A/N: Dear USA Network – Thank you for coming to your senses. It's enabled me to write about Goren and Eames for the first time in a long time. (You are aware, of course, my dear network, that I am only borrowing these characters and that Dick Wolf really shouldn't sue me for that.) Also, USA, could you remind my readers that I don't really 'ship in the traditional way ('cause that's no fun and way too easy) and let them know that they should probably check out some of my previous stories for the inside references listed here? I suggest "Absalom," "Breathe," and "Fortunate" at least. All episodes are fair game, so spoilers abound. Thanks – I'm looking forward to our new episodes in 2011! Love - Piaffe

Well, so that is what happens and what has happened and you might as well admit it and now you will never have two whole nights with her. Not a lifetime, not to live together, not to have what people were always supposed to have, not at all… Not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom, not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up together, not to wake and know she's there and that you're not alone. No. None of that… You ask for the impossible. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

The scrap of paper bearing Hemingway's words traveled in your battered notebook for the better part of seven years, often forced to swim upstream for survival amongst case files, napkins covered in a light coating of spaghetti sauce and hastily-scratched notes, and whatever other bits of information you picked up along the way. For a while, it swam in tandem beside a crumpled slip of shiny paper from a fortune cookie that read "Stop searching for forever. Happiness is right next to you." Ever since you gave that to her a couple of years ago during a rough patch in your partnership, however - a desperate mea culpa delivered in the only way you knew how - the Hemingway passage has traveled alone.

The jury is still out on whether things improved back them because of the fortune itself or because you'd been reminded on that particular occasion not to take her for granted. Either way, the fortune is long gone – and now so is Alexandra Eames. The loss of neither surprises you; you're more astonished to discover that the Hemingway passage is still in your possession.

If only Alex was still there too.

It wasn't that you'd ever really possessed her in the first place, of course (talk about the impossible!), but she'd been there for so long - a constant, daily presence in your life - that you'd spent your first week of unemployment walking around like a sailor trying to adjust to land, so off-kilter that you could have sworn your inner ear was out of balance. Since then, it's taken conscious work to teach yourself to stop looking for her by your side before you cross the street, a task that's been fairly successful. You haven't yet mastered the art of conversation without her, however; you still occasionally pause for too long in a conversation because you're waiting for her to add something and it takes an extra few seconds to realize that you're waiting for a wry remark that won't come.

(She'd think that was hilarious, of course. She'd claim that in all those years you worked together, she'd had to fight to get a word in edgewise and that irony alone makes you want to keep the habit, if only in the barest hope that somewhere she's smiling and she doesn't know why.)

That power that she had to steady you – that power she demonstrated so effortlessly, right from day one - must have been why those particular words from For Whom the Bell Tolls caught your attention on what must have been your third reading of the novel, a reading that occurred somewhere around your second year of partnership with the lovely (yet formidable) Alexandra Eames. Back then, your friendship was new and tenuous (as opposed to the old and tenuous one you had later). Back then, you were still feeling each other out, deciding how much to share and how much to hide from each other – but you recall that you had a quiet sense about her from the start, a sense of being able to trust in her understated strength and blunt (but never cruel) honesty.

That same sense must also have been the one that told you that, no matter what happened between the two of you, your partnership would be for better or worse, but it wouldn't be forever – and perhaps that was what compelled you to copy the passage down and store it in your leather binder for safe keeping. There, it served as an unnecessary reminder that not everyone was guaranteed to receive the standard "American lifestyle" package in their mailbox, that traditional "two-point-five perfect children with a Golden Retriever and a house upstate" standard that so many aspired to. As if you weren't already aware from your upbringing (or lack thereof) that you were never going to get that lucky in your lifetime, you had Hemingway there to remind you every time you looked in your binder.

The unlucky people, you know, are instead relegated to mere moments of normalcy - brief moments of shining and brilliant contentment to be stored up and brought out when the reality of real life rears its head. You know because you, Bobby Goren, are one of those people – and the Hemingway passage, coupled with the simple word "moments" that you scribbled beneath it, was once your daily reminder to conserve those special moments with Alex, to care for and cherish them, and to never take them for granted. Even though you slipped up a few times along the way, Hemingway – and Alex herself - could always get you back on the right track.

Now, of course, you realize that, unlike those other, shorter periods when you felt less than normal and more than beat up by life, this must be the real rainy day occasion you had conserved those moments for: You saved your moments with Alex for the inevitable time when you wouldn't be with her any more.

You told her when you parted, "I'll see you around, I guess" but you both knew that you didn't mean it. The words just happened to sound superior to "Bye then," or "Thanks for the memories," or any of the other three hundred clichéd things that ran through your mind and sounded worse than false. The only thing you were dead certain of in that moment was the fact that "Good bye" was completely unacceptable. "Good bye" was something that Bobby Goren (not Robert Goren, Bobby Goren, because that's what Alex always called you) would never say to Alex Eames.

So "I'll see you around, I guess," it was and it served its purpose. "I'll see you around" was vague enough to be polite and at least left open the possibility that you might bump into each other on the street one day. "I'll see you around" suggested that, if you did have a chance encounter, you'd go for coffee and catch up. "I'll see you around" was nicely open-ended and acknowledged the fact that, though you both live in a city of eight and a half million people, there's always a statistical chance that you could run into her one day.

Right.

You're Bobby Goren, which means you know about statistics and knowing about statistics means that you realize full well that it's more likely your friend Earnest had it right all along: You ask for the impossible.

And what's wrong with that, dammit? What's wrong with hoping for what would amount to a miracle – that your best friend (for even after a year apart that's still how you think of her) could re-enter your life, that you could find a way to stay together this time? Can anyone blame you for holding on to that hope, fruitless as it may seem?

Alex Eames wouldn't. (She could, however, give you a pretty good series of reasons why you were talking through your hat. She'd listen patiently to your argument first, of course, but then she'd painstakingly poke holes in each piece of reason until your argument resembled a sieve more than a bucket and held just as much water.)

But maybe she feels the same way. Without having spoken with her for just over a year, it seems hasty to assume that she hasn't thought about you, isn't wondering where you are and what you're doing. After all, wasn't she always your keeper in some ways? Over the hours, days, years that you spent together, didn't she assume a fighting stance somewhere between you and the rest of the world, shielding you as much as she could from whatever threatened to harm you?

There's a passage from Henry James that has always summed Alex Eames up for you nicely and in the past year, you've had enough time to wade through so much classic literature that you couldn't help but be reintroduced to it. In his short story, The Beast in the Jungle, James wrote:

"It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him as the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run - since it covered so much ground – was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw loose for her, but she liked him in spite of it and was practically against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied."

You saw her in James' words the first time you read it and you still see her in them now. Despite everything – despite what that happened with Declan and Jo Gage, with Nicole Wallace, the incidents that surrounded your mother's losing battle with cancer, your brother's murder, and your discovery that your biological father was actually a death row serial killer – Alex stood by you. She didn't always do so happily and she sometimes looked as though she'd rather take out her service weapon and put you out of her misery, but she didn't leave. She wavered once or twice – oh yes, you keenly remember the wavering and the fear that it knotted into your stomach - but each time an exit was presented to her, she never took it. Each time the choice came down to you or something easy, she always picked you. You were Goren and Eames, for better or worse, and for that fact alone, you suspect she hasn't easily shaken your presence from her mind.

For better or worse but not forever. That was your relationship in a nutshell.

So what to do about it, Bobby Goren? Genius that you were once purported to be, if you miss her so much and you're convinced that she must be thinking about you, what's to stop you from calling her up and asking her to coffee?

But you know the answer to that question already. As with so many of your investigations, the answer to that question is another question: Can she get past the fact that she was the one to fire you in the end? Can she forget that she was the one to ultimately sever your partnership? Can she at least put it all aside long enough to drink a cup of coffee with you?

Just because you know that it wasn't her idea, that she only fired you under duress and that she quit her own job in protest just moments after your departure doesn't mean that she has gotten over her guilt - even after all this time. Just because you forgave her in that very same moment that she cut the thread between you, just because you kissed her cheek and wrapped her in your arms for the last time doesn't mean that she's accepted the way everything turned out.

You had the unfair advantage, of course. You had time to prepare for the inevitable ending and she didn't - after all, you'd read Hemingway and that was the same as predicting it. It was in writing, right there in your notebook: Not a lifetime, not to live together, not to have what people were always supposed to have, not at all…

For better or worse but not forever.

Looking back now, you can even pinpoint the moment when you knew it was all going to unravel. Alex may have been none the wiser, but on the cold night when the two of you stood helplessly by while the body of Captain Danny Ross – your captain - was photographed and his murder scene scanned for clues, you knew it was the beginning of the end. Alex's grief was ultimately what gave it away for you; to see her openly sobbing at a crime scene was the equivalent of a pig taking wing and you knew the moment she leaned into your shoulder and allowed you to put a steadying arm around her that it was about to end. You realized that you needed to memorize the feel of her because the two of you were about to be separated and you'd wanted to pull her to your chest and hold onto her in that moment – not only to allow her sobs a place to land, but so that you could have that memory to take with you, the memory of the two of you standing together against the world – but you knew she'd never allow it. To pull her to your chest would allow her to break down and, though crying at a crime scene was unheard of, Alex Eames was only bent at that point; she wasn't broken. She didn't break until the day she fired you.

That day – the day it ended – you were ready for it and you helped her to pick up the pieces. At least you think you helped her pick up the pieces. You can't know for sure unless you call.

She hasn't moved from her house in Rockaway; that much you do know. (In the old days, you could have used the NYPD database to (illegally, yes) look up that information, but given your present status, you instead resorted to an innocent (and not at all stalker-ish) drive out that way on a Sunday afternoon three weeks ago. She wasn't anywhere to be seen, but her familiar late model white Honda was parked in the drive so you knew she was there.

You could have stopped, you know, but you weren't ready then. You didn't know what to say or how to behave and it would have been awkward. Bad enough that you never know what to do with your hands when you have a conversation and, while she was once used to your unwieldy behavior and odd speech rhythms, you've concluded that it's probably best to call her before just turning up. Give her some warning, some time to prepare – after all, Alex hates surprises. To know her for just five minutes is to know that and you've known her far longer and much less superficially.

But you have her phone number and you can easily call and give her fair warning that you'd like to meet up, catch up, and soak up enough of her presence to sustain you once again. In your current state, you're running low on her steady gazes, wry smiles, and to-the-point observations and you've finally reached the point at which you need to refuel.

More than that, however, if you're truly being honest with yourself (and that's always a good place to start where honesty is concerned), you need to refill that store of hope that the pessimistic part of you threatens to close up for good. You need to restore the hope that Hemingway was perhaps wrong, that maybe you aren't asking for the impossible after all. (Hemingway was kind of a depressed guy, come to think of it, and Henry James was kind of angry – maybe you need to start reading less of them and more modern stuff from Dan Brown or even give Alex's favorite, Janet Evanovich, a try.) Maybe you can "see her around" after all this time and it won't be temporary. Maybe now that the two of you are distanced from your work, you can reconnect in a different – less tenuous, more permanent – way.

You don't need the package that Hemingway described – the house, the morning paper, et cetera. (The New York Times online, anyone?) But now that you've lived for a time without Alex's presence, you're certain of the fact that Heming way had at least one desire on that list that isn't impossible – or at least you don't think it is: "…not to wake and know she's there and that you're not alone."

It isn't romance you seek, of course. (Romance is nice, but overrated – particularly when one has spent as much time studying the depravity of the human condition as you and Alex did in your combined careers with the NYPD. Once you've seen what romance makes people capable of, it tends to sour your attitude on it and make a dyed-in-the-wool realist of you.) Instead, you just want that feeling of connection you once had, connection to another human being who understands you (at best) and accepts you (at least). You want to go back to that sense of waking in the morning and knowing that, no matter what else occurs that day, there's one person in the world who cares about what happens to you and whom you care about.

In short, you're tired of being alone, but there's only one person who can fill the space beside you. (It's only big enough for someone who's five foot two anyway.)

It's time, you've concluded. "I'll see you around" is as much in your court as it is in hers and you're going to take a shot. You'll pick up the phone, dial the number you couldn't forget if you wanted to, and invite your old friend/partner/confidant/other half to get a cup of coffee with you.

That's not impossible. That is what happens and what has happened – Hemingway be damned.

A/N – I really meant to end it here, but then Eames piped up and asked for her own take on things, so look for that to follow shortly. P.