I CAN GIVE IT ALL ON A FIRST DATE



After the first time, he avoids her carefully for a few days—waiting for her to take it back, to say it was all a mistake, to say something about “protecting their friendship,” to say something like, “I don’t want things to get weird between us,” to say it should never happen again.

She doesn’t say any of those things. Instead, she greets him pleasantly whenever she sees him, as if nothing at all has changed, and her nonchalance is so complete that he asks himself if he has dreamt the entire thing.

Until one morning he is in the garage, assessing the cars, all of which Storm says are now in his care, and she walks in, looking for a scarf she left there the other day.

He grunts a greeting to her, and goes back, mostly, to inspecting the Veyron in front of him.

Mostly—because not five minutes later, she turns around and says, “Either quit staring at my ass, or do something about it. Jesus.”

And the garage floor is cold; then, not so cold.


*


Afterwards, as he is trying to think of a discreet place to dispose the condom, she adjusts her tights and skirt, and remarks, “Even better than the last time.”

She is about to leave, when he calls after her, “So this is okay, then.”

She turns around, gives him a questioning look.

He clarifies, “This kind of—thing—we can—do it. Sometimes.”

She bursts into laughter again, and it sounds exactly like the time she laughed when he asked her about the Cajun.

“What are you, a schoolgirl?” she says.

He scowls, and she continues, “I already told you. As long as it’s good, and as long as it’s casual, we can do it as often as we like.”

Then she turns around again. Just before she is about to walk out, she brightens, then ducks behind a Carrera GT. When she re-appears, she is holding up a green and gold scarf.

“Found it!” she crows.

And after she leaves, he faces the Veyron again, definitely not thinking about how she must have lost the scarf in the first place.


*


“I can’t believe I’m fucking the girl who ate all my jerky,” he mutters, staring up at her in his bed.

She halts in her movements to look down at him, hard.

“You’re not,” she says, and then she moves again and he knows she is right.


*


Before one of his training sessions begins, she enters the Danger Room, followed by Storm, who proceeds to tell him that she would like to enlist Rogue as an assistant combat instructor. To him.

In response to his sputtering protest and absolute, unequivocal refusal, the kid charges forward, lifts him up by his armpits and flings him across the room, where he lands with an alarming thump at the feet of his awaiting students. In unison, they back away.

Flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, he thinks again, A little different.

When he can finally catch his breath, he says, “I guess we can talk about it.”

“We just did,” Rogue replies.


*


Later—in bed—he tells Storm, in the interest of full disclosure, that he and Rogue are casually sleeping together, and that, therefore, it might not be the best arrangement for her to be his assistant instructor.

Storm says, “I know. She told me.”

He blinks at her.

She sighs and says, “Look, Logan. She doesn’t just have these new powers—she has years and years worth of memories about how to control and utilize them. Frankly, it would be ridiculous to ask her to be a student in a combat class.

She adds, “I admit, I was a little unsure at first, myself, since she’s still pretty young—but she really wants to be part of the team. I think this is the best place for her. And you’re the most logical teacher to pair her up with.” She raises an eyebrow and says, “Unless it really makes you uncomfortable.”

“No,” he says slowly. “But it doesn’t make her uncomfortable?”

She shrugs. “She seems perfectly fine with it.”

Unsatisfied, he presses, “But isn’t it—inappropriate, or something?”

She looks at him, amused. “She might be a young one, but she’s an adult. You’re an adult. It’s not unheard of for two instructors in this mansion to have sex. Case in point.” She looks meaningfully down at her own naked body.

He hesitates, then is startled, as if he has just thought of something, and says, “Wait. But are you all right with it?”

“What?” she asks. “Me sleeping with her, too,” he says.

Storm laughs at him, and he thinks he is being laughed at a lot, recently. “Logan—like Rogue, I have no illusions about what we’re doing here,” she says.

Then she is suddenly on top of him, smirking. “So let’s do it again.”


*


As far as he can tell, the kid is only regularly fucking him and Gambit now, though there are rare occasions in which he catches a whiff of metal or ice on her, and he thinks that a couple of residents might also have creative inspirations, every once in a while.

All in all, he has it better than he could have ever imagined. No-strings-attached sex with two gorgeous, experienced partners—and anyone else he cares to pick up on his excursions from the mansion. Work he enjoys, with students who aren’t entirely repellent. A regular seat at a weekly poker game. Good food. A real bed.

Even, strangely, friends: he and Kurt have developed a sort of mutually antagonistic friendship, with his foul-mouthed nihilism against Kurt’s virtuous courtesy—though, like the best oft-lapsing Catholics, the German’s profound sensitivity to sin and guilt sometimes makes for a surprisingly black sense of humor.

Only when he occasionally turns his head to the side, about to make a dirty comment to a redheaded woman who isn’t there, does he remember how painful a happy life can be.


*


While he is fingering her in the Danger Room, he says something that irritates her—he thinks it was something like, “Your hair smells good, what is that”—and she punches him in the stomach so hard he falls straight backwards, like a silent movie star.

“Gross,” she says, standing above him. “No cheesy lines, please.”

“Got it,” he gasps out, clutching his abdomen.

She looks down at him. “I hurt you, big guy?”

“Nah,” he says. “I kinda liked it.”

She grins. “We’ll need a safe word.”

He makes a move to lift himself back up, but she raises a hand to stop him, smiling slyly. “On second thought, stay there,” she says, undoing her scarf and lowering herself onto his face.

And he thinks, Then again, sometimes a happy life is just happy.


*


He and Gambit have a sort of gentleman’s agreement; when they do have to speak to each other—which is rare, with their different teaching specialties—they do so briefly and without any pretense at camaraderie; and at the weekly poker nights, Logan teases Kurt while Gambit and Piotr argue politics, and Warren and Bobby share childhood stories, and he and Cajun almost never talk at all.

Nearly every week, he smells her at the poker table, so much so that one week, when he doesn’t, he searches the Cajun’s face for signs of disappointment, anger, frustration, heartbreak—and quickly averts his gaze when black and red eyes land on him, in a mixture of defiance and amusement, and something else he has looked away too quickly to read.


*


During a particularly athletic session, they fall off his desk. And as he is trying to regain balance, his claws come out, just a tiny bit, and scratch her on the back.

Before the horrified, desperate apology can tumble out of his mouth, she is turning back to look at him, eyes half-closed and mouth upturned with delight, breathing out: “Definitely, definitely need that safe word.”


*


“What about banana?”

“Too obvious.”

“What about fuckhead?”

“That could be confusing, since you actually call me that. Sometimes during sex.”

“Ha,” she says, turning over onto her stomach. “True. Fuckhead. All right. Er, what about—sushi?” At his look, she says, “I just had some today.”

“Eh,” he says. “Could do better.”

“You think of one, then.”

“Can’t,” he says.

“Valiant effort,” she says. “What about karaoke?”

“The hell?”

She laughs. “Kitty and Jubilee asked me if I wanted to go to a karaoke bar last week.”

“Not karaoke.”

“Samurai?”

He glances at her. “What’s up with all the Japanese?”

She blinks, startled. “I don’t know—Jubilee made me watch Zatoichi a couple weeks ago, it must be stuck in my head.”

She is lying, he knows it; though he can’t always tell when she is lying, only when she does it this badly. But he doesn’t know why she would lie about such a thing, so he lets it go.

“All right,” he says. “Samurai works.”

She grins and sits up. “Let’s try it out.” She picks him up in her arms, then flies a few feet up and away from the bed. Then before he can protest, she drops him on the ground, onto his naked ass.

“Samurai?” she taunts, floating.

“Christ,” he groans.

“Wrong answer,” she giggles, and flies towards him.


*


She behaves in class more or less exactly as she behaves during sex; which is to say, fierce, irreverent, brash, prone to punching people in sensitive spots when they annoy her. Still, she is clearly a devoted teacher, and the students warm to her immediately, are visibly happier and more hardworking when she is around.

While they both focus on hand-to-hand combat, she teaches flying (and fight-in-flight) lessons, while he teaches weapons and various martial arts.

How he knows these arts, he doesn’t remember, but a year ago, he had opened a book about martial arts in the library, and the knowledge had flooded back to him, so intensely he had dropped the book.

He is teaching a group of students a tai-chi exercise, in an effort to help them become familiar with the body’s relationship to things like leverage, circulation, stress, and stillness. He tells them he has read about tai chi masters who were able to push people across an entire room with only a gentle push. Or were able to stand so still, so rooted, that no person, no matter how strong, would be able to move them.

“Now if a mutant had tried, that might be a different story,” he admits, and they giggle in response.

On the other side of the training room they are sharing, he hears Rogue say to her group of students:

“While Logan is teaching those guys ballroom dancing, I think today we should learn how to thoroughly fuck people up. One-handed. Does that sound good?”


*


Later that evening, he remembers: No. It wasn’t in the library. It was in Xavier’s office. It was Xavier’s book.

And he nearly puts his claws through the door of his closet, where he had been about to hang his jacket.


*


“So,” he says, another time, as she is putting on her clothes. “You ever gonna tell me the story of how you got these powers?”

“Nope,” she says, and zips up her jeans.

“Not even if I ask nicely?”

She shoots a look at him and winks. “Not even if you ask meanly,” she says, and points to the tiny scratches on her back, nearly healed, before pulling on her shirt.

And his fist tightens around the sheets. “Hey,” he says, his voice a little strangled. “You wanna go another round?”

She laughs. “Sorry, big guy. Previous engagement.” And she zips up her left boot, opens his door, and leaves.


*


“God,” Storm gasps, as he pushes her back onto her desk. “You’re kind of insatiable, recently.”


*


“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he says suddenly, pulling back from between the kid’s legs and dropping the scarf. “How fuckin’ old are you?”

She stares at him, then shoves her knee up into his chin, hard, so he can hear his own metal jaw clanking, and he bites halfway through his own tongue. “Fuh!” he cries.

“You stop in the middle of eating me out to ask this?” she asks. “Do you have a death wish?”

“A li—le,” he admits, as his tongue heals. “But seriously. How old are you?”

She lets herself fall backwards on the bed. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

Then she looks up and sees he is still waiting for an answer. She exhales. “Old enough for you not to feel too dirty, Logan.”

And then a smile creeps over her face. “But young enough for you to feel a little dirty.”


*


He is in the hallway of her floor, walking towards her room—and from the hallway, a long way away from her door, he can hear her cries.

He turns around and walks away. And at the poker game later that evening, it is definitely not one of the times when Gambit does not smell like her.

And the next day, he more-or-less successfully avoids looking at the various bite marks under her breasts and on her thighs.


*


“You know, I have to tell you,” Storm says, as they lay in her bed. “I’m surprised about you and Rogue.”

He looks over at her. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I always thought you guys were kind of all-or-nothing. Like, either you were going to be together, madly in love, forever; or you’d never be anything but friends.”

She smiles. “I still remember when we first found you guys. Scott and—” And she falters, and swallows, then continues. “We thought you guys had known each other for a while; it was only later that Xavier told us you’d just met.”

He turns over onto his back, looks at the ceiling. “Well, it’s working out great this way.”

Storm looks at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I think that all-or-nothing stuff sounds like bullshit.”

She laughs. “Really.”

He nods. “Yeah. Honestly—this is probably the only way I can imagine things ever working between us.”

She looks at him, and smiles a little. “You must not have a very good imagination, then.”

He lifts an eyebrow at her. “You seemed to find it pretty good just now.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, your imagination on the subject of sex is very vast,” she says, sounding bored. “But I had something else in mind.”

She props herself up on her elbow, pauses, then says, “You never imagined being in love with Rogue?”

He looks at her. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Retract, retract the claws,” she says, laughing again. “It was just a curious question.”

“No,” he says firmly. “I never imagined anything like that. We’ve always been—something else. And what we are now still counts as—something else.”

He frowns at her. “Besides, you know my history in that area.”

Regret floods her face. “Logan, I’m sorry—”

He puts a hand up to quiet her. “It’s fine. It’s fine. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She pauses, closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says again. They are quiet for a long time.

Then she smiles, eyes still closed. “It’s just, I still remember how Rogue was like, those first few weeks. She was so sweet. Always looking at you with big cartoons hearts in her eyes.”

Storm opens her eyes again, to look at him. “It made me want to be young again; seeing how she looked at you back then.”

He looks away. “I don’t remember how she looked back then,” he mutters.


*


He remembers: nearly strangling Jean the first time he awoke in the medbay; darting through the lower levels of the mansion, trying to smell where he was, smelling nothing; trying to smell for the girl, smelling nothing. Being in Xavier’s office, feeling like he had been picked up and dropped off in another world; hearing Xavier’s words in his head—Logan, it’s been fifteen years hasn’t it, living from day to day, moving from place to place—and feeling that, instead, it was this other world that had been dropped into his own; it was this new world that had climbed its way inside of his old one.

Like a girl into his trailer, when they were both a little bit—different.

He doesn’t remember how he must have looked back then, either. Those people seem light years away.