A Chat

Based on To Serve and Protect, created by Patricia51 and Linda_S Suggested by Forever, ©1975 by Judy Blume

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story was meant to be part of the "S&P: Interrogation" series. Now it's the first of two stories about Patricia51's extended family of police officers, showing the other sides of their lives. In this one, nobody has sex and nobody commits a crime, but I hope to help set the stage for events later on in Patricia's stories.

Michael Gibson Junior stared in horror at the broken door lock.

Susan Adams stared at Michael Gibson Junior.

"Mikie," as he was known to his family (he desperately tried to keep his friends from calling him that) was in the Gibson family's third and smallest bathroom. Unfortunately, so was Sue. She had rapped hard with her knuckles on the door. Not only was the door's lock broken, the latch evidently was as well. The door had swung inwards despite Mikie's desperate lunge for it.

It's hard to tell which of the two people was more embarrassed, but Sue wasn't necessarily ashamed. Mikie was. Guilt spread all over his face. The upended paperback had fallen to the floor just a second before the knock. Mikie's hand was clutching the waistband of his pants, trying to pull them up. He was doubled over like he had just taken a blow to the groin.

Sue's eyes met Mikie's. She saw real fear in them. She looked at the one-person shower instead.

Mikie's mind played with four-letter words. He thought he would have been justified in saying them. But swearing was a punishable offense in the Gibson household, and anyway he didn't like people who cursed a lot. Finally he spoke.

"Get ... out ... please!"

Sue silently backed out of the bathroom, pulled the door to, and walked – not hurriedly – away. She made sure her heels clicked on the floor of the master bedroom. She went to another bathroom, waited for Mikie's mom to come out, and hurried in. Once she had done her business there, she went to the window and looked out into the back yard.

Mikie had left the little bathroom, gone to his own bedroom, opened the window and crawled out onto the roof. He cautiously made his way to the nearest tree and swung himself into it. Sue's gaze followed him up into the tree house.

Five minutes later, Sue knocked on another door. It hadn't been particularly easy climbing the tree in her nice outfit, but she managed well enough. She had excused herself from the family dinner with the Gibsons and with her lover Linda Shannon, saying she had something to do. She reassured her anxious hosts that it wasn't anything to get worried about. She took a circuitous route to the back yard so Mikie's 10-year-old brothers wouldn't see her and figure out Mikie was hiding.

Mikie curled up in a ball in a corner of the tree house. He was trying to figure what his punishment would be. Would Mom and Dad just stop at killing him? They had never spanked him, but Dad was a former Marine and he could get pretty creative in handing out punishments. Mom was one of the Sheriff's Department's top interrogators. And both were in very good physical shape. Mom had climbed to the top of the tree to rescue Mikie's niece's kitten last year.

There are worse things than dying. He heard the knock, followed by Sue's voice.

"I don't know the secret knock, Michael. You'll just have to let me in before anybody sees me up here."

Arrest. Jail. Jailhouse rape. Court. Reform school. Being someone's boy toy for the next three years. Mikie walked through neck-deep mud, it seemed, to open the door and admit the Detective Sergeant who had caught him in the act of masturbation.

"May I come in and have a seat?" Sue asked. Her tone was open to every interpretation in the book.

The loft had a beanbag chair, a bench, and a few cushions. Sue walked over to the beanbag chair, arranged it so she could lean forward and be about a step from the bench, and sat down in ladylike fashion. Mikie walked over to the bench and perched himself, imagining what the electric chair must have felt like in the past century.

Long pause.

Sue just watched Mikie. He felt constrained to speak.

"Are you going to arrest me for indecent exposure?"

A faint shake of the head.

"Public lewdness? Felony sexual harassment?" The last was the scariest.

Another shake of the head. Sue then spoke.

"Don't tell me they offer Government classes during freshman year now? I had to wait until I was a senior. You must know the criminal code of Georgia pretty well."

"Well, with Mom, Dad and Carol being cops ..." Mikie was astonished that he could be somewhat lighthearted in a position like this.

"Then you also know how the state sodomy law was overturned. The cops served a legal warrant, but while inside the house they accidentally spotted two gay guys making it in a bedroom and arrested them. The men sued for violations of privacy and won." Sue paused. "That wasn't my bathroom. Your mom and dad might ask you why you were using their bathroom, but I couldn't bust you even if I wanted to. And I don't."

Long pause. Mikie looked down, up, anywhere but at Sue's face, until he realized it was useless. Then he asked her directly.

"Are you pissed off?"

Sue shook her head in disapproval. "Are guys really that intimidated by women? You're more scared of me being upset than you are of anything except your mom and dad being upset."

"Jeez, Sergeant –"

"Sue."

"Sue. Jeez. You're a grown woman, you're a ..."

"Dyke?"

Mikie really didn't want to answer that one. He skipped over it. "You're sort of married, aren't you supposed to hate sex and don't you dump on guys who like to jack off?"

The question was answered with a question. "Do you like to jack off?" Mikie was quite nonplussed by Sue's use of the word. Sue continued: "It looked like you really didn't want to do it, you were just so wound up you had to do something."

Mikie grimaced. "Yeah. I'd gone three whole days. I was so wired you'd have thought I was on meth or something."

Sue looked disapproving. "Don't joke about drug addiction."

Mikie backed off. "I'm sorry. It's just that ..." he took a deep breath ... "I was seeing some guys in the shower and wondering what they were like. Not like I was gonna stick it to some guy, just thought what it'd be like to touch them and rub myself off." Even if Sue hadn't been a good lip reader, she could have figured out the curse the younger fellow bit off.

Sue replied: "Do you or don't you think I did the same thing?"

It sounded like a trap question to Mikie. Sue and Linda had been a couple since Sue graduated from the police academy, since before Mikie was born for that matter.

"I guess so," he finally replied.

"Sure I did! But I wasn't looking to go to bed with them! Jeez! I'd check them out and compare them to me, look at the early bloomers and the girls who weren't to puberty yet, wonder what in hell they felt, whether Betty Big Boobs got neck strain from the weight up front, if Sarah A-Cup was putting out to make up for so little on top, all this stuff everybody probably thinks. But do you think I was never interested in guys? Believe me, if I hadn't found Linda I might be married to a guy right now, if he was the right one."

"But how do you know he'd be the right one? I sure as hell don't," Mikie responded in some agitation. Sue realized she had gotten a bit agitated herself, and resolved to calm Mikie down some. If someone else came up that tree, Mikie would climb to the topmost limb and probably get stuck.

"You don't." Sue let that hang. Then she mentioned something else she had noticed.

"Where did you get the book Forever?"

"Stephanie left it behind when she moved out. Carol got it at a book sale, I think."

"I've read it," Sue said. "Some of it's pretty steamy. The scenes where they make out before they start actually fucking, the times when they make love and both of them come. I had four or five sections pretty dog-eared. I'll bet you do too."

Mikie couldn't believe he had heard Sue drop the F-bomb, but he had to agree with her assertion. Sue continued.

"Is that the only thing you jack off to, or do you have other things?"

Mikie didn't want to rat out anybody, but he felt he needed to tell the truth. "There's this guy who hacked his mom and dad's computer and accessed all the adult sites. He prints off Web pages and sells them to the rest of us."

"Very interesting," Sue said. "Also breaks at least two or three laws that I know of. Did you know Carol was the subject of one of those Web pages?"

Mikie let out a curse that broke every taboo in the Gibson family, and which would have earned him at least an hour of running in place in a truck tire filled with sand, with a time penalty for touching the sides. He stared in horror at his sister's work partner.

"It's true. A hacker created a phony sex site, with her pictures digitally manipulated to make her look like a total slut. We caught the people responsible, but I see people still like that sort of thing."

Mikie didn't believe in omens, otherwise he would have thought the world was going to crash onto his head. "I can't tell you who gives them out. You might could find out if you asked some other guys, though."

"Rest assured, someone will," Sue said. And that was that. She shifted the conversation back to Forever.

"Have you read it all the way through?"

"Yeah."

"My mom gave it to me," Sue said, "and I think my grandmother gave it to her. It came out in 1975, so I think at least three generations of girls have read it, and maybe a lot of guys interested in sex."

"It gets pretty yucky at the end," Mikie said. "Katherine leaves Michael for this other guy she hardly knows. I wonder if Michael blew himself away with a shotgun or something."

"Lots of guys have wondered that," Sue replied. "But remember the guy who tried to hang himself about 50 pages earlier. Michael wouldn't do anything that stupid, would he? Even over a girl?"

Mikie let out another mouthed curse followed by a mouthed comma and an audible "I don't know." He thought for a while. Sue was sure he was thinking about boyfriend-girlfriend relationships and possibly about breakups. She studied his expression carefully and decided he didn't personally know any guys who had broken up with their girlfriends. Now his female friends ... that was a different matter.

"How do boyfriends and girlfriends treat each other these days?" Sue asked.

"Like crap," Mikie said without thinking.

"The same as when I was a teenager, or different?" Sue asked gently.

"Dunno what you saw. But the guys act like they own the girls. I saw one guy in eighth grade get it right in the nuts for talking nice to another guy's girlfriend. Lured down an alley and ambushed. Four or five guys."

"Were you one of them?" Sue asked. Mike turned crimson.

"I didn't hit him. I stayed back."

"And nobody reported it, I'm quite sure," Sue said firmly.

"Shit, no. The guy who got it is in Harper High now anyway. He's one of the enemy."

Mikie shouldn't have said that. He knew he shouldn't have. Carter High School had been built as the city grew, which was in the last decade. Mikie's sisters had gone to Harper, and Sue had taught there on an undercover assignment. He glanced anxiously at the door, expecting Sue to exit and go get his parents. Instead she spoke coolly.

"Mom and Dad held you back so you wouldn't be among the youngest kids in the class. Now you're one of the oldest, maybe the oldest. Big and strong. Are you going to hit this guy again if you see him at the big game?"

That wasn't a rhetorical question. Harper and Carter Highs had fierce gridiron rivalries; during the week before they played, the principals set their lunch times an hour apart so students wouldn't meet and fight. Mikie's dad had broken up one such brawl single-handedly.

"Nah. Besides, every guy was hot for that girl, Rachel Underwood. She really had a rack on her and her ass was neat, too."

"I see," Sue said. "Tits and ass are what you want? Did you ever look at her face, hear her voice, listen for her mind?"

Mikie grimaced. "She was kind of sweet. She sorta liked me."

Sue fired away. "What happened to her?"

Mikie must have thought about Rachel before. There was a soft, sad tone to his voice.

"I think she must've got knocked up and had an abortion. This year, guys are avoiding her like she's got bubonic plague. A lot of guy talk says she screwed half the guys on campus. I've seen her sometimes and she always looks away."

Sue made a mental note to find out about Rachel. Right now, her attention was on Mikie.

"How do girls at school dress these days?"

Mikie thought it over. "Pretty regular, I guess. Jeans, sneakers, T-shirts or short-sleeved tops. When winter comes, they usually wear boots and long coats. Not much different from guys."

"Any of them dress up?" Sue asked quietly. "Shorts, too-short skirts, tummies showing, open necks, bras or thongs showing, tops too small, and – God forbid – pants so tight you can see a camel-toe crotch?"

Mikie nodded a little. "Not all at once, but I've seen girls who looked really hot. Mostly the juniors and seniors. You know they go to the office if they break the dress code."

"They've done that for a hundred years, or close to it. Would it surprise you that I did all of those things?"

Mikie certainly was surprised. "Why?"

"Because I wanted to be noticed, silly. I thought I was pretty, but I needed people to say I was. One nice compliment from a handsome guy and I felt good all day. Two from this one particular guy and I felt like a princess."

Mikie still had a great deal of trouble thinking that the gay woman opposite him could have been attracted to a man. He incautiously asked who she could have liked.

"You know him. Josh Crane."

Mikie's eyebrows practically knit themselves together. Things didn't compute and he said so. Sue smiled.

"I had a crush on him in tenth grade. I didn't think he noticed, and I was probably right. Then, when we were in the Police Academy together, he had a crush on me and I DEFINITELY didn't notice. He was too shy to say anything by then. I'm glad we became good friends later, but I'm more glad he didn't try anything, because I would have said no by then."

Mikie puzzled it over. "When did you know you were ..."

"Gay?" Sue asked. "It took a long time. I would gladly have dated Josh most of the way through high school, maybe even have gone to bed with him. But slowly I realized that I felt more comfortable around girls, especially non-judgmental girls. Then I heard a lot of stories about guys who were bad in bed, about well-endowed guys who just hurt girls, and I vowed I'd never be like that with a girl, and that's when I realized I was attracted to girls and wanted them instead of guys. That wasn't all of it, but I wanted to have women as lovers."

Mikie was curious in spite of himself. "How did you ... do it for the first time?"

Sue shrugged. "I went out on a date. Debbie and I had a class in elementary education together, and I found out she was gay. We did some projects together and stayed up late at night, got snacks and drinks, and talked. About the middle of the semester I asked her out to an art film. When we got back home, I asked her if I could kiss her. We didn't have sex then, but we kept going out on dates and we wound up at her apartment a few times, my dorm room a few times. But it only lasted a year."

"Nobody from then until Linda?"

"I left college after my sophomore year and joined the police academy. One day I heard a woman moaning in the shower, moaning for another woman. Linda walked out and caught me. I pretended to play dumb, but I knew.

"I didn't really meet Linda until Police Academy graduation ceremonies, and then I made a total shit of myself. Your dad gave me a good lecture. I was mad at Linda for a while, and then I started thinking about what she'd been through. She had to kill two men to save her partner's life, and that partner was your dad." Sue paused, looking to see if Mikie was surprised. When he wasn't, she continued.

"Then both Josh and I applied for the Narcotics Task Force. Linda saw something in me and picked me, I went undercover under her tutelage, and I acted on my desires. After the investigation was over, and after we helped save Carol's reputation, I realized Linda and I were truly in love. But it wasn't easy for a long time."

Mike frowned. "Is it ever easy?"

Sue shook her head. "I doubt it very much." Then she shifted the conversation again.

"What do you feel about ... girls who do?"

Mikie replied pretty quickly. "I don't like it. They're too young."

"And you aren't?" Sue let that one hang and continued.

"Michael, I'm the same age now as Judy Blume was when she wrote that book. She had a daughter who kept reading stuff about 'bad girls' having sex and getting punished for it. My mom told me there was as much teenage sex then as now, just that it wasn't talked about nearly as much and people had lots of wrong ideas. And she confirmed she had been through what Kath went through – getting exams, going on the Pill, wondering what losing it would be like. Then she forgot her pills and got pregnant with me right out of high school ... you know the rest.

"I got the 25th-anniversary edition. Judy Blume put in an extra page talking about AIDS and other things people could get from unprotected sex, and telling the kids who read it to use condoms all the time. Yeah, it was sad, but what matters is that there will always be girls who wonder about falling in love and having sex, no matter if it's 1975 or 1925 or 2025. And if girls do, guys do.

"Face it, Michael. Kids know something about sex way before grownups want them to. Many of them are going to do it. You want to."

"But I haven't done it with anybody."

Sue shrugged. "Would you believe that I'm a virgin?" She let Michael knit his eyebrows. "I've had ... feminine hygiene inside me and I've had my gynecologist's fingers there. Linda touches inside me too. But the hymen's still in place.

"Linda and I had a long series of talks. She described what it's like to have a man's ... manhood inside. It was fine as long as she loved and cared for the man – otherwise it was just an invasion. I realized I'd never feel that way with a man, so I asked her never to take me like a man would. She was really sweet about it. I put sex toys inside her, but I don't pretend to be a man with her and she doesn't pretend to be a man with me."

Mikie blurted out: "Do you know I'd like to ... you know, with you?"

"How come?" Sue replied gently.

"I feel like ... you're missing out. Guys love you. I've seen you around when I was with my group, and they all check you out and say things."

"What things? Just tits and ass and camel-toe, or something else?"

"Well, yeah, they look at your bod." Mikie grimaced. "But you're kind of like the teacher guys get hot for, you know? Smart as hell, smile lights up the room, says nice things, acts really interested when talking to guys like me."

Sue would have accepted that, but Mike struggled with something. She let him continue, knowing he wouldn't look at her directly.

"They're really turned on by you being a ... girl-lover. They'd like to see you and Linda doing it. They can't believe neither you nor Linda is, you know, butch."

Sue sighed. "For the record, I have known some women who were butch or at least looked butch, and were very nice. There was one woman, a nurse, whom you couldn't tell was a woman unless you saw the sports bra underneath her scrubs. When Linda went to the hospital after being shot, this woman performed a thousand little kindnesses for her and for me. She'd also go over to the pain center and give massages to dying people, strictly volunteer work."