Archive of Our Own

Lieutenant Logan Echolls is a sight to behold.

In his fancy dress whites, in a simple button-up, in that leather jacket, in a soaking wet long-sleeve tee, in the service khakis Veronica saw him in for the first time last night...

She almost wishes he’d kept that particular uniform on a little longer, because damn. On the other hand, she was more than happy to help him out of it, because... well, also damn.

Point is: this version of Logan, who has a job and a rank and looks at her like he can see every bit of her life, nine years apart or not, is keying into turn-ons Veronica wasn’t even aware she had prior to stepping off that plane from New York ten days ago, and for all her “You should only wear this” jokes, she’s really glad she doesn’t have to gun-to-her-head-choose, because she’s not sure she could.

But then there’s Logan as he is now: golden in the morning sun that climbs through the bedroom window, his ridiculously muscled back arched just so, head between her thighs, his mouth working what can only be described as a goddamn miracle on her body—yep, this vision of Logan definitely ranks high.

She loses it—the vision—a second later, as she’s right on the edge again (again) and Veronica’s head falls back onto the pillows, her eyes squeeze shut and her whole body feels like a single muscle, contracted so tight, so far—

When she releases, all control lost, she hears herself moaning—saying something that might be classified as words but is more likely just a lot of incoherent sound, jumbled up with Logan’s name and a lot of affirmatives, because right now, what else is there?

The anxiety of her dad in the hospital and student loans and eleven more days till deployment fell blissfully away a few orgasms ago, and now the entire world exists only in this room, this bed, really, and the important thing is that they’re here together now, that’s the only thing; her and Logan, Logan, Logan...

“Logan,” she mumbles, when she’s come down enough to say it, rather than moan or gasp it, and she tugs at his hair to bring him up to eye level. Logan smirks up at her and, with a final goodbye kiss on her cunt, he crawls up her body (like a cat, his biceps and shoulders flexing magnificently in the process) until he’s right over her again.

He wipes his shiny lips with the back of his hand and that might be the hottest thing Veronica has ever seen. She tries to look nonchalant. She doesn’t try very hard, though, it would be a wasted effort, who is she even trying to kid?

A goddamn sight to behold.

“You think you’re pretty smooth, don’t you, Lieutenant?”

“Who, me?”

He drops to the mattress, some of his weight on Veronica, but most of it on the space of bed to her left, and Veronica reaches out to run her fingers through his short hair. He’s grinning at her, she’s going to have to wipe that grin from his stupid smug face in another minute, but first she’s got to recover a little because—

“God, Logan, it’s after nine o’clock!”

Logan brushes her more-than-a-little-damp hair from her face, focusing with characteristic diligence on its security behind her ear, as he asks: “You got somewhere you need to be?”

“No.” She can’t visit her dad in the hospital again until this evening—something about the nature of the tests they're running, she doesn’t really want to think about it—and she’s taken all his open case files home with her, so it’s not like she needs to be in the office yet or anything, it’s just: “How long were you down there?”

Logan laughs. “Well you were having so much fun, I didn’t want to interrupt you...” Veronica slugs him lightly in the shoulder and then kisses him soundly, enjoying the feeling of his abs when they brush up over her side, his body tangling up with hers. She finds her foot flat against the back of his left calf. He’s hard and getting harder against her hip, and she begins to rub purposefully against him, so that she’s just succeeded in getting rid of that grin (he groans into her neck) when a faint buzzing—accompanied by a so obnoxious ringing—drifts in through the ajar door of the guest bedroom.

Logan groans again, this time out of real frustration, and rolls off of her, flopping onto his back with a pathetically self-sacrificing sigh. It simply won’t do. Veronica crawls over and continues to kiss him, “Let it go to voicemail,” mumbled into the stubble on his chin, but Logan pulls back, eyebrows raised.

“What if it’s the hospital?” he asks, confused.

It takes a moment for Veronica’s brain to work out those words (three—three!—times just this morning), but the second she does, she sits up and blinks. “What if it’s the hospital!” she repeats.

“Oh, good point,” retorts Logan. Veronica swats him and hops out of bed. She swings past her suitcase to pick up the blue night shirt draped on top of it and pulls the shirt over her head (inside out, she realizes but doesn’t really care, doesn’t plan on wearing it for long) as she jogs into the kitchen to her still vibrating/ringing phone on the counter.

The problem is, when Veronica reaches her phone, she’s so fixated on the idea that it’s Neptune Memorial Hospital calling with an update on her father’s condition and that she had better answer it before she misses the call, that she’s already swiping her finger across the green accept call icon even as the face on the ID picture registers with her.

Shitfuckdamn

It too late, though, by the time she mentally cusses herself out. She winces as the ID pictures is replaced with the call screen, and Stosh Piznarski’s voice crackles—faint at this distance—over the line.

“Uh—hello? Veronica?”

There’s nothing else (decent) to do but respond.

With a backwards glance down the hallway, Veronica brings the phone up to her ear and goes for it: “Hello?”

“Hey,” Piz intones—soft, relieved, whatever that means, “Hey, Veronica. Uh—how are you?”

Well:

Father in intensive care? Check. Trying to make ends meet on half-time P.I. work? Check. But, on the bright side, murder case solved? Check.

“I’m—okay. What can I do for you?” Veronica frowns at how awkward she must sound, and she moves further into the living room, grimacing down at the hardwood floor beneath her bare feet. Before Piz can reply, she remembers: “Oh, I went to the bank yesterday! I transferred the money for the rent—didn’t want you to get screwed over with that...” (Which, she thinks, was more than fair, given that they did pay first-and-last month’s rent when they got the place in September) “...And I already talked to Flo about mailing my half of the deposit to my dad’s, so it shouldn’t...”

“Veronica, hon,” Piz exhales, disbelief and humor mixed together in her name, “I didn’t call to talk about rent checks! God, I talked to Wallace; he told me about your dad.”

Veronica is right up against the front door now, her nose all but pressed to the glass. She would prefer to step onto the porch for this conversation, but venturing out into the world would definitely require pants.

“Oh. Right, yeah, he’s—doing better, I guess. The doctors are optimistic.”

“Oh my God, Veronica, it’s terrible. I’m so sorry. What happened? Wallace said some kind of car accident?”

Talk about your daily dose of understatement. “Yeah, a hit and run.”

Veronica closes her eyes and tilts her forehead against the cool windowpanes of the front door. Rehashing the accident brings back a painful stream of memories of that night: just four nights ago but it seems longer, seems like weeks. She’d heard the initial crash, felt a prickling sensation on the back of her neck at the first sounds of commotion from the street. Recognized the sense of dread when she stepped outside. Then it’s a mute blur in her mind. Logan pulling her dad’s body from the wreck just in time, waiting for the ambulance, screaming and crying, asphalt leaving tracks in the palm of her hand, Logan checking her dad’s vitals and muttering directions, they shouldn’t move him, support him there—things she doesn’t really remember now, but she must have understood and obeyed at the time.

The thoughts assault her with competing impulses: one, to climb into bed, curl up in a ball, and shut out the whole world. Two: drive to the hospital and demand to see her father, doctor’s instructions be damned.

“That’s terrible,” says Piz, and Veronica thinks he adds something else too, vaguely apologetic, but her attention is drawn by the creaking of the floorboards in the hallway, and then the opening and closing of one of the doors. The bathroom, she guesses. She hears the faucet run a second later, which confirms it.

She gives a non-committal “Yeah,” but feels the need to fill the silence afterward and babbles on: “It’s pretty bad, we can really just wait at this point.” She’s about to start gunning for a goodbye, maybe with a promise to e-mail him an update once they know more, because Piz and her dad always got along and it is nice of him to have called, when Piz says:

“Look, I can be on a plane tonight.”

The bathroom door opens and shuts, followed by the bedroom door, and wait, what?

“You really don’t have to...”

“I don’t want you to be alone right now, Veronica,” he interjects.

Veronica almost doesn’t catch herself from the automatic reply of I’m not alone, because she doesn’t think that would reassure him, and instead hastens to put an end to this line of reasoning in the gentlest way possible. “It’s not necessary...”

“Veronica, hon, I just checked the app, there’s a flight into San Diego tonight at ten o’clock...”

The Veronica, Hon, sends a flare of panic through Veronica; it’s Piz’s primary endearment, Veronica plus Hon, and only when he’s feeling particularly affectionate or nostalgic for college, or when they’re around his friends sometimes—

But what does it mean right now?

It’s not possible, it is so absolutely impossible that—

They broke up, right? They definitely broke up. He called and they broke up, yes, of course, Veronica knows this to be true, but—

Fuck, she needs pants.

“Can you hold on a second?” she interrupts his informative monologue about air travel and pulls the phone away from her ear, holding it against her shoulder as she speed-walks back to the bedroom.

Logan’s there, dressed in boxers now and throwing discarded clothes into the laundry hamper, but he pauses to look at her and observes the anxiety on her face.

“What’s the matter? Your dad...?”

Veronica shakes her head and stage whispers: “I need pants.”

Logan immediately casts around for them, matching her whisper though he doesn’t have any reason to: “I can drive if...”

“It’s not my dad,” Veronica insists, shaking her head and pointing at the dresser, where she left the sweats the last time she wore them—God, probably when Piz was here! Logan must understand some of the wordless instruction, because he locates the sweats and tosses them across the bedroom to her, frowning in confusion. “It’s Piz!” she hisses, and Logan’s eyes grow wide, his mouth forming a silent, Oh. “Yeah.” Veronica yanks on the sweat pants, holds up a single finger in the one minute gesture to Logan, and hurries out of the room. “Just hold on one second,” she repeats into the phone, buying herself time to cross the house and get to the front door.

As soon as it’s closed behind her, that she’s standing on the front porch, blinking in the morning light, she says: “Piz, we broke up.”

She doesn’t add, “right?” to the end of the sentence, because of course she knows that they broke up, it’s just that she’s been replaying their final phone conversation over and over in her head for the last thirty seconds, and she can’t remember his exact words when he broke up with her and what if he doesn’t think it was a break up? What if he thinks it was just a fight?

He said something about his parents, and then calling it quits (he said “quits,” right? Calling it a day? Walking away? What was it?) and then there was something about loyalty and she said breaking up wasn’t what she wanted and then he hung up and—and—and God, she has had so much sex in the last four days, so...

She just really, really needs Piz to confirm that he knows that they broke up.

“I know, Veronica...” (She breathes freely again, thank God!) “But I still care about you.”

The second he does confirm it, Veronica remembers all the reasons why her panic was completely irrational. Of course Piz broke up with her. He talked to Wallace about it two days ago, and—according to Mac—he reactivated his Facebook account for the sole purpose of declaring his relationship status to be “Single.”

She feels awful, though. Really and truly guilty about this. She watches a middle aged man in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt amble up the sidewalk across the road—her eyes catching on the glint of broken glass in the street—and tries to think of some way to express her gratitude for Piz’s sympathy while ensuring that he should, under no circumstances, return to California. The process requires a few moments of silence that Piz misinterprets entirely.

In that bashful, sort of joking way of his, he says: “For love and support? I’m your guy.”

He names no names, but it’s obvious that he thinks he's establishing himself in contrast with a very specific other guy.

This time, she says it: “I’m not alone, Piz. I’m—Wallace, and Mac, and all my dad’s friends are here. I grew up in Neptune, I can’t walk five feet without bumping into someone who knew me when I was yay high.”

“Veronica...”

“I appreciate the offer, I do, but...” It’s something she’s been thinking about quite a bit in the days since her father’s accident (before, even), but she hasn’t vocalized the decision yet, maybe didn’t even recognize she’d definitively come to it until right now: “Piz, I’m not going back to New York. I’m staying in Neptune.”

Piz doesn’t respond right away, and Veronica wishes he’d hang up on her again. She realizes suddenly that this is exactly where she stood during their last conversation. Her dad’s porch flag flaps in the breeze, and she paces an idle heel-to-toe circle around the patio while waiting for Piz to speak.

He sounds unsurprised: “You’re moving to California. Just like that.”

It doesn’t feel “just like that.” It’s been nine years. It’s been building. She remembers reconnecting with Piz last year and feeling like he was a connection of some kind—a lifeline to something far off that she couldn’t quite make out. Now it’s clear: he was a link to Neptune, to the Veronica of days-gone-by, to a time when she’d still felt alive and passionate, to—

Now, he’s the opposite. He’s a rope that drifts off, unconnected, into nothing.

She can’t explain any of this: why this isn’t “moving to California” so much as returning home. Being in Neptune should feel less natural than it does. Should be more surreal, probably, but it’s not. It’s like waking up from a strange dream and finding that the rules of the real world—not the dream world—still apply after all.

There’s no nice way to tell him that he was right. She didn’t get on the plane, and that meant something. At the time, she didn’t know it would cost her the relationship with Piz (and New York and a job) but even knowing that, she wouldn’t change anything. Every time, she’d choose the same.

Instead of the truth, she spins platitudes: “It’s the right decision for me right now, Piz.”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, disgruntled and a little shaky, just like the last time, “Okay, Veronica.” She half expects him to add Whatever, Veronica, imagines him making a “W” with his fingers semi-ironically. It’s not a very Piz thing to do, gesture-wise, but it gets at the spirit of the thing, and the image is funny. “And there’s no—no other reason you’re staying out there?” he asks, just this side of chilly.

Translation: are you sleeping with Logan Echolls?

“I need to be here now,” she says. And, because she is a little: “I’m sorry.” There’s nothing else to do but apologize. “I have to go now, but I’ll—I’ll be in touch about my stuff. And I’ll keep you posted about my dad.”

Another beat of silence, while Piz remembers the reason for his call. “Right. Yeah, okay. Goodbye, Veronica.”

They both hang up, and Veronica inhales deeply, takes a moment to gather her wits about her before re-entering the house.

Logan’s in the kitchen fixing coffee. He’s half-dressed now in his khaki pants and a white undershirt, like some kind of Cary Grant in-a-war-movie fantasy, and as she struts up to him, Veronica wonders if there’s really any way to make an oversized night shirt and baggy sweats sexy. “Eavesdropping?” she asks, then doubts herself, because is that a hot button issue?

Logan, turned away from her as he pulls coffee mugs down from the cabinet, glances over his shoulder and replies: “I tried. Couldn’t find the parabolic microphone. Where do you keep yours?”

Apparently they’re still in safe territory with eavesdropping jokes. Good to know. There’s a lot more safe territory than Veronica would expect in this new whatever-this-is arrangement with Logan. In part, it’s because Logan has mellowed with age. The other part is that Veronica has.

“Under the bathroom sink,” she returns. “Where else?”

Logan sets down the mugs on the island counter between them and snaps his fingers: “Rats.”

Veronica leans over the counter, propped up on her elbows, and explains—though she's under no obligation to do so: “Piz was calling to check in on my dad. I guess Wallace told him about the crash.”

“Ah.” He spins back to the coffee pot. “Your shirt’s inside-out, by the way.”

Logan’s nonchalance is practiced, that’s for sure, but he doesn’t seem annoyed or even frustrated. He continues to prepare their drinks, pouring the breakfast blend roast into two cups and then fixing Veronica’s coffee for her. A lot of cream, a little sugar—he gets her current specifications right. Like, the exact ratio. He must’ve been paying attention.

“That’s it?” Veronica asks, taking the offered coffee mug from his hands. “No interrogation?”

Logan is still in his surprising good humor as he shakes his head and prepares his own cup of coffee (cream, just the smallest dash of sugar, she commits it to memory).

“You don’t have any questions?” asks Veronica skeptically. She sips the coffee, and it’s delightfully strong.

“Oh, I have tons of questions,” Logan replies; he falls back against the far counter, legs stretched out before him with one ankle crossed over the other, and he takes a long pull from the coffee mug. “But they’re sort of none of my business.”

“None of my business?” Veronica echoes, faux thoughtful; “I’m not familiar with the phrase...” That earns her the desired smirk. “Ask away. I won’t answer if I don’t want to.”

Logan nods and shrugs. “Okay. So—you and Piz. How long were you guys...?”

“About a year.” Almost exactly. The anniversary is easy to remember; he asked her out last Valentine’s Day.

Logan nods, and he makes square eye contact as he asks: “Were you pretty serious?”

“Well he broke up with me over the phone because I was too busy solving the crime of the decade, so...” Logan rejects that deflection; he watches her expectantly, and Veronica sighs, setting down her coffee mug. “We moved in together after six months,” she says, and there go his eyebrows, “but it was all very... uncomplicated.” Unemotional sounds too cold. “It wouldn’t have stayed that way, I was...” Oh boy, “I was supposed to meet his parents this week.”

After that, things would have had to get complicated. Piz would want to propose eventually; he would want to start “talking about kids,” which—if Veronica’s various girl friends are any indication—usually means a quick conversation, inevitably followed by the expectation that she’ll stop taking birth control within the year.

“God, Veronica.” Logan closes his eyes briefly.

“What?”

“Well...” He opens his eyes to a squint, mouth pulled into a point to the left before he confesses: “I kind of feel like an asshole?”

Which actually makes her laugh. “Trust me, you’re not the asshole in this story, I am. And you didn’t choose to get accused of murder this particular week.”

“I know, but...”

“Stop.” Veronica picks up her coffee and walks around to Logan’s side of the island. “Halt. Desist.” She doesn’t know where even to begin with all the things she could say now—about how she’s made her own decisions and, at least when it comes to the most recent ones, she’s not unhappy with them. How her dad is alive because of Logan’s interference with her life. How it takes a certain kind of person to believe that a meet-and-greet with the ‘rents is a higher priority than solving a murder, and—well, Veronica’s never been that kind of person, anyway.

Veronica leans against the island counter and they both consider each other for a long moment. Then, Logan cracks a smile. “Have I thanked you recently for the whole dropped-charges thing? I feel like it’s been a while since I thanked you for that...”

“Oh, I don’t know...” The coffee goes down again, and Veronica takes two small steps to close the distance between herself and Logan, slinging one leg over his so that she’s straddling him, “I recall some... vague expressions of gratitude.”

“Great.” Logan sets down his own cup on the counter behind him, then brings his hands to rest on Veronica’s hips, “So we’re square.”

Veronica scoffs, stands on her toes, so that she’s in easily kissable distance, her nose just barely brushing against his, “I got you off murder charges, Lieutenant, don’t think a handful of thank-yous are going to square us.”

“So I’ve got some ground to cover?” His hands slide around to her ass, pulling her right up against him, and Veronica smiles into a soft kiss. She runs her hands up the fabric of his t-shirt, feeling the muscles underneath, and it sends a rush of desire through her. Her eyes drift closed, and she kisses faintly around his mouth.

“Do you have to go to—to the base?”

“Mmm, no.” He nibbles on her bottom lip, “Got homework though. So do you.”

Her homework is the case files she left in the dining room, but at the moment, the files are a very low priority. She loops her arms around Logan's neck, her body pressed entirely against his, mostly supported by it, too. “Homework is for suckers,” she murmurs and feels his smile.

“You’re a bad influence.”

“Mhm, that’s the plan.”

He brings his hands up to her face, pulls her in for a deeper, harder kiss that makes Veronica sufficiently eager to move things along, but as she reaches for Logan’s belt, the plan is tragically thwarted. Her cell phone—on the island counter behind her—begins to sound off once again.

Veronica sighs and drops to the flats of her feet. “If that’s Troy Vandergraff, I swear to God...”

Logan smirks, making a big show of stretching to check the caller ID over her shoulder: “Duncan Kane actually,” he jokes, and Veronica snorts. She turns and checks the actual ID—Mac—and huffs as she picks up her phone. “One minute?” she says to Logan, who retrieves his coffee cup and nods, extricating himself from their tangle of limbs and moving toward the dining room.

“Hey, Mac, what’s up?” answers Veronica, and she tries not to get distracted watching the long, lovely lines of Logan’s back as he retreats. God, those shoulders...

She shakes herself.

“Hey,” says Mac, brisk and efficient, “I finally finished that research you asked for.”

“Right—thank-you. You’re a life-saver, Cindy Mackenzie.”

“Happy to help. Also: confused. What possible scenario requires you to access the San Diego Public Library loan records?”

“Oh, you know...” Logan is just visible in the next room, standing in profile and staring down at one of the manila folder case files; “High stakes corporate espionage stuff.”

“Figures.”

“Did you get the other stuff? On Deputy Sacks?”

“Everything you asked for. I can swing by and show you now, if you like.”

“Oh—um, actually... can you give me an hour? I just got up.”

“Sure. Ten thirty?”

“Better make it closer to eleven.”

“Right. See you then.”

“Bye, Mac. Thanks.”

She hangs up and leaves her phone in the kitchen, following Logan’s path into the dining room. He doesn’t look up from the case file he’s perusing. Probably she should stop him, because privacy and all that, but there’s nothing terribly sensitive in the stack of cases, and she’s pretty sure the one he’s reading now is just some boring security job for a business downtown.

She saunters up behind Logan and snakes her arms around his waist, so her face hits right smack between the shoulder blades she was admiring a minute ago. She inhales. Then she bites him.

“Cut it out,” he says, like he doesn’t mean it at all. “So these people have a five-hundred-thousand dollar security contract and they’re taking additional measures to secure their—what? Dinky art exhibit?”

Veronica swipes the coffee from Logan’s hand and takes a sip.

“Hey, go get your own.”

“Mmm, no thanks.” She sets the mug down on the table and folds her hands over Logan’s stomach. Logan runs his hands up and down her forearms, then laces his fingers together with hers.

“I’ve seen that showroom too. The entire floor can’t be worth half a million...”

“Geez,” Veronica complains, “What’s a girl gotta do to hold your attention? I turn my back for two seconds and you wander off. First you go and get dressed,” Her hands slip down to his belt, which she begins to unfasten, “And then you come in here and start snooping on my work...”

“What can I say? It’s fascinating stuff.” He stills at her touch, but only for a second. Then, he turns to face her, in the same motion spinning their bodies so that she’s pinned between him and the table. “Your shirt’s inside-out,” he tells her again. Veronica shrugs.

“If it bothers you that much...”

Mac arrives at Mr. Mars’s house just five minutes before eleven. She usually has Saturday mornings to herself, works from home and doesn’t get dressed until nearly noon, but the side-gig for Veronica kept her fairly occupied late last night and got her up bright and early this morning. It’s a style of work that she hasn’t explored much in recent years—the kind of stuff that made tech her passion, not just her hobby. Always something new, a different challenge, a new problem set. It’s exciting, and—

Well that’s definitely not Keith Mars’s car.

As she strolls along the sidewalk, Mac smirks at the shiny blue BMW convertible parked by the curb.

She takes comfort in the knowledge that some things about Veronica Mars never change. Bond might be a hotshot corporate lawyer now, but she still likes ‘em rough around the edges.

Mac does feel a prickle of remorse, though, for all involved parties. She learned a long time ago that trying to have your cake and eat it too just doesn’t work with boys. She’s a great believer in making a choice and living with it, and second guessing what-might-have-been with various men is both a waste of time and a recipe for disaster. She likes Piz, really, he’s a good friend, and their brief sophomore year stoner phases synced up, so they had a lot of pseudo-deep intellectual discussions back in college. But a part of Mac thinks Veronica’s attraction to him was always based largely on what he lacked. And that lacking just made the other extreme—the Logans of this world—more appealing.

As for Logan: Mac understands his appeal, obviously. She understands the superficial element of it, and she thinks she kind of understands the deeper pull, because those two are like magnets, aren’t they? She’s seen it a hundred times. But what exactly is supposed to come of all this, anyway? (She makes her way up the porch steps.) Veronica gets her fix of the epically hot, if equally disastrous, Grand Romance of her youth and then retires to a safe, well-organized life on the other side of the country? Probably with another steady, well-intentioned boyfriend? And Logan Echolls attaches himself to some other time bomb.

So it goes.

But Mac feels bad. (She knocks on the front door). Logan is a big boy, he’s in the Navy for God’s sake (and seriously, what is up with that?)—he knows what he’s getting into with Veronica. And if Veronica gets herself some needed post-Columbia R&R via a quick fling with the ex, who is Mac to judge?

Who, indeed?

Because it’s not Veronica opening the door, but all six feet of Logan Echolls. He’s wearing the tan uniform like from an old submarine movie: a well-fitted button up with just a hint of white undershirt peeking out the top, with khaki trousers, and a black-billed cap tucked neatly under his arm, like he’s on his way out. There’s a smattering of pins and colored ribbons over his chest (which is about twelve feet wide by the looks of it), and a brown leather satchel hangs from his shoulder. The situation is so surreal, because it’s all of this, but it’s also Logan Echolls’s polite, tight smile, his mumbling “Hi, Mac,” and his quick nod for a greeting, as he steps aside to admit her into the house. And she knew this boy when he wore orange cargo pants.

(Really, she doesn’t blame Veronica at all.)

Some old habits do, in fact, die hard, because Mac—at something of a loss—resorts to her last known style of communication with Logan: snarky banter.

“Hi...” she frowns, as though considering, “...Not Piz.”

The joke doesn’t land.

Or rather, Logan doesn’t care to volley one back. His mouth twists into a stilted grimace, and he blinks twice, his gaze on the floorboards.

Mac immediately feels a rush of regret. She’d thought he’d laugh and tell her to fuck off. Or... she would have thought that, if she’d given this any real thought at all. There must be some way to start the conversation over again, but then Logan lifts his eyes to something over Mac’s shoulder—Veronica, of course, on the couch. He sends their mutual acquaintance a warm smile and a quick headshake, and then meets Mac’s stare again.

She expects something scathing, but all she gets is: “Good to see you again, Mac,” and then he’s on his way out, closing the door behind him.

“Mac!” Veronica groans, the second he’s gone.

Mac winces and goes to join Veronica on the couch. She’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with shower-wet hair, and she’s got one shoe on, the other ankle boot perched on the coffee table.

“Sorry! It was a joke!” Mac pleads, but Veronica just scowls at her. “Too soon?”

“Ya think?” She grabs her second shoe and jams her foot into it, with more force than is probably necessary.

“Should I...” What? “...Apologize?”

Veronica pauses, then her shoulders relax a little and she shakes her head. “No. No, it’s fine, I’ll talk to him later.” She continues to frown, working her bottom lip with her teeth, so Mac doesn’t think she’s dismissing the incident. More like—like she doesn’t want to give Mac any more opportunities to make things worse. Like she’s shielding Logan.

It’s supremely uncomfortable.

“I didn’t mean...”

“I know.” Veronica sighs and shakes her head again, explaining: “Piz called this morning.”

Well, shoot. Nicely done, Cindy.

“Yikes. Was it awkward?”

Veronica takes a moment to consider. “With Piz? Very. With Logan? Not really, no.”  The realization seems to take Veronica by surprise, too. “He was very...”

“Tall?” Mac offers, when her friend trails off.

“Respectful,” Veronica corrects, rolling her eyes. But some of the tension lifts.

“Well now I really feel like a jerk.” (A jerk who is nonetheless very grateful that Veronica isn’t making her apologize.)

“It’s fine,” says Veronica again. Cautiously optimistic. She eyes Mac’s canvas messenger bag with interest. “You have my goodies?”

“Oh. Yeah, I do. But first...” She slings her bag onto her lap, then extends one hand into the air, closing her eyes solemnly as she waits for Veronica to high-five her. Amused, but obviously lost, Veronica complies.

“What?”

“Are you kidding? A six-foot tall Navy pilot—who is also, I might add, a millionaire—just walk-of-shamed it out of your house in full uniform at eleven in the morning. You’re a hero to us all, Veronica Mars!”

“Oh shut up!” She punches Mac’s arm, but mostly she’s blushing and trying not to smirk.

“So?” Mac prompts, because she really doesn’t hate Logan, and Veronica looks so—not just happy, excited.

“So... I don’t know.” Veronica grins, more confident. “I didn’t even know I was into uniforms.”

“Are you?”

“Oh yes.” She clears her throat. “Very.”

Of course, there’s the abstract concept of a uniform, and there’s your very real ex-boyfriend, all damn grown-up and wearing one, and Mac doesn’t have much trouble guessing which one it is that Veronica’s into.

“Not Piz.”

Mac’s assessment bodes poorly for Logan.

He sort of thought he stood a chance of winning her over, and without Mac, Logan can go ahead and resign himself to a loss with Wallace too... Keith's approval? Well, it was never really on the table anyway.

Logan picks up a tail when he’s leaving the CVS on Sigmund Street, and it’s mostly annoying, but also a little bit of a relief in that it distracts him from the Not Piz of it all.

Logan knows better than to stop and go shopping while he’s still in uniform (at least these days, with the celebrity rags taking an interest in him again), but he needed to pick up razor blades and toothpaste, and the drug store was right there on his way to Dick’s, so he decided to risk it and make the stop now. A mistake, obviously, because a white Honda Civic has been following him for the last two miles.

He swears mildly under his breath and changes course, taking Hastings Avenue north towards downtown.

He has successfully prevented the paparazzi from finding his hideout at Dick’s for this long (and he’ll be damned before he leads them to Veronica’s), largely because he is willing to accept the inconvenience. There’s been an empty room under his name at the Neptune Grand since he was arrested, and he detours significantly when leaving the base in San Diego, so the commute is up to nearly two hours these days. Still, these are temporary measures, just until everything blows over, and they're small prices to pay if they allow him to maintain even a modicum of privacy.

The ambush outside the Sheriff’s department Wednesday evening was to be expected. People are scrambling, figuring out what narrative they want to plaster onto him. There’s still a pretty sizable group that thinks he’s getting away with murder, because no one knows who the hell Stu Cobbler is, and that story is just so much less sexy. But there’s also a growing number of people calling him a “victim of a corrupt system” and Veronica seems to think that by the time the footage of Dan Lamb confessing to everything-but-a-frame-up hits the airwaves, public sympathy will skyrocket.

Logan really doesn’t care.

His leave of absence officially ended as of Thursday, he really gets back to work again on Monday, and last night, he walked in on Veronica brandishing an angry spatula at the television and cussing out Trish Turley, so as far as he’s concerned, anyone else out there who thinks he’s guilty can go to hell. 

Still—he’d rather leave his friends out of this mess, as much as he still can.

So he drives along toward the Neptune Grand, speeds through a yellow light but gets caught at the next red, and the Civic is still on him, a few cars back now. He slips the Beemer into the underground parking garage across the street from the hotel and camps out between two large SUVs on the dark second level. The tail—a guy in a bowling shirt, squinting through sunglasses in the shaded garage—glides obliviously past him, down to the third level, and that’s when Logan makes his escape.

The drive out to Dick’s isn’t long—a quick step onto the highway, four exits, a little navigating around the La Belle Country Club golf course, and then you’re on Mosswood Drive, a quiet road of moneyed bungalows on the water, and none closer than Dick’s.

The master of the house splits his time between this place and an apartment in Manhattan Beach, an hour north. Dick sells commercial real estate, mostly when he feels like it, and maintains an ever-shifting roster of So-Cal residences for himself—a chic downtown loft was traded in for a renovated Pacific Palisades hotel was traded in for a tricked out Coronado condo was traded in for the beach house of the present. Logan mostly surfs the guest rooms when he’s not deployed, and probably it’s some reaction to their upbringings that Dick is constantly upgrading homes, while Logan’s existence has become essentially nomadic. These things are better left unanalyzed.

Logan lets himself into the empty house, deposits his things in the alcove off the living room designated for his use, and changes into civilian clothes.

He’s got plenty to do today. There’s a mountain of paperwork to prepare him for deployment in eleven days, to even up the score from the last two weeks he spent as the prime suspect in a murder investigation, and even on top of that, there’s plenty to occupy his time. He’s got to reserve a storage unit for his car, schedule another physical, send Jackson Frederick a check; there’re a hundred phone calls he’s gotta make... Trina left him a voicemail last night, and he’s been meaning to call Alexis Bishop, and he promised to touch base with a couple guys from his squad once his status was updated, so...

Not Piz—Mac’s voice sneaks into his brain again, and he can’t for the life of him shut it down.

She couldn’t have phrased it more accurately than that, could she? Logan swallows thickly, moving about the kitchen, preparing a second cup of coffee for himself (he never got around to finishing the first one).

Six months ago, the appellation wouldn’t have bothered him at all. Now—it’s not exactly upsetting, just... just at a certain point, he thought he’d put his paparazzi-dodging days behind him. And—

But enough.

He pulls out his cell phone and dials Alexis, because, yeah, not too long ago she was calling for his head on a stake, but she’s Carrie’s mom, and he hasn’t spoken to her since. Also, there’s always the possibility that he’s just a glutton for punishment.

“Logan,” is how Alexis Bishop answers. It’s damn eerie, because she sounds like her daughter over the phone. Older, lower, but with the same inflection. She doesn’t like Logan, never has, and Logan’s feelings for her are so filtered through his feelings for Carrie and then again through Carrie’s feelings for her mother, that he can’t honestly tell if he likes Mrs. Bishop or not. What he knows is that Carrie loved her mother (hated her father, usually, but loved her mother), and this is a conversation he owes Carrie.

“Hi, Alexis.”

After a few seconds, she almost whispers: “Are you calling to gloat?”

Logan sits down at the table off the living room, holds his head in his hands and lets out a sigh. “I’m calling to say how sorry I am for your loss. I would’ve called earlier if I could have.”

There’s a long silence on the line. Alexis sounds disbelieving when she begins again, “Last year, you came to me and said Carrie was going to end up dead. You said you had to ship out, and you asked for my help, and I said...” Alexis doesn’t cry, that would be out-of-character, but she chokes back the rest of the sentence. It doesn’t matter. Logan doesn’t need a recap, he remembers the conversation. “And now you’re sorry for my loss?”

“Carrie was murdered,” he says. “She didn’t get a fair chance to put herself back together. She would’ve. She wanted to. I believe that.”

Another lull, longer this time. “This guy,” Alexis goes on eventually, “Stu Cobbler? Who he is? Carrie never mentioned him. Although...”

Although you hadn’t spoken in months?

Although Carrie didn’t talk to you about anything real?

Although you preferred to blame all Carrie’s problems on me?

“He’s just a bad guy,” says Logan. “And he’s gonna rot in prison.”

Alexis huffs a breath of relief, fuzzy over the line. “I heard she knocked him out with a golf club,” she says quietly, with joyless but perceptible humor. “That cop who took him in.”

Logan closes his eyes, and he can’t help the smile, the warmth that sparks somewhere deep inside of him. “Yeah. She did.”

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and Veronica is hungry.

She’s been back at the office for two and a half hours, and the work isn’t bad, especially when she finishes all the clerical stuff. Then she turns her attention to the breadwinners—background and credit checks, low-key stuff that she can do from the comfort of her (father’s) desk.

Logan was right about that security job for the art gallery—fishier than Finding Nemo, she realizes, now that she’s had a proper look at thing. She’s pretty sure it’s an insurance scam in the making...

Then it’s two o’clock and she’s hungry and a little tired. She wants to stick around the office for at least a few more hours, so she calls Logan, hoping maybe she can convince him to fill out his paperwork here, maybe pick up some food on his way over.

“Hi,” his voice greets her over the phone, warm and happy and expectant, and the familiarity of it is weirdly thrilling.

“You wanna get lunch?” Veronica sighs into her cell. “Uh—late lunch?”

Logan snorts. “Would love to, but I can’t. Trina’s on her way down from L.A.”

Dammit. Trina Echolls arriving on the scene to steal Logan away from her—not something Veronica exactly expected. Although, it’s been nine years, so she really doesn’t know. “And how is your sister these days?” she asks. She doesn’t add, “Besides extremely tardy,” because she’s trying to keep at least ninety-seven percent of the Trina-judgment out of her voice until she knows how Logan feels about the whole situation.

“Still Trina. She’s dating Ted Knells.”

Veronica snickers. “Pastor Ted Knells? The televangelist?”

“Yep. Though something tells me he won’t be joining us this afternoon. She wants to meet at Pristine for coffee. ‘Course, coffee with Trina is like a hostage exchange, y’know? You gotta change locations at the last minute, so I’m thinking I’ll stake out the place and pull her into a cab, and we’ll go to Heritage instead.”

“To avoid the S.W.A.T. team.”

“And any paps she might’ve called on herself.”

“Ah.” ‘Still Trina’ is right. “And what did she think about all this ‘murder’ stuff?”

“Whatever Harvey Levin told her to think, I imagine,” he says, all Logan, terse-and-snarky. “We haven’t talked since it started.”

“If that sitcom of hers was any indication, timing was never really Trina’s forte.”

“Oh, this is downright prompt,” Logan agrees. “After they read Aaron’s will, I didn’t see her again until I graduated Hearst... at which time, she tried to sell me beachfront property in Nebraska and cocaine. Not necessarily in that order.”

So blow her off and hang out with me, goes un-whined, and Veronica awards herself a gold star for self-restraint.

“Still on for dinner?” Logan asks.

“Yeah. It might not be until eight-thirty or nine.”

“Mhm. How’s your dad?”

“No update. I guess I’ll find out more when I go there.”

“Final question: is you is... or is you ain’t... my constituency?”

Veronica laughs. “I thought you were going to ask me what I’m wearing.”

“I already know what you’re wearing, I saw you put it on this morning.” He sounds utterly pleased with himself. “And I have excellent visual memory.”

“Which you put to good use, I’m sure.”

“With healthy regularity.”

Veronica bites her lip and shakes her head, because he’s so ridiculous and there’s no need to telegraph how charmed she is. “Have fun with your sister,” she says.

“I’ll try.”

“And be good.”

“Oh you had to go and raise the bar.”

Trina checks her handbag (Coach) and trench coat (Burberry) at the desk, and then allows the twiggy, barely legal hostess to lead the way to her table where Logan’s waiting. They have fountain side seating in the Gold Lounge of Pristine—really, the only place in Neptune acceptable for eating before sundown. She would much rather have met somewhere in the Valley, but the paparazzi situation is so much worse in L.A., and she’s trying to stay out of the tabloids with this one. She’s not twenty-five anymore, after all.

“Hey, Trina,” says her brother, getting to his feet when she sits down, like Dad used to.

“Hey, Baby Bro. Have you ordered yet?” She settles in, and Logan shakes his head. “Get me a white, won’t you?” she asks, and he orders a glass of Pinot Grigio for her (smart boy) and an Americano for himself.

Logan looks good. Trina’s never cared for his hair so short, but at least he still has it all, and he’s kept in good shape, which is a relief. It depresses her when men get fat. He’s not in that uniform of his (always a good idea when you’re not trying to attract attention), but a forest green jersey Henley, dark jeans, and these handsome, cognac-colored combat boots. He didn’t check his jacket, which is leather and hanging over the back of his chair, and as much as Trina is relieved that he’s keeping himself together, she wishes he’d considered her a little. He knows who she’s dating, knows the image she’s cultivating for herself—would it have killed him to throw on a polo and some loafers?

“Traffic was hell,” she tells him, once the waitress brings her wine and Logan’s coffee. “I wasn’t even driving and I had road rage. Teddy sent his driver with me, it was very sweet.”

“The famous Pastor Ted?” asks Logan with a smirk, and Trina nods. “How are things going with you two?”

“Oh, great. Between you and me, we’re practically engaged. And ABC picked up his show for the four o’clock slot, which is huge, obviously.”

“Move over, Joel Osteen.”

“Joel Osteen’s a hack,” she tells him coolly. “Teddy really helps people.”

“Gotcha.”

“You’d really like him, Logan...” Trina sips her wine and second guesses that assessment. “Maybe not. You don’t really like people, do you? Teddy likes you, though. He thinks you have potential.”

Logan chuckles. “Potential for what, I don’t even wanna know. Also... and maybe this is just me stating the obvious here, but he’s never even met me.”

“Everyone in America knows you, give it up, you’re famous, Logan. You really should appreciate him more.”

Logan blinks. “Who? Pastor Ted?”

“Yes! See, when I heard about all of that stuff with Bonnie DeVille, I just thought—well, looks like Logan’s got more drama again; but Teddy said he thought you probably had PTSD from the war or whatever. He totally defended you.”

“My hero.”

Trina sighs. This is why she hates getting together with Logan. He’s always so morose about everything. Positive mental attitude is all he needs, or—faith, or whatever it is that keeps Teddy smiling on air. Prozac, probably. This is why she didn’t try to get lunch with him sooner... well, this, and the fact that it would hardly be appropriate, since Teddy and she are all about family values and whatnot, and she can’t just go gallivanting around with a charged murderer. What if he'd turned out to be guilty? Maybe if he did the repentant sinner thing, but the public would need a little time to buy that and... it’s a conversation for another day.

Still, she doesn’t want to come off as insensitive, so she tells him truthfully: “We were so glad it turned out not to be you.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I mean of course I knew you couldn’t be guilty, just like I knew...” She stops herself in time. Logan has his opinion about their dad and Trina has her own, and honestly, she doesn’t see why this has to be some huge thing between them, because it’s not like she’s saying Aaron was father-of-the-year or anything, but why would Logan want to believe his dad was a murderer, of all things? He’s dead anyway! But it is a huge thing, they always fight if they discuss it at all, so mostly they just don’t discuss it. “...Just like I knew the police would figure it out eventually.”

“The police didn’t figure anything out,” Logan snaps. “Veronica Mars did.”

“Veronica Mars? God, she’s still alive?”

“She lives in New York. She flew out to help me.”

“Smart of you to get her. She always used to do that kind of thing for you, didn’t she? Is she still blond? Did she get fat? I’m kidding!”

But Logan is chuckling and shaking his head in that condescending, Oh Trina way of his, so maybe he at least got that it was a joke, even if he’s being a dick about it. She ignores the condescension, because that’s how their relationship functions. He says and does precisely as he pleases, and she bites her tongue to stop an argument. Really, it’s a miracle she has the patience for him at all, but she doesn’t have to tolerate it much more than a couple times a year, since he’s always off on his boat and she’s so busy with Teddy and the show.

Speaking of: “You know, when all the hype dies down, you really should come out and meet Teddy. Oh, God, you don’t have to go to his church or anything!” she promises quickly, because maybe she and Logan aren’t the closest, but she wouldn’t subject him to that, “Just for dinner or something. He’s a big supporter of the troops, you know.”

“I’m sure he is.”

See—that’s what she’s talking about. She gives and she gives, and with Logan—just nothing. He doesn’t even look that happy to see her.

Whatever. He’s paying for the drinks.

They stay at Pristine for nearly an hour, but Trina’s anxious to be on her way, since traffic is only going to build up, and she wants to be back at Teddy’s in time for dinner. Logan takes care of the bill and escorts her to the coat check, and he doesn’t even fight her off when she winds her arms through the crook of his elbow, his hand anchored in his jeans’ pocket.

“I really knew it couldn’t be you,” she tells him again, just to drive that point home. “The whole idea is stupid. You’re my G.I. Joe action figure brother now, it doesn’t even make sense.”

“Yeah, well—thanks...”

They click across the marble walkway, through a corridor of palm trees toward the big glass front doors. Trina shoots off a text to Dave, her driver, to bring the car around to the valet stand in front of the restaurant, and that’s when things start to get hairy.

The vultures have shown up. Probably that bitch hostess called them.

There are four of them. Three are what you would expect from paparazzi: middle aged men in ten dollar khakis, and one is practically a kid—he doesn’t even have a real camera, he’s just thrusting his cell phone in Logan’s annoyed face.

“Ignore them,” Trina tells her brother, rolling her eyes as they wait on the curb. “Did you bring your car?”

“Cabbed it from the hotel,” says Logan.

“What was your relationship with Stu Cobbler?”

“Were Stu and Bonnie sleeping together?”

“How does it feel to be a free man?”

“Are you dating anyone?”

It’s a little bizarre, having them shout questions at her brother like this. Trina hasn’t been the focus of this kind of attention in a while, and even when she did have TMZ following her outside restaurants and salons, desperate for a word from her, it was usually because of something going on with Dad or her mom or Lynn.

“Did you kill Gia Goodman?”

“Have you spoken to Carrie’s family yet?”

“Is it true you were at the clubs with Bonnie’s body double last week?”

Crass. That’s what it is, so damn crass. She wishes she hadn’t come today. Why does Logan put up with this bullshit?

“Has Roger Bishop reached out to you?”

“Was Bonnie pregnant? Is that why you killed her?”

He’s clenching his jaw, probably reciting the serenity prayer to himself as he’s jostled by the tabloid hacks. Yet, somehow, he looks still as a statue. Finally, Teddy’s black Escalade pulls up in front of them and Trina slides into the backseat.

“C’mon, Logan, we’ll drop you off, you can’t stay here.”

“Trina, does Pastor Ted have a mistress?”

She starts a serenity prayer of her own. “C’mon, Logan.” He swallows and nods and starts to climb into the car after her, and then—

“Echolls, care to comment on your relationship with your private investigator?”

Like he’s been turned to stone, Logan just stops. Freezes in place, his hand on the inside of the car, his facial expression stuck in neutral, so that for a second, Trina doesn’t realize what he’s going to do. Then he smirks—actually smirks, because her brother is such a goddamn dumbass—and swings theatrically back around to face the guy who just asked the—frankly, rather uninteresting—question.

He’s in his forties or fifties, with ink black hair and a beaky nose. He’s wearing an 80s ski jacket without much irony, and he practically steps on that little hipster with the iPhone to get to Logan. This guy's going to get punched in the face in a second, Trina can just see it.

“Logan, c’mon, just get in the car!” she pleads with him, but of course Logan ignores her.

“If it isn’t our disgraced former sheriff,” he almost growls, but with a dash of dark mirth that means Logan’s about to pay for this guy’s boat. “Know what I heard, Vinnie?” His shoulders hunch, and he takes another step away from the car, “I heard you’re the one who plastered the internet with spy camera footage of my ex-girlfriend.”

“Logan, really.” Trina knows it’s no use, though, that her energy would be better spent closing the door and telling Dave to get her the hell out of here. This is Logan with a grudge; she doesn’t stand a chance. And she’s sympathetic, sure, because even at her stupidest, most twenty-two-year-old self, she wasn’t so much of an idiot that she let a sex tape leak (partially—okay, mostly—because she never found the right partner), but it’s done with now. Flattening this ridiculous dirt bag won’t take anything back.

She tries to tell him as much, but Logan is toe to toe with this Vinnie character now, and they’re about the same height, but Baby Bro has about six inches of pure rage height. Trina’s seen a lot of bar fights; she’s pretty sure “rage height” is totally real. The only thing that seems to have prevented Logan from taking a swing at the pap is that he just loves to hear the sound of his own voice.

“—You think that was funny?” he’s demanding. Trina doesn’t hear what the pap says, but she sees him smirking. It’s going to be a huge boat...

There’s a beat of silence, two beats, and then the air changes. Logan’s shoulders relax a little, one thumb hooks into his belt.

Everyone watches the unfolding scene, enthralled; Logan always had that ability to command a room—or in this case, a driveway. Trina’s glad he never went into acting, he probably would’ve been great at it, the twerp. Even the boy at the valet stand has his phone out, recording. Logan jerks his head quickly, like he’s shaking off a fly, and sniffs. “Doesn’t matter,” she hears him say, “Fact is, you’re going to get sued. See a couple hundred celebrities that want all this ‘hidden camera’ footage to go away... they’re not going to go after you. They’re going to go after the network that put them at risk, and after the trillion dollar tech conglomerate that you hacked, and those guys are going to go after you. And sure you’re going to be slapped with so many law suits, that it wouldn’t matter if I left your bloody teeth embedded in this curb right here, right now, because every dime I have wouldn’t cover half the costs... but what’s really gonna get you is the felony charges, and the jail time you’ll face once a multinational corporation decides to cover their asses by hanging it all on you.”

(Bloody teeth embedded in the curb? Logan obviously inherited his smarts from Lynn. God. How is Trina ever going to explain this one to Teddy?)

The other paps roar to life once Logan finishes speaking, showering him with questions that he ignores, as Trina calls her (adoptive half) brother’s name one last time. He turns, climbs nonchalantly into the car, and closes the door against the shouts of “Have you been discharged from the Navy?” and “What were Bonnie’s last words to you?”

Trina tells Dave to drive and pulls her sunglasses down over her eyes. She’s not going to lecture Logan, because she’s mostly glad he didn’t actually hit anyone. Still, she can’t quite help a minor reproach: “Honestly, Logan, you’re such a drama queen.”

You would think, you would just imagine, that working in a florist shop would be a little bit romantic. It’s like, the absolute ideal of meet-cute scenarios, for one thing, and of course there’s the obvious My Fair Lady tie-in. But in the last two years that Ruby Jetson has worked behind the counter at Silvio’s, she hasn’t felt much like Audrey Hepburn. Though she did handle an order from Greg Kinnear’s P.A. once. That was exciting.

Today: not so much. Silvio was in an awful mood, and some bitchy 09er wife came in to yell at her for sending flowers to her cheating, lying, son-of-a-bitch husband’s personal trainer, and, all in all, Ruby is glad her shift is over. By the time she gets home, she’s beyond ready to curl up in her cozy room with her high speed Wi-Fi and leftover Chinese.

Anyway, there’s not much that can get Ruby down today, even a crappy day at work.

Just eight days ago, she, Ruby Jetson, was on a date—an actual date—with Logan Freaking Echolls! He brought her flowers and everything—nice ones, not from the grocery store, but from some classy florist, like Bendon’s, or Dot, or The Garden Place. Logan Echolls! Carrie Bishop’s boyfriend! Bonnie DeVille’s boyfriend! King of Neptune High Royalty! Son of Movie Stars!

(Well, Lynn Lester’s best work was really her television stuff, and Ruby is firmly in the Aaron-Echolls-Totally-Did-It camp, but they were still A-listers! They still went to the Oscars!)

If Veronica Mars hadn’t made her sign that stupid N.D.A., this would be all over her blog right now. To be honest, she’s not completely sure that N.D.A. is legally binding, because it was just like, three pages, and it looked like Veronica Mars just printed it off the internet like thirty-seconds before she and Logan picked her up for the date (the date!), but Ruby did sign it, and she feels a sense of obligation to Logan. She’s been a fan of his since way back.

Plus, no one’s ever made her sign an N.D.A. before. It’s exciting. Way more exciting than the Greg Kinnear thing.

When Ruby gets to her room, she kicks off her Toms and falls gracelessly onto her bed, rolling her head to one side so that she can see a sliver of Bonnie’s eye on the mural. So beautiful. So tragic. Much prettier than Veronica Mars.

There’s another reason for Ruby’s improved mood these days, though. After Carrie died, she was positively depressed for days, and the fact that no one online seemed to think Logan was innocent infuriated her. She’d always had a certain amount of credibility on the more serious fan blogs, as a “childhood friend” of Logan and Carrie’s (and, yesokayfine, she stretched the truth just a little there), but suddenly, her solemn word that Logan would never ever hurt Carrie didn’t satisfy anyone. Even the most devout Lonniers (that’s what they call themselves and seriously, screw those morons that thought Carrie should be with that ugly country singer!) questioned his innocence. It was enough to make her consider taking a break from the fan sites.

But now, Ruby reflects, climbing off her bed and crossing to her computer at the desk: now things are better. People are coming around. There’s even chatter that there’s some kind of secret photographic evidence that proves Stu Cobbler is guilty, and it’ll be public very soon. Ruby has been vindicated by just about every celebrity blogger she cares about. So suck on that, haters.

Also—and she’s going to keep reminding herself about this for probably the rest of her life—she went on a date with Logan Echolls!

There was dancing! They kissed.

Ruby waits for her browser to load, clicks through to a few of her favorite haunts, and then, when she goes to her own home page, receives something of a shock in the form of eighteen new messages. Something big must have happened.

BonniesBae83 wants to know if she’s seen the latest footage of Logan “going apeshit on a pap” (sounds like him) but then so do Karenna and Lex and Cosmo. Pixi thinks that this is going to be so good for them, because there’re already a lot of Tweets saying Logan is a total hero, but Betts says she thinks people are gonna say he’s a psycho, and—ugh. Just ugh. Ruby hasn’t even seen the video yet, and she’s already heard twenty opinions on it. How is she supposed to be objective with all this bias swimming around in her head? And couldn’t any of them be bothered to—uh, send her a link?

It takes her a whole minute to find the thing on Twitter, because it hasn’t quite blown up yet. More like, it’s in the process of blowing up, the incident having gone down just a couple hours ago. The footage is only circulating so quickly, Ruby soon learns, because the valet who took the video has like, a million Instagram followers...

Ruby forms her opinion after only a single viewing, but she watches the clip twice more in immediate succession. Logan looks really good, though the video is kinda shitty quality (the cameraman should not quit his valet gig). Pixi and Cosmo are totally right. He doesn’t look psycho at all. That’s just how he is. Passionate. Don’t people know anything about him?

(Well, not as much as Ruby, obviously, but still).

Betts is just such a Negative Nancy.

Logan’s not violent, he’s soulful, for fuck’s sake!

(There’s a second video that gets Tweeted around seven-thirty, by which time half a dozen big celebrity bloggers have picked up the story. The new footage doesn’t have as good an angle, but fortunately the audio is clearer, because Logan, the sweetheart, has a growly voice that’s so hot but kinda hard to hear sometimes. You can even make out Trina Echolls’s voice in this one, calling Logan’s name, which is a cute little treat for the fans.)

Ruby finally decides that she has to weigh in, because her inbox is flooded with “What do you thinks,” so she prepares a precise, articulate statement for her blog.

First: it’s not like Logan actually threatened the guy. He just put him in his place. And he looked good doing it. Did anyone else notice that he’s wearing the jacket he wore when he went with Carrie to the Nepal Earthquake Benefit Concert last year? It’s totally a subtle nod to his Love!

Secondly, Ruby points out, he’s actually highlighting some very important issues about tech security and celebrity culture, and it’s totally gonna get people talking.

Once she’s finished saying her piece, Ruby sighs and sits back in her desk chair. She minimizes the browser, so she can see her computer background—a pic that one of the photographers snapped of her and Logan outside the 09er (“Logan Echolls and Unknown Brunette”). You can see most of her face in it, and Logan’s got his hand on her back, and it’s not even photoshopped! (Except, to like, fix her coloring and shape and stuff).

She does wonder how Logan is holding up through all of this. She imagines driving out to meet him at his hotel... even though she doesn’t really believe he’s staying at the Grand, because she’s staked out the bar there for the last three nights, and she hasn’t seen him once. But she imagines driving out to meet him—no, she imagines him calling her and asking to meet. Then she would comfort him, and he’d take her away for the weekend to—Palm Springs, or somewhere—and they’d drink champagne, and they would—

Betts thinks he’s gonna start dating that skanky Veronica Mars, but seriously. No. Anyway, Veronica Mars is a lawyer, and Ruby is pretty sure that Logan hates lawyers.

Veronica’s here.

His daughter is sitting next to his bed, somewhere in the vicinity of that beeping sound, and she’s wearing a smile that is pure light. Veronica is here, and Keith Mars can’t quite remember why this breaks his heart.

“—Doctor’s saying good things about you, but you gotta take it slow, or they’re—”

Morphine.

He’s on morphine because he can’t move and when he tries to, it hurts. So he’s high, and that’s why his brain is struggling to keep up with everything his daughter is saying. His beautiful, wonderful daughter, who is here. But shouldn’t be.

She’s frowning at him now. “Dad, what’s wrong? Should I get a nurse?”

He tries to shake his head no, but can’t quite manage that, so he squints and pouts, and Veronica understands that he means no anyway.

She sits down in the hospital chair again—she got up when she thought he needed a nurse—but she’s shaking her head. Like she’s read his mind, already guessed his objection even though he hasn’t said anything. 

“I’m not going to fight with you about this, Dad. I’ve been through all your cases, and I know it was Weevil’s thing that started this. Sacks was your man on the inside.”

“Veronica,” he tries to say, but mangles it because speech is not his strongest skill right now. Just choking out a part of each syllable nearly knocks the wind out of him. They’re going to have to put him back on oxygen soon. “Go home,” he manages, with more success.

Veronica’s frown deepens. She shakes her head. “I’ll stay until you go back to sleep.”

Not what he meant. She’s being stupid on purpose, almost the only way that Veronica is ever stupid. “Go back,” he tries again. To New York. To anywhere else.

“I’m staying,” she says. Final.

Staying. Veronica is staying. No.

He says the last word aloud. She doesn’t argue. She doesn’t argue because she knows he’s right, or because he’s in a hospital bed and high on morphine? That’s too much sentence for him, so he just pleads “Veronica” (vronka, it sounds like). His perfect, stupid daughter.

She touches his hand softly and changes the subject. She has that power, because she’s not hooked up to so many machines that she’s basically Darth Vader, and it’s easier for her to talk. But then, she could be in this hospital bed, probably would be if she’d stayed in Neptune, and that thought is way too much for him to handle. He closes his eyes, and Veronica closes her hand over his.

—Promise you everything is going to be okay the tests this morning really good I wish you could see the press on Lamb I just—

Staying. She’s staying. Staying. Staying. Staying. The beeps on the machine beat out the rhythm of the word, staying... staying... staying... over and over again. Keith has to stop this, he has to show her—

“Logan Echolls,” he interjects, somehow more successful than he was with his own daughter’s name.

Veronica falls silent. She leans back in her chair, but her eyes are still soft. She’s not leaving (he wants her to leave, but not yet, not until he knows that she’s heard him). “He’s deploying in ten days,” she tells him, only he thinks she says deploring at first, so he doesn’t really understand what that means for a few seconds. Deploying. Leaving. Because he’s in the Navy.

That’s way, way too much to think about.

Logan might be a perfectly fine man now, but he can be a perfectly fine man far, far away from Veronica. He’s had two girlfriends die on him, and Keith’s not a betting man, but he sure doesn’t like those odds.

And Logan’s not a perfectly fine man. He’s trouble. He’s death and pain and Veronica’s tears, Veronica leaving. He’s not a nice boy. Not like Piz. He’s not good for her. He’s not going to keep her safe, he’s going to pull her into his darkness and make her suffer, and Keith knows, Keith knows this is true, because he’s done the same thing to her, and he’ll never let that happen again.

“Go home,” he says again, adding, “Please.”

“Not yet, Dad,” she answers.

He’s drifting in and out of consciousness later, on the threshold of a welcome slumber, and he sees Veronica pacing. When he stares directly up, he glimpses the harsh white ceiling with its orange peel texture, but he can shift his eyes to the side, too, and catch Veronica. First she’s standing in one corner of the room, then he glances upwards again, and back down to Veronica, and she’s over by the door.

They’ve put him back on oxygen. He can’t speak to her, she probably doesn’t even realize he’s awake still (or again?). It’s dark outside, too. He can tell, because the room is all electric yellow with artificial light. It must be late—late on whatever day it is, Keith can’t quite remember. He’s so very, very tired.

She’s pacing and looking down at her phone, and at one point, she releases this typically Veronica sigh as her fingers glide across her phone screen. “Oh, Logan,” she breathes, and Keith closes his eyes, accepting sleep as it overpowers his senses, his body.

Too late tonight, too worn out, too high to fight the battle even with himself. He’d never win one against Veronica.

Okay, there were probably better ways he could have handled the whole Vinnie Van Lowe situation.

Logan knows this.

Turning the other cheek has never been his defining virtue, though, and Carrie’s dead, and that smug prick had the nerve to stand there and harass him about Veronica, and dammit, enough was enough already.

Besides, it’s not like he actually hit Vinnie.

Wanted to. Didn’t.

Do they hand out brownie points for that?

Anyway, when he gets home—which takes an hour, because Trina drops him at the Grand to get his car, and from there, he drives the long way back to the beach house—Logan struggles to settle down. He begins eight different chores and abandons each one halfway through, only managing to go back and complete the first task—updating contact and insurance information—when he’s cycled through all the others.

Around six-thirty, he surrenders altogether and decides to go for a run.

The sky is all but dark by the time Logan is dressed in track pants and a t-shirt. He laces up his running shoes on the front porch and decides to add a hoodie at the last minute, as it’s already a little cold. The stretch of beach by the house, while aesthetically ideal, only spans about a mile and a half unless he plans on blending his excursion with rock-climbing, so Logan plots his course in the other direction, setting off down the sidewalk toward the country club. He’ll loop around the golf course, then cut down to the dock, and make his return along the shoreline.

He sets a steady pace. No rush tonight. Veronica said not until after eight.

He’s going to see Veronica Mars tonight.

The fact that this is a possibility—that this is reality—keeps striking him as extremely odd. Veronica is back. Veronica is in Neptune and she doesn’t hate him and they’re… whatever.

He hopes she won’t be pissed about the whole teeth in the curb thing, but, God, if she doesn’t know what he’s like by now...

Mosswood Drive curves into Bayside Avenue, and the houses become larger and older. Nouveau Victorians, minimalist mod boxes, and the expected array of Mediterranean inspired villas thrown together at the fancy of millionaires, without much regard for each other. Logan makes a point of finding his favorite house on this stretch, a white wooden plantation style building—ugly, sure, with this garishly hodgepodge garden and a bottle-green tinted hothouse encompassing the third floor, matching nothing in the neighborhood (nothing in the state), but trying so earnestly.

Logan runs past, cuts through a neighborhood dog park, and starts up the hill toward the country club. His heart rate’s evening out; he needs the strain.

He wonders if Veronica likes living in New York. He’s been a couple times. Enjoyed it, but always as a tourist, would he like living in New York?

Not that it matters.

He doesn’t get much say in where he lives these days. Doesn’t get much say in a lot of things.

(He picks up the pace, feels a pleasant burn in his calves.)

That’s no way for some people to live. Some people need more control than that. Some people are better at drawing their own lines, making rules for themselves. Some people are smarter and stronger than Logan is—faster now, crossing Waverly Street, almost to the deli, he should pick up some Italian soda for Veronica tomorrow—and they don’t need so much direction.

Veronica’s like that. Veronica’s good at everything. Veronica’s—

Going back to New York.

He doesn’t know when she’s leaving, but thinks probably not until after he ships out, just judging by things she says and the circumstances with her dad. He hopes, incredibly selfish, that she’s not going back to Piz, that this isn’t just a brief, stupid relapse. He hopes that she’ll respond to his e-mails, and not lose interest when he’s out of the frame.

That’s not how Logan reads the situation, not at all, but he’s been known to be wrong about people in the past. She seems so present, though, so invested; she asks him questions, and she volunteers information and she does this thing when she’s on top where she... not relevant, and so not the time... but the point is, even though by all accounts, she has one foot out the door, for the first time in any iteration of their romantic relationship, she seems completely settled.

The sky is a deep navy blue now. Logan moves between pools of light from the streetlamps. A high, white stone wall divides him from the La Belle golf course, but sounds drift over—live music and voices and the echo of microphones, far off. A wedding or a bar mitzvah or something, probably.

Maybe it’s easier to be settled, though, when everything is so fleeting. Maybe this is her carpe diem fling, because he’s gone in ten days and there’s no need to worry about consequences. Maybe she hasn’t thought this through...

Fact is, he’s not Piz, he’s Logan Fucking Echolls, and he’s got a complicated job, and he’s still trying to grasp what happened with Carrie, and it’s probably going to be all over Perez Hilton tomorrow how he threatened Vinnie Van Lowe outside the Pristine Gold Lounge, and—the ground has evened out now, he’s practically sprinting—and he doesn’t want Veronica to go back to New York, not at all, but if that’s what she’s got to do, then fine, just fine because he’s got ten days to convince her that it doesn’t really matter if she’s on the other side of the continent when he’s back on U.S. soil, because he’s going to call her, and damn it, he would really, really appreciate it if she’d answer her phone again.

And he’s going to say all of that to her. Eventually. At some point before he leaves. There's still time.

Dust-colored clouds move in with the breeze from the ocean, as Logan takes the wooden steps down from the boardwalk to the short fishing dock at the southernmost end of Ariel Beach. He hops down into the sand, beginning the final leg of his workout while his mind maps out the rest of the evening. Get home. Clean himself up before Veronica calls. Dinner. With any luck, sex. A whole night of Veronica—Veronica’s sharp little smile, her lit up eyes, Veronica’s sarcastic edge all intertwined with her unexpected, startling sweetness.

It’s a marvel—it’s a damn miracle—that the universe and Veronica have allowed him to touch her again, sleep next to her, talk to her, even if it is only ten more days, and then months and months of e-mail and shitty Skype reception.

The thing about Veronica is that she’s—

She’s...

She’s sitting on top of his car.

The Beemer is parked at the front of the long driveway that divides Dick’s house from his neighbor, Doris’s place, and as Logan approaches, he becomes more convinced that it is, in fact, Veronica Mars perched atop the hood of his convertible. Automatically, he quickens his pace, and he’s nearly sprinting again for a few seconds before he realizes he’ll be completely out of breath by the time he reaches her and maybe he should at least try to play it cool.

Anyway, he needs to cool down physically, so he slows to a brisk walk for the last fifty yards or so. Veronica’s smiling at him. Backlit from the porch-light, she sits in her dark blue jeans and black-and-white striped t-shirt and a leather jacket, boots balanced on the license plate, and there’s a white paper bag that looks like take-out resting beside her.

He takes deep, panting breaths, rolls his shoulders with his hands on his hips as he strolls up to the house, and he’s grinning back at her, even though he should probably be pissed that she’ll fuck up the paint job. He can’t quite locate the irritation, though, she’s too fucking cute for her own good.

He tops the cinderblocks that divide the beach from the driveway and then jumps down, kicking up gravel as he traverses the short remaining distance to her. Then she’s right there, still smiling, eyes bright and matched to his, all silver and gorgeous in this light.

“Hey,” he says, leans over and kisses her softly on the lips, because it’s a marvel and a miracle but she lets him do that, so he’ll be damned if he misses the opportunity.

“Hey,” she hums in reply. Logan pulls away, swings his leg back and grabs the ankle to stretch. “I called, but you didn’t pick up.”

“Sorry, yeah, I left my phone here. I didn’t realize you’d be done so soon.” It can’t be eight o’clock yet—he couldn’t have been gone that long? He finishes with his hamstrings and moves on to his calves, asking: “How’s your dad?”

“Better.” Veronica shrugs. “He was up for almost an hour.”

He finishes a too-brief stretch of his calves, swings each arm over his chest and pulls a few times, and then closes the distance between himself and Veronica again. “Any changes?” He nudges her, she scoots over, and he joins her on the hood of his car. She bumps his bicep with her shoulder.

“I don’t think so. Doctor Guillar is optimistic.”

“Yeah?”

“He’ll probably be there for at least a couple of weeks, and he’ll need physical therapy after that, but...” She does this one shouldered shrug that physically hurts to see, and he grabs her hand from where it rests on the sliver of car between them. Veronica smiles up at him, weak but sincere, and their fingers thread together. “Anyway, they don’t think there’s going to be serious permanent brain damage. He talked a little more today.”

“Say anything interesting?” She might interpret the question for a joke, but mostly he wants to know if Keith gave Veronica anything that might send her, oh, say, chasing down drivers of phantom white trucks. She’s been in work mode for the last four days, getting Keith’s affairs in order, keeping house at Mars Investigations, taking on as much as she can in the limited hours available to her. The other day she quipped about this being her crash refresher course in P.I. work, and he doesn’t doubt that, but he also suspects that she’s trying to work out what happened to her father—which is equal parts terrifying and impressive. The classic Veronica Mars cocktail.

Veronica shakes her head, eyes fixed on some point out on the horizon, and Logan’s pretty sure she was answering his real question anyhow. “I don’t know how you’re not a mess,” he confesses before he can stop himself, but it’s true. He’s pathetically jealous of that skill of hers, that she never collapses under the weight of whatever shit the universe throws at her. Never implodes, only ever gets better, stronger. Takes things too far, sometimes, but doesn't self-destruct, like he has. The statement draws her out of her reverie, though, and she turns to Logan, lips parted in surprise that he can’t quite interpret.

“I could say the same thing to you,” she points out, squeezing his hand a little. It triggers his defenses for a moment, like maybe she’s speaking in broad terms, maybe she never thought he’d get his life together. But he studies her expression, and her eyes—they’re shining, and he doesn’t know what that means, but probably it’s a good thing. So he jokes:

“Oh I am.”

Veronica chuckles. “Yeah?”

“Big time. Utter disaster.”

“No.”

“Yep. Supernova.”

“As bad as all that?”

“Worse.”

She laughs now, mutters something that he can’t quite make out, but seems to include the word ridiculous, as she shakes her head and brings her other hand around, so that she’s holding his one between both of hers. A long moment passes, then she says, with just the barest hint of teasing: “I’d ask about your lunch with Trina, but it’s all over the web.”

Ah, shit.

The vultures really didn’t waste any time, did they? The ‘mess’ joke suddenly seems less appropriate. Logan groans loudly, drops his head forward, and Veronica squeezes his hand again. She’s biting her lip, like she’s trying not to laugh.

“Cheer up, kid,” she says, “you looked great.”

“That’s encouraging.”

(He’s glad she’s not upset. He had his reasons, he’d probably do it again, but he’s glad she’s not upset, all the same).

He sighs, somewhat affectedly, and falls back, laying out now on top of his car in a way that he never has on the Beemer and probably never would if he were with anyone but Veronica Mars. There’s a glare from the porch-light, from the city around them, and smoky clouds coast into view, but a few bright stars peek through nonetheless. In the corner of his frame of vision is Veronica, leaning down, the ends of her hair swaying with her movement.

She’s laughing again, which was kind of the point, and she releases his hand only to reach out and brush a warm thumb over his lips. He smiles like an idiot. “Final verdict isn’t in yet, but I think this could pull in your favor,” she says.

“Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the temple?” he parrots that lawyer from last week.

“Something like that.” She frowns. “Except the people who think you’re psychotic, but they’re just idiots on the internet, what do they know?”

Logan groans again, turns his head so that Veronica’s hand is mostly covering his face, and she laughs. He talks into her palm: “Well it got Vinnie to shut up.”

“I didn’t realize that you two were so well acquainted.”

“Sheriff Van Lowe and I?” Her hand still mostly shields his face, but he blinks through her fingers, “Oh, we go way back. He had front row tickets to a very—colorful phase in my life.”

Self-Destruction: The College Years.

“I can see that the bonds of friendship remain strong between you two,” replies Veronica, “You felt very comfortable threatening to curb stomp him.”

Logan snorts inelegantly. “I didn’t threaten to curb stomp him. I proposed a hypothetical situation in which I could inflict violence upon him without fearing that my actions would benefit him financially. It’s completely different, Veronica.” Veronica looks dubious, and Logan sighs, sitting up. He’ll wreck the paint, but it’s just a car, so he props his tennis-shoes up in front of him, arms stretched out over his bent knees. “Yeah,” he admits, “I just needed to put a little fear of God in him. He was asking about my...” and he knows he sounds like a sulky teen as he says it, but whatever: “...relationship with my private investigator. So I played it crazy.”

Veronica’s frown grows a little deeper, and her head shivers with surprise. “He asked about me?”

He can’t quite meet her eye, just focuses on his hands, because it's embarrassing. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” she echoes, like she’s never heard the word before. “Sorry for what?”

“Y’know.” He throws up a hand in a useless gesture, caught between playing it off as a joke and genuinely apologizing: “The black hole.”

“Oh.” She kisses his shoulder, which is brave of her, considering he’s kind of gross right now. “S’Alright.” They sit in silence for almost a minute, then Veronica tells him about the food she brought in the white paper bag—burgers from The Habit—but makes no attempt to start dinner or move things inside. She just kind of gets caught up in her own head for a little while, but that’s okay. It’s more than okay, even, because her hand is resting on his arm, her thumb moving back and forth over the fabric of his sleeve, and the air is full of the sound of the waves, the smell of salt. When the wind whips past them, it stirs up her hair so that the strands brush his cheek, and he’s crazy—he knows he’s crazy—for finding comfort in the sensation.

Then, suddenly, as though they were in the middle of an extensive conversation on the topic, Veronica asks: “Are you going to sue the County?”

Logan responds with an incredibly intelligent, “Huh?”

“Lamb and the D.A.,” she clarifies. “They clearly mishandled evidence, they straight up ignored the M.E.’s report, and once all the stuff comes out about how our esteemed Sheriff treated you after Carrie died, you’d be within your rights.”

Logan shrugs. Truthfully, “I hadn’t thought about it at all. Do you think I should?”

“It’s up to you, really. But maybe—maybe you’d just rather move on?”

He has no idea where this is coming from or going, but he can see that her mind is working on something complicated and guesses that she’s back in work mode. So he teases, “Would you come out and represent me if I did sue, Counselor?”

She smiles and leans in to him but doesn’t actually respond. He feels like she’s building up to something, some conversation, probably uncomfortable, so he waits for whatever it is that she has planned. He recaptures her hand and kisses her knuckles, which draws her eyes to him and paints a slow, rich smile across her lips. He’s missed her. Genuinely missed her, he thinks, all the way up until last week—nine years apart be damned.

“Logan,” she begins after a moment, then stops again.

He prompts her, “Mhm?” and she breathes out a puff of laughter, shaky and nervous.

“You’re—you’re leaving in ten days.”

He doesn’t release her hand, but he lowers it, studies her black-painted fingernails mixed together with his plain ones.

This is a fact: he is leaving in ten days, but he doesn’t know what conclusion she’s drawing based on that fact. She could be thinking almost anything; there’s no cause for alarm. You’re leaving in ten days, let’s take a step back, or you’re leaving in ten days, let’s go fuck on the kitchen counter because why the hell not, or you’re leaving in ten days, can I borrow your car? The important thing now is to relax (because he’s probably crushing her fingers the way he’s holding them) and just let her say whatever it is she came here to say.

He nods, exhales, “Yeah,” and he sounds sad about it, which isn’t even accurate, because he’s completely fucking devastated by the fact that Veronica Mars is here and he only gets two weeks with her. But there’s nothing he can do about it, and if his twenty-eight years on this planet have taught him anything, it’s that the Rolling Stones said it best. You can’t always get what you want.

But if you try sometimes, Veronica bails your ass out and steals sips from your coffee and does that thing she does when she’s on top and saves your fucking life, so he’s gotta try.

—All of which he’s going to say if he can get past the awkward first couple of words. “Yeah, Veronica, and six months is...”

“Thing is,” she goes on, as if he weren’t speaking at all, “When you get back... I’m going to be here.”

The words are spoken in English, Logan has no excuse for why he needs like six seconds to figure out what they mean. Then another ten to figure out why Veronica’s finally making square eye contact again, and her mouth is set in this firm line like she’s waiting for bad news from a doctor, or why she’s suddenly the one squeezing his fingers a little too tightly, and the whole thing is so utterly ludicrous that Logan feels his face split apart with a grin that actually startles her—her eyebrows shoot up—when it breaks.

All he can think to say is: “Good,” which makes her laugh.

“Good?”

“Yeah, good.”

This time, he does release her hand, on account of the fact that he’s threading both his hands through her hair, angling her head so that he can kiss her really properly. He pauses, an inch out, adds: “We’ll save a fortune on airfare,” before he finally lets himself press his lips onto hers again.

Veronica alternates between laughing and kissing him, shifting in their awkward positions to make it work. “Awfully—mpf—awfully sure of yourself, weren’t you?”

“Mmm... Optimistic.”

He’s not even certain if he’s easing her back or if she’s pulling him down, but Logan finds himself braced above her, Veronica stretched out on the hood of the car. Cool metal under his palms, her hot mouth snatching tastes of his. Her hands go all over, under the fabric of his t-shirt, warm on his back, the other needy and eager gliding over his belly. His body burns everywhere it touches hers, and this position is the silliest, most delightfully adolescent thing he’s done in ages, pressing Veronica from the hips up against a car, making out for the sheer bliss of being able to touch each other again. He was supposed to be saying something to her, but he can't quite remember what, and he's not sure it applies anymore.

Later, they sit on the hood of the car and eat the hamburgers and French fries that Veronica brought, bickering about ketchup distribution and whether she’s a weirdo for not liking tomatoes.

As they make their way up to the house close to an hour later, Logan tells her that Dick’s in L.A. for the weekend. Fantastic news for Veronica, so really, she doesn’t see why Logan should act all surprised when the first thing she does after he unlocks the house and lets her inside is slam the door shut with her back and drag him with her by the strings of his jacket. What did he honestly expect?

He recovers quickly.

He presses so close to her there’s no space to move, back flat against the door, front crushed against Logan. Feels wonderful, tastes wonderful. She just wants to be closer, wants more. She’d actively like to climb him, but she can’t when he just won’t help her, when he’s got her pinned like this. So she hitches one leg up around his waist, just for incentive. Claws at his clothes—his jacket zipper rattles when it scrapes the floor—and he kisses her harder, she’s actually gasping for breaths but he keeps moving, his mouth on her neck, behind her ear, she wants more.

“Logan.”

He doesn’t pick her up, though he releases her a fraction of an inch, just enough to slide a hand between them. He drags his fingers along the inseam of her jeans, exposed with her leg up around his hips, and jesusfuckdamn. She whispers her whole-hearted approval at what he’s doing there, deliberate circles that create this—this perfect friction between her clothes and her body. She’s grinding her hips, lets him take his time but only to a point, as he kisses in rhythm up her throat to her mouth—she can’t help grinning at him. He beams back at her, eyes crinkling, kisses her lips firmly. And then pulls away.

“I better get the curtains,” he says, but there’s no doubt, zero doubt in Veronica’s mind that he did that on purpose. It’s the exact moment that he skips into the living room to draw the blinds over the wall of windows, shucking his shirt onto the hardwood floor so damn self-satisfied, that Veronica—still aching over by the door—decides that she is going to make him absolutely beg for it.

She follows him into his sleeping area, where he tends to the blinds and the curtains that section off his room, and she sits down on the bed, pulling off her shoes, socks, jacket, and—just as he’s turning back to face her—her t-shirt.

They climb into bed together, help each other out of what’s left of their clothes, and then, when Logan’s stretched out on top of her, working her the short remaining distance up with his fingers, mouth over her breast, then, Veronica reflects on how perfectly absurd it is that she gets to fuck Logan again. Absurd and positively right, positively necessary, because no version of herself that she’s developed over the years—chipper girl-next-door Stanford Veronica, workaholic type-A Columbia Veronica, wanna-be shark Veronica—none of them has ever stopped wanting this.

She’s ready and he knows it, and she pulls his face up to hers so she can properly kiss him, then places small, sucking kisses along his jaw—“On your back,” she murmurs, not because she needs to but because she knows he likes it when she bosses him around, and she still has every intention of having him at her mercy.

He reclaims her mouth in a hard, searing kiss, and then rolls them over so she’s on top of him—she’s so wet she actually slips a little, and he groans as he helps situate her. He steadies her hips when she rises up on her knees, then lowers her body slowly to meet him. And—oh, God, oh God, when she’s taking him inside of her. Not even twelve hours since the last time, how is it possible she’s missed him? She has though, fucking missed him, she knows as she starts to move.

They go slow at first, Veronica adjusting to the—uh, not insignificant presence of Logan inside her. They kiss or they don’t; they touch each other all over, snark at each other or concentrate on the goodness of how this feels.

She doesn’t close her eyes because it’s wonderful to watch Logan like this, and he locks into her gaze, while one hand slides up her body to her breast. He does that thing that he does with his thumb on her nipple that just shouldn’t feel so good but does.

Then his other hand spans the width of her thigh, and he thumbs her clit. This back and forth, firm then teasing, faster then slower rotation...

Veronica soon abandons all pretense of self-control, speeding up her hips, because Christ, the next one can go slow, right now she just wants to fucking come.

Logan’s expression changes, from slack-jawed, dark-eyed arousal to this gorgeous smile. There’s no headboard, just that low wall behind the bed that she can’t quite reach, so she grips her knee for balance, and it does something glorious to her insides that he’s not guiding her motion, not at all, she’s basically just fucking herself on top of him. He’s grinning up at her, and she has to know, gasps out a breath of, “What?”

He changes the rhythm or the direction or something of his thumb beneath her, and she moans…

“You,” he says, sucks in a breath through his teeth, “You’re so fucking pretty.”

“Pretty?” she repeats, breathless and damn close, “Logan, I’m—fuck—I’m naked on top of you, what’s a girl gotta do to get better than—than pretty?”

Logan doesn’t answer, except he laughs and takes his hand from her breast, replaces it with his mouth, which is really just beyond anything at this point, and Veronica wraps her body all the way around his and pushes herself as hard as she can right over the edge into heady, lingering—and if those sounds are coming from her, noisy—freefall.

When she comes down, Logan’s tongue is on her neck, and he’s gripping tight on her hips, like he’s really restraining himself from flipping them over and taking control. But she feels just perfect right now, could do this all fucking night, and may just decide to.

She eases Logan down onto his back and kisses him softly around the mouth, rocking her hips up and down and holding herself over him, eye to eye.

“Hey,” she whispers between tastes of his mouth. He snickers, Hey, back, and she goes on: “I was thinking...” She nips at his chin, “...for tonight...” presses faint kisses all along his jaw, “We could go slow?”

In contradiction to her words, she rocks her hips a little harder, a fraction of a second quicker, and Logan doesn’t seem to understand at first; he’s frowning, focused. But there can’t be much blood going to his brain at the moment, so she lets him catch up—

“Slow?”

“Mhm.” She parts his lips with hers, pulls back and then bites gently at his lower lip, “Yeah, y’know, really...” She clenches around him, kisses around to his ear, “Just—take our time...”

“God, Veronica,” he breathes, and she’s rising so far up and then pulling him so deep inside her, she knows exactly why...

“Unless,” softly, she bites his neck, rolls her hips faster a few times, “unless you don’t want to. Just—” She kisses the column of his really, truly beautiful throat, “—just say the word, if you need to... y’know... set the pace.”

Logan stills... no, well, not all the way, but he slows the pitching of his hips, his hands move up to her back, and he pulls away enough to get eye contact with her, so she knows he’s caught on. “Say the word,” he echoes. His breathing’s just slightly labored, maybe he’s not close, but he’s not impervious. She beams down at him.

“Yeah.”

“’S-that right?”

“Mhm.”

“And what word is that, hmm?” His eyebrows bob playfully, and he brushes her hair from her face. “Please?”

“Well.” She pecks him on the lips. “Just let me know. I’ve always been a fan of good manners, though.”

“That so?”

She nods eagerly, and Logan—he kind of grits his teeth, breathing in deep, and she can feel him change his pace, his motion, where they’re joined, as he nods his head against the pillows. “Let’s do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Cause it’s a challenge now, and Logan loves, just loves a challenge. He pulls her face to his for one long kiss, and then pushes her body up, so she’s straight on top of him again. His hands slide down over her legs to her bent knees, but he’s ceded control to her.

So she just kind of goes for it. Splays her hands over his abs for support and locks eyes with him and she doesn’t even need his hands at this point, because this angle is divine, she could do this forever. She works herself up on him, and she knows she’s bringing him along with her because he’s keeping his eyes fixed on her face, fucking concentrating, but he does match her rhythm with his hips. He’s show-off-y that way, which is hot, really, that confidence, but so, so, so ill-advised, strategy-wise, because he can’t possibly maintain that kind of control for long...

There was this boyfriend, senior year at Stanford, who accused her of pinching him in bed. She didn’t, she was just holding on for God’s sake, but he said she was pinching him, and after that she made a point of actually pinching him, because Jesus, that was the stupidest thing to complain about. Then she pinched another guy just to be funny, a kind of inside joke with herself, and he—maybe it was Piz, maybe David from Columbia?—didn’t comment on it, which was a much more reasonable reaction. She thinks if she pinched Logan, he would probably comment; he’d probably moan her name and swear, or call her a pest in that way that she’s pretty sure means he’s really fucking into it. Sometimes she wonders if her time with Logan at Hearst gave her a weirdly inflated sexual confidence, since so many of her formative sexual experiences were with a guy who was really fucking into basically everything she ever wanted.

Her hair is all in her face now, she’s hot and flushed and sweaty and really, really close, and Logan’s not helping her at all—untrue, he’s helping her but only the barest minimum—which is hot all on its own.

He fucks up into her harder and faster, and when she comes this time, it’s quicker, sharper, not as long as the first, but strong and good and she doesn’t bite her lip, doesn’t hold in the moans that are clawing their way out of her throat, because she’s still got her eyes on Logan, and he’s burning bright with need. She’s right there with him, this was the kind of orgasm that fades too rapidly, leaves her hungry for more. Sooner, rather than later, because she’s a strange combination of spent and starved.

She pushes her hair away from her face, holds it back because her neck is hot and because when she does, Logan’s eyes rake up and down her whole body. She clenches around him, and he groans. He spreads her legs a little wider by the knees and reaches a hand down between them, two fingers flat against him so that she really has to reach for it, and the feeling is—amazing, but it’s too much work and her legs already feel like jelly...

She grabs his shoulder and pulls him up to her, the angle’s a little easier now and she gets to kiss him, which—yes, obviously, but she’s just getting traction again, really starting to build, when he pulls her in and nibbles at her ear, muttering, “All right up there?”

Veronica’s really not in a place to chat, and she just sighs some approval in response.

His voice is low and gravelly, but he’s holding it together when he goes on: “—Don’t want to make you do all the work. If you get tired, just say the word.”

Then he falls back onto the pillows again, and she loses the angle and—

Fuck him.

Seriously.

He’s grinning up at her, somehow, trying to make this look easier for himself than it is, and so, okay, maybe wearing her out wasn’t the worst strategy, actually, because she really wants to finish again, but it would just be so much easier if he would fucking—

She falls over him, presses her whole body over the planes of his chest and abs, and she kisses him hard, teeth and tongue, so they’re both moaning into each other’s mouths. She reaches down to brush a finger over his balls, but he’s smart, snatches it away and mutters, “Cheating,” which makes her laugh way too hard, considering she really needs to conserve energy if she’s going to outlast him.

But she doesn’t need (or want, really, really doesn’t want) to outlast him, actually—just the opposite. She needs to come again, because she knows him and no way in hell he holds out if she comes again, not the way she’s feeling now, it’s going to be just...

She grabs the sheets and leverages it to pull herself under him, so he’s on top, and she wraps her legs around his waist so he’s so, so deep inside of her, and he thinks he’s won because he groans into her neck, “Tired of slow?”

“No,” she gasps back, it doesn’t even sound like her voice anymore, and he feels so good like this—he’s a jackass and a prick and fuck him but also she’s so about how he rotates his hips like that, still matching her pace, “Just—just a breather.”

Logan actually growls and bites her shoulder, and yes, yes, yes, she is a fucking genius. He should never have let her be on the bottom, because she can go for days like this now. He can get her off twelve more times for all she cares; they can change positions—see how much control he has when she’s face down in the sheets.

He pulls back, almost all the way out but then pushes back into her hard, and Veronica doesn’t even notice that he’s lifted her legs up all the way to his shoulders until she feels how glorious this angle is, because he’s hitting her right where she needs it. Logan’s eyes are so dark, so focused on her, he’s studying, and she should probably feel self-conscious about the way she’s gasping his name, but she just can’t find it in her, because now she really is so fucking close, that—

He drops her legs from his shoulders, pins her hips into the mattress and changes tactic... light, shallow thrusts barely inside of her at all suddenly, and his dick brushes along her clit as she meets him. The change completely fucks with her, feels amazing but she has to adjust. She grabs his hair and the sheets and anything she can, and just as she does start to find her rhythm, he releases her hips, spreads her legs wide instead and pushes deep again, slowing again, slowing almost painfully...

Fuck.

Him.

“Fuck you, Logan,” she actually says, when she leans up to kiss/bite his lip, because she knows what he’s doing finally. He’s holding her right there, keeping her on the edge, getting her close and then just—just not.

“’S-the-idea,” he hisses, because he’s close too, she sees that, but he wants to win as much as she does. He’ll be done if she finishes, but she just needs to finish, so she grinds her hips and he does too. She releases his hair to reach down and touch herself, but he’s too quick, grabs her hand again and tangles his fingers through hers, holding her hand against the pillow and calling her a cheater again, even though Veronica’s pretty sure she made up this game and the rules don’t even make sense anymore, nothing really makes sense anymore. Least of all how helplessly turned on she is by the fact that he’s pinned her hand over her head and is now, jesusgod, fully sucking on her breast, and yet she would also kind of really like to pinch him—the jerk.

But she doesn’t.

Instead she gets creative, finds a loophole in this completely nonsensical system of rules by which they seem to be operating. With her free hand, she grabs Logan’s, and he pulls away because he has to shift his weight to his other arm, but she doesn’t care because really she’s so unbelievably high right now, she could give a fuck if they fell off the bed, as long as she got what she wanted. Logan steadies himself and she takes his hand and takes two fingers and puts them in her mouth. Lord knows she doesn’t need to, but it certainly gets Logan’s attention, he’s fucking riveted when she holds him by the wrist and pushes his hand down between them and rubs herself off with his fingers.

She comes apart in seconds, and Logan’s right there with her.

Her brain kicks back into gear minutes later, when she finds that Logan’s head is on her rib cage and she’s combing her fingers through his hair. The first reaction that registers with her is wonder—and just a little amusement—at how many times Logan has gotten her off today. The second thought is that six months is a really fucking long time.

“Oh God,” she sighs, not even sure what for, and Logan grunts in response, lifting his face to kiss her belly. She adds: “Too bad the sex isn’t any good, or you and I might have something really special.”

Logan’s chuckle warms her skin, a puff of hot breath over cooling sweat. He pushes himself up on his hands, looks like he’s going to climb off her, but first he detours past her breasts, kisses one and gives the other a playful, insouciant suck before he rolls over on the mattress beside her. If she were bolder and more coherent, she’d tell him that he’s fucking pretty, too. The fucking prettiest.

“I’m never walking again,” she tells him instead, unfortunately a lie because she will at some point need water and to pee.

“’Getyouawheelchair,” Logan mumbles, and Veronica reaches out to pat his face in appreciation for the thought. He bites her thumb, not too hard.

“People are gonna ask a lot of questions about why I’m in a wheelchair,” she babbles on, even though Logan seems like he’s half asleep at this point, “I’ll have to come up with another story to preserve my squeaky clean image.”

“Mmm.”

“Like... I hurt myself diving into a river to... rescue a baby or something.”

Logan doesn’t respond to that for some time, and really, this nonsense doesn’t merit a response, so Veronica wouldn’t blame him if he just went ahead and dozed off. He waits so long to say something, as a matter of fact, that she’s completely lost when he asks: “So it was like a Moses situation?”

“What?”

“The River Baby. Why was there a baby in the river? Was it like a Moses thing? With the—reeds and the basket...”

“Oh. Yes. Like Moses. Very brave of me.”

“Liar. You just had a bunch of sex.”

“Shhh.” She pinches his shoulder.

“Pest.” He pinches her ass and rolls out of bed to go get some water.

Veronica found out about Logan and the Navy in probably the most embarrassing way possible. She means to tell him the story someday down the line, but not for... ages.

What happened is this:

During a study break one evening in her second year at Columbia, Veronica allowed herself to become distracted by the internet long enough to fall into a click-bait rabbit hole, featuring those silly articles like, 21 Singers Who Can’t Carry a Tune and 12 Children’s Movies that are Secretly Satanic. Eventually—after 32 Reasons You Need to Rewatch 'Ghost'—there was one, 15 Celebrity Children Who Have Normal Jobs. And the absolutely insane thing (even crazier than the fact that Veronica clicked on it at all) was that Logan Echolls was there, number seven, and he was in the goddamn Navy. He was an aviator.

She remembers now with shame that her first reaction (after shock) was not of pride or even admiration. For those few seconds, she was just unspeakably angry.

‘Cause, thing is, Veronica never allowed herself to look Logan up, not for all those years. She never allowed Mac or Wallace to tell her anything about him, talk about him at all, and his name certainly never passed between her and her father, or—later on—her and Piz. For this to work, for her not to know Logan, she had to pretend that he didn’t exist. She had to fucking believe it.

But then after all that, there he was on her laptop screen, like the universe just didn’t care that Veronica Mars had declared him to be gone.

The worst part, though, was that when she saw his picture there, found out he was a damn pilot for the damn military, she realized that, for all intents and purposes, the Logan she knew didn’t exist. She'd succeeded.

Because sure, the stupid listicle only had maybe a hundred words telling her anything about him, his life, but it was enough for Veronica to realize that this was a man she didn’t know anymore. This mythical figure in her life, Logan Echolls, Ex-Boyfriend, had gone and disappeared on her, and she’d... she’d just missed it.

Logan was a stranger. She just didn’t know him. If she'd had any desire to brag about that kind of thing, it wouldn't be "Oh, I know Logan Echolls" anymore; it would have to be "I went to high school with Logan Echolls." Which just sounded pathetic and wrong because... well because it was Logan.

Because anger is a much easier emotion than fear, the whole situation was fucking infuriating.

The next year, she saw him on television at the Grammy’s, when the camera panned to Bonnie DeVille as she was nominated for Best Pop Album, and Veronica just turned off the T.V. right away.

Except:

She was wrong.

This Logan—this Logan is different. He’s calmer, he’s not a spinning, terrified, hyper-impulsive nineteen-year-old. He’s polite to wait-staff, he’s gotten outside of his own head, he cares about his job, and he knows so many things that Veronica never thought of before. He can fly a plane, he's been in combat, he's got a rank.

But...

He’s still Logan.

She’s sure of that, been sure of that since Day One in Neptune. Before that. Before he called her in New York, even. The second she found out what they were saying he’d done.

Every moment that Veronica spends with him now, she becomes surer and surer in that conviction. He’s changed, he’s so changed, but he didn’t have to wash out the old Logan Echolls, not altogether. He'll still go to the mattresses for the people he cares about, for her. He still understands her, still gets her on a level that she doesn't comprehend but thinks she might try to, someday. He still has his humor and his moodiness and his low-key, semi-perpetual irritation with almost everything and everyone in the world. He's still that Logan: he just built himself up. Says he’s a mess, but seems to have accepted those elements of his life with a kind of grace he’d never mastered before, a grace Veronica envies. Somehow, amazingly, he’s restructured his life, himself, without stomping out the parts that made him him.

And if that’s possible...

The light in the bedroom is sparse and grey when Veronica wakes, cocooned in blankets and Logan’s sweatshirt, but not—she finds—Logan himself. The bed dips, and he’s moving about the room. He must be going to pee or something, but just to be sure, she doesn’t fall right back asleep.

Actually, Logan fishes clothes out of his suitcase, and Veronica watches—not totally disinterested—as he strips out of his boxers and into these black spandex-looking shorts, that—Jesus, they look painted on.

“What are you doing?” she grumbles at him, and he straightens up, hands on his hips.

“Surf’s up, Brother John.”

“Logan, the sun’s not even up.”

He grins, climbs onto the bed and crawls over her. “Go back to sleep,” he whispers, with a quick kiss to her lips. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Not dressed like that you won’t,” Veronica whines, just for the sake of whining. “Those beach girls are gonna be all over you, and you know what they’re like.”

“Well, I’ll put on my trusty wetsuit,” he assures her, “And I’ll shout for help if I need you to come out and do battle.”

“I bet you will.”

He smirks.

When Logan leaves, Veronica curls up onto her side and closes her eyes, but she doesn’t drift off right away. A few minutes tick by, and she surrenders the cause, kicking off the blankets and grousing about Logan and his stupid surf.

She makes coffee. Brushes her teeth, washes her face, puts on her jeans. Then she divvies the coffee into two travel mugs from the kitchen, fixes her own cup and carefully rations out the cream and sugar for Logan’s, going from memory but pretty confident that she’s got the ratio right. She snags giant men’s flip flops from the porch—Dick’s, presumably—and stomps out onto the beach, just as the first traces of the sunrise hit the sky.

She finds a spot in the cool sand in front of the house, fifty yards from the door and not much further from the water. The beach is just about empty, but there are a few surfers—little black specks—out on the horizon, riding dusky blue waves. Wind whistles tunelessly around her, kicking up sand in short puffs, and Veronica drinks her coffee, pulls Logan’s sweatshirt tight around her. She’s missed the beach, even when it’s not the sunny California postcard ideal—even when it’s chilly and grey and February.

Yellow light breaks through the haze when the black surfing speck that is Logan sails back to shore. He heads straight to her like he’s magnetically drawn, and Veronica studies his approach, memorizing the contours of his shoulders, how he looks when his hair’s all thick with salty seawater, wetsuit around his waist and board tucked under his arm as he trudges through the sand towards her.

She ponders in a fleeting sort of way, whether it counted as love at first sight if she’s not sure she ever put the torch all the way down. It almost doesn’t matter anymore—then and now and ten days from now—because fact is, it’s still Logan coming up to her, going from greybrown to gold as the sun sneaks up the sky. All Logan, grinning at her in this single, out-of-time moment, probably formulating a quip for his greeting if she doesn’t beat him to it.

He's a goddamn sight to behold.