Wondering how Logan must see me was depressingly paralyzing. It was too big, and I knew too much, most of it conflicting, some of it damning, and a lot of it buried deep. I was on the edge of a cliff, here. If I started reevaluating how things between Logan and I had gotten this way, I’d fall.
I needed cheering up. Logan had told me to have a good time tonight, right? That was a get-out-of-guilt-free card if I’d ever received one. Taking my cell with me, I sat back down on the living room couch. From a white gift bag, I took out a velvet box. Inside, there was a small, very basic, silver cross. I clasped the thin chain around my neck, adjusting it with one hand as I scrolled down my contact list looking for Kurt’s number.
It rang just twice before his comforting voice answered, “Hallo?”
Instantly all grins, I responded, “Hi, Kurt.”
“Anna Marie, Alles Gute zum Geburtstag. I was just thinking about you, you know. I wondered, how has your birthday been?”
“It’s been great. Thank you so much for your presents. I love the book of Rilke poems, and I’m wearing the necklace right now.”
“Oh gut, you like it?”
“Sehr viel.”
“Wunderbar. You sound so happy. I knew you would be. Your friend has returned.”
“Yeah. It’s good to have him back.” I added, “It’s really good,” because I’d forgotten until just now how relieved I’d been this morning. I finally knew that Logan was safe, and that was something to be infinitely grateful for, even if he wasn’t exactly pleased with the way I’d dealt with things in his absence.
I didn’t realize how long I’d been silent until Kurt said tentatively, “You have not seen each other in a long time. You both are different now, perhaps?”
“A little.” I nearly told him about our fight, but I didn’t care to open those floodgates, not when I had just over an hour to kill before Keller and Jubilee and everyone would be there to enable my denial. Instead I assured him, “I’m trying really hard not to seem different, though.”
“You will seem as you are. You cannot hide that, not from someone who knows you so well. Trying would feel dishonest, ja?”
“I guess it would.” To myself I amended, Except that I’m really fucking great at being disingenuous.
“You be you,” Kurt continued. “You he loves. How could he not?”
My chest tightened with affection. “I love you, Kurt.”
“Natürlich. How could you not?” he teased. There was some background noise. “One moment, bitte.” Holding the phone closer to my ear, I managed to place Storm’s low voice. After a second, Kurt said, “I am sorry, I must go now. I have made dinner plans.”
Tone overly casual, I asked, “Oh? With Storm? Anything…special?”
“How do you mean?” Poor Kurt sounded puzzled.
“Never mind. Tell her I said thank you for the blanket. It’s beautiful.”
“I will pass on your thanks.”
“All right. Bye, Kurt. Have a great time.” If he’d been any of my other friends, I might have supplemented, “Seriously, you two should probably just get hammered and go at it already,” but he was Kurt and she was Storm, both veritably cloistered, so I said nothing of the kind. I merely amused myself with the idea.
“Gleichfalls. Biss bahlt, Mein Lamm.”
My lamb. I bit back sudden, bitter laughter as I snapped closed my phone. He’d been calling me that almost as long as I’d known him, but I wasn’t so docile and innocent now, was I? I was, again, a murderer and a traitor and a sociopath, a would-be rapist, and, to top it all off, a bad friend.
Movements slow and dense, I went back into my room. To stave off the angst, I did that terrific, terrible thing I can do. I pushed all potentially painful thoughts away from my consciousness by restricting my myself to surface-level thinking.
That required music, so I flipped on my laptop. Singing along to Elvis, I changed into suitable bar-hopping attire – a clingy long-sleeved black top and the most expensive, risqué pair of jeans I owned, due on both counts to the so-advertised designer holes and fringe. By the time I was redressed, “A Little Less Conversation” had changed to The Beatles’ “Help!” and, after a few bars, I clicked to the next song. Sometimes iTunes shuffle had far too insightful a sense of humor for my liking.
I was mindlessly creating a new playlist when my doorbell rang. “Just a second,” I called out, hurrying to slip on the pair of gloves I had laid out while I walked.
“Don’t bother, I got it,” came Keller’s muffled reply. There was clicking noise and the door opened wide. Keller came through the door, four pizza boxes hovering beside his head. Kitty and Jubilee ducked under them, teetering on high heels as they tottered toward me. They grabbed me in a hug, their faces awkwardly tilted away from mine.
“Where’s the sex?” Jubilee wanted to know, leering over my shoulder as if Logan was due at any moment for a naked stroll out of my bedroom.
“He went out, but he’ll be back. Hey, Bobby,” I disengaged from Jubilee and Kitty so I could lean over to give him a hug. I felt a light pat on my back and turned around to smile at Peter. “Thanks for coming.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he replied, a nice attempt at enthusiasm. I felt like giving Jubilee a quick kick to the shin for breaking the poor guy’s heart, but I figured I had no room to judge. However callous she’d been to Peter, it was nothing compared to how I’d been to Logan.
From the kitchen, Keller called, “Rogue, first mixed drink of the night. What’ll it be?”
“Um, rum and Coke. No, Sprite and vodka.”
“Both it is,” Keller replied.
“Bring ’em on. I can drink faster than you can pour,” I challenged.
I had a nice buzz going before we’d even finished pizza. Thanks to Logan’s healing factor I really had to make an effort to get shit-faced, so I kept downing whatever Keller handed me and remained gleefully tipsy as we went from my apartment to the first bar to the next and so on. For once, I allowed myself to act less than my age. It felt good. Too good, because I opened my mouth and started talking.
First to Jubilee in the ladies room. She was updating me on the Peter and Keller situation while we took turns peeing in the stall. “So, you know, we’ve been doing the partner-switching thing for this side of forever, right? And now Peter chooses to get all clingy about it? Nuh-uh. We had a good thing going, and he screwed it up. But you want to know the really fucked up thing?” she asked, pulling up her thong.
“I should wear thongs,” I said, head lolled against the decidedly unhygienic door.
“Peter only wants to a commitment out of me because Kitty and Bobby are getting engaged, and he’s full-on in denial-love with dear little Kit-Kat – who, not to be gross, but, seriously, he would break in half.”
I chose not to dwell on the imagery. “Bobby and Kitty are engaged?”
She shooed me out of the stall door and I pushed my way to the crowded sinks with my uncovered hands well above my head.
“Nearly,” Jubilee replied, pumping out soap. “She’s picking out rings, he’s trying to pretend that he’s not outrageously psyched to be Mr. Susie Homemaker. Boring! Myself, I don’t want comfortable. I want all-consuming passion, even if I have to love ’em and leave ’em.”
“Preach it, sister,” a girl with hair the color of my bangs testified.
“Woo to third-wave feminism and all,” I said, scrubbing my hands harder than was necessary, “But I, if you remember, have a condition.”
“What you have is baggage,” was Jubilee’s snorted reply. “I bet you had abstinence-only education down there in Mississippi, and I further bet that you were one out of maybe fifteen people in the entire United States that it actually worked on. Your first kiss was, what, when you were sixteen?”
“Almost seventeen, and that turned out real well,” I drawled, drying my hands on the seat of my jeans since the contents of the paper towel dispenser was currently trampled under a never-ending swarm of stiletto heels.
“Exactly, chica. I mean, fuck’s sake, you’ve clearly got issues with your sexuality.”
I jammed my hands into my gloves significantly.
“I call bullshit. You could have sex if you wanted and you damn sure could invest in some quality stress-releasers. But you’re so hooked on this fantasy, this myth that sex is something more than people rubbing against each other with varying amounts of affection to varying degrees of satisfaction.”
Not anymore. The myth was dead. Stone-faced, I blurted, “When I had sex with Logan my eyes were closed the whole time, and I didn’t even realize it.”
Strangely enough, Jubilee’s reaction mirrored my own. She burst out laughing. Slammed her hand against the wall. Howled. Then sobered up enough to take me by the shoulders and give me a good shake. “Oh, Rogue. That is beyond a shadow of a doubt the absolute saddest thing I have ever heard.”
About the long and the short of it. Happy birthday to me. “I need more to drink.”
Jubilee followed me closely out the door, patting my back sympathetically.
She put Keller on cheer-up duty, which resulted in an obscene amount of shots in very few minutes. My friends from work, Ellie, Stephanie, and Kyle, wished me a forgiving hangover and dropped out about one o’clock. Keller and I ended up splitting a bottle’s worth of Jäger at the bar.
“I am a horrible person,” I announced at the end of it, my head chin cradled on both my hands.
“You? No,” Keller slurred. “You’re lovely. You’re my friend.”
“I’m a horrible friend, you don’t even know. Listen – listen to this.” I shushed him even though he wasn’t talking. “Listen. All I want to do is have sex with Logan, and all he wants to do is share feelings.”
Keller about fell off his stool. Goody that my pathetic love life was the cause for so much high comedy. When he was finally able to right himself, Keller could only shake his head. “Two years in the jungle with a couple of butcher-than-thou lesbians and even the mostly manly of men will come out the other end sans sex drive. Duly noted.”
“I don’t think it was the lesbians. I think it was me. I think I’m, like, the anti-aphrodisiac. I’m the person – you know when you’re supposed to think of someone hideous, like Margaret Thatcher in a string bikini – that’s me. I’m the killer of erections. Men, guard your penises.”
“Objection,” he said, hitting his fist like a gavel. “You’re swinging ass and titties. I’ll have sex with you right here. Right now. Bye-bye V-Card.”
“I’m not a virgin. I had sex with Logan once already and, apparently, it sucked for him.”
“Get the fuck out of town. How did I not know that? When was it?”
“Years ago.”
“Mm, Wolverine’s a cradle robber.”
“The cradle wasn’t particularly well-guarded in this case.”
“So more like he was rocking the cradle of love?”
I would’ve rolled my eyes, but I was feeling too dizzy. “Thank you, Billy Idol.”
“Tell me one thing. Was it a gentle rocking, or are we talking shaken baby syndrome?”
I tried to smack him but was stopped by his telekinesis.
“Easy, Birdie. Violence.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’m just saying. There’s a delicate moral balance here.”
“Don’t lecture me about morality, you slut.”
“Says the lady of easy virtue.”
I considered that longer and harder than Keller could’ve have intended. Easy virtue, indeed. Not in the sexual sense. I knew virginity was no indicator of goodness. Rather, what I saw in myself was an fatal design flaw. When it came right down to it, wasn’t I was only as virtuous as the last person I touched? Did it really matter what I thought or who I wanted to be when I could be summarily erased at any given moment?
Slumped over the bar, I only vaguely noted Keller getting up to intervene in an argument between Jubilee and Peter. Bobby acted as mediator between the boys, while Kitty guided a green-looking Jubilee to the bathroom.
Fucked up beyond all repair, every last one of us. And the funny thing was, we were supposed to have better and more important things on our minds. We were supposed to be goddamn superheroes.
Grimly, I tossed back another Jägerbomb as a toast to the sanity-decimating powers of the love triangle. How the hell had we all gotten caught up in them? From day one it there was unspoken tension between Bobby, me, and John, a kid’s table parallel of Scott, Jean, and Logan. Now that Peter-Jubilee-Keller was coming to a head, and you could just bet that Bobby-Kitty-Peter would be next.
I was in a triangle right now. Logan, me, and false expectations.
Overwhelmingly tired in spite of the Red Bull, I pulled out my phone. I was thinking about a warm taxi driving me to my warm bed, but, predictably, I pressed 1 on my contacts and wondered if Logan bothered to keep his old emergency cell phone on him.
He answered on the second ring, sounding like I’d jerked him out of sleep. “You all right, kid?”
“Yeah, sorry. I just – ” After two years, it was a kind of miracle to actually be able to get into touch with him so easily. I found I couldn’t articulate myself. “Don’t worry, this is not a rescue situation.”
“But you need something?” There was a hopeful note to Logan’s voice that I grasped onto.
“If you don’t mind. I need – I need to talk.”
There was a long silence. Then, “Where?”
Tears of relief sprang to my eyes. “It can wait until tomorrow. I wanted to make sure, you know, you were still willing.”
“Anything you need. You should know that.”
I had to laugh a little as I hid my face in my palm. “I really don’t know why you bother,” I replied, asking for forgiveness through humility. “I’m a hot mess with delusions of mental stability.”
“Good thing I know a something about that,” he said.
Logan had been back for less than twenty-four hours and that was the second voluntary comparison he’d made between us. I could make others. Isolated. Self-consumed. Aged by forgotten and false histories.
I was suddenly struck by the idea that, from the beginning, we were strangers who loved each other better than ourselves for no other reason than recognition. We’d exchanged sidelong glances and known, instantly, who the other was because we were the same. Mutants with no place to call home and no one to miss us when we were gone.
People and powers and politics had complicated us, but that foundation was still there. Our belief in it was mutual and unshakable.
“Kid?”
I broke out into a smile. “I was just remembering why I love you so much. I’ll be home soon,” I added, before he had time to respond. “Goodnight, Logan.”
“See you tomorrow.” And then, somehow better than “I love you,” he said, “Marie.”