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There was no warning, no appointment made for the abrupt visit of Miss Audrey Horne midway through the morning of December 17th. One moment, Cooper was reviewing field notes for a new case near Alpharetta, his coffee forgotten at the northwest corner of his keyboard, and the next he found himself blinking at the no longer empty frame of his office door.
“Miss Horne,” he said promptly, halfway out of his chair before he could even entirely comprehend what he was seeing. The last he’d heard of Audrey Horne, she’d woken from a coma in a Bellingham hospital. Cooper remembered that he’d meant to send flowers, but had a feeling that, like so many other things, had escaped him in the months after he left Twin Peaks. “This is a surprise.”
“It shouldn’t be,” answered Audrey instantly, unwinding her scarf from her pale throat. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
Cooper looked meaningfully at the piles of paper strewn across the small enclosure of his office. When he requested the transfer to headquarters some ten years before -- about two years longer than he should have asked for it -- he’d made a specific request for a windowless office and tried not to think very hard about his reasons why. “My office isn’t the most welcoming of places.”
Audrey seemed to take that as her cue to step inside anyway, shutting the door with a click not at all unlike that of her heeled shoes. “That doesn’t matter to me. Your office has ignored three requests from Senator Macalister on the Wenatchee murders. You must have known the senator would send someone eventually.”
“I didn’t expect you, of all people,” said Cooper absently, but he cleared off his extra chair and gestured her toward it all the same. “I don’t believe the agents working that case would deliberately ignore an enquiry from a senator.”
“I said I had a contact at FBI headquarters.” Audrey shed her coat and draped it across the back of the chair, perching at the edge of the seat with her legs crossed. Her Senate identification card still hung around her neck on a lanyard, with her faded out picture showing a bright, cheeky smile for the photographer. “And it happens that you’re the agent working the Wenatchee case.”
“There are field agents out of Seattle who are actually--”
“But you’re the chief investigator.” Audrey dusted something invisible from her immaculate skirt and smiled back at him. “I checked. Now, why haven’t you responded to the Senator’s questions about the murder of three of her constituents?”
He had not, in actuality, seen any Senate communications asking for information on what he’d been telling himself was an open and shut drug case. There was ample evidence to argue that the hikers had been killed after stumbling onto a cache of drugs bound for the Canadian border. Enough to settle the matter, until an intrepid young field agent found some old files with similar patterns in the evidence. Old cases with Cooper’s name on them.
Well, he’d been putting off dealing with it until after the new year. Deal with his already explosive caseload and build up a buffer of self-affirmation through annual holiday leave and handle it when the warmth of it hadn’t yet dissipated.
Cooper closed his hand into a loose fist to keep himself from paying any attention to the slightest tremble in his fingertips. “If the Senator has specific questions about the investigation, I’m happy to give her a briefing on the case details in private. I’m sensitive to the interest the case has drawn from the public and the position this places the Senator in, but you understand that there are--”
“Rules and protocol, of course.” Audrey waved a hand absently. “You’ll meet with the Senator, then?”
“Assuming she isn’t planning to leave town before the Senate goes to recess,” he offered pleasantly. Given what he knew of the storm of legislation being hotly debated up to the end of the session, Cooper did not think the Senator planned to leave town until Christmas itself, if it came to it. “Otherwise, a meeting can be arranged in the new year.”
“I’ll talk to the scheduler.” Audrey’s voice was hard with resolve, and Cooper found himself feeling very sorry for the aide in charge of scheduling if there were any conflicts. He scribbled a quick note on his pad to make sure he told someone where he was going. His notes would need to be much more detailed than that when Audrey left.
“Well, that settles it. Send my apologies to Senator Macalister for the trouble.” Cooper took a preemptive step toward the door to open it for Audrey, but stopped short when she didn’t yet move from her chair.
Her moss green eyes were still fixed on him, her lipstick-stained mouth creased up thoughtfully, and Cooper thought that maybe -- definitely he’d forgotten something than important than flowers to her sickbed. He abandoned the door handle and slipped a hand into his trouser pocket, pulling out a silver card case and offering her one of his business cards.
She took it, gently examining the sharp edges of the heavy linen paper with a fingertip, and then stood up and reached for her coat. “Thank you, Agent Cooper.”
“It’s really good to see you again, Audrey,” he said, and was surprised just how sincerely he meant it.
*
Audrey found a reason to be occupied with another meeting when Cooper had his meeting with Senator Macalister, something complex and without much hope for resolution that would inevitably spill over the allotted time for the meeting room. But when she finally shrugged her way back toward the Russell building, daydreaming about a coffee to beat back a tension headache like an ice pick behind her left eye, she was surprised to find Cooper waiting in her office.
“I thought you’d be in the meeting,” he said simply, unfolding his hands and standing with his best approximation of an amiable smile. The halo of light from the overhead lights pulsed in time with her throbbing head, but they also drew her eyes to the spray of gray hair at Cooper’s temples. He was still too young for that, she thought instinctively, but maybe he was evergreen only in her mind. Always smiling, always thirty-four, even when she’d grown out of girlish fantasies of him.
In the present day, Cooper was just this side of fifty, and he looked a little worn, like the watery, midwinter sunshine. Audrey scrubbed a riot of curls away from her eyes and gave a thin smile.
“You asked for a private meeting,” she reminded him, unbuckling her wool coat and hanging it on the crooked coat hanger by the door. Her office was the result of her recent promotion within the Senator’s staff and simple stroke of luck when the office’s previous inhabitant abruptly retired back to Washington after the last election season, warning Audrey that she needed to slow down or she’d burn out sooner, rather than later. “In any case, I don’t work drug or criminal justice policy.”
She didn’t add that it had been a specific request of hers, when she’d finally been promoted, that she never have to touch the things that called her back to a night at One-Eyed Jack’s, to Laura Palmer, or home in Twin Peaks. Audrey liked to think that she was better off, that she’d moved on with her life, but some things were better to play a little safer.
“You just know a few FBI agents to connect the Senator with.”
“Just the one,” Audrey corrected with an attempt at a more sincere smile. “Can I get you some coffee? Is there anything you needed to talk to me about?”
“I thought I owed you an apology. You really were the last person I expected to sashay into my office in mid-December, and I was a little terse with you.”
“Well,” she expelled with a sudden, barking laugh. Outside her office, one of the interns swiveled her head around to look at her curiously, then snapped back toward her computer monitor with a violent giggle. “I assume FBI agents don’t love when senate aides storm their offices.”
“Not when they do a week before Christmas, usually.” Cooper seemed more at ease now, maybe because he’d said everything he meant to say to her. “I’ll be doing paperwork for this when I should be doing yoga on the beach.”
“Oh, that’s actually a shame. But you said you wanted to apologize to me?”
“Could I buy you dinner?”
A chocolate malt and some french fries, about twelve years overdue. Audrey stopped herself short of saying it out loud. She’d only mostly grown out of the girlish fantasies, apparently.
“Dinner would be lovely,” she said, looking discreetly at the old, wooden clock her father brought her from the Lodge when she’d graduated college. “But I still have a little work to do tonight.”
“It can wait.” He said it in a way that made her think it meant I can wait.
“I’ll be here through the holiday,” Audrey heard herself hurrying to add. She didn’t want to just let it be. Not that she hadn’t known that going to Cooper’s office would inevitably dredge up things she’d left forgotten for a long time, but it wasn’t all bad, really. And, anyway, playing coy only had so many advantages. “If you want to get dinner before you leave for the beach.”
“The twenty-third? The senator should be home by then.” Cooper’s smile was deliberate, knowing.
Audrey glanced down at her desk just to see if her calendar was open. It was, showing her schedule mostly open. “As if that’s when work finishes here,” she said, shifting a stack of paper to cover it. “I’ll see you then. You can pick me up.”
*
Despite Audrey’s casual words in parting, Cooper met her outside her office, rather than picking her up from home. And although he'd said he would be doing paperwork, his memo about the meeting with Senator Macalister was brief and finished the same day. Cooper had instead spent the day with a rare breath of freedom, and was consequently dressed more casually in a pair of slacks and a sweater over his favorite button-up when he arrived.
“I like this look,” Audrey told him when she descended the stone steps to the street, adjusting her scarf on her throat. The downward sweep of her eyes was obvious and approving, but then they returned to his and she smiled and Cooper felt abruptly and astonishingly disarmed.
“A little time off is good for you now and again,” he reminded her, offering her an arm and extending the other to hail a taxi. “I didn't always know that.”
“I still don't know that,” Audrey quipped, flashing a smile when he opened the door to the waiting cab for her. “It always seems like there's something else to finish up, and I didn't want to drag it home. My roommate left town earlier this week, but I still find it easier to get things done in the office.”
Cooper gave the address for a quiet restaurant he favored in Georgetown. It was housed by an older building with a stone hearth and, when he'd given half a moment of thought to where he might like to take Audrey, it was an obvious choice. When he led her inside, it was apparent that his choice was a good one. She hummed her appreciation when she stepped into the bubble of warmth emanating past the guard of the heavy, wooden door. The narrow restaurant had a line of tables on each side of the room, and a great table in the center.
“Most people will be gone already,” he said, behind her ear, when she handed her coat off to him. “I thought you might prefer somewhere a little more intimate.”
Her eyes flashed something inscrutable at that and Cooper blinked back his surprise as he remembered another time Audrey gave him a remarkably similar look. It had scared him then, but she wasn't eighteen anymore and he wasn't shaken by it this time. Not in the same way, anyway.
“Intimate sounds delightful,” she answered in a voice that may have been a little more casual than she meant. Still, Audrey followed to a table in a secluded alcove of the restaurant, and her smiles were reserved, but sincere. “Are you going to tell me this is your favorite place to go?”
“No,” he laughed, scanning the wine list as though he could merely guess what she preferred. “I thought you might enjoy it, though.”
“Well, you weren't wrong.” For a third time, Cooper lifted his eyes and found the sort of smoldering glimmer he hadn't thought to hope for from anyone. He certainly hadn't imagined to find himself receiving it from Audrey Horne again, not in this life or the next.
He didn't look away. Instead, he offered her the list and simply said, “Tell me about your life since you left Washington.”
*
When Audrey checked the time some long, unknown period after they finished dinner, it was out of habit rather than any wish to be finished with Cooper. There was a certain formula these evenings took -- dates, she corrected immediately. At some point in the last -- heavens, the last two and a half hours, she had come to think of this less as a chance to simply catch up.
Still, Cooper noticed. Once Audrey assured him she had no intentions of returning to work and she had no other plans for the evening, she followed him to the bar and claimed one of two plush chairs set near the comfortably burning fire.
She thought of what he'd said when she left his office maybe a week before and compared it to the lingering, thoughtful glances he stole of her when Audrey smiled at the bartender and ordered her Manhattan perfect. She tried to consider what that meant. What it might mean.
“You never said why you moved to DC,” she ventured at last, when she wanted to ask whether he still felt the years between them were an insurmountable gulf, rather than a bridge. “I had the impression you enjoyed your work. That you liked Washington.”
The silence that hung between them for the briefest of seconds was answer enough, though. It was the silence of ghosts and unanswered questions hooting outside windows on cold nights when the wind scraped tree branches like fingernails on her windows.
“It was time to move on,” Cooper ventured, his throat working under the primly folded collar of his shirt.
“Was it?” The question sounded barbed to Audrey’s ears, although she didn't entirely disagree. She could not help imagining if Cooper had stayed in Twin Peaks after Laura Palmer’s murder was settled. Even if he'd stayed a few weeks, or months, he might have… But there was no use thinking of that. There was no imaginary what-if world, only what had already happened.
“I still think sometimes that I’m haunted by the Palmer case,” Cooper offered in a tone that sounded a lot like an apology, as though she'd telegraphed her thoughts to him. “It’s better I left when I did, although I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you were in the hospital.”
“It’s fine.” Audrey lifted her Manhattan by the delicate stem of the glass and flashed her eyes back at him. Seeing a glimpse of genuine regret, she flashed him a sharp-toothed smile and took a drink. “Honestly, it is. Laura’s… murder was traumatic for a lot of people.” She choked a little on the word and tried to cover by taking another too-deep sip of the cocktail. “But I think it would have gotten a lot worse if you hadn’t left when you did.”
“Do you think?” Cooper hadn’t touched his drink at all, really, and Audrey nudged it in his direction, toeing off her shoes and flexing her nylon-sheathed feet toward the warmth of the fireplace. He took it willingly, plainly contemplating what she’d said before going on: “You never seemed like you would change your plans for anyone. Least of all me.”
Audrey felt her whole face soften, her heart beating off time for a few seconds of sweeping, overcome emotion. When she was younger, when he rebuffed her advances on account of her age, it had seemed like he hadn’t been taking her seriously. Now, she wondered if maybe he had taken her altogether too seriously.
“I would have had a hard time leaving Twin Peaks when I did if you’d bought that house and stayed,” she explained with an urgent clearing of her throat she masked by drinking. “Instead, I went to college, majored in politics and communications, interned on the Hill, and here I am: spending Christmas in DC because the flights were too expensive.”
“I doubt that’s the whole truth.” Cooper drank from the glass, but his eyes never left Audrey’s.
Ah, she thought, remembering that he was very, very good at hiding how sharp he was. “I don’t like to think about the whole truth,” said Audrey. “Not any more than you do.”
“Well,” he said, setting his suddenly empty glass next to hers. “That’s the truth.”
For an insane second, Audrey considered fishing the cherry from the bottom of her glass and doing something obscenely childish with the stem. In another, equally implausible instant, she thought she saw Cooper imagining the same.
She finished the cocktail with a breathless gulp, past daring and beyond hope. “Weather says snow tonight.”
“We should get somewhere warm, then.”
*
Audrey’s cramped apartment was across the river, but Cooper’s close enough to walk, even though they took another cab. She spent the trip with her hands folded in her lap, fidgeting inside her gloves and resisting the urge to pinch herself. This is real, she told herself. As real as the glow of the streetlights passing over them, the press of the cold leather seat under her thighs, or the click of the lock giving way to the turn of Cooper’s key.
There’s a light on at the end of the hall, but the entryway was lit well enough for Audrey to see shelves of books lining the way to the living room, a painting of a woman cradling a child on the far wall, the bright paint catching the sparkle of a chandelier in another room.
This is real, she found herself repeating silently when Cooper's hands rested on her shoulders as she unbelted her coat. A question, not a demand.
“Your place was the right call,” said Audrey with the ghost of a smile curling on her lips. She shrugged off the coat and relinquished it to Cooper, a hanger in his hall closet. “My roommate is gone, but her dishes…”
“Do you think a few dishes scare me?”
Audrey didn't know what scared him, really. Maybe the same things that scared her, or maybe things she'd never dreamed to be afraid of. Giggling laughter burst like champagne bubbles from her chest and she reached for his scarf, caressing her fingertips over the coarse weave of the wool.
“It never occurred to me to be nervous before,” she explained, as if he needed to hear that.
Cooper shed his coat in response, while Audrey followed deeper into the apartment. Her heels clicked across wooden floors, then softened at the edge of an opulent rug. “You're nervous now, though.”
She stepped down from her shoes and into his chest, as though he'd been waiting to catch her. Cooper’s hands were very warm.
“Not exactly,” said Audrey, tasting the words in her mouth and realizing it was true. It wasn't a nervous sort of anxiety as much as a sense of excitement, of some predetermined thing coming to be at last. It was the effervescent brush of sincere joy.
It was nothing to the first touch of her mouth to his, taken in a single motion that began with Cooper turning his head in question and ended with her raising to meet him.
Waiting had never seemed like such a waste as then. I would have wasted this at eighteen, she decided after the first, breathless kiss. Her fingertips stretched toward his hairline, where she scraped gently along the curvature of Cooper’s head. I could never have known how sweet it really is.
Reminding herself that she would waste it again if she merely reminisced instead of enjoying it, Audrey slipped her hands under his sweater and fumbled with a few of the buttons. She would leave nothing to assumptions and maybe.
“The bedroom, maybe,” suggested Cooper in a low voice, lips moving against hers. He didn't move away, but Audrey did, abandoning her efforts and following from one room to another. The apartment was dimly lit by the streetlamps below, until Cooper switched on a lamp beside the bed.
For a moment, Audrey considered suggesting that they turn it off, but she rather liked the warm glow off to the side. It was somehow like an anchor to reality, the beam of a lighthouse off the coast to show her where the dream crashed into the edges of reality. She shimmied off her silk blouse and set it to the side, her eyes watching when Cooper as he undressed, sitting on the corner of the bed and unlacing his shoes. The barest touch of the mundane skimming over a churning ocean, too unbelievable to be real.
Cooper set them aside, unfolding and watching her stare back at him. “Come here,” he said in a light voice that only seemed to break at the very end.
Audrey removed her skirt and tights in a hurry, and then she did.
*
Audrey slept lightly beside him, the blankets pulled all the way to the bottom of her chin and her hair falling over eyes. Cooper reached out and brushed it aside with two fingers. It was surreal, all of it: the cold outside held back by the warmth of the room, dissipating toward the edges. The street below was quiet, broken occasionally by a car passing below. The lamp had already been put out hours before, but the room was still lit faintly from the outside light.
Despite his light touch, Audrey stirred with a little hum that was plainly happy.
“I didn't mean to wake you,” Cooper explained in a low voice.
“I don't mind,” she yawned in response. “I like seeing you here. Makes this feel like it's…”
“It's real,” Cooper told her, instantly recognizing what she meant to say. It was all too much like the feeling that had sat in his chest since Audrey came to his office. “I promise.”
“Ah,” she said, drifting back toward sleep, “then stay.”