11She tries to sleep.
It is an exercise in futility.
Like that kiss, the damn kiss that hasn't stopped buzzing in her brain like an overachieving firefly illuminating the maze of her mind and revealing her personal demons cringing in their dark forgotten corners.
Suddenly she is swinging her legs out from under the tangled sheets, striding to her desk and flipping open her laptop.
She is well acquainted with futility; it is an old friend who long ago wore out its welcome. She has had enough futility to last her a lifetime. These days she is into action. She starts to write the words flowing into one another as her fingers danced over the keyboard and her eyes focused somewhere past the picture of she and Lilly cavorting on a beach laughing like they had not a care in the world. Her eyes aren't seeing those magical moments forever lost in the mist shrouded Camelot of legend. Those moments were past the point of recreation and there was little use in revisiting them. The troubling thing was the image that did float across her mind's eye...the image that squeezed something inside that she had thought long dead. Logan on a balcony, his eyes boring holes into her hard won armor and leaving her grasping for something that she knew was impossible and unattainable.
"Maybe it's in my blood and I just didn't see it until I had to but I've found of late that I have a gift for subterfuge. Not to sound like I'm bragging but I have to say with all appropriate humility that I'm great at bluffing. I mean we're talking world class. If they had a bullshit event in the Olympics I'd blow away the competition and abscond with the gold medal without breaking a sweat. The guys in the 09er version of Celebrity Poker became well acquainted with this talent at a highly successful fleecing a couple of months back and I have to say it was what Martha Stewart, to her detriment perhaps, would call a 'good thing'.
In the Veronica Mars manifesto it is a clearly accepted premise that deception is high on the list of necessary survival skills. I'm an avid proponent of the power of a well-placed half-truth and believe whole-heartedly in the need to know version of many a tale. Why cloud the picture with a bunch of inconsequential and irrelevant details? Simple isn't always bad. In my experience a well-aimed implied accusation is generally as effective as a kill shot directly to the head. No need to make things all messy when a little insinuation will get you all the guilty confessions you need.
In the past year I've become a regular contortionist and I'm proud to say that I can bend the facts with nearly the skill that Beckham aims at the ball. However, that being said with all sincerity, there comes a line in all of us that we do not cross without hesitation. Mine is out right lying, not to say that I avoid this pitfall entirely but l I do try whenever possible not to actually break that fragile thing called truth. Aside from a few sins of omission I think even St. Peter himself would agree that my record is pretty clean. This rule of thumb especially holds when the person I'd be lying to is myself.
So, in the spirit of full disclosure I'll spell out it out... the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... I have no idea what possessed me to kiss Logan Echolls. There it is, in black and white for the entire world to see, well at least the ones who can hack past a firewall and several extremely clever passwords. Okay, so that narrows the field a little, but the point is I'm saying it, I'm admitting I don't know why I did it and worse I don't know what I'm going to do about the fact that I did it. (Insert sigh) God Veronica you've gone an gotten yourself in one hell of a pickle this time."
Veronica stared at the blinking cursor on her computer journal and then backspaced and replaced the last period with an exclamation point. A pickle was an understatement. She had just kissed her dead best friend's ex-boyfriend, Duncan, her epileptic ex's best friend and the erstwhile bane of her existence also un-fondly known as Satan incarnate. This was no laughing matter. This was a serious infraction of the Veronica Mars code of conduct. This was consorting with the enemy in the most blatant fashion. In many a communist state this would be grounds for an extremely unpleasant death.
No one, least of all her would deny that it should not have happened, it was a point of fact that a few weeks ago she would have gladly braved the fires of hell barefoot before she would have let it happen. So, how had the universe managed to trip her up so smoothly and so quickly? How in a mere space of days had she gone from hating Logan Echolls with the fire of a thousand suns to kissing him like he was the white night and she the rescued damsel in distress. It was like one big cosmic Monty Python kind of joke. They were the most unlikely fairy tale couple... well, ever. Logan was about as far from white as you could get without falling off the spectrum and she had made it her pursuit in life for the past months to ruthlessly squash the life out of every last ill-begotten damsel in distress tendency that lived secretly within her.
She was a girl on a mission and a girl on a mission traveled a hell of a lot faster without people and the baggage of emotions getting in the way. She didn't have time to care. She didn't want to care about anyone or anything but finding Lilly's killer and seeing justice served. She had no room for the chaos that Logan Echolls seemed to breathe like oxygen. Inviting Logan anywhere near her life was akin to inviting the devil in for a spot of tea and expecting to walk away without a pitchfork in the gut.
She was a solitary warrior riding onto the field of battle and that was exactly how she wanted it to stay. This was nothing new, this internal pep talk had been all but her mantra since that first day she had walked back into that fractured universe that was now peopled with hostile eyed strangers. There was a time when she had counted Logan amongst her friends but there was a lot of dirty, ugly, raging whitewater under that bridge now and the Veronica who had so innocently believed that the world was all roses and puppy dogs and fairytale romance was long gone. Ground into dust beneath those once friendly heels and resurrected like a vengeful phoenix from the ashes.
She remembered the day that leaf in their collective history was turned as if it were ten minutes ago. The halls of Neptune High had seemed to ring with the silence as her footsteps echoed in the frozen landscape. The lies and sly inferences had started at a whisper but soon grown to a roar carried loudest by the voices of those she had once trusted. The brown-eyed devil himself had been the first to take up the cry, to ruthlessly slash her to ribbons with his cruel words and leave her bleeding on the floor with nary a Good Samaritan in sight. She was the outcast, the pariah and her old playmates made it clear in that moment that their once cherished friendship was now the putrid corpse clogging the hallway with it's cloying scent. The carefree children that had existed before that landmark day were dead, murdered in cold blood along with Lilly and replaced by tough, cynical combatants in a war where the enemies were everywhere and the only person you could trust was yourself.
There were only three things she believed in nowadays...her own wits, her father's unconditional love and the seemingly unplumbed depths of darkness that existed in human nature. She had learned a lesson in the months since her world fell to pieces in a split second as she looked at the dead, bloodied face of her best friend and she had learned it well. She always had been a quick study. Once she had been the girl who believed in the good in people, now she believed without qualification that if you gave them a chance people would betray you and undermine you and take you apart piece by piece until nothing was left of you but that will deep inside to survive, to climb wrung by wrung out of the depths into which you were thrown and conquer the world that had taken everything from you.
She knew that day they had expected to walk away victorious, to reduce her to nothing but an unpleasant memory, a dirty little smudge in their bright shiny world. Their claws would have mortally wounded the old Veronica. They underestimated her though and she had fought back, fought dirty with the tricks she had learned from them and then she had walked away with her head held high. Damning them all to their own personal hells. She hadn't looked back, not then and not now. Her choice had been made on the battlefield that day.
She'd worked tirelessly in the past twelve months on her solitary crusade. She was alone and she liked it that way. Alone meant no messy soft emotions to get in the way. Alone meant there was no one close enough to know your secrets or creep past your walls and somehow worm their way into your heart. Alone meant the only person you had to count on was yourself. Alone was cleaner, less confusing and ultimately less painful when the people outside the walls walked away as they invariable did. She didn't need friends, she had companions that kept her moving, the twin daggers of anger and bitter pain that drove her to bring the buried secrets into the light of day.
She couldn't move on with her life until she knew that Lilly's real killer was suffering for all the lives that had been broken, for all the beautiful crystal castles of idealism that had come crashing down with one smashing blow. This was about retribution; it was about vengeance but most of all it was about a clean slate. Clean slates didn't just appear like some magical janitorial staff came along and wiped them blank every night. This kind of slate, the kind stained with blood, had to be scrubbed clean before it could be written over. Until that was done she had no room within her carefully constructed walls for anyone but herself. She had to be strong and she had to do it on her own. Maybe it wasn't the right way to deal with grief according to the collective wisdom of the venerable scholars of psychology but it worked for her. It was the sole reason she was still standing.
She'd been doing a whiz-bang job of it too. She had a few allies, a network of spies and a very clear blue print of exactly where the enemy lines were drawn. Then a funny thing had happened. When she wasn't looking people started sneaking closer and before she knew it the enemy forces were camped just outside the wall and had her under siege.
She had heard Logan's secret animosity towards her during his bugged counseling session and part of her had understood, the same part of her that held onto the mirror image of that guilt and had made a silent invocation of the litany of what ifs that fell from his lips.
Things had shifted ever so slightly that day as she listened to the pent up anguish that rang too familiar. She hadn't wanted to but she had seen him a little better, recognized the broken boy that hid beneath the flippant facade. She saw his pain and it looked eerily like her own. Not that it mattered. Shared agony didn't make them friends. Recognition of their similarities didn't erase the bitter words spilled like tainted blood between them, it didn't remove the darts and arrows they had hurled at one another until they were the walking wounded. One step from faltering but head held high by sheer pride. They weren't anywhere near the negotiation table and any overtures of peace would surely be set fire and hoisted to the heavens as an example to deter all who might suggest a truce.
Then, one night, he had done the unthinkable. It was the ultimate of sneaky tricks...he was a wily enemy but she hadn't foreseen that he would bring the battle to her doorstep. She hadn't expected to open that door just a crack to find him huddled in denied pain, his eyes screaming with the sorrow of a lost little boy. She had thought herself immune to another's pain but she had overestimated her ability to sublimate the softer side of herself. She understood too well the knife in the heart that a child felt when your parent has abandoned you to the face the cold hard world alone and no matter how hardened the shell it wasn't in her to turn him away.
She'd watched him struggle and a trickle of empathy had slid in past her most vigilant guards. She had watched him crumble and the heart she had thought was frozen had started to drip slowly like an icicle on that first warm day of spring. She couldn't walk away and let him fall so she had held him while he cried but she hadn't let herself look past that split second of comfort.
The mystery lay in the path from temporary ceasefire to passionate embrace and she still couldn't quite make the clues add up. Her hands were still as she stared at the screen again but the words were blurred as her eyes focused in the distance and replayed the taste of him on her lips. She didn't like that he had tasted like the sweetest of forbidden fruit. She couldn't quite stop the frantic flapping of the butterflies in her stomach or the way her breath caught almost imperceptibly in her throat when she thought of the searing gaze that had held them immobile, caught in some powerful magnetic force field for an instant after their mouths parted. She didn't like that even in memory there was something in his touch that catapulted her back to the memory of a moment that had sent her world rocking.
It was a dangerous ledge she was walking. To state the obvious; that kiss should never have happened. Nevertheless, here she was and the litany of shouldn't have, wouldn't have, couldn't have didn't hold much weight against did.
She laughed, a low and self-mocking sound as she shut her eyes and rubbed her hand over her tired eyes. She would never deny that she and Logan had chemistry. It just wasn't the good kind. It was the kind of that led to explosive reactions that you took extra precautions against. The kind that the chemistry teachers spoke of it in whispered awe and then made sure to lock the components in separate rooms behind heavy doors to avoid blowing up the entire science wing with everyone in it. It was not the kind of fire that one expected to play with and escape unscathed.
Maybe it was just the improbable and impossible combination of adrenaline and relief and proximity that explained it all. A momentary lapse into the topsy-turvy land of irrational physical response, a chemistry experiment gone awry, a fluke of timing...could it really be explained away that simply? Could a little adrenaline set light to that subterranean rancor and twist it into something else? Was it possible, despite months of well aimed barbs designed to kill softly, slowly and with excruciating suffering, hours spent concocting improbable calamities usually involving grand pianos tumbling from the sky and squashing him like a bug with a satisfying splat, that when you started to lose your grip on the animosity, passionate hatred became simply passion?
She felt like she was running mental laps around the truth now. She dropped her head to the desk and rolled her head back and forth in frustration. This was ridiculous. So she had weaknesses...she was human, it came with the territory. That didn't mean for a second that she was going to admit it aloud but it was time to stop ruminating on the why and the how and start focusing on the what. That definition should be easy...Temporary stupidity, MOMENTARY FOLLY... capital letters...in bold.
It should have been dismissed just that easily...everyone had a bad day now and then; everyone made mistakes and had lapses in judgment. Not even Veronica Mars was perfect. The only problem was that the words didn't quite click into their designed place in the puzzle. They didn't explain away the tingle she still felt on her lips or the heat that had washed over her skin where his warms hands had rested and pulled her close against his body before reason had returned to them. It didn't explain why she was awake at two am worrying the issue like a terrier with a bone.
She took a deep breath and raised her head. Clearly denial wasn't working for her. It was time for a new strategy. She resolutely set her fingers back to the keyboard and hit the delete key with some aggression. The cursor flashed at the end of the words in a hypnotizing rhythm and she paused only a fraction of a second before her fingers moved of their own volition.
"The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... I know exactly why I kissed Logan Echolls and that scares me like I haven't been scared since the day Lilly died."