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“There you are.”
At her girlfriend's words, Rosa turned to the rooftop door.
“It's freezing up here.” Alicia stood with her arms hugged around herself, rubbing her arms as though she might lose feeling any minute. She looked quite pretty in her tight red dress, her hair pulled partly back and her cheeks already pink from the cold.
“I'm fine,” Rosa told her, even as her breath puffed in front of her in icy clouds. Her leather jacket creaked in the cold and the ceramic mug she held full of now cold tea was beginning to sting her fingers. She shrugged towards the city, traffic honking on the Brooklyn streets below. “I like the cold.”
But she melted a little when Alicia stepped close and slung her chilly arms around her neck, grinning at Rosa with a wholehearted warmth she was still getting used to.
“Are you sure you don't want to come tonight?” Alicia asked, and Rosa clocked what she thought might be hope flickering behind her long lashes. “I know it'll be crazy—and loud. But there'll be a ton of food and everyone's really excited to meet you.”
Rosa fought the tension rising in her shoulders, sucking cold air through her mouth and feeling it numb her insides. She didn't want to have to say no again, to try to explain again why she didn't feel right accepting the invitation, so she bowed her head and said nothing and hoped that Alicia wouldn't hold it against her.
“It just feels wrong leaving you alone on Christmas!”
“I'll be fine.” Rosa caught her hands and squeezed them, managing to look her in the eyes, trying to communicate that she really would be.
Alicia squeezed back like she understood, and Rosa finally relaxed.
“You look great, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Alicia smiled and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. Her lips were surprisingly cold. “Now come downstairs and say goodbye properly before I freeze to death.” She winked and pulled Rosa towards the roof door, down the stairs and back to Rosa's apartment.
They were enveloped in a swell of spicy-smelling heat at the door—a combination of mulled wine and pine fragrance and the cinnamon sticks in a bowl on the entryway table.
As soon as they were both inside, Alicia whirled around and pressed Rosa up against the door frame. It took her a moment to relinquish herself to the surprise attack, as Alicia suddenly kissed her and she reciprocated until they were both breathless and had to come up for air. A quick glance above them confirmed that one of Alicia's handmade MISTLETOE signs had made its way over the door. They'd been appearing all over the apartment all day and she and Alicia had been getting a lot of mileage out of them.
She let Alicia go with a final kiss, stripping off her own leather jacket and boots as Alicia put hers on, suiting up agains the cold Brooklyn day. Rosa watched her carefully pack the family gifts she'd brought into reusable bags. Finally she stood, purse and bags in hand, puffy winter jacket and decidedly-not-dumb knitted toque on her head.
“Alright.” She raised an eyebrow at Rosa. “Last chance.”
Rosa leaned against the door frame. “I'll see you tomorrow night. Have fun.”
“You too.” Alicia looked around at the apartment like she was appraising it. “What are you gonna do here all by yourself?”
“I'll think of something,” Rosa murmured as her girlfriend stepped close enough that they could once again obey the mistletoe sign. She held Alicia by the lapels for one last lingering kiss before stepping back and watching her leave, still feeling the press of Alicia's lips against hers.
Rosa locked the door behind her and turned to face the apartment. She took in the chaos of their pre-Christmas together while savoring the new silence.
She had had it in her head that she would take this time to tidy everything up, back to the way she liked it. Throw away all the opened wrapping paper scattered around the tree, and all the tissue paper balls they'd made and thrown at each other. Straighten the nest of blankets they'd wrapped themselves in cuddled on the couch, and the clutter of kitchenware they'd brought out onto the counter trying to get the right background for the perfect Nancy-Meyers-style dinner pic.
She took a breath and heard it in the stillness of the space. Heard the traffic outside the window and her upstairs neighbors' heavy footfalls and the fridge clicking through its cycle. She thought of her and Alicia's good day together and decided that this was the way she liked the apartment right now.
Instead, she went hunting for her phone, found it wedged between the couch cushions, near where Alicia's feet had been thrown over her lap as they watched videos of kids and pets knocking over Christmas trees.
Her own tree stood proudly in the corner with its clear twinkle lights and the hand tied bows and the pine cones all neatly spaced. Alicia had insisted on the tinsel, claiming she missed it from her own family tree now that her family had a cat, and Rosa relented. But now, she didn't mind the extra shine.
She felt the weight of the phone in her hand until finally getting up the nerve to check for messages. There was a text from Jake, a text from Gina and already a text from Alicia. But there was nothing from her family. No missed calls, no texts. She looked away from the phone. She wasn't sure what she was expecting. No matter how many cheesy Christmas movies she watched—and with Alicia, this year, it had been a lot—she knew from experience that families didn't just magically come together for Christmas.
Last year had been hard. Fresh off their Diaz Family Thanksgiving, after she'd come out as bisexual, her mom had needed to 'take some time', including Christmas. After a terse conversation with her father, where he'd asked if she could maybe just pretend she'd 'gotten over' being attracted to women for her mother's sake, she'd told him she'd rather spend the holiday alone.
The nine nine had all invited her to spend Christmas with them and their own families. Even Captain Holt had sent her a very formal e-mail explaining that he and Kevin would be pleased to welcome her to Christmas at their house. She'd declined every offer, donated the gifts she'd bought to a homeless shelter, and gotten drunk at a divey gay bar in Connecticut with a couple of young punky queers and some old leather bears. As Christmases went, it wasn't too bad.
She started to accept that maybe all that family stuff wasn't for her after all, and she was okay with it. She was opening up to her family in the nine nine, work was good, and she was finding her rhythm with Alicia, between her instincts to keep up her walls and her desire to jump into the middle of a working relationship.
Then, in the summer, her mom started talking to her again and she had felt a glimmer of hope. But at her first game night back, her mother had a friend's son in tow and spent the majority of the evening in an embarrassing attempt to set them up. Finally Rosa had broken down and told her she was seeing someone. She tried to ignore the accusation in her mother's eyes and didn't respond when her mother asked her pointedly if he was a man. She just turned around and left and hadn't heard anything from either of them since.
She took a breath and stared at her phone. It wasn't all them. She hadn't called either. Hadn't sent a message, hadn't tried to talk to her dad or her sisters. She should. She missed them. She just didn't want to be sitting here, in the wake of this perfect day, trying to justify herself or her life to anyone. She didn't want to think about the fact that her mom wouldn't want to meet the woman who, if she was being honest, she was most likely falling in love with.
She blinked away the threat of tears and was just getting up to grab the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard on top of the fridge when her phone vibrated. She tensed, but it was a video call from Gina.
She sighed with relief and slouched back to the couch, plopping down and slinging her arm over the back, making sure she looked chill before accepting the call. Gina popped up bright on the screen, the gold sequins on her shirt spelling out #ginazon4evr. She held Iggy, wearing a pink sequinned toque and a little black sweatshirt with a picture of a baby wolf on it (courtesy of Rosa).
“Hi Auntie Rosa!” Gina yelled and waved and the toddler copied her and Rosa self-consciously waved back.
“Hi Iggy. Hey Gina.”
“Has Auntie Rosa had a long day of getting busy? Have the love birds finally come up for air? Is Auntie Alicia tied to a bed somewhere?” Gina asked in singsong while bouncing her daughter on her knee.
Rosa rolled her eyes. “Alicia's not here. She's having Christmas with her family.”
“And she didn't invite you? Say no more. I can see to it she gets a used diaper in the mail—”
“No.” Rosa couldn't help guffawing, mostly because she knew Gina wasn't kidding. “I was invited. I just—” she shrugged, hoping the gesture somehow explained everything, but Gina looked like she was still waiting for an answer. “It just seems kinda soon to meet her whole family.”
“Soon? You guys have been together like, six months. I've had engagements in half the time.” Gina flipped her hair and Iggy squealed happily.
Rosa smirked. “I don't know, I just—It's going really well and I don't want to jinx it. I kinda just want to take it slow.”
“You two have pretty much been shacked up since Jake and Amy's wedding—”
“That's different, that's just between us. Everything else is just—messy.” She shrugged. She didn't like messy or awkward or uncomfortable, as her experiences with new people she wasn't trying to arrest or piss off often were.
“Girl, that's what families are,” Gina said as she put Iggy down on the floor.
“Yeah, well, right now, I kinda like it just the two of us.” She didn't mean to sound bitter, but she couldn't help it. Right now, meeting Alicia's family felt like a lose-lose situation. If they accepted her with open arms when her own family couldn't, she wasn't sure how she would feel, and if they didn't, well, maybe it would be a nail in the coffin of the relationship. “I'll meet them sometime. Just not now.”
“I get it.” Gina nodded sagely. “Holidays are a straight up mind-freak.”
Rosa heard a voice in the background of Gina's video, but couldn't make it out.
“I'm talking to Rosa,” Gina yelled to someone out of frame.
“Are your parents there?” Rosa thought she saw a shadow moving in the background.
“Mom and Lynn are on a psychic cruise.” The shadow solidified into a man who popped his head out of the kitchen and waved.
“Is that Milton?” Last she'd heard, they were taking time apart.
“Yeah.” Gina said lightly, as Milton scooped Iggy up into his arms and tickled her chin. “We both wanted to spend the holidays with Iggy. It's been alright,” she added.
“Good for you.” Rosa didn't ask if it meant they were getting back together or not. It was just good they were getting along. Her phone chirped its low battery warning. “I should go, though, have a good night.”
“Hey—you wanna come over? We could hang, drink some stuff, watch bad Christmas movies with former teen stars in them.”
“Maybe another time. I gotta work tomorrow,” she said. Gina made a face. “Someone's gotta pick up the slack while you all are off having fun.”
“You're a dang angel, Ro-Ro.”
“Night, Gina.”
“Love you Auntie Rosa!” Gina called, as Milton came closer to the camera with Iggy. The three of them in front of the multi-color twinkle lights Gina had up year-round looked like a family Christmas card.
Rosa hung up, and grabbed some pizza from the fridge, finally scrolled through the rest of her texts. Alicia had sent her a couple of pics of food. I'll bring back leftovers!! And one of a fabulously done up tree with decorations and lights of every color. Anti-Nancy Meyers??
There was a pic from Jake of him and Amy in green elf hats with jingle bells at the ends. Jake looked like he was wearing the rest of his Kalar costume underneath. Nerds, she wrote back, but she was smiling.
Boyle had sent her an extra-long Boyle Family Christmas e-mail. She started skimming it and stopped about a paragraph in when his use of 'succulent' collided with his penchant for oversharing in a mental image of him and Genevieve that she could never unimagine.
There was even a text message from Captain Holt.
Dear Detective Rosa Diaz, it read. I hope you are keeping yourself well this holiday. Sincerely, Captain Raymond Holt.
She followed his link to an Instagram page where Cheddar the dog was standing under a Christmas tree on a mess of wrapping paper wearing a santa hat. #corgichristmas #prechristmasgift #santadog and a final hashtag she assumed was added by Captain Holt himself #ToWhomItMayConcernCommaThankYouForAppreciatingMyInternetContentPeriodSincerelyCommaCheddarTheDog
She smiled at her phone and put it down, feeling more relaxed than she had since the Christmas decorations had started appearing in store windows. Now that she had started to admit to actually caring about people, there was something about this time of year made everything feel high-stakes. And this year, with Alicia and her family, she had felt the pressure building, but she felt like she had weathered everything okay.
Leaving the couch, she made her way to the bedroom, scooping up the latest Claire Essalgorn book—which she'd finally gotten her bookclub to agree to read—along the way. She stripped off her pants and burrowed back into the unmade bed, taking up the side that Alicia had unceremoniously claimed as her own and settled in to read.
She was just at the part where OverLord Jargon was launching a retaliation against the Kinshippers when her phone buzzed with a new text from Alicia.
It was a photo. The lighting was dark, but she could make out Alicia's face, head cocked with a smug smile. Her girlfriend was topless, with present bows covering her nipples as pasties. Rosa laughed out loud, privately thrilled at a sexy pic. Missing you!!
She shut her book and typed a reply. Hot pic. Miss you too.
Do I get one? ;) The response came quickly and Rosa wondered how she'd managed to sequester herself from the rest of the family. She knew Alicia didn't really expect anything, since she respected the fact that Rosa didn't like taking any selfies, clothed or otherwise.
But she did text Gina to ask if she could borrow her mad Photoshop skills for a minute, sending along a photo.
Just a sec, she wrote to Alicia.
!! was Alicia's only reply.
Rosa received Gina's quick work and sent it along, biting her lip to keep from laughing. She imagined her girlfriend seeing the pic she'd sent. It was the photo of Cheddar in the Santa hat from Holt, but with one small adjustment—Christmas bows right where Alicia's had been.
omg LOL
Rosa grinned at her phone. She could hear Alicia's laughter in her head and felt a sort of inner warmth knowing she'd made her happy. She let that feeling settle in her as she typed back. Love you. Her thumb hovered over the send button.
She hadn't said it before. She hadn't really planned on saying it, not yet anyway.
But if she'd learned anything in the past couple years it was that things didn't always come out as planned—for bad, but also sometimes for good. Some of the moments she'd been truest to herself had been blurted out at top speed before she could think, and before she could shut herself down.
She pressed send. And waited, heart in her throat, certain she was going to be stuck waiting until the next day, or worse, that she'd somehow never hear from Alicia again.
Her phone buzzed in her hand and almost made her jump. She thought about smashing her phone into a million pieces so she'd never see the response, but then, because she reminded herself she was a tough Brooklyn cop, she took a deep breath and looked.
I love you too.
She smiled and rolled on her side, holding her phone tightly, carefully, as though some random bump might somehow delete the message. It felt right, this all still felt right. She raised her gaze to her bedroom window where balconies were decorated in Christmas lights across the street. One apartment had a string of lights in rainbow colors around the window and inside was a little tree draped in pink and purple and blue and Rosa watched it behind the white gauze of her curtains until she fell into a peaceful sleep.