Marital Bitch (Men with Badges)

Chapter TWELVE

(Colleen)

Game on, Patrick.

EARLIER IN THE week I had promised myself that I would try in mine and Brad’s marriage. Every morning when he wakes up for work, before he puts his suit on, Brad makes us both a cup of coffee. It tastes like crap, but it’s the thought that counts. By the time he leaves, I’m just barely stirring in bed. Normal husbands would kiss their wife goodbye. Mine tells me to get out of bed and then smacks my ass. Four mornings in a row and I have yet to learn to get out of bed before I hear his footsteps trudging up the stairs.

Every night I make sure Brad has dinner. Some nights I just order from some place I know he likes; pizza or hot wings or something like that. Other nights I try to actually cook. My skills are limited, though. His schedule is hectic. I never know if he’s going to come home in time for dinner or not. The nights he doesn’t, I fix him a plate and put it in the microwave before I head up to his bedroom that I’m slowly, but purposefully, taking over. When Brad finally gets home and crawls into bed, I curl up against him.

I think we’re working on some sort of record because we haven’t fought since the day Thomas made me sign that stupid performance contract and that was nearly a week ago. When Brad found out about it, first he chastised me for not being smarter.

I thought all you Harvard grads were supposed to be smart, Colleen!

This shit ain’t legal. What’d you let that prick boss ya around for, huh?

You want me to talk to him? I’m gonna talk to him. This is bullshit.

I didn’t want to hear it. Signing the paper, accepting Thomas’s words as gospel, and showing him that I have no backbone had been eating away at me since I told Brad. Oh, he was livid. I swear, if you’re not from the neighborhood, you can’t understand a damn thing Brad says when he gets mad.

After questioning my intelligence, he went about swearing in Gaelic and kicking things. He asked why I signed the contract. Through streaming tears I managed to tell him that I was scared of losing my job and not being able to pay the mortgage on my condo, thus losing that, too. I did, however, leave out the paralyzing fear of my inability to pay back my two hundred grand of student loan debt. Brad knows it’s high, but he doesn’t know it’s that high. If he found out, he would have told me that nothing is worth that kind of debt, but I digress.

So, it’s Saturday morning and I woke up to a hard smack on my ass at an ungodly hour. The sun wasn’t even up yet. The only positive thing about Brad having to be at work so early is that unless something happens on one of his cases, he comes home early, too.

I formulate a plan for the day. I want to clean up some and get the husband’s laundry done and his suits to the cleaners. I’m sucking up, I totally am. I’m trying to seduce my husband through starched shirts and clean dishes. We’ve been so busy this week that the sex issue hasn’t come up again. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself because if I don’t wholeheartedly believe that Brad is too busy to rub himself against me then I’m going to feel rejected. It’s one thing to be rejected by a guy you just met, it’s quite another to be rejected by your best friend.

As it turns out, Brad isn’t very messy; but every room I’ve been in looks like a tornado has hit it. I never really noticed how tidy he is in comparison. I’m hit with a sense of guilt for always looking at him like he’s some sort of pig.

I take the time to unpack as much of my stuff as I can. There’s extra space on the bookshelves in the living room, so I fill that up. With some creative reorganization I manage to fit all of my cooking utensils in the cramped galley kitchen. My pots and pans happily cohabitate with his and I’m not the least concerned with ever having to figure out what belongs to whom. When Brad left for work today, the house was his. When he comes home tonight, it will be ours. I sound like an idiot, I’m sure, but I don’t care. I’m staking my claim.

After the kitchen, I find myself even enjoying finding room for my clothes in his tiny closets and already full drawers. I shove everything over in his sock and boxer-briefs’ drawer to make room for my socks. I can’t bring myself to put my panties or bras in there just yet—not before Brad actually gets in my panties, anyway.

Unpacking doesn’t take very long and before I know it I’m on to the very last box, which just has DVDs in it. It turns out, I don’t have very much stuff; and I’m grateful that whoever packed it up was methodical and organized about it. I’m guessing it was the husband. Thinking over how neat he organizes everything—something I hadn’t realized about him before—I wonder what else I don’t know about him.

Brad’s DVDs are organized alphabetically by genre and then alphabetically within the genre as well. I had no clue he was this damn neurotic. I do my best to work within his system as I fit my DVDs in with his. Between Action and Comedy there is a lone, unmarked DVD case. For a moment I consider that it might be porn, but then I remember back in high school how he kept his porn in a rolling bin under his bed. Knowing Brad, that’s probably where he still keeps it. He truly is a creature of habit. Curiosity gets the best of me and I grab the unmarked case and open it, only to be shocked by what I find.

‘The Notebook.’

Like, the chick flick, ‘The Notebook’. I can’t believe I’ve found this here, and he’s hiding it no less. But then I remember the whole gang going to see this movie in theaters. We had only just resumed being on friendly terms without it being super awkward between us after The Heather Incident. Brad sat at the end of the row and I was next to him. I had a large supply of tissues handy because I just knew I’d cry. But I didn’t need a single one. No, Brad used them all. That’s been our little secret ever since. I hadn’t even been tempted to ever bring it up to torture him with. It just didn’t seem right since it was such a significant turning point in our friendship.

I take the DVD out of the case and flip it around. It’s covered in scratches, both deep and shallow. It’s so beat up that I doubt it’ll even play. And I have an idea! I know just how to show Brad that I want to try to make this work.

I rush to the kitchen and look for baking supplies. Of which, there are none. I can’t bring him homemade cookies at the station if I don’t have anything to make them. So, I improvise. If there’s one thing I learned from Darla, it’s how to fake being a domestic goddess. To this day, James still doesn’t know that Darla’s famous lemon squares come from the corner bakery.

THREE HOURS, ONE shower and four stores later, I’m walking into the station with a wicker basket in my hands, looking for my husband. I am so proud of myself for my forethought. I was lucky—the corner bakery had some reject chocolate chip cookies they gave to me. Old Mrs. Neilson even had an old Tupperware container for me to put them in. She wasn’t very helpful at first; that is until she found out the rumors about me marrying “The Patrick Boy” are all true. Everybody loves both Brad and James and if I didn’t love them both so much, it’d be sickening.

Love?

Um…

Yeah. Yeah, love. You know, like best-friend-love. Like first-kiss-love. Like I-might-get-some-love.

“Miss, this area is restricted!“ the woman at the front desk calls out to me as I pass. She has pale skin and beautiful strawberry blonde hair with lovely grey eyes. I have never seen any woman look this good in her dress blues. She is stunning. I sort of want to s her already.

“Pardon me,” I say in a faux nice voice. I look at her badge and try not to sneer. I have an irrational hatred of her name. “Vicky,” I say, drawing it out. “My name is Colleen Frasier Patrick. That means my daddy is the Chief, my brother is Detective James Frasier, my godfather and father-in-law is John Patrick, who is the Assistant Chief, and my husband is Detective Bradley Patrick. Please remember that.” My tone is snotty and I know it, but this “Barbie in Blue” needs to know who she is dealing with. I grew up in this station.

I breeze past Vicky, ignoring her muttering about policy and waltz into the squad room. Brad is seated at his desk with James hunched over him. My dad and John are flanking them on both sides. They look so serious.

I walk over to them and offer a timid, “Hello,” so as not to startle them. They each look at me with sad eyes. Each of their hellos is something akin to a gruff bark. I don’t even want to know what they’re working on. I’ve spent years blocking myself off from the gruesome world they work in, never asking many questions and always respecting their boundaries when it comes to what they’ll share about their work—and this is why—all too often they’re working on a case where someone has lost someone dear to them.

Brad stands, crosses the desk and hugs me tight. His body is rigid and he’s burrowing his nose into my hair. I set the wicker basket down on his desk and curl into him. I know this hug. Brad needs this hug. When he’s working on a really bad case, he needs a hug. It grounds him, lets him know that he’s still here, with us. I’m more than happy to be able to be that for him.

“What’re you doing here, pretty girl?” he asks and we pull apart. My dad has collected all of the papers they were looking at and has them safely in a manila folder far from my line of sight.

“I made you cookies,” I beam up at him. Brad smiles and kisses my forehead. I lean up and kiss his cheek, shocking him. “You should look in the basket,” I whisper. Brad turns and starts to rifle through the basket, pulling out the cookie container first, his eyes dancing with amusement. I’m so excited and proud of myself that I don’t even see it happening—it being the chaos that is about to happen.

The moment that James hears there are cookies, he grabs the container and opens it. Sure, they’re discarded bakery cookies, but they don’t look half bad as homemade cookies. Brad pulls out the Special Edition DVD of “The Notebook” that I’ve bought him to replace his deeply scratched copy; and quickly shoves in back in, his cheeks turning pink. He spies the box of tissues and doesn’t even move to pick them up.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, embarrassed because he knows the meaning behind the DVD.

“There’s a note,” I say, prodding him to read it. I need to see his reaction when he reads the note. I spent a lot of time thinking about that note. I’m not quiet about it and my voice carries to James’s big old honking ears. Before I can stop him, James finds the note in the basket and starts reading it. Brad tries to snatch it from my stupid brother but he dodges him in time.

The entire squad room watches the budding show as James begins to read the note aloud. I put my head down, nearing tears. This was private and was never meant to be shared with anyone—especially not the entire squad room.

“Bradley—,” James recites in a feminine voice. “—I wanted to replace your worn, but well-loved copy of “The Notebook—,” James pauses to laugh. This is so bad. I hear feet shuffle and chuckling from all around. “And the tissues are because I know that you can never make it through Noah and Ally’s reunion without tearing up—,” there’s more, but James stops reading, thank God.

One of the rookies whose name I’ve forgotten takes the opportunity to rag on Brad. “I want all of you, forever!” he shouts to Brad. James is still laughing his ass off, though he won’t be for long—not after I tell Mama and Darla about this.

Big brother, you’re going down.

John claps his son on the shoulder, trying to withhold his laughter. “You know, son,” he clears his throat, “There’s no shame in liking those girly movies.” Brad pulls away from him, his back to me.

My dad takes the opportunity to chime in. “John’s right, kid,” he rubs his mustache thoughtfully. “Those movies keep Louise’s engine going strong, even with the on-set of menopause.” I cringe and James verbally protests. I can hear John in the background agreeing. If I wasn’t so mortified and sorry for embarrassing Brad like this, I would be thoroughly disgusted by our fathers’ topic of conversation—our mothers’ libidos.

Brad leans in close, his voice icy. “So that’s your game, Frasier?” he snaps. I gulp. This is not how you go about impressing your husband. Not at all.

“Patrick,” I correct him, nose firmly in the air. He knows damn well what my last name is.

“Okay, then,” he smiles in the most unfriendly way imaginable. “Game on, Patrick.”