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Show 108 the most awful sound of ra^fge. She bolts - Hall in pursuit. Jewel runs out onto the grid. Hunt starts coughing. He musn't wake Leah; he does not want that; but the Best Western air feels like it has been conditioned to dust: Hunt presses his chest. On the grid, Jewel's bare feet cling, looking white, to the blackened I-beams. "Jewel!" Hall calls out, chasing her: "I just wanted to be close - don't you see?! Just even for a short while again: I wanted to be close - without troubling you!" Hunt tries, violently, to contain his coughing. Hall closes the gap -- until Jewel leaps from his beam and is unmoored and in the air above the thousand panels of one-way glass, the acres of mirrors on the ceiling. "No!" Hall shouts out. And Hunt shouts it too. In the room. Leah startles, Then Hall sees Jewel land, and Leah relaxes -- shakily at first, but then steadying -- on the next beam, five or six feet away. "You prick!" Jewel screams. Leah pulls the sheet up. Jewel's body is heaving; her face is plastered with tears. Hunt wonders what the hell Leah might be dreaming about. Often, she tells him, she dreams about them joined. "God! . . . Jesus Christ!" Jewel shrieks. They poise, across from one another. "Don't move," Hall says. He urges: "Please: Please -- be careful." "I'll move anywhere I goddamn want!" Jewel announces. And she looks as if she wants to move _up_, like an Apolo moonshot! "Can we talk?" Hall asks. And Hunt is crying. "I think you're sick!" Jewel says. And then she repeats the brutal word: "Sick!" "I think you're beautiful," Hall holds on - headache or no headache -- and says. |