When he went to find Rogue the next day, she was in the library stacks again, only this time she wasn’t alone. After checking to see that the coast was clear, he slipped unseen into the aisle next to hers, quietly creeping along until he reached the section where she stood talking quietly to one of her classmates.

He saw her gloved fingers moving over the tops of the books, absently searching for the right one even as her attention was directed elsewhere. Every so often, she would tilt a book toward her, decide it was the wrong one, and then slide it back into place, whispering all the while in hushed conversation.

He continued to inch along the bookshelf, following her until she finally settled on a thick textbook with a green hardcover. Just as she was about to pull the book, he reached through the space between the shelves and yanked it over to his side, letting it drop to his feet with a loud flap. Before she could figure out what was happening, he grabbed her hand in his and pulled it through the empty space.

She gasped and looked over quickly, her eyes meeting his through the books. He watched as several emotions flickered across her gaze, all within a matter of milliseconds. Surprise. Confusion. Relief? Then, finally, annoyance when she tried to snatch her hand back and he wouldn’t let her.

“Are you okay?” he heard her friend whisper to her.

“Um…yeah,” Rogue said, turning back to her conversation. “I just dropped a book back here somewhere.”

She tried to pull away again, but he grasped her wrist with his other hand, holding her in place. He saw her reach for another book with her other hand, tilting it forward in front of her in an apparent attempt to keep her friend from seeing what was going on.

Logan listened as she tried to casually continue her conversation. Slowly, he began to massage her wrist, rubbing intently through the satin until he felt her relax a bit, stop fighting him. He pulled her arm closer to him and pressed his thumbs into the fleshy base of her palm, kneading there until her fingers loosened up around his.

He heard her breath catch in her throat as she tried to concentrate on what she was saying. He continued to work his thumbs into her palm, squeezing small, slow circles, molding the flesh in his hands. When he got to her fingers, he began to massage them one by one, pulling them slowly and deliberately between his thumb and forefinger from base to tip.

She was barely holding on to her conversation at this point, repeating things she’d said only moments before and searching for words that should have been easy to find.

Moving back down to her palm, Logan began to trace slow, lazy shapes into it with his thumb. A teardrop. A figure eight. A spiral. She’d surrendered her arm completely to him now, the once tense flesh now soft, pliant, and yielding. Her breathing was scattered, and Logan could all but feel the quickly rising heat of her body through the books separating them.

He pulled her hand up to his mouth and traced her fingertips over his lips, breathing against them until she could feel the heat of him through the thin fabric of her gloves. She let out a slight sigh, and through the books, Logan saw her eyelids flutter slightly as she fought to keep her focus.

There. Right there. The problem wasn’t that she didn’t want him to touch her. The problem was that she did. Too much. And that scared her.

He waited while Rogue finished her conversation and said goodbye to her friend. Now alone in the aisle, she met his eyes silently, and he released her hand so he could walk over to meet her on the other side. He came to stand before her, hands shoved in his pockets. She looked like she wanted to say something but didn’t know where to start. It was Logan who broke the silence.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said. “If I hurt you.”

“Me too,” she said, breathing out a sigh of relief. “When I didn’t see you last night at dinner, I thought you --…I thought…”

“I heal.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” she said with a nervous smile.

“So what the hell happened, anyway? I mean, when we…?”

“Well…it’s kinda hard to explain, really,” Rogue said, looking down at her gloves. “The professor’s not really sure how it all works, but so far what we know is that when I touch someone, I absorb their ‘life energy’, or something like that. I get their muta-…their gifts, along with thoughts and memories.”

“Memories? No shit.” Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

“So…” Logan tried to look unaffected as he brought a hand up to rest against the bookshelf. “When I touched you, what did you…?”

“Oh, nothing!” she said quickly. Then at his obviously confused expression, “The professor’s been teaching me to put other people’s thoughts and memories into a kind of mental lock box. It keeps me from having to live with other peoples thoughts clouding up my brain all the time.”

Well I’ll be damned, Logan thought to himself. Turns out the old man is good for somethin’ after all.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured him. “I don’t want to know about your personal thoughts any more than you want me to.”

He breathed an internal sigh of relief. “So you didn’t see anything.”

“No,” she said. A slow blush started to creep over her features. “I mean…I caught a few surface thoughts, sensations and such. I know about your…’gifts’. And I know about the…the, uh…”

“These?” He slid his claws slowly out from the hand he had up against the book stack.

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes flickering over to the adamantium blades extending from between his knuckles. “Those…”

Logan studied her as she assessed his claws, not a goddamn ounce of fear in her gaze or in her scent. In fact, if he was seeing things right, there was almost even a glint of fascination in those curious brown eyes of hers. And Christ if that didn’t get him hard right there and then.

“So that’s why you won’t go out with me,” he said. “Cause of your skin.”

“Well, it’s kind of a major issue,” she said, eyes dropping to her gloved hands.

“Yeah?” He reached forward with his free hand and took the scarf she wore around her neck between his fingers. He drew the feather-light material across her mouth and swept his thumb over her lips. “Says who?”

She breathed a warm sigh against his finger, and her head tilted back to rest against the bookshelf, eyelids fluttering closed. Logan continued to caress her mouth through the thin fabric for a few moments, letting her enjoy the sensation a bit.

Her eyes opened again to meet his, a look of drunken pleasure in her gaze. She seemed to come back to her senses a bit as her eyes darted to his claws, which he was slowly sheathing again.

“Does it hurt?” she asked, concern suddenly filling her voice. “I mean, when you…?”

He stepped forward until he had his body pressed up right against hers. Thumbing her lip again, he leaned down until his mouth brushed against her ear through the fall of hair protecting it.

“Only the first couple of inches,” he said softly. “After that, I’m told it feels really, really good.”

He heard her swallow as he pulled back to look into her eyes.

“Lemme take you out tomorrow night,” he said.

“I…can’t. I have a –"

“No you don’t.” He smirked, watching her mentally scramble for another way out before ultimately giving up. “Pick a movie. I’ll meet you outside at seven.”

Logan pushed himself up from the bookshelf and turned to leave.

“I didn’t say yes,” she muttered under her breath as he walked away.

“You will,” Logan called over his shoulder to her. He smiled to himself as he left her standing in the stacks.