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Yolanda got the call to come in shortly after three thirty. "Ugh," she said as she rolled out of bed, displaying her usual disgusting ability to go from sound asleep to wide awake in a matter of seconds. "Redmond ate bad hot dogs again and I have to cover for him. Asshole never met an E. Coli vector he didn't find delicious."
Trinity made an inarticulate noise that was mostly consonants, and tried to block out the lamp light and the sound of Yolanda turning on the shower by tugging a pillow over her head. It didn't work. Unlike Yolanda, Trinity needed a good ten to fifteen minutes for her brain to engage once she woke up—and even then, that just meant gaining the capacity to make herself coffee—but she was also the one who slept less deeply. Once woken up, Yolanda could easily drop off again, no matter how uncomfortable the spot or bright the lights.
Once Trinity was awake, she was awake.
After a few minutes, Trinity groaned and sat up. She checked the time on her phone and sighed. No point in her trying and failing to go back to sleep when she was on shift at seven anyway.
"I can always use the time to catch up on my charting," she said with a carefully indifferent shrug when Yolanda came back into the bedroom to find Trinity already dressed and waiting for her. "Also, no point in taking two cars."
"I see how it is," Yolanda said as Trinity locked the apartment behind them and they headed downstairs. "You just want me for my sweet ride."
"Who can resist a hot lesbian with a Subaru?" Trinity drawled, as if she hadn't been gone on Yolanda long before she knew what kind of car Yolanda drove.
("She's mean," Dennis had whispered, appalled, the first time that the three of them had somehow ended up having dinner together at the Italian place a couple of blocks over from Trinity's apartment.
Yolanda had spent the meal finding fault with Dennis' hair, undergraduate institution, musical taste, and condiment preferences before sighing and saying, "Guess the most senior has to pay it forward or whatever," and going to pick up the cheque for all three of them.
"I know, isn't it great?" Trinity had replied with a little sigh. She'd felt her cheeks heat and she'd knocked back the last of her wine and hoped that Dennis would assume she was flushing because of the alcohol and not because of anything she might have been thinking about Yolanda's thighs and what they felt like when they were clamped around Trinity.)
At that hour—the blurry edge between night and morning—traffic was light, but they managed to hit every red light between Trinity's place and PTMC. Yolanda sighed. She hadn't turned the radio on, so there was no sound in the car except for the occasional drumming of her fingers on the steering wheel and the faint hum of the engine. Trinity had been hooking up with Yolanda for months now, which was long enough for a lot of things, but not quite long enough for Trinity to feel wholly comfortable with nothing between them but silence.
"I've been thinking," Trinity said, because what the hell, why not say this now? Trinity had never been a fan of leaving the bandaid on when it could just be ripped off instead.
"Oh?" Yolanda shot Trinity a sidelong glance before taking the next left.
"I know it's not like, the easiest career path or whatever," Trinity said, picking at a stray thread on the strap of her backpack. "But I've been thinking about it a bit, read up on it some, and I'm pretty sure I want to go for double board certification. Emergency medicine and surgery."
There was no answer from Yolanda.
"I'd have to put a lot of time into it, I get that." Time, and fees, but Trinity had been careful with her settlement money. She'd only used it sparingly, and only for her education, for her career, because she wanted to put as many goddamn fucking miles as she could between herself and Michigan and never, ever go back. "But it'd be doable, maybe? What do you think?"
"I'm not saying you can't." They stopped at another red light a few blocks from the hospital. Yolanda shrugged. "But real life isn't like in a shitty sci-fi movie, where the audience knows the expert they wheel out to do the exposition has to know what they're talking about because they've got four PhDs or something else implausible."
"You think I want the second certification because I want to make people think I'm smart?" Trinity stared at Yolanda, whose eyes were fixed on the road and whose hands were at ten and two on the wheel, posture perfect as always even while driving. "Seriously?"
"Or because you want to prove it to yourself," Yolanda said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather, or the chances of Trinity being able to clock out when she was supposed to today.
Trinity felt a muscle in her jaw twitch. She'd survived NCAA gymnastics, on the beam and in the locker room; what else could she possibly have to prove to herself? "Or it's because I want to do it, and I know I can do it," she shot back. "I know I have the ambition, and the talent and the attitude needed to back it up. I'm going for it."
"Good," Yolanda said calmly. The lights changed, and she drove on and into the parking lot that was reserved for hospital employees. When she parked, and looked over to see the surely baffled expression on Trinity's face, she laughed. "What?"
"What do you mean, 'good'?"
"Good, you actually sounded like someone whose colleagues would want to support in going for that," Yolanda said, unbuckling her seat belt. "No more I'm pretty sures or I'm maybes. Do it scared if you have to, but don't do it half-assed. No one wants a half-assed surgeon."
"Stick that on a motivational poster," Trinity grumbled as she climbed out of the car.
"You'd prefer if I bullshit you?" Yolanda asked as she retrieved her bag from the backseat and then locked the car. "Because you know that's not how I work."
"No, I know." Even back when Yolanda had still thought that Trinity was trouble—the bad kind of trouble—she'd never been anything other than honest with her.
"Well then," Yolanda said. "If you want it, go for it. You think you can?"
And Trinity's parting kiss for Yolanda was part gratitude, part acceptance of a challenge: she wasn't scared, and she was doing this anyway.