E is for Enough

[parallax23]

ENOUGH

 

He sighed and stared at the bottom of his glass. It was empty. Again. An entire bottle of whiskey and it still wasn’t enough to dull the pain. How much more before he finally found relief or just died?

He didn’t dare count how much he drank since she told him. Maybe it was because time had just stopped while he kept pouring. It flowed past him with every burning mouthful that slid down his throat and clouded his mind.

He had meticulously counted every measured glass drunk in the hours before she validated his suspicions. Those first six glasses of Jack Daniel’s didn’t count because that was just speculation drinking. When he didn’t know what they had been up to in her apartment that night, he could at least hope that he had been mistaken. But really, if he didn’t believe that was the case, why did he open the liquor cabinet the moment he returned home? Why didn’t he stop pouring after the fourth glass?

Confirmation of betrayal drinking was more insatiable, more unrelenting than speculative drinking. Speculative drinking involved stopping the imagination. Confirmation drinking was trying to blur out of reality itself. There was no stopping. You just kept going until something gave out – your mind, your heart, your liver. Maybe if you got lucky it would be all three at once and your worries really would be over.

He remembered that it would take a lot more than what he had to make an X5 get to that point. But he wasn’t an X5 and it still didn’t seem like enough to drown out the sorrow.

Betrayal had leaked into the very bones of his existence and nothing was going to wash it out.

His face was growing warm with a sticky wetness. He staggered into the bathroom to splash some water on his face, washing away the tears that had fallen for losing her once again.

It was an odd sensation, feeling his hands move across his face. It brought back memories of the last time he held her face in his hands, the last time he had kissed her before the window for intimacy was slammed shut on them once more. She had gone off with Alec before to hunt down that gossamer thing. She was always dragging Alec along these days. Heck, if Logan wanted Max, dialing Alec had become an option and often the boy knew where she was.

Running his tongue along the roof of his mouth, he wondered if they had been together then when they had the temporary cure. The thought made him almost taste Alec inside of her mouth as it collided with his own. He re-edited that once sacred memory to make it another piece of damning evidence against her.

He wasn’t sure when the idea of Max and Alec being intimate had first entered his mind. It was probably when Max let it slip that Alec had been assigned as her breeding partner that he first imagined them getting acquainted horizontally, though she assured him that that wasn’t the case. Besides, Logan figured that if Alec had slept with Max that he would’ve taken the time to torture everyone with that knowledge by casually dropping graphic details into every day conversations.

Well, that showed how much he knew about them. About her.

What they had been doing before Logan saw them that morning had caused Max to smile at Alec like that, to have him pull her head close to his without her pushing him away or hitting him wasn’t lost on Logan’s imagination in the car on the way home. How many unanswered phone calls during the early hours of the morning, secret hushed conversations, hours spent together as partners in crime would it take for Logan to see what was right in front of him?

When he shut his eyes, he could see them taking stolen kisses when no one was looking. He could imagine them on her bed, Alec touching her everywhere he couldn’t, greedily helping himself to every inch while Logan could only watch. Max would smile back at Alec with that look of trust in her eyes as she was under him. They knew each other’s dark secrets and didn’t hide anything from one another. Alec was as strong as she was if not stronger, he wouldn’t have been intimidated by taking her on. Alec knew what he wanted and he never denied himself. It was just one of the many ways Logan would never be enough for her.

Damn that long drive back to his apartment when he had to be sober.

It was more than screwing, Logan had seen that too clearly. The tenderness in their eyes was what wrought him with the real betrayal. If it was just them screwing each other, she wouldn’t have walked him out of her building. She wouldn’t have watched him as attentively as she had. He wouldn’t have lingered to embrace her in reassurance.

Alec could hold her, touch her, console her in a way Logan couldn’t. It wasn’t just about the virus. If it was just about sex, Logan could have lived with that until they found the real cure. No, this whole situation made him aware of just how little he knew about life in her shoes.

Logan didn’t know about being constantly hunted for being different, living every day in fear of being caught and being stuck in a dead end job because you wanted to go unnoticed even though you knew your talents were greater than anyone could imagine.

Logan didn’t know the unspoken tortures of Manticore that Max refused to share with him. The same tortures Alec spent even more years living through.

Logan wasn’t smart enough to play her at chess with any hope of winning.

Logan wasn’t strong enough to fight her or take a hit, let alone pull punches the way Alec obviously did when he fought her.

When had he ever been enough for her?

She was so much more than he was. Sometimes she made him feel inadequate, but that had been fine because when he was with her she let him into that secret world of hers that none of her other friends saw and that was enough. But Alec had access to that world too, and Jam Pony and Manticore and Crash. Alec and Max were the two people that kept Joshua company in that lonely house. Heck, they’d even gone on heists together, something Logan wouldn’t nor couldn’t ever do.

She’d finally had enough. She’d decided to be with someone who could be her match in every way. Running from a past that didn’t let them forget. Running from a present threat to everything they held dear. Someone who Joshua truly considered a friend. Someone who fit right in at Crash and with the other bike messengers. Someone who was like her.

She had always wanted someone like her in her life, another X5, she had once said. Now she had him.

It wasn’t that it didn’t make sense for her to be with Alec, but the fact that it made too much sense that drove Logan to give up on his glass altogether and drink straight from the bottle.

He had found a half empty bottle of gin in his kitchen, it wouldn’t be enough to kill him the way he wanted to die, but maybe it would lull him into a sleepy oblivion with its inadequacy and that would have to do.