He ought to have been a footnote to her history. A distraction she used for a time to endure her last few years at home. Instead, what had happened meant their dysfunctional courtship was trapped in amber along with everything else from those final days.
There was something perverse about finding Logan here, in dingy unremarkable environs with no signs of success or suffering hovering obviously about him, proof that the world had lurched along without apparent regard for the importance of their tragedy. Logan looked like any other middle-aged man you might find in a bar like this, and whatever image she’d built up in her head of him crumbled immediately as he caught her eye.
There was another employee inside, a woman with slate-gray hair and a thick neck. She caught JJ’s eye as she entered, but JJ walked deliberately toward Logan.
“Juliette,” Logan said. “Of all the gin joints, et cetera.” He smiled but it had no warmth to it. JJ made herself walk forward, take a seat at the bar. She was breathing too quick, prickles of sweat at the base of her neck.
“He said he never saw you after the Saracen house, but he was lying, I could tell,” Emma had said.
His eyes tracked the curl of a vine up her arm.
“Logan. It’s been a while,” she said.
“That’s an understatement,” he said. He cocked his head. “You’re not here for a drink.”
“No,” she answered, though, God, she wanted one. She had a rule with Vic. No drinking alone, no drinking before five o’clock, never more than one drink. She’d broken them just about every night since she got back to this godforsaken town.
Logan took a survey of the bar. JJ had hardly noticed the other patrons when she entered—a couple having burgers and beers in the corner, a woman in a pink T-shirt and work boots. “If you’re not going to drink, I’m going to take my smoke break,” he said. “You can join me, if you like.”
A dip of her chin in a nod, and she was following him toward the back door. Behind the bar was nothing but an empty lot. The air stank with indistinct sour smells from the dumpster nearby, but Logan didn’t seem to notice. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one unhurriedly.
JJ reached out. She’d quit years ago, at Vic’s insistence, but she still snuck one now and then. Logan offered a light, and she leaned in. His fingertips were calloused and stained. He met her eye as he held the trembling flame up to the tip of the cigarette, his own dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Long time,” he said again, like it was the only thing to say.
She leaned back, weight on her back foot. She took the cigarette from her lips and let the smoke spill from her mouth slowly, savoring the familiar flavor and sting of it. It wasn’t a thing she’d ever liked, exactly. It was more like a ritual or a talisman, a way to mark in the moment who she was. Who she wasn’t.
“Miss me?” she asked, the trace of a smirk in the corner of her mouth as she remembered who she meant to be.
“Now and then,” Logan allowed with a half smile of his own, relaxing a fraction. He gave her a look that encompassed her scuffed-up boots, her skintight jeans, the loose blouse that did nothing to conceal the bright purple bra she had on underneath, the tattoos she’d accumulated over the years. “You look good. You look—I dunno. I would say you’ve changed, but I feel like this is what you were always supposed to look like,” he said.
“Thanks, I guess,” JJ replied. “You haven’t. Changed.”
“Never got around to it,” Logan said. “I’ve stopped trying to be more of an asshole than I already am, at least.”
“That’s something,” she offered, and it did feel like she was giving something to him, a gift as real as the cigarette she lifted to her lips again. It was strange looking at him and seeing in his aged face the face of the boy she had tried so desperately to want. By the time she’d gotten into his car that first day, she’d started to be worried about the fact that the boys in the back seats and teenage bedrooms held no attraction to her, to panic about the way her heart thudded when she caught a glimpse of Sara Williams applying a careful layer of lip gloss to her ample lower lip.
So she’d tried for a while to want Logan. She’d gotten as far as liking him, despite him being an asshole, despite him being, at best, a loser and a drug dealer and a sleaze. She thought she might still like him, maybe even like him more, without the pressure of anything more.
“What’s that look?” he asked her.
“You don’t want to know,” she told him, with a shine of humor on it to keep the mood light. It did its job; he chuckled, ducked his head.
“Your sister came by. Asking questions about you,” Logan told her, lifting his eyes to hers.
“So you mentioned,” JJ replied, trying to sound casual, her pulse quick and loud. “What did you tell her?”
“Some of it. Not all of it,” Logan said. “She wanted to know about that night.”
She grunted. “You told her you didn’t see me after the Saracen house. She thinks you’re lying.” The arch of an eyebrow, turning it into a question, a demand, but he only let out a long smoke-wreathed breath and didn’t answer. “We never talked, you and I. After that night.”
“Seemed like the smart call,” Logan said. There was guilt there—or fear, maybe. “I figured you didn’t want people knowing what you’d gotten up to.”
“Very insightful of you,” JJ said, throat tightening. “Not at all self-interested.”
“So what if it was? No one wanted to touch that mess with a ten-foot pole,” Logan said. “It was bad enough they found those bloody clothes at the house.”
“The police talk to you?” JJ said.
“You mean my dad? Yeah,” Logan replied. “That was a lot of fun, let me tell you. He didn’t actually ask the questions, got Hadley to do it, but he was there.”
“What did you tell them?”
“What do you think? Sure, I went there sometimes. Can’t remember specifically when that night, can’t recall ever seeing any drugs or underage drinking, can’t recall, can’t recall,” Logan said. His eyes were on the pavement. He shuffled his feet.
“You said something else,” JJ said.
“Look, it was a moment of weakness. I panicked a bit,” Logan said. He looked up at her. “Hadley said it like they already knew. I thought if I lied, I’d be in deep shit.”
“Said what?” JJ pressed.
“He’s asking about the Saracen house, right? Who’s there, when, what they did, all of that. And he said he knew the Palmer girl had been there, and had I seen her, so I said yeah, maybe, I thought I remembered seeing her but I could be wrong. I kept it ambiguous. Just trying not to get in trouble.”
“Wait, he knew I was there?” JJ asked, brow furrowing, and then she played his words back in her mind. “The Palmer girl.”
“He was all ‘You’re sure you saw Emma Palmer,’ and at that point I guess I panicked. Said yes,” Logan said. “I thought I was protecting you.”
JJ stared at him. Her mouth was dry. “Why would I need protecting, Logan?” JJ asked quietly.
He fixed his gaze on her. Held the silence long enough that ash dropped from the tip of his cigarette, ghosting down to the ground to vanish against the gray concrete. “What do you remember?”
Yellow wallpaper. White grip. Red hand. Splinters of memory under her skin, no more. The rest a wide blank.
She wetted her lips. Swallowed. “Not enough,” JJ admitted.
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
“You do know something.”
“I know a lot of things, Juliette. You did a lot of things,” Logan said. “I’ve thought about that night a lot. Trying to come up with a way none of it was my fault, right? But I think it was, at least a little. I knew I gave you too much. You were done with me. I could tell. I thought maybe if there was something else you wanted from me it might last a bit longer, or if you were more relaxed, you’d actually have some fun, and then…”
He trailed off. She let him stew in the silence.
“Just tell me what happened,” she said, trying for a gentle tone. She didn’t do gentle or sweet much these days. It sounded strange, and Logan gave her a look like he could tell she was out of practice.
“You really don’t remember. I guess that’s not surprising, given how fucked-up you were when we found you,” he said.