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“But I wasn’t driving!” the man protested, being brought to his feet.
“Yeah,” Officer Chen said, cuffing his hands behind his back. “But being drunk in public is still a crime.”
“But it’s not like I was even doing anything, I was just asleep!”
“Yeah, for two hours!” the bookstore barista exclaimed from behind Lucy. “I would’ve called an ambulance if he wasn’t snoring the entire time.”
“Thank you, ma’am, we’ll take it from here,” Tim said, grabbing onto the drunk guy’s other elbow and looking over Lucy’s head at the other side of the bookstore cafe.
“What?” Lucy asked, pausing her walk to follow his gaze. She found a table of young adults all whispering to each other and pointing at the two of them. Lucy gave them a small wave before turning her attention back to Tim.
“Wonder what that was about,” he mused, pulling out his radio to call in their arrest.
After sticking their guy in the backseat, Lucy made her way to the passenger seat of their shop when she was stopped by two young women she recognized from inside.
“Hi!” the blonde girl chirped, looking over the patrol car at Tim, then back to Lucy. “Um, are you Officer Bradford and Officer Chen?”
“Actually, he’s a sergeant now, but yes, that’s us! Can we help you ladies with something?”
The girls looked at each other before they both released high-pitched squeals. Finally, the other girl cried, “From the Corey Harris true crime documentary!”
Lucy beamed and looked back at Tim just long enough to see him roll his eyes more dramatically than she’d ever seen. She looked back at the girls. “Yes! Yes, good eye!”
“Oh my god, oh my GOD!” the first girl exclaimed. “My friends and I love true crime, but it is a severely ship deprived genre! Do you think we could get a picture with you?”
“I’m sorry… ‘ship’?” Lucy heard Tim repeat behind her and she froze, knowing exactly where this was going after too much time spent with a teenager.
“Yeah! You know, like ‘ relationship’! You guys are a thing, right?”
“What?” Lucy croaked.
“Come on, everyone saw the way you two were acting in the documentary, you have to be a thing!”
“Oh, my god, Marcy,” the other girl whispered, looking at her friend like she’d just discovered the cure for cancer.
The first girl, now identified as Marcy, made eye contact and seemed to receive whatever telepathic message she’d been sent because her eyes were now as big as golf balls. “Oh, my god, it’s a secret! Is it a secret? We won’t tell anyone, who would we even tell? We don’t know any cops!”
“No,” Tim replied tersely. “Chen, let’s go.”
“It was really lovely to meet you!” Lucy chirped, running past the girls into the passenger seat.
“Wait! But what about our-” Lucy assumed the girls were going to ask about taking pictures again, but Tim peeled off the moment Lucy’s car door was shut.
The drive back to the station was quiet for the first couple of minutes, the only sound being the snoring of the drunk guy in the backseat who’d fallen back asleep.
“So,” Lucy said, breaking the silence. “Those girls were nice. Little invasive, but ....”
She looked over at Tim for a reply, but his only response was staring out the window and grinding his teeth to dust with an unreadable look in his eyes.
She looked back out the window. “Okay….” Silence, it is.
Lucy expected the awkwardness to wear off over time and it did, but not as much as she’d hoped. She’d gotten a few short answers and even a couple of smiles out of him, but when she ventured too far into banter territory, he’d shut down and look back to the road. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t them.
It wasn’t until she’d ticketed a jaywalker and came back to find Tim leaning against the side of the shop, eyes glued to his phone, that she had to address his behavior.
“Never thought I’d see the day when Sergeant Bradford was on his phone during a stop,” she commented, about to pass him on her way to her seat.
“I trust you,” he replied, holding his screen up to her eye level. “Did you know that documentary got almost three and a half million views? Million!”
If Tim hadn’t been acting so oddly, Lucy might have appreciated the widespread attention. “Okay?”
“And look,” he said, quickly swiping to a different tab. “The director posted a trailer for the documentary the day he released it, and look at the comments.” As she took his phone to scroll, he added, “We weren’t even in that trailer!”
Lucy scrolled through a patch of comments out of hundreds, none about Nolan or Jackson, and only a few of them were actually about Corey Harris. There were a few comments about Angela that Lucy couldn’t dignify by fully reading, but the overwhelming majority were about the only officers interviewed as a pair: herself and Tim.
“Did y’all see the chemistry between Bradford and Chen?”
“Are Chen and Bradford married in real life? They seem like it.”
“I could watch a whole series of those two officers bickering at each other. The married energy is real!”
“Could you make another doc about a case Lucy and Tim covered? I’d love to see more of them!”
“I wish Detective Lopez would-”
Skip!
“Why aren’t Bradford and Chen in your trailer? They stole the whole show!”
“The way he looks at her…”
Each comment made Lucy’s cheeks grow hotter, but she hoped that Tim couldn’t see it. She’d need to look cool and collected if she was going to diffuse the understandable awkwardness.
She shrugged, handing him his phone back. “The doc came out months ago, Tim, these comments are all old. Plus, since when do you care what the internet says anyway?”
“This isn’t just the internet, Chen, this is people around the world thinking we’re… whatever!”
Lucy tried not to let the word “whatever” ring in her head on repeat. “You’re acting like we’re in elementary school,” she declared with a short laugh. “What, are you scared that people are gonna combine our names and make a hashtag or something?”
“This isn’t a joke!” he said, his voice suddenly harsher than she thought was warranted. “Three million strangers, odds are, a lot of people at the station saw it. And if they think the same thing-”
She cut him off, matching his tone. “You have never cared what people at the station thought of you! How is this suddenly so different?”
“Well, excuse me if I don’t feel comfortable with people thinking I’m with you!”
Lucy hoped her face didn’t betray the way her heart shattered at his words. At least, not before she made a conscious effort to pull her face into professionalism, giving him a quick nod. “Gotcha.” She marched over to the passenger seat and buckled in, refusing to look him in the eye all the way back to the station.
Usually, in a situation like this, Lucy would have been somewhere Tim knew to find her, knowing he was in a similarly planned place as they each waited for the other’s pride to crack. This evening, however, Lucy was in a random interrogation room, doing paperwork in the interviewer chair.
The door creaked open and Lucy reached to gather her papers, expecting to see an officer or two and a suspect awaiting their lawyer, but she readjusted to her original position at the sight of Tim in the doorway.
Her heart pounded at the sound of his footsteps approaching the suspect chair, the distraction of work fading from her mind. Lucy didn’t bother lying to herself about why his words stung her so badly; she’d known for months how she felt about him. She didn’t dare entertain the possibility that he felt the same way, but she’d hoped maybe one day, she could get him there. She knew he treated her differently than other coworkers, and dammit, those comments she’d read didn’t exactly suck for her, especially the last one she’d read. She had no idea how she looked at him, but there were moments she’d catch him looking at her that made her think that, beyond professional boundaries, maybe he thought she was cute. Maybe even beautiful. But now, as his eyes scanned her face, with no idea he’d wronged her, she realized just how stupid she’d been to even hope.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he stated.
She looked back to her paper and continued to write neatly. “Well, you found me.”
“In an interrogation room? At the back of the station?”
“It’s quiet. Or it was.”
He gave a short chuckle, which made her want to scream.
“Can I at least help you with some of this?” he asked, reaching for a blank form, but she placed a hand on it to keep it where it was.
“Hm, nope! It’s the aide’s job to do the paperwork, so I’m doing the paperwork because I’m the aide. Or the go-fer, depending on the day.” She looked up at his face, now flooded with confusion. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Sergeant Bradford?”
His eyes narrowed as he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You know, if you’re gonna do this reverse rank pulling, you probably shouldn’t be actively avoiding your supervisor.”
It briefly crossed her mind that, typically, after saying something like that, he’d end the conversation first and storm off. But he was still seated, and underneath the annoyance in his features, she could still see his concern and a plea for her to just talk to him.
She gave a dry laugh. “Most girls don’t like guys voicing their aversion toward them.”
“‘ Aversion’, what-” She looked back down at her papers and continued writing as the wheels spun in his head. “Wait, you’re mad at me for what I said earlier?”
She didn’t answer, biting her lip to keep it from trembling. This was why she didn’t want to face him, couldn’t risk saying too much. Best case scenario, he’d act like she was being unreasonable, and she couldn’t handle being discredited about this. Worst case, he’d start analyzing her reaction and come to some truths she wasn’t yet ready to defend.
“Lucy,” he said softly, stilling her writing for the briefest moment. “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“I know,” she replied. That’s the problem.
“Lucy.” His tone was firm this time, and Lucy could’ve sworn he knew what calling her by her first name did to her. “Do you know what it could be like for you if rumors about us got any real footing?”
“I do.”
“So then why are you mad that I don’t want anyone making any insinuations about us?”
“God, do you hear how you sound? People are going to start rumors, but you don’t have to sound so… ashamed about it, it’s pretty insulting.”
“‘Ashamed?’” he echoed as if the word had personally wronged him. “You think I’d be ashamed to be with you?”
“Or have people think you are, I… I don’t know.” Her words were reduced to mumbles as she lost confidence.
“If you’re being looked at for a job and cops higher up than me find out I was your training officer, they’ll think you slept your way through your career.”
Lucy scoffed and muttered, “Clearly that’s not the only reason.”
“ YES! The only reason-” He cut himself off, realizing what he’d just said at the same time she did. Slowly, she looked up from her papers and laid her pen on the table. “I-...”
“Tim?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even. “‘The only reason’ what?”
He took a deep breath and looked at his hands. “If higher-ups see that documentary and make the same assumptions, you could be stuck at P3 level for the rest of your career and you know you’re too good for that.”
Lucy wanted to scream that the documentary was the least of her worries for the time being. “And if that wasn’t a factor?”
“If what wasn’t?”
“The documentary, higher-ups, rumors, ranks, Mid-Wilshire, all of it. Then what?”
He looked up at her, fear and invitation in his eyes. “Then… I’d see if you wanted to get dinner. Or lunch. Or… a coffee even, but you always say that’s a tacky first date.”
Lucy had thought she was all out of blushes for the day, but she was proven wrong. “That sounds nice.”
He gave a sad smile, clearly giving up on getting back on topic. “If it weren’t for any of that, I’d never be ashamed to be seen with you. I’d be proud.”
It felt like she walked a mile around the table to get closer to him, feeling his eyes on her the whole time, but eventually, she made it to his side.
He turned his chair to look up at her, and he shook his head, reading whatever look was in her eyes. “Lucy… we can’t.”
“Why not?” she asked, crossing her arms.
He stood, crowding her space and mirroring her stubborn posture. “I just explained to you why not.”
She rolled her eyes. “Tim, I am a grown woman. I know the risks, but I can make my own decisions. I can figure it out.”
“Last I checked, this is a two-way decision. And no matter how badly I want you, I’m not going to ruin all your hard work and your reputation.”
Despite the words “how badly I want you” ringing in her head on a loop, Lucy forced herself to focus. “So what?” she asked, her voice softening. “You’re gonna let public opinion decide how you live your life? How I live mine?”
He squinted, and Lucy hoped he was realizing how unfair that was of him. “If the roles were reversed, you would have the same concern for me.”
“Yeah, and if the roles were reversed, me refusing you over this would be pissing you off too!”
The corners of his mouth turned up, and Lucy fought like hell to retain her serious expression. “You’re relentless.”
She took a small step toward him, her body now an inch away from his, and brought a hand up to tug on his uniform collar, trying not to react to the way his breath hitched at her touch. “I’m gonna try something,” she spoke lowly, raising to her toes. “And if you want me to stop after, I will, and we never have to bring this up again. If you don’t, we figure it out. Deal?”
The war he was having with himself was written all over his face, but finally, he exhaled and closed his eyes. Lucy pushed herself up the rest of the way and pressed her lips to his, feeling the weight of almost two years lifted from her shoulders. Though his lips moved against hers, she didn’t deepen the kiss or increase the passion, just prayed the taste of her alone would be enough for him to want more.
Finally, she broke from him, feeling his breath on her face as she moved back. She was tempted to keep her eyes closed a little longer to avoid confronting the possibility that her kiss wasn’t enough, but when she opened her eyes, she saw that look was back on his face. That look outside Nevin’s, the look in the parking garage after she read his final evaluation. The way he looked at her at Angela’s attempted wedding and that night in his living room. And she knew he didn’t want her to stop.
He didn’t wait to close the gap between them again, bringing one hand to rest on her hip and the other up to her cheek, planting a kiss that was both soft and urgent. She moved both hands to the back of his neck, pulling him as close as she could, while he wrapped his arm around her waist in a way that felt like both a lover’s embrace and a hug from a friend after too long spent apart. Like he’d somehow missed her, even though she’d been there the whole time.
It was him that broke apart that time, and she chased his lips with hers despite being out of breath herself. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, leaning his forehead against hers with closed eyes and a smile. “So what now?”
Lucy almost laughed at his nerve to ask her to form complex thought at that moment. “Now, I think we have some different paperwork to fill out.”
He gave her another kiss, a small laugh against her lips before pulling apart again. “And then after that?”
“I believe you said something about dinner?”
He chuckled again, confusing Lucy. “What?” she asked, running a hand over his shoulder.
He pulled his head back to look her in the eyes. “I think I have a new appreciation for true crime now.”
Lucy rolled her eyes, but knew she couldn’t disagree.