Healing the Living

Rating: PG-13 for language

SUMMARY: After a grisly discovery is made during an investigation in the Seattle area, Albert Rosenfield finds that Dale Cooper's stoicism under stress is not as infallible as he makes it out to be. Takes place before the television series; hurt/comfort.

DISCLAIMER: The characters of Albert Rosenfield, Dale Cooper, and Gordon Cole do not belong to me in the least. All main characters are copyrighted to David Lynch and Mark Frost, who own the rights to the television show *Twin Peaks*. No profit is being made from this piece of fan fiction.

Credit must be given in any and all reproductions. This story may not be distributed publically without expressed permission of the author. Events, places, and incidents mentioned are ficitious and any resemblances to any persons (living or dead), is purely coincidental. Please send any comments to PollyHammer@yahoo.com; any input is appreciated!

WARNING: This fanfiction story falls into the genre of 'slash' and implies feelings and potential relationships between two men of legal age. If you are uncomfortable with this, please don't read this story and please don't write and flame me afterwards. That's just silly.

******************************************************************

Healing the Living

by Polly Hammer

pollyhammer@yahoo.com

How does the song go? "One of these nights"? Well, it was kind of along that line of thought. One of _those_ nights, more like it. It was one of those nights that make you want to chuck it all and be a tree surgeon. A bee keeper. _Anything_ besides what you are - anything that doesn't involve people, the living or dead variety. Anything that doesn't break a man, even if only for one night.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It _was_ one of those nights. Gordon Cole in his infinite wisdom and vocal cords to match had assigned us to an investigation just outside the Seattle area, out in the suburbs. It was your typical suspected serial killer routine, with the FBI being flown in because of similar MO's being found in the Philadelphia area. Big Daddy carrying on his business out-of-town, they figured. Some brainless slip-up had caused the guy to be traced to the outskirts of Seattle, and since we'd worked on the Philadelphia cases, we were flown in: me on the forensics angle, Cooper on the investigative side.

I hate these fucking field trips. The local brass almost never want to show all the cards - they'd rather get the gold star for their own offices, thank you very much. And I hate to say this, but it was another serial killing, and those can get me down. Even though I put on a convincing front, I'm not _quite_ to the point where I get the shiny blazer pin that says "Completely Jaded." God help me if I ever am. That's the day I really do chuck it all.

But it was an assignment with Cooper, and that was the one bright spot that was helping me keep it together. Something about the guy keeps you on - the obsession with food minutiae, maybe. The tangential stories and factoids probably pulled out of old almanacs and well-read encyclopedias. The completely random and really weird shit he pulls out of the air and then somehow translates into clues, messages, case solutions, what have you. I've seen enough of his cases closed because of some dream of his to know that he's definitely got a charmed star working overtime.

Some paralegal convention in the same hotel had us splitting a room for the time that we were in town. But that's a completely separate tangent. Let's just say that I wasn't complaining.

I wasn't prepared for the amount of rain that they got in that area. I'd heard the jokes and stories from the guys in the Seattle office, yeah. But we're talking torrential. We're talking hit the hardware store and hope that they have do-it-yourself ark kits kind of rain. It was raining when we arrived, and it rained every day for the week that we were there.

All in all it was a pretty dismal situation. A pack of cigarettes and a sardonic attitude helped me make it through the long nights in the morgue, snipping and examining and jamming small bits of people under microscopes. Even the original luck I'd had of being assigned to work with Coop wasn't holding; I was spending all of my hours working overtime in the lab, and Coop was out stomping Seattle with the local officers.

We got the proverbial "big break" on Tuesday afternoon, after Coop and I had been in Seattle for three days. A guy matching a description of the killer was pulled over for a traffic violation on the other side of town. When the cops tried to bring him in for questioning, he flipped and pulled a shotgun on them. Ended up being plugged six times by a pair of rookie cops on the scene. God bless the trigger-happy boys in blue.

Coop and I got the call at about five in the evening. We'd been going over the evidence so far back at the hotel, both of us running on probably three hours of sleep. The phone rang - it was one of the local detectives who was also working the case, telling us about the guy they'd picked up. He'd died in the ICU about an hour after being shot. Turned out that his glove compartment had had some little girls' panties stashed inside, the sick bastard. He'd also died without any ID on him, so it'd taken a while to figure out who he was. But they did, eventually, and they'd found out where he lived. And that's where we came in.

Coop drove the rental car over to the guy's house while I sat in the passenger's seat, drumming my fingers on my med bag and taking a last couple of drags on a cigarette before we got there. The rain was trailing down the window - I could barely see the picket-fence houses that we were passing along the roadside. It's not like I was trying to admire the view, though. Truth be told I was steeling myself for the potential crime scene. The underwear in the glove compartment was not a happy indicator of what we might find there.

I looked over at Coop. He hadn't said much since we got in the car, but he was holding the steering wheel with a death grip.

"Jesus, Coop, if that thing were a hamster, it'd be dead by now." Yeah, okay, it was lame. But I wasn't warmed up yet. A couple of minutes at the crime scene with the local 5-0 and whatever surprises El Sicko had waiting would get my hackles up, no problem. From zero to Sarcastic Bastard in nothing flat.

Coop hadn't caught what I said. Probably just as well. He'd never been a big fan of my smart remarks, especially given my track record of directing them at the in-town cops. The last thing I wanted before we arrived on the scene was yet another lecture on respecting the local wildlife.

A couple of flashing blue lights caught my eye through the tracks of rain on the windows, and before I knew it we were out of the car, hiking up coat collars against the downpour and nodding at the other detectives. We were part of the first wave of investigators, after a handful of grunts in blue who had gone and knocked down the door and made sure that the place was safe to check out. It was just us and a handful of cops and ME's itching to start tearing down peeling-paint walls and busting windows, all in the name of investigation. Or they were like me and just wanted to get the hell out of the dark and damp and into somewhere with light for a change, even if it was only 60 watts strong.

The place reeked of neglect - ratty stained wallpaper, a couple of leaks in the ceiling, splintered bannister to the upper floor, the works. Big piles of old newspaper in the living room. Mold in the bedroom corner. Ancient furniture yellowed from years of exposure to tobacco smoke. The main investigators strode around looking thoughtful and jotting down notes. I was stuck with a couple of Romper Room ME's, still new to the job and arguing over whether or not to just douse the whole place with luminol.

People were searching but coming up empty. One guy managed to find a kid's size Barbie t-shirt underneath the kitchen sink, but even after bagging and tagging that, there wasn't much else to go on. I was scribbling a note to have the shirt taken to the lab and tested for hair, blood, etc., etc., when I glanced over at Coop, who was standing out in the hallway. He was staring up at the second floor with this glazed look in his eyes and even as I watched him he started up onto the first step of the staircase.

Shit. I'd seen that look enough times to know that something was up. Coop's intuition-cum-weird-dumb-luck was about to make a guest appearance, and I knew that it'd pay to be on hand when he found whatever it was the magic elves were leading him to.

I handed the evidence bag to one of the wannabe ME's and took off towards the stairs. Coop had reached the landing at the top and was making his way into the guy's bedroom without any signs of stopping.

"Coop?" Nope, he wasn't answering. He wandered past the dingy double bed with its cheap sheets and exposed mattress and headed right to a glass door that led to a patio deck. Christ, he was going to make me follow him back out into the rain, wasn't he?

"Hey, Cooper, what is it?" I shouted, trying to be heard over the godawful weather. The man was edging out onto the deck, a rickety platform thrown together with wood that didn't look all that stable. I'm sure that the past few days of rain hadn't helped, and somehow our guy didn't strike me as the kind who'd add weather-resistant varnish to his shopping list. I stayed by the door and watched as Coop inched carefully out towards the edge. The deck itself wasn't all that high, but I wasn't about to chance it, especially given the state of the rest of the house.

"Come on, Coop, share what you know with the other boys and girls." I was still in the doorway. It was the downpour or his own weird Cooper-trance, but either way he couldn't hear me. Or he just wasn't listening. The rain was starting to splash inside and some of the other cops were giving me the evil eye for letting all the cold air in. I was all set to close the door and just keep an eye on Coop through the window when the rotting wood at the far end of the deck suddenly gave out under his feet and dropped him with a yelp underneath the patio.

"Coop!" That was me, yelling and tearing off across the deck, rotten wood or no. Damn it, I should've stopped him from walking out onto that goddamned deck, my _grandmother_ could've told you that it was unsafe, and Gordon Cole was going to have both our heads on sticks if we fucked this up and especially me if I let Coop go on one of his vision quests without anyone backing him up --

I stopped just short of the hole in the deck - I wasn't sure how sturdy the wood around it was. The damned rain was getting in my eyes, and the area underneath the deck was so dark I couldn't see a thing. _Goddamnit, Coop._ I got on my knees and leaned over towards the hole, trying to avoid the splinters. "Cooper? You okay?"

"Albert?" It was Coop's voice, but it sounded far away - small, and strained like a kid's. He couldn't have been more than five feet down, but I still couldn't see him. Some of the other investigators were starting to follow me out onto the deck, curious about what was going on.

"Somebody hand me a flashlight!" While the cops checked their pockets, I turned my attention back to Coop. "Coop, are you all right? Anything broken?" I made a mental note to check for concussions or any other interesting injuries as soon as we got him out of there.

"Um, Albert - I can't ... really see very well, but I think ..." he trailed off. Something in my stomach knotted up. This whole thing was giving me a really creeped-out feeling, but I couldn't tell why. Maybe Coop's psychic aura was infectious. The night rainwater trickling down inside my coat collar wasn't helping, either.

"... Coop?" I'd never known him to be at a loss for words before. One of the cops had finally gotten hold of a flashlight and was inching his way around the edge of the deck to pass it to me. Taking his time, the slow bastard. I glared at him and snatched the flashlight from his hand. It wouldn't turn on right away, so I whacked it a couple of times against the planks of the deck until the beam clicked on.

"Okay, Coop, just hang on a second, get you right out of there -" I shone the flashlight down into the hole and caught Coop square in the face. He was flat on his back but wasn't moving - God, it was like a rabbit in headlights. He was staring up at me with eyes as big as banjos and biting his lip hard, all without moving a muscle. Even the rain dripping down through the hole in the deck wasn't making him blink. I'm talking _frozen_.

"... Cooper?" That's when I moved the flashlight beam away from Coop, scanning the rest of the area under the deck. At first I couldn't tell what was down there - whatever the flashlight was picking out on the ground just looked like a jumble of colors. I couldn't make any of it out. One of the investigating officers had made his way across the deck and was leaning over my shoulder, distracting me. I nudged him back with my elbow.

"Albert?" Damn it, Cooper again. I couldn't focus.

"For Christ's sake, Cooper, hang on." I was mumbling now, almost to myself. I forced my hand to hold the flashlight steady for a minute and tried to make out what was in the beam. Something blue - pastel blue. With laceholes on it. It was a little girl's sneaker, and even as I was staring at it a mouse jumped out and scurried away from the flashlight beam.

I panned the light back around and suddenly everything came into focus like one of those goddamned Psych 101 pictures with the two faces that look like a vase. There were clothes - rags, really. Old shirts and socks and overall dresses, filthy from the dirt and some of them just in tatters. And bones. There were dozens of them. Hands, feet, femurs, ribs, you name it. Most of them had gnaw marks on them, from mice and rats, probably. Some of them still looked like they might have had meat on them. Coop had fallen into the fucking charnel grounds.

Cooper. I'd forgotten about him for a moment. Christ. I shook myself back into gear and smacked the arm of the officer behind me, who was still gaping at the hole in the deck. He'd caught all of that too.

"Okay Coop, hang on - don't move." I pushed the officer to the other side of the hole and we both reached our arms down. It was a few seconds before Coop grabbed hold - he was moving slowly, with deliberation - but I could feel a bit of a tremor from the hand I was holding. We both put some weight into it and managed to haul Cooper out of there. Once he was standing back on the deck, he let out this long sigh and shuddered, as though he'd been holding his breath.

"I tried not to move," Coop told us in this really small voice. "I could tell what was down there. I didn't want to disturb the crime scene. I tried not to move." He was staring past both of us with this half-dead shell-shocked expression on his face. He still wasn't blinking, even when his sopping-wet hair started dripping down over his forehead.

"I know you did, Coop. C'mon." I put my arm around his shoulder and led him away from the hole in the deck, out of the downpour. I could hear the shouts of the other officers still out on the patio. To the other cops milling around inside the house I nodded at the glass door. "Get going, blue boy. There's a damn crime scene out there."

I let the resident ME's take charge for the moment while I sat Cooper down and checked him over. He hadn't hit his head in the fall, but he was cradling his left arm enough for me to know that something was hurt. It turned out to be a mild wrist sprain - nothing serious, but enough for me to keep his ass there on the couch while I bandaged him up and watched him for any signs of fainting or panic. That damned heroics routine of his - courage under fire and all that. I swear, he'd take gunshots and be up five minutes later trying to find out whodunnit. It'll kill him someday.

After the killer's site of disposal had been found, it was easy for me to slip into autopilot and go through the motions. I was only half paying attention when the officers started tacking tarpaulin over the deck and collecting the remains for reassembly and analysis. In reality I was keeping watch on Cooper and trying to blot from my mind the image of that area underneath the deck. Already one of the rookie ME's had been sent out to the van for a fresh box of evidence recovery bags for the team working under the deck. It was one of those scenes that sticks in your mind for years. I didn't even want to _think_ about what it must be like to crash through the floor right into it.

We didn't leave that rat-infested hellhole until three in the morning. The local brass spent half the night patting themselves on the back, happy as clams over having nabbed the guy as well as saving the public any cost of trail. Very efficient. All of the relevant evidence and remains had been gathered up, right down to damp bone and cloth fragments I scraped from Coop's coat myself. Everyone on the scene was exhausted and half-soaked. With the most likely perpetrator dead, the local cops vetoed an all-nighter, telling everyone there to go home and get some rest. I was all too happy to agree, both for my sake and for Coop's. He'd been strained since the fall, going through the retrieval of evidence without really paying attention and muttering one-word replies to every question anyone asked him.

I nodded a quick agreement to the other ME's about meeting them again at the lab at 9am and then it was back out into the rain, which for the record hadn't shown any signs of letting up. Coop would've driven but I made him give me the car keys and take to the passenger seat. Okay, so that did give him idle time to think about what had happened, but he was in no shape to drive and I'd be damned before I let him kill us both on some suburban road in the middle of the night.

Damn it. Cooper's got this - this childlike thing to him, some kind of innocence that gets everyone's protective instincts working overtime for him. You forget that he went through Quantico and weapons training and everything, just like the rest of us. Every five minutes I wanted to check on him, ask him if he was okay. That would've been nagging and completely unhelpful, though. But he still seemed kind of dazed. It could've been weariness - it'd been a long night. God knows it was getting to me. The damn rain all over the windshield kept me from driving anything more than 30 miles an hour, and I hadn't had a cigarette since we pulled up to the crime scene. Things were getting twitchy. I held in the shakes and promised myself a cigarette once we got to the hotel. I would've lit one right there at the next red light, but I didn't want to get on Cooper's last unjangled nerve. Smoking was another thing he wasn't a big fan of. Damn.

Twenty minutes of complete silence, except for the squeaking windshield wipers and downpour on the roof of the car. I never thought I'd actually miss all of his little stories and weird observations, until now. He piped up once - one time. Asked me if I minded if he opened the window a littel bit. "Of course not - go right ahead." Oh, great, Rosenfield, very helpful. I'm not the shoulder-to-cry-on type by _any_ stretch of the imagination. Shit, I knew that I should've had him talking, that it would help to ground him and bring him out of it, but for the life of me I was just frozen with no idea what to say. Frozen like Coop in the flashlight beam. Damn it - more bad images. I was breathing a sigh of relief when we finally pulled up to the hotel a few minutes later.

It was 3:30 in the morning by that time. We crept through the hallway back up to the hotel room, trying not to disturb any of the other guests. Once we were back inside, Coop ran himself a glassful of water while I headed straight to the balcony for a cigarette. My nerves were shot and I needed to calm down somehow if I was going to get any sleep before 9 the next morning. I was even willing to put up with whatever rain was splashing past the balcony awning. Lucky for me the awning actually managed to pull its job off and ended up keeping me and my cigarettes dry. Little victories, I tell you.

But you win one, you lose one right after it, that's been my experience. I'd had my back turned for not even ten minutes; when I came back inside, Coop had already washed up, hung up his suit and coat, and crawled into the bed on his side of the room. Damn it. I was hoping to at least get a couple of words out of him before he went to sleep. No such luck - he was out like a light. I just shook my head. "Pleasant dreams, Coop." Hope _I'd_ be able to sleep that well.

An hour later I got my answer on that one. No. And not just no, but _hell_ no.

Fuck. I'd switched out the light and closed my eyes and would've sworn that I would pass out right there. It's the fatigue you feel on Friday night, after you've been on the go all week at work - the kind that makes you fall asleep on the couch still wearing shirt and tie. All the weight of the past three days plus the weeks of work before that was making itself felt, and I was _so_ ready to sleep that it wasn't even funny.

I drifted in and out of half-consciousnes for about an hour. That weird delirium state where you're partway dreaming and the other part awake kept settling over my brain, but just when I thought that I was finally about to follow it into oblivion, I'd see that little blue mouse-chewed sneaker again and end up jerking myself awake. This just wasn't working. I even tried a couple of breathing techniques that Cooper had rattled off one time en route to an assignment in Virginia. Bet he thought I wasn't paying attention. Actually, now I was wishing I _had_ paid a little more attention - all they were doing was making my nose drip. With my luck I'd probably missed the part when Coop had mentioned the shambala chant or chicken sacrifice or whatever it was that made the techniques effective.

The delirium-dream fog was pulling me in again, and I think I really did fall asleep for about ten minutes there before I was woken up again by this sound that I couldn't identify. I rubbed my eyes a couple of times and cursed under my breath. Things were still a little fuzzy around the edges. I climbed out of bed and flicked the radiator dial, thinking that it was the heater that had woken me up. The stupid thing wasn't even on.

Then, just out of the habit I'd been in all night, I took a quick look over at Coop. He was turned facing away from me, and seemed like he was still asleep. I could see that he'd kicked off most of the bedcovers and was curled up under the one thin sheet that was stil tugged up to his waist.

Ah, Jesus. Like I said, I certainly hadn't complained when Coop told me that we'd have to split a hotel room. But I had kind of anticipated at least _one_ moment like this. I swear, working with him sometimes makes me feel like fucking Tantalus - it's always right there, just beyond my reach, and there's absolutely nothing I can do. And there, just when I'm about to go back to bed and try to sleep, just as I anticipated. There it is again. There _he_ is. Yeah, sweet fucking dreams, Rosenfield.

Of course, in the middle of all my self-pity and internal whining, that's when I noticed that he was shivering. That's what had woken me up, not the radiator.

I took a couple of tiptoe steps over to his bed. "Coop? You awake there, pal?" No answer. He was still asleep, but at the same time he was trembling like a hypothermic. Even though the radiator wasn't on, the room wasn't all _that_ cold. Very carefully, I reached over and ran one hand over his forehead, pushing away a few stray strands of black hair. His skin was cool and a sickly clammy, and even as I pulled my hand away he whimpered just a little, still in his sleep.

I saw this coming. No doubt it was some form of delayed shock, a post-trauma reaction. An incident like that one on top of minor sleep deprivation would do a number on anyone's system, no matter how strong they insisted they were. Coop had put on a good stoic front back at the crime scene, but it was catching up with him now. For a split-second I wondered how many other times this sort of thing had happened to him, given the stiff-upper-lip routine that he usually employed.

Yeah, well, all those other times _I_ hadn't been there to make sure that he took care of himself. _Somebody_ had to watch over this guy, and I'd never forgive myself if I just went back to bed without making sure that Coop was okay first.

It'd been a while since I'd had to think about how to take care of the living. Most of the people I see are at the clientele end of scalpels and power drills. _Come on, Rosenfield, it's shock. What do you do for shock?_ It was coming back to me, however slowly. Doing my best to keep quiet, I crept over to the washroom and ran lukewarm water over one of the facecloths. I wrung out the excess water and then crept right back, making sure that I stepped around the squeaky spot in the floor that I'd hit on my way back to the bathroom.

But when I got back to his bedside, I froze up again. My eyes had used the time to get adjusted to the room without the lights on, and now I could see Coop more clearly. I hadn't noticed before how tense he was, even in the middle of sleep. He had a handful of the bedsheets clutched in that grip of hamster death, and the furrows on his forehead looked like they'd been chiseled from stone.

Was he dreaming? It wasn't like he was obviously twitching and chasing cats in his sleep, so I couldn't tell. Was he dreaming about the deck? Was it a special dream? It's one of those things that you don't think about, and here I was possibly witness to it - we all laughed and poked fun at Cooper's infamous dreams, but it had never really clicked in my head that he actually _had_ them. They were just stories to us, but to him they were a constant reality. Maybe even right now. That sent a shiver down the back of my neck. I didn't know how he lived with it. Me, I'd be hitting the sack every night with a glass of water and a bottle of Valium chaser.

Regardless. Right now he was suffering from shock, and if I didn't act, who knows what would happen. So I did.

I really don't know what got into me, to be honest. I'd been standing there for a moment with the dripping washcloth in my hand when without thinking I grabbed one of the spare pillows from my bed and gently sat down on the edge of his, setting the washcloth on the nightstand and being careful not to disturb him.

This was one method of dealing with shock. Really. Check the textbooks.

"C'mon, Coop," I was mumbling half under my breath. I laid one hand on his shoulder and held it there for a moment, trying to calm the shaking. "C'mon, buddy, you're not wherever it is you think you are. You're back in the hotel room. You're safe." Putting a little strength into it, I turned him over so that he was facing me and eased his head onto the spare pillow, which I'd rested against my leg. "C'mon, Coop. You're safe now."

I think I woke him up a little because he twitched a few times and groaned. He kept his eyes clenched shut, though, almost as though he were afraid to open them. I picked up the wet washcloth from the nightstand and laid it over his forehead, still mumbling to him the whole time.

"Calm down, Coop. Everything's okay."

" ... it's not ... there are bones everywhere --" He was muttering in his sleep now. My back was killing me from leaning up against the cheap wooden headboard, but I couldn't move. Not yet.

"There _were_ bones, Coop. But not anymore - you're out of there now." And then again without thinking about it, just on instinct, I ran the fingers of my left hand through his hair, very gingerly, until my fingertips touched the edge of the damp facecloth. Then I curled my fingers back and did it again. For all the Brylcreams jokes we make about him at the office, his hair was as soft and pure as cornsilk and a hundred times more thrilling than all of the guilty daydreams I'd had behind my desk of a situation like this.

Damn, I'm a hopeless case.

We must have been there for at least half an hour - Coop gradually calming down, letting go of his deathgrip on the sheets and stilling his shakes; and me, tracing my fingers over neatly-cut black hair and taking an indelible mental snapshot of a moment I wouldn't trade for anything, even if he didn't remember a second of it and tomorrow morning we were back to business as usual.

A crick in my neck was starting to get my attention, so I reluctantly eased myself away from the headboard, shrugging my shoulders a few times to relieve the muscle knots. I peeled the facecloth away from his forehead and noticed that the furrows were gone, thank God. Coop's breathing had settled into some pattern close enough to normal, and the shivering that had woken me up earlier had subsided completely.

I let my fingertips trail through his hair one last time, shaking my head. Hopeless case is right, that's for certain. I don't know how it got to be this bad. Dale Cooper inspires a lot of weird reactions in people, like I've said. People don't know what to do when they're faced with this odd combination of quirks, trivia, cheeriness, and a sense of observation that'd put Holmes to shame. Some people get defensive and refuse to cooperate with him. Some people go out of their way to take down every word and observation like gospel. Some people ... some people fall in love with him.

Yeah, and some people also know how to recognize a good enough situation when they've got one and know to be quiet or they might end up ruining it.

Like I said - hopeless.

It was getting late, and I still had to meet up with the rookie ME's in a few hours. Before I shifted out from beside the pillow entirely, I touched Cooper's shoulder one last time; thankfully, the trembling had stopped and the sickly coolness had gone completely, leaving behind warm, slightly damp skin. _Quit stalling, Albert._ "I think you're out of the woods, Coop," I said to him, smiling a bit. "Now don't you ever do that to me again."

And just then, before I had the chance to move my hand away, I saw his fingers creep out from underneath the bedsheet, finally resting just on top of mine. This little half-awake grin spread across his face. Without moving an inch or even opening his eyes, he murmured "Thanks, Albert" and smiled again.

I paused for a second and just let my hand stay there under his. "Any time, Coop." I smiled back at him and watched as he curled back up under the bedsheets, tugging the tangled blanket just under his chin. I followed his example and climbed back under my own sheets, closing my eyes and listening to the endless rain against the window. It was still coming down with force and didn't show any signs of going away, but at that point I felt like nothing would bother me in the world. Even all that godforsaken rain.

I could feel that half-dream state settling in again, and this time I knew that I'd be asleep within a few couple of minutes. The last thing I remember before completely passing out was hearing Coop's even, soft breathing from the other side of the room and almost in response my own fingers curling together, thumb brushing across the fingertips like muscle memory, reminding me of what had happened there in the hotel room, only a few hours before dawn that Wednesday morning.

Like I said, it was one of those nights. It was definitely one of those nights where you think about cashing in the pension fund and just moving on to something better or at least something just slightly less disturbing. But when you get the opportunity to help someone for a change, especially someone who -- someone who is _important_ to you, that's when it all weighs out in the end and you actually get some decent sleep at night.

--------------------------------------------------

Send any feedback to:
Polly Hammer

Back to the Bookhouse Boys archive