Chapter 6: Nigel

And time passed. A week and a half went by, and Jordan stayed away from alcohol the entire time. She'd spent much of her time sleeping on the couch in her office rather than going home. Nigel knew because he worked most of the afternoon and night shifts (while Jordan worked the day shifts), and he could see her asleep on the couch. He wondered if she didn't go home because she thought she would be tempted, or because she wasn't ready to remember. She hadn't said anything, and he hadn't asked.

One evening, because of someone's vacation, Jordan had ended up working the night shift with him. A couple of bodies had come over from the hospital, deceased due to unknown causes, and Jordan had spent most of the first half of the shift doing the trace and then the autopsies on the bodies. Nigel had purposely spent most of his time in the lab, analyzing the data and samples he'd been sent on one of the police department's cases.

It was about 1:30 in the morning when he heard a small tap followed by the swooshing sound of the door opening. He didn't have to look over his shoulder to know who had entered.

"What can I help you with, Jordan?" he asked, still clicking away at his keyboard, occasionally moving and clicking the mouse.

"You can start by looking at me."

Nigel's brow furrowed, but he didn't turn around, keeping his attention on the monitor. "I don't get your meaning," he said over his shoulder.

A small hand reached over his right shoulder and pressed a button on his monitor. Instantly the screen went dark. Nigel protested. "Hey! What'd you do that for?"

Jordan grabbed the back of his barstool on wheels chair and swung him around to face her. He accepted it, but still didn't look her in the eyes. "Relax, Nige. You know as well as I do that all I did was turn off the monitor. Your work is quite safe from all of the little computer goblins."

"Jordan, what's this all about?"

"I want to know why you've avoided me for the past couple weeks."

"What are you talking about, love. I've done no such thing."

Jordan folded her arms and shifted her weight to one foot. "Bullshit. You've switched to the night shift. And even though I'm here in my office just about every night, you never stop in to say hi. You've stopped telling me about interesting and weird things you see and think. Every time I see you, you're like a zombie, and if you do see me, you go in the other direction."

He finally looked her in the eyes. "I'm sorry, Jor. It's… just been busy."

"Nigel, I'm the one who should be sorry."

Nigel felt himself relax all the sudden. His body, if not his subconscious seemed to realize that this was what he had been waiting for. "What are you sorry for," he asked hesitantly.

Jordan drew her hands back, looping her thumbs in her waistband as she shifted her weight around. "Garret told me what happened that night. How I got drunk and hurt Woody. He told me how Woody came here for help. It doesn't take a genius to check the work schedules and find out that you were the only other person here that night, so you probably know the whole story. I'm sorry I put you in that position."

Nigel felt torn. A part of him still wanted to protect Jordan, as he always had. The other part of him just wanted to lash into her for her actions, to vent all his frustration and anger. For thirty seconds, that first part won. "It wasn't exactly your fault, Jordan."

But only for thirty seconds.

"No, I take that back," Nigel said sternly, straightening up to his full height. "It was your fault. It's your fault you decided to drink yourself into a stupor these past couple months. It's your fault you've been biting our heads of the whole time. It's your fault I spent an entire week doing double shifts because Sidney was sick and you were drunk off your ass, so I had to cover for both of you! And it's your fault that I was the only one who could do that because no one else knew what was going on, and for some stupid reason I felt like protecting you. But I'll tell you what, Jordan. It hurt. It hurt that you'd be so damnably selfish that you'd hurt your closest friends like that. And I didn't even get the worst of it! Woodrow got his head bit off practically every day! Did you even remember what you did to him? Here, I'll show you," he said as she shook her head. He turned back to his computer and switched on the monitor. A few clicks of the mouse later, a vibrant color photo of Woody, sleeping on Garret's couch, stitches exposed, appeared on the screen. "I took this while I was changing the bandage and waking him up to make sure the bloke didn't have a concussion. Did you know that it took Garret nine stitches to close the wound? Nine." He held the same number fingers up in front of her face as he said it. "Stupid bloke wouldn't even let us take him to a hospital, where a real doctor – you know, the kind that work on living people – could take a look at him."

By now, Nigel was pacing short strides in front of Jordan, pausing occasionally to look at her reaction. "Took me three days to figure out why. If he had gone to a hospital, an injury like his would have required a police report. And with his boy scout belief in the system, he couldn't have lied to them, so news of what happened would have made it's way back to the big bosses – you know, the ones that sign your paycheck – and you would have been forced to take leave from a job that he knows you love. Stupid man would actually bleed to death than do something that would hurt you."

"He won't answer my calls, Nigel."

"What?" Jordan's first words since he began effectively stopped him in his tracks, essentially finishing his tirade, though he was just about done with it anyway.

She inhaled a shaky breath, finally turning away from where she had been staring at the picture on the computer, but stood her ground. "He won't answer any of my calls. I've left a dozen messages on his cell, but it was disconnected a couple days ago, and he hasn't returned any of them."

Nigel already felt his temporary, and uncharacteristic, rage ebbing. "What about his home phone?"

"Disconnected. Has been since that day, when he left, I guess for Wisconsin. Look, Nigel. I know I've been a really crappy friend lately, but I need your help. I still can't remember what happened that day. I get a couple flashes here and there… someone touching a bottle of vodka on my coffee table, the office toilet from very close up – not a good view, mind you. I just can't remember anything, Nigel, and it's kind of… Well, I'll admit it's pretty much scaring the crap out of me right now." She shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, but now that he looked, Nigel could see the fear and frustration in her eyes. "I went to an AA meeting the other day, and they suggested having a friend, someone you could confide in. I can't reach Woody. Garret has too much on his plate right now, trying to handle Wolcott, and I don't want to burden anyone else with this. So please, I need your help."

Nigel studied Jordan for a while. He knew how hard it was for her to ask for help. And he could see the tears forming in her eyes, one of the few times he had ever seen such a sight. "You know I'll help you, love," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "But you've got to let me."

Jordan leaned into his friendly embrace, and he automatically felt himself reciprocating. Giving her a quick squeeze, he pulled back and looked down at her. "You're lucky I like you so much," he teased. "Come on. Let's get back to work. When we get off, I'll take you for a cup of coffee and we can talk."

More time passed. Jordan started taking things one day at a time. Then days turned into weeks, turned into months. She and Nigel spend a lot of time together, just talking. And while they did talk a lot about Jordan's problems, they spend just as much time talking about mundane things, about… life. That isn't to say she neglected her other friends. She went shopping with Lily. She went to the museum of natural science with Bug and Nigel. She went to an occasional movie. If anyone noticed that she avoided the bars and dance clubs, no one said anything.

After a while, Jordan and Nigel were a little stunned to find that it had been two months since that night; Jordan still had no memory of what had happened. Her only knowledge came from the second-hand information Garret and Nigel had. One afternoon, as they shared lunch before they started their evening shift together, Jordan confided in him that knowing that she might never remember was what scared her most of all. That she could do something so horrible and deliberate to someone she cared about and not have any recollection of it. And in those moments where her head ached and the nightmares began to creep up on her, when she was alone in her apartment, when she was temped to jog over to the corner store, all she had to do was look at the picture on her nightstand.

The picture was a copy of the one she had given Devan's mother. The gang from the morgue had been celebrating something, and a picture had been taken since it was one of the few times they were all in the same place together. The photo served to remind her of all that she was hurting if she caved in to her need for alcohol. Invariably, though, she would find her gaze drawn to Woody's bright smiling face. He was standing next to her, and she could remember that his hand had been on the small of her back. Even in those days, when she had doubted his friendship because of how close he was to Devan, he had continued to support her and be her friend. In one of their conversations, she told Nigel how she often found herself wishing that she had more pictures of him, or of the two of them together. When ever they had gone out as a group or just by themselves, Woody was usually the one behind the camera, snapping random shots with his digital camera. Briefly, she would wonder if he stored them all somewhere.

For the first couple weeks after Woody left, Jordan hadn't worried too much about him. She had done something terrible to him, and he deserved his space. But when he still didn't call her after three weeks, and no one at the precinct seemed to know anything, she did start to worry. Bug and Lily had noticed; though Woody would occasionally go off and 'sulk' (as Lily said), it was unusual for him to stay away for so long, to not forgive and forget.

But Jordan suspected he never forgot anything. And she was starting to think that he really wouldn't forget what had happened that night in her apartment. But there was nothing she could do. She had no way of communicating with him. And no matter how many hints she dropped, Garret, Nigel and even Woody's police captain refused to take the bait. The only information she got was that he was taking care of his late aunt's affairs in Wisconsin, and that things were taking longer than expected.

The fact that the ball was, essentially, in Woody's court didn't mean that Jordan stopped thinking or worrying about him. Even Nigel could see that, hear that in her voice when she talked about him. And two and a half months after Jordan's turning point, he could see that she was tired of waiting, and would jump at any chance to talk to Woodrow Hoyt again.