Roomies

Angela’s Secret We’d all been living together for about a year, and again, this was back up in San Francisco in the late '80s. Michelle was on loan to the FBI and down in the LA area, and Jamie was visiting family up in NorCal. The only reason Angela didn’t go with her was because of work, of course. That’s the only negative to being with those in law enforcement: their schedules are pretty unpredictable a lot of the time, and they can’t just take time off the way most people can. When they do, they often have to cut things short. So Angie and I were both working—she on the usual cases, and I as a part-time police sketch artist among the few other odd jobs the department had me doing. How I came to be a sketch artist was kind of by accident, but that’s for another entry. I have to backtrack a little bit first. When I first met Angie, as I may have said, she came off as rather gruff, and I didn’t think she liked me very much. Even though she was kind of a hottie, I didn’t want to be around her much because of how intimidating she was, so I kind of avoided her at the beginning. One time, I had asked her if she wanted to go get a cup of coffee for lunch, and then somebody called out to her, and she pretty much brushed me off. I didn’t see or hear from her for a while after that. I figured she just wasn’t interested. Then I met Michelle, and we hit it off, and things took off from there. Right as things were heating up with Michelle and me, Angela called me into a meeting with her because she wanted my intuition on a particular subject. She also commented on not seeing much of me lately, and I told her why. “I thought you didn’t like me,” I said with a laugh. She sort of shrugged as if she had no idea what I was talking about and didn’t say much more on the subject. I told her I was sorry if I misunderstood her, and the subject of Michelle came up a few times as well. Anyway, I didn’t think much of it, but later on, I had moments where I sort of wondered if she regretted not getting to know me better before I met Michelle. Plus, she met Jamie and settled down with her. I mean, I always knew she liked me and considered me special in some ways. I had some qualities about me that Jamie didn’t have. It was the night that my gut feeling was confirmed, which was pretty interesting. She drove us home from the department that night, and we ordered a pizza for dinner. We later checked in by phone with both Michelle and Jamie and spent most of the night watching movies together. I eventually fell asleep on the couch and was somewhat aware of her long, thin, lean body beside me. I thought of getting up and going upstairs to bed but was too tired to move. In my sleepy state, I was aware of her turning off the TV by remote. The lights had been off, so there were no lights to turn off. There was just the soft glow of light streaming through from the street and patio, which was enough to make out where things were if we decided to make our way up into our rooms. But we crashed there all night. Yes, she behaved. She had an arm draped over me, and I’m sure I dropped mine over her at some point as I shifted positions in my sleep, but that was it. We thought Michelle might make it back the next day, but she didn’t. So again, we were alone. This time we went out to eat—her treat, of course. Then, just like the previous night, we were on the couch in front of the TV. I was actually kneeling by the coffee table, flipping through a magazine while she was lounging on the couch. A contemplative mood overcame me. “Ever wish you’d taken the opportunity to go for something when you could, not realizing what a good thing it might have been until it was too late?” I asked her. “Yep,” she said, almost with a hint of regret in her voice that made me wonder for a nanosecond if she regretted that we didn’t become a thing. She asked why, and I told her I was wondering if I should have passed up a certain job opportunity at the department, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t for me. That night, she told me things not even Jamie knew. She was once with a man and had a miscarriage. She was even far enough along to know it was a girl. “You never told Jamie?” I asked, just as surprised that she hadn’t confided in her as I was by the revelation itself. She shook her head and said, “Naw, she can’t keep a secret.” That was a very true statement, since I was never supposed to know that it was she who saved my life the day I was held hostage in the bank by the ex-disgruntled employee whose main target was the manager. Jamie had slipped up and revealed that secret one night when we were all at the dinner table. Even though Angela is a trained sniper, I didn’t know that she was on the scene that day. I asked her and Michelle if they knew who had saved me so I could personally thank them, but they said they didn’t have that info and couldn’t divulge it if they did. Seeing how disappointed I was to hear that, even though I fully understood, they assured me that they were sure my savior knew how grateful I was. But somewhere along the way, Angela had told Jamie. I felt all the emotions anyone would feel—grateful, thankful, and even a bit flattered to be saved like I was, even though Angela was “just doing her job.” I had to laugh when she commented on me being smarter than Jamie, LOL, but I think the whole household agreed that I was the smart one, while Angela and Michelle were the tough ones, and Jamie was the one with the great sense of humor—not that my sense of humor was ever that dry. Or maybe my sense of “sarcasm” would be a more appropriate way to describe it. Then we began to have playful disagreements about little things, but not literally argue if you know what I mean. It was more like having fun disagreeing and teasing the other, even though sometimes I was on the edge of exasperation because of her bossy nature. At one point, I said something about how relieved she must be to know that our other halves would soon be back, and I fully expected her to quickly and adamantly agree since we were having silly debates and fussing over this and that, but she simply shrugged indifferently. Toward the end of our “alone time,” I almost got genuinely pissed, although I don’t remember why. I looked at her and said, “Thank God you didn’t accept my coffee offer because had we ended up together, we would have made each other absolutely miserable.” And then I saw it: the truth in her eyes. Her cornflower eyes gazed intently into my wilderness green ones, and she said, “Yeah, Kate, it’s kind of hard to accept a coffee invitation when you’re in another country.” Confused, I asked her what she meant, and she said that the guy who had called out to her right as I asked her out was one of her superiors. The Marshals were quickly rushed down to Mexico when they got a hot lead on a highly dangerous fugitive they’d been after for years. So anyway, I just stared back at her, at a loss for words. I seriously didn’t know what to say at that point. All I could tell myself was, Oh my God, so she really did like me. She really was interested. So that’s when I knew for sure that I hadn’t been misreading the body language, the way she would look at me, some of the things she would say—or wouldn’t say.