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passed, in case it was her. No luck, Chuck! So I complained to the security guard and he threw him out before I came back with my Wendy’s. Not bad, huh?”
    “Kenny, you’re a real prick.”
    He smiled, as if I had just rumpled his hair and chucked him on the chin. “I told you. I loved her.”
    “When did she dump this guy?”
    “Months ago. Somebody told me they got back together after, but I don’t buy it. I never saw him again.”
    “What about you?”
    “What about me?”
    “Did you get anywhere with her?”
    “You media assholes are all alike! Who the fuck do you think you are? Can’t you respect anyone’s right to privacy? You make me sick!”
    Kenny sneered, but he leaned his body still closer, with all the grace of a construction crane redeploying. “All right, you filthy hack,” he said. “I’ll give you your juicy little tidbit. Put it on the front page of the
Post
! Maybe I’m drunk—I just don’t fucking care.” He planted his beer on the ledge. “Here’s something nobody knows, not even the police. They never asked.”
    The blisters of sweat on his forehead were popping. One of them dripped down his forehead into the filter of his eyebrow. He blinked and swiped at his forehead with a soggy cocktail napkin that had been stuck to the side of his beer.
    “The night before she left—I kissed her. No one else in the world knows that.”
    “No one?” Had I really spent the price of four beers for the story of Kenny’s First Kiss?
    “No one. We were here, in this very bar—but Tuesday, so it wasn’t so fucking suffocating—and a bunch of us had had a few after work but we kept on talking and when it was just the two of us, I leaned over, like this.” And he stabbed with his head at me, like a pigeon; I recoiled. “Right on the lips. And you know what? She kissed right back.”
    “Unbelievable.”
    “You gonna write that down?”
    “I’ve got it all up here. Any tongue?”
    “You fucking journalists! A little tongue. You know. A taste.”
    “And afterwards?”
    “Well, we had work the next day, so I didn’t make my move. What I was doing—you understand—was laying the groundwork.”
    “Right.”
    “I can’t believe I gave you this stuff. ’Cause it’s gold! I should be the one writing this up! But I’m just the office gofer. For now! You’re a lucky bastard. This blows everything out of the water. She must have been thinking about me down there. Maybe she went out with someone else, but she was thinking about me while it was going on. And maybe that’s why someone got pissed off at her. But one thing’s for sure. She wouldn’t have run off. Not knowing I was waiting for her. Not with that, that issue, you know, still out there. Unexplored.”
    He glugged manfully at his beer, but there was still a sudsy inch churning when he slammed it back on the ledge.
    “Maybe you think I’m full of myself,” he said. “But there are a few times in life when you don’t have any doubts. And I always have doubts! But not then. Not when she kissed me back. The next day I wanted to talk to her, but I said to myself, take it slow. Lay the groundwork. Give her time to think it over. And then the day after that I learned she was off to Bolivia, on her press trip. She left work early. No biggie, I figured. I’d talk to her when she got back. And now she’s gone. And that’s why I’m serving up my secrets. Because maybe if you know them you can find her.”
    And I did know her better now. I saw a woman sweet enough to talk to the dork of the department, and either kind enough or drunk enough not to push him away when he did the bravest thing he could ever do. I imagined her smiling at him afterward, touching his sleeve andtelling him she had to go home. And now that kiss that should have tingled on Kenny’s virgin lips for a few weeks would burn in his lonely soul forever. But what was the harm in that? Kenny would have his own little tidbit of tragedy to savor and brood