“Chua’s a good guy,” I said ambiguously, but I couldn’t deny that I knew where she was coming from: He never smiled, crossed his arms, and grunted in affirmation. And if you came up with ideas, he poked holes in them and shot them down. He was a wet blanket wrapped around a stick in the mud.
“How long are you gonna do paperwork?”
“Unclear.”
“Did that boyfriend of yours ground you or something?” She asked, her eyes sparkling with suspicion.
“No,” I said a little too quickly.
“I thought so,” she said with a sly smile. “My boo got on my case about that a little while ago… but we’re good now.”
I put my highlighter down, and it rolled to the edge of my desk. “…how did you resolve it?”
“Well, we just reached the agreement that if he couldn’t chill out about my job, we were donezo.”
I steepled my fingers and watched her face carefully. She was trying to act smug about it, but I could tell there was more there. There were layers of discussions and fights and compromises that she wasn’t telling me.
There had to be.
“I see what you’re doing, Big Guy. You’re doing that shrink stuff on me. It ain’t gonna work.”
I pulled my gaze off of her, forcing it to return to the paperwork on my desk. “Sorry, I was just trying to figure out if that’s all there was to it.”
“Yep. That’s all it was.”
“No discussions? No fights? No compromises?”
She bit her lip, and her eyes went to the ceiling. It was as if she was studying a memory projected onto one of the tiles up there. “Nope.”
“So you just told him that if he didn’t, and I quote, chill out about your dangerous job, that—”
“That he could find someone else, yeah.”
I was stunned. Maybe that worked for Claire’s relationship, but it certainly wouldn’t work for mine.
“And things between you are just… good now?”
“Yep.”
I stared at her silently, then decided that there must be something she wasn’t telling me. The guy had to resent her now, or—
“It’s about the choice,” she said.
“It sounds like an ultimatum.”
“No, it’s giving them a choice. When you and your partner are fightin’ every day about something, it’s hard on both of you. You do everything you can to fix it, but when it comes to things like a career… in the end it’ll come down to the choice. My boo chose to stay with me. Ever since then, we haven’t fought.”
I pondered this for a second, poking the tip of the highlighter cap to the corner of my mouth. “Doesn’t your boyfriend worry?”
“Of course he gets worried, but it used to be so much worse. He’d see something on the news, and I’d find ten missed calls when I got back to my personal phone. But now I guess he’s used to it, or he pretends I’m not a cop or somethin’.”
A part of me wondered if that would ever work for Luke. If he could just… get over the fact that I had this job.
Then I was picturing how his face looked when he yelled at me the other night… when he said I should find a new job.
My tooth began to ache. I realized that I’d been chewing on the tip of the highlighter too hard, gnawing little dents into it.
Claire locked onto it with her brown eyes, then leaned over my desk.
“Look. People like us… we need this. There’s nowhere else we feel more alive than in the field busting bad guys. I need you out on the streets, in the car with me. Hell, this whole city needs you. And you’re going to stay in here doing this bean counter shit because you’re afraid your partner might be a little uncomfortable?”
A man at the desk shot Claire a dirty look.
“Sorry, Greenman, but we both know you’re just pushing paper.”
Greenman scowled, then turned his chair away.
I sighed long and heavy. Claire had a point. I couldn’t put my life — my passion — on hold just to keep Luke’s worries at bay.
His anxiety already controlled his life to a degree — I wouldn’t let it control mine as well.
As if rising to the challenge, I stood up.
Claire smiled, her eyes dancing with delight.
“Alright. Let me just text Luke, and then we can go,” I said.
“Yay! I’m so happy you’re joining me! No more Chua! And, we need to go back to that factory again. Sarge wants us to do another sweep.”
“Alright, alright,” I said. The thrill of adventure shot up my spine as everything in my nervous system lit up with excitement. I was going back to where I belonged — patrolling the streets, investigating, making sure people were safe. I didn’t realize how much I’d dreaded sitting down to do paperwork until I didn’t have to do it anymore.
I tapped out a quick message to Luke and hit send, then put my personal phone in the drawer.
On the way to the factory, Claire was babbling about what she made for dinner with her boyfriend last night, and my thoughts were drifting away to Luke, as usual. What if something happened when I was out here again?
I put my hand to the bandage on the side of my neck and frowned.
It was a reminder that I could get hurt. It was a reminder that I wasn’t invincible.
I knew how Luke saw it; he saw it as a threat from this vast, scary city that I could be taken away from him at any moment.
Up until I’d gotten this cut, I would have batted those fears out of his mind, and we’d end the night with some kinky playtime. Sometimes he just needed to feel like he was in control.
But now that I had this wound, I was more inclined to agree with Luke’s line of thinking. The question now wasn’t if the city could chew me up and spit me out, but would it.
Though I tried to shake it off, the
