The words blurred as they sank into her brain. Left the page, danced in front of her eyes, then exploded with meaning. A revelation.
It was her.
He wasn’t in control of their relationship. She was.
He wasn’t disinterested, as remote as he pretended. He was playing a role.
Father. Brother. Benefactor. None of those things, but with shades of all three. He smiled benevolently, and she glowed back – shyly, of course. If his hands occasionally lingered on her back a little too long, they ignored it. If her spine arched into him, it was innocent pleasure, sensuality.
“Crap!”
Heads flew up from cubicles all around the reading room. She smiled – sweetly, of course – and held up the book. “Pop psychology,” she apologised, the disgusted tone eliciting a number of sympathetic smirks.
She murmured a quick prayer of apology to the author. Because there it was, on the page in black and white. That final piece that slides into the puzzle and clarifies everything. The proof.
It wasn’t Jean. Or that blonde in Vegas. Or even Ororo, though they’d been thrown together a lot lately.
It was her. Marie. Teenage, scared, soul-bared Marie. But eighteen. Voluptuous. Virginal. Nature had designed the perfect mate for a man who was a little more captive to his biology than most.
*
The bio paper started it. She chose evolution as her topic, and that meant natural selection. And then she discovered Darwin’s other mechanism, the one that most people seemed to forget about. Sexual selection. The Mansion’s library didn’t have anything particularly up-to-date on that front, so she trekked into town. And there, in one of those cubicles in the third floor reading room, she found the most useful book ever published.
It was certainly eye-catching. The couple embracing, bathed in red and black. His hand on her hip looked huge, possessive. And she was small. Nubile. (Young, her knowing mind whispered. Young.) And the title: “Strategies of Desire”. No beating about the bush there.
Well, Mr Buss wasn’t as exciting as he sounded. She’d worked her way through chapter one, and snorted a few times as he laid out “What women want”. Then came chapter three.
Men wanted beauty. Men wanted fertility. And most of all – because it was all the same thing, really – men wanted youth.
She stopped taking notes there. Checked her purse, counted out a couple of tattered tens and a handful of ones. Her fingers clenched around the book as she forced herself to drop it in the return bin on her way out, and she wondered if the woman at the information desk – older. Older! – could see the glitter of triumph in her eyes.
“Would you know where the nearest Barnes & Noble is?”
A practiced smile and the woman didn’t even attempt a reply - simply handed her a bookmark with both the library and Barnes & Noble marked on it, only four streets away.
Half a mile, four mocha lattes and three chapters later, Marie had enough material to return to the Mansion. The cursory notes of selection mechanisms and anthropological studies filling the front of the notebook had given way to a detailed, exhaustive plan of attack.
Logan was hers. Her alpha. Her mate. There was no point in reticence or passivity. This was Nature, red in tooth and claw.
*
“Logan?”
“Marie.”
“How much do you know about evolution?”
“Besides’ Wheels basic primer? Fuck all, sweetheart. Why?”
“No reason. I just found a few of the points really interesting, and wondered what you thought of the ideas.”
“About us being mutants?”
“No, actually. Human. What it means to be human.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Marie.”
His shoulders slumped as that mask slid over his face. Self-loathing hadn’t been her goal, but she wanted him to think. Think about him. What he was.
“Logan!” He looked up, unable to ignore her protest even as he slid into his usual funk.
“You are human. Your genetic code has everything everybody else’s has. It’s just built new things out of it, that’s all. And kept some old things other people have lost.”
He was unconvinced. She heard him mutter “an animal” as he turned away. She repeated it silently. An animal. Like every other Homo sapiens out there. But better.
*
“How’s that paper coming along?”
“OK. But some of the concepts are a bit complicated. Sex isn’t as straightforward as it sounds!”
“It’s not?”
“No! The scientists think sexual selection was one of the things that made us human – bipedal, hairless, etcetera. But then society comes along and puts a different set of rules on things. We could really be screwing ourselves up by going against nature!”
She watched his reaction through a curtain of hair, adjusting her sprawl at the desk to expose the line of her hip and the jut of her breasts. He was slouched in the door as had become the norm lately – words had been said, she suspected – but his eyes still travelled over her, soft and warm. And intrigued.
“Against nature?” He strode across the room to stand over her, and she hoped he wouldn’t ask any difficult questions, because his hip was grazing her shoulder, and if she straightened up a little …. He glanced down as the side of her breast slid slowly along his hipbone. He could smell her. She knew it, and her nipples began to ache as speculation flared in his eyes.
Speak. She had to speak.
“Uh, you know. Men choosing anorexic models, or women that look like children. Or older women, nearly past childbearing.”
“Instead of?” Was his voice strained? The question had an edge to it, she knew that. He was expecting to hear something he didn’t like.
“Women at the peak of their fertility. Younger and fatter than the current ideal, basically.” She was proud of that. Voice level, even somewhat flippant. And she hadn’t yelled “me, you fool!” the way she wanted to.
He’d got the message, though.
She heard him swallow and felt the energy in the room splinter as he yanked his focus away. He picked up the black book, eyebrows shooting skyward at the risqué cover. “Strategies of human mating?” This is what you’re reading?”
“Buss is a leading worker in evolutionary psychology. And sex is what made us who we are, Logan. Especially us.”
Because she had some theories there. Theories about mutation and mate choice. And her mate had better be prepared to listen.
*
She got an A on the biology paper.
“This is remarkable, Rogue! Excellent work – truly insightful thinking!” Dr McCoy tried to hide his astonishment, but failed. “May I ask …” he faltered, unable to pose the question diplomatically. Not many students went from a D average to an A in one leap.
“I had never really put much effort into Bio before,” Marie shrugged, congratulating herself on avoiding the words “deathly boring”. She wanted to explain exactly why sexual selection was such an interesting mechanism, but she doubted Hank wanted to hear it.
She had identified more than 20 characteristics that were theorised to have been selected for via mate choice, rather than survival. Hairlessness. Skin colour. Eye colour. The waist-hip ratio. Penis size.
Logan had laughed when he read that passage, and when she stared pointedly at his crotch, gave her THAT look for the very first time. The one that said “play your cards right, baby, and maybe you’ll find out”.
She wanted to see that look more. Wanted more than just the look.
Mother Nature was beckoning, taunting her. “Time to take what’s yours, girl.”
Red in tooth and claw. What did that mean, exactly? Being ready to fight for what you wanted? Being so hungry you could taste it? Being willing to surrender to that part of you that was wild, pre-human?
It was. She was.
*
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Author's Chapter Notes:
With thanks to Skybluerae for the beta.