“Hey Marie.”
Marie recognized the voice immediately and let go of Kitty's hand, pushing up her sunglasses and jumping up from the sun chair.
“Logan!” she yelled and threw her arms around his neck, practically launching herself at him.
“Easy, kid,” he laughed and hugged her back, his strong hands holding on to her small body. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and then let go of him, taking a step back and eyeing him appreciatively.
“You look great,” she said and smiled.
She could feel her heart hammering in her chest and knew that he could probably hear it, but what did it matter? After three years, long after she had stopped believing he would ever come back at all, he had returned and there was no need to hide her happiness about it.
The fact that she was only wearing bikini (this had been supposed to be a girls-only tanning session after all) didn't bother her. Ever since her skin wasn't a lethal weapon anymore, she hadn't been too shy about showing it.
Or touching everything and everyone all the time.
Her friends probably still found it kind of strange that she constantly needed to hold somebody's hand or be in some other form of random physical contact, but she had to make up for lost time.
“And look at you,” Logan said, not hiding the admiration in his eyes.
Marie laughed and plopped back onto the sun chair.
“Come on, sit. Do you want a drink? Not virgin, I promise. You have to tell me all about your trips. Oh and you remember Kitty, right?” she babbled away.
She had given up on imagining what it would be like to see Logan again a long time ago and concentrated on trying to find another boy she might like. After a bunch of bad dates with various guys and two months with Bobby Drake, she was sure that there were no other boys she could ever have feelings for – not as intense as those she had for Logan, at least.
Bobby was by now happily dating her best friend Kitty and miraculously, there was zero awkwardness between the three of them.
“Why don't you tell me about you first?” Logan asked, taking her hand into his. “This is new.”
“Yeah. Amazing, isn't it? Did you hear about the cure? I went to get it and now...well.” She shrugged, a wide smile on her face.
“I'm glad to see you happy. Missed ya, kid.”
“I missed you too,” Marie said, positively excited.
She heard Kitty snort but ignored the background noise. Her friend knew all too well just how much she had missed Logan.
There had been the primary whiny phase after his departure, which had involved moping around, polishing the dogtags daily and reading werewolf romance novels.
Somewhere between that and Bobby, there had also been the extremely humiliating Ryan Atwood phase which had been characterized by obsessive The OC-watching and drooling over Ben McKenzie's wifebeaters, hoodies and cage-fighting skills (thank goodness for that little angsty twist, it had made Marie giddy for weeks) to the point of dehydration. Of course that had nothing at all to do with a certain other grumpy cage fighter with the fashion sense of an angry cowboy.
Eventually, Marie had started opening her eyes to examine other beauties, as Shakespeare would have put it. Sadly enough, there weren't many male beauties around to be examined, much less to be taken home to Mommy (or in this case Kitty).
Even cute Bobby hadn't made Marie happy – maybe because he lacked the grumpiness, belt buckle and facial hair.
Or those adamantium claws. She had always had a thing for those...
...a particularly embarrassing first date had been what Kitty had afterwards started calling the Facebook Claw-faker incident. Marie had talked to some guy on Facebook who was also a mutant and appeared to have metal claws very similar to Logan's on his (admittedly very blurry) picture.
On their anxiously-anticipated first date it had turned out that he was in fact just a horror movie fan who had a kitchen-knife fetish and carried a small collection of them wherever he went. Needless to say she didn't reply to any of his messages after that.
So, yes, it was finally time to get over all those episodes. Logan was back now and she was ready for the craziness to end. Or maybe it was just about to get started, you could never be sure.
But for now, Marie was happily sitting on Logan's lap (couldn't risk to sit in his shadow and get an uneven tan, and this was obviously the safest way to prevent that, right?) and listening to his travel reports.
Occasionally, she or Kitty threw in a random embarrassing story or crazy piece of gossip from the Mansion, which earned them a bunch of raised brows and eye rolls from Logan.
Kitty's comment about Marie's newly-discovered love for anything touchy feely was met with one more curious facial expression on his part and a bunch of occasional, seemingly accidental caresses of her exposed skin, hidden from Kitty's view.
Things really did look very promising.
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