Good feelings,
won't you stay with me
just a little longer . . .

AN: RIP John Hughes, your movies meant more to me than I ever knew.

****

As John Bender walked home his body buzzed a little with each step. Everything felt different.

He'd become aware of his skin, especially where she'd put her lips against his neck, all awkward, innocent, and the sexiest thing he'd ever seen, ever. Sexier than the view of her cotton panties under the desk, sexier than that stupid trick with the lipstick between her breasts, sexier even than when they'd kissed goodbye.

He stopped dead in his tracks, because he realized that suddenly not only the sexiest thing he'd ever seen but all the runners up he could think of came from what? Not from his respectable list of back-seat make-out sessions or under-the-bleachers sex or even from his father's massive porn stash from but from a virgin he'd spent a few hours insulting in detention.

Bender shook his head laughed out loud, at himself, at her, at the whole surprising day.

His hand reached up and touched the earring, the fucking diamond earring, the diamond that the queen of the whole fucking school had given him, him. That was pretty good too. She'd taken it out of her ear, her pristine, never-been-tongued ear, and given it to him.

Either she wanted to tell him she didn't care about diamonds or tell him she cared about him enough to give him one, and for once both sides of that story sounded pretty good.

That girl, that princess girl, had taken her diamond and put it in his big, dirty hand and closed that hand and pressed hers around it, like she meant it. And then he had kissed her and she had kissed him back like she meant that too, lips opening to let his tongue meet hers after all with only a moment's hesitation, darting her own out shyly but with conviction, sliding it gently along his for the briefest touch . . .well, fuck. That had been pretty sexy too.

He was in so much trouble.

He shook his head again to try to stop the spinning. Then he looked around and realized he was almost to the edge of the wide field he'd been walking through. That put him closer to home and with this awareness his mood darkened.

Claire might have been sympathetic when he told stories about his life but that didn't mean that the reality of it was something she'd want in hers. Or that he should put it there. Worthless. He knew what her friends would say, they'd say the same thing she'd said earlier, the same thing their parents said and his parents said.

Worthless. The one thing everyone from both sides of the tracks could agree on. John Bender was a worthless punk.

Bender took a deep breath as if to blow it all away, but the air in his lungs expanded his chest outward and brought back that sense of skin, it tingled where her lips had touched him, on his body, when he hadn't even been going to try to go there with her.

That was the thing. She came to him, to tell him that in spite of every mean, true thing he'd said to her all day, or hell—maybe even because of them, she saw something in him that was worth something. Worth a risk. Worth touching with her mouth.

He didn't want to go home yet. He couldn't lose this sense, this good feeling that was humming and buzzing all over him. He lay right down in the grass, stretched out under the sinking sun in the cold late air and the ground pressed up against his back, through his coats and boots.

And all of it, the sun and the air and the grass and the cold said, "Yes, you are here. That did just happen."

It did. The one girl who could have anyone in the whole school, anyone in the same school that only pissed on him, shit on him, threatened him and locked him in a closet, had chosen him.

She risked getting caught by that asshole to come to that closet for him. She came for him. Like he was Rapunzel, for Chrissake. Despite everything. Despite his teasing and mocking and shouting at her.

She came to the closet to kiss him because even though he'd practically shoved his face up her crotch while she was trying to protect him, she somehow knew he wouldn't make a move for serious.

Why he wouldn't, he didn't even know because he was sure he'd gotten her more hot and bothered than she was used to just with the eye sex and talking dirty and yelling at her. But. Then he saw her liking him, sticking up for him, lying for him, caring about what he said, and suddenly she was right, he wouldn't have touched her, like she was to good for that.

So how did she know he wouldn't? It wasn't like he hadn't done enough to her, been enough of an asshole.

Maybe she knew he believed what they said about him just a little too much and wanted him to know that she didn't. Maybe she wanted him to know that even though he'd been right about so many things, he was wrong if he thought she was frigid or too pristine to touch, and that if the world thought she was too good for him and he thought so too, she didn't.

And then that girl whose innocence he'd outed and mocked gave him an innocent, curious, sexy as hell kiss on his neck. It still burned there, just a little, as the cold March evening chilled his skin everywhere else.

It was like the world had opened just a little bit more to John Bender. He stretched out his limbs.

He had no idea what would happen on Monday but she'd given him something already, something he didn't have before. He wasn't going to tell her that, not right away. Clearly, she was the kind of girl who liked to be kept guessing just a little bit. The kind of girl too used to having everything handed to her before she even knew she wanted it.

No. Not the kind of girl. Not any kind of girl, just her. Just a girl. The girl, maybe.

What the fuck? Sounded like maybe he was the girl. What was he even thinking? Not even one part of him believed that kind of bullshit. Might be the girl. Jesus.

So much trouble.

Bender got up, shook himself off and started walking again. He lit a cigarette and let the smoke fill deep into his lungs, calming and cooling him just a little bit on the inside with its dry heat. Cool worked with her. He needed to keep it.

All he knew, he hoped like hell she was thinking about him too.

******

Claire dove onto her bed and buried her head in the pile of pink fluffy pillows so no one could hear her in case she screamed. It seemed like she might, like something inside her might need to get out. She felt so full and so light at the same time.

She'd never felt like this before. It was like happy butterflies had taken off under her skin and were fluttering there, just beneath the surface. She'd had butterflies in the stomach before a dance or piano recital or when Blake Pitney walked by her desk in fifth grade, but these were everywhere, taking over every part of her body. Breathing was almost hard because of them, but breathing was also more exciting. Breathing made her happy.

She heard her parents arguing downstairs and that made her happy for once because it meant she could keep from talking to them and keep from fake smiling or pretending not to notice and instead just keep that feeling on her lips that had been on him.

The tiny empty hole in her earlobe made happy. How dumb was that? It was proof it happened, proof she'd done something risky and brave and stupid, maybe more than one thing. She could have gotten into so much trouble. Probably still could. And for what?

He insulted her friends, her family, her lunch—he mocked her for using sex she'd never even had and then he mocked her for that, too. She knew these things, she knew them.

He was right. She couldn't ignore him if she tried. She had tried so hard.

But she knew, even as she sat in there in that library and listened to him lay into her, that he was right, right about her and the way her life was and what was wrong about it. She hadn't liked that part of the day in the sense of enjoying it but somehow, by insulting her friends, her family, her lunch—he showed that those things weren't why he was interested in her. He was interested in her, and wanted to get through the bullshit.

God, so did she.

He'd mocked her earrings. So she gave him one. She wanted to show him she could meet him halfway.

What would that even mean?

He'd clearly had a lot of girls. She felt a little miserable at the thought of his wallet and all those pictures of those sexier, more experienced girls. She didn't want to think about what he'd done with them.

What if he just wanted to "pop her cherry?" She wasn't ready for that. Even though she felt, tonight, after John Bender's mouth had been on hers and her mouth had been on John Bender, she felt readier for something than she ever had before. Not that. Not yet. Not for a while. Just the thought of it made her feel tense.

But she did remember the feeling that warmed and buzzed in her body as he said those words "under the blouse, over the bra," "over the panties, no bra" and how despite everything she imagined his hands on her in those places, and the thought of that made her breathing change and new parts of her buzz and she was positive that he could see that. Was that why?

Maybe she was the one who just wanted him to . . .show her, because he could?

She shook her head. She remembered other things too. The look in his eyes as he nodded when she said she wasn't going to be like her parents. He really heard her. She knew he did.

The way he took it on himself without even thinking to keep her and the others safe, letting them get away while he piled on even more trouble and detention on himself. Sure, maybe part of him liked it, for sure he did. But he didn't need to do that for her. And she knew, he did it for her.

Most of all, she remembered the look on his face when she showed up at the closet where he'd been locked. He'd gotten himself locked up to help her and then climbed through the ceiling and then fallen through the ceiling and crawled back to the hole they locked him up in.

OK, so maybe it wasn't just for her. He seemed like he cared a lot about the others. Even Andy, at the end. Plus Bender was for sure not the kind of a guy who would rather stay locked in a closet than get high with a bunch of other kids. He liked taking risks for the hell of it. He liked doing the thing no one thought anyone do because it was so outrageous. That was clear.

But she knew he didn't like that Principal Dick, as she would now forever think of him. Something wasn't right there, the way he talked to John, and she knew John felt that too, they all had. It's why everyone had stuck their necks out for John, too. Well, that and because he was really entertaining.

Still, she knew part of why he'd done it was for her. She knew what it was like to have people do things for her, and what John had done felt like that and not like that at the same time.

People were always doing things for her. But not like that. Not real things. Not things that didn't cost money, but cost something else.

So she tried to do something for him. She walked through the hallway, too. Quietly, sure. Not to get caught. But it was a lot more rule-breaking, a lot more risk-taking, than she was used to. Sneaking through the halls to find the school delinquent so she could kiss him in the janitor's closet felt different from cutting class to go shopping. It even felt different from getting high with everyone else in the library.

It wasn't going along with what everyone else was doing, which was always easier. It was really easy if what everyone else was doing was what she wanted to do anyway. But even when what everyone else was doing was something she didn't want to do, something maybe she hated, on the inside, it was still easier to go along than to do what she'd done today.

Which was doing something no one else was doing, because she wanted to.

It was surprising. It was both harder and easier than she had thought.

And the way he looked at her, when she got there? She could tell he hadn't had even one thought that she would show up there. That it would have never crossed his mind in a million years that Claire Standish, Prom Queen, would show up in the janitor's closet to see him.

She could tell for that flicker of a moment before he covered with a smartass comment, that it meant something to him that she did. She could tell it meant a lot.

You lost? OK, so the smartass comment made her feel weak in the knees so she had to lean back against the door. He just looked good when he said those things. He knew he looked good and that looked good too. She knew she would have to be careful of that look.

But the look before it, when he looked at her, in her, made her feel powerful. It made her feel like he wanted something that he wasn't getting anywhere else, something he maybe even hadn't known he wanted, and that she, she, had it.

When she kissed him he was even more surprised. He shouldn't have been. Like he said, she couldn't ignore him if she tried. He was the one who insisted that she was so pristine. Sure, she might not have done those things he talked about. It didn't mean she didn't ever want to.

With the right person.

John Bender might not be the right person. She knew that. She had no idea what would happen on Monday. What she did know, is that John Bender had made her feel a hundred different things, good and bad, that she had never felt before. He, Mr Burnout Delinquent Criminal, taught her things she hadn't known she needed to learn. Some of them she hadn't wanted to. Like about cigars and their uglier uses.

Claire shuddered. If John had been here now, she would have thrown her arms around him, tried to protect him.

At least that would make him laugh.

What had she taught him?

How to put a lipstick on with no hands. He was going to be grateful for life.

Claire squirmed on the bed. No. That wasn't how he made her feel. Not at the end. At the end she felt that whatever it was that he'd gotten from her, it was worth an awful lot.

She sighed again, came up from under the pillows. She went over to her dressing table and looked at her face in the mirrors. From all sides.

She didn't look very romantic. She still had red hair and freckles. She didn't look any different, any more daring, any more . . .sexy than she did before. Idly, Claire put her hand up to the earring that was still there and twisted it between her fingers.

Now she was going to think about something else.

Like what lipstick would make her lips look like lips a boy like John Bender would really, really want to kiss? And what outfit would say, "I'm still the same person and I'm not changing for anyone but I am changing, a little, because I want to be different?"