Dare to Love

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  * * *

  ANDREA’S STOMACH WAS a mass of butterflies that afternoon as she watched the DARE trainees file into the auditorium for their culmination ceremonies. She always felt this sense of hopeful anxiety as she got ready to send another team of qualified people out to do damage to the drug activity in the schools, but never had she felt the importance of the next minutes so personally.

  Was Doug going to show up? He’d been silent all through breakfast. Andrea couldn’t understand it. What had happened to the rogue who’d ridden the exercise bike with her just the day before?

  She relaxed, though only slightly, when she saw him take his place between Sven and Steve. He looked marvelous in his blues. He also looked determined. He didn’t glance at her.

  The speeches seemed to take forever. Though they usually inspired Andrea, she barely heard a word this time. DARE T-shirts were passed around to all of the trainees, and finally the moment Andrea had been anticipating—and dreading—arrived.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you have all successfully completed the rigorous course set before you. You all have the knowledge you need to fight one of this country’s most hideous crimes. It’s now up to you how well you do your jobs.”

  One by one, the trainees were called to the stage by Sergeant Miller, the man in charge of the DARE training program, and one by one they filed back to their seats. Andrea didn’t see any of them. She only saw Doug. She watched as he rose when his name was called. In her mind she walked across the stage with him, willing him to hold out his arms when the time came.

  And she felt her eyes moisten when he took his DARE Bear from the sergeant and held it up for his peers to see. Doug had done it. He was now, officially, a DARE officer.

  He glanced her way and a smile flickered across his face, though it didn’t reach his eyes. Nothing seemed to reach his eyes. He was again the cold stranger she’d met two weeks before, with one major difference—he was holding a teddy bear. Had he reverted back to each man for himself? Or was it just her he was shutting out?

  * * *

  “SERGEANT, MAY I HAVE a word with you please?”

  “Of course, Andrea, come on in. What’s up?”

  Andrea entered Sergeant Miller’s office Monday morning with less control than she would have liked, but determined all the same.

  “I’d like to be assigned to Doug Avery’s classroom, sir.”

  Miller never missed a beat. He picked up a pen, scribbled his signature on a form and passed it to Andrea.

  After she’d put it in her pocket, he spoke. “Do you have doubts about Avery’s capabilities?”

  “No! No, sir, I don’t. It’s just that Officer Avery had a harder time than most in coming to terms with himself and his new position. He had some disturbing philosophies that needed to be changed. I just feel that we’d be shortchanging the children if we don’t make sure he’s not still reluctant to turn his back for fear of being stabbed.”

  Miller nodded, as if satisfied. “You’re on him for seventeen weeks. We’ll talk again after his first students graduate.”

  “Yes, sir,” Andrea said. She shook Miller’s hand and went to turn her assignment in to bookkeeping. She hoped she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life.

  * * *

  IT DIDN’T LOOK TOO BAD. Really. What could possibly be threatening about patches of sandy earth and a swing set? A couple of people walked by. Little people. Impossibly little people. They stared at him.

  Doug broke out in a cold sweat. He shouldn’t be here. He didn’t belong.

  He ran a finger inside the collar of his navy uniform shirt, the one he’d ironed for the first time in his life that morning. The top button was fastened, and Doug felt like he was strangling. He couldn’t do it.

  Another surge of kids walked past, eyeing his cruiser and him with open curiosity. Hadn’t anybody taught them that it was impolite to stare?

  A bell rang. The children, all squeaky clean and dressed in miniature versions of the current fashions, started to run. A couple of girls squealed, their fresh young faces filled with laughter. Doug watched from the relative safety of his car, his stomach knotting with dread.

  Everything looked so innocent, so pure, so fresh—as if from a Norman Rockwell masterpiece. He would never have fit in here, even when he was their age, and he certainly was out of place now. Norman Rockwell would have been a flop if he’d ever tried to depict lives like Doug’s. Doug couldn’t believe what a fool he’d been. He wasn’t needed here.

  But he couldn’t make himself leave, either. He’d spent the last week mentally preparing himself for this assignment. He had five schools to hit in five days. And he’d be hitting them again every week for the next seventeen. He had a job to do. An important job. He watched as two girls walked past, holding hands and giggling, and was once again seized with doubts.

  A second bell rang, and Doug watched in amazement as the children cleared away, leaving the playground deserted and the sidewalk in front of him empty. In a matter of seconds, the brick building before him had swallowed up every last one of them.

  Or had it? Doug caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He watched without turning his head, hoping to catch it again. Was there someone behind those bushes? He was sure he’d seen a flash of green.

  He only had to wait about a minute before he saw the movement again. It had definitely been a flash of green—a lighter green than the bush. Doug felt his adrenalin begin to pump. This was what he did, what he was good at.

  He had to remain patient for a few more minutes, and then suddenly a blond head peaked out from behind the bush. Alert eyes surveyed the playground, but they missed the parking lot—and Doug.

  Apparently deciding that the coast was clear, a grubby boy appeared and dashed toward a side entrance to the school. Doug knew that he should report what he’d seen, that it was probably even his duty as a cop to check behind those bushes. But mostly he knew that he felt sorry for the kid. It looked like the boy had been wearing somebody’s castoffs, like he needed a bath. Maybe he needed a friend. With one last look around, Doug picked up his brand-new briefcase and got out of his cruiser.

  * * *

  THE HALLWAYS WERE NARROW, with ceilings so low Doug felt like he was King Kong as he walked toward Room 116. Everywhere he looked there were primary colors and shapes made out of construction paper. Outside Room 102 there was a paper kite with the longest tail he’d ever seen. And on each segment of the tail there was a name written in black Magic Marker. Doug’s chest tightened again. He was used to dealing with theft and back stabbing. Here they dealt with nontoxic glue and brightly colored paper. Even the floors were clean and new looking. Anything he might have to offer was tarnished and used.

  But then he remembered the boy he’d seen running from the bushes. If there was one, there could be more like him in this fairy-tale building. Doug kept his eyes focused on the little black numbers above the doors, cloaking himself with numbness and a determination to do the job he’d come to do. When he reached Room 115, he looked straight ahead, preparing to commit himself to the next doorway.

  He froze at the sight before him. Andrea was there, standing in the hallway, watching him. She was all decked out and official looking in her blues and shiny black shoes. Her sassy blond hair looked freshly cut. She looked wonderful.

  He’d thought it would be easy to get Andrea out of his mind after the training course had ended. He’d finally managed to convince himself that his reaction to her had just been unfortunate timing, a matter of proximity.

  And then she smiled. That’s all it took. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and carry her away. He was turning into a sap.

  “What’re you doing here?” he asked as soon as he reached her side. He sounded gruff, even to his own ears.

  “A mentor usually follows her trainees out into the schools.”

  Her chin was jutting, as if she was daring him to oppose her.

  “So you check up on all of us?”

  �
��Not quite.” She looked across the hall at the door they’d both be entering. “I’ve been assigned to your schedule.”

  Doug didn’t like the sound of that at all. “You’re going to be working with me every day?”

  “For a while.”

  “How long’s awhile?” Why wouldn’t she look at him, damn it?

  “Seventeen weeks.”

  Doug was beginning to understand. “You don’t think I can handle it, do you?”

  Her gaze flew up to meet his then, and Doug couldn’t doubt the sincerity in her beautiful blue eyes. “Yes. I do. I think you’re going to do just fine. It’s procedure, really. There aren’t enough mentors to assign one to every new officer, so Sergeant Miller usually sends us to the ones who’ve worked the toughest beats out on the streets. The adjustment period is usually a little harder for them.”

  Doug was a little worried about the ease with which he bought her story. But he was more worried about the lightning he felt in his gut as he realized that he’d be seeing her every day, at least for the next few months.

  “Let’s go in,” he said, motioning for her to precede him.

  * * *

  “NAME ME a consequence of not using alcohol.”

  Doug’s statement was met with total silence. He sat on the tile floor of the classroom, resting his back against the wall as he looked around at the myriad faces surrounding him. He waited.

  Andrea sat beside Doug, watching the scene unfold. They’d been in the schools for almost three weeks and already she was addicted to Doug’s teaching methods. This week he’d pushed all the desks to one side of the room, saying that the sixth-graders were too stuck in their student roles to really open up to him.

  After what seemed like forever, a big boy in front of Doug raised his hand.

  “Mike?” Doug nodded to the boy.

  “I thought consequences were like what happened to you when you did something bad,” Mike Cooper said.

  “Yeah,” several voices chorused.

  “Okay. Let’s talk about that.” Doug spread his legs out in front of him. The kids, all sitting Indian fashion, scooted back on the floor to give him room.

  “You got a big game coming up Saturday,” Doug said, addressing Mike. “Let’s say you spend the night with a friend Friday. You eat so much junk you think you might barf and you stay up trying to scare each other until dawn. What are the consequences gonna be?”

  “I probably wouldn’t play too good.”

  “Anything else? Anybody?”

  “The team would lose for sure. Mike’s the only good player we got,” another boy called out. The classroom resounded with laughter.

  Doug smiled briefly, and then his expression turned serious again. The room fell back into attentive silence. “So you got consequences. Negative consequences. Now let’s take the same thing. You got a big game on Saturday. But this time you go right home after school on Friday, eat a decent dinner, watch a little TV and go to bed early. Then what?”

  “I’d probably have the best game I’ve ever had,” Mike answered with a laugh.

  “Probably.” Doug nodded. “And that would be a consequence of having been smart on Friday. A positive consequence.”

  A girl in the middle of the crowd raised her hand. “I get it,” she said before she was called on. “So like, if we don’t use alcohol, maybe a positive consequence would be that we won’t, like, get in trouble for it, right?” She smiled shyly at Doug.

  “Right,” Doug said. Andrea wished he’d smiled back at her.

  “And we’d have more brain cells,” a bespectacled boy called out.

  “We’d have more energy and drive and stuff,” someone else said.

  Pretty soon the entire class, with the exception of one grubby blond boy who had refused to join the rest of them down on the floor, was calling out benefits to be had by staying straight. Some made more sense than others, but they were all equally important simply because the kids were calling them up from within themselves. Just like Doug had suggested all those weeks ago, the kids were buying into the program by coming up with their own conclusions.

  If only Doug were able to feel half the personal satisfaction Andrea did as she listened to the kids. If only she could be sure that he allowed himself to feel anything at all.

  It was so hard for Andrea to believe that less than a month ago, the man had been trying to go to bed with her. The way he’d been acting for the three weeks they’d been working together, you’d think she was sixty years old and married.

  And there were times when she wished she was. She kept telling herself that Doug was constantly on her mind because he was her responsibility—and because it was human nature to want what you couldn’t have.

  But when she lay alone in her apartment at night, remembering something Doug had said, or feeling weak inside as she thought of an expression she’d caught on his face, she had a hard time convincing herself that he meant no more to her than any other professional challenge.

  And then, as the morning hours loomed close and panic started to set in, she’d console herself with the fact that she’d been alone a long time. She was still living in a healthy adult body with healthy adult needs. Her attraction to Doug was a result of neglected hormones. There was nothing personal in it.

  She’d fall asleep believing herself, too. Until the dreams set in.

  * * *

  “OKAY, THIS IS IT, guys. If we don’t get ‘em now, we’re sunk. I’ll fake it to Brackwhite, you two head straight up the center and Avery, you get to the short outside so I can lob it over to you.”

  Doug nodded, going over the play in his mind. He’d been a member of the precinct’s intramural football team for only a couple of weeks. He didn’t want to let the guys down now when their first big win depended on him.

  He left the huddle and jogged over to his place on the twenty-yard line. They should pull this off without a hitch. They’d better. He didn’t relish the idea of walking into the locker room with the braggarts from Precinct 11. He’d probably need to punch out one or two of them.

  “Twenty-six, forty...” Doug was listening to the quarterback’s calls, waiting for his signal. He looked over to the sidelines, judging how far he could go and still be in bounds, and was startled to see a boy walking off in the distance. A slight boy. A slight, blond, grubby boy. Was that Jeremy? He hadn’t been in class all week.

  Before Doug could tell for sure who the boy was, he’d been blindsided by the nose guard from Precinct 11 and was eating grass. His ribs ached. He couldn’t breathe. His head felt like he’d bashed it into a slab of concrete. He forced his eyes open long enough to see that he’d blown the play. And that the boy was gone. Damn.

  * * *

  “I HAVE A FAVOR to ask, baby.”

  Andrea sat at the kitchen table and watched her mother roll out dough for homemade pasta, marveling for the thousandth time that she went to all that trouble when there was perfectly good pasta for sale down at Gibraldi’s market.

  “What do you need?” she asked, munching on a carrot stick.

  Gloria started cutting lasagna-size lengths of dough. “Remember I told you about that nice man who moved in next door?”

  Andrea reached for another carrot stick. “The one with the two little boys?”

  “Yeah. They’re such good little guys, Andrea. They march behind Mark with these little bubble mowers every weekend, helping him cut his grass.”

  “What’s the favor, Ma?”

  “Well now, don’t say no right off, Andrea. Just hear me out. You see, Mark won this mystery-weekend adventure for two. Well, he didn’t win it, exactly, little Shawn did by accident. Anyway, Mark’s not going to go, because he doesn’t have anyone to go with.”

  Andrea quit chewing. “No, Ma.”

  “I told you to hear me out. It might be fun, Andrea. You arrive at this hostel in Cincinnati on a Friday afternoon and they stage this crime. You and twenty other guests have the place to yourselves, and all weekend to solve the cri
me. The winner gets a room for a whole week at the hostel.”

  “Oh, great. So what would I and what’s his name do with that?”

  “You’d give it to him, of course, since he’s the one who won the mystery weekend to begin with. It might be fun, Andrea. Just think, a real policewoman playing at solving a crime.”

  “No, Ma.”

  “He’s alone and lonely, Andrea. He’s an architect and he works at home so he can watch out for his boys. He hardly ever has an opportunity for adult conversation. He needs this weekend.”

  “No, Ma.” Andrea picked up another carrot and started crunching again.

  “His wife left him high and dry. He came home one day to find the boys alone with a note from her. She needed to take time off from family life and go find herself. So he quit his job, moved the boys to a new city where there weren’t constant reminders of their mother and is doing the best he can to give them a good life. Don’t you think he deserves one simple weekend away?”

  Andrea could think of someone else who deserved a weekend away, someone who’d been all work and no play for weeks, someone she’d love to have to herself for an entire weekend.

  No!

  What she’d love was to find a nice safe man she could spend some time with without risking her heart, someone with other responsibilities and obligations taking up his time so he wouldn’t need much from her. And she needed to find him soon, so she would quit being obsessed with Doug Avery.

  “Sure I do,” she said, finally answering her mother’s question. “I just don’t see why I should have to go with him. Come on, Ma, the man doesn’t even know me.”

  But he definitely has other obligations that take up most of his time, was her next thought.

  “That’s just it, Andrea. I talk about you so much that he feels like he does know you. And it has to be you, because he doesn’t know anybody else here yet.”