The two of them had followed the ambulance to the hospital and stayed there until the elderly reporter was stabilized. There were tests still to be run, but the doctor didn't believe he'd experienced a heart attack or stroke. He'd fallen as he had a few weeks before, but this time he'd hit his head on the kitchen counter and shed a lot of blood.
"We'll have to encourage him to get one of those devices," Jane said. "The kind you press if you've fallen and you can't get up."
Griffin flicked her a glance, the blue of his eyes washing over her like the brief pass of a strobe lamp. "He wasn't conscious. He couldn't press anything."
"Right," Jane said, grimacing.
With a sudden shove, Griffin jerked away from the table and stalked toward the office. Private followed. Jane looked at the door, looked down the hallway. She cast a glance to the countertop, where a dish held the key to No. 8. Then with a sigh, she trailed in the wake of the man and the dog.
When she breached the doorway, she found Griffin studying the photos. Then he spun toward her, his face set. His voice tight. "I lied. Remember Whitman?"
The soldier who had stolen Griffin's Twinkies and gotten his porn purloined in return. "Yes."
Griffin's eyes blazed with too much heat, and his hand was rubbing a spot on his denim-covered thigh, over and over. "There are other memories, beyond death and blood and stink and boredom, but there's no good memories. I shouldn't ever say any of them are good."
"You didn't say 'good' the first time," Jane said, her voice set on soothe. "You said that very thing, 'other memories.'"
He paced around the small room. She didn't think he was actually seeing his surroundings, or Private, or her. Which meant she could go, right? Ever since realizing she'd fallen for him this afternoon, she'd known distance was the only way to ensure he'd never guess the truth.
Dangling from his fingers was the half-full beer. Tipping back his head, he drained the brew, then reached for another that she hadn't noticed he'd carried in. It sat on the desk beside the original pages of the manuscript. The sheets were marked with blue pencil by him. Her comments were on yellow sticky notes.
The latest beer was half consumed in less than a minute. Considering they'd missed dinner for a run to the hospital, she gave a look to the bottle in his hand. "Don't you think you should slow down?"
He stilled and his eyes slid to her. They hadn't cooled any, but the expression in them made her shiver. "Are you my mother? Oh, no, that's right, you think of yourself as my governess."
"I'm your friend," she told him.
"Well, then as your friend, let me tell you something." He set the half-full beer back on the desk in the very precise way of the getting-drunk and leaned against it. "You can't slow down, Jane. You gotta fill all the moments with everything you can - with booze, with sex, with whatever gives you pleasure - because this moment might be the Very. Last. One."
Then he straightened, and she could read the intent in his eyes. "No," she said, putting out a hand and stepping back at the same time. "I don't want to go to bed with you right now." Everything was too raw. The state of her heart, his state of mind.
He stared at her a moment, then shrugged and went back to leaning on the edge of the desk. His hand reached for his beer, but it found the manuscript instead. The pages spilled to the floor. "Ah, look at that," he said.
Jane came forward.
"I've got it," he said. He bent for the papers, taking them up in his hands. "I know exactly what to do." And then, to her shock, he began tearing great hunks of the pages, ripping them in half, in quarters, rending them into unrecognizable shapes only to let them flutter from his hands to fall to the floor like snow. Like tears.
"Griffin, no," she said, but she was too stupefied to stop him. And maybe a little afraid.
So he tore more. He tore again and again and again until all their hard work was a mound of ragged confetti scattered by his feet.
Private whined, and the sound woke her from her stupor. She looked up from the wreck of pages to Griffin, remembering that she'd told him that rending a manuscript out of temper would