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Norma Bates let out a huff of cold December air as she slammed her vintage green Mercedes door shut. She paused for a moment, staring at the doors of the police department that lay straight ahead before shaking her head clear and walking up the path that felt oh-so-familiar. How many times since moving to White Pine Bay had she taken those exact same steps – sometimes in anger or fear – to get something she needed fixed resolved? To get Norman off the hook for yet another crime he may or may not have committed? Oh, Norman. He really was the cause for her always being here at the department; so much so that Regina the front desk receptionist barely glanced at her anymore before buzzing her in and directionally waving a hand towards the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff. Norma’s stomach did a little flip when she thought about Alex. The reason for her visit today wasn’t because of Norman, but because she needed to see her husband. Well, indirectly it had been about Norman. The previous evening she had mentioned to Alex that she was letting Norman come home from Pineview, and he had all but freaked out.
“Norma, you can’t let him come home. At least not now. It hasn’t even been two weeks! How is he supposed to get better if he’s not getting daily treatment and therapy?”
To which Norma had bristled at what she considered Alex pretending to know what was best for her son. He didn’t know the situation like she did. “I talked to Dr. Edwards on the phone. He said that Norman’s made huge progress. Anyways, he’ll still be on his meds, and we’ll make trips to Pineview at least twice a week for check-ups.”
“It’s not the same,” Alex had grumbled and switched the TV off, pressing the remote’s button a little too aggressively for Norma’s liking. When he stood to move past her, a look of slight yet apparent annoyance on his normally-indifferent face, she had snapped. Maybe she was on edge because one of the bottoms of a grocery bag had given out that afternoon on the three flights of stairs, leaving her chasing cans of tomato paste in eyesight of motel customers. Or maybe she was just overly-tired from not getting enough sleep the night before, the scene of what had happened the night Norman had been admitted to Pineview replaying over and over like a broken record player that, instead of playing something happy like Mr. Sandman, somehow instead showed her the image of her sweet baby boy pointing a gun at her.
To be honest, she wasn’t completely sure that she wanted Norman home all that much. Of course she missed him; she missed him with her whole being, which, as she had once said to him, was partly his since they were two halves of the same whole. Two pieces cut from the same fabric. He was her everything, her last light in a world that was so cruel, and she had never been away from him this long at once in his life. So she could only sympathize with him as he all but cried in her lap to let him come home when she had gone to visit him in the big, beautiful place with gleaming marble and cheery staff workers. It must’ve been so hard for him to be away from her, and she felt a slight guilty stab in her chest when she realized that she could not say that it was the exact same on her end.
It had been hard for her too, yes, but…but now Alex was in the picture. He was constantly there for her, her rock when she needed him most, and he had this incredible ability to make her feel calm. She didn’t know how he did it. At first she suspected it was because he was a cop, and having the law on her side for once was nice for a change. But then she realized that he was going out of his way to keep her and Norman safe, like when she had picked up the phone that one morning and he had the news that he had gotten Norman a spot in Pineview. There was no way he had done that legally, or at least not without pulling a few strings.
Or when he had met Jake Abernathy on the Bay’s dock in the middle of the night, shot him twice, and then proceeded to pitch his miserable body into the water. Sure it was his job to deal with scumbags like men involved in sex-trafficking, but he could have easily thrown him in prison for life. Looking back, Norma remembered the anger steeping in the sheriff’s eyes when he saw Zach Shelby’s dead corpse on her bed, and her gut told her that even back then, Romero would go to lengths to make sure she didn’t have a lingering threat hanging over her head. It was just too bad that he thought her own son was one of these threats. That made for an extremely touchy subject, and both Norma and Alex were too stubborn to admit that the other might have a point in their argument. One would think that after getting married they wouldn’t argue as much, and while they had been taken aback at how much they savored being together, Norma had too much emotional baggage to let anyone say anything even remotely bad about Norman, and Alex was always used to his intuition being right. It had to be, for his job.
Good god, Norma thought in near-disbelief as she headed towards the back of the building after receiving some curious looks from the people who were sitting in the waiting room. I’m freaking married. The marriage had been for a practical purpose – for Norman’s purpose – but the residents of White Pine Bay didn’t know that their marriage was technically a fraud. So she had to act like all was normal whenever she was around Alex in public or talked about him. She hoped her sudden realization of her relationship status hadn’t shown on her face because she needed the people in the department now to believe that she was here for her husband. Which, with a brown paper-bag in hand, she was.
She had felt a little sorry for snarling at him last night and wanted to show her apologetic state to him before the side of her that made her indifferent to others got its way. He had left very early that morning, as he usually did, but he had been up and out the door before she could make breakfast at 7:15. She hadn’t really been looking forward to having Alex come home and give her the cold shoulder and perhaps not eating her dinner, so she’d packed him a lunch – nothing big or fancy: just a sandwich and apple and water – and drove into town around twelve. This slight gesture ought to do it. If she knew one thing about Sheriff Romero, it was that it didn’t take too much for him to feel appreciated. It was the same way with her, too. Maybe they were more alike than she thought.
Pushing the door that bared a shiny plaque reading Sheriff A. Romero on it open, Norma glanced around the office. It wasn’t a tiny room, but it wasn’t that large either. There was one bookcase on each of the walls, save the wall on her left. Norma tripped over a box jam-packed with files, and the light that was able to make it through the closed blinds was just enough to let her see where she could grab onto the desk to catch her balance without disturbing its contents. He wasn’t in the room, so Norma frowned when she saw that his coat was hanging on a nearby coat rack and his computer was still on. If he wasn’t there, then where was he? She straightened herself and set the lunch on his desk. She was about to leave, but curiosity tugged on her.
Where was he? It wasn’t like he was supposed to be there just for her sake, but for some reason his absence irked her. She had come all this way to do something nice, and he had the nerve to not be present for it. She knew his lunch break was now and that he regularly worked through the beginning of it, finishing up some loose ends before breaking for the afternoon. Half temped to take the meal she’d prepped for his enjoyment back, Norma forced herself to resist the urge to stomp out of the police station. Usually she didn’t really mind making a scene if it was necessary, but she didn’t want anyone to think that she and Alex had had a fight just then, or, even worse, think Why did Romero marry that nut-case? He could have done so much better. Instead, she pulled out her phone to leave him a scathing message. After hitting send, she felt better in the sense that she’d let some left-over pent-up annoyance out, but she also felt a nagging sense that she probably shouldn’t have done that. But that was just like her: acting on impulse. Acting on a whim, in the moment, making decisions on the fly, had been one of her ways of making it this far. Of staying alive and sane when she lived with her ex-husbands. Anyways, she’d made the choice without much of a second thought to come see him in the first place, right?
A buzzing sound interrupted her thoughts, and the nosy part of her compelled her to investigate. She didn’t have to look far; Alex’s phone sat under two sheets of paper on his desk. Glancing quickly at the doorway, she looked down at her hand and saw her text beaming up at her, the bright light of his lock screen nearly blinding her in the process.
Her heart gave a little jump when she saw her name attached to the top of the message notification. It read “Norma Louise”, which made sense, since her name was indeed Norma Louise, but there was an additional emoji next to her name. It wasn’t the hotel emoji, though, but a simple red heart that suddenly didn’t seem so simple. She stared for a moment longer, stunned that her contact name was anything other than “Mrs. Bates”. She didn’t think he even knew what emojis were, much less use them. Formality was Alex’s native language. If someone had told her back when the whole Keith Summers incident was going down that Sheriff Romero’s love language was stoic, no-nonsense interactions, she would have agreed in a heartbeat. He hadn’t struck her as the sentimental kind.
Then something else caught her eye: The picture he had set as his screensaver. Her text blocked the faces of the photo, but it was obvious what it was. On the left, a man wore a black suit, leaning down over slightly into the smaller, shorter figure to his left. They wore a grey pea coat and maroon-colored scarf, the tips of their wavy blonde hair visible, showing the identity of the second person as a woman. It was a picture of her and Romero at the Lights of Winter Festival from just a couple days ago. Although she didn’t need to move her message away to confirm that it was the same picture from the newspaper, she did it anyways, swiping her thumb upwards on the screen to stare down at a smiling version of herself and Alex.
The picture made her sad that they were arguing. That when he read her text, he wouldn’t be thinking of her grinning and carefree. Of course he’d seen her moody and blunt and borderline rude plenty of times, ranging from when she’d asked him why he needed a motel room after his house burned down to the time she showed up at his doorstep at the crack of dawn, asking for him to use his position as sheriff to get Norman out of the county hospital.
The scathing text, though she was still annoyed at him, could have gone unsent, so she needed to get into his phone and delete it. Clearing the notification screen wasn’t going to suffice. Pressing the home button, Norma stifled a groan when she was prompted to enter a password. Of course he had a lock on his phone. What normal person didn’t? She had a hope that maybe the password was his birthday before realizing she had no clue when it was. A fleeting feeling of embarrassment overcame her, for what kind of wife didn’t know her own husband’s birthday? After the few more attempts to hack the device turned up futile, her fingers hovered over the blurred image of her and Alex as a wild idea wedged its way into the logical part of her head. What if the needed combination of numbers was her birthday? She let out a shaky breath after it was revealed that 0-4-0-2 was also incorrect, though she wasn’t so sure if the disappointment stemmed from the failed guess itself or if she had been secretly hoping that, in addition to the picture and contact name, she’d been on his mind just one other time. It truly was the greedy side in her, the part of her that measured love in material, fleeting instances and actions. And she hated herself for it.
“Norma?”
Norma nearly screamed as she whirled around, eyes wide enough to be labelled as comical, her breath coming out in short pants as she froze in place, staring up at the sheriff who was at fault for her presence in his own office.
“A-Alex!” she stammered, recovering her composure and trying to set the phone back down on the desk behind her back as stealthily as she could but utterly failing. He quirked a thick dark eyebrow at her.
Taking a step towards her, he suddenly appeared intimidating, all dressed up in his sheriff’s uniform with unwavering, questioning eyes. He gestured in the direction of the desk, and while he asked, “What are you doing here?” in a tone that could have been used to comment on the upcoming weather, Norma could tell that he was at least vaguely annoyed with her meddling with his privacy.
The blonde motel owner saw the loophole in his words and seized her opportunity to get out of being interrogated. Instead of interpreting his question as an inquiry of what business she had handing his belongings, she spun it as him wondering why she was there.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said with the same smart-ass attitude Alex had accused her of having back when Annika Johnson had died right in front of the motel. “Aren’t you supposed to be on break? I realized that you didn’t have food for lunch, so I brought you some.” Now it was her turn to point behind herself. “But,” she said with a shrug, “I guess if you don’t want me here I can take it back.”
“I was making copies in the back room.” He held up pages of paper for proof. “Don’t make this about me-”
Norma’s defenses were rapidly rising, and she couldn’t figure out why until the words were out of her mouth. “Well lately it seems like it is all about you! You don’t want Norman around, and it just feels like you would take matters into your own hands and keep him locked up if I wasn’t around to make sure he could come home. Which he should! He’s my son, and I hate seeing him so miserable.” During her spiel, Norma’s voice had risen, and it wasn’t lost on Alex that it was laced with anger and hurt. If Norma knew that she was trembling with her hurricane of mixed emotions, she gave no hint. As much as Alex wanted to match her frenzied attitude, he saw the vulnerable state she was in and tried his best to keep any trace of exasperation and agitation out of his tone.
“I know,” he said quietly. Norma’s head snapped up from her anxious pulling of a loose thread on her dress. That wasn’t the reaction she’d been expecting. Alex had been so adamant last night about how Norman was a threat to her safety – to which she’d defended her kid with equal stubbornness – that she thought their present, recurring conversation would take the same route as before.
“You understand?” she quipped, scared to even begin to hope that he was now starting to see why her side of the argument made sense.
To her disappointment, the sheriff shook his head, but he didn’t look annoyed. “Not completely, but I think that’s expected. I’m not a mother or a parent at all, which means I won’t ever know what it feels like to be in your place. You have a bond with Norman that’s stronger than anything, that makes you need him here with you, so if you want to let Norman come home, there’s not much I can do to stop you. But-” He reached out slowly to gently grasp her small palm in his. “I can make sure that you’re okay. Safe. Happy. I know this marriage is supposed to be fake, but I can’t stop caring about you. You make it impossible for me not to, not only because you deserve it, but because…” Norma thought she could hear his breath quicken from where she stood in front of him, or maybe it was hers as she anticipated his words. “…I love you.”
Now her heart was beating at a pace at which she couldn’t ignore. As she felt it hammer against her chest, any lasting elation from harshly scolding Alex that had momentarily filled her just a moment ago completely dissipated and regret for her rash decision claimed the vacant spot. He didn’t deserve to be the victim of her hot-tempered outbursts. He shouldn’t have to put up with her pushiness or clean up her messes from Norman. Hell, he didn’t have to be so easygoing with her when they were in the privacy of her – now more like their – house.
At the beginning of their marriage, she’d resisted the urge to acknowledge the reality of Alex’s sweet kisses and smiling eyes and warm touches being fashioned for her and her exclusively, all because none of her previous husbands had come even close to upholding their vows as Alex currently was. Norma knew she was slowly letting herself fall for the man who had been smitten with her for a while, and that was why she felt so terrible for treating him like he was always plotting against her and not for her. If she loved him, when was she going to trust him?
It’s the past trauma influencing me, she attempted to convince herself, though in the back of her mind, she had to acknowledge that she couldn’t blame her callousness towards Alex on her past for forever. At some point, it would just be her bare nature pushing him away. She didn’t want that. She wanted to love him without fear and for him to see that.
As Norma stared, paralyzed, into the gentlest gaze bestowed on her in a long time, she wanted to pull away as he started to rub his thumb in slow circles on her hand, unaccustomed with the motion. Then her heart skipped one of its frantic beats with the realization that this was the first time he’d told her that he loved her first. It almost knocked the wind out of her.
“Alex-” she all but whimpered, fighting the urge to tear up at his eagerness to protect her. “I left you a text message and was trying to delete it. Please don’t be mad.” It came out more like a beg for forgiveness than she would have liked, as if she was afraid he’d take back his last sentence after seeing what she’d left him, though she knew deep down that he wouldn’t.
A chuckle escaped his lips, tugging the corners of them upwards as he scanned her earlier words. Norma’s cheeks burned with embarrassment and fought with her want to be close to him. He probably thought she was a lunatic for taking the time to write what she did. “I didn’t know you have such a colorful vocabulary, Mrs. Romero.”
Physical contact won.
He sensed her desperate longing to be in his arms, and as she lay her head on his shoulder at an angle she hoped wouldn’t let the small amount of tears leaking out of her eyes leave a stain on the beige fabric, the landline telephone began to ring.
“Don’t answer it,” she murmured, grasping him tighter to make sure he obeyed her command. Feeling his mouth press against her hair when he kissed her head drowned all other senses out, including the obnoxious ringing until it abruptly cut short, replaced with a singular beep. The answering machine was taking a message.
“Hi, Romero. Deputy Lancaster here. I got my sister to set aside, like, six fruit trees at the nursery. I don’t know what kind they are, sorry. I’m sure Norma will like them. Oh, and no disrespect, but you gotta chill with the sappy married life talk.”
Alex was trying to reach behind Norma to shut the phone up. Picking the black receiver up before settling it back down in its cradle did nothing. He pressed a button, but that just happened to be the volume button that made the speaker’s voice louder.
“It’s always ‘Norma this’ or ‘Norma that’! Even Regina told the office that she’s sick of hearing about her, and Gina is the biggest roman-”
Finally Alex was able to end the call. It was his turn to flush red as Norma gaped at him, blue eyes blinking in astonishment.
“You had your deputy pull strings to get me trees?”
Her husband shifted from one foot to the other. “Uh…yeah. That was supposed to be a surprise,” he said sheepishly.
A warm, happy feeling spread through Norma’s core, and it resulted in yet another one of her smiles Alex found himself falling head over heels for, this one being a small, eager but shy and stunned one. Her fingertips traced his arm, absentmindedly admiring the muscles underneath and said, “I…I love you too, Alex.”
She thought briefly to the other times she’d told him that. The first time in her kitchen, abruptly because Chick had just stopped by with her window, and she had been terrified that Alex was going to leave her that night before she got the chance to tell him. The next time was in the heat of the moment as he kissed over and over, clouding her mind and stripping her down to her most vulnerable state. The last four times weren’t said out loud, but instead rested uneasily on the tip of her tongue, begging to be vocalized, only to have her fear of being hurt by another person she told she loved stop her. It was as if uttering those stupid three words into the air somehow created a physical being who told the men she said “I love you” to news that she was now at their mercy.
Alex didn’t – wouldn’t – abuse this news, though.
Decades of having the men in her life take advantage of her good heart made her give up on meaningful romance a long time ago, and then he’d pulled up in front of her motel that rainy first night in White Pine Bay and eventually gave her that same news, but from his point of view. They were rough and finicky with each other on the outside, but careful with each other’s hearts because they understood the damage that couldn’t be mended if there was a tear, couldn’t stand the idea of hurting the other person. Out of all 7 billion people in the world, they’d somehow found each other and then mutually made the silent agreement that they were willing to jump in head first into their fears if that’s what it took to have just one last shot at love.
When he beamed back down at her, she knew their fight was over. She replayed his earlier words in her head: Don’t make this about me, and understood that it really was all about her. He made everything about her because she was constantly on his mind. Her as his phone wallpaper was just one piece of evidence that he chose to have her on his mind and even more so, he liked it.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to leave so I can eat lunch and get back to work if I want a shot at coming home early,” he murmured before kissing her temple again.
And if she was honest with herself, she really liked it too.