Soap Gets In Your Claws

Chapter 2: Dreaming From the Waist

Xavier Institute, 1974

I: Logan

Wolverine was sitting in his office with his feet up on his desk, brushing up on his Lord Byron when his nose began to tingle and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

He smelled that expensive Pantene shampoo she used, and Ivory soap, and that drugstore cologne that had the same name as the professor, and under it all, her smell, the sweet, sweet smell of Jeannie.

I dream of Jeannie with the dark red hair.

Worse, I think Jeannie dreams of me.

Logan looked up from his desk to watch her go past the door.

She’d been dressing differently that usual, lately.

No more tailored slacks and knee-length corduroy skirts with boots and stockings and Oxford shirts and sweater vests and blazers when she was teaching, and no more tee shirts and Levis after hours.

Gone were the tasteful leather and cloth coats, that little flash of slip when she walked by.

Logan had always been grateful that when Jean wasn’t in her costume she dressed in what the TV commercials called a tasteful, classic style. Even though, as a man who had come of age in the Victorian era, the sight of her bare calves covered only in sheer nylons and a hint of slip under a knee length skirt still made him feel dizzy, at least she didn’t run around in hip-huggers and miniskirts and midriff-baring tops.

At least, she hadn’t.

She was wearing miniskirts now, tight mini-skirts and thigh-high stockings with silky, lacy, ruffly garters, low cut blouses, high-heeled shoes and stacked-heel platform shoes and boots.

Hip-hugger jeans, tight, with wide belts, little hippie shirts, halter tops, tight bolero jackets.

Gym shorts and tank tops in the kitchen after class, bending over to look in the bottom cabinets.

Miles and miles of round, white, creamy thigh, a dizzying expanse of torso and slightly rounded belly, the maddening curve of her waist and flare of her hips and God help him, God save him, that faint, fine, trail of red down just under her achingly perfect cute little outie.

Oh, the agony!

Oh, the ecstasy!

Oh the funny way I walk all day because of my blue and aching balls!

If it wasn’t for Mel, and for Wednesdays with Napalm, he knew he would be dead.

He was too old for this shit, his heart couldn’t take it.

Napalm seemed to think that Jean was trying to light a fire under Cyke, that was the reason for her changed ways.

Mel thought that Jean was going crazy from the heat, and she was putting it out there for somebody, anybody to notice her, so that Cyke would get pissed off enough to get his mojo working.

Neither of them were jealous.

Napalm thought it was funny and Mel sympathised; she knew how Jean felt, after all, before she met Logan she couldn’t get within six feet of a man for two years without driving him to insanity, or death.

Logan rather felt like getting within six feet of Jeannie, lately, was going to kill him or drive him nuts.

He hadn’t been sure he wanted to stay when he first came to the X-Mansion.

What the hell did he have in common with a bunch of damn idealistic kids, and as beautiful as Charlie’s dream was, that’s what it was.

A dream.

But, they were offering him a couple of rooms of his own, a home, three squares a day, and regular work at something he didn’t have to be ashamed of.

It was a better deal than he would have got sharing an ancient shack with his crabby old hermit of a father up north in Howlett, until he could work enough hours logging to build a shack of his own.

And it was his last, best chance to do something with his powers other than return to being a drunken lumberjack, living in a shack with no heat, no plumbing, and no electricity.

Burying his beer and his food in the snow, having to walk outside to the outhouse to take a shit on a frosty winter morning.

Still, after a few months at the X-Mansion, spending his time amongst essentially good and decent kids made him uneasy enough to get nostalgic about a cabin in the snow, or even a cave.

Then, Jeannie came back from college.

It was the thunderbolt, love at first sniff, let alone first sight. He stayed at the X-Mansion, jockeying with Cyke, her ex, for Jean Grey’s love, and in the process, he came to know and befriend her, and a lot of the other members of the team.

By the time Jeannie decided to return to Scott, Logan had begun to think of the X-Mansion as his home, of his teammates as his family, and he was beginning to feel protective of the students, especially Kitty Pryde and Jubilee.

As for Jeannie’s love, he knew she loved him, as a friend, and he knew that somewhere in her, she loved him as a woman, but in the end, his love was something that she felt she couldn’t bear up under the weight of.

It was okay, sometimes it hurt worse than others, and Mel and Napalm had eased his pain, but he had become a reasonably contented, even a happy man.

But now Jeannie had to go and upset the apple cart.

She wasn’t just wearing these semi-sleazy outfits to get Cyke’s mojo working; they were for his benefit, too.

She may not have returned the love he felt for her, but, lately, her lust for him was just as strong as his lust for her.

If not stronger.

Almost every time she was in his presence she got horny, desperately horny, consumed even, by plain old hog lust.

The sweet, sweet smell of it filled Logan’s mind as well as his nostrils, it made him feel drunk and stupid and painfully horny, himself.

He was a man of great dignity and honour, and that was a good thing, because, if he hadn’t been he thought he might have got down on his knees and begged her, just once, to let him have just a little taste.

The very thought made him growl, deep in his chest.

Jesus, I feel like I got a tree growin’ outa my crotch, and she ain’t even come past the door, yet.

He realised he wasn’t breathing as Jean walked by, slowly, in a brown corduroy miniskirt and a low-cut ruffly white blouse, wearing stacked heel platform knee-high boots.

No stockings.

Thighs, thighs, thighs!

Just passing his office, thinking about him, wafted the sweet scent of her to him.

He held onto his desk, gritted his teeth, swallowed his snarl.

What the hell was Cyke’s problem?

Was he blind?

Stupid?

Crazy?

“Logan! Just what the hell are you doing? You little creep! Did you just stop what you were doing so you could ogle me as I passed by?”

Yeah, it was time to make deals with God.

Dear God, I know I ain’t your favourite person, but please don’t let her come in here. I’ll be a good boy, I promise, even if they’re gonna cut off my head I won’t claw anybody for a month, I’ll go to confession and scare the hell out of a priest, anything, just don’t let her come in here.

God, however, as Logan well knew, did not make deals.

What was it in that one Doors song, one of Naplam’s favourites, how did it go?

Oh yeah.

Look, she’s coming in here.

I can’t live through each slow century of her moving.

Good old Jimbo, he was partial to redheads, he knew what he was talking about.

Jean was mad, her eyes were flashing, but he didn’t smell anger on her.

Just the opposite.

Play it cool, Logan. Do not toss her over your shoulder, lock the door, slice her clothes off and bend her over the desk.

Even though if you did, she wouldn’t make any attempt to stop you.

“Just enjoyin’ the scenery, Red.”

Try to be casual.

Do not move away from the desk.

Logan put his hands under his desk and held onto it like it was a life preserver.

“I am not goddamn scenery! Look, Napalm might think you’re a good time and Mel Reinhardt doesn’t have any other choice, and I know some of our young female students think Mr. Logan is just the most shit-hot bad man they ever saw, but your gutter charm doesn’t work on me! If you want to continue this friendship, you had better continue to treat me with dignity and respect! Are we clear?”

“Yeah. Sure. All I did was look.”

“It wasn’t the look. It was what you were thinking.”

“Hell, darlin’, I’m just a man, ain’t I? I can’t help thinkin’ what I was thinkin’.”

He smiled.

She frowned.

She just stood there for a few moments and glared at him.

A few moments.

A few centuries of torture and agony.

“You can try!”

Jean slammed his door shut and continued on her way past his.

Logan let out his breath in a rush, detached his claws from under the desk; they had slipped out, at some point, and put his head down on his desk for awhile.

Didn’t she know what kind of effect she had on him? She was a telepath, one of the most powerful telepaths in the world, she had to know—

Wait.

She had to know.

She tryin’ me.

Baitin’ me.

She wanted me to lose it, completely, lock the door and slice off her clothes and bend her over the desk and give it to her every which way.

Wolverine broke out in a cold sweat.

Oh no.

No, no, no, no, no!

Jeannie was Cyke’s girl. Cyke was the team leader. And maybe they weren’t the best of buddyroos, but Scott was his friend.

If he took the bait, it would be disrespectful to Scott, and to Charlie for the kindness he’d showed Logan, and the faith he had in him, and it would be a great black mark on him, a dishonour, the lowest kind of animal behaviour he could possibly stoop to.

Panic.

Time to panic.

“It’s real simple, hoss. No matter what she does, you ain’t gonna touch her. At all. Ever. Not unless she breaks it off with Cyke, or he decides it’s okay for her to run around with other men.” Logan told himself.

He thought about it, and then put his head back down on the table.

Maybe it was about time he took Mel for that trip north they had been talking about.

Before the shit hits the fan.

II: Yukon Mel

Melanie “Yukon Mel” Reinhardt, AKA Femme Fatale was in her last year as a student at the Xavier Institute in 1974, but, at 24, she was much older than anyone else in her graduating class.

Four years earlier, she arrived at the school having hitch-hiked from San Francisco, homeless, broke and desperate, with nowhere else to turn.

Her cold and remote mother had divorced her beloved father when she was eleven, and driven him out of their lives because he was a mutant, and when she and Mel’s new and much-hated stepfather discovered when Mel was 13 that she was a mutant, too, they kicked her to the curb.

Mel’s father, a giant of a man, seven feet tall and able to lift a pickup truck over his head with ease, died by his own hand, broken and alone and far from home, but his daughter refused to share his fate.

She had grown up in the West Coast School of Hard Hippie, sometimes a hippie gypsy, sometimes a Earth Mother of a mountain man, sometimes a West Coast sharpie on the grift, sometimes riding on a wartime BSA motorcycle her mutant father had built just for her with her brothers as one of two female full members of the Hell’s Angels Frisco Chapter.

It was a helluva life, and she liked it, but Mel had a helluva curse to go with it.

She lived from hand to mouth, sometimes by the generosity of the times, sometimes doing odd jobs, but always by her wits. She was no stranger to the grift, in the parlance of the times she had seen the elephant. Melanie thought of herself as a true flower child, a free spirit, a genuine North American Outlaw, but she wasn’t a sucker, a pushover, or a soft touch. She wasn’t some naïve flower waif in for the summer from some cushy Midwestern North American home; the road was Melanie’s home and she went where it took her, asking no questions and looking no further than the next stop along the way.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

If Mel’s only mutant power had been super-strength, she would have been alright, but she also inherited the power that every woman in her father’s family had, pretty much since the trees of the Black Forest from which they had sprung were saplings.

Melanie was almost completely irresistible to men. She wasn’t too tall, but she was a big, busty German girl, a blonde and blue-eyed Dresden doll in tye dye and flared Levis and leathers with chains on but that wasn’t how she could get them to do anything she wanted.

Such was her mutation.

Mel was a Nymph, and had she any member of her family, or any other adult woman with the same mutation, or maybe even her father, who had watched his mother teach his sisters, to train her in the use of her powers from their first onset, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

But Mel came to her maturity alone and on the road, having lost her father before he could even explain to her what was going to happen to her at puberty.

She became afraid to get close to any man, because if she didn’t want their company for long, the effects were very bad for the men in question.

A man she met at a concert, once, killed himself a week later, after she failed to call him back again.

And when she found herself actually attracted to a man, even as a friend, her feelings amplified her powers to the point where she could literally knock a man out, and in some cases had literally driven them mad with desire, irretrievably insane, forever.

Mel found it hard, even with her strength to bear up under the curse, and she became a junkie.

It didn’t dull her powers, but it made her feel a lot better and look a lot worse, so it was easier to avoid men.

As she got older and her powers strengthened, she eventually got to the point where she was afraid to be in any place where she was within six feet of any man.

It didn’t matter that she had devolved into a hollow-eyed, greasy junkie, all stringy hair and gristly muscle and track marks and bloody leathers, all she had to do was growl and say “Get the fuck outa my way” to a guy she brushed past in a store, and he was hooked like a crook, and liable to face complete suicidal madness by the time she was leaving with her usual chicken soup and chocolate cookies, the only food she could bring herself to eat.

It got that bad.

She had sold her bike for one last fix and tried to OD, but she was too strong to die that way.

So, Mel ended up going cold turkey at a women’s collective in Big Sur, from where she made the cross-country journey in the VW camper she’d lived in since 1963, a long journey across the highways and byways of America, on the bum and with her thumb, any which way she could, until she arrived at the Xavier Institute with everything she owned in an army surplus knapsack, the clothes on her back, and two dollars, having had her last meal about a day ago.

Could Professor Xavier help her?

Of course he could.

She had been glad to have a home again, a room of her own and a roof over her head and three squares a day in a place where she was with her own kind.

But, still, Mel was a pretty normal girl, she liked men, for friends and otherwise, and when she started to learn to control her powers, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to her.

It meant so much to just to be able to talk to a man, again, even if he was just some kid.

It was great to be able to take the train to New York City, alone, or with some of her new friends, cats and chicks alike and go places.

Go see bands, go to movies, go have a drink, even just go sit in the park.

Sure, if she wanted to go to a bar she had to go by herself, because they had raised the drinking age in New York to 19, and she wasn’t all that close to any of the professors, but Mel didn’t mind that too much; she could take care of herself, and it was nice to be able to go to a bar and have a drink with a grown man and talk to him, even if that was all she could do.

She was looking forward to being able to progress.

It had been a long time.

But, amidst all these good vibrations, there was sort of a worm in Mel’s apple, and the more time she spent at the Xavier Institute, the more she realised it was a problem.

A big problem.

After a year and a half of celibacy, and a semester at the Institute, Mel was pretty sure that she had fallen in lust.

Worse, it was with a man who was her friend, like one of her brothers, the last man in the world she would want to hurt.

But there it was, anyway, screaming, intemperate, burn up the world and tear down the stars lust.

She always felt a little funny around Mr. Logan, right from the first time she met him and he jokingly told her she looked a lot like the girl on the bottle of his favourite German beer.

True, he wasn’t the tallest cat in the world, when she looked at him they were eyeball to eyeball, but he was a man, spelled M-A-N and no two ways about it.

For one thing, he was a grown man, not some 17-year old kid who wouldn’t know what to do with her even if he did have her.

Because of her powers, Mel never had much to do with men unless they were the Big Bad Wolf type. They seemed to be able to tolerate them a little better. Take Gypsy, her old man who was the president of the Frisco chapter.

He looked like something out of a Viking movie.

He was about six foot three, and he had lost an eye and a leg in the Pacific. He didn’t wear a patch, either, and he had long hair a darker color blond than hers, some of which he wore in braids that had trinkets and charms hanging from them, and a long red beard and moustache. He was heavily scarred and heavily tattooed, and wore jump boots and fatigue pants with his jacket and colors.

Gypsy was a good guy with a big, booming laugh and a seemingly endless capacity for beer until you fucked with him, and then he would make you the sorriest motherfucker on God’s Green Earth.

She had loved Gypsy since she was 15, and she supposed she would love him on the day she died and on into eternity, but her love would kill him, it almost had, and that was the end of it.

They still spoke, sometimes, and she wrote, sometimes, but, they did say it was better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all, and it may have been true.

Still Gypsy had left a hole in her heart that no amount of just talking to mutant boys and college dudes and other hippie cats could fill.

But, Mr. Logan was made from the same mould as Gypsy, and then some.

He was some kind of man. Broad shoulders. Barrel chest. Legs like tree trunks. Muscles on his muscles and so very hairy. Wild, thick black hair and blue eyes.

And he was bad, he was bad like Jesse James, you could tell.

The younger girls, they were always Mr. Summers this and Mr. Summers that, and Cyke wasn’t too hard on the eyes, but for one thing he was taken, and for another he was a nice guy, but he was truly Mr. Plastic Fantastic Square John Dry White Toast.

And they were teenagers, who didn’t know the kind of bone deep hunger for a man, a real man, that grew up inside you, and the terrible aching loneliness when you couldn’t so much as talk to a guy for years.

Logan was like the guys she grew up around in BC, right down to the lumberjack shirts and steel-toed work boots. One of those Great White North tough guys who wasn’t born so much as he grew out of the snow, whole and breathing with a chainsaw in his truck and a checked flannel shirt on and a beer in his hand.

Except, unlike most of those dudes, he was pretty cool.

A freak amongst freaks.

An outcast amongst outcast.

She could smell those tall Scotch pines on his logger shirts; he looked like home and he smelled like a real good time, and he even rode, too.

They’d had a few beers together in the kitchen at night, and she had a drink or two with him at the local dive, it turned out that she was from the same small town outside of Vancouver that he was, a little logging town called Howlett, which Mr. Logan said was named after the man that was supposed to be his father.

He knew her father, Erich “Fritzy” Reinhardt, who used to be the boss of the logging camp near Howlett, and she knew his real father, Thomas “Old Black Tom” Logan, a sometime logger and full-time mountain man.

Their fathers had been friends.

That was too close for comfort for Mel. She knew the man couldn’t be killed but he felt pain just like any other human being, and she didn’t want to hurt him, so she was straight with him that if he came any closer to her than six feet that her powers could kill a man and might hurt him and she wasn’t under complete control of them.

He never asked her how come it was she could get closer than six feet to other guys, he probably had it figured out, but six feet away was close enough to become friends with somebody, and it wasn’t long before Mr. Logan, combat instructor, the feared Wolverine, was just her good friend Logan.

She hadn’t had a friend like him since she had to leave her brothers behind; and she had never met a man who could understand the life she’d led and the kind of freedom she needed so well. Sure, they traded tall tales of a life on the road with the only other person from the Institute that liked the Thruway Tavern, but things could get heavy between them, especially on a long, cold night that reminded them both of the home they’d been driven from long ago.

Maybe they’d go back someday, she said.

Maybe to stay for awhile, he said.

They knew it was a pipedream, that it was miles and years between them and their youths in the Canadian Rockies, but it was a good dream to have, when you were drunk and you were lonely, it was the kind of dream that might come true, if only for a little while.

Mel had the market cornered on lonely, and the worst thing about it was that Logan eased her loneliness and made it worse.

She had a friend again, a brother, but he might as well have been one of the sisters she lived with.

Nights were the worst.

Paradise was becoming Hell.

Mel didn’t want to get in the wind, but, alone in her room, loneliness and misery assaulted her, and she lay in her bed, night after night, naked and tossing and turning in bad dreams and cold sweats and sleepless nights where she smoked and drank alone and tried to take care of it, herself, but that only made it worse.

The night she found out that Logan had got her bike back for her she let it slip to him that she wasn’t like Rogue; touching her wouldn’t immediately physically hurt him; she was more like human heroin.

The touch of her uncontrolled powers would suck every bit of pain and hurt out of him, body and soul, make him feel like he was the king of the world, and make him so dependant on her that when she got up to go to the can from his bed she’d come back to find him trying to saw his own head off with his claws.

But Logan laughed that off; he told her that he wasn’t an ordinary man, that an H-bomb hadn’t killed him, that whatever she had, he could take it.

Maybe he even needed it.

They needed each other, that was for sure, and Mel knew after spending one raunchy, sweaty night in Logan’s bed that even if he wasn’t hooked on her she was hooked on him; her own personal rough and ready hard-bitten outlaw Superman, the only man who could touch her without dying.

The only man to whom her powers were a blessing rather than a curse.

But he was hooked on her, as hooked as she was, and as he first year at the Institute wound to a close, they were out of control.

They did it all over the school. Even outside. Mel considered it a miracle she and Logan never got caught in the act.

It got so that every free moment they had they were all over each other. He had her in the kitchen at night on every conceivable surface, bent over his desk, on the floor in the gym, outside in the grass, in the danger room, on the couch in the TV room, on the floor in the TV room, they broke his bed, they broke her bed.

He’d come to her room without knocking, without asking, if the door was locked he’d kick it in grab her, throw her on the bed or put her on the closest possible surface and fuck her, and she never even though about stopping him, once.

And Mel, she’d crawl under his desk while he was working in his office; she waited for him when he got back from missions and peeled his uniform off him and licked the sweat off his hairy chest; she was on her knees or on her back before he could even get his boots off.

It was nothing but riding all up and down the highways and by-ways of New York, and fucking and sucking and wanking and spanking morning, noon, and night for the rest of the school year.

They quickly got to the point where if she would have asked Logan to go to Rio and get her a coconut, he would have done it, and if he asked her to ski down Mount Everest naked with a carnation up her nose, she would have gone right to the flower shop and then to the airport.

Mel didn’t know what she was doing, and she knew for a fact Logan didn’t know what he was doing, anymore, either. He wasn’t just cunt-struck, it was her powers, he was hooked on her but she was hooked on him, too. She knew she was riding him into the ground, and there were mornings when she woke up with her jaw clicking and her legs feeling wobbly as Jell-o and her back hurting something fierce, but she couldn’t care. If she could lavish her lust on him and her powers and it couldn’t hurt him, didn’t faze him, and why worry about tomorrow when it’s not going to lick itself, today?

They were both drunk a lot of the time, too, and not just a few beers drunk, they were really hitting the bottle hard, night after night after night.

That night was the absolute apex of their mad misbehaviour.

Then there was the nigh they went for a ride in Mr. Summers shiny new truck. They were drunk. Really drunk. Mel had some pot and she discovered that Logan didn’t smoke a lot of pot it went right to his head. They were in the truck, drinking and passing the joint back and forth and laughing like idiots and playing the radio really loud and Logan ended up driving all the way to Toronto.

They got a hotel room, and Mel started telling Logan about her grandmother in Vancouver, and how she was the only one in the family she was in touch with and that she hadn’t seen her for about seven years and before Mel knew it, they were on the way to Vancouver.

Alone with each other, Mel realised she wasn’t doing Logan any favours.

His thing with Jean Grey, it was driving him crazy, and what she was doing wasn’t helping. It was like drugs. She was hooked again, and so was Logan.

Mel was hooked on the feeling she got from having this incredible, indestructible guy that her powers didn’t seem to hurt at all, and Logan was getting hooked on how said powers they just took all that pain and suffering about Jean Grey and his fractured memories and so on and swept them all away.

They were literally fucking their brains out.

What Mel was doing to both of us was turning their brains into mush.

Then, one terrible night, she got up out of bed in the latest cheap motel with him, bleeding a little from three thin scratches across her back, and said she was going into town to get some beer and smokes.

Logan pinned her to the wall and waved his claws in her face, snarling at her that if she ditched him he would find her, and cut her all up so that no one would ever want her again, but him.

She barely got out of the room in one piece, and as soon as she was outside, she could hear him in there, howling in pain and despair, like a wounded animal.

Mel was horrified.

Her worst fears realised, again, she figured Logan had to go cold turkey. She took the truck and everything and paid the hotel bill and fled, intending to go back north, back home, to the mountains around Howlett, and build herself a cabin, shut herself off from the rest of the world, forever.

If she really, really needed a man, there was always Old Black Tom; if she kept it casual and infrequent she couldn’t hurt the old bastard, and if she called him Logan at the wrong moment, well that was his name, wasn’t it?

She sent Logan’s duffle bag and wallet back to the Institute, thinking he had gone home, with no intention to ever return.

She though she had her shit together with her powers, and that she could make it on her own, but things went bad, fast, again and Mel found herself in deep trouble with another kind of man her powers didn’t affect, a complete sociopath she met in a bar who tried to steal Mr. Summers truck and wrecked it and beat her up.

Yukon Mel, however, was a graduate of the School of Hard Hippie and stronger than six punks like this one.

She got the better of him, left him for dead, in fact, and didn’t care if he was, he had been asking for it. Coming to her senses, Mel got the truck and headed home to the Institute only to find that Logan was AWOL, somewhere in the wilds of the Great White North.

She spent weeks worrying that she had killed him, that he woke up the next day and she wasn’t there and he went off and killed himself, and then they found out he was alright, and that he had hooked up with Liv “Napalm” Napier, the Harlequin.

He was gone all summer, and when Napalm brought him back, she challenged Mel to a fight.

That was bad news. Napalm Napier was the only full member the New York Hell’s Angels had ever had, she was the ruthless alcoholic daughter of a supervillain and aside from being a mask in her own right, she had a reputation for ultraviolence and brutality that spread all the way to the West Coat.

Nobody fucked with Napalm without being scarred for life, and if you really fucked her over, your life and the pain she put you through was mercifully short.

Now Yukon Mel was a pretty tough chick, but she wasn’t crazy enough to take Napalm on, and decided to approach the matter from the standpoint of them being sisters, greeting Logan and his new feral, deadly friend in her colors when Napalm brought Logan back to the Institute.

Over time, the two of them, sisters, Logan’s old lady and his friend by the bonds of a blood oath they swore on each other, became friends.

Both women realised they weren’t going anywhere at had Logan’s best interests at heart, so they buried the hatchet, and not in each other’s heads.

Still, with Logan back at the X-Mansion, things had been difficult, for awhile, at least for Mel.

She managed to drag it out of Logan that he had gone completely nuts trying to kick her, and that the only reason he was still alive was because being hit by a truck didn’t kill him, jumping off the roof of the hotel she left him in didn’t kill him, clawing his own guts out didn’t kill him and he passed out before he could use his claws to saw his head off.

She wanted to throw in the towel, altogether, but he didn’t want to.

Mel kept working on her control, and after a torturous fall, by Christmas of 1970, Professor X told her that she had attained the maximum control she could over her powers. It was safe for her to be with Logan, again, but, he regretted to inform her that it was only Logan’s healing factor and his degree of mental discipline that would make it safe for him to be her lover, but Mel didn’t care if she couldn’t have any other men, Logan was good enough for her.

Who the fuck were you going to get to follow Wolverine, anyway?

She didn’t mind his Wednesdays with Napalm, either, and she was glad for her when the crazy chick met her match in the Comedian, an old army buddy of Logan’s.

As for Jean, Mel accepted Logan’s feelings for her with equanimity.

She knew there was room in the old Canucklehead’s heart and his life for all three of them.

The only thing that bothered her was the way it could torment him, at times.

She hadn’t been mad at Jean, until recently, when, in Mel’s opinion, she started purposely tormenting him, parading around in high-class hooker outfits and waving her pussy under his nose, then scolding him when he tried to take a sniff.

Mel came to Logan’s office after her classes were over for the day to see if he felt like going to happy hour over at their favourite dive of an eyesore, a wretched hive of scum and villainy back-alley, back-door, roadhouse pool hall juke joint bar with a parking lot loaded up with motorcycles and rusty pickups and muscle cars all full of drunk and lowlifes and bikers and loonies and misfits and outlaws and freaks and trouble where there’s always a good rock band playing on Friday and Saturday nights and decent people are scared to go there.

It was called the Thruway Tavern, and it was only a ten minute drive away and Logan was such a fixture there that when he wasn’t sitting in his usual place at the bar or in his usual table in the back corner with his back to the wall, nobody else was either.

She was a philosopher at heart, even-tempered by nature, and very slow to anger, but when Mel found Logan slumped over his desk with his head in his hands and a half-drunk bottle of whiskey close at hand, she got mad, and slammed the door on her way in.

“Baby, how can you let that square john chick do this to you? Just make a pass at her, man. If she tells you to get your hands off her, you can write her off as a prick teaser. And if she starts takin’ your pants off, give it to her. Screw her right into the wall, show her what a real man’s good for, maybe she’ll go find herself one. She’s just lookin’ for somebody to give it to her, anyway. I mean, hell, it’s just balling, everybody does it.” Mel insisted.

“Jeannie doesn’t feel that way about it, darlin’. And I can’t do that. She’s Cyke’s girl.”

“Yeah, you go a point there. Nothin’ good ever came from messin’ around with a brother’s old lady. But Jean’s askin’ for it! An’ she should fuckin’ know better! I mean, if workin’ her ass isn’t her thing, she should cover it up and go home. Or she should shake it at somebody who doesn’t live here. Jesus, I hate to see you like this, Logan.”

“Mel, darlin’, I don’t want you to feel like you’re second best, because you’re not, you’re my girl, my old lady, an’…”

Mel laughed.

“You think I care who got your engine running as long as I get to ride? It’s a nice day. C’mon, lets go get close to nature. Real close. Then we can take a ride the Thruway. Get trashed. Play some pool. Come back here in the middle of the night, get it on in the kitchen, get Cyke to come downstairs and scream at us. Maybe it’ll inspire him to do his job so that Jean quits torturin’ you. You dig?”

Logan thought about it.

God bless bad girls with good hearts; if it wasn’t for them, he’d be a lonely man.

“That sounds like a plan for the night ta me, darlin’. I’m buyin.” He decided.

III: Jean

Jean sat in her window in her expensive and uncomfortable revealing outfit, looking out over the grounds.

Scott was in bed, dead to the world; he had been working and teaching for three days, straight, without sleeping.

She saw Logan and Mel walking lazily across the lawn to the treeline.

They were both barefoot and he had no shirt on; they were probably going to take a nice walk in the woods and find a pretty green spot to go make love.

That was so romantic.

Then they were probably going to get on their motorcycles and go get ripped at that dive up on the interstate.

Not so romantic, but it might be fun.

Back in the city, Eddie Blake and Napalm were either at his place or hers, sitting on the couch with him in his bathrobe and her in her boxers and undershirt, two beers on the coffee table, looking for something violent to watch on television before he and Napalm went to work.

If they got bored she’s reach under his bathrobe for something to do, and after they got done making life Hell for New York’s criminal element or sending them straight to it, it was likely to be round two and then off to dreamland.

That was so unromantic, but at this point, Jean would be willing to take what she could get.
***The end of the month came and went, with no trip for her and Scott, and Jean just quit sleeping, pretty much altogether.

It began to take a toll on her, and that was when she started sleeping in other parts of the X-Mansion, and she realised it wasn’t that she couldn’t sleep, it was that she couldn’t sleep next to Scott.

It became hard to explain to those seeking a midnight snack and some TV whey she was always sleeping on the couch in the TV room, so she took to sleeping on a mat in the gym, with a pillow and a blanket.

Since nobody worked out in the middle of the night, nobody really noticed.

Scott slept like the dead; as long as she got up right before he did in the morning and was there when he woke up, everything was fine.

Except it wasn’t.

Jean began to feel like the Invisible Woman, she was Professor Grey, just Professor Grey, X-Man; she might as well have been a robot.

No one looked at her, no one thought about her, no one even remembered she was a woman, at all.

“Ya know somethin’, Jean? Ya look like shit.”

“I haven’t been sleeping much, Liv. Working late. So, tell me, what’s on tap for this week’s edition of Tales From the Crotch?”

Napalm chuckled.

“Well, ya know how it’s been real hot this week, first time it’s been hot this year. It’s too goddamn early to be this fuckin’ hot, an’ I’m not used to it yet, so I been sweltering in my costume. I mean, it’s not like I can get a summer weight one, and the hint of spandex so’s I can move don’t make canvas and Kevlar all that lighter, yunno? So, I keep it unzipped about a quarter, and all night, I kept zippin’ an’ unzippin’, fannin’ myself, zippin’ an’ unzippin’. Me an’ Eddie are on patrol on the docks, and it’s too fuckin hot for anybody to be out makin’ trouble.”

Storm eased her chair over to their table.

“I think I know where this one is going.” She said.

“The crazy fuckin’ bastard, it ain’t like he ain’t seen it all before, ya know? And I’m not lettin’ my tits flop out and it’s too goddamn hot to wear anything under the boiler suit. So, I’m fannin’ myself an’ pantin’, an’ all the sudden, Eddie just throws his cigar butt down on the ground and he says “Fuck this!” and picks me up. Picks me up. I mean he ain’t got time for me to walk to the car, he picks me up and carries me a few blocks back to it, and pulls the zip down all the way and sits me on the hood. The goddamn zipper goes all the way down to my hip, but not until I take off my gunbelt. So, we’re getting’ into this serious clinch on the hood, and I’m pretty sure he woulda given it to me right there, but, you know, with his costume on and my belt and my weapons and all, there was too much hardware between us. So I take off my belt and my guns and my machete and put em on the front seat, an’ unzip all the way. This pretty much leaves me open for business. An’ Eddie takes off his weapons and his armor and his shirt and puts them on the front seat, and Jesus, its’ just like in the comix I read, all he’s got on are his leathers and his boots and his goddamn shoulder shields. Now, what they don’t tell you in the comix is that he hasta take those off too, which he figures out after he shuts the door and gets in the back seat on top of me and almost breaks my nose on the steel. So, off they go into the front seat, and while he’s busy doin’ that, I’m busy unzippin’ his pants an’ lettin’ the beast out of its cage, ya know. And Eddie, shit, he’s all over me; an’ I’m all over him, and my costume’s gettin’ in the way, so while I’m pushin those skin-tight leathers down off his ass, he’s got the zip in the leg so I can take my costume off without takin my boots off unzipped, and one leg outa the boiler suit, and we are good to go.”

By this time, Jean realised that everyone in the room was listening, whether or not they were pretending not to be.

“And we’re fuckin’ rollin all over the back seat of that big black Caddy, I can tell you. The windows are fogged up, the car’s rockin’ and squeakin and it’s a good thing I did the work on the suspension, because lemme tell youse, when we quit rollin’ around an’ Eddie got on top an hit his stride, man, was he nailin’ me like a fuckin’ railroad tie. I got my legs up around his shoulders, an’ he’s found the sweet spot, an’ I got my hands on his ass like he’s gonna drive us right through the middle of the Earth to fuckin’ Australia. I’m howlin’ like a fuckin’ dog during a full moon, an’ Eddie’s sayin’ all these really dirty but kinda nice things to me, and then BOOM!”

Napalm slammed her fist down on the table.

“WHAM! We both go off, like it was fuckin’ synchronised. And there we are, a little bit later, sittin’ up in the back seat, sweatin’ like pigs, tryna put our clothes back on. An’ Eddie turns to me an’ laughs, an ya know what he says?”

“What?” Jean asked.

“He says, ‘Kid, keep your goddamn costume zipped! It’s bad enough you bein’ fulla hellfire, without fannin’ the goddamn flames.’ I thought that was a pretty good pun, an’ I laughed pretty hard, an’ then we got dressed and drove back to Eddie’s place. I was too tired to drive home, an’ I got up so late the next morning I was almost late to go teach my class, an’ when I was leavin’, Eddie was still in bed, snorin’ away.”

That little story was on Jean’s mind during a recent mission with the Avengers to thwart some loathsome and obscene evil that threatened to assail the helpless Earth from some frightening dimension at the dark heart of space and time.

Remembering the effect it had on the Comedian, Jean left her costume a quarter unzipped, sort of going for the whole Hollywood effect, to see it wouldn’t work with Scott.

In the thick of battle she forgot all about it, and the thrill of victory was also distracting, but she found herself the object of a horrified look from Scott when she and the others stepped into the X-Jet.

Cap’s face turned red and he pretended to cough and looked away, poor Logan looked as if he might actually be having a heart attack, and finally Kurt gently asked her if perhaps she was a little bit cold.

Iron Man was quite debonair about the whole thing.

“As much as I enjoy beautiful things, Jean, I think you should have that zipper replaced. It’s very possible you may have defeated the alien, well, let’s be polite and say single-handedly.”

Jean looked down.

At some point in time, the zipper had slipped all the way down to her belt, her tits had freed themselves from the confines of the suit, and they were just hanging in the breeze.

Her intent was to show a little cleavage, not the whole nine yards.

Jean was completely mortified. She wanted to cover herself with her hands and scream until she couldn’t scream anymore, or until someone mercifully knocked her cold, but she just zipped up to her neck in a cool and rational fashion.

“Of course. It must have been damaged in the fight. Oh well, at least no one lost his codpiece.” She joked.

Worse, the only effect it had on Scott was to mortify him.

Things were getting desperate.

Later on that same week, she went to the city, to Times Square, and tried to buy a dirty book, or a dirty magazine, or a dirty movie, several times. But she could never bring herself to walk into a place like that.

She could have asked Napalm to pick something up for her, anything to take the edge off of the furious frustration she had begun to seethe with, but she was just too ashamed.

And as she got more and more desperate, it became harder and harder to pretend that just thinking about Logan’s horrible, messy room that probably smelled like beer and cigars and old sweat socks where he had dirty clothes and stroke books all over the floor and probably never you changed the sheets drove her wild with lust, let alone thinking about the man.

It also didn’t help that she knew that he was probably still willing, at any time and in any place to give her what she wanted any way she wanted it, including a few things that she could never convince Scott to do for years and maybe even a few things he’d never think about doing.

Or that Logan was just this side of a wild animal.

Or that he had four score years of debauchery in which to practise his skills.

Or that his healing ability probably gave him incredible stamina.

He had, of course, once burnt for her with the white-hot intensity of a thousand burning suns, but how long can a man be expected to carry a torch for a woman who shows no interest in him?

But he had a girl on his dance card, didn’t he? Two girls, if you counted Wednesdays with Napalm. Three if you counted his lady crime lord in Madripoor. Not to mention the fact that she seriously doubted that if Logan was in one of his usual pool hall dives and between him getting drunk and having fistfights some woman who was reasonably good looking inquired to him as to whether he had ever seen the parking lot, and if so had he ever seen the parking lot with her, he would tell her he wasn’t interested.

He wouldn’t have to be free of responsibility, or in the goddamn mood; he probably wouldn’t even have to be in a prone position.

Just let down the tailgate on his old green truck, put the girl up on it unzip his jeans and give it to her.

He seemed like the kind of man capable of that kind of act of naked lust.

Jean was not a bad girl, she had never in her life done something that dirty.

Maybe she could disguise herself, use her telepathic powers so he wouldn’t know it was her.

She could almost smell the cheap whiskey on his labouring breaths, and feel the cold metal of the tailgate on her bare thighs, tempered by the heat of his hands, his large, strong, hot hands, finding her thighs bare above her garters.

The growl in his throat as he pushed, no, tore, that was it, tore her panties aside.

And she’d unbutton just a few buttons on his shirt, and rub his hairy, manly, muscular chest as his mouth hungrily sought hers, a real kiss, a deep kiss, and his hand, his rough, dirty hand, sliding up her thigh, coming ever closer to—

Oh no.

No, no, no, no no!

Am I having…fantasies…about Logan?!

Good Christ in Heaven, yes I am.

It was time for Jean to face the music, to quit telling herself he wasn’t her type, that what he could give her wasn’t what she was looking for, that she wasn’t interested in him, because that was all damn dirty lies.

She broke up with Scott before she went to NYU; he hadn’t wanted her to leave him and go to college, and she had a boyfriend at school, but when she returned to the Institute, she knew she still loved Scott and he still loved her and they got back together.

Logan had been there then.

It was when he first joined the X-Men, and he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

And not her type at all.

That was Napalm’s type.

Like goes with like.

The way Logan burned for her then, the lust in his eyes, she was little more than a goddamn kid, it had frightened her.

She had always been a little bit attracted to him, right from the start, but he frightened her.

Not now.

Not anymore.

She was frightened, alright, frightened of herself, frightened of ruining her life, and Scott’s, and even Logan’s, because she was going crazy from the heat.

They were friends now, though, she and Logan, good friends, old friends.

If she kept throwing herself at him, even though Logan was a man of honor, he was still a man, and he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself.

That would be disaster.

Jean realised that her first instinct had been the right one.

She had to find somebody else to do it to her.

Anybody, as long as he was a man, a real goddamn man.

And, whereas there was no such thing as a Superhero Dating Service, in the mask community, there was no shortage of real goddamn men.

Time to go and find one.

Soon.