Chapter Text
“Please tell me he is pranking us,” Veronica mumbled sleepily.
It is 8 AM and Dick Casablancas is in his shower singing My Heart Will Go On so loudly that his wavering, sincere warbling has woken Veronica up from a deep sleep.
“Actually, no,” Logan replied. “I think he unironically loves Celine Dion. We saw her three times in Vegas.”
“Wait. Did you just say you saw Celine Dion three times in Vegas?”
“Front row at Caesars Palace. But don’t focus on that. Focus on how he’s going to start singing The Power of Love next.”
Veronica moaned and put the pillow over her head.
“A woman in a giant white dress flew over us while someone played the piccolo,” Logan said, his voice disbelieving.
She couldn’t help it. She giggled.
How could it feel this good, being woken up by the sound of Dick screeching “You’re heeeeeeeeeeere, there’s nothing I feeeeeeeeeeeear!”?
And then she felt Logan’s fingers skimming along her arm, sending delicious chills up her spine.
Oh yeah.
--
“OK, I am officially asking if you have a place of your own in Neptune. Which, come to think of, I should have asked much sooner.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Besides the fact I just found Dick in the kitchen sitting on the countertop wearing only tighty-whiteys, eating Froot Loops, and humming a Whitney Houston song?”
“Good enough reason.”
--
And that’s how Veronica finds herself and her small bag of belongings in Logan’s small beach bungalow. It’s not too far from Dick’s, but much harder to get to, it’s tucked in a small corner cove and though it’s not very big, Veronica knows the location means it cost a small fortune. The bedroom is the largest room and it has huge wrap-around windows that face out to the ocean. It’s even closer to the shore than Dick’s.
“I wasn’t here often,” Logan apologizes and Veronica can tell from the thin layer of dust on everything. “I spent most of the short times I was in Neptune at Dick’s or sometimes Carrie’s. I kept this place - I’m not sure why.”
“I know why,” Veronica says, staring out the huge windows and watching the waves crash. It’s a quiet, breathtaking little place.
He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes.
She pretends she didn’t hear the phrase “short times” in his sentence, doesn’t know that although these past four days have felt like forever they aren’t, they’re a short time too, clicking closer down to the time he’ll leave Neptune again.
“I think now I know why too,” he whispers.
--
She can’t remember the last time she behaved like this. No, that’s not right. She doesn’t think she’s ever behaved like this. It took them five days to figure out Logan has his own place, to connect that they should move there out of his bedroom at Dick Casablanca’s house.
And Veronica knows why: it had taken them five days to take their hands off each other. Clichéd but true, the first five days had been a haze of reconnecting. At first, the reconnecting was body-to-body and skin-to-skin as they relished the pleasure of being with each other physically again (and relished too, she knows, being alive, being free, surviving another catastrophe.) But the reconnecting quickly turned to something other than just the physical contact - conversations and laughs and stories of the past nine years flowing freely - and even that had kept them too busy to think of leaving Dick’s.
But now here they are - Logan’s little house on the ocean in the middle of no where. Not that she’d ever let herself think of the possibility of this but if she had, well, it was never mansions or gentrified New York with Logan Echolls. It was never Paris or Rome. It was this - a little house, a brilliant sunset, and the waves outside.
“We should dust, go food shopping, unpack what little we brought, think of dinner -” she says half-heartedly.
Logan moves his hand from her shoulder and winds his arms around her waist, pulling her flush against his body. He leans to nuzzle her neck and her heart (still, always) races.
“We can do that later. But now we should … take off our shoes and go wade in the water.”
And she thinks of all the ways she never let herself imagine this moment. She thinks of all the years it took her to get right here. She thinks of how sometimes on the subway she’d close her eyes and try so hard to convince herself she wasn’t missing the salty smell of the ocean.
She thinks of how she never entertained the possibility of this wonder - Logan Echolls and a house on the beach.
She says the only thing she possibly can.
“Yes,” a murmur, a promise, a celebration all at once. “Yes, let’s do that.”