Hey All! Just a short little update. Thanks so much for reading and sticking around, I'm really grateful for all the love this story has received, even in the long waiting periods for updates! All your feedback keeps me interested in writing this story, and theDarkestSky's comment today (thank you) struck at just the perfect point of procrastination, so I scribbled a little something out to post. Love to all of you, can't say when this story will be updated again, but I'm thinking probably 4 more chapters at the most. Take care!
"D'ya mean it?" His voice is low and husky in her ear. His warm breath touching her skin electrifies her so that she feels it everywhere, radiating through her. Such a thing as a whisper – as a three-worded sentence, such a simple thing as this can unconditionally compromise her.
"Mean what?" Avoiding his eyes, her long-proven undoing, Angela concentrates on the regulation of her breath – steady, in and out. Holding her breath, falling breathless, these would signal to him what she does not mean to betray.
Without looking at him she can feel his eyelids lowering and lifting as he looks at her – not at her face, but at her: the slope of her collarbone, the arc of her neck, the flush of her skin. Long dark lashes flutter coolly over the warm blue of his steady unflinching eyes; she feels it, though she does not hazard to look. "What you said, earlier," he clarifies hazily, "an' back at my place—" his lean solid body leans in fractionally, threateningly close, but oddly undemanding "—when I wasn't lettin' you out the door. Or—" his eyes find her lips; Angela presses them inward and closed, a less than conscious tactic to force his concentrated attention onto some part of her he isn't directly magnetized towards "—is that just sum'in' you say when you're in a spot and keepin' the wolves at bay?"
So accused her posture shifts, and her intonation reclaims some of its natural incredulity, "Is that what you are?" For the first time since he's moved in close enough for her to breathe him, Angela ventures to meet his gaze. In the dark passage where he's cornered her, flooded by the music from the headliners playing a level below where they stand, she looks at him, archly, "A 'wolf'?"
Before her, and still effortlessly close, Jordan spreads into a slow self-satisfied grin of self-incrimination. "I been a lotta things to you, over the years." Nobody, Angela is sure, plays a cad as well as he. The utter charm of his assailment is winningly lethal, like no other downfall could possibly be. It isn't fair, the boyish deniability he brandishes at will.
Angela extracts herself some, if not in proximity than in culpability of wherever she was allowing this exchange to take her. "If I did mean it," she speaks, infusing her answer with a stiffer edge, "and every word I said to you was true, would you care?"
Jordan looks at her – he looks at her beyond the games, beyond the hard line she's telling herself she's drawing, beyond the shouldn'ts and shoulds – and the connection between them becomes unbreakable in the moments she waits in anticipation of his response— "I'd be better informed—" he distinguishes for her, his voice cool and unhurried "—I wouldn't 'care'." Then there in the narrow hallway, up the stairs overlooking the modest stage, he kisses her. All at once, with no regard for the clarity he himself asked for, his virile body had moved into hers and his lips caught hers in a tumult of insatiable desire. People brush past them with beers and guitars, mic cables and amp cords, and still he's kissing her, deeply, intensely, with no means of relenting, with no inclination to slow. In the half darkness, in the rush and the sparks, and the lingering wanting still haunting her passions from the previous night, she yields into him, letting his will play guide.
Jordan presses tighter into her. Though he pulls her to him like he'll never let go, there ever remains a sort of airiness in his embrace – a nonchalance, no matter his urgency, shadowing the unspoken promise of every touch, of every kiss, of every heated breathless gripping. Something in him, even when he's giving himself to her, holds him back, though it does not keep Angela from breathing him in, from swallowing whole this elusive ecstasy of being pursued and then plundered by him. She is not unaware that he may yet have one foot out the door – may already be backwards glancing; this has always been who he's presented himself to be. Since the start, when he was just another seventeen-year-old too messed up about too many things beyond his control to let himself be happy, he'd never made her an explicit promise. But undeniably – even to one such as Jordan Catalano – there are implicit promises made between bed sheets, and wetted in kisses, and harnessed wantonly to glances. He has made these to her, time and time again. He breaks them, sometimes at her own urging, but always he returns to make them again. Heated and willful he'd renewed each one of them in the night he'd just spent with her; but though he would not deny this to be true, and while he believes fervently she is more his to come home to than any other place or person he's encountered in his life, though he's given her this weight and position, and willingly tied some level of his wholeness to it, still there's something in him drifting while he clutches her. Angela knows this. Leastways there's a part of her that does. But she can't afford to care; he, and memory, and years of frustrated wanting forbid her from caring. She can't care, like she can't stop it. Angela bends into his hands. This just keeps happening.