Mid morning the next day, after second period, Angela went looking for Jordan. She wanted to clear the air, and find out if everything was still okay between them after last night's awkward altercation. She found him outside, by the vending machines with Tino. Tino made a charmingly off-color remark about interruptions and fathers walking in, and that was about all that was said about it. Jordan didn't seem all that fazed. He didn't say any of the list of things she thought he might have; he didn't avoid her eye contact or walk away, and he didn't seem at all interested in her prepared apology and retroactive reflection that perhaps she shouldn't have handed over a house key to him like it was nothing. What he did do was take her hand, his long lanky fingers entwining tightly with hers, and lead her back behind the groundskeeper's shed and lean into her with such unspoken intention there was no mistaking what was on his mind.

Standing there, tangled up with him, Angela's eyes flutter up to his, as her lower lip catches in her teeth and she lingers in heated anticipation. "Didn't sleep last night," he tells her huskily, his intense gaze never releasing her from his attention. His proximity is making her breathless and heady, and a faint blush climbs her cheeks, but she emotes no verbal response. But Jordan isn't looking for words, more so he takes pleasure in her difficulty to muster some. That grin — that jaunty, self-satisfied grin, the one that shows he knows exactly what he's about — takes hold of her, and the slump in her posture against the wall, and the upward arching of her mouth towards his is much closer to the mark he's after. His bottom lip brushes against her forehead when he speaks again, "Thinkin' 'bout you…"

Angela's lips part to speak to him, but instead her fingers reach out and slip beneath his layered shirts to touch his lean waist — his skin is warm. Intoxicatingly so. The kind of warm that makes her want to wrap herself up in him. And wish he still had a key to the door that would grant him free access to her bedroom. When she's with him, this close, with such loaded possibility simmering between them, it's easy to forget all the rest. She gets dizzy, and heated, and breaths come less easily, and she thinks about him, and about the burning in her lips and the dull yearning somewhere deep inside grows a little more acute. And she's back to before, to when what mostly occupied her mind was him. Before bags were packed, and bathroom doors were locked, and her house went quiet. Jordan Catalano makes her feel normal — and alive — because he isn't going to wait around forever just letting her be sad, watching as her worry piles higher weighing her down. From the start she liked him. She'd always wanted him. Now it's a need, and a want, mixed in desire and… a willingness (a happy willingness) to be readily distracted. Taking hold his hip belt loops in her hooked index fingers, Angela tugs his body — his hips, closer to her.

And then their lips meet. Their lips and their tongues. Hands in hair, faces flushing, chests nearly heaving. The bell rings, and by the time the electric blaring dies out, they disentangle, her small hand slips into his, and they walk to class.


"Hey," Mr. Demitri interrupts his U.S. history lesson, "Kelly and Dylan—" he says dryly in the direction of Angela and Jordan. All eyes in the classroom follow. "We all think it's cute you two finding each other — teenage love and all that—" his reprimand takes on a style unlikely to flat-out villainize him to his other students— "But get it together." Angela, slightly mortified at having been singled out, freezes in place. "Sit up. Feet, off laps. Learn something." Demitri shoots them an indiscernible look, but one that Angela thinks is safe to take as he's quickly losing his patience with her and from the start has never had any for Jordan; then he turns back to the board and to the lecture he'd been giving, though most eyes in the classroom remain trained on them.

Stung a little from the unexpected public scolding, but not otherwise fazed, Angela sits up a little, straightens her posture and removes her feet from Jordan's lap. Jordan, on whom the allusion to the lovers on the adolescent soap opera sensation is completely lost, leans back slightly from her, but otherwise makes no change to his countenance or lack of engagement in the civics lesson.

Angela though did get it (his meaning), as did their classmates. There may have been a point last fall when she would have been thrilled at such a public acknowledgment no matter the humiliating form it took of her connection to Jordan Catalano, but it is not last fall, and she is not so desperate to prove something now. Jordan is her boyfriend, she no longer has to scrounge pitifully for evidence that he might be, so at this point, especially given her mood lately with everything else going on, she'd much prefer to avoid being made the center of attention and fodder for a teacher's tried temper. In one heavy perfunctory motion she drops her feet to the scuffed and ever-dirty classroom linoleum, looking semi-starkly at her instructor all the while. True, maybe Jordan and she were a little too enwrapped in each other than appropriate for a classroom — desks edged in closer to one another, limbs entangled with one another, eyes on each other more than on the board — but still she resents greatly being called out in such a manner.

Jordan would have taken issue with and bristled at the censure, but it was said without malice, if with impatience, and Angela's only reaction was to drop her legs from is lap, so he lets it go. And wonders what has changed that he would find himself in the position of sitting in class with his girlfriend's clothed legs flung casually across his own. Less than a year before he never would have been seen doing such a thing. From his start with girls he has never been big on public displays of any kind. And something like this? He never before would have felt so comfortable with this casual closeness, in public, well lit, while he himself's not at all lit. But there he is. And he isn't especially angry at himself for it either. He can't exactly look back and point to what lead to these changes — going to class, keeping a girlfriend, and all the other things he is or is not doing — but he can see them in himself if he ever pauses to look.

...

After class Angela walks with Jordan to the west exit where he'll walk out the door, take the steps two at a time, take long indifferent strides to the sports fields, duck under the field bleachers, meeting up with any buddies also at their spot, and light up. But before he does, Jordan, without looking, reaches back behind him as he passes through the heavy door and pulls her with him. Once outside he, in one quick twist of his wrist and instinctual lean, has her backed up against the brick wall, and he's leaning into her (his hands at either side of her head, his one knee surreptitiously inserted between her thighs), hovering over her in a sudden cloud of desire and frustration. It all happened so quickly and unexpectedly Angela doesn't have time to think about all that's weighing on her and all the reasons she has to be sad or locked up in her own head, and instead she giggles and smiles up at him with those large bright eyes of hers, and there, so close to her, his lips just lingering over hers, he studies her intensely, and sees in her face not the girl who's taken too much on trying to keep her fragmented family together, but the girl who last year he couldn't walk away from — the girl who keeps him interested, and from feeling too hardened and untethered. His breathing slows as he concentrates on her flushed waiting lips and her fluttering blue eyes. He wants her. Jordan wants her in every way, but right now he wants her mouth on his, her tongue tangled with his own, her hands on him, clutching at him like she does sometimes, clutching at him like she won't ever let go. And he kisses her. Deeply. And with force. Till she— can't— catch— her breath.

She doesn't kiss him like this in her house. Not usually; there there are other things taking precedence in her head and over her emotions, but in the sunlight outside of school, he has her full attention. He can tell — because once again Angela's hips are pressed tightly against his — something that's been happening more often in the recent months, and he knows what it means: Finally Angela, though she may not be ready to acknowledge it herself, is asking for more. Jordan is stirred by this thought, and he thinks right then about taking her home in his car and going to bed with her in the way they still never have... The notion is more than tempting—

Brrrrrrriiihhhhhhrrr!

The bell rings. And for the moment the spell is broken; he backs away some. "Keep thinking this," he whispers heavily in her ear. "So hot." Then he breaks away, and leaves to smoke the cigarette that will make him late to his next class, if he even goes at all.

The breathless huskiness of his voice remains in her ears as the warm caress of his breath stays on her skin, and her thoughts are all of him. Of Jordan, and sex, and heat, and passion, and firsts. And the rush and thrill of spontaneity that comes of being absolutely in and of a moment. What her thoughts are not full of is promises, and vows, and words that have or may be broken. To think of home is to think of these things, and to think of them is to doubt, and question, and self-shield; and once that begins it's Jordan she pulls away from, and she does not choose to do so. Not now, while she's feeling so alive, and rightly so young, and not so driven down. Angela's sparked eyes follow after the figure in the russet corduroy jacket and she watches her boyfriend saunter easily toward the bleachers.

She blinks softly. When she thinks of him, of Jordan Catalano, who's faced much worse than she, much more directly, and for much longer, but is still... as easy going, and unhounded as he is, it gives her comfort. She feels better with him around; both safer, and stronger. And her head ushers in thoughts of maybe sometime soon not calling it quits, falling asleep, when next she's in his arms wrapped up in him in bed.