That Evening…

Cooper's fatigue lived in his limbs, had claimed squatter's rights in his femurs and deltoids and the soles of his feet and the space surrounding both Broca's and Wernicke's areas in his midbrain to the point where he wasn't certain he would be able to recite his own name and job description if he were asked, point-blank, to do so.

And yet there he was, sitting at the bar in the Great Northern, staring a hole in the coaster where Annie's drink had been sitting up until the moment the barman took it away, which was precisely three minutes after Annie had gotten up to leave. That was ten minutes earlier. Cooper had barely moved an inch since.

Annie, Cooper thought with a sad shake of his head. They had connected on a level he never would have imagined for someone he had known for such a short time. The sadness behind her eyes, coupled with the timid awe with which she took in the world around her, marked her as different than the others. Cooper had been surprised to learn that she had spent any time in Twin Peaks at all as a girl; she didn't feel like a part of the town's fabric, wasn't woven into its tapestry, the way everyone else seemed to be.

He was lying to himself if he pretended he wasn't interested in her; he was, and very much so. Regardless of what Truman said, Cooper was more than intrigued. He thought she was very pretty; plain, but still pretty, in a way that was as unassuming as her personality. He liked that she was a good height, not ungainly but not too short either. She wasn't vain, with her kinked curls never styled to within an inch of their lives, always dressed in clothing she felt—perhaps intuitively—were appropriate without concern for what was trendy or highly fashionable. Classic and softly comfortable, in colours not out-of-place in a beautiful set of under-utilized oil pastels on a shelf in an art studio.

Beyond the physical, she was charming and well-mannered without being cloying or presenting that facade of niceness that plagued so many people who try too hard to be something they're not. Annie was the real deal. She was caring and sweet, with a gentle soul. Cooper thought a career path as a teacher in a preschool or with the Humane Society would be more than fitting for her, and he could easily imagine her surrounded by children and small animals; the image pleased him immensely. He felt protective of her because of her naiveté, her child-like wonder. He was drawn to that, piqued and enthralled by it.

But if he was being honest he would have to admit to himself that he was troubled, too, by the pain in her past that the scars on her wrists attested to. What darkness could drive someone of such light to commit violence of that magnitude against oneself?

Of course, he knew the answer to that question…

With a deep sigh, was about ready to give in and head up to bed when the click-click-click of heels on hardwood drew his attention to the door. Standing there, in large-print houndstooth, suitcase in hand, Audrey was scanning the bar.

She cast her eyes in a wide sweeping arc about the room; clearly, she was looking for someone she wasn't able to find. Her shoulders signalled her deflation, and in the space and time it took for Audrey to heave her suitcase from one hand to the other and brush an errant strand of ebony hair back behind her ear, Cooper felt both compelled to leave and strangely rooted to his chair, torn between not wanting to speak to her and desperately craving her attention, her eyes on him. He planned an escape route that would take him to the lobby without being seen while simultaneously counting the steps it would take for her to cross the worn wooden floor and reach his side.

He took too long in his considerations, and when she saw him, even though he was clearly not who she was looking for, she managed a half-smile and made her way over to the bar.

"Good evening," she said as she neared his stool.

"Evening," he croaked. He smiled, looking down at her luggage. "Going somewhere?"

She glanced at her suitcase and rolled her eyes, repositioning it in front of her, holding the handle with both hands. "Seattle," she replied. "I should be there by now, but I cashed in the ticket Daddy bought and got a seat on the red-eye instead." She blushed suddenly. "Thought I'd save some money and get in a few extra errands before I left."

"When's your flight?" Cooper asked.

"Just after midnight," Audrey replied, glancing at the clock above the bar and then back at him. "How's your eye?"

Cooper's instincts lifted his hand to his cheekbone, where he felt the tiny mark left from the hostage situation a few days earlier. "Nearly healed," he said.

She nodded, and their silence stretched on, far longer than was comfortable. Audrey's awkwardness was amplified by the child-like way she swung the bag in front of her, side to side; Cooper cleared his throat, and she looked up at him.

"Would you like to sit down?"

Cooper gestured to the chair recently vacated by Annie, and watched as Audrey considered his invitation. Finally she nodded, setting her suitcase on the ground and scooting herself up onto the seat, swivelling to face the bar. She rested one leg on the footrest and crossed her other leg over, ankle and foot bouncing in the air as she got comfortable.

"I've never been to the city before," she spoke reverently, staring at the bottles lining the glass shelves behind the bar. "I've never been to any city before."

"That so?" Cooper replied.

Audrey mm-hmmd and swivelled in her chair a bit. "Shirley Temples don't have any alcohol in them, right?" she asked.

Cooper shook his head. "I don't think so."

She folded her hands on top of the bar and squared her shoulders to the barman who rounded the corner from the back to take her order; Cooper heard her ask for the drink, and the man set out another coaster and a cocktail napkin in front of her before leaving again to fill the order.

"Y'know," Audrey said as she re-commenced swivelling. "I read once that Shirley Temple never liked that drink even though it was invented for her. She said it was too sweet."

"No kidding."

"I'm not old enough to drink yet. Old enough to drive, old enough to vote, old enough to make love without it being considered a crime…" she didn't look at Cooper directly but he caught the flick of her eyes up and over at him in the mirror behind the bar, and his heart skipped a beat. "But I'm not old enough to drink."

Cooper counted scratches in the bar's surface beneath his weary hands.

"Thing is, I don't even know what I'd drink if I could," she continued. "Beer is too domestic, too pedestrian, you know? But wine seems too grown up. Vodka doesn't interest me, and I don't know the difference between whiskey and rye and bourbon and scotch but—"

Cooper smiled and held out his hand, counting on his fingers as he spoke. "Farmers drink rye. Cowboys drink bourbon. Lumberjacks drink whiskey. Gentlemen drink scotch."

Audrey kicked her foot, the toe of her shoe grazing the aromatic cedar that comprised the front of the bar. "Is that what you're drinking?"

He shook his head with a smile. "Canada Dry and a splash of lime juice."

She nodded and shrugged. "I think if I had to order any drink I'd probably order something with rum in it…"

Cooper remembered his conversation with Annie—the remnants of which might still be echoing down the halls of this Pacific Northwest castle perched high atop Whitetail Falls, if he listened hard enough—about her beverage choices. Annie likes rum, too, he thought, letting his mind wander to the other things these two disparate women might conceivably have in common.

His list was short. Physically, he didn't even try—short and tall, brunette and blonde, the two women were about as different as night and day. And for every personality trait he admired in Annie there was an equal, opposite trait in Audrey. Annie was guarded; Audrey was open. Annie was a mystery; Audrey was easy to understand. Annie was sweetly chaste and modest; Audrey was seductive. Annie was fearful and timid; Audrey was reckless.

They both liked rum, and they were both sad. That was about it. Sadness shaded their eyes and coloured their movements—the shallow slowness of Annie's gestures and the way she spoke, the luxurious shuffle of Audrey's gait and her soft embraces—as if they teemed with the ghosts of their former melacholy, the depressive haunting of a life's worth of indignity and misunderstanding and heartbreak and deeper, darker evils still.

Cooper recalled the mottled purple scar bisecting Annie's wrist. In an instant, his eye followed the line of Audrey's coat, from her collar to the end of her sleeve, before taking in the snow-whiteness of her clean, unsullied pulse point. Suddenly the questions on Cooper's mind changed; for a moment he no longer wondered what had driven Annie to such a place. It didn't matter. Because yes, Audrey carried her sadness in her lips and the tips of her fingers the swivelling motion of her hips on her chair or caught mid-dance. But for all her impetuous abandon and child-like naiveté, Audrey would never have done that.

He looked down at his hands, circled around the glass, and took three deep breaths that he directed into the very bottom corners of his lungs before each exhale. The checklist of reasons for staying the hell away from Audrey flashed through his mind, clear as day: She was involved in one of your cases…she could be put in danger…she looked so happy and content with Jack Wheeler's arm wrapped around her waist…

The barman brought out Audrey's drink—a sunset in a hurricane glass, Cooper thought—and Audrey thanked him before stirring the thing a little and taking a bite from the wedge of orange sitting on the rim.

"Agent Cooper, do you know anything about poetry?"

Cooper spoke at the same time. "How was your picnic the other day?"

She chewed on the flesh of the orange, contemplative, for a long while before setting the peel down and stirring the drink, muddying the colours until it was uniform. Her shoulders sank and she collapsed inward, facing the bar now and not him as she took a sip through the straw. "It was fine," she said finally. "Quiet. Cold. The potato salad had too much onion. But it was fine."

Cooper didn't feel much like talking anymore. His fatigue once again weighed him down as it washed over him anew, the bolstering energy of Audrey's presence having disappeared the moment the spectre of her new boyfriend emerged between them. Cooper had one last gulp left in his glass and he wished it had been alcoholic as he finished it, swiping a hand across his lips and straining to not look at her too closely. Because he ached for her, deeply, and it was taking everything in him to ignore his impulses—borne, he knew, from a lack of judgement springing forth from his tired mind and its diminished capacity for critical thinking—and merely stand before her, an agent of the Bureau and a federal employee and not as a man who loved her once upon a moon-bright night…

"Audrey," Cooper shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from fidgeting. "It's been nice talking to you. I've had a long day and I'm dead tired, and—"

She nodded, focused on her drink. "Well, good night then, Agent Cooper."

"Goodnight, Audrey," he said, resisting the urge to correct her, remind her to call him Dale. He sighed. "Have a safe trip."

"Thanks."

She didn't look at him.

He turned and walked from the bar, wondering if she felt the same let down as he did, wondering if he'd ever talk to her again, wondering if he would be okay with this being their last conversation, but being too tired to do anything about it.