Its – he doesn’t know what it is, this experience. He’s never seen Nathan mad. Never had to. Their relationship or…or whatever it had been, had never given Nathan much of a reason to be angry. He seems a mess with it now, seems aggravated and upset and Logan realises that he deserves it.
Come on now, Ainsley. He thinks to himself. No need to self-victimise. “I don’t need to be a good driver, St Leger. I live in Manhattan.” And he knows its useless to say it. Its a useless argument with a pathetic man, apparently holding a grudge. Its a useless situation. Logan misses sensible, well dressed people. Misses the people who don’t look scruffy and exhausted and upset, who aren’t blocking him in, who don’t make him feel oddly torn open inside. All he can do is watch as Nathan moves his hideous car.
He doesn’t mean for the laughter to bubble up in his chest, certainly doesn’t mean for it to spill out of his lips. But he feels torn open, and the reality of all of this is dawning on him as bright as the sun. Nathan St Leger is in the parking lot of a police station, presumably a murder suspect. A hand flies up to cover his mouth, breaking the imperious crossing of his arms, and the laughter is spilling out regardless of it.
He shakes his head. The laughter keeps coming. He feels like a dick.
“They think you killed him, don’t they? Oh my god. That fucking fight you had. That’s their running theory? That you and–” A snort. Oh god. Why can’t he stop. “–That you and fucking Jonathan Marko snapped and killed him?”
They’re stupid. He cannot believe how stupid the Lovell Police Department are. His other hand comes up to rub over his face, chuckles dying down now, though the tremor of them remains in his words. “You set them straight, surely? ‘Sorry, was too busy fucking the guy who reported him missing to murder him, you’ll have to look elsewhere.’ Easy as that, eh?”
The fact that Logan thinks it's hilarious that he is, somehow, the prime suspect in a murder case is simultaneously a great vote of confidence and, at the same time, the most endlessly frustrating experience he could possibly be facing right now. But-- and fuck, he had been trying to consciously avoid actively thinking the phrase "prime suspect in a murder case" up to this point, just to keep his cool.
Car in park, now, he leans back, taking his hands off the wheel. It's not the most convenient place to be having this conversation, but he's not planning on letting this conversation last any longer than it has to. At one point in time, Logan had been the easiest person in the world to talk to -- and they'd done a surprising amount of just talking, for whatever they had been -- but he doesn't know, anymore, what it would be like to talk to Logan, even if he were in a better mood, and he's not really sure he wants to find out.
Because listening to Logan laugh, listening to Logan express everything he's been thinking all day but hasn't been able to say, he's already finding himself wondering, in the back of his mind, what it would be like to patch over the rough scar across his mind that covers the end of senior year, the beginning of his post-Lovell life, the struggle to adjust to a life that suddenly had a Logan-shaped hole right in the center.
"Yeah, really thrilled that I spent the morning recounting my college sex life to a bunch of cops but, like, whatever. Don't think it made a difference, seeing as apparently I'm not legally allowed to leave the state until they tell me I can. As if I don't have a fucking life to get back to or anything."
