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Jordan couldn't really argue with dating makes you look normal; he'd been there, used the appearance of the sort of thing other people did to protect himself from too much attention, too much curiosity. "You don't think much of yourself," he said instead, curious, a little sad. "Don't you think that she thinks you have worth, something to offer her? If she asked you, and then stayed with you, she wanted - she wants to be with you," he corrected his tense quickly. "Why do you think that is?"

He drained his glass, then looked up sharply as Melvin's voice strained and cracked, as the bottle's neck creaked and began to break under Melvin's grip. "Hey," he said, and reached over to take the bottle. "You're going to get glass in your hand, man." He set the bottle and his own glass aside, and reached to check Melvin's hand. "I guess that depends on what your definition of being a man is, whether you feel like you can call yourself that," he answered the question.

The cuts weren't bad, and there didn't seem to be glass embedded in any of them; Jordan let Melvin pull away without protest. Saliva would heal the small slices quickly enough. "You should trust her," he said, absently wiping the small smears of blood that had gotten on his hand off on his jeans. "Can you trust she's telling the truth, that she wants to be with you, even if you can't see why? You're a smart guy, good-looking, interesting."

He shook his head. "Fighting's not everything. The rest of it's important too, backup and support and all the jobs we all do on the island. If you weren't useful you wouldn't be awake," he pointed out. It maybe wasn't the most tactful way to put it, but his mind was moving slowly, words framing concepts with less finesse than usual. "If you were stronger than her, would you be okay with that?"

He frowned briefly at the broken bottle. It might be salvageable, but he wasn't sure he trusted either of them to perform a complex operation right now. It didn't really matter. This was an important conversation.

"It's hard to trust sometimes," Jordan said, and rested his elbows on his knees. "I thought ... I thought I trusted them, but I couldn't ask when I needed something ... " He shook his head, and regretted it when the spinning sensation went on rather longer than it should have. "We're all kinda broken here. One way or another. If it doesn't look like it, that just means they're hiding it better."

He leaned on his hand and wished he hadn't finished his drink already. "If that was too much to ask, you'd already know. If she minded what you need more than she wanted to be with you she'd be -- " he caught himself before he said she'd be gone, " -- she wouldn't stay with you, so that means that she loves you enough to stay even when it might be difficult."

He sat up a little and aimed a lazy kick in Melvin's general direction, missed deliberately. "Dumbass," he said, "your friends support you because we want to. We haven't dropped you because we choose not to. It's not out of some, some kind of sense of obligation."

"It's not your fault," Jordan said, and reached out to touch Melvin's arm, briefly, lightly, taking care to touch his sleeve rather than his hand as he remembered that Melvin didn't like that. "She wanted to protect you. You're here, you're alive. That's what she wanted, when she, when she ... " He trailed off, left the sentence hanging.

You seem so good. Jordan flinched, laughed dismally. "I'm not," he said. "I'm blind, I couldn't even see what I was doing to push them away. I still don't know. Not really. Just that I didn't trust enough. Didn't say enough." He put his head in his hands. "I don't trust words," he said, and swallowed the constriction in his throat. "When you, when you talk, when you put something into words, that's the first step toward it not being true. Whether or not you thought it was, or whether you meant it. Words can be true to one person and a lie to someone else, or completely true but not complete, or true when you said them but not later. It's, I don't trust words, because of what they can do. What people do with them. And I didn't say enough, I said the wrong things." He choked on the words and stopped and rubbed the slow spill of tears out of his eyelashes.

"I'm not a good person," he said, very low. "I do the wrong things. I did it wrong and I don't even know until it's all wrong, I tried to think of what to do and how it could go and I was wrong. I should have figured it out. I should have known."

"I think a lot about how to say what I say. But it doesn't always work." Jordan slumped, leaning on his elbows. "I wasn't there enough," he said softly. "I wish I'd known. I could have done something. Maybe. Maybe it was all going to fail anyway. I just thought I didn't have to be alone any more."

"I didn't ever think they were lying," he answered, and his voice cracked as he spoke again. "But maybe it didn't mean the same thing as it meant to me when they said it." He wiped his eyes again. "Maybe it wouldn't even matter if I asked."

"Rep didn't want me anywhere near him," Jordan said, quietly. "I don't know why. I don't, I can't, I must have done something, why would he reject everything I am? I said the wrong things, if I can't be close I can't fix it, I don't," and he swallowed hard and folded down over his knees, hiding his face in response to Melvin's attempt to look at him.

"I have to use words," he answered. "But it makes me a liar. I hate it. I don't know what else. I don't, reading minds would ******** suck, I don't want to know the s**t that other people want most to hide. I like to know about people, but that stuff, that's private. Being naked. You can't, if you didn't earn it, that's wrong. If you know anyway, then you can't say. There's so much I can't say. Mine and others. It's heavy. I'm tired. I'm so tired."

He sat up slowly, attempted a smile, let it slide off when it felt entirely fake. "I miss them. I miss them so much, and they're still there, just, just I can't touch them. I didn't know it was going to hurt this much. I've been alone before. Why can't I handle it now? What's wrong with me?"

He didn't stop Melvin from reaching for the bottle, but he untied his scarf and offered it to Melvin, unable to shake the practical edge, even now. "Filter it," he said, "don't risk swallowing glass."

"Sorry," Jordan whispered, and laced his fingers together to keep from reaching out. "Sorry." It was the empty spaces that were the worst, the quiet, the absence. He wasn't the right person. He turned his head, leaning on his knees and choking on half-formed sobs. Rin was actually gone. Melvin had so much more right to grieve.