Author's Note: I am having a Very Good Day. So let's all have a happy chapter to celebrate, shall we? My dedication to research for fanfic does not extend to doing illegal drugs, so any inaccuracies in the details of this chapter are my fault, for not misspending my youth enough.

Chapter 4

Veronica

I wake up feeling so bad, I don't even have words to describe it. Logan's gone, with all his sparkling magical skin and kisses that feel like they could cure cancer. I convulse around a cramp in my stomach, my feet kicking in the wrecked sheets.

Oh, fuck my terrible life.

I stagger out of bed and fall against the wall, feeling my way to the bathroom. There's a roaring sound like maybe a hurricane blew in overnight, and it takes me a minute to sort out that it's the shower running. Why it sounds so loud at the moment is a mystery for another PI.

"Want to join me in my study?" Logan says, his voice bright and happy, and my heart pings a little. Maybe last night wasn't a dream. If he sounds that cheerful, and my legs are this wobbly, all of that might actually have been real.

But then my stomach torques and I fall toward the toilet, grabbing the rim just in time to boot the contents of everything I've ever eaten into the water.

"Huh," Logan says from behind the curtain. "That tracks."

All I can do is gasp toilet-scented air and regret everything.

"Is this like the last time you got sick, and I'll lose a finger if I try to hold your hair back?"

"Ung."

"Okay, just moan if you need me to carry you back to bed."

The shampoo bottle snaps open with an annoyingly pert pop. There's a knock at the front door and I flush the toilet and drag myself to the living room. I don't need to be carried. Probably.

It's my father of all people, and he wants to talk about work, of all things. All I can think are inappropriate thoughts.

Hi Daddy! I did drugs and now I have a naked man in my shower with the most beautiful fingerprints on earth. Oh and by the way, last night, I fucked him in ways that would make the Kama Sutra blush.

I manage to stumble through the conversation without saying anything too revealing, but all my veins feel like they're filled with concrete dust: heavy and gray. When my dad leaves, I slump back to the bedroom to change, gravity tugging me inexorably toward the ground with every step. Logan lifts an impossibly energetic eyebrow as I slap hangers aside and rip a shirt out of my closet.

"What are you doing?"

"Going to work," I rasp. "Fucking security tapes. Bomber."

"Um, no." He plucks the shirt out of my hands. "You're not working today."

"How do you figure, champ?"

"Question. Have you ever come down from ecstasy before?"

I glare at him for asking a stupid question. Logan is very aware of how many drugs I do not do. It took me something like three years after law school to be able to smoke a simple joint without being hypervigilant about being out of my right mind, and maybe acting stupid, or not being able to protect myself if someone tried to take advantage of me. And I've never told him this, but I rarely risk any kind of drugs when he's not with me.

"Why are you not sicker?" I grouch at him.

"Easy. I had half as much as you."

"We were doing shots together," I argue. "And Nicole gave us the same dose of E."

He flexes like Popeye, and gives me a grin that should be goofy but is really kind of dazzling. Maybe because he's only wearing a towel. "Yes, but I'm twice your size. Math, my darling Watson."

"I'm Sherlock. You're Watson." I try to duck around him to reach my work clothes. "And speaking of, I have a case to solve."

"You're not going to be able to solve anything today, no matter how many hours you spend in the office." He takes me by the shoulders and turns me toward him. "When you come down off E," he tells me, "your brain goes to mashed potatoes and everything feels gray. It's like everything interesting has been drained out of the world. Pretty much, you feel like you've got Stage 4 Lymphoma and no one on earth will ever love you again."

I frown, remembering suddenly that he's coming down, too. "Wait, is that how you feel right now?"

"I'm okay. I didn't take enough to add up to a hangover, by my standards." He kisses my forehead. "But you, my tiny turtledove, are fucked. You get couch time, cuddling, and Hallmark movies all day, or I'll be hiding the razor blades by noon. Now get thee to the shower. Not even I will cuddle you when you smell like this." He pats my bottom, herding me toward the bathroom. "I'll bring you a change of clothes."

"Hallmark movies?" I squint through ragged strands of my hair. "Who are you and what have you done to my badass Navy boyfriend?"

"Better question. Why didn't you misspend more of your youth, so I wouldn't have to explain to you about coming down off drugs?"

I snort in response, sounding like a heifer with indigestion, and feeling like an unwashed Oompa Loompa.

He gives me a sly, crooked grin with his eyes alight. "Now, let's get some more details about how you think I'm a badass…"

"I can't believe you called me a fucking turtledove." I slouch away toward the bathroom, frowning at the floor.

I don't like the idea that he's been on Ecstasy before when I wasn't around. Who did he fuck? When he touched them, could he read their fingerprints? And I really, really don't like the idea that he came down from it alone, feeling like no one had ever loved him. Somehow, when I picture it, he's on his old couch at the Neptune Grand, curled onto his side with his big hands tucked between his knees.

I turn back and meet him coming up the hall with a bottle of water and an aspirin. I hug him hard, ignoring the water. "Are you sure you're okay?" I ask, even though talking hurts all the way from my eyebrows to my bellybutton. He hugs me back, far more gently.

"I'm okay, promise." He pulls away and smirks. "Or I will be, once you don't smell so much like rancid vomit. My sweet little turtledove."

I give him some side-eye, considering. I don't know if it's because I'm so hungover that he just looks that much better by contrast, or because my fantastic dream of soul-bewitching sex was actually real, but I'm not sure I've ever seen Logan this happy.

Either way, it's the only thing about today that I don't hate entirely.

#

I lay on the couch, pouting my way through my third Hallmark movie. Logan was so painfully, horribly right about the ecstasy hangover. The whole world feels as pointless as high school. My libido is as limp as a discarded piece of yarn, and if I tried to work a case right now, I'd probably spike my coffee with hemlock at all the reminders that people are basically selfish, immoral trash fires.

Except Logan. And Wallace. They're pretty okay. Wallace made an emergency delivery of bacon earlier, which Logan proceeded to cook for me before he ate something he called "an egg white omelet" and what I called "a vomitorium of mucus-adjacent food textures."

Right now, Logan's curled up behind me with his legs warming mine, his arm ridiculously heavy but nice, where it cuddles over the top of mine. My head is tucked under his chin, which is the only place the terrible hangover thoughts can't find me.

I've got on my softest leggings and Logan's "Property of the US Navy" shirt. When he wears it, it makes me scowl and want to commit a small amount of arson—just enough that he never has to be deployed again. But when I wear it, it's sort of like he belongs to the Navy but I'm his and he's mine, and I don't feel quite so homicidal. That explanation makes no logical sense, actually, but I like it anyway. And when he saw me in his shirt, his eyes glowed like maybe his libido doesn't feel like a limp piece of yarn this morning.

Though considering the working over I gave him last night, I'm not sure how that's physiologically possible.

Maybe there's something to those egg white omelets.

Logan also, in his infinite thoughtfulness, pulled the sheer curtains over the windows to create a safe little nest where the light can't stab into my eyeballs. And when the AirBnb'ers woke up and turned on Metallica, he quietly went downstairs and quietly put the fear of God into them. They've been so silent since that I think they're still down there shaking in their boots.

Since then, he's been just sitting with me. Stroking my hair. Kissing my wrists. Smiling his soft-eyed smile at me every time a new wave of hangover-depression starts to tug me down, so it can never quite sink me all the way. I'm even starting to like the fucking Hallmark movies.

"How can she not recognize this Santa as the guy who's also her childhood best friend?" I grouch, gesturing at the screen. "It's just a fake beard, not full plastic surgery. Has she never looked at his face before?"

"Thought you were just watching for the puppies," he teases. "How is it you know so much about the plot?"

I scowl and pull his enormous arm more tightly around me, like my own personal bicep blanket. "Quiet, you."

The Hallmark movies are so saccharine I'll probably need three cavities filled by Tuesday, but there's something nice about them, too. How everybody in the little movie town is good, underneath. How everything works out in the end. It's how I feel every time Logan comes home from deployment, whole and safe and handsome and inexplicably, mine.

It's like the world isn't so bad after all.

This spark of optimism lasts until Logan gets up to go to the bathroom, and then the crushing hope hangover squeezes me down into the couch cushions until I can barely breathe again. To fight it back, I get up and sneak around the apartment, looking for the blazer he wore last night. I have a hunch I haven't been able to get out of my mind.

I'm back on the couch by the time Logan returns, but he glitches slightly when he sees me. The hesitation only lasts a second, and then he slides in behind me, his warmth bathing my body until all my muscles relax. He slides his fingers in between mine, bumping the band of the glittering ring I'm wearing.

"Shut up."

"I didn't say a word!"

The sound of his voice, so light and happy, makes me feel like a flock of doves just made a run for it inside my chest. I scowl to combat all that fucking fluttering.

"I thought I'd just try it on for a minute, since you're apparently going to keep carrying it around everywhere anyway. Don't make a big deal out of it."

"Far be it from me to make a big deal out of anything. Especially the love of my life curled on the couch in yoga pants, with her hair all adorably messy, and my ring on her finger." He kisses my head, and even that small movement manages to be smug.

I try to watch the movie, because I really don't want to keep talking about this, and also because I think Santa Claus is about to get the kiss of his life. But the curiosity won't leave me alone.

"Logan?"

"Yeah?" His voice is a little hoarse, this time, but it still sounds glowingly pleased.

"How come the ring didn't have a box?"

"Uh." That gives him some pause. "It used to have one. It got…dirty."

I think about that for a second. If he doesn't want to say how, that probably means it got blood on it. Which might mean he bought it way before this mission.

"How long were you carrying it around?"

He hesitates.

"I won't freak out," I say to the screen, where Santa Clause is indeed getting kissed within an inch of his fake-bearded life. Though very chastely, because Hallmark.

"Since you came back to Neptune."

I suck in a breath.

"I never really meant to give it to you," he rushes to say. "Not after all our talks about not getting married. I just carried it, I don't know. To remind me of you, to remind me how much I wanted a life with you and that I had something to come back for these days. But then, you brought up marriage, and I thought you were hinting, not joking, and I…it felt right. You felt right." He pauses. "We don't have to talk about it anymore."

"Good. Because I think there's a puppy scene coming up once we get through all this kissy kissy crap."

He scoff-laughs and snuggles me a little closer. "You're the worst Hallmark watching partner ever."

"Damn straight. Remember that next time you guilt-trip me into staying home from work with you."

I mean to stay quiet, but every beat of my heart is counting off the days all the way back to when he bought that ring. When he hadn't seen me in nine years and we'd only had two weeks together before we were parted again.

"Logan?"

"Mmm?" His thumb is tracing the line of the ring on my finger. The one we're not talking about. The one we both already know I'm never taking off.

"I knew, too. Even back then."

His chest goes still behind me as he stops breathing, and my hand tightens on his.

"For nine years after I left Neptune, I told myself I managed to fall in love once, and I could do it again just as easy with someone else… And the second I saw you in that airport, I knew I was a goddamn liar. And it was only ever going to be you."

"Forty-nine dollar ticket to Palm Springs." He kisses the top of my head. "Totally worth it."