Teresa Noelle Roberts on Respecting the "Dress Uniform"

[In today's blog Teresa Noelle Roberts talks about her story, in which you discover (when you read the whole thing) how to have your kink and eat it too, while still respecting the uniform.]

Teresa Noelle Roberts here, and I’m thrilled to have a story in Lesbian Cops. It’s always a pleasure to work with Sacchi, and it’s doubly a pleasure to find my own work snuggling up to the brave and incredibly hot women in uniform (and friends) depicted by my fellow contributors. But I almost didn’t come up with a story for this anthology.

Usually when Sacchi wants me to submit something to her, I jump. (Yes, that’s supposed to sound both silly and suggestive. If you expect me to play this all vanilla and prim, you’ve got me confused with some other author.) I hesitated a bit over Lesbian Cops¸ though, because the first few stories that came to mind involved uniform fetishes. For one, I figured a lot of people would take that approach and unless I had a really clever twist, it would be hard to stand out. For another, I don’t find police uniforms sexy.

I’m married to someone in law enforcement. It would certainly be handy if I were kinky for uniforms. But my beloved is a humane officer, like the “animal cops” from that Animal Planet series. His uniforms are utilitarian and rather ugly—but at least they’re highly washable. That’s key in his line of work. Every time I do laundry, I do an entire load of uniforms that smell like dog and worse—unless he’s come home bloody and/or skunked, in which case he’s kind enough to deal with the mess himself.

Can you say “not sexy”?

I started a piece involving a cop and a dog trainer, the cop’s profession being only a tiny piece of the story, then discovered that my frequent co-author Dayle Dermatis/Andrea Dale was working on a story in which a dog played a key role. Quite a different story than what I’d had in mind, as it turns out, but since I knew there was already one dog-related piece in progress for Lesbian Cops, one that I was (correctly) confident would be wonderful, I decided to table the slightly kinky dog trainer. (I’m sure she’ll be back, though perhaps not with a lesbian cop as her partner in mischief.)

But that left me without a story idea and I was starting to get frantic.

When I was tearing my hair out, I remembered a firefighter friend telling me how a would-be girlfriend got pouty because my friend wouldn’t wear her dress uniform to a fetish event and couldn’t understand that it was, from my friend’s point of view, both a risky career move and fetishizing something she took seriously.

I don’t think that real-life relationship got too far.

But what if I gave that story a happy ending? I could incorporate my friend’s seriousness, my own feelings about uniforms being work clothes, conflict, tenderness, and good old-fashioned ingenuity, all mixed together as facets of a healthy, growing relationship. And I could weave in plenty of kinky while I was at it, because it’s just not a Teresa Noelle Roberts story if no one gets spanked or tied up.

But no dogs. Because dogs and kink don’t mix (and if they do in your world, please keep it to yourself. Like I said, I’m married to a humane officer and I’m pretty sure that would be illegal.)

And thus “Dress Uniform” was born.

Here’s a taste—slightly suggestive, but also showing something of the characters:

“Are you kidding? I can’t wear my uniform to the Fetish Fair!” I smiled as I said it, though, because Lisette was wheedling like a kid who wanted candy, and it was pretty damn adorable. Lisette looks like an anime girl, all big eyes, big smile and big breasts, and she was using all three of those attributes to good effect. Usually when she makes her eyes wide, smiles eagerly and poses so I can’t help but look at her cleavage, I’ll give in to just about anything she wants, especially if she’s also wearing a short schoolgirl skirt or cat ears at the time.

This time I couldn’t afford to give in. “I’d get in serious trouble if the Chief found out. Besides, they’ll have officers doing security detail. I don’t want any confusion, especially if God forbid there actually is a problem.” Not that I expected problems. The kink community may lead edgy sex lives, but we tend to be well-behaved in public, if only to avoid anyone asking if dressing your lover up in a pony harness violates some obscure local ordinance. Whenever you get a few thousand people together, though, there’s a potential for weirdness. Especially at a downtown convention center, where someone who thinks they’re on a mission from God to get rid of pervs could pay their $20 and walk right in to cause trouble.

“How about your dress uniform? No one would get confused then.”

I winced.

I’d just met Lisette the last time I had to haul out the dress uniform. I hadn’t known the officer who’d been killed. He’d been from a different precinct and we’d never run into each other on a detail or a Police Benevolent Association benefit. But that doesn’t matter when one of your own buys it. You go to the funeral in your dress uniform and you’re part of a strong wall of blue for the poor bastard’s family and you hope you don’t have to put on that uniform again for a long, long time—and that no one ever has to put it on for you until you die of old age.

Joe Morrissey had died less than four months ago. It was way too soon to put that uniform on for anything less than the president coming to our town and needing a police escort. Certainly not to gratify the whim of a lover. A uniform that still had a mass card in the pocket from a fellow officer’s funeral wasn’t sexy.

I didn’t say a word, but I’m not as tough as I like to pretend I am, because my eyes got misty at the memory. Within a second, Lisette dropped her cutesy face and was holding me. “Sorry, Barb. I wasn’t thinking. That was a bad idea.”