It was the first day of the fall semester, and Marie rolled, with trepidation, out of what felt like the wrong side of the bed. She’d slept with her arms over her head, embracing her pillow as if it contained all her knowledge and competence, and it might sneak away in the dark of the night.
The pillow was still there when she woke, though squashed into impossible bumps and bulges. Her protective arms—and hands—were asleep. They buzzed with what felt like ten thousand ants apiece, and she could barely control her fingers.
She stood in front of the window doing circles with her arms, then flapped them like some ungainly bird. It was a gray, sticky day beyond the curtains of her bedroom.
Logan would be invading her classroom today, laying siege to her nerves and hormones. She pictured him approaching the Fine Arts Building stealthily in a longboat, a horned cap, fierce brown eyes, and leather weskit.
Marie blinked at her fanciful imagination and wanted to smack herself. She stumbled blearily into the bathroom, snatched her toothbrush from the ceramic cup where she kept it, and squeezed toothpaste onto the bristles. She spied a robin in the branches of the pear tree outside her window, and his tiny beak, bright eyes, and quick movements reminded her of Miss Amelia.
Marie stuck the toothbrush into her mouth. A bitter, nasty chemical flavor spread across her tongue. Blek! It most definitely was not toothpaste she’d spread on her brush.
She gagged, spit into the sink, and pawed water into her mouth with both hands, dropping the brush into the basin. Eeeuuwwwww—nasty. She recognized the smell as hair gel.
Logan had her brushing her teeth with hair gel, curse him, and class hadn’t even begun. This didn’t bode well for the coming week—not to mention the rest of the semester.
She climbed into the shower with a scowl, soaped her silly self, and shampooed her hair. Whilst she waited the couple of minutes required for her conditioner to soak in, she let the hot water drum over her shoulders and neck, welcoming the rhythm and pressure. Ignoring the rest of her body, which made her uncomfortable, she looked down the length of her legs and noticed that her toenails were scraggly and wore only half of the polish she’d applied a couple of weeks ago.
It was going to be too hot for closed shoes, so she’d have to do something about it. For some unknown reason, the idea of facing Logan with scruffy toes was intolerable.
Marie emerged from the shower, wrapped her hair in a towel, and stuck one foot up on the side of the tub. She’d painted three toes with Persimmon Pleasure when the phone rang. Trying not to growl, she hopped to her bedside table and answered it.
“Hello my young progeny.”
She smiled in spite of the inconvenience. “Hi, Daddy. How are you?”
“I am in superior health this fine morning, thank you. But that is not why I called. I simply wanted to wish you luck with the upcoming semester.”
Her father was the most considerate man she’d ever known. “Thanks, Daddy.” You have no idea how badly I need that luck. “I hope you have a good group of students yourself.” He’d taught biophysics at Boston University for as long as she could remember.
“Yes, as do I. I was quite fortunate enough to have such marvelous classes last spring.” He paused, but stayed on the phone. She could hear him stirring sugar into his coffee. “Yes, well, I presume you must be expedite if you wish to attend your classes in a prompt fashion.”
Marie could tell he was lonely, but as usual, he had a hard time discussing anything which didn’t pertain to work. “Oh, no,” she lied. “I have plenty of time.” She didn’t tell him that she was shivering under the vent in her bedroom. Always uncomfortable in the buff, she foraged for underwear and a big T-shirt. She felt odd without panties… vulnerable, exposed, almost dirty.
“Ah. Well, I, okay then,” he rumbled. And then stalled once more.
“Daddy? What’s on your mind?”
“Er, you see... rather do you, uhm…” she heard him gulp down some coffee.
“Just say it.”
“There’s a new assistant in the department.”
“Okay,” Marie said, puzzled. “Is this a problem? Is she a bad typist? Can she not spell?”
“No,” replied her father. “That isn’t quite it.”
She waited.
“She’s grammatically irreproachable…”
“Do you need to speak to her about something in particular?” When he didn’t answer, Marie waited some more, utterly in the dark.
“She has the most exquisite legs.”
“Exquisite legs,” Marie repeated, stunned .”Oh. I see. Daddy, are you trying to tell me you’re dating somebody? Because that’s… wonderful.” She’d better be nice. If she hurts him, I’ll kill her. “Do I get to meet her?”
“Why yes, of course. Of course you shall. Soon.”
“Okay. I… look forward to that. Thanks for telling me. And good for you, Daddy.” Marie hung up the phone, bemused.
Daddy, after all these years of solitude, was poking his head out of his shell of a lab to risk dating again? It was so out of character for a man who’d destroyed or hidden away every last picture of her mother and told Marie silly stories about how he’d had to lasso the stork that brought her to him.
She sat down on her bed, pulling the covers around her. How old had she been? Five? Six? One Christmas years ago, full of hot, cinnamon spiced apple cider, and candy canes and truth. She’d learned the words to “Oh, Tannenbaum” in German, the significance of mistletoe, and the meaning of shame.
Aunt Moira and Aunt Irene, believing her asleep had discussed a mysterious packet that she’d seen arrive in the mail. The envelope displayed a foreign return address, strange stamps, and unfamiliar handwriting. It upset everyone in the household, her father most of all. He’d left the house to walk alone in the darkness, and no one would tell her what was going on. The evil packet disappeared.
“Shameless hussy!” Aunt Moira spat. “How could she?”
They’d showered Marie with hugs and kisses and cookies, as if somebody had died, and tucked her into bed with not one but two bedtime stories.
She lay awake in bed and worried about Daddy, trudging around in the dark and snow, while her aunts hissed and squawked downstairs in the kitchen. If no one would tell her what was going on, she’d have to find out herself.
She slid out of bed and tiptoed to the top of the stairs, where she sat, drawing her knees up and pulling her nightgown over them. She then tucked it under her cold toes and cocked her head.
Her aunts’ voices were audible from the kitchen, just around the corner.
“I knew no good would come of it,” Irene declared.
“She was bad news from the start,” said Moira. “Shaking her bosom, twitching those hips, flipping that hippie hair around. She thought she was something special, all right.”
“So did Henry. He’d never seen anything like her before, poor boy.”
Henry was Daddy, Marie knew that. But who was the shameless hussy?
“She sucked the life out of him and moved on, leaving him like some poor dead insect in her web.” Aunt Moira slammed something—a mug?--- onto the table.
“Women like that should be sterilized,” Aunt Irene snapped. “How could she leave him with a two-year-old? How could she leave her own child?”
Marie hugged her knees to her chin. The shameless hussy was her mother? A chill shot through her, and her stomach rolled. She wasn’t even sure what a hussy was, but it had to be bad, from the sound of things.
“And now,” continued Aunt Moira, “she has the unmitigated gall to send pictures after all these years. Pictures of herself and that German Lover of hers. As if we’d show our poor darling…”
Marie hadn’t found the packet for years afterward, but she’d disentangled her knees from her nightgown that evening and gone upstairs immediately to look up the word ‘hussy’ in her father’s dictionary. ‘A lewd or brazen woman,’ it told her. ‘Lewd’ proved to mean evil or wicked, but the first entry for ‘brazen’ simply meant ‘made of brass’.
So her mother was a shameless evil woman made of brass… the discovery confused her. Did that mean she, Marie, was shameless and evil, too? If she tried really, really hard to be good instead, would it work?
Since Santa didn’t put coal in her stocking that year, her efforts must have meant something and she’d try even harder next year…
Marie pulled herself out of the past and shrieked as she looked at the clock. She’d forgotten that she needed to run off the course syllabus before class.
She pulled off the T-shit and twined a braw around her torso, trying to fasten it and apply deodorant at the same time. She dived into linen slacks and a top, shoved her feet into sandals, and grabbed a short sleeved jacket.
Next she ran into the bathroom, ripped the towel off her head, and aimed the hair dryer, full blast, at her head for a couple of minutes. Then she twisted the mass of her hair into a knot and secured it with a pair of Japanese hair-sticks.
A quick slash of lipstick completed her toilette, and she ran down the hallway to her office to gather the papers and notes she’d need for today. Stuffing these into her nylon satchel, she leapt down the stairs and out the door, only to rush back in again when she realized she’d forgotten her keys.
Then she burned rubber to the college and the art building, squealing the Jeep into a parking place that she suspected wasn’t entirely legal.
She dashed into the department office and pulled the syllabus from her bag, eying the copy machine warily. It was her nemesis. If something could go wrong with it while under her hands, it would.
“Nice copier,” Marie said, patting the dirty beige plastic lid. “Good boy.” It loomed, menacing, in its corner, and certainly didn’t wag its power cord. Well, what did she expect?
She flipped open the lid and placed the first page of the syllabus inside, not trusting the machine enough to load it from the top and let it collate for her. She set her teeth and pushed ‘start’.
Amazing! The technology gods were with her, and the thing began to slide, flash, and whir. She closed the lid thankfully. Twenty copies emerged obediently into the output slot.
She opened the lid and exchanged the first page for the second page of her syllabus, programmed the machine for a second twenty copies, and pressed ‘start’ once again. One, two, three… Marie looked at her watch, just as the copier emitted a thwack and a groan. No!.
The ting glowed evilly at her, igniting the ‘paper jam’ button. No, no, no!
She opened it and managed to tear out a piece of paper stuck in its hidden roller. She closed it. She pressed the ‘start’ button again.
Whirr, kathunk, kathunk. It reset itself and spit out all of two more pages before thwacking and groaning again. This time, she swore she heard fiendish laughter emanating from its bowels.
“You piece of---“ she opened it again, wondering savagely why the department secretary wasn’t there. Kitty would know what to do. Kitty and technology had no problems, since Kitty lived in the twenty-first century, unlike Marie.
She ripped out the jammed paper once again, and slammed the machine closed. This time, three copies emerged before the diabolical thing spattered and died.
Marie took a long, slow breath and counted to three. Her gaze fastened on the fire extinguisher to the left of the copier. She had a vision of seizing it and beating the Xerox machine into shards of plastic wreckage. But if she did that, then she’d not only have to explain to her class—and Logan—why she was late, but also why her next lecture would be videotaped from a psycho ward.
She began again, and only had to unjam the machine six more times before she had all twenty copies. Kitty tripped in blithely as Marie removed the last two.
“Good morning!” she trilled. “Oh, sorry I wasn’t here to run those for you.
“Not a problem,” Marie said, trying to wipe the serial killer expression off her face. The machine’s hiccups really weren’t Kitty’s fault. And she should have run the copies on her printer the previous day… “Got to fly! Late!”
She waved good-bye to Kitty as she dodged into the hallway.
Run, run, run! She popped frenetically in and out of the slide library, grabbing the slide carousels she’d need for her lecture. Then it was run, run, run again to her seminar room.
She blew in two minutes late, puffing like a first-day freshman, and painted what was surely an insane grin on her face. Fourteen junior and senior women stared at her, analyzing her inch by inch while she unloaded her materials and caught her breath.
Logan was nowhere to be seen. Marie didn’t know whether to be relieved or irritated. Mostly she was just on edge. What was wrong with her? She was normally prepared to a fault, but just the thought of Logan in her classroom had her completely askew. She needed to get her act together, now, before walking on stage.
After her bout with the copier, she eyed the slide projectors even more warily than usual. She knew her carousels were in order, and that she’d put in each slide correctly. But that didn’t mean that the projectors were easy to position, or that a bulb wouldn’t burn out mid-lecture, or that some mechanism wouldn’t malfunction, popping a slide in the air like a tiny pictorial piece of toast.
She pulled down the large screen in the front of the seminar room, then walked back to fiddle with the projectors to get them elevated to the right height and positioned at the correct distance and focus.
She’d clicked the first sequence of slides into place and was making minor adjustments when a hulking shadow appeared across the screen, blocking the light. The twin barrels suddenly illuminated Logan’s fab abs, the best of his chest, and his impeccable pecs.
A collective, appreciative murmur rippled through the ranks of young women, and Marie groaned silently.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Back to school. Logan had never felt more ridiculous in his life. He shielded his eyes from the projector lights and made his way beyond them, looking for a seat. Christ Almighty, was he going to have to sit in one of those tiny chairs with the miniscule writing desks attached?
Appalled, he searched the room for any other viable option, and found none. A pert brunette scrambled to pull her backpack off the seat next to hers and all but leered at him.
Reluctantly, he walked to the seat and nodded at her briefly before squeezing into it. The freaking thing was like a medieval torture device: far too low and narrow, so that it was impossible for him to bend his knees and sit comfortably. Instead, he had to extend his legs straight out ahead of him, his feet straddling another student’s seat.
The back of the chair hit him at an agonizing place along his spine, so that he had to straighten and arch to avoid it, throwing out his chest like an angry ape. No way in hell was he going to sit in one of these things all semester. He’d be lucky to make it through the next hour.
Marie walked to the light switch and illuminated the room—and the barely disguised lust of his fellow classmates. Every single one of them seemed to be eyeing him covertly or overtly, and it took a superhuman effort on his part not to blush.
He sighed in relief as he spotted one girl with a crew cut and a silver ring through her nose, glaring at him with open hostility. Hatred was preferable to salacious stud fantasies. He smiled and nodded at her. Her brows drew together, and she looked as if she’d gladly put his most precious part through a salad shooter.
“Good morning, everyone,” said Marie in that southern voice of hers. “I’m Dr. Marie D’Ancanto, and this is History of Art 367, Charles Xavier and the American Scene. Is everyone in the right place?”
No, thought Logan. I’m in an alternate universe.
She looked at him severely, as if he’d said the words aloud.
He met her eyes with a bland stare, then let his gaze run over the rest of her. She’d covered up her legs entirely today, to his regret. He had to fill those in from memory: svelte, creamy, and shapely. Trim, tailored ankles, disciplined long, supple calves, and those knees. Suffice it to say that those knees had been made to be nudged apart.
He’d better stop there, he thought, trying without much luck to x-ray through her pale linen slacks. So he began again at her neck, where he detected an uneasy flush, and found himself speculating about her breasts. They’d been far too well disguised the other times he’d met her, but he had a feeling they were small, high, and proud under that sexless little jacket.
Her waist nipped in so neatly, and he found himself approaching that forbidden zone again and had to distract himself.
Up, eyes, up! Up to that gorgeous knot of chocolate hair. The flush at her neck rose until her face was bright pink, and the brown eyes she narrowed at him were deliciously stormy.
Marie broke eye contact with him, and he realized he’d been giving her quite the randy once-over. She strode to a corner of the room and retrieved a long wooden pointer, which she held like a weapon now in front of her. Oh, spank me! Logan thought, and grinned.
His grin triggered a new expression on her face: her nostrils flared, and she pursed her mouth in insult.
Aw, don’t do that, Professor. Let those pretty lips spread wide, now. Show us those lovely, even teeth, and the mysterious depths of your mouth…
He knew he was making her uncomfortable and didn’t much care.
Play a double game with my grandmother, will you, darlin’? Then you’ll deal with me on the offensive line.
Her hands tightened on the pointer and went white-knuckled. Maybe she’d raise it aloft like a spear and skewer him right here in her classroom. Hey, now there was a nice new image. Marie, clad only in a scrap of animal skin, and maybe some green paint, running after him with a spear.
Her voice interrupted this pleasing fantasy. “We’ll go through the attendance sheet, and then we’ll start with an overview of the work of Charles Xavier, whose paintings and prints are a fascinating study of American city life before and after World War II. We’ll look at how his work changes over the years, and analyze why.”
Marie’s voice was smooth, professional, and calm. But her fierce grip on the pointer, that telltale flush, and other signals belied her crisp enunciation. He noticed when she turned her head that her hair was still damp. She wore no eye makeup, and her lipstick was slightly askew. She’d gotten ready in a hurry this morning.
“We’re very… lucky… to be joined by Charles Xavier’s grandson this semester,” she said.
Logan felt sixteen pairs of female eyes upon him and resisted the urge to squirm. Instead he pulled his mouth into a grin and continued to take inventory of Marie.
His gaze swept down to her toes, clad in brown sandals. His grin widened: only three toes on her left foot sported polish. The remaining seven were bare.
Her glance followed his, and he choked back laughter as the flush at her neck rose again up her cheeks to suffuse her whole face. It remained as she finished calling the role. “…Jennifer Schmidt, Tanya Ullman, and Deidre Weinberg.”
She put down her pencil and the class roster, took a deep breath, and eyed the slide projectors warily, as if they were raptors escaped from Jurassic Park. Then his professor turned off the lights and flashed two images on a wide white screen.
Logan looked up at them and froze. On the left side, his grandfather’s wrinkled face stared out at him from under a beetled brow. On the right side was the old Victorian house in which Miss Amelia still lived.
His throat closed, and he was unable to breathe for several seconds. It was one thing to remember the old man’s face, and another to be confronted with a two-foot-by-three-foot mug shot. Six square feet of unforgiving judgment. Six square feet of hard-bitten reproach. Six square feet that were six feet under, yet jarred him with the force of a blow.
Meanwhile, the mellow Victorian, once a childhood haven, mocked him on the right. The sight of its cheerful gingerbread trim caused bile to rise in his throat.
Logan knew the urge to bolt, to throw his ridiculous chair right through the screen and smash the twin projectors to the floor.
He did none of those things. Instead he turned and narrowed his eyes at Marie, who returned his gaze evenly. Without a word, and in the space of perhaps five minutes, they’d gone a silent round in the ring. And the damnedest thing was that though he’d had her breathless against the ropes, off-balance, and on the defensive, she’d won with a single gesture.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Author's Chapter Notes:
Okay, so now Logan's officially a student. Which means I get to start having fun with him. As will be seen in the coming chapters.