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"i'd sell my soul my self esteem a dollar at a time for one chance one
kiss one taste of you"
— "magdalena," by A Perfect Circle
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After a night to sleep on the idea, and bit more brooding on the matter, Marie had to conclude that Logan's idea had some merits. Of course the hell of it was that she had a fresh dose of*him* in her head, and he was not only genuinely sincere in his offer to play guinea pig for her, but had a certain personal motivation in making her touchable. She had no idea how much of her current willingness to experiment with him might be due to the collusion between her secondhand case of Logan's willingness and her own desires that coincided so surprisingly with his own. Possibly if there had been a little less of him in her head at the moment, or if she'd had a bit more time to consider the matter or to get an outside opinion, some downsides to the plan might have occurred.
But Logan and Rogue were happily outvoting Good Li'l Marie on this one, so when Logan collared her the next day in a break between classes and wanted to try again, she didn't argue. She had an hour or so between history and biology for study time, so five or ten minutes in Logan's room wouldn't exactly be missed from her schedule.
As before, her only warning was the "Ready?" before he put his hand to the side of her jaw, mere seconds after closing the door behind the two of them. It wasn't much time to prepare herself to resist before being touched — and perhaps he would have been wiser to have sat down first. As it was, his knees started to buckle when she pulled his hand away, and she had to make a grab for him. Had she not absorbed a fair bit of borrowed strength, she probably wouldn't have managed to keep him on his feet, but somehow she managed to prop him up against the wall.
"Right... Better... next time?" he managed after a minute, and she shook her head at the bravado.
"Don't you have a self-defense class this afternoon?" A rhetorical question — the answer was already in her thoughts.
"Hmm?" A blink, before the gears caught and the wheels turned. "Later."
"And you still wanted me to try this *now*? Less than half an hour before?" She gave him a raised eyebrow, leaving it to him to fill in the unspoken commentary on the wisdom or lack thereof of his chosen timing.
"I'll be fine by then," he said defensively. "Besides, aren't you supposed to be learning *not* to do this to me?" The Logan between her ears told her that he really *was* feeling a bit foolish for not having thought this through before impulsively hauling her off to his room, but wasn't about to come right out and admit that it had been a less than stellar idea.
"Right. From here on out, no more ‘practice' until *after* classes are done for the day."
"At least until you get good at it," was his conditional agreement. He gave her a half-grin, and her very own personal subliminal Wolverine supplied that he wasn't going to let her feel anything less than confident in the eventual success of this little project.
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