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Jordan picked a table in one of the corners farthest from the food line, a spot where they were less likely to be overheard, and got a cup of coffee for himself, because he was absolutely not doing this without coffee. He'd left it long enough for things to get awkward already; he couldn't put this off any longer.

He really hoped she wasn't busy, because he didn't want to have to brace himself for this conversation all over again.

"Morning," Jordan answered, and made himself smile at her. "I owe you an explanation. Sorry it took so long. You want to grab coffee or breakfast or something beforehand?"

Jordan nodded, looked down at his coffee, sighed, and looked up to meet America's eyes again. "I might as well just be straightforward. The reason I asked you to stop pushing Rep about the wedding is because I left." He took a deep breath and a sip of coffee, then went on, "We've been having problems, and it's been getting worse. I didn't see any way it could get better if I stayed." He looked away then, shrugged one shoulder. "Hopefully he'll quit being an a** about it now, or soon."

His hands clasped tight around the mug. "Don't blame them for it," he added quietly. "This was my choice. I'd rather they be happy together without me than have everything fall apart irreparably."

"You're a good friend, America." The tension in Jordan's shoulders relaxed fractionally. "It was complicated," he agreed. "It is complicated." He made no further explanation, though; it had been an extended and painful process, a slow fracture that had eventually become a break. He didn't want to try to detail the complexities, and he didn't owe that to anyone except maybe, eventually, himself.

"In time, maybe." His fingers rubbed across Ferros's ring; if America was looking, was observant, she might notice that the gold and silver ring he had previously worn on his other hand was gone. "It's going to suck to be me for a while, but that was happening already."

(In the past few days, whispered a traitorous thought, he had talked to more people than he'd talked to over the weeks before the breakup, had conversations about things both important and immaterial, and not had to think constantly about the looming prospect of his lover's jealousy. It was like a collar looped tight around his throat had been suddenly removed, letting him breathe, and he had never realized how little air he was getting until his lungs were filled.)

He liked people, and he was good with people, and that was not only part of the core of who he was, but part of what the problem had been, and he didn't know if he was okay with not having been able to change that. He'd tried to break himself into a shape that didn't fit, and he didn't know if he wished he'd succeeded. "It's a good thing I have friends," he nodded, and smiled, and made sure to open his eyes a little wider and bring his brows up so his eyes would glint a little and the expression wouldn't look as fake as it felt.

The part about habits startled him out of the carefully constructed facade for just a moment, though, unexpectedly catching at a truth that had been scraping across raw pain for days when he woke in the early hours of the morning and reached for a warm touch no longer there, when he picked up the bottle of shampoo as he stepped out of the shower and then remembered he could leave it there without worrying about it being used up, when he put his clothes into the laundry basket at the end of the day and looked around the room for discarded clothes that nobody had left on the floor. For a second, his mouth compressed to an unhappy line and he blinked rapidly twice to chase away the sudden sting in his eyes before making himself relax back into a more neutral expression. "It's the little things," he agreed, voice roughening slightly.

America understood loss of one kind or another, and Jordan was grateful for that, even though he hadn't wanted her to see the break in his control. "Work, mostly," he said, as lightly as he could. "Training, research, going to be checking for optional missions I can take. Maybe some personal outings. My tattoos got burned off on that one desert mission. I could get something else."

Jordan smiled a little, a more genuine smile this time. "A dragon of some type for sure," he said, and tapped deliberately at the totem ring on his right hand. "Gotta give this guy his props. He takes good care of me. I had a dragon and a phoenix on my back before. Maybe I'll just get that redone, or redesigned." He'd planned something else, a sweeping gesture, and was now both sorry and grateful that he hadn't done it yet. This was for him, not anyone else.

"A couple of things. Been hunting down an artifact, for one, and I keep hitting dead ends. I might have to just go looking for it." What's for ye - "Laying out plans for a training course proposal, too. Too many Suns have this habit of charging in without assessing a situation first. We're the hitting-things division, yes, but I feel that we could be hitting things harder and more effectively with a little forethought and care." The smile quirked up mischievously. "It'll piss some people off if I do this right, but that's part of the point. Lessons are better learned if they make you feel something."

"Outposts? What kind of outposts, and how far apart?" Jordan asked, his grip on his cup loosening to incidental, and he leaned forward just a little in genuine interest. "A course that requires planning is going to involve having stopping points in which the person running it can take a breather and get a look at the next leg, so that could be useful as a base or as a model to start with. I'd love to have a look at that."

He smiled wryly at the mention of the town, hid a barely-there flinch when she mentioned the school. "That place needs to get cleaned out. There's been a nest of shadowlings down there at least once. I wouldn't want to go without a good team, maybe two or three eclipse pairs. Might not require a larger team, but I'd rather take more people than I need than get unexpectedly overwhelmed."

Jordan grimaced amiably. "When my test group got unpodded, we got dropped into the middle of the town with baseball bats and a few bandages to make the point that we didn't know what the ******** we were doing. What we fought wound up being Insanity hallucinations, but the point sure got made. Getting some caution into the heads of new hatchlings would be a great outcome." He sighed. "Ideally, we'd be getting a brief rundown before each mission, or at least a word or two about what we're facing, but barring that, I'd like people to be taking a few seconds to make an assessment before diving in. Won't always help, but if it helps at all it'll be worth it."

He nodded thoughtfully. "Mind giving me the tour sometime? I can incorporate it into my plans and then bring 'em to you to see if you've got suggestions or alterations. This isn't a project I can complete solo."