Work Text:
1. eight ball girl, tell me how you feel about me
Getting drinks after work on the occasional Thursday was a good way to shake off the day. But as per usual, tonight they had spent two-thirds of the time discussing cases. Trinity had had an exciting day in the Pitt, and she was bright and sharp with adrenaline, letting her foot nudge against Yolanda's calf beneath the table and toying with the straw in her drink.
Yolanda's day had been long and exhausting, but having Trinity across from her, giving her sidelong glances from beneath hooded eyes and clearly thinking about what came next after they left the bar, was rejuvenating. It made her feel hot, and wanted, and alive.
"One more drink?" She asked, tapping a finger against the glass holding the last bits of Trinity's mojito. This specific cocktail had had a blackberry syrup addition that they'd both agreed was good, but perhaps a bit too sweet. Yolanda liked her drinks sweeter, but Trinity preferred them to be more alcohol-forward.
"Mmm…sure," Trinity said after a moment, and leaned down to take one final sip through the tiny red straw, keeping her gaze locked on Yolanda's the whole time. The corner of Yolanda's lip quirked up in a smile. Trinity was feisty tonight.
"You paid for the last round, I'll get it." She slid from her stool. "Same thing?"
"Just a regular mojito this time, I think."
"Got it."
She made her way over to the bar, mentally running through the list of drinks. Maybe a mocktail this time, if she was the one driving them back to her place. She'd only had one drink, but she was tired, and she'd need to stay sharp to keep up with Trinity tonight. They'd only been sleeping together for six or so weeks, and each time felt fresh and new and exciting as they continued to learn more about the other, and her body, and the way she liked to be whispered to, or touched, or not touched.
The bartender was a slip of a thing, brunette and pale with gauges in her ears and a silver ring through her eyebrow, and Yolanda found her eyes lingering on the glint of the light on the piercing as the girl flicked her a grin and said, "I'll be with you in a sec, hon."
It gave her more time to study the cocktail menu, but she found instead that her attention was focused on the pretty bartender, who was putting together drinks for the other patrons in a confident way that had always been attractive to her — competence, after all, was one of the sexiest qualities in another person.
Perhaps Trinity was wearing off on her tonight.
"All right. Whatcha having?" The bartender leaned onto the bar across from Yolanda, who found herself unconsciously mirroring her body language and leaning in as well. The other woman's shirt was cut just low enough to reveal a hint of cleavage, and Yolanda forced her eyes back to the menu.
"That elderberry lemonade for me, I think."
"And for your girlfriend?"
Yolanda's eyes stuttered back up to meet the bartender's, which were warm and brown and sparkling with just a hint of a tease. "Oh, she's not my girlfriend," she heard herself saying automatically, which was, in all fairness, not a lie. There had been no promises of exclusivity when she and Trinity had begun sleeping together.
"For your friend, then." The bartender winked at her.
Trinity, when Yolanda returned to the table with their drinks, had her phone on the table and had not noticed the conversation. Perhaps that was for the best, Yolanda thought as Trinity greeted her with a smile, and behind them, presumably, the cute bartender went on to flirt with the next patron.
----
2. eight ball girl, making up your mind without me
If there was one person who had her ear to the ground in the Pitt, it was Princess. She and Perlah always knew what was going on before everyone else did, often including the people involved. They had ears everywhere, and Princess's knack for languages meant that there was very little that got by her regarding patients or providers.
So, of course, it was only a matter of time before she pinned Trinity down to ask her about Yolanda.
"I'll see you tonight," Trinity had said to Yolanda in the hallway as Yolanda escorted a new trauma that they'd both been working on up to the surgery floor. Yolanda had waved back before she and the gurney passed around the corner, and Trinity had gone to her workstation with a faint smile.
It was only seconds before Princess appeared behind the monitor, arms folded on the counter. "What's tonight?" She asked.
"What do you mean?"
"With Dr. Garcia."
Trinity found herself getting faintly flustered. "Oh. Uh, nothing really."
Princess rolled her eyes and switched to Tagalog, which was an indicator that she was here to gossip. "C'mon girl, give me something."
"We're just getting dinner," Trinity replied in the same language, trying to keep from sounding defensive. "It's not exciting."
But the look that Princess leveled at her made it clear that she knew something was up. "So who pays, when you get dinner?"
What a loaded question. Trinity tried to keep her response neutral. "We both do? We go Dutch."
Princess scoffed. "What kind of date is that? Tell her she needs to step up and be paying for you sometimes. We all know she makes good money."
Trinity had no idea how much money Yolanda made, but that wasn't the most pressing thing she had to correct in the previous sentence. "It's not a date, it's just dinner."
"Suuuuure," Princess said, and Trinity's heart dropped when Perlah also came around the corner.
"What did I miss?" Perlah asked in Tagalog.
"Dr. Garcia doesn't pay when she and Dr. Santos go out on dates," Princess said gravely, and Perlah hissed through her teeth as she turned to look at Trinity.
"Girl, you'd better run."
"Okay," Trinity said in English, "that's enough," and she signed out of her work station, trying to ignore the blush she could feel on the back of her neck as she went to check the board and find a new patient. She knew that was just how Princess and Perlah were, and she knew something else juicier would come around at some point that would catch their attention.
Unfortunately, they were back at it the next day.
"How was your dinner with Dr. Garcia?" Princess asked innocently in English, in the earshot of Javadi and Mel this time. Mel, thankfully, was distracted by charting, but Trinity could see Javadi's ears prick up at the first hint of gossip.
"It was fine, we just got Thai food," Trinity said, trying to keep it short and sweet and, above all, boring.
Unfortunately, everyone knew what had happened with the scalpel two months ago — that had been good gossip fodder — so the fact that Yolanda even gave Trinity the time of day was objectively interesting. Javadi asked, "Where did you go?"
"And she still let you pay?" Princess asked, mock-scandalized.
Trinity switched to Tagalog and turned to Princess, exasperated. "We're not dating, it's just casual, okay?"
Javadi looked between the two of them, displeased to be left out of the loop, whereas Princess grinned like a cat with a canary and replied in the same language, "Casual. Got it."
Trinity knew she'd regret giving her even that bit of information later, but she considered Princess a friend (or a friendly coworker, at least), and sometimes giving her scraps was enough to keep her sated.
But god, did everyone have to know her business around here?
----
3. it's a yes or no or maybe
Yolanda liked Emery Walsh. She used to like-like her, until they'd been working together long enough for her to realize that they were cut from too similar of a cloth. And at the end of the day, Yolanda had no interest in dating herself, so she'd put aside her little crush on Walsh and settled into a companionable sort of friendship with the attending.
That friendship didn't mean, however, that Walsh gave her any sort of break. Not when it came to work or to her personal life.
Yolanda found this out one day when they were sharing the surgeon's lounge, and Walsh asked her for the time.
Yolanda had one hand occupied by a sandwich, but she tapped her phone with her free hand to light up the screen. Walsh was close enough to see the numbers, but also to see Yolanda's lock screen. It was a rotating lock screen, and the current photo was a selfie with Trinity from the last time they'd gone out for cocktails.
"Is that Robby's REBOA intern?"
"Santos, yeah."
Walsh narrowed her eyes at her, and Yolanda felt a flicker of unease as she saw the other surgeon beginning to lock in like a homing beacon. "You talk about her a lot."
Yolanda shrugged. "She's talented. And she's considering surgery."
Walsh barked a laugh. "I wouldn't have thought she'd want to leave the ED. What, she's getting tired of being an adrenaline junkie?"
"Please," Yolanda scoffed. "We have just as much fun up here as they do, plus we don't have to deal with all the runny noses and stubbed toes."
"Do you see a lot of her?"
"Santos?" She sure did. A flash of memory, of rumpled sheets and arched spines and soft, pale skin. "Yeah, a bit."
Walsh didn't need to know the specifics of Yolanda's sex life, but they knew each other well enough that she could probably read between the lines. Walsh shook her head with a half-smile hooking at the corner of her lip.
"Are you seeing her?"
That one caught her off guard, and Yolanda paused. Was this what it felt like, to be laid bare by Walsh beneath the lamps of the operating room? She was as sharp as a 10-blade, and Yolanda had probably made a misstep by putting herself in this position to begin with. This scalpel only came blade-first.
There was nothing wrong with the fact that she and Trinity were sleeping together. Yolanda wasn't in any sort of supervisory position over her, and they worked together less than Yolanda worked with the team on the surgery floor. But it felt too vulnerable to acknowledge to Walsh, like she was being asked by the other woman to rip out a piece of her heart and present it with open palms.
"Relax," Walsh said after a second, blessedly interrupting Yolanda's stalling. "I don't give a fuck if you are. It's messy, but if she can handle Robinavitch, she's tough. And you need tough."
Well. Yolanda wasn't quite sure what to think about that — about this conversation with Walsh in general, or about the way that she had inserted herself into giving opinions about her personal life. She hardly knew anything about Walsh's, other than the fact that she was also into women and had probably left a long history of broken hearts in her wake. Had she ever slept with a resident?
"We're not dating," Yolanda said after a moment, aware that the argument was belated and no longer useful, but she still felt like she had to clarify the semantics. "It's…casual."
Sort of. In most senses of the word. Was it casual when their gazes met over a trauma and they shared the tiniest of smiles? Was it casual when she woke next to Trinity some mornings and studied the play of the sun across her cheekbones, like she was admiring the work of a great painter?
Technically. Probably. Because it wasn't like they were actually dating.
Walsh held up a hand. "Okay, yeah, like I said, I don't really care. Just don't break one of Robby's toys, or else he'll come crying to me. Got it?"
"Sure."
Walsh was back out on the floor before long, and Yolanda touched her phone screen again as she finished her sandwich. The picture was from a few weeks ago; they'd both shown up for drinks wearing red flannel shirts, and Yolanda had dragged a reluctant but laughing Trinity into frame for a photo.
Trinity's eyes were shining in the photo, big and brown and beautiful beneath the lights of the bar. The screen dimmed, and Yolanda touched it again. She looked happy too, with the beginning swell of a grin caught forever in the static snapshot.
Then the lock screen rotated, and now her cat was blinking up at her from a cozy spot on her window perch, black-and-white fur set alight in the sun.
Yolanda stared for a moment longer, then she pocketed her phone and went back to work, feeling slightly off-kilter and not entirely sure why.
----
4. but just please don't make me guess
Trinity took a sip of Whitaker's latte and made a face. "This is disgusting."
He yanked his mug away from her and mirrored her expression. "Yeah, I told you you wouldn't like it."
She hummed in response and sipped her americano to wash the sticky-sweet taste of hazelnut mocha from her mouth. "You're going to end up with cavities."
"I won't, because I brush my teeth twice a day."
"Yeah, with both your toothbrush and —"
"— yeah, yeah, I get it," Whitaker interrupted her, well aware of how that sentence was going to end, and he briefly buried his face in his hands. "Fine, I walked right into that one. Take my coffee. You win."
Trinity grinned, all teeth, and took another sip of his too-sweet latte, just because. "Sorry, Huckleberry, you're too easy."
He resurfaced, grumbling, and began to pick at the very crumbly almond biscotti he'd gotten to go with his coffee. They were at a new cafe this morning, a cute little place that had just opened within walking distance of their apartment. It was full of large windows and shelves of trailing plants, and a there was a low, comforting murmur of activity as people typed away on their laptops or chatted over pastries and lattes.
"Have you heard anything from Dana about swapping those shifts next week?" Whitaker asked after a moment, carefully wiping at his hands with a napkin.
"No, I don't think so." Trinity pulled out her phone and opened her messages. Nothing from the charge nurse, but there were two from Yolanda.
GARCIA: I'm about to rip this guy's balls off and use them as a doorstop
GARCIA: at least then he'd be making himself useful
Trinity grinned. There was a new intern on the surgery floor who had gotten on Yolanda's bad side on day one, and she'd been complaining about him to Trinity all week. Trinity hadn't had the misfortune to meet the guy yet, but she imagined he probably wasn't quite as incompetent as Yolanda was making him out to be. She was beginning to type out a response when Whitaker tapped the table between them.
"Hello? Any news from Dana?"
"Oh, no, not yet."
Whitaker sighed and leaned back in his chair. "What's Garcia saying?" When Trinity squinted at him over her phone, he shrugged. "You only grin like that when it's her that's messaging you."
It was uncomfortable to be noticed, even when it was about tiny things like this. Trinity had spent most of her life constructing the thickest walls of iron and stone to prevent those moments of vulnerability, to keep other people from looking her in the eye and seeing her. She'd been living with Whitaker for eight months at this point, and she still wasn't used to how he always seemed to effortlessly find the cracks in those walls, like a particularly insistent plant looking for a foothold. It was an unsettling talent of his.
His comment made her itchy and uncomfortable, so she retaliated by stealing a bite of his biscotti. It was very dry, and it took a lot more effort than she'd initially judged to chew on it. Her mouth was still full when she said, "That's not true. I grin when plenty of people message me."
"Like who?"
"Mel," Trinity said immediately, because it was true. "Samira. Javadi."
Whitaker raised an eyebrow, doubtful. "Javadi texts you?"
She didn't, not really, and even Samira was a stretch. Yolanda was definitely who texted Trinity the most, outside of Whitaker, although Mel did have her moments. Trinity relented. "They've got a new intern in surgery, and Garcia hates him."
Whitaker winced. "Poor guy, already?"
"Apparently."
Her phone lit up again with a third message from Yolanda, who had apparently found thirty seconds of breathing space in her day and was filling it with texting Trinity.
GARCIA: I wish we just had another you instead. can you get on cloning yourself please.
SANTOS: you'd like that, huh? ;)
GARCIA: that wasn't where i was going with that lol, but yes i would like it very much
GARCIA: does it count as a threesome if two of the people are clones
Trinity snorted, then covered her grin with one hand. Whitaker gave a little grumble of dissatisfaction, and she glanced up, feeling briefly guilty. They didn't have any rules about phones during roommate time, but she knew she was being rude.
"Sorry, sorry, hang on."
SANTOS: stop ittt i'm in public and huckleberry is glaring at me
SANTOS: I'll text you later, lmk if you need me to help you bury a body
She sent the message and flipped her phone so it was screen-down on the table. "Anyway, yeah, she thinks he lied on his resume or they didn't check his references closely enough, because apparently he doesn't know half the things that an intern should by this point."
"Damn. I hope they can get that figured out." Whitaker ran his finger along the lip of his coffee mug, but the corners of his mouth were tight like he was thinking about something.
Trinity frowned. "What's up?"
It was Whitaker's turn to look up, startled. She wondered if he felt the same way about her powers of observation. Probably not, Whitaker had never had anything to hide from her. His soul was pure as the driven snow. The only stains of guilt he had were the occasional obnoxious roommate habit. "Nothing," he said, entirely unconvincingly, then backtracked in the face of Trinity's dubious expression. "It's just…are you ever going to ask her out?"
Whatever Trinity had been expecting Whitaker to say, that certainly was not it. She choked briefly on her americano, which at least gave her the chance to process what he'd asked while she was trying to clear the espresso from her lungs.
"Ask out Garcia?" She asked once she'd stopped coughing, her voice still faintly raspy. "To do what?"
She knew what the answer was, but she still wanted to hear Whitaker say it, and to make him hear his own words. True to form, he was already looking sheepish. "To be your girlfriend."
There it was. A flicker of discomfort began to spark at the base of her throat, and she let the hand that wasn't on her coffee curl into a loose fist. Were they really going to have this conversation? Was he actually going to ambush her in public? "I don't need her to be my girlfriend. Things are fine how they are."
"Are they, though?" Whitaker pressed. He seemed to have found his feet beneath him, like he'd brushed the solid ground beneath the waves with his toes and gotten brave. Stupid of him, because Trinity was not having this conversation while they were surrounded by coffee hipsters and macrame plant hangers.
"Things are fine," Trinity snapped, letting some irritability bleed into her voice, but she was distressed to also hear a faint wobble in her tone. Time to build the walls higher, to shore up her defenses. "It's casual."
"And there's nothing wrong with casual," Whitaker said, "but I've seen the way you look at her, and how she looks at you."
How did Yolanda look at her? Trinity wanted to sidetrack this conversation right here and now to follow that line of thought, but Whitaker was pissing her off, and it was time to redirect the conversation to something more personal for him. "Just because you're pining after that farm girl doesn't mean that everyone else is equally as spineless."
Whitaker's eyes got big and sad in the way that let Trinity know she'd struck true, so she latched on like a terrier with a rat between its teeth and continued. "You like her because there's no way the two of you can be together. It's too messy, and you're too much of a gentleman, so you're never going to make a move, and that's what makes it safe." She paused for effect. "It also makes you a coward."
Maybe the last bit was a little too far, she thought as she watched Whitaker bite the corner of his lip. He was a sensitive soul (not as sensitive as most people thought, though; while she accused him of being spineless, she knew that was far from the truth), and she knew it wasn't fair of her to take advantage of that just to shake him off her trail because he was getting to close to her. She sighed and forced her hackles to settle.
"Look, I'm sorry." Whitaker met her eyes with a flicker of curious surprise, and she pushed on. "Things with Garcia are…complicated. But I appreciate you looking out for me."
His shoulders began to melt down away from his ears, and he shrugged. "I get it. But I don't want you to be afraid to want more."
"That wasn't an invitation to keep talking about it," Trinity said flatly, and set down her mug with the clank of pottery on wood. "I'm done. Now drink your damn latte so we can go."
----
5. do you love me, is it hazy?
Trinity was having an awful day.
It had started as she'd left the apartment this morning, when she'd tripped up the stairs and spilled hot coffee all over herself. She'd already been running late, and after she'd taken the time to clean herself up, run cold water over the burns on her arms, and change into a new pair of scrubs, she had gone from "slightly tardy" to "you're going to get a call out," which had proven true when she'd finally dragged herself into the ER and faced Ellis' wrath.
So she'd already started her day with burned forearms and a scolding from a coworker who she looked up to (and might have a little bit of a crush on), and now she had no coffee to help her face the rest of her day. Break room coffee would have to suffice.
Except the break room coffee machine was broken, again, and after two hours of work she was beginning to get a headache from caffeine withdrawl. It wasn't quite migraine territory, at least not yet, which was good because her meds were in the jacket that she'd spilled coffee all over at 6:30am.
But the Pitt slowed for no one, and before 11am they'd already had to call security on one patient and lost two more, including a teenager. Morale was low and tempers were rising across the board, and around 1pm, Trinity and Langdon got into a debate about follow-up care for a patient that was so heated, Dana had to intervene.
"Both of you, go cool off," she snapped, and Trinity stalked off to the ambulance bay in a huff. Her headache was now definitely bordering on migraine territory, which wasn't a great sign considering she still had six hours left in her shift. Whitaker usually had some of her meds on hand, but he was off today, which meant she'd have to text Yolanda. Yolanda had started keeping some in her locker after the other week when Trinity had had a migraine so disabling she'd had to lay down in a dark call room in the middle of her shift until she could drive herself home.
She pulled out her phone and sent a quick text to Yolanda, praying that she wasn't in the middle of a long surgery. Thankfully it was only a few minutes later that she got a message back, and Yolanda was on her way downstairs.
"Hey," she said once she met Trinity out in the ambulance bay. Her brow was furrowed with the beginnings of concern. The blister pack was in her hand. "Here."
"You're a life saver," Trinity sighed. "Thank you so much."
But Yolanda didn't leave once she'd handed over the meds. Instead she stopped, head tilted to one side. "What's up?"
"Oh. I'm just having a shit day." Trinity let herself deflate and rubbed a hand across her eyes. "Not worth talking about."
Yolanda hummed in acknowledgement. "I'm sorry. Can I do anything?"
"Can you tell kids to fucking wear their seatbelts so they stop dying in car crashes?" Trinity mumbled, and when Yolanda winced, she shook her head. "No. Thanks though."
"I'd give you a back massage if we weren't at work," Yolanda said wistfully. "You're so tense, babe; no wonder you're working on a migraine."
Babe. Yolanda had been slipping pet names into their conversations more and more lately, and Trinity would be lying if she said she wasn't secretly thrilled by them. They made her feel like she was something special. She had yet to reciprocate, mostly because she was afraid of using the wrong one or saying it at the wrong time, but she thought Yolanda could probably tell that she liked hearing them. Babe was a new one, and it felt more comforting and intimate than the way they usually spoke to each other.
"Yeah," Trinity sighed instead, and she pocketed the medication. "These should help though. Thanks again for coming all the way down here."
Yolanda scoffed. "Please, like it's that far. I'll probably be down here again within the next hour anyway."
"Come say hi to me if you are?" Trinity could have kicked herself for how pathetic she probably sounded, but her day had been a tidal wave of shit, and seeing Yolanda felt like coming up for air. She felt like she could breathe properly for the first time since she'd arrived this morning.
Yolanda, thankfully, seemed to find her appeal flattering, and she smiled, then flicked her finger along the underside of Trinity's chin. "Count on it. Now go take those meds before that migraine knocks you on your ass."
----
+1 do the signs all point to yes?
Yolanda's pillows smelled like rosemary. Or rather, Yolanda's shampoo smelled like rosemary, and they had both used her shampoo last night, so now Trinity lay ensconced in forest green sheets that wrapped around the two of them like a gentle embrace from an herb garden.
Yolanda reached over and gently snagged her wrist, a thumb nestled against the lateral edge of her radius. She then walked her fingers up her palm in a whisper of motion until they were woven in with Trinity's. "What are you thinking about?"
It had been a slow and relaxed morning at Yolanda's. Trinity had slept over the night before, and while they'd both woken early out of habit, neither had been in any rush to get out of bed, and now it was verging on nine o'clock. The need for food was probably enough to prompt them to leave the cozy cocoon of the bed, but if Yolanda wasn't feeling it, Trinity wasn't going to disagree.
"Honestly…not much," she replied. Her mind felt lazy and languid, like a cat stretching in a sunbeam. It was nice. "Maybe about breakfast."
"What about breakfast in bed?" Yolanda hummed. She squeezed Trinity's hand and released it.
Trinity made a face. "I don't want to get crumbs in your sheets." Especially if they were going to spend even more time in it today. It felt like it was going to be that kind of weekend.
"Ah, yes. Good point." Yolanda yawned and stretched her arms over her head. The sheets rode up slightly, exposing the top of her breasts, and Trinity's palms tingled with the desire to touch, to caress, to worship. But they had a task now, and she forced herself to behave.
"I can get it started," she said. "You still have eggs, right?"
"I should." Yolanda yawned again. "I'll come with you, I should get up anyway."
Trinity slid from bed and shrugged into a pair of sweatpants and a borrowed hoodie, forgoing a bra, and stopped to admire Yolanda as she also left the sheets and began to dress.
"What are you looking at?" Yolanda asked after a moment, though her feline grin made it clear she knew where Trinity's eyes had been lingering.
"Nothing," Trinity lied, and slipped over to kiss Yolanda on the lips. It was a gentle, easy kind of kiss, the kind that evoked slow mornings and coffee and homemade breakfast.
She knew her way around Yolanda's kitchen, including where the silverware and spatulas and pots and pans were, so she got to work mixing some scrambled eggs while she heard Yolanda brushing her teeth brushing her teeth. She emerged several minutes later with a fresh-washed face and her hair pulled back.
"Toast too?" She asked, moving behind and around Trinity in the kitchen with the ease of practice. They'd done this enough times at both of their places that it was like a dance they both knew every move of.
"Why not," Trinity said, and poured the eggs into the pan on the stove. The kitchen soon filled with the smell of warm butter and pepper, of eggs beginning to cook, of bread crisping in the toaster. At one point, Yolanda came up behind her and wrapped her arms around her waist before pressing a kiss to the sensitive spot below her ear that always made Trinity shiver.
"Behave," Trinity admonished, brandishing a spatula. "Hot stove here."
Yolanda disengaged with a laugh. "Sorry, sorry." She clearly wasn't.
Soon they were seated in Yolanda's little dining nook with breakfast, and Yolanda scrolled through something on her phone while Trinity ate her eggs. They were a bit underseasoned, but it was nothing a little salt couldn't fix.
It was quiet but for the scrape of silverware and the crunch of toast, and Trinity felt more at peace than she had in weeks. Time with Yolanda was like that, like she'd stumbled across a little bubble of tranquility floating amidst the chaos of her regular life. These moments were self-contained and perfect, and she hoarded them away to draw on when the rush of the ER swelled and crashed around her.
She didn't know why it was Whitaker's words that came to her then.
I don't want you to be afraid to want more.
What more was there to want? Sure, she could call Yolanda her girlfriend, and the idea of that filled her with a muted fizzing excitement. But did she really need that? Did she need anything more than what they already had?
Maybe the answer was yes. And maybe it was the sleepy drawl of the morning that lulled her into doing something that felt brave and terrifying, because one minute she was eating her toast, and the next she heard herself ask, "What are we?"
Yolanda stopped, her finger hovering in the air over her phone screen, and looked up, confused. "What are we what?"
"You know. This." Trinity spread her arms, indicating the breakfast, the borrowed clothing, the cozy intimacy of routine and time together.
Yolanda's eyebrows began to drift towards each other in something like confusion. "I don't think I get what you mean."
Trinity thought she probably did; perhaps she just wanted Trinity to spell it out for her. And Trinity was already in it now, so she took a breath and kept going.
"I'm the happiest I've been in a long time. And a lot of that is because of you."
The crease between Yolanda's brows stayed, but she nodded. "I'm happy, too."
Maybe was impossible to be anything but, here in her dining nook with the remnants of a home-cooked breakfast between them and nothing they had to do all day but go back to bed together. But there was still a careful almost-tension in the air, like both girls were waiting for the conversation to tip one way or the other.
Trinity looked down at her plate. "What if we…called each other girlfriends?"
There was a sharp exhale then, like an abbreviated laugh, and she looked up to see Yolanda beginning to smile. "That's it?" She asked. "That's what this is about?"
"I mean…yes?" What else had she been expecting?
Yolanda sighed, her posture slumping forward briefly. "God, I thought you were about to break up with me."
"Oh, shit, no." Did that mean there was something to break up? Trinity's interest was piqued. "But does that mean…"
"And the answer is yes," Yolanda cut her off. "I would love to call you my girlfriend. And I'm glad you finally got on the same page, you dork."
"Wait, why am I the dork?"
"Because we've basically been girlfriends for months," Yolanda said. There was a certain lightness to her voice now, a grin, like something had been lifted from her shoulders, and Trinity felt herself responding to it in kind. "But I was worried you weren't ready to call it that."
Trinity grimaced. "Have we both been dancing around this for no reason?"
"Think so. And I think we're the last ones to call it this."
"Yeah…Whitaker pinned me down the other week and basically told me to get my act together."
"Whitaker did?" Yolanda laughed. "And how did that go?"
"I was moderately a bitch to him," Trinity sighed. "But he had a point."
Yolanda reached across the table, palm up, offering. Trinity placed her hand in Yolanda's. They fit together so perfectly. "Okay, girlfriend. I'll clean up the kitchen since you made breakfast."
"Thanks, girlfriend," Trinity said in return, and then giggled in spite of herself.
Not much was different, the rest of that day — they spent the rest of the day alternating between Yolanda's bed and the couch — though Trinity did at least text Whitaker that she owed him a drink or six.
Princess, however, was like a bloodhound on a scent, and when Trinity and Yolanda walked into work together the next day, she grinned a Cheshire Cat smile.
"Casual, huh?" She asked in Tagalog, and Trinity matched her smile.
"Not anymore."