Logan grins and just squeezes my hand tighter. “The thought never crossed my mind, sir.”
“I want to show you something.”
It’s later, after everyone’s gone and left us to each other, when Logan grimaces as he slides out of his bed. He takes my hand, leading me through the huge expanse of his penthouse, past the paintings on the wall, past the floor-to-ceiling windows with the jaw-dropping views of Manhattan.
He see’s me taking everything in and shakes his head. “This is all meaningless, you know,” he says quietly. “It’s a disguise that your father taught me put on. To hide who we are and to blend in.”
“Logan, you don’t have to tell me anything, you know.”
He shakes his head. “Hang on, this is important.” We’re at the end of a hallway in front of a door, and he fishes a key out of his pocket and slides it into the lock. “You asked me before what your father saved us from.” He opens the door and leads me inside. “I want- I need to show you my life. Where I really came from.”
He flicks on the light, and I gasp.
The whole room is full of framed photographs, hanging on the wall, hundreds of them. They’re of dusty, run-down-looking streets running past grimy looking oil derricks, of a young kid who can only be Logan with that grin on his face leaning against a beat-up looking pickup truck. My eyes scan over the walls, seeing pictures of the desert, of tanks and burning buildings. I stop on a snapshot of Logan in full combat gear, older now than the boy with the truck and looking completely shattered.
I gasp, bringing my hand to my mouth as I step into the room and let my eyes just follow the timeline of the life of the man I love. There are villages in Africa, of smiling kids kicking a soccer ball around a grungy looking field. Pictures of Hudson and Logan gritting their teeth and grinning as they sit in chairs getting tattoos in some hut of a building, Bryce smiling sadly at the camera, Hudson striking a pose, Logan wearing boxing gloves, looking sweaty and triumphant with Javier of all fucking people standing with his arm around him.
And then there are pictures of my dad.
From there the pictures change. We’re out of the jungle and in a city that can only be New York. There’s Logan grinning and looking completely out of place behind a thick wooden desk with a view of the city behind him. There are shots of him looking bored at lavish looking parties, and standing next to a new sports car, followed by more of both.
And then we’re back in what must be Africa, and my dad’s there as well and the two of them are holding shovels and standing next to what looks like a new water pump. We’re in the desert somewhere, Hudson, Bryce, Logan and my father standing alongside others I don’t know in front of a brand new building that I can tell is a school from the playground out front and the boxes of books being unloaded from a truck.
And it’s when I realize that this is everything I never knew about my father that I start to cry.
“This is our past, Quinn,” Logan says quietly from behind me. “It’s the past that I need to remember.”
He touches my arm and I turn as he takes my hands. “I need to know the past, because it’s the path I took to get right here to you.”
Epilogue
Quinn
What’s funny about growing up is watching yourself and those around you change and grow in ways you’d never have imagined. For instance, who would’ve known that my tom-boy of a middle sister who would have just as soon gotten her teeth pulled than wear a “stupid dress’ would’ve been the first one of us to have the romance novel of a happy ending. The one where everyone ends up barefoot and pregnant and getting married? And by the same stroke, if you’d have told a younger, nerdy, never-miss-a-curfew, never-step-outside-the-lines me that I’d end up with the swearing, tattooed, bareknuckle boxer of a bad-boy, I’d have thought you were nuts.
But hey, that’s love; totally nuts.
Logan and I aren’t getting married, not yet anyways. Reagan and Hudson, for all that passion and drama, had their history. Theirs is a story that they started writing five years before they found each other again. But Logan and I are just opening our book up. Ours is a story we’re still learning to write, and one I might add that seems to get steamier by the page.
We’re also not pregnant. Not yet anyways. For now, we’re too busy helping the frankly staggering amount of kids out there in the world already that don’t have anyone. There are the hospitals we’re finishing up with the Archer humanitarian program in Cuba, Liberia, and Guatemala, but also the schools in Ghana and Afghanistan that Logan and I are just doing on our own on the side. I mean, just the traveling is enough to keep me busy enough that getting knocked up really isn’t an option.