A/N: Okay, so this chapter would be better off tacked to the end of last chapter, and last chapter cut in half. And, actually, the second half of this chapter would be better off as its own chapter, or maybe combined with what I’ve got planned next. The fact is, I’ve had a hectic couple of weeks… this week in particular. I didn’t even have time to write until last night, and I ended up staying awake until 2:30 in the morning to write this. (I get up at 6am, fyi). Basically, since I update this weekly, I just write as much as I can and get to a decent stopping point and call it a chapter.

Sorry for that rambling, half-incoherent explanation. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this and as always I love my awesome reviewers to itty bitty bits, and I mean that as sincerely as a ¾ asleep girl can.

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Chapter 61: Moving On

Unfortunately, Nate wasn’t quite done yet. He caught up with Aleda just before she made it into the cafeteria.

“Hang on a minute!” he said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her back into the hallway, out of sight of the bored eyes of the teachers on lunch duty.

“Hey!” she protested. “What are y—”

“Do you even realize what you’re doing?” Nate hissed at her, not bothering to loosen his grip on her arm.

“I’m trying to go back to lunch, that’s what I’m doing!” she retorted. She jerked her arm out of his grasp.

“You’re breaking up with me for a jackass hobo, are you serious?”

Aleda’s jaw dropped. “Hobo? What the hell are you even talking about?”

“Are you kidding me? He never stays in one place longer than a few weeks, and you really think he’s going to stick around for you?”

She felt her skin tighten at his words. She didn’t want to be hearing this. It was just a little too true. She turned from him and walked determinedly through the cafeteria doors. He followed close on her heels.

“Don’t walk away from me!” he said, a little too loudly. “Are you even going to answer me?”

“Drop it, Nate!” she growled. She kept walking towards her table. “Go back to Spanish class.”

“No! I want an answer!” He chased after her and stopped her halfway through the cafeteria. “I’m not going to just let you break up with me over something so stupid!”

She whirled on him, a look of fury on her face. “And what,” she said in a dangerously low voice, “Makes you think…I need your permission?”

The teachers looked up from their meals and watched them with interest, having finally noticed the two teenagers. One put down the sandwich he had been holding. A few yards away, Val had also seen Aleda return and got up tentatively to see what the matter was.

“Five months!” Nate yelled. “Five months we’ve been together, and you know I liked you before that, and you’re just going to throw that away!?”

“Bullshit!” Aleda exclaimed. “You hardly noticed me!”

“What? Yes I did! I asked you to Homecoming, didn’t I!?”

She sneered. “Yeah. After Halloween. Then, suddenly, guess what? You were all over me! Explain that!”

“So it took me a while to work up some nerve! You’re really going to hold that against me?”

“Oh, please,” she scoffed. “I’ve heard all about your ‘reputation’. Try again.”

Val edged over to the two of them, looking warily over her shoulder at the increasingly restless teachers. “Hey, guys…?” she said, moving between them and the front of the cafeteria and trying to edge them towards the table. “Come on, let’s sit down, before one of the teachers spazzes.”

Nate waved her off. “I’m not done with her yet,” he told Val.

“That’s a shame,” Aleda shot back. “Because I am really done with you!”

“What the hell, Leda!? Seriously! You’re just going to leave me for some asshole drifter? We’re a perfect match, Leda, think about it!”

“You’re a perfect ass, is more like it! You never would have even thought to do some of the things he’s done for me!”

Val caught Aleda’s arm and attempted to drag her rather more forcibly towards their lunch table. One of the teachers had already gotten up to investigate. Aleda saw. She just didn’t care anymore. She pulled her arm back, more gently this time because it was Val and not Nate.

“It’s cool Val,” she said. “Stay out of this. I don’t want you getting in trouble.”

“Me? I’m worried about you!” Val protested, but finally backed away. She shook her head. If Leda wanted to get her ass sent to the principal’s office, that was her thing.

“Yeah, you’ve said what he’s done for you,” Nate interjected, not willing to let her have the last say. “Thirty damned feeders in the middle of the day!

“Is there a problem here?” a middle-aged teacher asked sternly. Aleda looked up at the man in annoyance.

“Only if this jerk won’t let me get back to lunch,” she said.

“Hey!” Nate protested. “Don’t put this on me! You’re the one who’s being a total bitch right now!”

Aleda’s eyes narrowed. “And you wonder why I dumped your ass?” she snarled.

“Come on now, kids, break it up,” the teacher insisted. He put a hand on each of their shoulders and pushed them apart. By now, half of the cafeteria had seen them arguing. Most were watching. A couple of kids fighting in the middle of the cafeteria was pretty good theater for the middle of a school day.

“Just think about it, would you?” Nate insisted, a whine entering his voice. “It’s too much of a coincidence that we’d both move here and be the same age and everything and it’s too perfect not to be right!”

She shook her head, almost in pity. “Nothing’s perfect between us, Nate. It never was.”

The teacher holding them apart signed impatiently. “Are you two done? Fantastic. Let’s take a trip to the principal’s office, shall we?”

“You bet,” Aleda said dryly. She raised an eyebrow at the man. “Can I get my backpack, first?”

He nodded and led Nate to the door, where they waited while Aleda grabbed her backpack and the remnants of her lunch from the table. Val looked at her wide-eyed and worried. Aleda gave her a reassuring half-grin.

“Well, this is an exciting day, huh?” she remarked, and left.

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It turned out that their incident at lunch earned them detention for the next two Saturdays—for disrupting lunch and for leaving their designated classrooms (and cafeteria) without permission. Even Mom wasn’t too pleased with her that time, and she ended up without television for a week.

Aleda didn’t mind that nearly as much as the prospect of spending an entire hour, two Saturdays in a row, locked up in a classroom with Nate… when she should be in a basement with Ryan, where the locking would be optional.

At least it would give her a chance to do some of the homework she had missed, and hadn’t really planned to do.

Detention was supposed to be from noon to one o’clock on Saturday. Technically it wouldn’t be cutting all that much into the time Ryan and his sister usually spent training her on Saturday mornings, but considering the past couple of weeks, Aleda had been hoping to have a chance to grab lunch or something with him afterwards. She went into her drawer that evening, intending to pull out her usual comfy pajamas and go to bed.

She reconsidered.

Sometimes he showed up earlier than usual on Saturday mornings. Sometimes he showed up so early she was still in her pajamas. And sometimes he was too impatient to let her go back upstairs and change. She shoved the old pajamas back into the drawer and pulled out something she thought would work a bit better, then smiled a little to herself. She shut off her alarm clock and went to bed.

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When Ryan and Talia got to their house the next morning, he was surprised to see Alejandro’s car missing. It was only eight o’clock in the morning, and while Aria was the type to be up and about at the crack of dawn, the term “morning person” just didn’t stick to her husband. He looked at his sister, who shrugged. A little bit curious, he knocked on the door and waited. He had to wait a couple of minutes, actually, and knocked again before he finally heard and felt somebody stumbling around upstairs and coming to the door. He knew it was Aleda before she even opened the door.

He didn’t know what she would be wearing.

The warm smile he had ready for her twitched at the sight of a very tousled-looking Aleda wearing nothing but a tank top and boxers. She yawned and smiled up at him.

“Hey, g’morning!” she said sleepily. “Sorry about that, I must have slept in.”

“Not… not a problem,” Ryan coughed out.

Talia decided to be helpful and pounded him on the back. “Just you, kid?” she asked. “I saw your dad’s car was gone.”

Aleda nodded. “Yeah… I think Mom said they were going to go out for brunch or something today.” She grinned slyly. “I think she just wanted to get Papá away from you,” she told Ryan confidentially.

He stared at her. Got to keep those eyes on her face. On her face, jackass.

“You, uh, going to come in?” she prompted.

He addressed his sister, his eyes not budging. “Talia, you…”

“I’ve got to get over to Newark!” Talia finished for him. “Man, what am I doing here? Totally forgot all those errands. Yeah, errands. So I will see you later!” She backed off, grinning. “Forget my own head next. There’s just no help for me.”

Ryan didn’t even see her leave. He followed Aleda into her house, barely remembering to close the door behind him. She slipped into the kitchen, bare feet slapping against the tile. Her hair was such a riotous mass of curls that he couldn’t even see her tank top with her back turned.

“You want milk?” she asked over her shoulder. “I haven’t actually had breakfast yet.”

He stopped himself at the divide between the living room and the kitchen, leaning one hand against the doorframe, and watched her move around the kitchen. She had to reach up to pull a box of cereal out of the pantry. There were no bowls left in the cupboard; she bent over and grabbed one out of the dishwasher. Ryan’s fingers dug into the wall. When she leaned over the sink to wash it off he couldn’t stand still any longer. He pushed off from the doorframe and moved behind her, putting his hands on the counter on either side of her. The smell of her hair flooded his senses and he closed his eyes, reveling in the fact that he didn’t have to hide this anymore.

“No oatmeal today?” he murmured into her ear.

She shivered and shook her head. “Too hot.”

“I can see how that would be a problem,” he said agreeably. “So, cereal?”

She finished washing her bowl and slipped away from him, ducking under his arm. He bit back a groan and turned to watch her pour cereal into her newly-clean bowl at the opposite counter. “Well, I like it,” she said. “Hey, could you hand me the milk?” She nodded towards the fridge to his left. He chose one of the several gallons of milk at random and pulled it out for her.

He set it down gently next to her elbow. “Anything else I can do for you?” he asked.

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Get me a glass?”

Merciful heaven. “Sure. Which cupboard?”

“That one,” she said, and nodded at the one directly in front of her, just above the counter.

He smirked and once again closed the distance between them. He reached around her and opened the cupboard door cautiously, making sure that it didn’t bump her head. Sure enough, there were rows of glasses inside, of all different sizes. He picked one at random and set it down in front of her.

“Thanks!” she said brightly. She poured some milk into the glass and then picked up her assembled meal and walked out of the kitchen to set it on the table. Ryan shook his head and followed, pulling out a chair across from her.

She looked up at him from her bowl of cereal and raised an eyebrow.

“Didn’t you want anything?” she asked. “Plenty of milk in there.”

“Maybe later.”

She took her sweet time eating, too. More than once she leaned over her bowl to fish out a particularly stubborn cornflake. He had to grit his teeth to keep his eyes from slipping. Fecking hell, that little tank top of hers wasn’t covering much of anything, was it? When she was done she went back into the kitchen and dropped her dishes in the sink, then came back around the corner and went directly down the basement steps without a backwards glance. He shook his head and followed her, grabbing the gallon of milk off the counter as he went.

“Don’t you want to be changin’ first?” he asked her. If nothing else, she must be chilly in this concrete basement.

“Nah, I’m good,” she said. “You’re the one that said it was better to train in loose clothing.”

“I wouldn’t call that loose,” he muttered under his breath, then said a little louder: “I don’t want you getting cold.”

“I’m just going to get all sweaty anyway,” she retorted.

Ryan stared at her.

“And what about you, Mr. Leather Jacket?”

“What? Oh.” He stripped down to his T-shirt, laying his jacket and long-sleeved button-down shirt on the steps. He glanced back at Aleda to see her looking at him expectantly. Right. The claws. He pulled the dull pair out of his jacket and walked over to her. He handed one set to her and concentrated his attention on strapping the other set onto her hand.

“Could you do this one too?” she asked, holding out her first hand. He finished fastening the straps and buckles as gently as possible, letting his hands linger a few extra moments.

“Does that feel alright?” he asked softly.

“Feels great,” she said. She waved her hands a little. “So… what’s the plan for today?”

“Oh, you know.” He cleared his throat. “Same as usual.”

“Pretend we’re trying to kill each other?”

“That’s the one.”

Aleda grinned and circled away from him, slipping into her role seamlessly. Ryan followed suit, willing himself not to see the sparse fabric and the light shining through her skin, all the more visible now with so little cloth in the way. He watched her feet, looking for shifts in weight to tell him where she would go next; watched her leather-wrapped hands, and the set of her shoulders.

He broke first, charging her from the side and switching directions at the last second. She saw him coming, though, and quicker than he had expected she dropped and rolled forward, springing to her feet behind his back. She managed to catch him in the side before he whirled around, striking just hard enough to tell him she would have hit his liver. Not lethal, but a good strike none the less. He twisted around sharply and swung out an arm intended to catch her by the waist.

Again she was quicker than he expected. She launched herself into an unexpected backflip and made it all the way to the wall. Without wasting a second he closed the distance and pinned her against the concrete. Their few minutes of exertion had given her a light sheen of sweat, and it glistened with every breath she took. He slid his hands from her wrists, where he held them to the wall, down to her elbows.

“Hey, Ryan?” she asked.

“Mhm?”

“Papá said something on Thursday…do you know what ‘bonding’ is?”

Ryan’s right hand, which had been on it’s way from her elbow to her hair, froze in midair.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Contrary to all expectations, Ryan managed to blush. “It… It means we’re connected,” he tried to explain. “You’re… well, you’re a part of me lass, and there’s naught in the world that can break that.”

Aleda frowned in confusion. “But… what does that mean? Really?”

“It means exactly what it sounds like.” He bit through the pad of his thumb and held it against her temple. The familiar electricity rushed through her, even stronger this time. She gasped and stared up into his eyes… and straight through them. Just that little boost was all she needed. She could see straight to his soul and there were no metaphors involved.

“Ryan…” she whispered.

“I can feel you a mile away,” he murmered, not breaking contact. “I can see you through walls and a dozen other people. I could find you in a hurricane. You’re a part of me. And I’m a part of you.”

Aleda stared up at him. This close to him, she could feel the heat behind his eyes as he looked at her. He pulled her close and kissed her deeply, and she melted into his embrace. Something inside her was stirring in the wake of the fire now coursing through her veins. And they still had three hours until her detention.