He tried not to get sucked into Kerian's seemingly infectious good spirits. He had plenty of his own and he already felt full to the brim. Beside just the mysterious journals, there was something else they had to talk about.
Keiran's drinking actually bothered Jackson more than it should for knowing the kid for only two days. "Why do you do that to yourself? You're going to lose your kidney before your thirty if you don't wind up dead in a gutter somewhere first," he replied instead. God, he sounded like a nagging mom, but that nearly overwhelming feeling of protectiveness reasserted itself and nagged at the back of Jackson's mind. "It's one thing to let the sorry drunks here do it, it's another thing entirely to let yourself go down the same road they're already on."