Page 40 of Misadventures in Blue
“Where are you going?” I ask as he shoves his feet in his boots. “You can stay. We can…talk.”
He shoots me a dark look. “If I stay, we’re not going to talk.”
“I’m okay with that,” I whisper.
He gives a cheerless laugh. “Of course you are. I’m good enough to fuck, but that’s it, right?”
Irritation stabs through me, fast and sharp. “I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.” He gets to the doorway, swiping his keys and wallet off the dresser and turning to face me. The morning sunlight pouring in from the living room outlines his hewn, perfect form in hazy gold. “Here’s what I can’t figure out,” he says with a glare that raises the hairs along my arms. “How can you say you’re afraid of having your heart broken if you can’t even admit you have a heart at all?”
It’s a fair question, and it lands with a punch. I stagger backward a step and sit heavily on my bed, unable to meet his eyes.
And he leaves without another word. He leaves me naked and alone and searching for an answer to a question I should have asked myself the moment we met.
It’s the weekend, and since Jace is on my mini–task force of two, he has the weekend off as well. But he doesn’t call that night or the next day. He doesn’t text or stop by.
I don’t reach out either.
Instead, I catch up on work email and a few other cases I’ve had to shelve while I’ve focused on the burglaries. I go grocery shopping. I do a yoga class. I call my parents, who’ve retired in France, and we catch up on the last couple of weeks. They beg me to come out and stay a month. They drop hints about how much fun their little farmhouse and pond would be for children.
I usually dodge the hints easily enough, but this time, my voice catches when I say I haven’t been really dating anyone.
“Catherine?” Mom asks. “Is there someone?”
I don’t know how to answer that. “Sort of,” I hedge. “It’s complicated.”
“What isn’t?” Mom laughs. “I’ve been married to your father for forty-one years, and it’s still complicated. Is it another police officer?”
“It is.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
I sigh. “We fought yesterday.”
Mom takes a minute to reply to that, and when she does, she says, “You know, sometimes your father and I worry about how we raised you. The…impressions…we might have left, without meaning to, and I just worry that it’s made things harder for you now that you’re grown.”
“You’re going to have to be less vague,” I tell her, “because I don’t understand.” And I mean it. My parents were the ideal parents. One a judge, one a doctor. They doted on me, their only child, and while there were certain expectations of etiquette and demeanor required of me, I never doubted their love. Or their respect, once I reached adulthood.
“I’m afraid we’ve raised you to be, well, picky,” she says carefully.
“Oh, Mom.”
“We really did adore Frazer,” she forges on quickly, “but maybe your father and I didn’t tell you enough that we didn’t mind that he was, you know, poor.” She whispers this last word as if it’s not a word for polite company, and I lean my head against the doorway I’m standing in.
“Mom.”
“We’re so proud of what you do and that you do it for not very much money. It’s so honorable, and we would extend the same perception to any police officer you wanted to date.”
I’m suddenly and fiercely grateful I never told them about Kenneth, because I know with a deep, regretful certainty that dating Kenneth wouldn’t have required this conversation. They would have been overjoyed with Kenneth’s background and career in law, especially my retired judge of a father, and we never would have had this talk about them not minding someone I loved.
It’s both exasperating and sweet, I suppose, that Mom feels these things must be said to me now. Exasperating because, generally, when someone goes out of their way to tell you they don’t mind something, it’s indicative that they do mind, on some level. And sweet because I can tell she means well, in her own privileged way.
“That’s thoughtful of you,” I say because I’m truly not sure how to respond.
“I know,” Mom says with benign obliviousness. And then she adds, “And we just really, really want to have some grandchildren before we die!”
I manufacture an excuse to get off the phone very quickly after that, but her words find their mark. Not because her guilt finds any real home in me but because her words echo the fleeting, forbidden fantasies that have been chasing through my own mind. Feeling my belly swell with Jace’s baby. Watching his big, strong hands cradle our child. Seeing him play on the floor and roughhouse and carry our child on his shoulders.
