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It’s just past eleven o’clock, and the sky has turned to inky darkness outside. Somewhere else, it would be quiet now: maybe trees would rustle or crickets would chime, but here the night is alive with horns and sirens. There’s a bang as a car in the distance backfires, and the sound makes Rosa flinch and reach for her gun, her hand grasping at nothing before she remembers that she’s changed out of her policing clothes, her gun safely locked in her bedroom dresser.
She clenches her hands into fists, then forces them flat and stiff against her lap. A light breeze blows through the open window, and the curtains rustle in response. Rosa makes herself breathe in, once, twice, her jaw loosening until she can take the glass tumbler in front of her and pour its contents down her throat.
A child starts to cry outside. It’s too late for a kid to be out, she thinks, and she wants to ignore it, but the sound is grating, high and incessant. Rosa swings herself up off the couch and crosses quickly to the window; she’s about to slam it shut when she glances down to see the sobbing child being gathered up into a woman’s arms. The woman smoothes the girl’s hair down and leans against the car behind them, kissing the top of her daughter’s head. Rosa thinks she recognizes the pair from the apartment building across the street—they must’ve just gotten home from somewhere, she thinks; maybe the child is disoriented from being woken up suddenly, or she’s scared of something in the road, or there’s some other reason that Rosa can’t remember for why little girls break into tears.
For a minute the crying continues, and when it trickles to a stop, the air is strangely quiet in its absence. Rosa hears the mother speaking for the first time, the words blurred but the rhythm of her Spanish solid and comforting. The woman presses another kiss to her daughter’s hair and then looks both ways before crossing the street and disappearing into their building.
A blast of music blares from a car rolling down the street, and only then does Rosa realize that her hands are still resting on top of the open window and her eyes are glassy. She shoves the window shut, chest heaving, and kicks the coffee table as she turns her back to the city outside. She’s still wearing her combat boots; she doesn’t take her shoes off at home anymore, not since she got back from prison, just like she doesn’t keep her gun out in the open at night or sleep without waking up in cold sweat or spend longer than five minutes every morning in the shower.
She kicks the table again, and then again and again and again, and she hears a Spanish lullaby in her head, one she hasn’t thought of in years, and then her mother’s face is flashing through her mind and maybe we better put game night on hold for a little while and she kicks the table so hard that it crashes over, sending the whiskey bottle and empty glass spinning across the room and into the opposite wall where they splinter into shards.
The floor beneath her thumps indignantly— someone in the apartment below must’ve just thrown something at their ceiling to get her to shut up. Breath rattling, Rosa stands there and watches the dark amber from the bottle seep out and roll across the hardwood floor. The broken glass glitters strangely in the lamplight. She closes her eyes.
Once, when she was with Marcus, Charles arranged a date for them on her birthday. The whole evening, Charles had made her think that he was taking her to some surprise party, and she’d been startled by how much that hurt: that all of her friends really thought that sort of celebration was what she wanted. When she’d opened the door to the bar and saw it empty except for Marcus and learned that Charles had planned it all along, she’d felt some strange surge in her chest, a little jolt of something that came with being known.
It’s stupid to remember that now. Rosa can’t even recall the last time she’d thought about Marcus, and it’s not like she’d expected anything like that tonight. She’d considered taking the day off, but then she and her girlfriend broke up—something she hasn’t even been able to admit to the squad yet—and she’d decided that she didn’t want to just be at home all day, waiting by her phone for a message that never came.
When she got to work today, Charles was exhausted from some late night drama with Nikolaj, and Holt was at One Police Plaza for a sort of citywide Captains’ meeting. Amy and Jake were embroiled in a dramatic-sounding case they were working on, one whose details Terry got so excited about that he volunteered to go arrest the perp with them. They invited her to come too, but she made up some excuse about too much work because she didn’t know how she could articulate the bone-deep exhaustion she felt, how she wasn’t sure that she could even make it out of the building for lunch, much less trek across the whole precinct in tactical gear.
At six o’clock, she checked her phone again and saw nothing from her parents, and that was enough to get her up and onto her motorcycle, where she could go so fast that she couldn’t hear anything, not her friends laughing or the clink of handcuffs as perps were brought in or even her phone’s stubborn silence: just the wind shooting by her ears and the concrete roaring along beneath her.
She’d known not to expect anything like that night at the bar with Charles, known not to work herself up to wanting anything she wasn’t going to get. They’d all been so good about her coming out, so good about the game nights, and she knew there was a limit to how much she could have. She could have her dream job and great friends and in exchange there was her mother and her nightmares, the cold dampness of her cell etched into her body and the realization pulsing through her now that she’d somehow let her guard down, for once actually wanted a kind of human closeness, the feeling of being known, and that, today, it hadn’t come.
The table is overturned in front of her and the sharp scent of the whiskey soaks itself into the room. Rosa holds back a scream.
A minute later, or maybe ten, she really doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there with her eyes clenched shut and her heart hammering in her chest, her phone rings. She lets the call pass, measuring her breaths against the undulating chimes, and when it goes quiet again, she opens her eyes. A few seconds later, the phone pings with a notification for a voicemail.
No one leaves voicemails anymore, Rosa thinks, and maybe it’s the randomness of that that makes her dig her fingers into her back pocket and extract the phone. She opens the message without looking at the name and presses it against her ear.
Hey, Rosa. It’s Jake. Which you probably know from the contact info—if you’ve even saved my contact, which I hope you have…. Anyway, I realized I never said happy birthday to you today. I was just so caught up in the case and everyone else had stuff going on, and we should’ve done something, and I’m really sorry that we didn’t. I know it’s late now, but if you want to get drinks tomorrow night, or do something else, I’m up for whatever you want. So, yeah. Hope you’re having a good night.
Maybe it’s something about his tone, which is strangely serious for once. Maybe it’s the fact that he left a voicemail at all, when he could’ve just texted or even waited until he saw her tomorrow. Maybe it’s the fact that he said he’s up for whatever she wants. Rosa thumbs the call button before she can convince herself it’s a bad idea, and a second later, his voice is echoing into her ear.
“Rosa! You’re still up! Listen, I know I said it already, but I’m really sorry that I didn’t—”
“Jake.” Her voice is weirdly croaky, and it’s all she can do not to throw the phone across the room.
“Yeah?”
“Could you come over?”
She hears his breath hitch for a second. “I’m on my way.” There’s a quick muffled shout on his end that’s probably him saying something to Amy, and then heavy footfalls and the sound of a door slamming. He’d stay on the line the whole drive over, if she asked, but if Rosa grips the phone any tighter than she already is she’d probably crush it, so she makes herself press the End Call button and then lets the phone hang down limply by her side.
When the buzzer sounds, she unfreezes enough to let him into the building, and then she goes and stands by the door. After a minute there’s a tentative knock, and she doesn’t even have the dignity to pretend she hasn’t been waiting; she just opens the door.
Jake’s in an old T-shirt and sweatpants, ones that Rosa vaguely recognizes from the Academy. There’s something like relief in his eyes when he sees her, as if he didn’t really think she’d be there. “Hey,” he says, his voice quieter than normal.
Rosa turns on her heel and walks into the apartment, but the second she looks around her, she realizes that the coffee table is still on its side and there’s still shattered glass and spilled whiskey on the floor. She freezes and she feels Jake come to a stop behind her.
He exhales. “Cool cool cool, okay, uh, yeah, had a bit of a party?”
She feels ashamed suddenly and doesn’t have a witty retort or even an angry one. She just looks around at the chaos of the room, light glinting from scattered shards, her boot-prints on the table, and all she can smell is the alcohol and only a split second has passed since Jake tried to make a joke, but she abruptly just has no strength left at all. Her head drops forwards, hair curtaining her face, and her chest is tight enough that her breath shudders to a stop.
“Rosa?” Jake takes a step closer and after a second she feels his palm on her shoulder. She glares at the floor, lungs aching.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m here, okay? You’re okay. You’re gonna be fine. Just—hey, breathe, okay? C’mere.” He guides her to the nearest wall and with her back against it she slides down until she’s sitting, her knees bunched up in front of her. Jake is next to her, and he takes her hand. Her whole body is trembling.
His voice is a little higher than normal when he says, “Rosa, I need you to breathe. Just, with me, okay? Follow my breaths.” He inhales exaggeratedly and waits until she lets in a tiny, sharp bit of breath, and then he exhales and she forces air back out, and it’s a little easier the next time and the next. “You’re doing great,” he tells her, squeezing her hand. “Just like that, okay?”
She nods, and all of a sudden a silent sob erupts out of her, her shoulders contracting and eyes clamping shut. Another sob comes, she’s shaking back and forth with tears spilling down her face, completely noiseless, and Jake grabs her around the shoulders and pulls her into him.
Rosa doesn’t normally touch people like this; the only time she can even remember hugging Jake is when they both got onto the task force—and look how that turned out. But now he’s holding her against him and whispering “I’ve got you, let it out,” and it turns out that that’s what it takes.
She releases a ragged gasp, sobbing into his shoulder. It’s loud now, she couldn’t control it even if she wanted to, and part of her is still afraid that he’ll leave, but he just holds her tighter. She cries until she’s limp against him, her throat sore from it all and face slick with sweat and tears. Even after her crying stops, though, Jake doesn’t let her go. He rests his chin on top of her head and hugs her until she’s not even trembling anymore, until her breathing has soothed to something near normal and his T-shirt is damp where her face has been pressed.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, muffled against him.
“Don’t,” he says.
She’s quiet for a minute, and then: “This isn’t how I want you to see me.”
“How I see you hasn’t changed,” he says. “You’re always gonna be tough and scary and one of the best detectives I know, okay? You’re Rosa.” He waits for her to answer and then continues. “There isn’t anything you could do that would make me love you less, you know. You’re, like, my best friend.”
That’s almost enough to start her crying again, so she just mutters, “Don’t let Charles hear you say that.”
“Yeah no,” he says. “I mean, can you imagine?”
Rosa turns her head so that the side of her face is against his chest now, a little more open. After a moment, Jake says, “Do you want to talk?”
She comes so close to saying no. She always says no. She wants to at least tuck her face back into his shoulder, but she forces herself to stay where she is. She opens her mouth. “It’s stupid.”
“I mean, is it stupider than when I cried about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being taken off Netflix last year?”
Rosa snorts. “Nothing could be.”
“Hey, it was a very legitimate reason to be sad!”
She curls her fingers into her palms. Maybe this isn’t as hard as she thought. “My parents didn’t call today.”
“Rosa…”
“And I knew my mom wouldn’t, but I guess I’d thought my dad might. Which is just, I shouldn’t have thought that, but I’d… I’d hoped.”
“They don’t deserve you,” Jake says fiercely.
“And just at work today, I couldn’t really think about anything else, and you all have, I don’t know, everyone’s done so much for me. And I just—I was looking around and you all… you all have lives. Really good lives. And Jake, I don’t know how you’re so unaffected but sometimes it feels like I’m still there. In prison. And I don’t know how to leave it behind me. We’ve been out for months and I still dream about it every night, I dream about getting beaten up and getting threatened and walking down the hallway knowing that some of them had legitimate reasons to hate me. I thought I could handle it, I know I should be fine by now, but I—I don’t know how to not think about it. I don’t know why I’m still scared.”
“Rosa, did you see me when we got back?” Jake asks. “I couldn’t make a single arrest. I was at desk duty for weeks.”
“But you’re not—” Rosa makes a slack gesture at herself.
“Because I talked about it,” he says. “With Amy and with Charles. And I cried about it too. A lot.” She’s quiet for a moment, and he keeps talking. It’s easier, with his chin hovering on the crown of her head, where they can’t see each other’s faces. “And look, I know you had Holt and the Sarge come visit you, but I don’t know who else did. And it’s just—everyone thinks of you as so unflappable. Charles and Amy were so devoted to figuring out how to get us out of there, I think they probably forgot that you needed people while you were in there too.”
“I could’ve—”
“Amy’s told me that she regrets it, you know. She said that in the beginning she was worried you wouldn’t want to see her, like you’d think that she hadn’t done enough to keep you from being in there.”
“I would never—” Rosa starts, her voice rough.
“I know! She knows too, I think.” He pauses for a second and sounds a little more tentative when he continues. “She said that she wanted to see you later, after the first few weeks, but that they said you weren’t allowed to have visitors?”
“I was in solitary.”
“Wait, seriously? No, duh, obviously you’re serious, sorry. How long?”
“From the fourth week on.” Jake makes a strangled noise above her. “I had a few… altercations. News got around pretty fast that I was a cop. There were a few people there that I’d put away. They’d come at me sometimes, in the yard or in the bathroom. I didn’t even want to report some of them, the ones I knew weren’t in there for that bad stuff, because I didn’t want any of them to have more time added or get transferred somewhere worse, you know? I mean, god, I hated it in there. I know it’s our job to put people there, but…”
“I know,” Jake says.
“So we’d fight and I’d beat up a few of them, and once or twice I got pretty beat up, and eventually the guards noticed. And they put me in solitary for my own protection.”
“That sounds…”
“It wasn’t bad, at first. But after weeks of being there…”
“I can’t even imagine, Rosa.”
Rosa shrugs a little. “I mean, I’m out now, it’s not like—”
“Just because you’re not there anymore doesn’t mean it can’t affect you,” Jake says firmly.
Something snags in Rosa’s throat. “Yeah,” she whispers. “I guess so.”
Jake rubs his thumb against her arm. “You know we’d do anything for you, right? I mean, more than game night. You can always ask any of us for— whatever you want. You know that, right?”
Rosa doesn’t answer for a minute. She thinks about Charles planning the surprise date and how he did everything he could to keep her secret after she came out to him. She thinks about Amy agreeing to organize her wedding to Pimento in 14 hours only to realize before even Rosa did that she didn’t really want to marry him. She thinks about Terry, and his steadfast leadership, how he didn’t even blink when he learned she was bi; and about Gina, how in another universe they could’ve been a couple, how out of all of them sometimes it’s Gina who can make her laugh the most. She thinks about Holt’s words to her at the very first game night and them crying together in his office after her break-up, about how he convinced her to stay for the trial and how he might be the most similar to her out of anyone she’s ever met.
And she thinks about Jake. About 1,000 push-ups, his decision to step out of running for the task force, his being there when she talked to her parents, how he started the squad game nights. How he came tonight when she didn’t give him any reason to. How he’s still here.
“I know,” she says.
After a while, Rosa’s thirsty and she’s pretty sure Jake’s arm is numb even though he’s doing his best to pretend it’s not, so she pushes herself off of him and makes her way to her feet. She reaches down to help him up too, pretending not to notice that his eyes are swollen and red as he gives her a small smile. She returns it without thinking and goes to the kitchen to fill two glasses of water for them. When she comes back to the living room, the table is upright again and Jake has somehow found her broom and swept all the glass up into a pile. She hands him his water and gets a bag to dispose of the glass in; Jake uses a paper towel to mop up the whiskey.
When that’s all done, Rosa nods sharply. “Thanks, man.”
“You should be impressed I knew how to sweep that up, I don’t think I’ve ever even used a broom.”
“That’s horrifying,” she says. “But— I mean— thanks for everything.”
He grins again. “That’s what friends are for.”
“Right.” She clears her throat. “I know it’s late, so you should get home and get some sleep.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course.”
“But, you know.” She swallows. “If you want to sleep here, you can.”
His eyes widen a little. He probably doesn’t think anyone from the precinct has ever slept over here, saving maybe Pimento. He’s right. “That would be— yeah, that would be great… You sure you’re okay with that? I mean, I really don’t mind going, I don’t want to be too much.”
“You’re not,” she says shortly. “The guest bedroom’s that way. I’ll give you a toothbrush.”
“Cool cool cool. Sleeping at Rosa’s.” Jake follows her down the hallway, babbling about all the weapons he’s expecting to find hidden under his bed. She gets him a toothbrush and some toothpaste and finds a sweatshirt for him that she’s pretty sure is actually his.
“I leave at seven,” she tells him, “if you want to ride with me.”
“Cool cool cool, going to work with Rosa!”
She rolls her eyes. “Goodnight, Jake.”
“‘Night, Rosa!”
She turns towards her bedroom, and just as she’s going through the doorway Jake says, “I love you!”
She looks back at him over her shoulder. She’s only said that to a handful of people before, but out of all of them, she’s pretty sure he deserves it the most. “I love you too.”