Fresh from the shower, he reenters his room in his snug-fitting grey jersey boxers, surprised to find her already up and fully dressed. It is early for him to be up and showered, but he woke up beside her, his legs tangled in with hers, and nothing in him would fall back asleep. He'd watched her a little, lied flat on his back and listened to the soft fluctuation of her breath, and when the clock on his phone hit seven, he threw back the sheets and walked himself to his shared bathroom for a quick shower.
She's gathering her shoes when he returns; he's pulling back his long wet hair into a knot at the back of his neck, watching her. He doesn't like how polished she looks. It's too early for that. Sunday mornings after a night like they had shouldn't start with one party halfway out the door looking as sharp as she does. Her well-cut angled bob's settled easily back into place, the eye makeup she slept in with just two quick swipes under her eyes has taken on a chic smoky look, her slim jeans transitioned perfectly to daytime and her white cropped jacket survived the night without a wrinkle. If not for the heels instead of flats, there'd be nothing telltale about her as a woman who never saw her own bed the night before. She looks like a person on her way to a meeting, or to a brunch; you'd never know he'd thrown her up against his bedroom wall last night. Jordan hates how good she looks. He hates how easily she appears to be able to erase him from her life. He had her breathing so deeply, gasping his name, clenching herself around him, and now he's a mistake walked away from, a history closed tightly within a book. That's all he's been rendered in this morning light. But his sheets still smell of her, and his head's still full of her, and he's not letting her off this soon.
As ever, he doesn't know what he wants – in the larger, grander sense – but he wants more of last night. More of Angela Chase in his bed and in his hands, and he's watching her now step into her shoes. "What're you doing?'
At the sound of his voice Angela looks up. She smiles, but it's a benign thing, it isn't something that's meant to stir him, or especially encourage him – it's a mild breaking away, a cordial self-excusal. "I have to get going." She's being polite, and she's being pleasant. He can't stand when she's pleasant with him; he wants her to be real. He wants her to be her, the her he knew for years; Angela Chase has been many things to him since first he met her her second year in high school, but pleasant was never one of them. He wants her – not for her to disappear into some polite shell of herself, and not for her to disappear through his door. He's going to make her stay.
Jordan shakes his head. "Naw, you don't."
She smirks pleasantly. "Not everyone's days start after noon." He doesn't mention to her that it's Sunday, or that he was up before her, or anything else he might; he knows how she likes to be right.
But she watches as his brows rise brazenly at her, amused with her as ever. "That you being mean?"
Angela steps into her second shoe, and breezily flips her hair into place, "Why would I be being mean?"
"Be-cause," he lays it out for her slowly, that same old glint in his eye, "you're all, weirded out, 'bout last night. An' last night again. An'—"
"All right," she stops him; Angela's not one to blush, but she doesn't need to stand there before him to hear him recount the last hours they've spent together. It's easy enough to get lost with him in passion and sink into the moment, but in the light of day she's trying to keep her head above water. She knows very well what they did together and to one another, but there's a lot more history behind them than one heady night, and she'll have learned nothing since age fifteen if she allows him now to negate it all with rousing details of one anomalous night.
Still with no encouragement, and noticeably disproportionately clothed, he isn't bashful about the way he looks her over, hungrily, and knowing. "You know," he tells her, not breaking the lock his gaze's got on her, "you're not as shy as you make yourself out to be."
"Stop it." The way his eyes hold her lit her afire last night, but it's too much now; she wants to get out of that apartment, out of his bedroom, and out of the firing range of those piercing blue eyes and the heat they're generating. She looks away, swallowing any smile he has the power to evoke in her, and looks instead for her bag. When she finds it and lifts it from where she'd blindly dropped it, she slings it over her shoulder, smiles, and begins the final steps to extracting herself. "I gotta go."
"So, just like that?" he puts it to her. "Outta here?"
Angela edges around him, positioning herself into his doorway as he shifts round to keep facing her as she backtracks herself out of his world. Angela bites her lips before she looks him in the eye – he's closer now, and his body still glistens from his shower, and she steadies herself before she looks at him, "It's time." She keeps it light, she keeps it friendly, this isn't a break up, it's not even a blow off, it's the close of a momentary occurrence of time travel.
Jordan too is keeping it light, but he isn't letting her off that easily, "To whut? Disappear?"
"'Disappear'? " she offers to throw back at him, in case he's in need of reminders of his own past behavior, but Jordan lets it bounce off him; he isn't easy to be made to feel guilty.
Though there's likely some feeling behind it, he plays it down because he's good and practiced at not letting things get at him, or give him away, and he speaks like everything he says is one more line in a lifelong joke, or a never fading flirtation; banter – short-winded though it may be – is his comfort zone. "Not ready tuh let you go."
Angela's head tilts to one side, and her too-adult eyes blink softly at him, and then she raises her face to kiss his lips. She'd intended a brief kiss, a friendly dispassionate parting, but he has nothing but disdain for her mature handling of their liaison and he grips her to him, backing her into the door jam, letting his hands and lips traverse her as freely as they did in the darkness, wanting to muss her up in some way to leave some impression of himself upon her – to not let her slip away so wholly unaffected by him. Time was, he remembers, she could hardly stand upright in his presence. He can remember nothing but gibberish coming from her lips when he was in earshot, and how her bare girlish thighs used to quake at the magnitude of just being in touching distance of his own near body. He remembers. He used to get lost in it, in her — the sensation of being so wanted, and so desired, so (even) looked up to. Him. It had been everything. He'd never had anything close to it in his life to that point. Being loved? That had been all her. She'd been ballsy about it too – persistent; no matter how badly he behaved or how callously he acted she'd been there, loving him, in a real way, in a grounded, not-just-for-a-week kind of way, and it'd changed things. For him something in him changed because of her. To his chagrin, at seventeen he let her in, and he never fully got her out. He doesn't want to. Angela loved him when he'd had no family around, or inclined to do it. She's his family, as much as Tino is, as much as Shane, much more than any blood relative. She's what he has to come home to. And over the years he's watched her pull away, felt her easing away at times when he wasn't already out the door, head somewhere else entirely, but now – it's not the same as those other times. Though so much between them is exactly as it ever was – nothing dampened, nothing diminished – there is something that's changed. He didn't see it last night. Maybe it hadn't been there, maybe he had been blind to it, maybe she had hidden it, but there is a distance, no matter that his mouth is opened wide and hungrily on hers.
In his grasp Angela does not resist the kiss, she accepts it even, and returns it with skill, but the passion is notably absent, and even as he kisses her he asks himself: Was I away too long? When his passion lessens she retracts herself, then reshoulders her bag from where it'd slipped down her arm. "It was good—" she swallows, "to see you."
Pressing together his moistly kissed lips, Jordan crosses his arms; he sees she's wanting to leave him, to walk away with all of this and them behind her, and he will not hold on too tightly. But he will ask her to stay. For now. If it can't be long term, and she seems irrevocably convinced that it can't be, then it can't be this quick. Not just one night. Jordan stands over her, studying the girl – the woman – he's walked away from so many times; he blinks, and his head nods. "Come to the show."
Angela moves past him into the hallway and through the little living room, making for the front door. Jordan reaches for a t-shirt and tugs it on as he follows after her.
"Angela—" he pushes his wet hair back. "Hold up." She stops, and she waits. "Don't go. Come to the show tonight." He looks her in the eyes, assessing any traction he's getting with her. "Jus', show up. You know where."
Angela's hand stops on the door handle, and she pauses to look at him, "Jordan—" She isn't blinking as she speaks to him; she's no longer a person who fawns over him, and though that was who she was when he'd first come to love her, he doesn't regret the loss of it. The way she looks at him now – unmitigated and free of illusions – is sharp-pointed, and keeps him on edge. He's come to enjoy it. It's electrifying; no one holds him to any kind of standard the way she does. He'll never be in others' eyes what he can be in hers, and he doesn't mind the fixed look she's giving him, nor mourn her girlish innocence. "—I'm not the girl standing on the sidelines of the Jordan Catalano Show anymore." She means by this to tell him she's not a kid, and she's not his fan, both things he already knows. She can't see that part of him though. He knows she can't. Too many times she'd tried to see him grow up, mature, take on responsibilities beyond himself, and one way or another he's always let her down, and now, though she's looking at him fondly, those let-downs are all she sees. He understands she's unable to see what it is he really sees in her when he looks honestly at her, and that look of perennial affection for him is given from some removal. Angela watches for him to listen to her— "I'm just not."
If she was expecting some kind of reaction from him, she doesn't get one. He's listening, and he's seeing her, and all he does is shrug. And it doesn't disappoint her. If anything it mollifies her – she wasn't wrong about him. She hasn't been for some time. But he does not let it rest there.
"Come to sound check." The knob twists in her hand. "Come," he says again flatly. "Have a drink. Have a couple." Jordan looks at her, and shrugs, "You c'n tell us if we suck," and here his brows duck boyishly over his too-blue eyes, "if you want to." His flirting is shameless.
Angela looks at him, and her mouth opens to speak, but whatever she meant to say does not come. Somehow, there in his bare feet, hardly dressed, chasing after her after having already had her, his charm is winning out. Angela does not speak, instead she sighs, and her absence of a reply opens the space for one more appeal from him.
"Can't be over this fast, Chase."
She opens the door, somewhat wearily, "Jordan," she looks at him straight on, "I'm seeing someone."
Again he isn't fazed. Whether he should be, he isn't, and if that should bother her, it doesn't. "So," is all he says. "See me today." She sighs again and her eyes roll. "Com'on," and he presses rakishly at his one point of advantage, "ya saw me last night."
Angela turns her face away from his. "Shut up."
"Chase—" the familiar conviction with which he's said her name draws her eyes back to his – to his face, and its earnestness, and eventually to the shapes made by his lips. "'ve known you since you were fifteen," here he shifts and leans his height over her for effect, "ya think not coming's saying something about you. But it doesn't havfta say anything. You being here— Last night, or," he blinks, looking at her, biting his soft lower lip, his voice dropping several decimals, "or, whenever… doesn't havfta mean anythin' more than what you want. Just—" she watches as he reaches out and hooks his finger in her front belt loop and tugs her waist fractionally closer in his direction "—come."
Their eyes flutter. And their breath stops.
How is this going, thoughts? Worth continuing? ... Not sure anyone's reading for MSCL anymore... Take care xx :) (& happy New Year!)