1. Romance Novels #2
The Jane Doe from Fremont. It had been six months and I still couldn't let her go.
She was dressed in layers, dirt smudged across her face that would make any responding officer write it off as another homeless death.
But the smudge didn't sit right with me.
It was uneven, too deliberate, like someone had wiped it on her.
And underneath it, her skin was clear. Her nails were maintained.
The clothes didn't belong to her. Only the surface said street.
Everything underneath said she'd been looking after herself just fine before someone put her in that park.
I recommended a sexual assault kit. The responding detective passed on it. Case closed, overdose, filed under a number instead of a name.
Elliot stopped by on his way out.
He glanced around first, confirming nobody was reading anything into a sergeant checking in with an officer at shift change. "Hey. I've got a lot to get through tonight. Don't wait up."
"Okay." I didn't look up from my screen. "See you later."
The thing I looked forward to at the end of every shift was the bath.
I picked that up from Doug, in a way. Not the bath itself, no. Though if Doug Price took bubble baths, that was between him and his wife Diana.
Whenever they invited me over for dinner, I'd see what Doug was like when he walked through his front door.
He wasn't Officer Price anymore. He was Honey.
He was Daddy. His daughters climbed him like a tree and he let them.
Diana handed him a plate and he kissed her on the forehead and asked about her day before she could ask about his.
When he talked about work at the table, it was always the guy who locked himself out of his car three times in one week. The calls that made people laugh. Never the alley on East Bonanza. Never the ones that followed you home if you let them.
Doug made me realize that the job only takes what you bring through the door. He left the job on the porch every night and walked in as a husband and a father.
I didn't have a wife or kids waiting for me. But I had the bath. I had the candles.
I kicked off my boots by the door and dropped my keys on the counter.
My father's bookshelf covered one wall. It was the one thing I took when I rented out the house to a young couple who'd just had a baby and needed a family home.
After my father died, four bedrooms and a backyard were too much space and too much silence for one person who couldn't bear to look at his empty chair.
I ran my fingers along the spines. Memoirs, autobiographies, books about history, anthropology, economics, survival.
My father read everything and anything that caught his attention.
It was what filled our dinner conversations.
Whatever he was reading that week, he'd talk about at the table, and I'd listen until I ran out of questions.
Eventually, I started pulling the books off the shelf myself so I could keep up. I read every one. And somewhere along the way, I realized that his habit of reading widely was most likely what made him one of the most revered detectives in the department.
I unstrapped his watch from my wrist and unclasped my mother's necklace. I set them both in the trinket dish in front of their framed photo on the shelf, and straightened the camellia pendant so the flower faced out.
"I'm home." I said it every night. My parents smiled back from behind the glass the way they always did.
I turned down the hall, stripped off my uniform, and stepped into the shower.
The water was as hot as I could stand it.
I let it run over my shoulders, my neck, and the tight spot between my shoulder blades where the tension always lived.
I let it wash off the parts of the day that stuck to your skin even after the uniform came off.
The people who spat at you during an arrest. The ones who called you a pig on a traffic stop.
The little boy at the domestic who looked up at me and asked if his dad was coming back.
The water hit the scar beneath my left shoulder blade. I felt it every time I showered. A small raised line that didn't hurt anymore but never let me forget what this job could cost.
I dried off and started the bath. Lit the vanilla candles on the ledge. Unplugged the charger from the rolling TV I'd bought after a call that left me unable to sleep for a week, and dragged it close to the tub where I settled in to read my romance novels in peace.
This was the version of me that nobody knew.
Not Doug. Not the precinct. I'd learned a long time ago what happens when you show people a side of yourself they don't think you deserve.
They take it from you. Elliot was the only person I ever let see it.
And I'd spent a long time trusting him before I did.
I picked up where I left off last night.
He brushed the hair from her face and held it there, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw. "You don't have to be brave right now," he said. "Not with me."
Elliot was working late again. Third time this week. He cancelled dinner on Saturday, rescheduled drinks on Monday, and tonight was another "don't wait up."
I picked up the remote and turned the page before I sank lower in the water.
I still remembered the first time Elliot asked me to dinner.
FTEP had just ended. Six months of him teaching me how to read a scene, how to talk down a domestic and write a report that would hold up in court.
Then he asked me out to a restaurant off the Strip where nobody from the department would see us.
That was four years ago.
We were the same rank when we started. Both patrol.
It was easy then. Two officers keeping their personal life out of the precinct.
Then Elliot made sergeant, and the chain of command made it complicated.
Disclosing meant one of us would have to transfer.
He didn't want that. I didn't either. I liked working with him.
I liked being with him. So we kept it quiet, and quiet became the rule, and four years later I was still eating dinner alone on the nights he worked late.
She closed her eyes. She didn't know how to stop being brave. It was the only thing she'd ever been. But his hand was still on her face, and he wasn't moving, and for once she didn't want to be the strong one.
The water cooled. The candles burned. I just kept reading.