Harry can see himself twenty years on, when his lanky frame begins to collapse into itself. He'll be the one hunched over a fifth warm-up of coffee at the Double R, seat facing away from the window. The caffeine won't make him alert; instead it'll keep him drugged-up and slow, rattling through a life that's both more and less than he hoped it would be.

Cooper is completely alien. Life in the city ought to put years on a man, but his face is clear and unlined as a woman's. He looks, if Harry will be honest with himself, eerily like Josie. Both of them have faces like water, faces that make it easy to conceal.

Harry can imagine kissing Agent Cooper, though he half-wishes he couldn't. All his kisses belong to Josie. He needs to keep this separate from the press of mouth on mouth, the soft tongue that whispers *love you* and *take care of you.* Words like that are worse than useless with another man.

But the other way is no better. He learns it through the distortion of the police scanner: pickups at bars not the Roadhouse, men who turn vicious when they don't get what they want, or when they do. The men are always strangers to him. He will never see their faces alive with anything more complicated than anger, fear, intoxication, sex.

What he feels for Cooper Harry knows they have words for in other places, but here it's something unexpected, inexplicable. He's drawn to Cooper in a way he hasn't felt since high school, but this is nothing like those fumbling attempts at sex.

Cooper is a lake by night, surface warmed by a long day of sunshine. Harry would like to press himself against Cooper's body and stay there for a long time. Nuzzle into the crook of his neck, rub their faces together like an Inuit kiss.

Twin Peaks is large enough that he just might be able to bring Cooper home. He lives alone, and after Mrs. Tramer died last year no other neighbor has taken up the post of surrogate mother hen. There are no more pointed offers to fix him up with nice girls, but no casseroles either. Harry thinks he would like to die that way: quietly and suddenly, many years from now.