It was June.
Kitty had finished her freshman year and was back at the Mansion for a couple of weeks before starting an internship with the Hayden Planetarium, and Jubes was teaching a summer course, so us Three Mutant Musketeers were together again. Everything was about pedicures and chick flicks and girl talk. All right, I was still keeping Jubes pretty busy talking me down from the ledge, figuratively speaking, but this afternoon we were just lying around on the lawn. Kitty was reading something by Jared Diamond, Jubes was sunbathing, and I had my sketchbook. Nice quiet afternoon.
I’m not really sure when I became aware that the buzzing in my ear wasn’t a mosquito. It was a motorcycle on its way up the driveway. My heart started pounding and I couldn’t speak.
Jubilee was half-asleep, but she noticed when my pencil dropped from my fingers. She sat up and cocked her head to one side. Then she turned to me with a wicked grin. “Hey, chica.”
“I know,” I managed. I wanted to get up and run, but first, I knew Jubes wouldn’t let me, and second, it was too late. Logan once told me he could track a given scent through Yankee Stadium—all right, he told me he could track me through Yankee Stadium—and since the motorcycle had now pulled up in front of the Mansion, he wasn’t going to have any trouble finding me.
I must waste a lot of perfectly good worrying time, because event though I’d spent the last six months thinking about not much else, I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was going to do. The one thing that kept going through my mind as I waited for him to appear was just She was right. Jubes was right. I was wrong and she was right. Jubilee herself was still grinning at me.
“Make him sweat a little,” she advised. Then she scooped up her towel and swatted Kitty’s butt. “C’mon, Kit-kat. We gotta go.”
“Huh?” Kitty is totally oblivious when she’s reading. Jubilee whispered to her—I was staring at my sketchpad—and she squealed and then slapped her hands over her mouth. Then she grabbed her book and followed Jubes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw them crossing the lawn—and then I saw him. Jubilee stopped for just a second and said something; she was too far away for me to hear and I didn’t really care. I was too busy trying to get my heartbeat and breathing under control, because they were going to tell him way too much. He glanced back at Jubilee as she left, hesitating for a second, and then he was coming towards me again, looking like he was about to face the firing squad.
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…And Upon Me Proved…
I was determined to get it over with fast. I left my stuff on the bike—there’d be no pretense that I was coming “home” this time. I knew where she was before I was halfway up the driveway, and I headed straight for her.
Jubilee and that other kid—Kitty Pryde, her name is—were heading towards the house and I passed them. Jubilee stopped me by grabbing my arm. She was wearing a yellow bikini. What is up with her and that color, I don’t know and never will.
“Not now,” I growled at her, and she let off a spark. It stung.
“Fuck yes, now.” She growled right back. “I won’t keep you from your mission long. Just wanted to say it’s about time you got back, and try not to do anything too stupid this time.”
She stomped off and I kind of turned to look at her, but I didn’t have a lot of attention to spare to figure out what the hell she meant. Marie was sitting on a bench, holding one of her sketchbooks, and as I went toward her she closed it and set it down beside her. She’d dyed some white streaks into her hair awhile back to emphasize this premature white streak she had, and they were still there. She was wearing a short-sleeved top and her gloves and scarf as usual, even though it was hot, but she had these pants on that didn’t come all the way down her legs and she was barefoot—a pair of sandals lay on the grass beside her. Even with everything going through my head as I walked that last distance, I noticed that, because honestly I don’t think I’d ever seen her feet bare before. Her toenails were painted red and noticing that wasn’t helping my resolve any. Then, just as I’d expected, she looked up at me and her eyes were different. She looked at me like she’d never seen me before and even though I knew it was coming it cut like a knife. Then she gave me a polite little smile. Her voice was flat and calm when she spoke.
“Hi, Logan.”
“I need to talk to you.” I couldn’t make small talk, not with her. This was still Marie, who knew me better than any other person on the planet. I needed this to be quick and brutal, just a clean cut and then I could get out of there. I was even glad she seemed so icy, because when I left she was crying and I can’t take it when she does that. She just looked up at me for another second, probably wondering whether she should call Scotty-boy to be a chaperone, and then she nodded.
“Okay. Come on.” She slid her feet into her sandals, got up and started towards a path that led into the woods.
“What—why?” I just wanted to get this over with, and wandering off alone with her just seemed like a really bad idea.
She turned around and put her hands on her hips. “I’m not havin’ this conversation in full public view, Logan. If you want to talk to me, then come on.” So I followed her. What else could I do? She just turned around and walked away, not even looking to see if I was coming.
She went about two hundred yards, till we were out of sight of the Mansion and we came to a little clearing where there were a couple of picnic tables and a grill set up—people used it in the summer, but no one was around right now. She stopped in the middle of the clearing, turned around and crossed her arms. “Okay. Talk.”
I’d practiced enough. “I’m sorry about what happened at Christmas. I—“
“Why?” She cut off my carefully-rehearsed speech.
“Wh—because it was wrong, that’s why. I know that.” She gave me another look, thoughtful this time, and I didn’t get it. “Look—I just wanted to tell you that. It was a fucked-up thing for me to do, and it wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t my fault,” she echoed, and then she dropped her arms to her sides and took a step towards me. “What wasn’t my fault?” There was something else in those big brown eyes now, something I didn’t recognize, and she wasn’t reacting in any of the ways I’d anticipated. She took another step towards me and it was almost like she was stalking me.
“Marie—“
“Logan,” she shot back. Taunting me. She took one more step and this time I actually backed up. “You’re apologizing for something, I get that much. What I don’t know is what.”
Neither did I, at that moment. She was way too close to me now and I could see the flush of anger on her cheeks, at least that’s what I thought it was. “I shouldn’t have made you think you should—goddamnit, Marie.” She backed me up another step and I almost tripped over a root.
“Finish your sentences,” she ordered. “What the fuck are you sorry for?” She actually shoved me than and I realized my back was up against a tree. She went to shove me again and I automatically grabbed her wrists, which was sort of a mistake because it brought her even closer to me. I looked down at her, and under her white scarf I saw a chain-—the chain of my tags, which I’d never gotten back from her the last time.
She was still wearing them. I must have been in shock, because I totally froze for a second. My brain just couldn’t process what my senses were sending it. She stared up at me, eyes glittering, and then she—very deliberately—pulled her hands free of mine and she put them, palms out, on my chest. I really couldn’t breathe.
“Let me help you out here.” Her hands began to move in slow circles as she spoke. “I’m thinking the whole protective thing got a little out of hand, right?” She slid her hands up to my shoulders. “I was always gonna grow up eventually, Logan. Nothing you did or didn’t do was going to change that. So if you couldn’t deal with that, and that’s why you ran out on me, you should apologize. But if it’s just that you think there’s something wrong with noticing that I’m not a kid any more, well—“ And suddenly she was pressed up against me, her hands on my face, making me look down at her. “There isn’t. I know you, Logan. I know you’d never hurt me. Why would you think I’d be scared of you?”
“Marie, darlin’—you’re way too young. I can’t—“ But a slow smile was spreading over her face at that unconscious endearment I’d let slip in, and I was well and truly fucked. Couldn’t say another word.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Tell me how old I have to be. Twenty? Twenty-one? Do I have to finish college?” Her fingers, in those silk gloves, stroked my face. “Just tell me. Jesus, Logan—you don’t seriously think it would ever be anyone but you.” She was looking up at me, those wide, honest eyes staring into mine, and then—while I was trying to convince myself that she’d really said what I thought she’d said—she pulled my head down to hers and her mouth met mine for the second time, and this time I didn’t pull back. Never said I was a saint, and I wasn’t trying real hard to resist temptation at that point. My arms came up and closed around her waist, pulling her even closer, and it took some time for the not-so-minor point that I wasn’t falling to the ground in a twitching heap to sink in. When it did occur to me, the surprise wasn’t enough to make me stop what I was doing. When I finally did come up for air, her lips were wet and swollen-looking and her eyes were dark with—christ, my senses finally got through to me. I picked her up, feeling her arms tighten around my neck and her legs wrap around my waist, and I carried her a few feet to one of those picnic tables. I set her down on it and kissed her again, very thoroughly. She was breathing hard when I finally raised my head again.
“Marie.” I made myself slow down. “You can control it?”
She nodded, looking more than a little dazed. “For a while, anyway. Although I haven’t really had any major test—“
“Tell me if you’re slipping.” And I dove in for another kiss, feeling her hands running through my hair, her body tight up against mine.
Nothing in my whole fucking life had ever felt that good. And she wasn’t scared, or horrified, or disgusted—it was a goddamn miracle. She slid her tongue into my mouth and she tasted like honey and raspberries and everything clean and good you can imagine. I had to pull back eventually because, no matter what, I wasn’t going to keep going out here on a goddamn picnic table in the middle of the grounds. I took her face between my hands, marveling at that soft skin I could suddenly touch. “You sure about this?” It was gonna kill me if she said no, but I had to ask. “Darlin’—if we do this—I’m not gonna want to let you go.” I was warning her. I’d wait, if that’s what she wanted, while she did the college thing and grew up some more, but I knew already that if I could have her, I wouldn’t be able to let her go again. Not ever.
“You better not.” Her arms tightened around my neck. “Are you sure? Because if you do another disappearing act on me, I’m gonna have to track you down and kill you.”
I kissed her again, and when I finished she was on her back on the table with me on top of her, and I wasn’t even sure how we’d gotten there. “C’mon.” I kissed the tip of her nose, then got up, keeping her hand in mine.
“Where?” she asked, but she followed me.
“If we’re doin’ this, we’re doin’ it right,” I told her. “It doesn’t have to be—we don’t have to rush. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
She stopped and tugged at my hand, and I looked down at her, smoothing back one of those white streaks in her hair. “You promise?” she asked, but her eyes told me she already knew the answer. I looked down at her, still my Marie but different, and I knew she was everything I’d never dared to dream of.
“Yeah. I promise.”
…I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
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The titles I have had the audacity to usurp are all from Shakespeare, which you probably figured out. The first three are from Marc Antony’s famous speech in Julius Caesar, but the last four are from one of the loveliest sonnets of them all, Number 116, which deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
Let me not the the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Rogue starts. When you see the second half of the title quote, the point of view shifts. You'll figure it out. I trust you. ;-)