Establishing character and stakes early on in a narrative is important. And in the case of my current W.I.P., back–story takes up a large but of my opening chapters. I felt it vital, considering the “taboo” nature of the relationship in this story to document thoroughly their history. Tell me what you think.

Chloe

My name is Chloe Louise Rawlins. I am 23-years-old, and I have red hair. I work as an EMT and am about to start medical school in Boston, MA. I enjoy reading, cycling, hanging out with friends, and the occasional camping trip.

Oh, and I might be sorta falling for my Step-dad.

Before you get all judgmental and jump to conclusions, I have to establish the Copperfield shit, I suppose.

Cy and my mother got together when I was still in grade school, and they were both in their middle-to-late twenties. They had apparently grown up in the same small town out west but ended up in Boston as complete strangers to each other.

He was working as a traffic cop for the Boston P.D. in those days. He pulled mom over one spring day after she’d blown through a red light in her old ’87 Mustang.

I was in the back seat chattering away, and she hadn’t been paying attention. I remember looking through the rear window of the little cloth-top and seeing him swing his leg over his shiny motorcycle. He strode up to the side of the car and leaned over to flash mom his dark cobalt blue eyes over the rims of his mirrored glasses.

“Do you know why I stopped you, Miss?”

Mom, in those days, could flirt her way out of any traffic ticket.

“Sorry, Officer, I– have we met before?”

“Chrissy Rawlins?” He smiled, pulling his shades off entirely.

“Cy Brown! Oh my God, you actually became a cop?”

In this case, she pulled away from the curb with a “warning” and the handsome policeman’s telephone number. That night, when we got home, I made my Ken doll into a cop who kept arresting Barbie for being “too pretty.”

After the initial dating phase, Cy would come over and cook us dinner, and then he and mom would read me to sleep before closing my bedroom door. Mostly I think they just watched old movies or split a bottle of wine and talked. At any rate, eventually, Mom sublet our apartment and moved us into a three-story walk-up with “Officer Cy.”

I should clarify that his name is actually Leroy, but nobody calls him that. Any telemarketers who called the house asking for “Leroy Brown” got a laugh and were promptly disconnected.

For most of my life, I assumed that his middle name was something like “Cyrus.” However, he looks less like a Cyrus than he does a Leroy. Cy is the name on his cards, although I can’t recall even a piece of mail coming to our house listing a middle initial.

Anyway, Mom has always called him Cy, so that’s what I called him from the time they first started dating.

He was really sweet to my mom. She told me about finding little notes he managed to slip into her pockets or about little gifts he would send her at her office. “I’ll walk in and there will be a little paperback novel or a CD with a post-it on it,” she said. “‘Read this, thought you’d like it.’” Or “‘This song made me think of you.’”

Mom and I were each other’s best girlfriends. I was only 8, but I remember how crazy about Cy made her, how giddy she felt about him.

“He’s so… I mean, he’s careful and cautious about things, baby. He’s also so flustered sometimes, like I can see how much he’s holding back. He was so shy when we were kids. Cute, but brainy. And I kinda gave him hell, I guess. But, now, he’s got this quiet power, mmm.”

I smiled and giggled along with her, not knowing what she was talking about, but happy because, well, she seemed happy. Different. Up until meeting Cy, mom had always seemed, well, mildly sad. I always felt loved, and we had a fabulous friendship, but I always vaguely recall that before Cy, Mom was hiding some old pain or heartbreak.

By the time I was 14, I chalked it up to how things had ended with my biological father. She seldom talked about him because I assumed it was so painful. I mean, of course I was curious, but by age 12, I knew better than to ask. And Cy, well, he made it all okay.

When she returned from those early dates and paid the sitter, she always acted slightly giddy and hummed to herself as she tucked me in at bedtime.

“Mommy, are you in love?”

“Do I seem like I’m in love, Bunny?”

“You’re happier.”

“Well, let’s just say I like Officer Cy a whole bunch, huh?”

“More than my daddy?”

She’d made a face, one I remembered but never quite understood, a sort of soft and quiet little frown that lasted only a moment.

“Go to sleep, huh? Or else your teacher’s will call me into the principal’s office for letting you turn into a pumpkin.”

My mom was a master of lullabies. I never fought her on questions when she sang me to sleep in those days. She’d start with “Goodnight, My Angel” then “Bye Bye Blackbird” and top it off with “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

I always held out for “Not Easy Being Green.” She sang it so soft and even. And I loved it because it was a song about being okay with life.

It didn’t seem quick. From their first date, I’m pretty sure Mom made Cy work for it. She was a single mom, working two jobs, raising me on her own….

Ugh, I hate myself, right now typing this. Having a thing for your step-dad is bad. Realizing you’re also thinking about your mom’s husband, well… believe me, that’s a level of betrayal I’ll never get over.

I loved my mom. For the first 8 years of my life she was my whole world. Wrapped in saintly white satin and dipped in the purest love, anyone who would have broken her heart was doomed to be my sworn enemy.

But about three months after the traffic stop, one morning Cy was just there, dressed in his Boston Police Uniform, pouring her coffee as she smiled and Oldies played from the radio, and he was asking me whether I preferred pancakes or waffles for breakfast. And, well, I liked him.

At first he was only over every other weekend, then his presence grew in our lives to the point mom gave him his own shelf in the bathroom medicine cabinet and I’d find myself cuddling up with him on the sofa, reading whatever book he was engrossed in at the time.

Books were a big part of Cy, mom and I soon discovered. They were his way of decompressing after trying days keeping the peace on the mean streets of Boston.

“Anything but True Crime!” He joked.

Although being a big city cop was no doubt a stressful job, he never brought that stress back with him. Only paperback books by the brown paper bag full. Harry Potter, Tolkien, Roald Dahl, fantasy and science fiction novels, spy thrillers, biographies, classic and contemporary literature.

Mom and I had to occasionally poke fun of him when we’d catch him reading the odd cheesy romance novel like the ones you’d find in the checkout line at the supermarket.

“These are for old ladies,” I’d say, taking in the bare-chested hunky guys holding cowering women with big hair and bigger boobs spilling out of strategically ripped bodices.

“Hey, my mom is an old lady!” he’d jape. “Besides, how else am I supposed to learn how to help a woman ‘reach peeks of pleasure that would dwarf the highest Himmileayas?’”

“You’re getting there,” I remember Mom joking, presenting my outfit for the day and dowerly eyeing my unicorn pj’s while glancing at the clock on the stove. “Maybe somewhere between Mount McKinley and the Materhorne, Officer Brown?”

I get that joke, now.

(Oh, God. Mom, I’m sorry.)

I feel the need to pause here.

I loved my mother. I will always love my mother. That’s what makes this so difficult for me. Because, I end up betraying my mother… repeatedly.

My life is hell.

Anyway, Cy made her happy and he was the sort of guy who liked making the woman he loved happy. No, he didn’t outright say it (like a mook) but he showed it.

Flowers because it was Wednesday. Fluffy socks with “The Great Gonzo” on them for Valentines Day because mom always joked she was a “Whatever” when it came to dating.

And for me, always books and music. He took an interest in me. Tried to learn what new pop song I was into, bought me books at my reading level when he was shopping the used bookstores off Boston Common.

Once I held a romance book cover up and noticed Cy had some of the same features as the guy depicted. Squared jaw, dark hair, piercing blue eyes. He was the sort of good-looking guy women expected to gaze at them with smoldering intensity from the covers of books with names like “Midnight Heat” or “The Savage Heart.”

“Can I read this one with you?” I’d asked.

He cocked his head and made a face. “Not exactly age appropriate, kiddo.”

“Is there kissing?” I remember asking, making a face.

He made the same face. “I know, gross right? I only read those parts so I can highlight them for your mom.”

He was attentive to mom, but always appropriate around me. He always made time to play games and give me piggyback rides. When mom started working on bigger real-estate deals, Cy helped with my homework and took me anywhere in the city I wanted to go.

We went to the movies, to all my favorite parks and playgrounds, he took me to used book stores and vintage record stores, always trying to interest me in artists from bygone days.

He was corny in a lot of ways and after the initial adjustment to mom’s having a regular guy around instead of just a short-term boyfriend, I really began to think of him– I supposed– the way most girls thought of their dad’s.

Always very innocent and above board. Stupid jokes that made my eyes roll. Always ready to debate the latest Marvel or DC movie with me or argue about what place in Boston had the best pizza or chili fries.

In parks he’d push me on swing sets. At museums he’d listen to me read about the exhibits and dioramas, helping me to sound out the big words my 10-year-old brain had yet to learn on vocabulary quizzes at school.

“Ne-Nea..”

“Neanderthals,” He aided.

“Neanderthals,” I repeated. “Are an extinct species or subspecies of ar-ar…”

“Archaic,” he smiled. “

“Archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. While the cause of their extinction remains ‘highly contested,’ demo-demo…”

“That’s a big one,” he said, taking over. “Demographic factors like small population size, inbreeding, and random fluctuations are considered likely factors in their extinction.”

I had never really known my birth father, and mom said he’d been a brief fling she’d had right out of college. She’d shrugged off my questions, joking that he’d left her practically in the middle of her first Lamaze class. So Cy was a good fit in our lives.

“Nighty night, Cy.”

“Sweet dreams, Chlo-worm.”

It was a nickname that had started as a tease one weekend he had taken mom and me to the beach. While applying sunscreen to my face, he remarked at how pale I was. “You could glow in the dark,” he joshed.

From that sprang the nickname “Chlo-worm.”

Mom eventually switched from selling commercial real estate to selling residential real estate out in the country. Cy, who had made the leap from traffic cop to the detective bureau of the Boston P.D., allowed her to convince him to leave the city. He took a job as the police chief of Lawrence, a medium-sized town in Essex County.

It was bittersweet moving out of Boston proper at the end of 4th grade. I was 11, and both Cy and I loved the hustle and noise, but Mom said it was better to raise a kid out in the suburbs to get into better schools.

At any rate, we put in for the two-story neo-colonial with the picket fence and the three-car garage. Cy made it official and offered mom a ring, and mom said “yes,” and they were married at the courthouse three months after we finished unpacking. I was both the “best kid” and “the kid of honor.”

After that, it was a bit awkward transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood as the town’s police chief’s kid.

Mom and Cy were both staunch believers in education. I made it all the way to my high school graduation without going on a single unchaperoned date that wasn’t a church social or a school dance. After my prom, both Mom and Cy rolled up in his police cruiser promptly at 9:30 sharp, and Mom blasted the horn.

“My date has a car, Mom,” I’d scowled, tossing my corsage in the back seat and climbing in, making sure my prom dress didn’t get caught in the door.

“She knows,” Cy said, shooting me a glance in the rearview. “She made me run his plates after you two drove off.”

“Any felonies?” I asked.

Cy had simply shaken his head and put the cruiser in gear, driving us past the ice cream parlor on the way home.

The thrill of my prom night, three weeks after my 18th birthday, was a scoop of mint pistachio ice cream. Mom had Vanilla frozen yogurt, and Cy had an iced coffee before going on patrol.

The summer after graduating, I risked sneaking out to a summer party with a few other just graduated seniors. I hadn’t been there twenty minutes before Cy showed up with a swarm full of cops and stormed into the fray. I recall him peeling the varsity swim-team captain off me just as things were starting to get interesting.

“Chloe! Car!” He barked.

I’d never seen him so livid. This was a man who’d never raised a hand to me or my mother in all his time with us. He was a cool customer, level-headed, like Andy Griffith with biceps.

“I’ve got a mind to get my nail gun and fix your balls to the flipping Civil War monument, Cavenaugh!”

Cy never did tell me how he tracked me down that night. Instead, we had driven all the way home with me hugging my knees in the back of his squad car, totally miffed.

Mom had been livid with me, too, of course. Even though I was over eighteen, she was determined I would not go through college as a single mother juggling two jobs and an infant daughter like she had done.

The story of “Bad Chief Leroy Brown” and his nail gun kept me celibate and single through the first two years of junior college. Any future comers interested in doing the no-pants-dance with good old Chloe had to wait until I saved up enough to make the leap to a four-year school.

I kind of recall not talking to Cy for the rest of that summer, actually.

Of course, the other reason I avoided Cy had to do with something else that happened later that same summer.

I had joined the girl’s intramural soccer team as a way of keeping in training and possibly landing some scholarship money for my eventual transition to a University.

And one day, after a very intense and gruelingly hot practice, I walked in on “my parents.”

I was covered in dirt and sweat, my hair sticking to the collar of my grass-stained uniform. All I wanted was to ditch my uniform in the wash before heading to the bathroom for a hot shower.

I passed by the den, where suddenly I heard sounds of hips slapping thighs and mom yipping like an excited pomeranian.

I inched a glance around the door to find Cy, still in his uniform shirt, and mom, in her house-showing skirt and blazer combo, pulled up to her waist as he corkscrewed into her.

I felt my eyes widen at the sight of the two of them together. The veins in his forearm pulsed as he held the back of mom’s neck firmly, grounding her so that as his hips thrust she gasped, teary eyed with intense pleasure.

I felt a lump form in my throat, realizing I was in nothing but a sports bra and panties. I stepped back from the door, suddenly afraid of being seen by the two of them. Of being caught.

But then, something else took hold. It dropped down on my knees and let one eye peep around the door. They changed positions, Cy lifting mom up from the sofa in the study, his arms going under her legs as she wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him passionately, whispering something intense and (I imagined) dirty.

Cy’s face creased into a smile as he laughed returning her kisses.

I’d seen Cy, of course, coming out of the shower in our old apartment in Boston, wrapped in nothing but a towel, drying his dark hair. But I’d been 10 at the time. At 18, after a summer of hot hormones with hardly any place to go but the soccer field or humping my hair brush while straddling a pillow… He had a hairy toned chest and broad shoulders, a toned core all wrapped in skin that was tanned from weekend trips to the beach.

“Yummy,” a voice groaned inside me, I rolled away from the door, covering my mouth hoping I hadn’t actually uttered the word out loud.

I listened to the two of them in the next room. They continued on and I beat a hasty retreat to my room.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” I thought, flapping my hands and looking at myself in my bedroom mirror.

“Oh fuck, indeed,” the little voice growled.

I realized all the sexual frustration of that summer had finally found its voice. My young pussy was wide awake and drooling and all over the images of Cy smiling lascivious while kissing and fucking my mother.

“We’re not 10 anymore, honey. And… Woof, Oh Daddy!”

I was flushed, hot all over, but it wasn’t from soccer practice, now. I felt my hand drift down over my stomach.

“Yeah, let’s play!”

And then I stopped myself. It was too much. I couldn’t think of Cy like that.

“Yeah, you could…”

Well, my pussy could apparently think what it wanted too, but I couldn’t give in. I knew it was wrong.

Adolescence was confusing enough without finding yourself suddenly tempted by your stepfather.

“And his broad sinewy shoulders, strong chin, pulsating….”

I shutdown my sexdrive as best I could and dressed quickly in a spare uniform. Then I snuck downstairs to make a loud and pronounced entrance into the house. “Anybody here? I’m home!”

I’ll never forget Cy appearing in the hallway a few moments later, tucking his shirttails into his uniform pants. He cooly ran his fingers through his dark black hair. “Hey, Kiddo,” he smiled. “How was practice?”

He took in my flushed face and dirty knees but was puzzled over the cleanliness of my uniform.

“I took my spare,” I said, shaking my practice bag. “The one I wore for practice is pretty ripe.”

He nodded. “Throw it in the washer, and I’ll start a load, then. You want a snack from the kitchen?”

“After I grab a quick shower. Oh, hi, Mom. I didn’t know you were home.”

Mom had managed to put her hair back in a neat ponytail and looked amazingly unrumpled considering what she’d been doing only minutes before. “Cy and I hooked up for a quick lunch,” she said, kissing him on his cheek. “Thanks, Honey. See you at dinner?”

He gave her a polite peck as she grabbed her briefcase and went out through the garage.

Now, I keep saying I’m not a freak or a perve or anything. But that afternoon, after I had showered, as Cy made me a peanut butter sandwich, I saw him in a new light.

My step-dad was sort of a hunk.

“Sort of?”

I squirmed in my seat watching him spin the Sara-Lee bread package and tie it off, putting it back in the box on the counter.

“He’s my dad. He used to put Hello-Kitty bandaids on my cuts and let me put some on his face while smiling and tossing my hair.”

“But what if he pulled it from behind?”

“Fuck off,” I said to my frothing sex-drive. I ate my sandwich, not looking at Cy, or the front of his crisp uniform pants, behind which lurked a freshly fucked cock.

I was going to hell for thinking about it. I knit my brow, chewing on my Jif creamy and strawberry jam.

“You okay, Chlo-worm?”

“Fine,” I lied.

He poured me a glass of milk. “Nervous about college applications?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling him walk around the counter and rub my shoulder the way he’d done a hundred times before.

“Grab me! Spin me round! Kiss me!” I choked on an extra large bite of my sandwich, hoping to shut up my stupid teenager hormones.

“You’re going to get so many acceptance letters it’ll make all our heads spin. Just don’t let it turn you into a basket case, huh?”

He was earnest, supportive, saying all the right things a good Dad was supposed to say.

Since mom had had me so young, she was only just hitting 40 when I finished high school, and Cy was only a year older than mom.

I wiped the goofy look off my face. “You think someday you can teach me how to ride your motorcycle, Cy? You know, something to distract me?”

He’d bought an old BPD bike at auction and spent a summer or two tinkering with it in the garage.

“Brilliant plan,” he said. “If it’s okay with your mother, we can have your first lesson this weekend. Work on getting you a motorcycle license, huh?”

I fantasized for the first time about him that night.

Nothing major, just him smoothing the orange-red strands of my hair back over my ears and leaning down to kiss me. That was as far as I let it go.

More images and desires tried pressing themselves into my brain but I shut them down. I knew they were perverse. I knew they were sick. I mean, even if he wasn’t my birth father, he was still the closest thing to a real father I’d ever known.

I tried telling myself it was just hormones and I was a stupid teenager who’d get turned on by anything. When you’re 18 and horny, you’ll find anything arousing.

I knew the moment that little spark ignited in my belly and those feelings found their voice that it was wrong to think of Cy like that.

The kiss fantasy was as far as I allowed it to go for a while.

It varied a little. Different rooms of the house. Different set-ups. I’d be lugging a heavy box or need help down off a ladder, and he’d be there, helpful and handy. Or he would just suddenly grip my shoulders gently or tilt my chin up to meet his lips.

I refused to touch myself thinking about him.

I felt that if I crossed that line, somehow he would now. I’d be sitting down at dinner with him and mom, staring down at my mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables, having come down after thinking of him kissing me, his hands gripping me, his mouth exploring me….

It was bad enough, feeling the way I did. Fighting the thoughts I was fighting. But I knew then and there that if Cy ever found out, I would die of humiliation. Not only that, I imagined seeing the look of disgusted disappointment on his face. On top of all the self-loathing I felt, all the confused shame, all the desire, I knew, that would really hurt. If he ever knew, I’d die. He’d be disappointed and angry and feel guilty somehow, even though it wasn’t his fault.

Cy, disappointed. Cy, guilty. And all because I was a sick stupid teenager with a crosswired sex-drive.

“Maybe I need therapy?” I exhaled one night after sitting up watching “Dark Passage” with Cy and Mom before he left for an overnight patrol. Cy was big on classic Bogart films. And despite my usual resistance to black and white movies, something about the tenderness in their eyes, Bogey and Bacall, it was mesmerizing.

“I wish he’d look that way with me.”

I shut that thought down. Locked it away with so many others.

“Bogey had brown eyes. Cy’s are blue.”

“Dark blue,” my hormones corrected.

“Shut up!”

That fall, I’d gone out for the Junior College Fall Play, hoping more activities would distract me. I landed the part of Hamlet. Significantly few guys went in for drama in my town.

Cy ended up running lines with me after dinner most nights while he did the dishes and mom studied for her Masters in Business Administration.

My nerves over performing in front of an audience while also tackling the hardest role in English Literature, tamped down my sex drive a bit.

And it helped that Cy was ridiculously nerdy when it came to books. He’d probably memorized everything he’d ever read.

“How do you memorize so much without any effort!?” I’d groaned in exasperation, having read through all my dialog three or four times with none of it sticking.

“It’s hard to explain. But come on, you’re doing great, kid. Never say, die, huh?”

“But I do die. In the play, I mean.”

“Well, fine. Hamlet can die. You have to get up and take the bows.”

“I can’t believe I let Jolene rope me into going out for this. I was expecting something easier. Spear carrier number two. Or assistant grave digger, maybe?”

“That’s no way to be.”

“Or not to be.”

“See, you’ve got the hardest lines down already.”

I laughed. “You’re sweet.”

“I’m also not letting you give up. You get to stab your step-father at the end, you know?”

“After he poisons me,” I scowled. “What was in that meatloaf?”

“Har har. Try again, yee rogue and peasant slave,” he smiled. “Where wilt thou lead me…”

“Where wilt thou lead me? Speak! I’ll go no further.”

“Mark me,” he said in his best raspy voice. “My hour is almost come when I to sulfurous and tormenting flames must render up myself.”

“Alas, poor ghost…”

Even as he washed and put the dishes in the Maytag, doing his best to sound like a wheezing old ghost, even through the nerves, I found my thoughts drifting towards our imagined kiss.

“But know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown.”

I blinked.

“It’s you,” he smiled, pointing a potato peeler at me.

“Oh,” I looked down at the lines before me. “My prophetic soul, My Uncle.”

“Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts— O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power so to seduce!—won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.”

“So, is Gertrude in on it, do you think?”

He scowled. “We’re running lines, not analyzing the play.”

“No, but if you were a cop investigating the case, you would totally suspect the queen of helping bump off her husband, am I right?”

“Someone trying to avoid learning her lines?” Mom asked as she appeared with a basket of laundry for me to help fold.

“Someone doing laundry when she’s supposed to be studying supply-chain management?” Cy teased.

“I’m multitasking.”

“Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her.”

“I would have bumped him off,” Mom nudged me with a smile.

I ended up getting a dean’s list certificate for my performance. Both mom and Cy were very proud.

I keep a picture of the three of us on the nightstand in my apartment in Boston. I’m dressed in my doublet and hose while Cy and Mom both have their arms around my shoulders, grinning from ear to ear.

I keep drifting back now to all the everyday family things because I dread having to go into the depravity of it all.

This was the guy who’d checked my math homework and learned how to braid my hair in elementary school. Every time I’d drift off into my little fantasy after that summer, I would quickly shake it from the etch-a-sketch of my mind.

Bad, Chloe. No. Wrong. Utterly and irredeemably wrong in the wrongest way.

Then the image of running my fingers through his chest hair the way my mom had, kissing him through giggles as he held me up and I sank down on his hard….

He was my dad! My DAD!

“Step-dad.”

Anyway, the time eventually came for me to head off to U-MASS. I left after my 20th birthday in mom’s old Mustang with a hug and kiss from her and a quick side-shoulder hug from Cy.

“Keep gas in the tank,” he said. “And there’s mace on the key ring.”

“What if he’s cute?” I asked.

He scowled at me. “You come back with a Bachelor’s degree before you bring home a boyfriend, alright, Chlo-worm?”

I saluted. “Yes, Chief.”

I enjoyed college. In junior college, I had decided my degrees would be in pre-med and psychology. I had my first long-term boyfriend, Matthew, a guy in my dorm, who wore thick-rimmed glasses and old concert t-shirts.

By my third year, I had my EMT certification and my nursing degree. Also, I like to think I had an average “body count” for a moderately good-looking ginger-haired coed with long legs, B-cup boobs, and porcelain skin.

Then that summer, just as I was beginning to study for my M-CATs, Mom started bringing up how much she missed having me in the house.

Cy had apparently become a ghost in her life, coming in from working long hours on patrol to crash out on the sofa watching the day’s sports highlights. Or else he was brewing coffee in the morning without speaking and just casually reading his newspaper.

“I don’t know what’s happened,” mom sighed one night over the phone. “Just a few years ago, we were still like a couple of teenagers. Now, he’s just this stone-faced cop who lives in my house.”

By the end of the summer semester, I had agreed to come home for a few weeks before the fall term commenced.

I took the commuter train out of Boston to Essex County on the Friday afternoon before July Fourth. I arrived just as the sky was turning orange and pink over the Lawrence Metro station.

“Chloe!” Cy waved to me on the platform and scooped me up in a big lifting hug before I could say anything. “What are they feeding you at that college?” He asked. “You’re practically a toothpick, Chlo-worm!”

Arms. Big solid arms. Holding me. Clad in a brown leather motorcycle jacket that creaked softly against the swell of his muscles.

Oooh, the sound of well-weathered leather, even in summer.

A quick mental image of him kissing me hello. And then…

Harsh repression and guilt.

“A leather jacket in July?” I teased.

“Hey, I’m from Arizona. So this mid-60s crap is fall weather to a kid who grew up with it hitting 120 in the desert shade. Seriously though, you’re a stick.”

“My gentleman callers have yet to complain.”

He grabbed my pack off my shoulder and hefted my suitcase like it was air. “Har har,” he said, obviously staring at my hair.

At the start of the summer, I’d decided to ditch my long red braided ponytail for something sleek and low-maintenance.

“You don’t like it,” I said, brushing my fingers through my short pixie cut.

“No, it’s nice,” he said. “Just reminds me of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, is all.”

“Mia who in what?”

“It was a horror movie in the 60s. One of Polanski’s early films. How are the grades?”

“You sure you don’t want to see my phone? I’ve got a whole stable of boyfriends for you to track down with your nail gun.”

“I never actually had a nail gun,” he smiled. “At least, not in the trunk.”

“Don’t tell the guys I went to high school with, and you’ll ruin their favorite urban myth.”

“Grades,” he prompted again. “And the job I got you.”

“GPA through the roof,” I said. “And I’m the best underpaid, overworked part-time EMT Liberty Med Rescue ever had. My captain says, ‘hey,’ by the way. Or, let me get this right.” I paused, grabbing his aviator glasses from where they hung from his undershirt and pushing them up onto my nose. I cocked a hip doing my best to look sultry and scintillating. “Hey,” I said breathlessly, pulling down the shades.

He laughed. “Rosie Payne,” shaking his head. “There was a summer.”

I returned his glasses. “She jokes that if mom hadn’t come along and snapped you up, you would have been her biggest mistake.”

“Well, there’s a rule,” he said.

“If you wear a uniform, don’t date a uniform,” I said. “EMTs shouldn’t date cops or firemen—too much drama.”

“There is something a bit off-center with people who run towards gunshots, gaping wounds, and into burning buildings.” He nodded. “They aren’t altogether sane. A lesson I learned from Rosie Payne.”

“She says she learned it from you.” I wiggled my eyebrows.

“Hey, I’m a quiet, small-town police chief. I clean out old lady’s gutters and jump people’s cars in the winter. I’m sound as a pound. Rose isn’t giving you a tough time for being my step-daughter, is she?”

“She speaks not on the sins of my father,” I said. “Though I do ask. She’s a real sweetie, actually. Makes sure I do my job, finish my homework, and get to bed by nine every night,” I smiled. “Except when I stay up blowing firefighters and injecting heroin into my eyeballs.”

“Hardy har har,” he said again. “You couldn’t be a bad kid if you tried,” he said, leading me out of the train station to his patrol vehicle. It was a late model Explorer painted in ghost black and silver. “Tease me all you want, Chlo-worm.”

“Oooh,” I said, taking in the cruiser. “New wheels?”

“Raptor conversion,” he smiled. “Town bought it from the state and gave me the budget to soup it up,” he said. “Those lucky stiffs on Highway get new cars every year. This one only had 84,000 miles on it. With the new engine, she’s practically cherry,” he smiled.

He tossed my bags in the back, as I climbed into the cruiser. I smiled to see the same old Polaroid of my mother and me making funny faces at a carnival he’d taken the first summer we’d lived in Lawrence.

He climbed in the driver’s seat and fired up the engine, chirping the siren the way he always had from the time I was a little girl.

“I thought mom was meeting me,” I said.

“She got called out of town,” he sighed. “Some big house outside of Boxford she needs to prepare for a showcase in the parade of homes.”

“On Fourth of July weekend?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“She wasn’t happy about it. But, she’s the only one her boss trusts with the sale. Blah blah blah. She said it was just for a day or so. So it’s just you and me for dinner tonight.”

“Ooh, ice cream and gummy-worms then?” I smiled.

“Your mother still hasn’t let me live that down.”

“I was 10,” I smiled. “I tasted colors on that sugar high!”

“I’m thinking I’ll order us a pizza,” he said. “Maybe split a six-pack now that you’re legal.”

Legal.

Now, of course, he meant legal drinking age. I knew that. But somehow, my mind popped to an image of him stripped bare and slamming into me, my own yips echoing off the ceiling of the bedroom I’d had since I was 11.

Wow. Where did that come from? I mean, it was one thing to think about a sweet little stolen kiss. But…

I swallowed hard. I wasn’t that sick, was I? It had been just an innocent fantasy when I went off to college.

No! Bad Chloe! He’s your dad!

We stopped at Ralph’s and bought a large Brooklyn Style pie. Then we hit the liquor store, and Cy came out with a sixer of light beer for me and him to split.

“Need anything else before we head for home?” He asked.

“Na, I’m good. I just want a hot slice, a quick shower, and to slip into my jammies with a good book.”

“The acorn falls not far from the tree,” he smiled. “That’s your mom’s routine for signaling to me that any attempt I might make at fooling around is ill-advised.”

“How are things with you and mom? She says you’re both working a lot and aren’t connecting as much as you used to.”

He shrugged. “Empty nest syndrome,” he said. “Delayed empty nest syndrome. Without a kid to shuttle to and from soccer and softball and school play practice, the need to get home on time has sorta drifted to the wayside.”

I looked at him sideways. Something in his expression didn’t match his innocuous words.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Your mom and I are working on it. We’ve started seeing a marriage counselor, and we have a regular date night where we listen to each other and share our feelings.”

“That’s good,” I said, looking to change the subject. “Mind if I choose some tunes?” I pulled an aux cable out of my bookbag and plugged it into the dash.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “But I reserve veto privileges.”

I scrolled and found Demi Lovato and hit play on “I love me” before turning my attention out the window and taking in the July New England scenery.

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