“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…”