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.
I assumed for most of my life 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 from the time they first started dating.
He was really sweet to my mom. And he was always making time to play games and give me piggyback rides. When mom started working on bigger real-estate deals, Cy helped with my homework and read me stories at night. Always very innocent and above board.
I had never really known my birth father, and mom said he'd been a brief fling she'd had right out of college, and 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. 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 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, 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, 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 and realizing I was in nothing but a sports bra and panties, I beat a hasty retreat to my room. I dressed quickly in a spare uniform and then 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 messy knees but puzzled over the cleanliness of my uniform.
