Angela lies there, beside him in his bed, watching him sleep, her head propped up and resting in her palm… His chest rises and falls as he slumbers, so absolutely asleep, gone to this world. Not long before he'd been so alive and ravenous, insatiable in his desire. In a passion that could not be quenched he would not let her go once he had her behind the door to his place. His grip was firm — reaching back to her through the years that have passed them by — but his touch was soft. And attentive. Heat coursed through his skin, radiating from his lips and shooting through her body. He would not be denied, or slowed, or hindered. But she was so lost in him by then she could not have thought to defer him. Jordan held her, carried her to his bedroom and ravaged her, for his pleasure and hers, never making space for a single word. He knows her. Knows her mind, her body, her heart. He knows she keeps him some small place deep inside her, somewhere no one else will know how to get to to push him out; they don't need words, him and Angela. Silence is where they thrive. The look of an eye, the arc of a neck, the brush of a hand and the arching of a back; it says it all.

And still it wasn't silence between them, breathing never sounded that loud, that deep, that desperate for air and respite, and more. More. More

He'd had her behind his door, pinned there beneath his kiss, his hands revisiting her, this body, this body he can't forget because it belongs to the girl he can't get over. He thought himself in danger of losing his mind with her, but he did not. He was very much in control of his faculties, using every one of them to seduce her, and frustrate her, and satisfy. Satiating his own passion came to him through the attending to hers. His hands and lips found her in familiar places in new ways and there was no containing it. The wanting of the other person was immense, a thing not to be demurred.

Satisfaction came to them in a heated explosion of everything in them that had been dormantly waiting, and longing, and denying, and making do with failed facsimiles of the other. This is what had been silently, surreptitiously building up in the distance they'd created and sustained from one another. But face to face it was not sustainable. That distance, that divide — it was an illusion, a hoax, and a diversion. In each other's grips once again it was so clear: He'd never left her. She'd never forgotten him. In each other's presence the chasm between them closes as if it'd never been; the wall she'd built, brick by brick, around her heart disintegrates to dust. Pretense. It was all self-preservational pretense and posturing. How could she not love him? How could he have ever walked away? It was in her, and in her arms, he found again what he'd been missing, and he accepted it, took her into himself, though she'd never meant to offer it. Never meant to be there with him again. But it happened. In spite of all that she'd told herself for years. Because he touched her and it was like she'd been deprogrammed. He touched her and it was like so much of it had never happened; it was like it was when it was good. It was like it how it always is when it's only them two and the complete and busy expanse of the world and it's expectations and societal marks of acceptable progress in life are shut out and kept at bay. It was like— it was like it had to happen. Because that's how it always feels with them, in the beginning.

And that's where the trouble lies.

Lying beside him in a ruined bed, Angela breathes, the adrenaline still coursing faintly through her, watching him, letting her mind wander. Jordan. She blinks, and slips her hand on his naked hip. Jordan Catalano. Her first love. Her first heartbreak. And so many things in between. Is this love? He hadn't let her turn him away when she'd tried. And in the moment even as she'd pushed him off she'd wanted him to push back. And he had. Is that love? She doesn't know where to begin the disentangling of passion, and nostalgia, and transference, and longing, and loneliness, and aging, from whatever it is that love is meant to be.

She can't think in terms of love at all now. Not now when she's feeling this satisfied, and he's there lying inches away, undressed and utterly, willingly, achingly at her disposal. She can't think 'love' while he's there beside her, promising more of whatever it was that just consumed them like a maelstrom, because of course, there with him — and those eyes, and that face, and those old friendly hands — she'd have to answer yes. There never is an alternative when it's put to her like that. But the truth is, there is an alternative. Many. There's a life, and a world beyond Jordan Catalano. Beyond his moody taciturn ways, beyond the image of the car and the guitar and the careless cigarette. There's a life beyond the lean, and the touch, and the kiss, and the voice, and the batting eyes. There's even a world in which all that's rendered silly, and an act. Or, rather, a cover. Covering a not-so-secret secret that he doesn't have much more to offer than a smolder, a few laughs, and a contagiously reckless outlook. She can see it that way when she's away from him, keeping her distance, seeing every part of their story with equal clarity, but, when he's around, staring down at her, breathing in her hair, tracing the length of her arm with his fingertip, so much of who and what they are and have done to each other hazes over, and slips into a foggy midway, and being with him seems so possible. The life she could have with him is so near, it hangs heavy in the air above their sweaty heads. It's palpable. But she does not forget it could all be just a distractor. It could all be for naught. Again. He could, he could disappear. And — she bites her lip — if he stayed, they could, like every other time they've ever tried, just, not fit.

Again she looks at him: now spent, he lies there on his side, his back to her, head pillowed by his muscled arm. This is not where she'd seen her night going. This is not how she'd set her life to go. Jordan… Fucking, Jordan. He just keeps letting himself back in.

He breathes in deeply but he does not stir, and quietly, deftly, she climbs out of his bed, pulls on her underwear, and tiptoes across the room, pulling on a plaid shirt of his, long enough just barely to cover the tops of her slender legs. Angela listens at the door, hoping most to avoid encounters with any roommate who may be on the other side. But when assured it's only the stillness of the night that's in her ears, Angela twists the handle and pulls the door open wide enough for her to slip through.

The place is what she'd expect. Messy but not dirty. Not at all concerned with itself or its appearance. Filled with instruments and music equipment. Threadbare and under furnished, sparse and twenty-something bachelory. It's enough to live in. Enough for Jordan and his roommates; enough for three guys to live in, make music in, and bring girls back to. Angela thinks of all the girls Jordan must have brought up there, but the thought does not disturb her. She's only mildly curious as to who they were, how they met, what it was he liked in them. She drops the thought like a fallen leaf and moves on, stepping into the kitchenette, looking for what she does not know. Suddenly she remembers the first time he came to her at night: in her darkened kitchen speaking in soft whispers so as not to wake her parents where they lay above their heads. It seems so long ago. So long ago and far away, both in time and emotion. Some memories with him still feel so alive and recent — at least the memory of the feeling of being in the moment — sometimes her heart feels as if it's stopped, swelled and frozen with the sense memory of him, but truthfully, it all was so long ago.

Angela fills herself a cup of water and sits in the windowsill in the front room, sipping the cool water as she looks out into the night, and into the darkened alley.

"Hey," he whispers softly. Angela looks up. She hadn't heard him approach. He's across the room, barely dressed, standing in the darkness, waiting for her to come back to bed with him. But she does not move.

Jordan advances. Right in front of her, his soft pale eyes look down at her, "Watch'ya doin'?"

Angela only smiles faintly and shakes her head. Nothing...

"You cool?" he asks her, not quite adjusted to the sight of her so undressed, and in his apartment. She'd been so far away, for so long, and now there she is. In his shirt. And looking soft, and inviting, and mysterious, and disturbingly beautiful, there among album cases and cigarette butts and a half-dying house plant some misguided girl had once given to Shane.

In the street light from the window she looks so much like herself — quiet, and thoughtful, and softly, girlishly pretty — it is hard not to want to be closer to her. Slowly he pushes the unbuttoned shirt open from the collar, and he looks at her. He looks at her, in that same way he seems always to. In that way she couldn't understand except that it's how she sees him too — when she gets past everything else that's forever piled up between them — like it's the first time. Jordan never looks at her like he's seen her; he looks at her like he's seeing her. Like he's alive with her, right in their moment, and like he's never going to be the kind of person who'll decide for her who she is. At least— that's how it always starts. A look of... It's something more than admiration; it's a look that says to her: 'I know you; and I'll know every part of you there is you'll let me; and, I'll keep you.'

But if that's how it begins between them, something must change, at some point; slight and undetectable as it may be. Otherwise, how could he leave?

And, isn't that what happens? He leaves?

... Or... could it be... she does?

No.

... Right?

But either way, this is now. They're at the beginning, again, and he's looking at her like he hasn't seen her in years, like he hadn't just marauded her, and handled every part of her. His cool blue eyes fall on her like she's new, yet, so familiar — so something that had been missed. It's hard to breathe under such a gaze; being seen this well — without distractions, without illusions, but fully — bears down on her, a thing she can feel, and breath becomes short as her body constricts in expectation. With another slight touch Jordan's pushed the shirt from her shoulders, letting the soft flannel fall, and tumble, and pile about her wrists. She's nearly naked there before him, save for the thin fabric of her panties. She's seen, but unexposed. Held so warmly in those generous crystal eyes. Jordan.

He's beautiful to her in the darkness. Handsome as ever, if wicked in intention and rugged in appearance. He's much the same as when last she saw him, more defined in muscles perhaps, hair longer and more unkempt, but, the same. The funny thing is, had she never known him, had she only seen him in a bar, encountered him in a club, she never would have entertained the thought of going to bed with him. He's not her type. He's both too good looking and too much the rogue; in her adult life such things no longer have a draw on her. Were it not him — her first love, her youthful passion he would have no pull on her. But it is him. And he's as tied to her as anything. Who she is — what she's grown up to, what she's grown up from — it all comes back, in one way or another, to the years she spent with him. The years spent in the passenger side of that old red convertible, and standing on the sidelines of endless band rehearsals and minor gigs at inconsequential rock shows and local Thursday club nights, and pulling him, and being pulled by him, into dark and intimate corners, they never fully faded into history, and had formed the shape of her heart, and in some ways her life. He's not so easy to leave in the past.

He edges closer by a fraction, moving his right thigh just between the ends of her knees, subtly parting them open. Without the appearance of spreading her knees imperceptibly further apart, Jordan moves in nearer, so close that his leg, firm and solid, stands there between her own bare legs, touching her closely, touching her so she feels it immensely. The vague dull wanting. The aching that distracts and calls and … And…

He knows what he's doing. Jordan holds his hand out to her, slowly running his thumb down the lines of her face, down her nose to her jaw, lingering there at the parting of her lips, hitching at the edge of her teeth, where with fluttering eyelids she bites down, her tongue just brushing at his skin. His hands find her knees. Rubbing and gripping, he effortlessly pushes open her thin shapely thighs ever wider, so that he's there entirely between them, building the frustrating, mounting anticipation, forcing upon her the keen awareness of her desire. Her legs could not close together now should she want them to. But she does not want to. In this moment she wants so many things, but none of those is to shut him out. Jordan touches her breast, still slight, but with the heft now of womanhood; she is all herself, nothing excess, every bit of her body vital. And alive and electrified with current. He cannot withhold much longer, self denial was never a strong suit.

Angela lays her hand on his chest. She wants to feel him, there beneath her touch, strong and lethal — at least to her — but more she wants to feel his heart beat. She needs to know that he's feeling something. That this means something to him. But really what would that prove? A heart beats no differently from desire or love. Adrenaline is the same: danger, conquest, passion. But the way his eyes are fixed on her right now, not on her lips or on her breasts, but on her, tells her everything for that moment.

Her hand trails down his torso, to the edge of his elastic waistband, and there her fingers traverse the only boundary keeping him from her. He waits no longer to kiss her. And the kisses are long and wet and deep. But there is a wanting that will not be quelled by a kiss. And roommate or no, suddenly Jordan's bedroom is miles away — much too far to wait for — and satisfaction must be reached. Small articles of clothing are pulled at and tugged at and drop to the floor, like stray flakes of confetti, and there they are with one another: not long to stay two.