Several hours later, we were sitting side by side at the picnic table, eating take-out pizza as Logan offered up demon-fighting tips.
“Your sword is tangible as soon as you touch it, so don’t tip your hand by reaching for it until you need it,” he cautioned. “You don’t want them knowing that you’re armed.”
I bit into my cheesy slice, mulling over everything I’d learned about these mystical weapons—and realized something wasn’t adding up.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
Logan’s warm brown eyes widened in mock terror. “Uh-oh, you’re asking again. This can’t be good.”
I gave him a withering look, and he bowed his head, holding out his slice of pizza as if to say, “Proceed.”
“If I can’t hurt you with your own sword, then why didn’t you just take it from me yesterday in detention?” I asked, wiping pizza grease off my hand with a napkin. “It’s not like I could have hurt you.”
“That’s true, but to just grab my sword from you? That would have been...I don’t know—” he turned to face me, straddling the bench as he searched for the word “—rude. Yeah, I think it would have been rude.”
“Rude?” I repeated, surprised. I had been expecting something a little more magically cryptic as an answer—certainly not something polite.
“Not chivalrous. I don’t know.” Logan sighed. He took off his hat, rolling the worn blue brim between his palms as his hair fell into his eyes. “You had just been attacked. You were so upset, and you were injured. You were also on fire,” he reminded me, then paused. “And it’s all my fault you were in that situation because I made you think you were crazy, and I didn’t get there in time, and...”
Logan ran his fingers through his messy dark brown hair before setting the cap back on his head.
“I don’t blame you. At all,” I said.
Logan smiled a small, but genuine smile, before it spread into a more playful one.
“Don’t tell your dad that. I think he wants to believe that you secretly despise me,” he teased, and lightly kicked my sneaker with his.
“Shut up and eat your pizza,” I said, wrinkling my nose at him.
“That’s not a threat. This is so good,” Logan moaned, giving his pepperoni slice a loving look. “You have no idea how so many places just get pizza wrong. Like cardboard covered in salty ketchup. It’s practically abusive what they do to it,” he added dramatically before taking a massive bite.
“The farthest I’ve ever been is Florida—and that was when I was a little kid,” I admitted. “I don’t remember the food, just Disney World.”
“Chicago pizza is good,” Logan said thoughtfully, peeling a piece of pepperoni off his slice and popping it into his mouth. “But just an average, everyday New York slice...damn, there’s nothing like it.”
“When were you in Chicago?”
“About two years ago, I think it was.” Logan’s brows pulled together in confusion. “Or maybe three. It was after we were in Texas.”
“You don’t remember when you lived in Chicago?”
“I’ll be honest, time kind of runs together when you do what I do.” Logan brushed crumbs off his jeans as he spoke. “It gets boring.”
“Boring?” I gaped, nearly dropping my slice in surprise. “How is what you do boring?”
Logan shrugged out of his hoodie and turned around so he could rest his elbows against the table behind him. His current pose put the more aesthetic benefits of demonslaying on display, Logan’s thin black T-shirt showing off what hoodies and his bulky uniform sweater hid. That evil, terrible, selfish sweater. I averted my eyes quickly before Logan caught me checking him out, busying myself with retying the broken lace on my otherwise perfectly tied Converse.
“It’s just boring. Killing demons gets repetitive. If I have any kind of social life, it’s because I’m tracking a demon to a party or whatever.” As he spoke, Logan pulled at the tufts of brown hair sticking out from underneath the brim of his hat. “It’s not like Ajax and I go clubbing. It’s not like I make friends in every city and keep in touch with them after we move.”
“Right. Of course not,” I said hastily. I took another bite of my slice and chewed it silently, but I’d lost my appetite, now that I’d been reminded that this friendship had an expiration date.
Logan was quiet for a moment before shifting on the bench to face me.
“Look, Paige. I didn’t mean it like that,” Logan said. “It’s more that I’m usually a ghost in people’s lives. The person who comes in—and then disappears. I never spend more than a few months in any place. I can’t keep in touch. There are no visits over Christmas break. There’s no point in making friends.”
“I can understand that—sort of.” I pressed my finger on a bead of condensation on the outside of my soda cup, swirling the liquid in loopy, abstract patterns as I spoke. “Why bother getting close to someone if you’re just going to get hurt, right?”
“When I leave, you mean?”
I stole a glance at Logan, and wondered if he was speaking in the abstract, or specifically about me.
“I’m just saying, I understand the impulse.” I sidestepped his question, pretending not to notice how the thought of him leaving—the first living, breathing person to know the truth about me—truly stung. “I don’t bother trying to get close to people, because they leave me or turn on me because I can’t tell the difference between the living and the dead.”
“There’s something to be said for being self-sufficient, isn’t there?” Logan shot me a sideways glance as he picked up his soda, and I nodded.
“It’s safe,” I admitted. “And smart.”
“At least for the time being, we can be self-sufficient with each other,” he said, holding out his cup in a toast. Our knuckles brushed as I tapped my cup against his, the ice slushing softly against the sides. Our eyes locked for a lengthy moment—too lengthy—in a gaze fraught with the kind of delicious tension and chest-warming rush of adrenaline that sets your heart pounding and your lips turning up into a smile of their own volition.
The kind of gaze that inspires trite songs that usually piss me off, because songwriters always rhyme “eyes” with “surprise,” and I always considered it lazy songwriting.
Until now. Because I could have sworn I saw deep affection and sadness in Logan’s eyes, and that surprised the hell out of me.
I stood up abruptly, nearly knocking my soda over. Logan reached out to steady the cup at the same time I did, and our hands touched—which made both of us jerk our hands back, leaving the soda to spill all over the bench.
“Sorry,” he muttered, flustered.
“It’s fine—I was done with it anyway,” I lied, equally as flustered as I busied myself by cleaning up, stuffing our garbage into the empty pizza box and mentally fighting with myself.
What was I doing?
What was he doing?
Had he just felt whatever moment passed between us—or was it all in my head?
These moments only happen when he’s trying to calm you down. You’re overreacting.
If I am, so is he. We keep having moments, voice-in-my-head! You can’t deny it.
Doesn’t matter: he has a clear and defined exit date from your life, so admire those warm brown eyes and that smile—and those arms—from afar and that’s it.
I needed to take my own advice and listen to what I’d told Logan earlier: Why get close to someone when you’re just going to get hurt?
“Let’s practice some more,” I suggested brightly. Logan nodded and quietly returned to the center of the roof where our earlier sparring had left slushy gray footprints in the otherwise pristine snow. We wordlessly fenced for almost another hour, the only noise breaking the increasingly overbearing silence being the discordant jingling of the swords clashing during our frenetic fight.