672. Chapter 672

She was raised not to trust the police.

How could she? They killed people who looked like her, didn’t they?

But she didn’t know where else to go. Didn’t know what else to do.

And she’d gotten the card – from that boy with the dyed green hair and soft eyes and silver earring, that one time she’d been brave enough to go to the LGBTQ+ Center in town – of a detective that the boy promised would be good to her, would help her.

She hadn’t told him anything was wrong.

He just kind of looked at her, and offered her some water and a place to crash if she needed it.

She declined – her girlfriend would be so damn angry if she didn’t come home on time – and that’s when he gave her the card.

Detective Maggie Sawyer, it said.

So she was raised not to trust the police, but the boy who gave her the card was brown, like her, maybe even bi, like her.

Her stomach rolled around even more than it had last night when her partner had gotten… disappointed in her. Again.

The fights – were they fights, really, if she was the one taking all the blows? mostly emotionally, but sometimes, like last night, physically too? – almost never started about her being bi.

But they always, somehow, wound up there.

Wound up with her being a slut, with her not knowing what she wants. With her needing to just call it one way or another, with her making her girlfriend constantly feel insecure, and doesn’t she care about her, doesn’t she want to make her feel good, doesn’t she want to make her happy, not make her worry all the time, make her stressed all the time, make her angry like this all the time?

Her nerves – terror, really, is a more accurate way to describe it – makes her feet want to pace in front of the precinct, Detective Maggie Sawyer’s business card in her hands, until she works up the courage to walk in.

But she worries that she’ll get in trouble, somehow. If they think she’s being suspicious, somehow. For existing, for feeling, or whatever.

So she holds her breath and she remember the eyes of that boy with the silver earring, and she makes herself march into the precinct.

She stands, awkward and still and wide-eyed, because no one pays attention to her. There’s a quiet buzzing, and she can’t tell if it’s in her head or just the way the old central air functions in this place.

She thinks about clearing her throat, or saying excuse me, but her throat isn’t working.

She thinks about leaving.

Running away.

Running back to her girlfriend.

No.

“Can I help you?” a man at the front desk finally asks, not much older than her. He barely looks at her, and it at once makes it more and less intimidating: more, because how will she ever get him to take her seriously, but less, because at least he’s not looking at her like she’s going to cause any trouble.

“I… yeah – no – yeah, I…” She shakes her head and clears her throat and holds up the business card like she’s offering up a prayer. Because, really, she is.

“I’m looking for Detective Maggie Sawyer,” she manages, and he barely glances at the card before her smiles lightly.

“One of her strays, huh?” he asks, and his words are distant, but his eyes, now, seem more focused, more kind.

She just shrugs, because what does that even mean?

He chuckles softly. “She’ll take good care of you. Come on, kid, I’ll take you back to her desk.”

She nods silently, follows him silently. “You’re lucky she’s actually here today. Usually out in the field, that one,” he says before stopping in front of the somehow precisely messy desk of a woman with long, dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail, glasses on the bridge of her nose, leaning with a frown and a pen in her mouth into a file on her computer.

“Sawyer,” the officer says, stopping short of clapping her on the shoulder, as though it’s his instinct to do so, but he knows better. “Kid here for you.”

“Adrian?” the woman asks without moving her eyes from the screen, holding up her index finger to tell him to wait a moment.

“No, a newbie.”

That takes the woman out of her seeming trance, and she turns immediately, taking the pen out of her mouth and the glasses off her face as she does so.

“A boy at the Center gave me your card,” the girl rushes to explain, as the officer just nods and slips back to his desk. She doesn’t say what center. She hopes she doesn’t have to.

The detective tilts her head and smiles softly, clearing some papers off a chair at the side of her desk without taking her eyes off the girl’s face. She gestures for her to sit before holding out a hand.

“My name’s Maggie,” she tells her, and the woman’s intense focus, the way the other officer had treated her, makes the introduction not at all what she’d expected. “What’s yours?” She leans forward with her elbows on her knees, her head still tilted, her eyes still soft, her lips still smiling slightly.

“Jacqueline. Uh, Jacqui.”

Maggie hadn’t stood on the formality of a last name, so Jacqui doesn’t, either.

“Jacqui. And what brings you here today, kiddo?”

Jacqui gulps. She’d practiced what to say.

She had no idea what to say.

Her eyes flood, instead. Her eyes find the ground, instead.

She feels Maggie’s eyes sweeping her body, carefully. She wonders vaguely what it might be like, to be a detective. To be able to tell so much about a person, about a room, by… looking.

She wonders if she would have gotten with her girlfriend if she’d known everything a detective could… well, detect.

“Something easier, then,” Maggie says, her voice soft, her eyes softer. “You hungry?”

Jacqui looks up with a wrinkle in her brow. “I…”

“I am,” Maggie offers, and the interruption doesn’t make Jacqui feel slighted. It makes her, instead, feel held, and she wonders how Maggie learned to do that.

“My fiancee’s bringing me lunch in a while. She’s amazing at pretty much everything, but she nearly burns down the kitchen at every opportunity. So it’s takeout. Should I ask her to bring you something, too?”

Jacqui’s eyes widen, and her heart thumps louder than normal, harder than normal.

“Okay,” she whispers, and Maggie smiles and picks up her phone, holding up her index finger again. To call her fiancee. A woman. A woman who, when she picks up her phone, makes Maggie’s eyes glisten. It gives Jacqui the chance to sink into her chair, to get acclimated to sitting her. To prepare what she wants to say. How she wants to explain.

“Hey babe. Yeah. You? Aww, good, sweetie. Listen, hey, do you mind bringing over an extra bit of pizza? Yeah. Thanks so much. I love you, too.”

There’s a beat of silence as Maggie clicks off the phone, and in that beat, Jacqui finds words.

And once they start, they don’t stop.

“I keep disappointing my girlfriend. Things are really hard for her right now; she’s working full time and she has night school, and I’m only working part time, but sometimes I still don’t have time to do everything she asks, and then also I have this friend, and he’s a guy, and we’ve been best friends since middle school, but she doesn’t want me to spend time with him because I’m bi, and I should be less touchy with him, and I should just pull back because it makes her insecure, right, and why would I want to make her feel like I don’t want her? So it makes her angry, because I keep disappointing her, I keep letting her down, and that’s pretty much all the time, except sometimes it’s really great, like we have the best times together, too, we went on vacation last month and it was amazing, and she loves me so much, she just is afraid of losing me, but last night, she…”

Jacqui stumbles to a halt; slams, more like, feeling like she’s talked her way into a brick wall.

A brick wall with insults on its tongue and cold, solid hands on her cheek.

This whole time, Maggie hasn’t moved. Her facial expression hasn’t changed, and her body hasn’t flinched. If Jacqui were looking at Maggie’s hands, she would see a slight clenching of her right fist. But she’s not looking, because her eyes are blurry, so she only sees Maggie’s stillness, her calmness.

The slight tilt of her head and the sheer warmth in her eyes.

“She?” Maggie prompts, and it’s soft and it’s not judgmental and it’s not calling her stupid for not having left earlier and it’s not calling her anti-feminist for loving her and it’s not calling her fake for being bi and it’s not calling her a bad girlfriend for, sometimes, trying to assert herself.

“I’m wearing a lot of makeup,” Jacqui says finally, and it almost cracks her voice as her eyes flood with shame and she feels like all the eyes of the precinct, of the entire world, are on her. All the fingers, pointing. All the mouths, frowning.

Or, more accurately, yelling.

But she forces her eyes up – up to Maggie’s eyes – and she’s nodding softly, silently.

“Do you know that none of this is your fault?” she asks after a long, long silence, and Jacqui tries to nod, tries to shake her head, and winds up shrugging, and swallowing a sob.

Maggie’s palm hovers over one of Jacqui’s hands, and Jacqui stares down at it like it’s foreign.

She can’t remember the last time someone asked permission to touch her.

She nods, and warmth courses through her at Maggie’s touch.

“It’s okay that you don’t know. But I know it enough for both of us, for now. None of this is your fault. You haven’t done anything wrong. If someone is insecure about you being bi, they need to get over their insecurities and biphobia, not shove them all into you. And I know you love her, and that’s okay. We usually love the people who hurt us most. But that love doesn’t give her the right to hurt you. With her words or with her hands, or with anything. You don’t deserve any of that abuse. Do you know those things?”

Again, Jacqui shakes her head, then nods, then shrugs.

“You’re not by yourself now, okay? I’m going to help you figure out how to make yourself safe. But the first thing you need to do for me is be at least a little bit proud of yourself for coming in and telling me these things, okay? Can you try to do that for me?”

Jacqui nods, this time. It’s slow and it’s hesitant, but it’s a definite nod.

Because maybe – just maybe – she can try it for Maggie.

And for herself.