A/N: This will be a compilation of moments about Audrey and Dale both apart and together. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking the open-ended nature of their relationship in the original series left many wanting. Sometimes I prefer when show/film writers do this as it provides me fodder for just such an occasion as writing these drabbles. Some of these drabbles will be rewrites of moments in the show, additional or behind the scenes events, or a completely revisionary telling of the ending of season 2. Don't know where this compilation is going to go, so I'm leaving the summary and rating open-ended. The title of the compilation comes from the Stones song 'Play with Fire'. Each chapter will have a song attached to it. I highly recommend listening to the song to get a feel for the tone of the piece. This first piece is called Visions of your Reality by Ultimate Spinach. The ending of the piece goes into 'It was a very good year' by Frank Sinatra. I hope you all enjoy and would much appreciate any feedback!
The virulent red EKG perpetuates itself across the walls from the trophy case to the locker rooms, and she spent the last four years haunted by each singular punctuation of some vague representation of life. Each frozen heartbeat serves as a constant reminder she is just the same, a pulse that goes nowhere, just loops back on itself, and she knows it each time she changes her shoes at the lockers or sneaks a cigarette into the girl's bathroom. She feels her own pulse suspended with it as she leans against the row of leaky sinks and stares down that sudden but silent exclamation of vitality. She is a girl with plans but her plans always seem to go nowhere, circling round and round with the heartbeat. They just circle back to this awful square one of sterile halls with nothing but that jagged red line frozen in time. All her plans, her aspirations, her schemes loop back on themselves with perfect predictability and she is left here in this teenage wasteland sneaking another cigarette, succumbing to another fruitless rebellion no one sees, no one cares.
She knows how special she is and finds it funny no one else seems to think so. Being pretty is easy for her and she can work her charms effortlessly on the boys and the men to get what she wants, but it doesn't mean anything. She could be anyone to them. It's not her they want.
Not like Laura. But she is just like Laura. Only – only Laura lets them want her, she gives in to their wants, lets herself be used. Audrey would never let herself be used, would never succumb to the machinations or manipulations of others even if she was really the one pulling all the strings. No one gets even the belief they got the best of Audrey Horne.
Audrey was barely edging into pubescence when she discovered her ability to subdue men with only a coy smile. Perhaps it started there, the persistent dissatisfaction with all things related to romance and affection. Nothing in those areas of her life ever quite lived up to her expectations and these few and far between occurrences only served to exile her further. She thought these were her first steps into womanhood but somehow her isolation grew.
She knows now she didn't do things the right way. Was there a right way? While preteen Donna and Laura were out skinny dipping and seducing boys, Audrey took another tack, albeit one she had not initially intended.
Her father always had some investor or contractor passing through the hotel. She cannot remember a time when her father was not engaged in fervent conference calls or making backroom deals, all in the name of profit. Never in the name of family. Her father knew his rolodex contacts better than he knew his children's birthdays. She was sure he kept his lawyers in better confidence and held them in higher esteem than his own wife.
There was this one, this lawyer Charles Nickleby who liked to tell her campy jokes and bring her back caramels from business trips with her father. She liked Charlie in the way young girls like nice older men who are not their negligent fathers, and she practiced flirting with him like young girls do with men when they don't know what they are doing quite yet. If Audrey had known better she would have realized men should not entertain such flirtations. Normally older men discourage those sorts of attentions. Charlie laughed or blushed or returned the sentiments and sent Audrey's mind sprawling. At first Charlie placed his hand on her shoulder, a harmless show of affection. He did this on more than one occasion in front of her father and drew no criticisms. In time that hand migrated farther south, inching its way towards some impropriety Audrey could not have anticipated, exploiting her naivete. Charlie started making excuses to touch her. A stray piece of lint on the front of her blouse, dirt on her skirt bottom, shoelaces untied.
While her father argued with a contractor over the phone, Charlie laid his hand on her thigh. She could feel the heat from his palm through the wool fabric of her plaid skirt and never once broke her gaze from her father. Her father blindly spitting angry into the receiver as Charlie's hand tested the waters ever deeper, Audrey could only stare in disbelief at her father.
Her first kiss is with Bobby Briggs during a game of seven minutes in heaven. He sneaks his hand up her shirt and Audrey doesn't feel a damn thing. She rolls her eyes and shoves him back into a pile of old coats. She wonders if she will always be nothing but a frozen heartbeat plastered to the walls as she walks home alone barefoot with her saddle shoes dangling from two careless fingers. She breathes frost into the night air and realizes how hot she is inside.
Her father catches a fourteen-year-old Audrey letting Charlie Nickleby molest her on the chesterfield in his office. He fires Nickleby on the spot with a swift kick to the rear on the way out. He asks her what she was thinking as she buttons up her blouse. All she could think to say was, "I didn't think you'd mind." He never seemed to mind before when Nickleby was easing his skeevy fingers into the dip between her legs while Ben Horne lit another cigar and cackled into the phone's receiver.
At fifteen years old, Audrey draws investor Mr. Noriega through the secret door to her father's office. Her rear crumples the contract on her father's desk as Noriega hefts her up onto the ink blotter. He settles his hips between her legs just beginning to fill out and curve in all the right ways. Noriega smells like alcoholic's aftershave but Audrey doesn't mind because he has that gorgeous black hair slicked back and that sharp camel suitcoat. As he buries his face into her neck, she realizes none of these men ever ask her age. She also realizes her neck is one of her most inviting features and closes her eyes with a hum. The hum breaks into a secret smile when her father comes waltzing in, snapping the lights on, fully expecting to wrap up the contracts only to find them buckling under Audrey's bottom as Noriega smears her red lipstick. The funny thing is Ben Horne no longer seems surprised. The funnier thing is he never seemed all that surprised in the beginning. Audrey sits on the chesterfield, watches Noriega and Horne sign the contracts and shake hands. Noriega buttons his camelhair coat onehanded and flies from the office without so much as a glance her way.
Ben Horne lifts the contract in front of his face with both hands and then snaps the back of his hand against it, his sneering grin bent around the newly lit cigar as he savors all the zeros. When he remembers Audrey still perched on the sofa, he tells her, "Good work."
Audrey slips behind one of the many hidden doors at the Great Northern to steal a moment of reprieve. The Big Band plays Sinatra on a circuit and she is so tired of Frank, exhausted with smiling, irritated with all those wandering hands. Her father trying to seal the deal for his new golf course with shameless fawning while his business partners Thurmond and Terrence and Wade feel her up on the dance floor. Her father dancing with Laura for the fifth time that night. Audrey spins and spins and spins with a new face every time and looks over to see Laura in her father's arms, Laura under her father's adoring gaze, Laura laughing at his inappropriate jokes. At sixteen Audrey tires of being used by all the wrong people.
She slides a cigarette from the pack she lifted out of what's his name's suit pocket and strikes a Great Northern match that briefly lights up the darkness of her hiding place. After she lights the cigarette, she holds the match between thumb and forefinger, watches the flame ever so slowly and surely consume the thin cardboard. She watches that tiny fire until it pricks at her fingertips and drops the match. It goes out before it hits the ground. Audrey exhales smoke in the darkness, watches the embers curl briefly before dissipating briefly after each inhale. She smokes until the heat licks at the filter. Without ceremony, she lets the cigarette fall from her lips to the ground at her feet.
She hears Frank reminiscing about enjoying the girls through the years. There would always be more girls, new girls, girls more willing and exciting than the last. She realizes that even though her father loves Laura, that all the boys and men love Laura, there is no such thing as fidelity. It didn't take much to get Bobby Briggs to kiss her. Charlie entertained his own fantasies about Laura at the same time he was sniffing at Audrey's skirts. Even her father chased each fresh piece of ass that floated through the lobby of the Great Northern. Laura was not the end all be all.
Audrey grinds her heel into the cigarette ember barely glowing, snuffs it out. She will be different. Laura settles. Donna settles. All the girls settle. Audrey will be different. She would never settle for anything less than absolute love. She would never accept anyone less than perfect. She was convinced there would be someone who fit the bill. The Bobby Briggs and Charles Nickleby's of the world were a dime a dozen and Audrey was a rara avis deserving a good year.
People think Laura is going places, a moving heartbeat, bold and strong and so kind, and she thinks about that Hemingway quote where the world breaks everyone. Those is doesn't break it kills. It kills the very good, brave, and kind. If you are none of these things you can be sure it will kill you, too – though there will be no special hurry. So when Laura dies, every can say it was because she was ultimately good and that is the nature of the world. But she knows better and they should, too. Laura's heartbeat was just as frozen as hers but now forever. She still has time. She just needs to pick her moment.