After dinner Rogue, Kitty, and Jubilee headed upstairs to their room to get ready for their night out. Rogue saw Logan approaching her out of the corner of her eye as they got up to leave, but she pretended that she didn't and kept pace with her friends. She really didn't want to discuss her dismissal of him earlier, even though he had deserved that and worse for being such an insensitive ass.
Jubilee and Kitty pushed Rogue into the shower first since, according to them, she had the longest hair so would take longest to get ready. Rogue laughed at their brand of logic but went willingly into the bathroom. In consideration of the fact that her friends needed to get in and out, too, Rogue quickly shampooed and conditioned her hair. She took a little more time washing her body, using the soap to shave so that her legs would be silky smooth, but she kept her shower to a record time of fifteen minutes. Rogue wrapped one towel around her body, another around her hair, and stepped out into the bedroom. Kitty, with the next-longest hair and thus the obvious choice for second, hurried in past her with a smile. The girls had taken to keeping all of their various post-shower products in the bedroom to make getting ready in the morning faster, so Rogue went over to the small vanity beside her bed and pulled out her favorite body lotion. It smelled like the honeysuckle she remembered growing in her mother's garden, a scent she'd often thought of as intoxicating once she was old enough to know what that word meant.
Slathering lotion onto her legs with a look of deep concentration, Rogue managed to avoid Jubilee's eyes. Since Jubes was rocking out to her iPod, she didn't notice. The quiet of the room gave Rogue the opportunity to think while she put on the underwear and bra she had laid out then sat down to brush her wet hair out.
It was probably pretty stupid to keep hoping for Logan to realize that she was eighteen now, graduated from high school (or at least, as of Monday she would be), and more than capable of making adult decisions. It might even make her pathetic. Rogue hated to think of herself as pathetic. After all, hadn't she managed to make her way all the way from Mississippi to Canada by herself? A pathetic person shouldn't have been able to do that. Her lessons with the Professor hadn't always been about controlling her powers; he had guided her in learning more about herself, about what she wanted out of life, who she wanted to be, in the hopes that centering herself mentally would create the kind of balance necessary to attain her goal of control. So Rogue knew that she wanted to be, and could be, strong. She knew that she was stubborn and could accomplish almost anything she wanted to do with enough determination.
The question she asked herself as she dried her long hair was whether what she wanted was to experience life without Logan or to wait around until he realized that she would kill for the chance to experience life with him. While the first option was scary, the second hadn't been working very well during the few visits he had made to the school since the Statue of Liberty incident or the past month since he agreed to become an instructor there. So she could embrace life and every chance it offered her, or pine away for a man who might, one day, figure out that she existed as a woman, not a child anymore. When she thought about it in those blunt terms, Rogue knew what she was going to do.
Application of make-up became something like war-paint, declaring her intentions through deep red lipstick and smoky eyeshadow. Kitty finished her shower in time to arrange Rogue's hair in a sexy up-do, with little curls trailing along her shoulders here or there and sparkling cubic zirconium-tipped pins holding it up and adding flash. Another flashy element was the necklace that she helped Rogue fasten, dripping with more cubic zirconium from her collarbone to her cleavage. Matching earrings were the last element to add to the above-neck portion of her.
Rogue paused in her dressing long enough to help Kitty with her hair, a classy French twist with pearl-tipped pins. Then it was time to put on the dress she had chosen for the night. Riding high on her thighs, dipping low in the front and suspended only by spaghetti straps, the sexy red dress was the most daring thing in her closet. She had never tried to wear it anywhere because it would have been too difficult to cover up every bit of skin it left exposed, but now it was just right. Slipping into the dress felt like heaven, but it also made her aware that she barely had any clothing on at all. The thought made her head spin, but in a happy way. She slid her feet into the strappy gold stilettos she had chosen to go with the dress and grinned at her reflection in the mirror hanging on her closet door. Fire with the red dress, gold, and ice from the jewelry. A very nice combination if she did say so herself. Jubilee came dancing out of the bathroom at that point in nothing but a towel, and she stopped dead when she saw Rogue.
“Damn, Roguey, don't you want to leave any guys for the rest of us?” she asked with a mock pout, her eyes gleaming as she took in her friend's very hot image.
Rogue laughed. “I'll leave a few for you, Jubes,” she told her.
Since Jubilee, with her spiky black hair, was able to get ready on her own, Rogue took the opportunity to slip out of the bedroom to find somewhere quiet to do a little more thinking now that Kitty and Jubilee were jabbering away about their plans. Normally she'd be right there with them, but she really needed a few moments to herself, and she didn't think her friends would see anything odd about it. After all, she'd had a momentous event happen today, and everyone needed a little time to adjust to something like that.
Rogue made her way downstairs without meeting any students or teachers, something that she would have considered amazing if she had been thinking about it. The garden and solitude were calling to her, however, if only for a few moments. She opened the French doors and stepped out onto the terrace, the lingering summer heat caressing her skin. Her eyes found the pink and gold sunset, and she drank in its beauty and the tranquility of the moment as she moved to the stone railing surrounding the large paved area.
Her mind seemed bent on examining the problem of Logan, so she let it have its way for a few minutes. She couldn't help but wonder how he would react to her taking control of her life this way, finding ways to experience life to the fullest. Especially ways that didn't involve him, since he seemed to want that. She'd never bothered with boyfriends at the school because they seemed too much like brothers, and any other young men in town were more likely to be humans than mutants. Trying a relationship with one of them before she had full control would have made her as good as a murderer. They would never have known to be careful with her skin the way a mutant would have. So Logan had never had the opportunity to see her in a relationship with any man that wasn't brotherly, and he had never thought of himself as qualifying as more than that, either. Rogue sensed that the outcome to her new desire to grab life in both hands and ride every wild turn might turn dangerous, if not to her then to others, but this was more a feeling than anything resembling a coherent thought, so she was able to dismiss it fairly easily.
As for how she planned to get the experiences she craved, well, she didn't really have a plan. However, she knew that Jubilee was probably the best guide a woman bent on having a good time could have, so she would just follow her lead. She knew she stood in no real danger from the path to experience thanks to her secret defense—her skin. So she wanted to latch onto enjoyment and just let it carry her away. Was that so very bad, anyway?
“Rogue!” she heard Jubilee call from inside the mansion. Her eyes lit with anticipation, and with a smile for what she expected to gain from the night she turned and went back inside where her friends were waiting for her at the door to the garage, the little gold and black clutch she'd picked earlier held out to her by Kitty. They made a great-looking group, Rogue in her red dress, Kitty in a black slinky number glittering with silver threads shot throughout, silver stilettos, and silver and pearl jewelry, and Jubilee sporting a tight yellow leather tank top and skirt ensemble with chunky black jewelry and black platform heel to make up for her lack of height. They were ready to party! The girls piled into the little black Jag that had been Kitty's eighteenth birthday present from her parents and drove away, ready and willing to see what the night would bring.
Rogue never saw the shadow that watched her as she stood on the terrace, too far away for her to smell the cigar smoke curling above his head. She never saw the glow of that same cigar as he watched the Jag disappear through the gates. His soft curse unheard, Logan headed for the garage himself, hopped onto his bike—courtesy of the Professor so that he wouldn't keep stealing Scott's—and with a roar of the engine pealed out of the gates and in the same direction as the Jag.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Rogue decides that if Logan wants someone else, she'll just have to see if that's what she needs, too.
Chapter End Notes:
Now, if you're expecting the next chapter to feature Slutty-Rogue-in-a-Club...well, you're probably right. I'm trying to give her reasons to be slutty, but really, at this point it's all just fun to me.