The first time I saw her I was working the races at Del Mar. I was still just a guard, but I'd already interviewed for a supervisor rank and it was pretty much a guarantee. I was giving out breaks - rotating from spot to spot to give the guys doomed to spend the day standing in one place a chance to take a piss or grab a smoke. She had one of two postings along the woodchip path leading from the victory circle to the track. It was a bad spot - stuck in direct sunlight, and in full view of every idiot with a question for a few hundred feet in all directions.
The guard opposite her bummed a cigarette off me for his break. I remember looking up and seeing her looking. She smiled like it was easy. Pale and sunburnt and blonde. She was tall, hair under six foot, more skinny than slender. A runner.
I said something that made her laugh, but I don't remember what. When the other guard finished his break, I took mine with her, passing a marb red back and forth behind the stables and talking. Her accent was soft. She might have been offended when I asked if she was Russian, because she explained (with more patience than I might have deserved) that mistaking a Ukrainian for a Russian was about as large a faux-pas as calling a New Yorker a Texan.
We took lunch at the same time. At the end of the day, I gave her a ride home. She gave me her number.
I called her that night. We talked for hours.
I got my promotion. Training for the supervisors position was a bunch of legal disclaimers and conflict intervention technique. I earned a certification in handcuff use from the company, and got a bit of training in using mace. Lisa came with me to the police supply store. She asked me about my favorite place in town, and I told her. Balboa Park. She was playing with the cuffs, sitting in the passenger side of my Accord when she asked me to take here there. So I did.
I didn't notice she'd slapped the cuff around her wrist until I'd parked the car. She snapped the other cuff around my wrist. I had just started to ask what the hell she was doing when she kissed me.
Which led to some of the strangest, least comfortable making out I'd ever experienced. Couldn't make much use out of my right hand - she had it cuffed to her left - and the brake and the shifter were both in the way, but after a minute we shifted to meet in the center. We'd just parted when my foot left the clutch and the car stalled out with a jerk, because I'd found better occupations than turning it off. She laughed. I fell in love with that sound.
I don't think we ever dated, properly. If we weren't working we were together, out exploring San Diego, showing her every place I could think of. Or at her place, ignoring a sullen room mate to watch The Lone Gunmen and The X-Files in her room. Or at mine, getting high and watching my friend Joe play Final Fantasy VII for hours on end.
She smoked but she never smoked alone. She'd come outside with me and take drags - always holding the cigarette between two fingers, delicately.
Even when work should have gotten in the way, we worked together more often than not. She picked up a promotion not long after me. I was the better talker and troubleshooter. She was the one with judo training and a smile that made you think everything was just fine until she gave you a faceful of pepper or a pair of handcuffs around your wrists.
I read Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic for the first time around then. Lisa was my Molly Millions. When shit hit the fan, she was the one that dragged me out of it. She was the one that decked the guy that broke my nose. She brought me ice afterwards. Half a year after meeting we decided to move in together.
So we found a cheap one bedroom apartment on the second floor of a dingy complex, and we lived together.
The first month was the happiest thirty days of my life.
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