with no buffers in between, and it’s mentally taxing to force her arm to stay limp and pliant when he grabs her wrist and pulls her off towards whatever tangent catches his eye.
It’s hard not to dig her heels in and fight him at every step.
The platform they’re standing on rumbles under their toes as the coaster screeches to a halt just feet away, the seated people red faced and incomprehensible as they jabber with excited glee. They’re first in line and he reaches out for her hand, trying to pull her to the very first car.
She flinches before she can stop herself and his face falls, eyes narrowing slightly as he folds his arm up to his chest like a bird protecting a wing.
“I’m trying, Veronica.”
The way he says it, it sounds more like an accusation than an admission as the man pulls the heavy bars down across their chests.
Only when the wind is forcing their heads back onto the little pad that cushions them and their shoulders are slammed against the backs of the chairs, hard bars clamping them down into their seats as the ground rushes up to meet them at inhumane speeds, does she open her mouth to answer.
“I’m scared!”
He doesn’t answer amid the screams of everyone else, but his hand inches over and his fingers mingle with hers when the cars lurch, their stomachs are left somewhere on the ground as they rocket back towards the sky.
***
They eat lunch sitting at a wooden bench, elbows tucked in politely, eyes down at the fries and his hotdog, knees held very carefully to avoid touching.
It’s not like she doesn’t remember the night before, because she does. She spent a good deal of the rest of the night and the morning trying to get it out of her head. His drunken voice slurring about how he thought she was pretty, of all things, and now he was trying to play the friend card and she was supposed to pretend it had never happened.
And all between moments of being hyper aware enough of her actions not to give him any ammunition in case he really was just playing a game that he’d tire of after a week or even less.
Her stomach grumbles against the flood of incoming soda as she sips at the straw and what she really wants is something solid and real, what she wants is a hotdog slathered with ketchup, just like the one Logan has, but she’s perfectly fine with her serving of fries, small, delicate food that can be eaten nicely, without a hint of innuendo or suggestion or crudity. Because she’s sitting with Logan and that’s habit borne of self-preservation.
What she really wants is to trust him.
“You gonna eat those?”
Veronica narrows her eyes.
“Touch my fries and die, Echolls.”
He laughs and it’s almost comfortable between them.
***
And maybe Logan knows more about what he’s doing, what they’re both doing, than she was willing to give him credit for.
It’s hard to keep up distance between two people when they’re rocketed back and forth at break neck speeds, screaming at the top of their lungs. It’s hard not to let some of the walls crumble as she gasps for breath, stumbling as her legs try to adjust back to solid ground, laughing, buzzing on the adrenaline high.
There’s something altogether freeing about giving up control of everything to an absurdly rickety cart and hurtling towards almost certain destruction as she opens her lungs and screams. And they both scream. It’s not because they’re scared and they both know it.
Veronica hasn’t gotten angry, really angry, for six months. She’s been resolute and strong, unwavering enough to convince everyone around her, but she hasn’t allowed herself to look deep enough to find any anger beneath the resentment and fear and grief.
She’s almost surprised to find it there.
Nobody even blinks at a couple of teenagers on a roller coaster if they shout out long, incomprehensible words against the loud thundering of the wheels and carts and hoists. And when some teen in front of them screams out a joyful ‘woo!’ on the way down, Veronica screams out a large ‘fuck you!’ to everyone and everything.
And Logan grins at her as he lifts the bars off his chest at the end of the ride.
The words spill out, rushed and heated, and they talk of nothing. Things that don’t matter, that can never matter, about the shape of a bush, about the suspicious color of an icecream cone held by a random passing stranger, about the height of one of the rides.
Things they don’t talk about include: his family; her family; school; the friends he has and she doesn’t but once did at school; Lilly; Duncan; the times when they were LillyandLogan and DuncanandVeronica; sex; law enforcement; crime solving; flat tires; vandalism; even the times before there were LillyandLogan and DuncanandVeronica, when they were just four kids being kids. It burns holes in the tips of their tongues, because these people and these words and these histories rule their lives.
She knows the instances that he feels it, even when he doesn’t say anything, it’s a gasp of breath, a sudden inhalation like he’s trying to pull the moment back into his mouth once he’s opened it.
Eventually one of them has to break and it ends up being her.
“Oh my god.” It’s a laugh, bubbling out of her chest before she knows it’s there as she grabs his arm and lets go in an instant, gesturing towards a shop front. “That’s the shop Lilly thought she saw Colin Farrell in that time!”
He blinks, stunned for a second, and she watches him shake his head free of it.
“No.” But it’s not a denial, just a moment of gathering thoughts, before a grin blooms all over his face. “I can’t believe she made us stalk that man for twenty minutes.”
The laughter is short lived and she breathes deeply, as if she can absorb all the happy molecules still floating about in the air, haphazardly wafting around her face. Most likely, she’s taking in someone else’s exhaled misery.
“She’s everywhere, here, isn’t she?”
Her question officially sets the mood and he stops smiling.
“Yeah.”
Suddenly the thrill of coasters and rides and defying everyone seems hollow and base and they’re just two people standing in the middle of a path that leads nowhere between islands of overly green fake grass and too cheery signs.
“I miss her.” She whispers. “Sometimes I forget she’s gone and then I remember.”
He’s not looking at her and it’s the first time all day she doesn’t feel like his own little mission, something he’s adopted for the sake of responsibility. It’s something she’s been waiting for, a small taste of freedom from the crushing weight of being someone else’s pity party, but somehow it just feels worse, feels a little empty.
“Her number’s still programmed into my phone, you know?” His throat trembles when he speaks and she pretends not to notice. “It’s stupid, but I can’t take it out. I know I should, but I just can’t… It’s just a fucking number, right?”
And this isn’t what she wanted, not at all, because all he’s doing now is blurring the line even further. That clearly defined line of Logan-That-Was-Her-Friend and Logan-Who-Now-Isn’t, the strict uncrossable line of friend and foe.
“Logan…”
He sighs.
“Sometimes I wake up with my phone in my hand and I’ve already called her.” He gulps, deep and oxygen starved. “And I get that fucking voice announcing the number isn’t connected anymore… and I hate it, that stupid anonymous voice… I want to hurt it. And it’s just a voice!”
“Logan, c’mon.” Her fingers curl around his arm as she keeps her voice low and steady, trying to pull him away, out of the middle of the road, out of the view of people who are beginning to stop and turn and look. “Let’s sit down somewhere.”
Her fingers slide on his skin when he jerks out of her touch.
“I’m fine.” It’s hissed and low and slaps her across the face like a physical entity. “Jesus, Veronica, I’m not about to break down.”
A lot of things have changed in six months, the length of her hair, the brittleness of her skin, where she sits at lunch and who with, but one thing remains the same from the week after Lilly’s death, the way Logan’s whole body seems to shake without moving an inch. She knows that this, combined with his words, is code for ‘I’m about to break down pretty damn soon’.
That was back when he could list her top ten favorite songs and name the color dotting her fingernails without even looking, back when he’d spent time with her after Lilly’s death, back before she became his own personal antichrist and the recipient of his venom.
Five months, three weeks and four days ago, she would have wrapped her arms around him and pulled him in for a hug, she would have let him cry on her shoulder and later pretend it had been him comforting her. They’d done that, she still remembers it, she still feels it.
Her fingers itch in mid air, as if trying to reach him of their own accord.
But it isn’t the week after Lilly’s death and her father did accuse Jake Kane and Logan turned around and cut her off at the ankles for it.
“I haven’t been back, you know.” She doesn’t say where and the words are her own physical barrier, pushing him away and maybe, just slightly, maybe even trying to push him over the edge. “I can’t look at it again.”
A child, maybe six or seven, runs past them with an oversized toy hanging from her arms and bouncing high against her hip. Her voice is high and squeaky and worn out with too much fun as she calls for her mother with an accent Veronica can’t identify.
Neither of them blinks.
“I’ve been back.” Logan says it bitterly. “Trust me, she’s not there.”
Veronica thinks about cold grey marble etched with the name of her best friend, the base of it nestled neatly into grass too neat and too perfect to be anything but cultivated in a greenhouse and sculpted by underpaid hands before the funeral.
No mess and not a grain of misplaced earth on Lillian Kane’s grave.
God forbid.
“She never was.”
She wonders if he’s thinking about three people sitting in an otherwise empty room drinking stolen vodka and making each other laugh with stupid tales about Lilly while all the adults cried in another room.
And maybe this is like that, maybe walking around this park and remembering Lilly as she trailed after some random stranger, making them all hilariously obvious as they hid behind lamp posts and looked at blank walls as if they were shop fronts whenever he turned around, all four of them bursting into giggles that made their stomachs hurt, maybe that was better than visiting a grave that didn’t even have the right name.
Because the first thing Lilly would have done would be to attack Lillian’s grave with a chisel and correct that mistake.
“Yeah.” Logan nods resolutely. “Let’s just go, okay? Day’s done.”
Veronica looks around at the park that now seems offensively bright and cheerful and sighs.
“Sure.”
***
The drive home is as silent and awkward as the drive there.
Veronica slips Logan’s phone out of the console between them and erases Lilly’s number when he’s not looking.
She finds the fifty in her locker the next day at school.
***
***
Logan doesn’t know how she does it.
He’s known now for little over two days and he’s already broken the third knuckle of his right hand over Sean’s face. The flesh bright red and swollen to bursting, tender with each and every flex, the times he forgets and moves his hand without thinking first.
“So, what’re we doing this weekend?”
Dick seems oblivious to the awkwardness he’s just created at the table. They sit grouped, huddled into the Chinese cartons, hunkered down like football players. Duncan glowers, pouting down to his chopsticks.
This would be the time someone usually perks up with some inane idea about TJ or a party or even something stupid like hanging out at someone’s house with purloined beer and the playstation. Pizza is usually never far from their plans, whichever way it turns out.
But there’s a silence, a gap, where the suggestion should be.
They’re waiting for Duncan to make the move. They’re like pack animals, hovering, scratching at the earth, waiting for some sign, some indication what the plan of attack should be. If Duncan plans to open the Kane house, then Logan is back in the group, if he doesn’t then nobody, not even the Casablancas will extend that invite.
Across the courtyard, not that he’s been looking or, more precisely, not that he’s let anyone see him look, Veronica sits by herself, hunched over her text books, ignoring people who pass by and the world in general.
She’s sharp, much sharper now in ways she never was before, and Logan wants to scream with it. Her hair slashed off and all her soft, vulnerable sides sharpened and defensive. How had none of them noticed? It makes his skin itch, makes him wonder.
He looks at Duncan, the way he sulks into his lunch and hasn’t been able to look Logan in the eye all week. This is a boy that used to know her, used to follow Veronica around like a love sick puppy, used to lap up after her and hold her in his arms and whisper private jokes into the shell of her ear.
It’s impossible, absolutely incomprehensible to Logan, that Duncan hasn’t put two and two together, hasn’t seen the sudden change in her and known that something is wrong. If it were anyone else, Logan would just assume it was because he’d dumped the girl beforehand and had moved on enough not to care. But this is Duncan and Veronica, and Logan’s felt the bruises all over his cheek that tell him Duncan still feels for her. Maybe Duncan doesn’t want to see, just like Logan for too long, maybe Duncan’s just too busy pretending all’s fine and dandy in the world.
And maybe, it’s a slight maybe that chills Logan to the bone, maybe Duncan does know and that’s what all this is about.
Logan forces himself to swallow that thought with the bile in his throat.
Not Duncan, he wouldn’t do that. Logan doesn’t know why he dumped Veronica so hastily, so cruelly, but he knows that the boy would never do something that unforgivable. It was somebody, though, somebody who was there that night.
Which leaves the list of suspects as long as the school roster. There are five guys sitting at his table right now that could fit that bill. Casey, John, Cole, Dick or Beaver were all there. Logan knows this all too well, he handed the GHB around himself.
“Hey man.” Dick breaks him out of his reverie with a slap to the shoulder, a hand that might have held her down. “You awake or what?”
Logan jerks away as if he’s been burned, he can’t help it.
“Don’t touch me!”
It’s almost a scream, certainly too loud in the small courtyard. Everyone turns to watch, heads pop up from distant tables like meerkats at the first hint of food. Logan scrambles back, back and up, his knees shaking as he stands. He can’t stay here, not like this, not with them.
Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees it, Duncan’s soft face and knowing expression, the way he gently reins everyone else in. That’s his friend, his best friend, has been for years, and if there’s anything Duncan knows how to do, it’s cleaning after the messes of Logan Echolls in a downward spiral, recognizing the signs of one too many harsh words with his father. Not even a fight of this magnitude will get in the way of protecting Logan’s secret.
He thinks he hates Duncan just for that brief second.
As he walks past, Veronica gives him a brief, understanding smile. Too small for anyone else to see, but he does, catches it with an inhalation. It cuts him right down deep, because her face is slightly confused, mildly worried for him, and she doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that she’s a sitting duck in a yard full of men who could have raped her.
Logan doesn’t know how she does it.
***
He shouldn’t be surprised to see her standing in his side driveway when he pulls up, hip leaning against the sleek black lines of her LeBaron and arms crossed in front of her torso, but Logan can’t help the raise of his eyebrows as the gravel crunches under his tires.
The agency making deliveries now?
Funny, I didn’t order a whore…
The lines spring to his head as easy as breathing and he bites his tongue. Hard. Even if he says it in jest, it’s much too early, much too cutting and close to the last six months he’s just vowed to make up for. So he swallows them back up and smiles, trying not to appear too much like he’s eyeing her legs as her right foot crosses over her left ankle and her calves pouch out against each other.
Not at all, not him.
“It gets easier, you know.” He almost chokes when she speaks, launching herself off the bonnet with a bounce of her hip, and she laughs at his confusion. “Being around them.”
His feet hit solid ground as he jumps down from the driver’s seat. There’s maybe two feet between their cars and even less between them.
“I wasn’t…” And he’s suddenly tongue tied, flustered. It’s not a good feeling, nor a familiar one. He needs to say something just to say it, to get it out there and brush past the elephant standing between them. “So, what brings you here?”
Smooth.
Veronica gives him a look he instantly recognizes. It’s the same expression she’d sent to Lilly constantly, just the memory flashes through Logan like a sizzle, and he’d seen it often enough. The roll of her eyes and set of her mouth clearly say ‘cut the bullshit’.
There’s only one thing to do and he breathes in.
“How do you do it?”
He doesn’t think about how easily she falls into step beside him, their feet finding a pattern without thinking that the rest of them can’t seem to grasp even with the Herculean efforts they’ve been putting in. Their hands don’t touch, though he sees his left hand dangling suspiciously close to her right one and wishes he had the nerve to close that distance.
She shrugs.
“I don’t have a choice.” She lifts her chin up, turning her face to the sky as she breathes in. “But it gets easier.”
Not for the first time, his brain throws out images of what it must have been like for the last six months of her life. Putting up with all the crap they’ve put her through, putting up with everyone who may or may not have done that to her.
He doesn’t think it’s going to get easier at all.
“So?” His keys twirl around his forefinger, little metal distractions as he tries to lighten the mood. “You had to come all the way to my house for that? You couldn’t tell me, oh I don’t know, at school?”
She stops suddenly, turning to him with an open mouth.
“I… I thought you were doing the ignoring me bit.” It’s a blush that rises all the way up from her neck. “I mean, you were buddying up to Dick and those guys. Don’t you wanna be in the ‘in’ crowd again? Talking to me kinda negates all that effort.”
He chuckles, giving a quick glance to the house.
It’s barely a second, certainly nothing for her to notice, but it’s enough for him to see that there’s nobody else home, the drive an empty expanse of gravel. That’s a good thing. Unlike most people, his house is the most welcoming when it’s empty.
“Veronica, I am the in crowd.” He hopes he sounds more confident than he feels. “Didn’t you know?”
She laughs.
“God, Logan, you’re so full of it.”
He thinks it’s the nicest thing she’s said to him in months.
***
The air changes as soon as they step inside the door, his fingers finding the alarm pad easily and habitually, and his skin prickles at the sudden feel of recycled air. Logan feels lost inside his own house, it’s not an unfamiliar feeling, but he hates the great expanse of emptiness at his back, the never-ending chasm of space that threatens to swallow him whole.
Veronica steps inside the door slowly and timidly; waiting to the side, and her stiltedness just highlights the awkwardness between them.
“So.” He shrugs. “You want something to drink? Eat?”
If she were any other girl, Logan would know what to do. It starts, usually, with the grand tour, the one that gets them all fluttery with appreciation, because they don’t bother to hear or understand the bitter irony of his words. This is Aaron’s kitchen… this is where Aaron reads his mail… this is where Aaron holds business meetings… these are Aaron’s Oscars…, but Veronica doesn’t fit into this category at all.
There are two problems there. First, she’s been to his house before and he’s going to feel more than silly giving her the grand tour. Yeah, so, this is the kitchen where we all stood around and mushed oreos into icecream… and this is the lamp we had to buy after Duncan didn’t catch the football in that impromptu game we played… and this is the new rug…. Secondly, she’s never been one to be impressed by either his father’s name or his father’s money.
It’s one of the things he remembers loving about her and that realization hits him hard, makes him both dizzy and ashamed. For all that he’d insisted to Duncan how much they’d once been friends, he hadn’t thought about it, really thought about the little waif like girl he used to giggle with as they waited in the Kane siblings shadows.
Even Lilly, for all her grandstanding, got girly and red faced, giggling breathlessly while telling him that oh my god, Logan, your dad’s totally fuckable with enough truth in her voice to put him into therapy. Veronica, on the other hand, had never gotten starry eyed and he doesn’t remember ever telling her, but he used to relish the way she’d just brush through whatever necessary greetings Um, hi, Mr. Echolls… until she could escape into the background.
“Sure.” She gives a little smile mixed with a grimace. “I guess.”
He steeples his fingers and gestures towards the kitchen and she nods resolutely as she begins the solemn march as if he’s just pointed her towards a gas chamber. As they walk, he watches her eyes flicker back and forth, quick and sure, cataloguing everything, cross referencing it with her memory.
“I don’t…” His throat goes dry with the sudden realization. “I don’t know if we have anything.”
Honestly, he spends the least amount of time possible being seen anywhere in this house and that includes nosing about the kitchen for food.
“Mrs. Navarro still work for you?”
Logan blinks at the casual question. He shouldn’t be surprised that she remembers, it’s the sort of thing she does, but it still takes him unawares and he nods. She gives him a roll of her eyes as an answer and it strikes him how comfortable that gesture is. How easy and unwarranted directed at him from her.
“Then there’s something, c’mon.”
It aches, just a little, when she smiles.
***
Logan sits on the floor with his back up against the foot of the bed, his right knee brought up and his left leg sprawled out in front of him, hands working the controller faster and harder than he’ll ever admit to anyone. There is no way he’s going to lose.
Of course, there’s no way he’s going to win if he keeps fumbling every time the little snake of wires leading up past his shoulder onto the bed behind him keeps jerking.
His neck burns with the imagined feel of her breathing.
“Man, you are really crap at this game, aren’t you?”
Veronica laughs somewhere behind him and he refuses to turn his head to look. She’s sprawled over the top, belly pressed into the mattress, and if he catches sight of her legs bent up with her ankles dangling somewhere above her ass again then there’s no way he’s going to be able to get that image out of his head.
“You wanted to play it, not me.”
There’s something seriously wrong with him, with the both of them, really. They’re sitting in his pool house using the controllers of the playstation to decimate little computer animated versions of themselves on screen and, somehow, they’re finding it all too easy. It’s still better than the polite awkwardness they were looping in until they’d picked something vaguely detached and impersonal to do. At least, it was supposed to be impersonal.
She whoops in celebration when she rips his head completely off for the fourth time.
“You really are out for blood, aren’t you?” He closes his eyes and leans his head back. “Were you always this vicious? What the hell happened to you?”
Movement behind him stops, the air suddenly turning electrified, and his eyes flick back open. He stares at the ceiling as the game beeps to death in front of him, he can just see the blades of the fan turning around and around above him.
The second controller hits the mattress with a small thump.
“Jesus, Veronica, I didn’t…”
He can hear her; he doesn’t need to turn around. She scrambles up, all limbs and rustling whispers and sharply inhaled breaths and he counts to ten before he does turn, shifting up onto his knees and looking her in the face.
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?” She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, her arms pulled in close and her face pale. “You didn’t do anything.”
Yes, I did.
He doesn’t know what it is about her, what makes him want to lay it all down and open for her to see, to just tell her everything. He wants to own up to sitting idly with the boys and trying to think up the lewdest, crudest things to say about her. That time he took out the half page photoshopped spread of her in a low-key girly mag and then taped copies of it all over school.
The bandage is gone from her wrist, but the skin on his back itches and he has the strangest urge to tell her of the price he paid for that, that he made himself pay for her. He wonders what she’d do, what she’d say, and that very line of thinking has him compulsively sucking all the moisture from his teeth.
“For everything.” He says instead, simply, to cover all bases, because anything else is too much and not enough. “Just… for everything.”
She shakes her head and her face is smooth and almost amused, if it wasn’t for the slightly desperate pleading in the back of her eyes, he’d be fooled.
“Don’t, Logan, just don’t. Not today.” Her voice cracks slightly on the last word and her eyes shift away from his to stare out the glass doors towards his pool. “Don’t.”
“Let me make it up to you.” He’s all but doubled over the edge of the mattress, leaning forward to get closer to her and she’s inching back. “Please?”
It’s a slow roll of her neck until she’s facing him again and he feels himself shrink under the shrewd gaze, the way her mouth pinches in and her forehead burrows in thought. She’s really studying him, looking for something in his face and he has no clue what it is.
“You really think you can make that up?”
His mouth is already open before his brain catches up and he snaps it shut. There’s no really safe way to answer that. Saying yes makes it look like he’s belittling all the things she’s been through, that he thinks a few half hearted fist fights in the hall is worth the way she cried as she told him. Saying no will be admitting defeat before he even begins.
“I can try.”
She mulls it over, her eyes flicking back and forth over his face, left to right and right to left.
“Will you…?”
Her bottom lip curls in underneath her teeth and she hesitates, leaving him on edge, leaving him breathless. He watches in confusion as she slowly pushes her hand out towards him. It’s like she’s made a decision and he should know what it is.
All he can think, as he looks at the newly healed wrist floating in the air between them, is about his carelessness, the way he hurt her.
His confusion must show in his face.
“Take it.” She goads, jiggling the hand in front of his face. “You do know how to hold someone’s hand, don’t you?”
He’d laugh if his confusion didn’t just quadruple and he can feel his own forehead wrinkling up as he slides his hand into hers, fingers sliding over her palm and into the grooves of the bones inside. Her face is blank as she stares at them and he desperately wants to know the reason for such a strange request.
Her fingers twitch inside his.
Then she smiles, soft and shy.
“Thank you.”
“But why?” He doesn’t let go as he pushes his feet against the floor and launches himself up onto the bed to sit opposite her, both of them face to face Indian style. “What’s so special about this?”
The smile curves around her lips, pushing the edges of them up, hesitating there for a second before dropping back to a blankly interested gaze as she turns their joined hands over, eyes moving swiftly over the knobbed structure.
“You wouldn’t understand.” It’s a sigh, sad and distracted. “But I missed this.”
“This?” He frowns as he looks down, too. “We used to hold hands a lot? Because I don’t remem…”
She jiggles his hand to get his attention.
“Touch.” It’s a whispered explanation and when he looks back up, her eyes are watching him intently and he’s stunned by the vulnerability she’s actually showing him. “Nobody touches me anymore.”
His thumb slides gently over hers and he’s choked by a thousand different memories.
All the countless moments he hadn’t realized he’d taken note of: all the stray, absent caresses that Duncan used to give her, the way she used to quiver into them, like a contented cat snuggling closer. All the wayward pushes and nudges and arms slung over shoulders and around necks between her and Lilly. The easy way she used to needle him and take being needled back.
Logan doesn’t like to be touched by a lot of people. Random, unexpected hands landing on his shoulders make him flinch, loud claps to the back and arms have him shuddering, but he always preened under the soft caresses of Lilly. And, once upon a time, his mother’s hand used to comfort him, sliding his hair back off his face and tending wounds. He has an easy camaraderie with most of his friends at school.
He tries to imagine living without any of it for months on end and then tries imagining the girl in his memories doing the same.
It burns like hot acid guilt up his gullet.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s tired and overworked and he’s been saying it too much, the brief flicker of amusement over her face tells him that she agrees. But she sobers up quickly enough as her eyes fix him in an intent stare.
“Just don’t make me regret this, Logan. That’s all I ask.”
Their skin slides against each other, warm and clammy, when they pull apart.
***
He’s a little bit bereft when she finally insists it’s time to go.
It’s a strange feeling and he doesn’t know what to do with it, it makes him slightly uncomfortable. As awkward as they are together, he really doesn’t want to let go. There’s a little pit, somewhere deep and dark inside his brain, that keeps telling him that if he lets her walk out of his house and get into her car, that she’ll never be back.
“Are…” His hand drags through his hair, fingers automatically parting and separating. “Are you sure? I mean, you don’t have to…”
She smiles politely and nods.
“Really, my dad’s waiting.”
There’s tightness in her smile, in the expectant way she looks at him that makes him think she’s actually counting down the seconds until she leaves, that she wants to get away. And maybe she is; he can’t blame her for it. Honestly, he’s a little surprised that she’s stayed this far at all.
As he’s walking her past the pool, his hand hovers inches from her shoulder. It’s not something he’d ever have thought about before, his natural inclination is to rest his hand there, maybe on the small of her back, and he really wants to do that. But he doesn’t want her to think he’s only doing it because of what she’d said.
A flash of light inside the house catches his eye and he stops thinking at all as he automatically catches hold of her and guides her to the side path that leads all the way around the house instead.
“Let’s go this way.”
His voice is tight and too high and she frowns in confusion as she looks at him. He’s not fast enough in looking away and she follows his glance to the house, to the obvious signs of life inside.
Sudden realization floods her face.
“Oh.” And her stance becomes defensive as her expression hardens. “I get it.”
Then it hits him.
“Wait, Veronica, no.”
But she’s already reaching for her bag, the one he’s carrying and he can do nothing but release it as she tugs it out of his grasp.
“It’s alright, Logan, really.” There’s a catch in her voice that makes him bite down hard on the inside of his cheek. “I get it, you know. My bad, I thought when you said you wanted to be friends again you meant…”
Her hand hovers forgotten in mid air and he’s not entirely sure if she’s gesturing to the inside of his house specifically or the air around them in general.
“Don’t worry.” She leans forward with an exaggerated wink, but her eyes are cold and narrow and her mouth is firmly set. “I won’t besmirch your good name. God forbid the parents know, huh? Couldn’t have that.”
He’s left helpless and alone as she spins on her heel and walks away, making a great show of avoiding the main house, and he can’t do anything but clench his fists open and closed. It’s useless and frustrating and he doesn’t have the words to properly explain his reasons.
For all that she’s been through and all that he’s put her through, there’s something in there that he has an insanely strong urge to protect. He’s known her for years and even if he hadn’t seen her with her father that morning earlier in the week, the both of them joking and moving about each other with practiced ease, he remembers watching her with Keith years earlier.
He doesn’t have the words to explain the sickly shiver he gets when his own father’s eyes slide over any girls he dares to bring home.
He doesn’t have the words to explain that he’d rather she be angry with him that to see Aaron looking at her like that.
***
***
Veronica’s hands shake as she parks just outside the Sunset Cliffs apartment complex.
“Dammit!” Her right hand leaves the steering wheel, bunching up and slamming down, once, twice and then a third time. “Dammit, dammit!”
She’s got nobody but herself to blame. She knew, she knew going in, every second since Logan Echolls stopped taunting her and started trying to make her trust him again. Every single second, she’d been telling herself not to do it, not to fall for whatever game he was playing.
And then she fell straight into his trap.
God, he must be laughing so hard at her right now.
They’re going to crucify her in school tomorrow.
She thought she was prepared. She thought she was smart enough. After everything, she thought she’d be able to stop caring so much about what they did and thought and said about her. She’d closed herself off from them and it had no longer hurt anymore.
And then she’d let Logan back in.
She’d actually thought he wanted to be friends again.
Her apartment is empty and she suddenly doesn’t want to go back to it, does not want to open the door and be surrounded by shrinking walls. It makes her feel traitorous. Backup is there and he is her best friend. She loves him with everything she has, but suddenly it doesn’t seem quite enough.
It’s a prison.
She didn’t ask to be branded an outcast, she didn’t ask to be the school whore, she didn’t ask for everyone to look at her as if she was handing out free ebola. She didn’t ask to spend her days avoiding meeting people’s eyes, skirting the edges of the halls to reduce the risk of people ‘accidentally’ knocking her books and bags out of her hands, habitually checking rooms before entering, opening her locker away from her face in case of messy explosives.
She didn’t ask for it, but she has it.
And for a brief few days, she had let herself believe that maybe it was going to get easier.
It just makes it all the harder to swallow.
But she knows what she has to do. She has to enter her home and do her homework and not think about familiar faces with hard, hostile expressions. She has to go to bed and forget the week ever existed, just like the last sixteen years of her life. She has to wake up and have a shower and eat her breakfast and then go back to school and not blink at whatever the hell they’re going to say.
She has to pretend that the constant, unchanging company of her father and her dog is not at all lacking in any way, shape, or form. They are all she needs.
In a few years, just over two, she can leave all of it behind. Until then, she refuses to let them break her.
She is stronger than that. She is stronger than them.
Her hand wipes harshly at her cheeks, swiping viciously at the moisture collected there. She’s furious at herself for this, for letting him get to her like that. She should know better. She did know better. She has no right to cry over them.
Her cell buzzes beside her and she glances down at the display.
“Tell me.” She doesn’t bother with small talk to open, just keeps her voice steady and calm and cold. “Just tell me how bad it is.”
“What?”
The hand holding her phone trembles and she bites her lip to make sure it’s steady enough so that he doesn’t hear it over the phone.
“Whatever they’re planning.” Her stomach rolls in on itself. “Whatever the hell you’ve cooked up, just tell me what it is so I can be prepared. You owe me that, Logan.”
“Veronica, please.” And she has to close her eyes to block him out, so that she doesn’t see his face as she hears him. “It’s not like that, I promise. Just listen to me, please…”
But she knows exactly what he looks like, what expression he’s using and how his hands would be imploring her if he was standing there. She can hear him use the exact tone on Lilly.
“You know, I get why.” She doesn’t let him finish, putting him out of his misery. “I mean, all the usual names, the taunts and all the flat tires, they were getting stale. I get it. You had to come up with something new, something big, I appreciate it.”
Her voice shakes a little.
“It was a lot of effort, actually. Bravo. You really know how to make a girl feel special. There’s just one thing…” The very thought of it crystallizes her sorrow and self pity into anger. A cold, seething fury. “Why bring Lilly into it? Why? You didn’t have to…”
“Veronica.” Logan tries again.
“She’d hate you, you know.” It’s something she’s thought often, but hasn’t ever voiced before. “For what you’re doing to me, and in her name, too. She might have been a bitch sometimes, but she was never cruel. You weren’t just mean, you let me think…”
But she doesn’t finish that thought; she doesn’t need to.
She can already hear the jibes in the hallway, did you really beg Logan Echolls to touch you? , Nobody touches you? From what we hear, everyone does.
“The things you let me say.” And then she has a horrid thought. “Oh my god, that morning…”
“Veronica, no.” He says it sharp and forcefully, demanding that she listen. “I wouldn’t use that against you. I promise.”
“You know.” She laughs, bitter and tired. “I might have believed that once upon a time.”
“What do I have to do?” He pleads and she almost believes the apparent sincerity in his voice. “Just tell me, what do I have to do to prove to you I mean it? I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not planning anything. I’m trying here.”
Veronica sighs.
“Just leave me alone, Logan.” Her head leans forward until she’s leaning against the wheel and her breath comes back at her from the dash. “That’s what I’ve been asking from the start. Stay away from me and leave me the hell alone.”
Her fingers snap the connection closed and she breathes in, gaining enough strength to step outside the door and get on with the rest of her life.
***
end chapter one.
Comments?
All fic found: here.
Title: "… To Dream".
Sequel to: "Sleep Perchance…". I really recommend reading that first; otherwise things get kinda lost. Although, it is 22,000+ words, so you might wanna bring a packed lunch and a thermos of coffee.
Author: Jacqui wily_one24
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica.
Word Count: 8,625.
Rating: pg-13.
Summary: She doesn’t know how to tell him no, how to explain exactly how much this is a bad idea
Spoilers: Pre-series, but some season one stuff.
Warnings: None, not really.
Disclaimer: Oh, they’re not mine. I just take them out of their boxes, play with them, muss there hair a bit, and put ‘em back when I’m done.
A/N: This picks up the very morning of the previous fic, in case anyone is confused.
A/N #2: Don't worry, Paranoia is being written. My muse is just being very stubborn and unrelenting. I am plying her with Tim Tams as we speak. Cross your fingers.
*~*~*~*
…TO DREAM, part one.
*~*~*~*
The leather sticks to the backs of her thighs as she stares out the window, toes curling inside her shoes, right foot, then left. Her mouth feels sticky and she wants to stop for water, but she’s not going to be the first one to speak, to break the deafening, heavy silence.
So the car drives on.
Outside, the streets and houses have fallen away to reveal never-ending highways and trees. Inside the car, Veronica thinks it would be easier to throw open the door at full speed, tuck her knees up and just dive out, hitting the road at a roll and hoping for minimal injuries along the way.
“I know where we can go!”
She jumps at his voice, if not the intention.
It sounds too loud and too sudden inside their close, self imposed suffocating quarters, even if she’s been expecting him to say something for the last thirty minutes. Even if she’s known exactly where he’s been headed since he first turned onto the highway.
The Xterra pulls onto the exit ramp and Veronica grips the edges of her seat even tighter, wishing she’d had the good sense to push him out of her apartment earlier and just go to school anyway.
Not that she wants to be there, either. The very thought of walking into the school and looking at the same multitude of faces who either taunt her or ignore the taunting is just wearying in ways that leave her listless and unable to move.
Unable to walk away from the one person who has bothered to look twice at her in the last few months.
“Okay.” It blurts out of her lips like an accident, like she should be following it with ‘excuse me’ in polite company. “Sure.”
She doesn’t know how to tell him no, how to explain exactly how much this is a bad idea. Especially when he’s spent the entire morning with his face pinched up into a worried expression that makes it look like he’s going to crack into a million fragile pieces if she even frowns too much.
Her eyes stay resolutely on the edge of the dashboard, not looking up, not searching the landscape for the telltale bumps and whorls and multicolored signs that indicate their destination. A place she hasn’t been in eight months.
Two months before all their lives went to hell.
She knows what he’s trying to do. He’s made it the day’s mission to Make Veronica Happy At All Costs and he’s playing the part to perfection, all excitement and enthusiasm. He’s working so hard at it, that she’s willing to settle for Letting Herself Forget For Just A Day.
Perhaps she should get used to the taste of bile if she can’t tell him to turn the car around any second now.
“Is it even open today?” His face falls so far at her words that she has no choice but to immediately backtrack. “I mean, why wouldn’t they be? It’s close enough to Spring Break, right?”
The sun is beating down hard through the windows and the skin of her knees is turning pink. They’re nowhere near summer just yet, but it’s already hot enough to notice.
There’s sweat trickling on the inside of her elbows.
“I just saw one move!” His cry is loud and sudden and triumphant, bursting with so much excitement and expectation that he sounds about ten years old. “It’s open!”
She angles forward toward the windscreen, stretching her eyes up and finally looking at the monstrosity that is far too close now to turn back from. Sure enough, as she’s looking high into the sky, one of the roller coaster cars rockets by.
They’re close enough to hear the sound of it rumbling, as if the very air around them is rocked.
Veronica doesn’t trust Logan Echolls enough to leave him alone with a caged rat and yet she’s there with him now, about to let him drag her into Magic Mountain and onto rides specifically designed to excite her terror-death responses as they pass places that are still tainted by memories of Lilly and forms of themselves that they’ll never be again.
And she doesn’t know how to look into his eyes and tell him that scares her beyond anything.
So she plasters on a smile she hopes is mildly believable and turns to him.
“Yay?"
***
It’s not like she’s a stranger to this.
Her dad does it, not always to this magnitude, but she knows the routine.
After the weeks following Lilly’s funeral, those weeks Veronica can barely remember in any true detail beyond the blur of existing, the sluggish way of moving that wasn’t really moving as hands pushed and pulled her where they wanted her to go, the numbness that had couched her, her father had taken her to the San Diego Zoo.
Since then, with every subsequent set back, her dad’s removal from office, her mom leaving, leaving their house for a smaller apartment, ostracism, the father-daughter activities have gotten a little less showy and lot more heartfelt.
They’ve got a definite schedule down now, set movies on DVD, standard orders at the local Italian take out, everything down to the timing of who does what and how and when. It’s comfortable, the two of them, together in ways that they’ve never been before.
She’s learned a lot about her father now that he’s at home more, now that they’ve both lost so much. They share loneliness, a love of fine foods, the care of Backup, a guilty indulgence in goofy movies and the occasional wistful glance at her mother’s photo sitting in a frame on the shelf.
This sudden enforced camaraderie, though cherished by them both, came at a high price. Too high, she thinks sometimes.
And not just her father, either. It comes in many forms, such as jokes shared with her father’s lawyer. Cliff helped Keith set up the business and from the very start laughed with and at her, jovial in ways that made her breathe easier, even if she could see past the light humor into the pity behind his eyes.
It’s a survival technique, one they’d all had to learn quickly, a legacy of being friends with Lilly Kane: how to ignore pity. She thinks even Logan has that one down. She also thinks they’re both reaching the end of their tether on it.
Which is why her fingers itch and curl as she watches him step up to the front gate.
She’s familiar with the sentiment, this desperate attempt to bring her up and out of herself, her bedroom is full of stuffed toys and her belly full of bags of sweet pastries and Italian cuisine bought in guilt, but it is still Logan Echolls.
And Logan Echolls is not the adorably mischievous boy who once held her down so Lilly could tickle her until she choked on her own laughter, coming up purple faced and breathless as they suddenly let go and backed away, splitting up and running in opposite directions so she couldn’t follow them both.
All she really needs to do is grit her teeth and remember the ugly words in his mouth, the brutal ways in which he’s tried to tear her down and it becomes easy.
He flinches when her hand slams down in front of him, slapping the fifty clearly on the counter.
“Veronica…”
But she glares and it’s painful. It’s hard won money she can barely afford to be pissing off on spur of the moment days when she should be at school. It’s pride she knows he can barely swallow, but really has no right not to.
“Fine.” He curls the note into the palm of his hand and continues pressing the credit card forward. “Two, please.”
She knows he’s going to slide that note back to her sometime during the day, but that’s hardly the point of the exercise.
***
She honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see a large ball of thistle tumble down the path ahead of them. It’s not just the heat, even if it’s really too early in the year for the air to be the kind of thick, arid vacuum that sucks all the color and energy out of everything, it’s that there’s so few people around.
They live in California and there’s mostly perfect weather all year round and somewhere in the world it has to be a holiday, so there’s always bundles of tourists and enough random stragglers dotting the park to make their presence un-noteworthy to everyone else, but the absence of eighteen hour long ride lines and shoulder to shoulder jostling just highlights their awkwardness.
Logan talks big, he always has, and she remembers finding it exhausting when she was just an observer, quietly clutching Duncan’s hand as they smiled at him trying to wheedle Lilly into whatever next big adventure he’d had planned.
But now it’s just her and Logan, with no buffers in between, and it’s mentally taxing to force her arm to stay limp and pliant when he grabs her wrist and pulls her off towards whatever tangent catches his eye.
It’s hard not to dig her heels in and fight him at every step.
The platform they’re standing on rumbles under their toes as the coaster screeches to a halt just feet away, the seated people red faced and incomprehensible as they jabber with excited glee. They’re first in line and he reaches out for her hand, trying to pull her to the very first car.
She flinches before she can stop herself and his face falls, eyes narrowing slightly as he folds his arm up to his chest like a bird protecting a wing.
“I’m trying, Veronica.”
The way he says it, it sounds more like an accusation than an admission as the man pulls the heavy bars down across their chests.
Only when the wind is forcing their heads back onto the little pad that cushions them and their shoulders are slammed against the backs of the chairs, hard bars clamping them down into their seats as the ground rushes up to meet them at inhumane speeds, does she open her mouth to answer.
“I’m scared!”
He doesn’t answer amid the screams of everyone else, but his hand inches over and his fingers mingle with hers when the cars lurch, their stomachs are left somewhere on the ground as they rocket back towards the sky.
***
They eat lunch sitting at a wooden bench, elbows tucked in politely, eyes down at the fries and his hotdog, knees held very carefully to avoid touching.
It’s not like she doesn’t remember the night before, because she does. She spent a good deal of the rest of the night and the morning trying to get it out of her head. His drunken voice slurring about how he thought she was pretty, of all things, and now he was trying to play the friend card and she was supposed to pretend it had never happened.
And all between moments of being hyper aware enough of her actions not to give him any ammunition in case he really was just playing a game that he’d tire of after a week or even less.
Her stomach grumbles against the flood of incoming soda as she sips at the straw and what she really wants is something solid and real, what she wants is a hotdog slathered with ketchup, just like the one Logan has, but she’s perfectly fine with her serving of fries, small, delicate food that can be eaten nicely, without a hint of innuendo or suggestion or crudity. Because she’s sitting with Logan and that’s habit borne of self-preservation.
What she really wants is to trust him.
“You gonna eat those?”
Veronica narrows her eyes.
“Touch my fries and die, Echolls.”
He laughs and it’s almost comfortable between them.
***
And maybe Logan knows more about what he’s doing, what they’re both doing, than she was willing to give him credit for.
It’s hard to keep up distance between two people when they’re rocketed back and forth at break neck speeds, screaming at the top of their lungs. It’s hard not to let some of the walls crumble as she gasps for breath, stumbling as her legs try to adjust back to solid ground, laughing, buzzing on the adrenaline high.
There’s something altogether freeing about giving up control of everything to an absurdly rickety cart and hurtling towards almost certain destruction as she opens her lungs and screams. And they both scream. It’s not because they’re scared and they both know it.
Veronica hasn’t gotten angry, really angry, for six months. She’s been resolute and strong, unwavering enough to convince everyone around her, but she hasn’t allowed herself to look deep enough to find any anger beneath the resentment and fear and grief.
She’s almost surprised to find it there.
Nobody even blinks at a couple of teenagers on a roller coaster if they shout out long, incomprehensible words against the loud thundering of the wheels and carts and hoists. And when some teen in front of them screams out a joyful ‘woo!’ on the way down, Veronica screams out a large ‘fuck you!’ to everyone and everything.
And Logan grins at her as he lifts the bars off his chest at the end of the ride.
The words spill out, rushed and heated, and they talk of nothing. Things that don’t matter, that can never matter, about the shape of a bush, about the suspicious color of an icecream cone held by a random passing stranger, about the height of one of the rides.
Things they don’t talk about include: his family; her family; school; the friends he has and she doesn’t but once did at school; Lilly; Duncan; the times when they were LillyandLogan and DuncanandVeronica; sex; law enforcement; crime solving; flat tires; vandalism; even the times before there were LillyandLogan and DuncanandVeronica, when they were just four kids being kids. It burns holes in the tips of their tongues, because these people and these words and these histories rule their lives.
She knows the instances that he feels it, even when he doesn’t say anything, it’s a gasp of breath, a sudden inhalation like he’s trying to pull the moment back into his mouth once he’s opened it.
Eventually one of them has to break and it ends up being her.
“Oh my god.” It’s a laugh, bubbling out of her chest before she knows it’s there as she grabs his arm and lets go in an instant, gesturing towards a shop front. “That’s the shop Lilly thought she saw Colin Farrell in that time!”
He blinks, stunned for a second, and she watches him shake his head free of it.
“No.” But it’s not a denial, just a moment of gathering thoughts, before a grin blooms all over his face. “I can’t believe she made us stalk that man for twenty minutes.”
The laughter is short lived and she breathes deeply, as if she can absorb all the happy molecules still floating about in the air, haphazardly wafting around her face. Most likely, she’s taking in someone else’s exhaled misery.
“She’s everywhere, here, isn’t she?”
Her question officially sets the mood and he stops smiling.
“Yeah.”
Suddenly the thrill of coasters and rides and defying everyone seems hollow and base and they’re just two people standing in the middle of a path that leads nowhere between islands of overly green fake grass and too cheery signs.
“I miss her.” She whispers. “Sometimes I forget she’s gone and then I remember.”
He’s not looking at her and it’s the first time all day she doesn’t feel like his own little mission, something he’s adopted for the sake of responsibility. It’s something she’s been waiting for, a small taste of freedom from the crushing weight of being someone else’s pity party, but somehow it just feels worse, feels a little empty.
“Her number’s still programmed into my phone, you know?” His throat trembles when he speaks and she pretends not to notice. “It’s stupid, but I can’t take it out. I know I should, but I just can’t… It’s just a fucking number, right?”
And this isn’t what she wanted, not at all, because all he’s doing now is blurring the line even further. That clearly defined line of Logan-That-Was-Her-Friend and Logan-Who-Now-Isn’t, the strict uncrossable line of friend and foe.
“Logan…”
He sighs.
“Sometimes I wake up with my phone in my hand and I’ve already called her.” He gulps, deep and oxygen starved. “And I get that fucking voice announcing the number isn’t connected anymore… and I hate it, that stupid anonymous voice… I want to hurt it. And it’s just a voice!”
“Logan, c’mon.” Her fingers curl around his arm as she keeps her voice low and steady, trying to pull him away, out of the middle of the road, out of the view of people who are beginning to stop and turn and look. “Let’s sit down somewhere.”
Her fingers slide on his skin when he jerks out of her touch.
“I’m fine.” It’s hissed and low and slaps her across the face like a physical entity. “Jesus, Veronica, I’m not about to break down.”
A lot of things have changed in six months, the length of her hair, the brittleness of her skin, where she sits at lunch and who with, but one thing remains the same from the week after Lilly’s death, the way Logan’s whole body seems to shake without moving an inch. She knows that this, combined with his words, is code for ‘I’m about to break down pretty damn soon’.
That was back when he could list her top ten favorite songs and name the color dotting her fingernails without even looking, back when he’d spent time with her after Lilly’s death, back before she became his own personal antichrist and the recipient of his venom.
Five months, three weeks and four days ago, she would have wrapped her arms around him and pulled him in for a hug, she would have let him cry on her shoulder and later pretend it had been him comforting her. They’d done that, she still remembers it, she still feels it.
Her fingers itch in mid air, as if trying to reach him of their own accord.
But it isn’t the week after Lilly’s death and her father did accuse Jake Kane and Logan turned around and cut her off at the ankles for it.
“I haven’t been back, you know.” She doesn’t say where and the words are her own physical barrier, pushing him away and maybe, just slightly, maybe even trying to push him over the edge. “I can’t look at it again.”
A child, maybe six or seven, runs past them with an oversized toy hanging from her arms and bouncing high against her hip. Her voice is high and squeaky and worn out with too much fun as she calls for her mother with an accent Veronica can’t identify.
Neither of them blinks.
“I’ve been back.” Logan says it bitterly. “Trust me, she’s not there.”
Veronica thinks about cold grey marble etched with the name of her best friend, the base of it nestled neatly into grass too neat and too perfect to be anything but cultivated in a greenhouse and sculpted by underpaid hands before the funeral.
No mess and not a grain of misplaced earth on Lillian Kane’s grave.
God forbid.
“She never was.”
She wonders if he’s thinking about three people sitting in an otherwise empty room drinking stolen vodka and making each other laugh with stupid tales about Lilly while all the adults cried in another room.
And maybe this is like that, maybe walking around this park and remembering Lilly as she trailed after some random stranger, making them all hilariously obvious as they hid behind lamp posts and looked at blank walls as if they were shop fronts whenever he turned around, all four of them bursting into giggles that made their stomachs hurt, maybe that was better than visiting a grave that didn’t even have the right name.
Because the first thing Lilly would have done would be to attack Lillian’s grave with a chisel and correct that mistake.
“Yeah.” Logan nods resolutely. “Let’s just go, okay? Day’s done.”
Veronica looks around at the park that now seems offensively bright and cheerful and sighs.
“Sure.”
***
The drive home is as silent and awkward as the drive there.
Veronica slips Logan’s phone out of the console between them and erases Lilly’s number when he’s not looking.
She finds the fifty in her locker the next day at school.
***
***
Logan doesn’t know how she does it.
He’s known now for little over two days and he’s already broken the third knuckle of his right hand over Sean’s face. The flesh bright red and swollen to bursting, tender with each and every flex, the times he forgets and moves his hand without thinking first.
“So, what’re we doing this weekend?”
Dick seems oblivious to the awkwardness he’s just created at the table. They sit grouped, huddled into the Chinese cartons, hunkered down like football players. Duncan glowers, pouting down to his chopsticks.
This would be the time someone usually perks up with some inane idea about TJ or a party or even something stupid like hanging out at someone’s house with purloined beer and the playstation. Pizza is usually never far from their plans, whichever way it turns out.
But there’s a silence, a gap, where the suggestion should be.
They’re waiting for Duncan to make the move. They’re like pack animals, hovering, scratching at the earth, waiting for some sign, some indication what the plan of attack should be. If Duncan plans to open the Kane house, then Logan is back in the group, if he doesn’t then nobody, not even the Casablancas will extend that invite.
Across the courtyard, not that he’s been looking or, more precisely, not that he’s let anyone see him look, Veronica sits by herself, hunched over her text books, ignoring people who pass by and the world in general.
She’s sharp, much sharper now in ways she never was before, and Logan wants to scream with it. Her hair slashed off and all her soft, vulnerable sides sharpened and defensive. How had none of them noticed? It makes his skin itch, makes him wonder.
He looks at Duncan, the way he sulks into his lunch and hasn’t been able to look Logan in the eye all week. This is a boy that used to know her, used to follow Veronica around like a love sick puppy, used to lap up after her and hold her in his arms and whisper private jokes into the shell of her ear.
It’s impossible, absolutely incomprehensible to Logan, that Duncan hasn’t put two and two together, hasn’t seen the sudden change in her and known that something is wrong. If it were anyone else, Logan would just assume it was because he’d dumped the girl beforehand and had moved on enough not to care. But this is Duncan and Veronica, and Logan’s felt the bruises all over his cheek that tell him Duncan still feels for her. Maybe Duncan doesn’t want to see, just like Logan for too long, maybe Duncan’s just too busy pretending all’s fine and dandy in the world.
And maybe, it’s a slight maybe that chills Logan to the bone, maybe Duncan does know and that’s what all this is about.
Logan forces himself to swallow that thought with the bile in his throat.
Not Duncan, he wouldn’t do that. Logan doesn’t know why he dumped Veronica so hastily, so cruelly, but he knows that the boy would never do something that unforgivable. It was somebody, though, somebody who was there that night.
Which leaves the list of suspects as long as the school roster. There are five guys sitting at his table right now that could fit that bill. Casey, John, Cole, Dick or Beaver were all there. Logan knows this all too well, he handed the GHB around himself.
“Hey man.” Dick breaks him out of his reverie with a slap to the shoulder, a hand that might have held her down. “You awake or what?”
Logan jerks away as if he’s been burned, he can’t help it.
“Don’t touch me!”
It’s almost a scream, certainly too loud in the small courtyard. Everyone turns to watch, heads pop up from distant tables like meerkats at the first hint of food. Logan scrambles back, back and up, his knees shaking as he stands. He can’t stay here, not like this, not with them.
Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees it, Duncan’s soft face and knowing expression, the way he gently reins everyone else in. That’s his friend, his best friend, has been for years, and if there’s anything Duncan knows how to do, it’s cleaning after the messes of Logan Echolls in a downward spiral, recognizing the signs of one too many harsh words with his father. Not even a fight of this magnitude will get in the way of protecting Logan’s secret.
He thinks he hates Duncan just for that brief second.
As he walks past, Veronica gives him a brief, understanding smile. Too small for anyone else to see, but he does, catches it with an inhalation. It cuts him right down deep, because her face is slightly confused, mildly worried for him, and she doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that she’s a sitting duck in a yard full of men who could have raped her.
Logan doesn’t know how she does it.
***
He shouldn’t be surprised to see her standing in his side driveway when he pulls up, hip leaning against the sleek black lines of her LeBaron and arms crossed in front of her torso, but Logan can’t help the raise of his eyebrows as the gravel crunches under his tires.
The agency making deliveries now?
Funny, I didn’t order a whore…
The lines spring to his head as easy as breathing and he bites his tongue. Hard. Even if he says it in jest, it’s much too early, much too cutting and close to the last six months he’s just vowed to make up for. So he swallows them back up and smiles, trying not to appear too much like he’s eyeing her legs as her right foot crosses over her left ankle and her calves pouch out against each other.
Not at all, not him.
“It gets easier, you know.” He almost chokes when she speaks, launching herself off the bonnet with a bounce of her hip, and she laughs at his confusion. “Being around them.”
His feet hit solid ground as he jumps down from the driver’s seat. There’s maybe two feet between their cars and even less between them.
“I wasn’t…” And he’s suddenly tongue tied, flustered. It’s not a good feeling, nor a familiar one. He needs to say something just to say it, to get it out there and brush past the elephant standing between them. “So, what brings you here?”
Smooth.
Veronica gives him a look he instantly recognizes. It’s the same expression she’d sent to Lilly constantly, just the memory flashes through Logan like a sizzle, and he’d seen it often enough. The roll of her eyes and set of her mouth clearly say ‘cut the bullshit’.
There’s only one thing to do and he breathes in.
“How do you do it?”
He doesn’t think about how easily she falls into step beside him, their feet finding a pattern without thinking that the rest of them can’t seem to grasp even with the Herculean efforts they’ve been putting in. Their hands don’t touch, though he sees his left hand dangling suspiciously close to her right one and wishes he had the nerve to close that distance.
She shrugs.
“I don’t have a choice.” She lifts her chin up, turning her face to the sky as she breathes in. “But it gets easier.”
Not for the first time, his brain throws out images of what it must have been like for the last six months of her life. Putting up with all the crap they’ve put her through, putting up with everyone who may or may not have done that to her.
He doesn’t think it’s going to get easier at all.
“So?” His keys twirl around his forefinger, little metal distractions as he tries to lighten the mood. “You had to come all the way to my house for that? You couldn’t tell me, oh I don’t know, at school?”
She stops suddenly, turning to him with an open mouth.
“I… I thought you were doing the ignoring me bit.” It’s a blush that rises all the way up from her neck. “I mean, you were buddying up to Dick and those guys. Don’t you wanna be in the ‘in’ crowd again? Talking to me kinda negates all that effort.”
He chuckles, giving a quick glance to the house.
It’s barely a second, certainly nothing for her to notice, but it’s enough for him to see that there’s nobody else home, the drive an empty expanse of gravel. That’s a good thing. Unlike most people, his house is the most welcoming when it’s empty.
“Veronica, I am the in crowd.” He hopes he sounds more confident than he feels. “Didn’t you know?”
She laughs.
“God, Logan, you’re so full of it.”
He thinks it’s the nicest thing she’s said to him in months.
***
The air changes as soon as they step inside the door, his fingers finding the alarm pad easily and habitually, and his skin prickles at the sudden feel of recycled air. Logan feels lost inside his own house, it’s not an unfamiliar feeling, but he hates the great expanse of emptiness at his back, the never-ending chasm of space that threatens to swallow him whole.
Veronica steps inside the door slowly and timidly; waiting to the side, and her stiltedness just highlights the awkwardness between them.
“So.” He shrugs. “You want something to drink? Eat?”
If she were any other girl, Logan would know what to do. It starts, usually, with the grand tour, the one that gets them all fluttery with appreciation, because they don’t bother to hear or understand the bitter irony of his words. This is Aaron’s kitchen… this is where Aaron reads his mail… this is where Aaron holds business meetings… these are Aaron’s Oscars…, but Veronica doesn’t fit into this category at all.
There are two problems there. First, she’s been to his house before and he’s going to feel more than silly giving her the grand tour. Yeah, so, this is the kitchen where we all stood around and mushed oreos into icecream… and this is the lamp we had to buy after Duncan didn’t catch the football in that impromptu game we played… and this is the new rug…. Secondly, she’s never been one to be impressed by either his father’s name or his father’s money.
It’s one of the things he remembers loving about her and that realization hits him hard, makes him both dizzy and ashamed. For all that he’d insisted to Duncan how much they’d once been friends, he hadn’t thought about it, really thought about the little waif like girl he used to giggle with as they waited in the Kane siblings shadows.
Even Lilly, for all her grandstanding, got girly and red faced, giggling breathlessly while telling him that oh my god, Logan, your dad’s totally fuckable with enough truth in her voice to put him into therapy. Veronica, on the other hand, had never gotten starry eyed and he doesn’t remember ever telling her, but he used to relish the way she’d just brush through whatever necessary greetings Um, hi, Mr. Echolls… until she could escape into the background.
“Sure.” She gives a little smile mixed with a grimace. “I guess.”
He steeples his fingers and gestures towards the kitchen and she nods resolutely as she begins the solemn march as if he’s just pointed her towards a gas chamber. As they walk, he watches her eyes flicker back and forth, quick and sure, cataloguing everything, cross referencing it with her memory.
“I don’t…” His throat goes dry with the sudden realization. “I don’t know if we have anything.”
Honestly, he spends the least amount of time possible being seen anywhere in this house and that includes nosing about the kitchen for food.
“Mrs. Navarro still work for you?”
Logan blinks at the casual question. He shouldn’t be surprised that she remembers, it’s the sort of thing she does, but it still takes him unawares and he nods. She gives him a roll of her eyes as an answer and it strikes him how comfortable that gesture is. How easy and unwarranted directed at him from her.
“Then there’s something, c’mon.”
It aches, just a little, when she smiles.
***
Logan sits on the floor with his back up against the foot of the bed, his right knee brought up and his left leg sprawled out in front of him, hands working the controller faster and harder than he’ll ever admit to anyone. There is no way he’s going to lose.
Of course, there’s no way he’s going to win if he keeps fumbling every time the little snake of wires leading up past his shoulder onto the bed behind him keeps jerking.
His neck burns with the imagined feel of her breathing.
“Man, you are really crap at this game, aren’t you?”
Veronica laughs somewhere behind him and he refuses to turn his head to look. She’s sprawled over the top, belly pressed into the mattress, and if he catches sight of her legs bent up with her ankles dangling somewhere above her ass again then there’s no way he’s going to be able to get that image out of his head.
“You wanted to play it, not me.”
There’s something seriously wrong with him, with the both of them, really. They’re sitting in his pool house using the controllers of the playstation to decimate little computer animated versions of themselves on screen and, somehow, they’re finding it all too easy. It’s still better than the polite awkwardness they were looping in until they’d picked something vaguely detached and impersonal to do. At least, it was supposed to be impersonal.
She whoops in celebration when she rips his head completely off for the fourth time.
“You really are out for blood, aren’t you?” He closes his eyes and leans his head back. “Were you always this vicious? What the hell happened to you?”
Movement behind him stops, the air suddenly turning electrified, and his eyes flick back open. He stares at the ceiling as the game beeps to death in front of him, he can just see the blades of the fan turning around and around above him.
The second controller hits the mattress with a small thump.
“Jesus, Veronica, I didn’t…”
He can hear her; he doesn’t need to turn around. She scrambles up, all limbs and rustling whispers and sharply inhaled breaths and he counts to ten before he does turn, shifting up onto his knees and looking her in the face.
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?” She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, her arms pulled in close and her face pale. “You didn’t do anything.”
Yes, I did.
He doesn’t know what it is about her, what makes him want to lay it all down and open for her to see, to just tell her everything. He wants to own up to sitting idly with the boys and trying to think up the lewdest, crudest things to say about her. That time he took out the half page photoshopped spread of her in a low-key girly mag and then taped copies of it all over school.
The bandage is gone from her wrist, but the skin on his back itches and he has the strangest urge to tell her of the price he paid for that, that he made himself pay for her. He wonders what she’d do, what she’d say, and that very line of thinking has him compulsively sucking all the moisture from his teeth.
“For everything.” He says instead, simply, to cover all bases, because anything else is too much and not enough. “Just… for everything.”
She shakes her head and her face is smooth and almost amused, if it wasn’t for the slightly desperate pleading in the back of her eyes, he’d be fooled.
“Don’t, Logan, just don’t. Not today.” Her voice cracks slightly on the last word and her eyes shift away from his to stare out the glass doors towards his pool. “Don’t.”
“Let me make it up to you.” He’s all but doubled over the edge of the mattress, leaning forward to get closer to her and she’s inching back. “Please?”
It’s a slow roll of her neck until she’s facing him again and he feels himself shrink under the shrewd gaze, the way her mouth pinches in and her forehead burrows in thought. She’s really studying him, looking for something in his face and he has no clue what it is.
“You really think you can make that up?”
His mouth is already open before his brain catches up and he snaps it shut. There’s no really safe way to answer that. Saying yes makes it look like he’s belittling all the things she’s been through, that he thinks a few half hearted fist fights in the hall is worth the way she cried as she told him. Saying no will be admitting defeat before he even begins.
“I can try.”
She mulls it over, her eyes flicking back and forth over his face, left to right and right to left.
“Will you…?”
Her bottom lip curls in underneath her teeth and she hesitates, leaving him on edge, leaving him breathless. He watches in confusion as she slowly pushes her hand out towards him. It’s like she’s made a decision and he should know what it is.
All he can think, as he looks at the newly healed wrist floating in the air between them, is about his carelessness, the way he hurt her.
His confusion must show in his face.
“Take it.” She goads, jiggling the hand in front of his face. “You do know how to hold someone’s hand, don’t you?”
He’d laugh if his confusion didn’t just quadruple and he can feel his own forehead wrinkling up as he slides his hand into hers, fingers sliding over her palm and into the grooves of the bones inside. Her face is blank as she stares at them and he desperately wants to know the reason for such a strange request.
Her fingers twitch inside his.
Then she smiles, soft and shy.
“Thank you.”
“But why?” He doesn’t let go as he pushes his feet against the floor and launches himself up onto the bed to sit opposite her, both of them face to face Indian style. “What’s so special about this?”
The smile curves around her lips, pushing the edges of them up, hesitating there for a second before dropping back to a blankly interested gaze as she turns their joined hands over, eyes moving swiftly over the knobbed structure.
“You wouldn’t understand.” It’s a sigh, sad and distracted. “But I missed this.”
“This?” He frowns as he looks down, too. “We used to hold hands a lot? Because I don’t remem…”
She jiggles his hand to get his attention.
“Touch.” It’s a whispered explanation and when he looks back up, her eyes are watching him intently and he’s stunned by the vulnerability she’s actually showing him. “Nobody touches me anymore.”
His thumb slides gently over hers and he’s choked by a thousand different memories.
All the countless moments he hadn’t realized he’d taken note of: all the stray, absent caresses that Duncan used to give her, the way she used to quiver into them, like a contented cat snuggling closer. All the wayward pushes and nudges and arms slung over shoulders and around necks between her and Lilly. The easy way she used to needle him and take being needled back.
Logan doesn’t like to be touched by a lot of people. Random, unexpected hands landing on his shoulders make him flinch, loud claps to the back and arms have him shuddering, but he always preened under the soft caresses of Lilly. And, once upon a time, his mother’s hand used to comfort him, sliding his hair back off his face and tending wounds. He has an easy camaraderie with most of his friends at school.
He tries to imagine living without any of it for months on end and then tries imagining the girl in his memories doing the same.
It burns like hot acid guilt up his gullet.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s tired and overworked and he’s been saying it too much, the brief flicker of amusement over her face tells him that she agrees. But she sobers up quickly enough as her eyes fix him in an intent stare.
“Just don’t make me regret this, Logan. That’s all I ask.”
Their skin slides against each other, warm and clammy, when they pull apart.
***
He’s a little bit bereft when she finally insists it’s time to go.
It’s a strange feeling and he doesn’t know what to do with it, it makes him slightly uncomfortable. As awkward as they are together, he really doesn’t want to let go. There’s a little pit, somewhere deep and dark inside his brain, that keeps telling him that if he lets her walk out of his house and get into her car, that she’ll never be back.
“Are…” His hand drags through his hair, fingers automatically parting and separating. “Are you sure? I mean, you don’t have to…”
She smiles politely and nods.
“Really, my dad’s waiting.”
There’s tightness in her smile, in the expectant way she looks at him that makes him think she’s actually counting down the seconds until she leaves, that she wants to get away. And maybe she is; he can’t blame her for it. Honestly, he’s a little surprised that she’s stayed this far at all.
As he’s walking her past the pool, his hand hovers inches from her shoulder. It’s not something he’d ever have thought about before, his natural inclination is to rest his hand there, maybe on the small of her back, and he really wants to do that. But he doesn’t want her to think he’s only doing it because of what she’d said.
A flash of light inside the house catches his eye and he stops thinking at all as he automatically catches hold of her and guides her to the side path that leads all the way around the house instead.
“Let’s go this way.”
His voice is tight and too high and she frowns in confusion as she looks at him. He’s not fast enough in looking away and she follows his glance to the house, to the obvious signs of life inside.
Sudden realization floods her face.
“Oh.” And her stance becomes defensive as her expression hardens. “I get it.”
Then it hits him.
“Wait, Veronica, no.”
But she’s already reaching for her bag, the one he’s carrying and he can do nothing but release it as she tugs it out of his grasp.
“It’s alright, Logan, really.” There’s a catch in her voice that makes him bite down hard on the inside of his cheek. “I get it, you know. My bad, I thought when you said you wanted to be friends again you meant…”
Her hand hovers forgotten in mid air and he’s not entirely sure if she’s gesturing to the inside of his house specifically or the air around them in general.
“Don’t worry.” She leans forward with an exaggerated wink, but her eyes are cold and narrow and her mouth is firmly set. “I won’t besmirch your good name. God forbid the parents know, huh? Couldn’t have that.”
He’s left helpless and alone as she spins on her heel and walks away, making a great show of avoiding the main house, and he can’t do anything but clench his fists open and closed. It’s useless and frustrating and he doesn’t have the words to properly explain his reasons.
For all that she’s been through and all that he’s put her through, there’s something in there that he has an insanely strong urge to protect. He’s known her for years and even if he hadn’t seen her with her father that morning earlier in the week, the both of them joking and moving about each other with practiced ease, he remembers watching her with Keith years earlier.
He doesn’t have the words to explain the sickly shiver he gets when his own father’s eyes slide over any girls he dares to bring home.
He doesn’t have the words to explain that he’d rather she be angry with him that to see Aaron looking at her like that.
***
***
Veronica’s hands shake as she parks just outside the Sunset Cliffs apartment complex.
“Dammit!” Her right hand leaves the steering wheel, bunching up and slamming down, once, twice and then a third time. “Dammit, dammit!”
She’s got nobody but herself to blame. She knew, she knew going in, every second since Logan Echolls stopped taunting her and started trying to make her trust him again. Every single second, she’d been telling herself not to do it, not to fall for whatever game he was playing.
And then she fell straight into his trap.
God, he must be laughing so hard at her right now.
They’re going to crucify her in school tomorrow.
She thought she was prepared. She thought she was smart enough. After everything, she thought she’d be able to stop caring so much about what they did and thought and said about her. She’d closed herself off from them and it had no longer hurt anymore.
And then she’d let Logan back in.
She’d actually thought he wanted to be friends again.
Her apartment is empty and she suddenly doesn’t want to go back to it, does not want to open the door and be surrounded by shrinking walls. It makes her feel traitorous. Backup is there and he is her best friend. She loves him with everything she has, but suddenly it doesn’t seem quite enough.
It’s a prison.
She didn’t ask to be branded an outcast, she didn’t ask to be the school whore, she didn’t ask for everyone to look at her as if she was handing out free ebola. She didn’t ask to spend her days avoiding meeting people’s eyes, skirting the edges of the halls to reduce the risk of people ‘accidentally’ knocking her books and bags out of her hands, habitually checking rooms before entering, opening her locker away from her face in case of messy explosives.
She didn’t ask for it, but she has it.
And for a brief few days, she had let herself believe that maybe it was going to get easier.
It just makes it all the harder to swallow.
But she knows what she has to do. She has to enter her home and do her homework and not think about familiar faces with hard, hostile expressions. She has to go to bed and forget the week ever existed, just like the last sixteen years of her life. She has to wake up and have a shower and eat her breakfast and then go back to school and not blink at whatever the hell they’re going to say.
She has to pretend that the constant, unchanging company of her father and her dog is not at all lacking in any way, shape, or form. They are all she needs.
In a few years, just over two, she can leave all of it behind. Until then, she refuses to let them break her.
She is stronger than that. She is stronger than them.
Her hand wipes harshly at her cheeks, swiping viciously at the moisture collected there. She’s furious at herself for this, for letting him get to her like that. She should know better. She did know better. She has no right to cry over them.
Her cell buzzes beside her and she glances down at the display.
“Tell me.” She doesn’t bother with small talk to open, just keeps her voice steady and calm and cold. “Just tell me how bad it is.”
“What?”
The hand holding her phone trembles and she bites her lip to make sure it’s steady enough so that he doesn’t hear it over the phone.
“Whatever they’re planning.” Her stomach rolls in on itself. “Whatever the hell you’ve cooked up, just tell me what it is so I can be prepared. You owe me that, Logan.”
“Veronica, please.” And she has to close her eyes to block him out, so that she doesn’t see his face as she hears him. “It’s not like that, I promise. Just listen to me, please…”
But she knows exactly what he looks like, what expression he’s using and how his hands would be imploring her if he was standing there. She can hear him use the exact tone on Lilly.
“You know, I get why.” She doesn’t let him finish, putting him out of his misery. “I mean, all the usual names, the taunts and all the flat tires, they were getting stale. I get it. You had to come up with something new, something big, I appreciate it.”
Her voice shakes a little.
“It was a lot of effort, actually. Bravo. You really know how to make a girl feel special. There’s just one thing…” The very thought of it crystallizes her sorrow and self pity into anger. A cold, seething fury. “Why bring Lilly into it? Why? You didn’t have to…”
“Veronica.” Logan tries again.
“She’d hate you, you know.” It’s something she’s thought often, but hasn’t ever voiced before. “For what you’re doing to me, and in her name, too. She might have been a bitch sometimes, but she was never cruel. You weren’t just mean, you let me think…”
But she doesn’t finish that thought; she doesn’t need to.
She can already hear the jibes in the hallway, did you really beg Logan Echolls to touch you? , Nobody touches you? From what we hear, everyone does.
“The things you let me say.” And then she has a horrid thought. “Oh my god, that morning…”
“Veronica, no.” He says it sharp and forcefully, demanding that she listen. “I wouldn’t use that against you. I promise.”
“You know.” She laughs, bitter and tired. “I might have believed that once upon a time.”
“What do I have to do?” He pleads and she almost believes the apparent sincerity in his voice. “Just tell me, what do I have to do to prove to you I mean it? I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not planning anything. I’m trying here.”
Veronica sighs.
“Just leave me alone, Logan.” Her head leans forward until she’s leaning against the wheel and her breath comes back at her from the dash. “That’s what I’ve been asking from the start. Stay away from me and leave me the hell alone.”
Her fingers snap the connection closed and she breathes in, gaining enough strength to step outside the door and get on with the rest of her life.
***
end chapter one.
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