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It was a slow day when Amy first met her.
She was coming back from a crime scene, and there was a young black woman loitering in front of the station, looking like she was waiting for someone. She was holding a small cat, scratching between its ears, and she looked so forlorn Amy couldn’t help but stop in front of her and ask, “Are you okay?”
The woman blinked, then smiled a little. “Yeah,” she said in a soft, pretty voice. “Thanks. I’m just waiting for my girlfriend. She sounded like she was stressed on the phone, so I thought I’d bring one of our pets here to cheer her up.”
“One of them?”
The woman giggled, and Amy very nearly blushed at the extreme cuteness of the sound. “Well, I kind of have a habit of feeding all the strays in the neighborhood. We get all kinds of cats and dogs, and some of them like to stay.”
So, slightly jealous of the fact that someone apparently got to date a literal Disney princess, Amy offered, “I could wait out here with you. I’m Detective Santiago, by the way.”
“Grace.” Grace shook the hand that Amy offered, shifting the cat and earning a soft huff from it. “And it’s completely fine. Me and Snickerdoodle here will be okay on our own. Thanks, though!”
Amy ignored the urge to ask her hand in marriage and went inside.
She passed Rosa on the way in, and didn’t think anything of it.
At least, until a few days later, when everyone was busy except for Rosa and Amy and, of course, Gina, who was playing on her phone and not paying attention to anything. So Amy was the only one who noticed when Grace stepped in, looking completely out of her element. Amy was about to get up when she noticed that Rosa was already at Grace’s side, murmuring quietly. Jake, noticing Amy’s distraction and eager for any excuse to not do his work, looked up. “Hey, who’s that with Rosa?”
That set off a chain reaction, and soon the team was crowding Grace, who gave them all a gentle smile and snuggled a small kitten to her chest, whose claws were digging into her sweatshirt. “Hello,” she murmured. “I’m Grace. It’s good to meet you all.”
She chatted easily with all of them until Holt came out and told them to get back to work. Amy saw her exchange a few more words with Rosa, even earning a bright smile. Which was startling, to say the very least.
When Rosa sat down, nearly half the team rolled their chairs over to her, but Jake was the one who actually asked the question: “So who was that, Rosa?”
The second she rolled her eyes, Amy connected the dots, and Rosa confirmed with two words. “My girlfriend. We met at a lesbian bar. I beat the shit out of some chicks that were trying to harass her out of the bathroom. It was love at first sight, or whatever.”
“Why were they harassing her?” (Amy didn’t mean to ask. She really didn’t. She just didn’t understand how anyone could harass a girl that seemed so sweet and perfect.)
Rosa just shrugged again and said, “She’s transgender. And if any one of you says a bad word to her, I will crush your skulls with my bare hands.”
(Grace visited a few more times after that. Amy watched them, trying to figure out how the scariest person she knew could date someone who was, by all appearances, the personification of sweetness and charm. The conclusion she eventually arrived at was that she had no idea, but it was probably because they saw something in each other she couldn’t.)