Reminisce: Chapter Nine
BACK THEN
If it weren’t for the gloves, Marie might have had some explaining to do--they kept her from answering questions and leaving red fingerprints everywhere she went. From the tip to the knuckle of every finger little gashes bled and closed and reopened all day long. For weeks now, her hands looked as though they’d been the favorite nightly dish of every rat the X-mansion pretended not to have. Nobody noticed.
Of course, Marie could have worn her gloves in the first place to save herself from explanations and cuts both, but she didn’t. Gathering the bottles from the mansion’s recycling bin, she smashed them with the rolling pin and then combed through the shards. Each maybe-right piece was held to the light--sunlight, fluorescent, flashlight, a practice she’d found pretentious at first and then too necessary to be embarrassed over. She fit the edges against each other, wove them around the strips of metal someone in the shop class had sliced for her, planting both in viscous layers of paint and polymer clay. She felt like a witch engaged in some elaborate ritual, though never very sure what spell she was attempting to cast.
Often, she slapped paint down carelessly, just to see how it would come off the brush. She mixed colors, leaving the room with skin and clothes and hair dabbed by the new shades. Dr. Hallemeier had given her the loan of a couple of privacy screens--filched from the theater department a few years back, and let her print out so many photographs of the New York skyline that an admin called to remind them about the department budget. “I told them to go dig through the couch cushions in Coach Brant’s office,” she confided to Marie.
Sometimes, Marie would sit in the art lab looking at her work, sucking a bleeding finger and thinking about tossing it all back into the trash. And sometimes even that seemed like too much effort. This had been a delusion, not ambition. In these periods of lucidity, she’d bury herself in the homework of other classes, visit the campus gym, volunteer, always hearing the project cry like an animal abandoned by the side of the road. Thankfully, that didn’t last.
On the other end of the spectrum were the days when she was too busy to even recognize her own happiness. It seemed as if she wasn’t imagining what her piece needed, but knowing it, and her hands consulted neither sketchbook or brain. She was a marionette, something moving the brush, images constructing themselves exactly how they wanted. On other days, Dr. Hallemeier would stop by her corner to question, suggest, commiserate. But on these, she just watched, advice stifled into silent contemplation.
That afternoon, it was raining and she was not lucky enough to be unaware of the work she was putting into the painting. As was often the case for the departments not bolstered by a sports team, the heater in the art lab was on the fritz. The walls glistened and Dr. Hallemeier blew on her fingertips between phone calls to Maintenance. Marie’s classmates were cranky, every few minutes worrying aloud about what the temperature would do to their projects.
To her right, a boy named Trevor, in the middle of building something with nooses that Dr. Hallemeier had called “cause for celebration and concern” shoved aside his work and took a nap on his arms. To her left, a classmate was listening to music so loudly that the headphones he wore could only have been for decoration. She liked the country song he picked the first seven replays, but not the eighth, finding it hard to believe that anyone could care about a tractor for such an extended period of time.
By the door opened--rubber sweep squelching against the linoleum, she’d pricked her thumb four times on the same slippery piece of glass, spent five minutes mixing the wrong pigments, and dropped her palette knife into her coffee cup. She wiped it on her knee and peeked through one of the rips in the privacy screen. She thought it might be the custodian, come to empty trash bins and remind them that the sooner they left, the sooner he’d get home to see the new episode of LOST. The first clue that it wasn’t Mr. Veech (with whom they all had a strained relationship due to the spilled paint) was the lack of sarcasm in the instructor’s voice. This was followed by deeper, graveled tones. Marie drew a quick breath between her teeth and despite the cold room felt a flush of warmth through her belly--
“Oh, certainly. You’ll find her right over there.”
--followed by a lurch.
She spasmed towards the privacy screen, to her easel, to her acrylic’d forearms. Her hands fluttered over the tray of shards and then her hair. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” she mouthed. In the end, she threw her paintbrush into the coffee mug and snatched up her gloves, jerking them on despite the moist gristle of blood and grain-sized glass.
“He-ey,” she ducked around the side of the screens, moments before Logan could do the same.
He raised eyebrows at her breathlessness. “You didn’t take a car today,” he said calmly, by way of greeting. “I thought you might want a ride. With--” he shrugged a shoulder toward the streaming window, in the process dislodging droplets of rain from his own jacket.
“Oh, Ororo actually--”
“Had some stuff to do. She asked me.” Logan’s gaze dropped to his feet, but he picked it right back up. Along the way it touched the splotches of paint and coffee on her jeans, the places she had torn and restitched her sweater, the simple chain crossing her collarbone. There was nothing critical in it, just short rests his eyes took before coming back to meet hers.
“Right. Okay.”
“You seem like you’re disappointed.”
“I’m not, I’m--” the response fumbled in her throat and then dropped back into her chest, like stones in a well.
Logan let it pass. “This is nice,” he mused, turning slowly around to take in the room, the students, the art on display and in progress. She didn’t miss the curious flick towards her corner.
“It’s my favorite place,” she told him. “To work, at least.”
“Yeah? And what is it you’re working on?”
“Don’t--” She stepped in front of him. Her hands went to his chest. Under his denim shirt, there was a warm edge of muscle and his pumping heart. She could smell his breath, not unpleasant, and see the individual hairs along his jaw. She must have surprised both of them, because Logan’s eyes were wide and he seemed now the one with frozen speech. Over his shoulder and across the room, Dr. Hallemeier caught her glance and made a show of turning away. Marie swallowed. “I mean, I’m just not ready.” Shrugging, smiling shyly. A beat too late, she remembered to take her hands off of him.
The kind of light that was in Logan’s eyes, she thought that he would tease her. But all he said was, “So how ‘bout that ride?”
“That’s--” It would be hard to put away her materials with him in the room. “Actually, I still had some things I needed to do.”
“I’ll wait on you.” He backed up.
“Okay.”
“Downstairs?”
“Alright.”
“No rush.”
He quirked his lips at her, but as he walked away she felt another irrational lurch, a sense that she wouldn’t see him again. Hardly thinking, she took a quick step behind the partition and one just as quickly back out, and in between snatched up the sketchbook from her table. She rushed between the tables of her classmates, some of whom were starting to pack up as well, and caught Logan’s elbow at the door. He turned around.
“You could take a look at these if you wanted. While you’re waiting.”
He took the book from her hands, that light in his eyes.
“They’re not much,” she said, suddenly wanting it back.
“I’ll see you downstairs, Kid.”
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He had picked out a sketch. It was not one of those she might have expected him to (they’d done a session with nude models last month), but a clumsy watercolor she’d shoved among the pages, a procrastination of its journey to the recycling bin.
“Camelback Mountain,” she said shyly, stopping just short behind the hallway bench where he sat, legs crossed.
“Arizona?”
“I spent a week there. It’s a nice spot to be alone, but I always wanted to see the snow, Alaska.” She paused, with the upward, interested flick of his gaze. Then she shrugged. “And nobody stared at me for wearing gloves.”
“Plus, better rides.”
“Yeah. There’s that.”
“Ready to go?”
A security officer was waiting for them beside the car, scribbling into a pad of blue paper. She was short enough to need to stand on her toes to pin it to the glass. This, perhaps, as well as the rain she had to blink from her eyes, had obviously not inclined her towards pleasantries. “Is this your vehicle?” she demanded.
“Yep,” he replied, cheerfully enough.
“What’s your name?”
“Scott Summers.”
“Mr. Summers, you can’t park here. This is reserved for faculty. If you’re a student, you have to buy a permit and I didn’t see a permit, so if you’re a visitor, you’re going to have to park in the garage, over by--”
Logan interrupted her. “I’ll remember that, next time.” Stepping around the officer, he plucked the ticket from the glass, nodding Marie to the passenger side. She avoided the woman’s still-vexed expression, following them as they pulled away.
Logan leaned over her to shove the ticket into the glove compartment.
“Did you know?”
“What’s that?” His eyes twinkled.
She shook her head, refusing to laugh, and ashamed at how much she wanted to.
She had avoided him for over a week. Now, with no escape from his presence except for a skin-grating roll on pavement and tar, she felt not entrapped but released. Sitting next to Logan was like a return to some natural state of being, like a circus animal whose harness had been removed. Marie took deep, easy breaths. At Logan’s encouragement, she told him about her other classes, sharing a few of the funnier stories she’d shored up over his absence. She noted that he took side roads rather than the interstate, letting other vehicles pass, driving at least five miles beneath the posted speed limits. The commute should have taken an hour, but he was clearly stretching it out, and it was impossible not to feel as if this moment was a bubble, floating carefully among the subjects that might burst their peace.
But the minutes drained away regardless of their efforts to preserve them, and any careless remark scraped the bubble’s edge. The Professor’s health. Bobby. Jean. She was surprised to see his eyes slash sideways when she said, “Scott suggested the art class, actually. All the people in my head--he thought developing a hobby that interested just me would help me separate myself from them.”
“How nice of him,” Logan said. Then his voice softened. “And you’re happier?”
She shrugged. What was happier? “It’s a nice feeling, that there’s more to me than being just another mutant in the room.”
“You’re not just anything in any room, Kid.”
“Unless Jean is in it.” She bit her tongue, hearing a distinct pop echo in the back of her mind. A beat late and off-key, she laughed. It was just a bad impression of levity that she couldn’t blame him for the look he gave her after.
Logan took his hand off the wheel and scraped it through his hair until the locks looked even messier than usual. With the air of someone choosing words like he might vegetables--from a limited and rotten stock--he said, “I know we’ve needed to talk about this.”
“No we don’t,” she told him, mortified. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I upset you--”
“You didn’t.”
“Marie,” he said, gently. He’d taken his eyes off of the road to catch hers. “Look, Jean and I are--”
“Logan.” She was close to tears. “It’s none of my business. It really isn’t. Whatever you are--whatever you and Jean are, um, figuring out, it’s up to you. Don’t worry that I’m--just don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
In his pained expression, she could see that he was tempted to leave it there. He didn’t believe her, but this, she thought, was a kind of discomfort that even the Wolverine was unacclimated to, and he wanted it to end.
“I’m fine,” she repeated.
“And we’re fine?”
She nodded. He exhaled. Discomfort had won out. They finished the drive in silence or with unimportant remarks. Marie held her hands carefully in her lap so that the crumbles of glass wouldn’t dig any deeper.
Strangely, she felt older than him.
__________________________________________________________________________
Shortly after that after, Marie decided to take what she had told Logan and make it true. It was wrong, forcing him to worry about her opinion of an affair that shouldn’t affect her in the first place. Neither, she thought, was the way she’d been living in the mansion--watching everyone else as if from the rafters. Placidly sitting while her friends take risks, formed bonds, helped. Jean had been right all along. She thought about running. But leaving everything behind would confirm that she’d never had a reason to stay.
It was time, finally, to grow up.
__________________________________________________________________________
“Fancy seeing you here,” Scott slid the carafe back onto the burner. He’d left enough in the pot for Marie. The coffee diluted without quite obliterating the scent of bourbon coming from his mug. She thought about warning him to hide his stash with Logan around but she bit her tongue, as if she could bite the unspoken idea in half. Scott didn’t need to be reminded about Logan if he was drinking at ten o'clock in the morning. “Feel like we’ve been ships in the night,” he smiled at her, took a larger drink than was probably safe, winced at the heat, and continued, “since your friend came back.”
“Yeah. Just, you know, busy.”
“Of course,” he said. Too understandingly.
“With my art project,” she hastened.
“Oh. Right. It’s coming along?”
“I--it’s good. It’s fine. How--how are you?”
“I’m good. I’m fine.”
Marie opened her mouth. It was time to say something. It was time to choose something. Even the wrong thing. “Scott?”
He blew gently on the surface of his coffee. “Hm?”
“I’ve got to talk to you.” She could sense, even if she couldn’t see, the sharp, sudden glance he gave her from behind the garnet glasses. He cocked his head and tightened his jaw; his whole body subtly realigned itself. He looked like a soldier, bracing for an assault. Marie held her coffee cup tighter so her sweaty hands wouldn’t drop it.
“I think I want to join the team.”
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I hope everyone had a happy holiday, that you ate as much as you wanted to, and that your break from work/school was everything you needed it to be. It was for me. I'm very pleased to have this chapter up, finally. May the New Year find us all with lots of ink on lots of pages!
Chapter End Notes:
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Thank you for sticking with this story! You are, as always, the best people in and out of the Marvel Universe.
Thank you for sticking with this story! You are, as always, the best people in and out of the Marvel Universe.