Fic: "From What I've Tasted of Desire" (Cooper/Albert) PG-13
A while back, I wrote a story called "If It had to Perish Twice" for Amatara for Yuletide. She, being the magnificent creature she is, in turn wrote a coda for the story called "Acquainted with the Night", which was lovely and a really flattering thing to get from someone for whom you've written a story. In turn, I promised to write her my own take on a coda for my story, including something (not guaranteed to be at all accurate!) of an explanation for what happened in "If It had to Perish Twice" as well as a more concrete ending for our two leads. Because I danced around shipping them, but never really went there. So here, I go there, but in that unique and screwed up way that only these two could manage.
As always, immense thanks to thisiszircon, without whose incredible betaing this story would suck considerably more than it does. Zircon's insights into grammar, prose, and perspective on the characters is invaluable to a writer, and I'm lucky to have such a magnificent beta.
Title: From What I've Tasted of Desire
Author: Nemo the Everbeing
Rating: PG-13 for sexual suggestiveness, language, and brief gore
Summary: Love taken to its worst extreme is a moment frozen in time that breaks the world around it. Love not taken far enough is a moment that never happened. Somewhere in between is a night in a hotel in Chicago, where the shadows are very long. A brief coda for "If It had to Perish Twice".
Disclaimer: It all belongs to CBS, David Lynch and Mark Frost. I'm just playing in other people's playgrounds.
It seems funny, in hindsight, that the nightmare that concluded the whole affair was his own. Albert rarely, if ever, remembered his dreams beyond the odd niggling fragment. He knew he dreamed in color. He knew he dreamed of crime scenes and faces still in death. These weren’t nightmares. Albert almost never had nightmares. He had very staid, quiet dreams. If anything, they were mournful.
That night, his dreams scared the hell out of him. He dreamed that filmy eyes opened, and mouths lined in ice cracked wide. They reached for him, but they’d been waterlogged, and the skin of the hands is notoriously loose in decomposition. It sloughed off like oily latex gloves. After that, they reached with tendons and bones. He dreamed of cutting into a body on the slab in a room of ice, only to have darkness bleed out of the wound in clumps. The slit opened so wide he fell in and kept falling.
He came awake in a hotel room in Chicago, away from Prophetstown and the entropy death of his dreamscape or whatever the hell that had been. But he was still terrified, and he still didn’t understand what had happened in that place, and now even his dreams weren’t safe.
For a moment Albert thought that he had been awakened by the dream, but then he felt the bed dip next to him. He experienced a moment of terror not unlike waking, unable to identify what it was settling down so close to him. He normally had a high tolerance for strangeness, but it had been chipped away and shattered in Prophetstown, along with so many other well constructed, well thought-out barriers.
And then he saw the light reflected in the window, spilling in from the adjoining room. From Cooper’s room. Albert realized who was on the bed with him, and derailed any further thoughts on that topic with ruthless efficiency. But the awareness was still there, as was the sense of a presence at Albert’s back, not malicious, but not safe either. Because nothing unknown could be entirely safe, and there were depths to Cooper he would never understand.
Albert felt fingers on his arm. He felt raw and open in a way he hated. Cooper had no sense of boundaries at the worst possible times. The adjoining door had never opened this way.
The slant of the mattress indicated that Cooper hadn’t bothered dragging a chair over. He couldn’t be that normal about it, couldn’t do what Albert had done for so many nights and so many nightmares. He had to be different and kneel there on the mattress so that Albert felt that presence at his back like two points of heat along his spine.
Albert recalled in unwanted detail how the cold had drawn them together, bound up in mittens and the heat of another body: the only thing that still burned in that dusky world. How the fear of that place, the cold relentless march of the ice, had thrown light upon truths he’d never wanted illuminated. Not even to himself. There were reasons not to pursue relationships at the office, and better reasons not to fall for a partner. The best reasons of all were reserved for not falling for a partner who also happened to be psychically and psychologically compromised and who needed you to function normally in his job. Because that crossed a line between inadvisable and predatory that Albert didn’t want to admit himself capable of.
He wouldn’t take advantage. He wouldn’t bring it up, wouldn’t change his behavior. As soon as he was through this night, and the lingering terror of Prophetstown, he would be the same reliable Albert. Cooper had no need to worry, if he suspected at all. In hindsight, it was difficult to tell if that kiss hadn’t just been a natural extension of Cooper’s strange familiarity.
He certainly wasn’t acting differently; kneeling on the bed instead of getting a chair like normal people was par for the course in Cooper’s world. Hell, it wasn’t even really too far out of the norm for the real world, either; it was just Albert’s own personal context that made this into more than it was.
“Nightmares are natural after a traumatic event,” Cooper said to the darkness.
“Cooper, I know you’re above pop psychology, so give it a rest.”
Then, because Cooper would always be Cooper, and would always do the completely unhinged and the sometimes desperately unwanted, Albert felt a weight settle behind him. Legs and a hip and a shoulder dipped the cheap mattress and the cotton sheets Albert always brought with him on field assignments because he didn’t trust hotel laundry facilities. He owned luminol. He’d seen hotel beds under black light.
His sheet was already kicked down, and he felt it shift further. He could imagine the bare feet behind his. There was a phantom pressure all along Albert’s back, and he only breathed when he realized he wasn’t. When a hand settled against his hip, he bit his lip hard and told himself that this wasn’t what he thought it was; it was never what he thought it was with Cooper. This was some sort of Buddhist healing or Tibetan psychic crap that had no basis in science and Cooper’s slavish devotion.
And all his thoughts stuttered to an abrupt halt when Cooper whispered the words, “I believe it was love.”
When Albert could think again, his mind raced to make up for lost time. He didn’t dare turn. He didn’t want to know what he would find there. “What?” he asked, and hated how hoarse he sounded.
“Prophetstown,” Cooper said. Of course he was talking about was about Prophetstown. Albert relaxed a bit, but the professional talk in such a bizarre setting wasn’t much of an improvement. “I believe that the spirit acted out of love.” His fingers curled loosely at Albert’s hip, scraping against the cotton of his pants. Albert’s thoughts swam. He tried to ignore it, and any impulse to push backward, to twist around, to drive away the cold in as definitive a manner as could be thought.
Cooper went on, and his words stirred the hairs on the back of Albert’s neck. “I have given it a great deal of thought, and I have to think that what we took for malevolence was love. Its host was dying, Albert, ten years homeless, and out in the freezing nights. It called down help; what else could it do?”
“Not kill six people,” Albert growled. He didn’t add, ‘nearly eight’. “Calling people to it was one thing, but that place? That wasn’t love, Cooper.”
“Wasn’t it?” Cooper had the gall to sound wistful. “The doctors all agreed that man should have died a week before. He was in suspension, preserved in a moment. What was that place, but an expression of what happens when a moment is preserved beyond its time? Love can be as destructive a force as hate, if pushed to its limits.”
An act like that didn’t sound like love to Albert, but in that statement Albert could hear more than just a reference to Prophetstown. A moment preserved beyond its time? Was Cooper speaking in metaphor? Was this Cooper’s completely wrong-headed way of ‘letting him down gently’?
“Cooper, we could talk about this on the plane,” Albert said. “We could talk about this in the car on our way to the airport. We could talk about this over dinner. We just got released from a backwater hospital under the care of doctors who got their MDs from the bottom of a Cracker Jacks box. Any sane man would be getting some shut-eye.”
“The shadows are very long in my room,” Cooper said, like that was all the explanation he needed to give.
But it wasn’t. Not this night, and not here. If Albert couldn’t understand what had happened in Prophetstown then he needed to find sense in the rest of his life. He needed to be able to question and prod and get answers here, or he feared he wouldn’t get them anywhere. And he refused to accept that.
“What does that mean?” he asked. Albert mustered his courage and rolled onto his back. Cooper’s hair was a mess, like it was every night, but it was different from this perspective. It was different with Albert on his back and Cooper propping himself on one elbow to half-lean over him. “What the hell does that even mean?” Albert asked, and for one of the first times in his life he wasn’t certain what it was he was asking.
“It means,” Cooper said, looking at Albert like he was looking through him, “that on some nights it is best not to be alone.”
Albert’s patience had been hanging by a thread, and it finally snapped. “Cooper, I know you’re capable of honesty and a considerable bluntness, in spite of your somewhat dippy demeanor. So drop the cryptic act and tell me exactly what it is that you want here.” Albert set his jaw and refused to look any more vulnerable than was inherent in his position.
And somehow it just made Cooper look sad. “Would it be any comfort if I admitted that I didn’t know?”
“You always know. You’re the most self-aware person I’ve ever met.”
Cooper sighed, and seemed to deflate. It took Albert longer than he wanted to admit to realize that Cooper’s slump had somehow become Cooper leaning against him, pressed close, with his arm draped across Albert’s waist.
Albert stared at the ceiling, and wondered how the hell they’d gotten to this place, wrapped together in the darkness and neither quite able to articulate what was happening. Cooper was speaking in riddles, and Albert was confrontational but gave as little of himself away as possible. It had always been this way, but for the first time it had become an impasse between them. Which was, of course, exactly why he had never planned on mentioning his little infatuation in the first place.
Cooper’s breath ghosted across his throat. Albert mentally catalogued the internal structures underneath: jugular vein, carotid artery, sternocleidomastoid muscle, omohyoid muscle, sternohyoid muscle, thyroid cartilage, thyroid membrane, larynx, esophagus, spine. Things were so much easier to compartmentalize when he remembered that he, like everyone else, was just a collection of parts.
“The shadows are very long in my room,” Cooper said again, like it meant something. Like he wanted Albert to understand.
But in truth, Albert understood nothing about Cooper when he got like this. He was something alien: beautiful and dangerous and intimidating enough that Albert felt the urge to lash out verbally. Albert was a strong individual, who had forged himself in self-sufficiency. He was good at being alone. He was good at knowing himself and his own capabilities. If his was a lonely existence, it was also well armored and prepared for anything the job might throw at him.
Cooper had worked his way in. He’d slipped in through Albert’s cracks until he made himself essential. Until Albert believed in him so strongly that he loved him. By the time Albert realized he’d joined the ranks of Cooper’s admirers he was both incapable of stopping himself and resolved to never give such a thing voice. Because he’d be damned if he’d be just another lovesick fool. Wasn’t it better to be Cooper’s partner? Wasn’t it better to be his constant and never fear loss?
Cooper’s mouth touched Albert’s skin at the juncture of throat and chin. It wasn’t a press. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a curious brush, a catching rasp against the thin skin stretched over the hyoid bone. The only bone in the human body not connected to any other bone. A point of connection set adrift.
Damn Cooper for having the ability to make anatomy a metaphor, anyway. This was why Albert didn’t do relationships.
So he quashed his desire and sat up. “Look,” he said, trying for understanding and falling short, “I know you mean well, Cooper. You always mean well. But I don’t do pity sex, or thank-you sex, or even confirmation-of-life one-night-stands. So go back to your room, or if the shadows are too long, stay on your own side of the bed.”
“Duly noted. However, I think you misunderstand my intentions.” Cooper held up a hand to forestall any arguments and sat up. “No, Albert, let me finish. First, I am far too exhausted at this moment to engage in any sort of strenuous physical activity, and as you noted, sex so soon after a traumatic event is almost always ill-advised.”
“Then what the hell-”
“Because I understand that impulse,” Cooper said, and his confidence faltered.
Albert, for all his protestations to the contrary, could read social cues when they slapped him across the face. Cooper wasn’t talking about the impulse toward inadvisable gratification in the wake of trauma. “What impulse?” he asked, not gentle, but not angry either.
“You were going to die,” Cooper said. “You’re rooted in this world in a way few people are, far more than I am, at the very least. But in that place where the impossible ruled, where others have lost their lives . . . I can comprehend the impulse to freeze the world.”
Albert fumbled for words, laid bare in the shock of that moment. “What . . . Cooper, so help me if this is some crazy Tibetan mumbo-”
A single finger laid against his lips shut Albert up with greater effect than anything he could remember. His mouth was his first, and at times his only, line of defense against the horrors of the world, and to be so effectively disarmed was something that hadn’t happened to him since he was seventeen.
Cooper drew his finger back as his lips curved into a small smile. It wasn’t his usual manic grin, but something private. “I have been in love two times in my adult life, Albert. But those two moments taught me what I needed to know about the stages of that experience. The form may be different in this case, but . . . I am not in love with you, Albert. To say anything else would be a lie, and I refuse to lie to you. But I could be. I recognize a path even after the first few steps.”
What Albert wanted to say was that was goddamn well not good enough. He didn’t want to be so close to something he’d wanted, but to know that Cooper just wasn’t there. The matter of ‘yet’ should have been more than acceptable, but at this stage it just felt like a cheat. Like something Cooper could offer up and take away at a whim. It left Albert with his ass hanging out without Cooper having to shoulder any of the risk.
His mouth kept working, even as his mind curled up in anger and vulnerability. “You are such a sap, Cooper,” he heard himself say. “How the hell did I fall for such a sugar-coated sentimentalist?”
And then Albert realized what he’d said, and snapped his mouth shut. He had never articulated his infatuation, not even alone. To have it slip out, particularly in the wake of Cooper’s half-assed confession, was exactly what he hadn’t wanted. He looked away and felt his ire rise as his cheeks heated. What right did Cooper have to put their partnership at risk over a ‘maybe’? Yes, what he’d said was flattering in some ways, but it was disturbing too. Albert had no desire for anyone to freeze the world on his behalf. Not that Cooper would. He’d probably do something inane instead, like buy some third-world farmer a cow or learn Tantric massage.
Cooper, whose psychic weirdness occasionally seemed to stray into mind reading, said, “Understanding the impulse and acting upon it are two different things, Albert.”
“Buy a cow instead,” Albert said because it made sense to him, and Cooper deserved to be subjected to non-sequiturs.
And there was that sunny grin.
And yes, fine, Albert wanted to believe that everything he’d wanted for years could be just around the bend. Of course he wanted that. Who wouldn’t? But Albert was a pragmatist at heart, and to be offered something so suddenly that had only been a dream seemed more than a little suspicious. How was he supposed to believe in something that just happened? How could he take it at face value that Cooper wouldn’t meet some nun in the next week and run off with her? For Cooper, love had always happened fast. To be at the opening stages and not further after three years of partnership seemed to Albert to be unlike his partner. Wasn’t it more likely that Cooper was convincing himself of something in the wake of Albert’s revelations in some stupid sense of altruism and fair play? Guys like Cooper-straight, handsome, unearthly brilliant guys like Cooper-didn’t fall for hardened, bitter cynics like Albert.
Albert shifted to turn away. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. It didn’t fit the patterns Cooper had established. He needed to back away before their friendship and partnership were both broken.
“Albert, please stop.”
“I’m not kicking you out. You can stay here and away from your ‘long shadows’ or whatever problem you have with your room. Just . . . just stay on your side of the bed, all right?” He hated the plaintive note in his voice.
“You’re upset.”
“You’re shockingly perceptive. You’ve been told that, right?”
“Albert,” Cooper said again, and maybe it was Albert projecting his own discomfort, but Cooper sounded as questioning and worried as Albert had been.
Albert rolled over and glared hard at Cooper. Now was not the time for a soft touch. “Cooper, I’ve seen you work. You meet someone and you know within twelve hours if you’re going to fall in love with them. You’ve known me for over a decade. You’re not in love with me. You’re just grateful.”
“Albert, my gratitude to you throughout the years has been such that if this was my reaction to gratitude we should have found ourselves in this position within the first year of our acquaintance. As for any timeline, I do not believe in absolutes. You are an exception to many of my norms, Albert. It doesn’t seem strange to me that this, too, would be aberrant.”
“And what’s going to stop you from leaving me flat six months in for a nice pair of legs?” Albert asked, deliberately harsh and crass. This was his last-ditch defense. He could feel himself caving, offering up his vulnerability to Cooper’s perusal.
Cooper’s fingers found Albert’s wrists, and he felt the weight of Cooper’s arms settle against his ribs. His fingertips moved up Albert’s hand and stroked between his fingers. “We have both experienced too much in our lives to make grand promises about the future, but I can promise you this: when I set myself firmly upon this path, I will not deviate unless we both agree that it’s best.”
Albert squeezed his eyes closed. That was an honest promise, going as far as truth would allow Cooper to go. He was being honest. He wasn’t fooling Albert about his level of emotional commitment or determination to trip him into bed. This should be his ideal: not a fairytale, but a realistic declaration followed by an adult discussion and deliberation. This adhered to logic. Albert refused to admit that perhaps some part of him was angry with Cooper for being realistic in that moment, for not bringing his customary storybook impossibility to this.
“May I suggest something?” Cooper asked.
Albert didn’t open his eyes. “Be my guest, Cooper.”
“First, while I admit that we aren’t currently engaged in carnal activities, I still think that in bed etiquette dictates you call me Dale.”
“Look, Coop-”
“But I accept that would be a large step, and you are already offering up enough. We can start with ‘Coop’ and work our way up.”
Albert started to reply, but Cooper’s fingers were in his hair, and he couldn’t be certain that what he said wouldn’t come out embarrassingly cracked.
“May I take a liberty, Albert?” Cooper asked.
Albert nodded, mute in the face of terror and wanting too much. Nothing Albert ever wanted this much worked out, unless it was professionally. And this had taken a hard right turn at professional when Cooper had climbed into bed with him.
Cooper’s mouth touched Albert’s hairline at the nape of his neck, then moved along it, pressing and nipping to the skin behind Albert’s ear. Petrous bone, hardest bone in the body, houses the smallest bones-Albert let out a ragged gasp as his concentration broke with the softest application of Cooper’s teeth scraping against that same patch.
Albert twisted around before he could talk himself out of it and found them face to face. Cooper hovered not even an inch from Albert’s face. Albert could smell the mouthwash and feel the gusts of Cooper’s breaths on his mouth. He was pulled forward and back, wanting this so badly he ached and not wanting to lose any more of his ground without a major concession from Cooper in return.
Cooper’s fingers were light when they traced Albert’s cheekbone. “Albert,” he whispered, smiling secrets into the air.
Albert mustered his voice and his courage just enough to say, “Sometime before mandatory retirement, Coop.”
Cooper caught the tail end of his own name on Albert’s lips, the plosive offering the perfect opening. Cooper’s mouth was soft and eager, and he was warm after the ice. Albert wrapped his arms around Cooper before he could convince himself it was a terrible idea. That they were throwing their partnership to the wind on a ‘what if’ that might or might not be pity, pathetic gratitude, or trauma.
Of course, avoiding thinking about something inevitably brought the thought to the fore, and Albert broke from that soft contact to lean back. “Let’s get something straight,” he said. Was that his voice? It had to be, but he had never rasped so badly in his life. “I am incredibly skilled at many things, but romance isn’t one of them. I’m not going to change, I don’t get better, and you aren’t getting a prince by kissing this particular frog.” He couldn’t help but run his fingers along the planes of Cooper’s face, memorizing this alone if it was all he got. “And I value our partnership more than anything else in my life. More than my work, or my doctorate, or my publications. Maybe even more than my convictions. I refuse to lose that.”
“I have prophetic dreams that can produce violent physical reactions,” Cooper said. “If we share a bed I will likely clock you at some point in the middle of the night. I have also been accused on more than one occasion of being mentally unbalanced. I’ve never felt that I am, but full disclosure is important.” Cooper leaned down and pressed their foreheads together. “Albert, whatever faults we have are long since exposed. Our partnership was forged during a possession and has survived hauntings, multiple attempts on our lives, one extremely drunk pop star with morbid fascinations, and the entropy death of an imaginary town. Our foundation is solid.”
They met in the inches between them. The kiss was focused, a careful mapping of the area and a reconnaissance of potential sites to visit again. It was a scientist’s kiss, a form of measurement, and Albert could feel the shock of it in his toes. Albert wondered how long they had been easing toward this, that the slide into this should feel so effortless. There was no conflagration, no great passion. They fit together, pressed and held until it felt like they existed in this place. Cooper pulled away for a breath and Albert drew him back. Albert turned his head to clear his thoughts and a kiss under his jaw pulled him in again.
They kissed themselves into a sleepy tangle, not working for anything beyond contact and the nascent potential of something more. A thousand things more, Albert corrected himself, because no action this large would have only one consequence. A car passed, and its headlights illuminated the room in a sweep. Bright and dark stood in contrast, and Albert watched the shadows stretch out. The shadows were long in his room too. For an instant, Albert understood what Cooper meant when he’d said that.
And then the room was dark again, and Cooper was pressed against him. There was a redeye back to Philadelphia scheduled for the next morning, a debrief with Gordon, and then days off. Maybe the shadows were long in Philly too; maybe they were long wherever Cooper went. Albert thought that he could perhaps live with that.
As always, immense thanks to thisiszircon, without whose incredible betaing this story would suck considerably more than it does. Zircon's insights into grammar, prose, and perspective on the characters is invaluable to a writer, and I'm lucky to have such a magnificent beta.
Title: From What I've Tasted of Desire
Author: Nemo the Everbeing
Rating: PG-13 for sexual suggestiveness, language, and brief gore
Summary: Love taken to its worst extreme is a moment frozen in time that breaks the world around it. Love not taken far enough is a moment that never happened. Somewhere in between is a night in a hotel in Chicago, where the shadows are very long. A brief coda for "If It had to Perish Twice".
Disclaimer: It all belongs to CBS, David Lynch and Mark Frost. I'm just playing in other people's playgrounds.
It seems funny, in hindsight, that the nightmare that concluded the whole affair was his own. Albert rarely, if ever, remembered his dreams beyond the odd niggling fragment. He knew he dreamed in color. He knew he dreamed of crime scenes and faces still in death. These weren’t nightmares. Albert almost never had nightmares. He had very staid, quiet dreams. If anything, they were mournful.
That night, his dreams scared the hell out of him. He dreamed that filmy eyes opened, and mouths lined in ice cracked wide. They reached for him, but they’d been waterlogged, and the skin of the hands is notoriously loose in decomposition. It sloughed off like oily latex gloves. After that, they reached with tendons and bones. He dreamed of cutting into a body on the slab in a room of ice, only to have darkness bleed out of the wound in clumps. The slit opened so wide he fell in and kept falling.
He came awake in a hotel room in Chicago, away from Prophetstown and the entropy death of his dreamscape or whatever the hell that had been. But he was still terrified, and he still didn’t understand what had happened in that place, and now even his dreams weren’t safe.
For a moment Albert thought that he had been awakened by the dream, but then he felt the bed dip next to him. He experienced a moment of terror not unlike waking, unable to identify what it was settling down so close to him. He normally had a high tolerance for strangeness, but it had been chipped away and shattered in Prophetstown, along with so many other well constructed, well thought-out barriers.
And then he saw the light reflected in the window, spilling in from the adjoining room. From Cooper’s room. Albert realized who was on the bed with him, and derailed any further thoughts on that topic with ruthless efficiency. But the awareness was still there, as was the sense of a presence at Albert’s back, not malicious, but not safe either. Because nothing unknown could be entirely safe, and there were depths to Cooper he would never understand.
Albert felt fingers on his arm. He felt raw and open in a way he hated. Cooper had no sense of boundaries at the worst possible times. The adjoining door had never opened this way.
The slant of the mattress indicated that Cooper hadn’t bothered dragging a chair over. He couldn’t be that normal about it, couldn’t do what Albert had done for so many nights and so many nightmares. He had to be different and kneel there on the mattress so that Albert felt that presence at his back like two points of heat along his spine.
Albert recalled in unwanted detail how the cold had drawn them together, bound up in mittens and the heat of another body: the only thing that still burned in that dusky world. How the fear of that place, the cold relentless march of the ice, had thrown light upon truths he’d never wanted illuminated. Not even to himself. There were reasons not to pursue relationships at the office, and better reasons not to fall for a partner. The best reasons of all were reserved for not falling for a partner who also happened to be psychically and psychologically compromised and who needed you to function normally in his job. Because that crossed a line between inadvisable and predatory that Albert didn’t want to admit himself capable of.
He wouldn’t take advantage. He wouldn’t bring it up, wouldn’t change his behavior. As soon as he was through this night, and the lingering terror of Prophetstown, he would be the same reliable Albert. Cooper had no need to worry, if he suspected at all. In hindsight, it was difficult to tell if that kiss hadn’t just been a natural extension of Cooper’s strange familiarity.
He certainly wasn’t acting differently; kneeling on the bed instead of getting a chair like normal people was par for the course in Cooper’s world. Hell, it wasn’t even really too far out of the norm for the real world, either; it was just Albert’s own personal context that made this into more than it was.
“Nightmares are natural after a traumatic event,” Cooper said to the darkness.
“Cooper, I know you’re above pop psychology, so give it a rest.”
Then, because Cooper would always be Cooper, and would always do the completely unhinged and the sometimes desperately unwanted, Albert felt a weight settle behind him. Legs and a hip and a shoulder dipped the cheap mattress and the cotton sheets Albert always brought with him on field assignments because he didn’t trust hotel laundry facilities. He owned luminol. He’d seen hotel beds under black light.
His sheet was already kicked down, and he felt it shift further. He could imagine the bare feet behind his. There was a phantom pressure all along Albert’s back, and he only breathed when he realized he wasn’t. When a hand settled against his hip, he bit his lip hard and told himself that this wasn’t what he thought it was; it was never what he thought it was with Cooper. This was some sort of Buddhist healing or Tibetan psychic crap that had no basis in science and Cooper’s slavish devotion.
And all his thoughts stuttered to an abrupt halt when Cooper whispered the words, “I believe it was love.”
When Albert could think again, his mind raced to make up for lost time. He didn’t dare turn. He didn’t want to know what he would find there. “What?” he asked, and hated how hoarse he sounded.
“Prophetstown,” Cooper said. Of course he was talking about was about Prophetstown. Albert relaxed a bit, but the professional talk in such a bizarre setting wasn’t much of an improvement. “I believe that the spirit acted out of love.” His fingers curled loosely at Albert’s hip, scraping against the cotton of his pants. Albert’s thoughts swam. He tried to ignore it, and any impulse to push backward, to twist around, to drive away the cold in as definitive a manner as could be thought.
Cooper went on, and his words stirred the hairs on the back of Albert’s neck. “I have given it a great deal of thought, and I have to think that what we took for malevolence was love. Its host was dying, Albert, ten years homeless, and out in the freezing nights. It called down help; what else could it do?”
“Not kill six people,” Albert growled. He didn’t add, ‘nearly eight’. “Calling people to it was one thing, but that place? That wasn’t love, Cooper.”
“Wasn’t it?” Cooper had the gall to sound wistful. “The doctors all agreed that man should have died a week before. He was in suspension, preserved in a moment. What was that place, but an expression of what happens when a moment is preserved beyond its time? Love can be as destructive a force as hate, if pushed to its limits.”
An act like that didn’t sound like love to Albert, but in that statement Albert could hear more than just a reference to Prophetstown. A moment preserved beyond its time? Was Cooper speaking in metaphor? Was this Cooper’s completely wrong-headed way of ‘letting him down gently’?
“Cooper, we could talk about this on the plane,” Albert said. “We could talk about this in the car on our way to the airport. We could talk about this over dinner. We just got released from a backwater hospital under the care of doctors who got their MDs from the bottom of a Cracker Jacks box. Any sane man would be getting some shut-eye.”
“The shadows are very long in my room,” Cooper said, like that was all the explanation he needed to give.
But it wasn’t. Not this night, and not here. If Albert couldn’t understand what had happened in Prophetstown then he needed to find sense in the rest of his life. He needed to be able to question and prod and get answers here, or he feared he wouldn’t get them anywhere. And he refused to accept that.
“What does that mean?” he asked. Albert mustered his courage and rolled onto his back. Cooper’s hair was a mess, like it was every night, but it was different from this perspective. It was different with Albert on his back and Cooper propping himself on one elbow to half-lean over him. “What the hell does that even mean?” Albert asked, and for one of the first times in his life he wasn’t certain what it was he was asking.
“It means,” Cooper said, looking at Albert like he was looking through him, “that on some nights it is best not to be alone.”
Albert’s patience had been hanging by a thread, and it finally snapped. “Cooper, I know you’re capable of honesty and a considerable bluntness, in spite of your somewhat dippy demeanor. So drop the cryptic act and tell me exactly what it is that you want here.” Albert set his jaw and refused to look any more vulnerable than was inherent in his position.
And somehow it just made Cooper look sad. “Would it be any comfort if I admitted that I didn’t know?”
“You always know. You’re the most self-aware person I’ve ever met.”
Cooper sighed, and seemed to deflate. It took Albert longer than he wanted to admit to realize that Cooper’s slump had somehow become Cooper leaning against him, pressed close, with his arm draped across Albert’s waist.
Albert stared at the ceiling, and wondered how the hell they’d gotten to this place, wrapped together in the darkness and neither quite able to articulate what was happening. Cooper was speaking in riddles, and Albert was confrontational but gave as little of himself away as possible. It had always been this way, but for the first time it had become an impasse between them. Which was, of course, exactly why he had never planned on mentioning his little infatuation in the first place.
Cooper’s breath ghosted across his throat. Albert mentally catalogued the internal structures underneath: jugular vein, carotid artery, sternocleidomastoid muscle, omohyoid muscle, sternohyoid muscle, thyroid cartilage, thyroid membrane, larynx, esophagus, spine. Things were so much easier to compartmentalize when he remembered that he, like everyone else, was just a collection of parts.
“The shadows are very long in my room,” Cooper said again, like it meant something. Like he wanted Albert to understand.
But in truth, Albert understood nothing about Cooper when he got like this. He was something alien: beautiful and dangerous and intimidating enough that Albert felt the urge to lash out verbally. Albert was a strong individual, who had forged himself in self-sufficiency. He was good at being alone. He was good at knowing himself and his own capabilities. If his was a lonely existence, it was also well armored and prepared for anything the job might throw at him.
Cooper had worked his way in. He’d slipped in through Albert’s cracks until he made himself essential. Until Albert believed in him so strongly that he loved him. By the time Albert realized he’d joined the ranks of Cooper’s admirers he was both incapable of stopping himself and resolved to never give such a thing voice. Because he’d be damned if he’d be just another lovesick fool. Wasn’t it better to be Cooper’s partner? Wasn’t it better to be his constant and never fear loss?
Cooper’s mouth touched Albert’s skin at the juncture of throat and chin. It wasn’t a press. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a curious brush, a catching rasp against the thin skin stretched over the hyoid bone. The only bone in the human body not connected to any other bone. A point of connection set adrift.
Damn Cooper for having the ability to make anatomy a metaphor, anyway. This was why Albert didn’t do relationships.
So he quashed his desire and sat up. “Look,” he said, trying for understanding and falling short, “I know you mean well, Cooper. You always mean well. But I don’t do pity sex, or thank-you sex, or even confirmation-of-life one-night-stands. So go back to your room, or if the shadows are too long, stay on your own side of the bed.”
“Duly noted. However, I think you misunderstand my intentions.” Cooper held up a hand to forestall any arguments and sat up. “No, Albert, let me finish. First, I am far too exhausted at this moment to engage in any sort of strenuous physical activity, and as you noted, sex so soon after a traumatic event is almost always ill-advised.”
“Then what the hell-”
“Because I understand that impulse,” Cooper said, and his confidence faltered.
Albert, for all his protestations to the contrary, could read social cues when they slapped him across the face. Cooper wasn’t talking about the impulse toward inadvisable gratification in the wake of trauma. “What impulse?” he asked, not gentle, but not angry either.
“You were going to die,” Cooper said. “You’re rooted in this world in a way few people are, far more than I am, at the very least. But in that place where the impossible ruled, where others have lost their lives . . . I can comprehend the impulse to freeze the world.”
Albert fumbled for words, laid bare in the shock of that moment. “What . . . Cooper, so help me if this is some crazy Tibetan mumbo-”
A single finger laid against his lips shut Albert up with greater effect than anything he could remember. His mouth was his first, and at times his only, line of defense against the horrors of the world, and to be so effectively disarmed was something that hadn’t happened to him since he was seventeen.
Cooper drew his finger back as his lips curved into a small smile. It wasn’t his usual manic grin, but something private. “I have been in love two times in my adult life, Albert. But those two moments taught me what I needed to know about the stages of that experience. The form may be different in this case, but . . . I am not in love with you, Albert. To say anything else would be a lie, and I refuse to lie to you. But I could be. I recognize a path even after the first few steps.”
What Albert wanted to say was that was goddamn well not good enough. He didn’t want to be so close to something he’d wanted, but to know that Cooper just wasn’t there. The matter of ‘yet’ should have been more than acceptable, but at this stage it just felt like a cheat. Like something Cooper could offer up and take away at a whim. It left Albert with his ass hanging out without Cooper having to shoulder any of the risk.
His mouth kept working, even as his mind curled up in anger and vulnerability. “You are such a sap, Cooper,” he heard himself say. “How the hell did I fall for such a sugar-coated sentimentalist?”
And then Albert realized what he’d said, and snapped his mouth shut. He had never articulated his infatuation, not even alone. To have it slip out, particularly in the wake of Cooper’s half-assed confession, was exactly what he hadn’t wanted. He looked away and felt his ire rise as his cheeks heated. What right did Cooper have to put their partnership at risk over a ‘maybe’? Yes, what he’d said was flattering in some ways, but it was disturbing too. Albert had no desire for anyone to freeze the world on his behalf. Not that Cooper would. He’d probably do something inane instead, like buy some third-world farmer a cow or learn Tantric massage.
Cooper, whose psychic weirdness occasionally seemed to stray into mind reading, said, “Understanding the impulse and acting upon it are two different things, Albert.”
“Buy a cow instead,” Albert said because it made sense to him, and Cooper deserved to be subjected to non-sequiturs.
And there was that sunny grin.
And yes, fine, Albert wanted to believe that everything he’d wanted for years could be just around the bend. Of course he wanted that. Who wouldn’t? But Albert was a pragmatist at heart, and to be offered something so suddenly that had only been a dream seemed more than a little suspicious. How was he supposed to believe in something that just happened? How could he take it at face value that Cooper wouldn’t meet some nun in the next week and run off with her? For Cooper, love had always happened fast. To be at the opening stages and not further after three years of partnership seemed to Albert to be unlike his partner. Wasn’t it more likely that Cooper was convincing himself of something in the wake of Albert’s revelations in some stupid sense of altruism and fair play? Guys like Cooper-straight, handsome, unearthly brilliant guys like Cooper-didn’t fall for hardened, bitter cynics like Albert.
Albert shifted to turn away. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. It didn’t fit the patterns Cooper had established. He needed to back away before their friendship and partnership were both broken.
“Albert, please stop.”
“I’m not kicking you out. You can stay here and away from your ‘long shadows’ or whatever problem you have with your room. Just . . . just stay on your side of the bed, all right?” He hated the plaintive note in his voice.
“You’re upset.”
“You’re shockingly perceptive. You’ve been told that, right?”
“Albert,” Cooper said again, and maybe it was Albert projecting his own discomfort, but Cooper sounded as questioning and worried as Albert had been.
Albert rolled over and glared hard at Cooper. Now was not the time for a soft touch. “Cooper, I’ve seen you work. You meet someone and you know within twelve hours if you’re going to fall in love with them. You’ve known me for over a decade. You’re not in love with me. You’re just grateful.”
“Albert, my gratitude to you throughout the years has been such that if this was my reaction to gratitude we should have found ourselves in this position within the first year of our acquaintance. As for any timeline, I do not believe in absolutes. You are an exception to many of my norms, Albert. It doesn’t seem strange to me that this, too, would be aberrant.”
“And what’s going to stop you from leaving me flat six months in for a nice pair of legs?” Albert asked, deliberately harsh and crass. This was his last-ditch defense. He could feel himself caving, offering up his vulnerability to Cooper’s perusal.
Cooper’s fingers found Albert’s wrists, and he felt the weight of Cooper’s arms settle against his ribs. His fingertips moved up Albert’s hand and stroked between his fingers. “We have both experienced too much in our lives to make grand promises about the future, but I can promise you this: when I set myself firmly upon this path, I will not deviate unless we both agree that it’s best.”
Albert squeezed his eyes closed. That was an honest promise, going as far as truth would allow Cooper to go. He was being honest. He wasn’t fooling Albert about his level of emotional commitment or determination to trip him into bed. This should be his ideal: not a fairytale, but a realistic declaration followed by an adult discussion and deliberation. This adhered to logic. Albert refused to admit that perhaps some part of him was angry with Cooper for being realistic in that moment, for not bringing his customary storybook impossibility to this.
“May I suggest something?” Cooper asked.
Albert didn’t open his eyes. “Be my guest, Cooper.”
“First, while I admit that we aren’t currently engaged in carnal activities, I still think that in bed etiquette dictates you call me Dale.”
“Look, Coop-”
“But I accept that would be a large step, and you are already offering up enough. We can start with ‘Coop’ and work our way up.”
Albert started to reply, but Cooper’s fingers were in his hair, and he couldn’t be certain that what he said wouldn’t come out embarrassingly cracked.
“May I take a liberty, Albert?” Cooper asked.
Albert nodded, mute in the face of terror and wanting too much. Nothing Albert ever wanted this much worked out, unless it was professionally. And this had taken a hard right turn at professional when Cooper had climbed into bed with him.
Cooper’s mouth touched Albert’s hairline at the nape of his neck, then moved along it, pressing and nipping to the skin behind Albert’s ear. Petrous bone, hardest bone in the body, houses the smallest bones-Albert let out a ragged gasp as his concentration broke with the softest application of Cooper’s teeth scraping against that same patch.
Albert twisted around before he could talk himself out of it and found them face to face. Cooper hovered not even an inch from Albert’s face. Albert could smell the mouthwash and feel the gusts of Cooper’s breaths on his mouth. He was pulled forward and back, wanting this so badly he ached and not wanting to lose any more of his ground without a major concession from Cooper in return.
Cooper’s fingers were light when they traced Albert’s cheekbone. “Albert,” he whispered, smiling secrets into the air.
Albert mustered his voice and his courage just enough to say, “Sometime before mandatory retirement, Coop.”
Cooper caught the tail end of his own name on Albert’s lips, the plosive offering the perfect opening. Cooper’s mouth was soft and eager, and he was warm after the ice. Albert wrapped his arms around Cooper before he could convince himself it was a terrible idea. That they were throwing their partnership to the wind on a ‘what if’ that might or might not be pity, pathetic gratitude, or trauma.
Of course, avoiding thinking about something inevitably brought the thought to the fore, and Albert broke from that soft contact to lean back. “Let’s get something straight,” he said. Was that his voice? It had to be, but he had never rasped so badly in his life. “I am incredibly skilled at many things, but romance isn’t one of them. I’m not going to change, I don’t get better, and you aren’t getting a prince by kissing this particular frog.” He couldn’t help but run his fingers along the planes of Cooper’s face, memorizing this alone if it was all he got. “And I value our partnership more than anything else in my life. More than my work, or my doctorate, or my publications. Maybe even more than my convictions. I refuse to lose that.”
“I have prophetic dreams that can produce violent physical reactions,” Cooper said. “If we share a bed I will likely clock you at some point in the middle of the night. I have also been accused on more than one occasion of being mentally unbalanced. I’ve never felt that I am, but full disclosure is important.” Cooper leaned down and pressed their foreheads together. “Albert, whatever faults we have are long since exposed. Our partnership was forged during a possession and has survived hauntings, multiple attempts on our lives, one extremely drunk pop star with morbid fascinations, and the entropy death of an imaginary town. Our foundation is solid.”
They met in the inches between them. The kiss was focused, a careful mapping of the area and a reconnaissance of potential sites to visit again. It was a scientist’s kiss, a form of measurement, and Albert could feel the shock of it in his toes. Albert wondered how long they had been easing toward this, that the slide into this should feel so effortless. There was no conflagration, no great passion. They fit together, pressed and held until it felt like they existed in this place. Cooper pulled away for a breath and Albert drew him back. Albert turned his head to clear his thoughts and a kiss under his jaw pulled him in again.
They kissed themselves into a sleepy tangle, not working for anything beyond contact and the nascent potential of something more. A thousand things more, Albert corrected himself, because no action this large would have only one consequence. A car passed, and its headlights illuminated the room in a sweep. Bright and dark stood in contrast, and Albert watched the shadows stretch out. The shadows were long in his room too. For an instant, Albert understood what Cooper meant when he’d said that.
And then the room was dark again, and Cooper was pressed against him. There was a redeye back to Philadelphia scheduled for the next morning, a debrief with Gordon, and then days off. Maybe the shadows were long in Philly too; maybe they were long wherever Cooper went. Albert thought that he could perhaps live with that.