The routine was practiced and all but perfected by then.
On any given Monday morning, Grace went through the same motions. She woke up in some other woman’s bed before any alarm could go off, slipped out from between the sheets, and grabbed her phone to send a text with a location pin so that she didn’t have to run and catch the bus when she didn’t know where the nearest stop even was. From there, she usually had about twenty minutes before the familiar truck parked by the sidewalk, and her best friend would make sure they both got to work on time.
Except, on this morning, she had barely finished clipping her bra behind her back and pulling her shorts up to her waist before her phone buzzed again. This apartment, it seemed, was closer to everything else in her life than she thought, and it put her in more of a rush than she anticipated.
[ text | from: Jane ] whenever you’re decent the truck is warm
[ text | from: Jane ] hurry so I can get my coffee
[ text | from: Jane ] if I don’t get caffeinated because you’re too slow I’ll go in without you
With a roll of her eyes, Grace hit the button to turn the screen off again. She’d gotten that threat plenty of times, and it had never once been true. If putting them a few minutes behind schedule made her best friend abandon her, she probably never would have even made it out of Afghanistan. Jane loved her coffee, in any form, but not enough to disrupt the routine they’d fallen into in the last few years. Since one night in a hospital, she knew her best friend was never going to abandon her for anything – and maybe she took advantage of that, some days.
Grabbing her shoes and a shirt from the floor, Grace slipped out of the bedroom and the apartment without a glance back over her shoulder. Barefoot, without even trying to pull the shirt over her head, she dashed across the cool pavement until she could pull open the door of a familiar gray truck. She climbed into the seat as quickly as she could, not bothering to pull the seatbelt across her chest while she tugged her shoes onto her feet.
“You’re getting bold, Mouse, risking hypothermia so that you don’t have to face someone in the morning.”
She shook her head with a scoff, turning the shirt over in her hands to find which end she needed to pull over her head. “I’d hardly call this kind of weather a hypothermia risk. Aren’t you supposed to be in a rush, or something? I thought Detective Halstead couldn’t function without her caffeine.”
“It would be a lot easier to get caffeine if my best friend wasn’t replacing opioids with sex. Or, better yet, if she didn’t text me every week and pull me away from where I’m supposed to be. I have to drop you off at the district and then immediately go to a scene. Thanks to this little detour, I don’t get coffee at all today.”
Grace pulled the shirt over her head, adjusting it around her chest where it hugged her curves just a little too closely. It wasn’t hers, that much she knew, but it was too big of a risk to go back inside and get the one she’d actually been wearing the night before. “Don’t stop now. Tell me how you really feel.”
It was the same dance they went through every few months, a script they followed as if any part of it was going to change just because Jane repeated herself. It had happened more often since they started working together, since Grace took up running searches and digging into bank accounts and phone records and pasts for the Chicago PD Intelligence Unit. They spent more time together, which gave her friend more opportunities to give her usual monologue.
“Haven’t you considered giving this up? How much longer can you keep playing these games before you... I don’t know. Grow up?” The truck started moving at a slow, safe pace in the direction of their district, and Grace looked out the passenger window instead of looking at her friend’s face and the inevitable frustration and disappointment there. “You can’t keep waking up in different beds every weekend, not forever. At some point, you have to get serious. You have this job now, and you can save money for a nicer apartment, and get the fancy veggie dogs you like. You can have a life that you haven’t gotten to live since you were a kid, right? You can be independent and strong and not weigh your worth against what someone thinks when she sees you naked.”
“My mother didn’t raise me to be independent, remember? My worth is entirely based on what I can do in bed and whether I can provide some rich businessman twice my age with an heir.”
“Yeah, but your mother isn’t a part of your life anymore.” She froze up when a hand briefly rested on her arm, pulling away subtly without aiming her frown anywhere but the passing buildings. “You can do whatever you want, now. You don’t have to worry about what she wanted for you.”
“And what if I want to spend my life jumping from bed to bed every weekend?”
Jane sighed and stayed quiet for a long moment before reaching over to turn on the radio to break up the silence. “Then keep texting me when you’re done so I can make sure you’re not late for work.”
