8. Logan
8
LOGAN
“How in the fuck did you convince her to move in with you when a month ago you couldn’t even be in the same room together without one or both of you yelling?”
Remy, one of the men I’ve roped into helping me pack all Poppy’s shit and move it either to my house or into storage, stares at me like I have the answers to everything he could ever want to know. He’s got a point, asking me that question, because I still don’t know why Poppy said yes.
“I have no clue,” I answer honestly. “But don’t you dare jinx it, or I’ll have to murder you and bury your body in my backyard.”
We are currently standing in the living room of Poppy’s house, loading boxes into my toy hauler after she spent the last two days telling me what she wants to keep and what she wants to get rid of.
Ian walks out of the kitchen with Poppy’s massive KitchenAid mixer in his hands and a strained look on his face. “I picked this thing up thinking it might only weigh a few pounds. Why does it feel like I’m carrying a car over here?”
I snort, unable to help myself. “That’s a top-of-the-line professional mixer that chefs use in restaurants. I’m pretty sure the box said it weighs close to seventy-five pounds. You’re supposed to use two people to lift it. Shit’s heavy as hell.”
“Why does she have it?” He huffs, holding it in his arms awkwardly as he walks by us and out the front door. “She’s a dispatcher, not a chef. I don’t think anyone needs this. I feel like it should be mounted on wheels and in a museum somewhere.”
“Because she can cook better than anyone else I’ve ever met in my entire life,” I tell him. “And she creates new recipes when she’s upset or stressed to help her get out of her own head. So I got her this for her birthday a few years ago because if I’m gonna spend money on something, I want it to be the best. Not just something to get by. I want it to be something that she’ll keep forever. And it has to come, because I need to know that when I piss her off, she has something to do.”
“Great.” Remy claps his hands together and moves to the other side of Poppy’s couch. “That means she’s gonna be cooking all the time while she’s putting up with your idiocy.”
Linc walks out of the kitchen with the last box of Poppy’s dishes and laughs while he passes us standing there. “Good one. But we all know Logan’s gonna do whatever he can to make sure he doesn’t piss her off. He won’t want her to leave him like he’s left her over and over.”
“Haha.” Rolling my eyes, I go to the other side of the couch and pick it up. “She’s not gonna leave. At least I don’t think so.” The uncertainty I feel while we carry the couch out isn’t a surprise.
I wake up every morning convinced that Poppy is going to leave me. That I’ll open my eyes and she’ll be gone. Or I’ll come home from work and her stuff won’t be scattered around the living room, where it’s all sat since she walked into my house the first time after the incident.
Our house .
Because what I haven’t told her, or anyone else, is that I built that house for her. For the life that I promised her when she was sixteen. Someone needs to slap me or stab me with a spork, because every single decision I’ve ever made has been with the hope that one day I’d be able to claim her the way I want to.
On the outskirts of Birch Harbor, less than a half mile away from Dom’s massive farmhouse, I bought a huge chunk of land. Technically, I owned my land before he bought his. Over the last decade, I’ve spent every minute I’m home building our dream house. From the cured concrete countertops that she saw in a magazine as a teenager to the exact type of bathtub that will hold both of us.
Even the colors on the wall are inspired by Poppy.
And the thought of her seeing me, being with me, and then leaving me alone in the place I’m most vulnerable makes me want to throw up.
But I did this. I caused this.
And I’ll do whatever it takes to prove to her that I’m not leaving.
“Has anyone actually been to Logan’s house?” Linc leans against the trailer, his arms crossed over his chest. “I was trying to figure it out, but I don’t think I have. And Kennedy said that she hasn’t ever been there.”
“Nope.” Remy shakes his head and smiles at me. “Why is that, Logan?”
“Because you guys are slobs and my house is my sanctuary.” I raise the back end of the trailer, locking one side of it in place while Ian gets the other side. “Plus, I don’t like any of you enough to let you come over to my house.”
Besides that, none of them were Poppy. She deserved to be there, to see it, before anyone else.
“How’s Poppy really doing?” Dom walks up with a case of beer in his hands. “Sorry I’m late. Emma was sick. The end of this pregnancy is driving her crazy. I just dropped her off with the others at your place so that they could rest.”
“She’s in shock, I think.” I nod toward the back of the truck, where Dom proceeds to put the beer he brought. “Parker and the girls were planning on taking her out of the house for mani-pedis while we get the moving done. I don’t want her to try and overexert herself lifting anything. Believe me, she would absolutely be here if she thought she’d get away with it.”
“I can’t believe she’s pregnant.” Remy watches me with confusion in his eyes, and I can practically see the wheels turning. “I was trying to do the math on it. Have you two been secretly dating this entire time? Or did it start when we were all up at Sebago?”
I nod, not giving him a clear answer. No one understands the connection we have, and I don’t really expect them to. Just over four months before, we spent the week at a lake house together on Sebago Lake. Chloe’s brother, Kevin, was thought to be dead at the time. Part of his will had been a trip for all of us to the lake. So when the group of us went, Poppy was there. She was always there when I needed her. If I were completely honest with myself, being there changed everything. Instead of being able to walk away or just watch her from a distance, Poppy was there, in my space, with the smell of her shampoo on my pillow every single morning. I was a goner after the first night of her body wrapped around mine when she didn’t realize she was doing it. Every single day since then, I’ve craved her more than anything else in the entire world, and it’s only gotten worse as the days go by.
Ignoring the men who continue to babble about my love life, I walk to the front of the truck and get in. Once I close the door, I can breathe. I can focus on what I’m doing. After a few seconds of silence, I start the engine and all of a sudden there is nothing but the growl of the exhaust drowning out everything. With it goes the sound of my friends betting on when Poppy might smarten up and leave me.
Why can’t they see that she’s pure torture. The best kind, but still.
The passenger door opening takes me by surprise, and Ian gets in before I can tell him not to.
“Great.” He slams the door harder than he needs to. “We’re all alone. Do you wanna tell me what in the hell you were thinking?” If he had even an ounce of anger in his voice, I would have reached over the center console and punched him in the face. “You got her pregnant?”
But he doesn’t.
“I didn’t go out and plan on getting her pregnant.” Putting the truck into gear, I start down the road before anyone else can get in the truck with us. “It happened.”
“At Sebago,” Ian adds on. “From what Chloe told me, Poppy’s already twenty weeks along. That means it happened when we were going through Kevin’s bucket list.”
I swallow the memory of that trip and the panicked meeting that Ian and I had after they rescued a redhead from drowning.
“She died because of me, Ian.”
“You keep saying that. You keep refusing to believe in a relationship with the woman you still love because of something in your past. But you still don’t want to talk about it, do you?”
With a sigh, I looked at the man I trusted with my life. With my secrets. Hell, I trusted him with my mental health. But I didn’t know if I could trust him with the darkest truth I had.
“Is it enough for me to tell you that I’m not just assuming responsibility for something that happened? It really is my fault that Poppy took that bullet.”
Ian stared at me from his seat on the lake, in the reclining chair that he’d dragged off the deck and next to the shore. He’d done it in an attempt to keep our conversation a secret.
“Yeah.” Ian finally nodded. “It is. But one day, you’re going to have to talk about it. You’re going to have to open up. Because if you don’t, it’s going to devour you.”
“It’s already done that.” I closed my eyes and thought about that night. The night I lost everything. “Did you know that she wasn’t even eighteen at the time?”
Ian nodded but didn’t say a word.
“Yeah. I’d just gotten my date for boot camp, and we were on our way to celebrate with our families. I took a shortcut through the alley next to Paddy’s, and out of nowhere, there he was. With a gun pointed right at me, or so I thought. He didn’t want money or anything else. He was there to take her from me. To hurt me.”
Ian didn’t interrupt, which is probably why I had the courage to keep going.
“I held her in my arms while she died, and I’ll never forget the blood pooling around her. When I finally pulled my shit together and started CPR—which I’d learned because she insisted it was a skill I needed before I left home—I didn’t even call 9-1-1 first. I watched the life leave her eyes, and I swore right there that if she lived… I’d do anything in my power to make sure she never hurt like that again. And if I was the reason once, I’ll be the reason again. I meant it. What I said before. I’ll eat a bullet before I let her get hurt because of me.”
“What’s changed, Logan?” Ian brings me out of the memory within a memory, and I can’t breathe with the realization that I’m sitting in front of my house. While he was talking, and while I was lost in a memory, I drove here.
His words echo the same ones that Poppy told me the night before last. When she let me hold her and our baby.
“Nothing.” That one word is the worst thing I’ve ever said. It was the admission that I don’t deserve her, and I never will.
Tapping on my window gives me the excuse not to continue the conversation with Ian, and I turn to find Dean Blake, Poppy’s father, staring at me through the glass.
“I brought the boys.” He nods over his shoulder, where the other members of his motorcycle club are gathered, along with both my brothers and Poppy’s. “Let’s get this unloaded so my girl doesn’t have a reason to complain when she gets here.”
When he follows me inside a few moments later, he stops short.
“Yeah,” I answer his unasked question.
On the wall are all the photos that had ever been taken of Poppy and me together. Not only that, but the photos of our families. There are a lot. Picture after picture, framed and lining the walls, telling our story. Our parents were friends before we were born. Poppy’s older brother, Sam, was—and still is—one of my best childhood friends, and our entire youth was spent together.
Dean isn’t the only one to pause when he walks in. Sam laughs and touches the frame of one of my favorites.
“Is that Poppy the night of our prom?”
He comes up beside me, a smile still on his face. “Yeah, that’s her. I still can’t believe she thought that was the right thing to wear.”
Poppy, thinking I didn’t mean it when I asked her to prom, decided that she’d wear pajamas when I showed up to remind me why I shouldn’t mess with her. Except, I did mean it. It was the first time I’d ever worked up the courage to actually ask her out. And when she realized I wasn’t just being a jerk, she ran upstairs and got dressed in less than ten minutes. The photo in question was taken when she came rushing back downstairs, and all of us were there together. Me, Charlotte, Emily, and Finn standing together, with Poppy by my side next to Sam and Evie. All of us dressed to impress. The only one missing was Bax, who spent that night sick in bed.
Poppy stole the show, though. Wearing a dress that I couldn’t even call green at the time, because it was so much more, shimmered under the soft light in her house. And her hair, which she never quite controlled, fell free around her shoulders.
We laughed, and I got to wrap my arm around her for the first time, as more than a friend.
That night was the beginning of the end, and none of us realized it.
It was the last picture I had of Lettie. The last one taken before her overdose.
“Sorry I missed the camping trip.” Sam claps me on the shoulder, taking away the sting of that particular memory. “I had a run for the prez that couldn’t wait. Thank you for saving her, though. Don’t know what I’d do without her.” He clears his throat unnecessarily. “Pipsqueak causes more trouble than she knows.”
“That’s the truth.” Dean grunts from next to me, his eyes locked on one of the other photos on the wall. “You plan on taking any of that down before she sees it?”
“No,” I tell them both, an edge of finality in my voice. “She deserves to see it all. To have all of me.”
Neither man says a word as we stand there for a few moments, remembering a life before chaos and destruction rained down on both of our families.
Silently, I think back to her words in the dark of night. To the fact that she said nothing changed.
She’s right.
Nothing has changed.
I still love her just as much as I did when I was eighteen and didn’t know what love really was. Just as much as I did when I held her hand the night of my junior prom, when she was a freshman, and I had to hold my breath because her smell almost drove me over the edge.
Even then, when I had no clue what my actions would have cost in the aftermath of Lettie’s death, I loved her more than life itself.
I meant it.
Nothing’s changed.
My feelings for her have only gotten stronger with time.
But maybe, maybe it’s time that I sit down with her so that I can make sure she understands exactly what I’m talking about. What’s at stake with the two of us being together.
It’s not a decision I can make on my own anymore.
Maybe it never was.
“Let’s get this shit done already.” I clear my throat, ignoring the knot of emotion in my chest. “The beer’s cold, the boxes are heavy, and I’ve got pizza on the way for dinner.”