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i.
Even after years and years of hearing it, Trinity still could never get used to the 5:00 AM alarm. She groaned as the shrilling sound kept going on, but before she could even reach out to smack the screen, a warm arm left her waist and reached across her body.
Baran silenced the alarm with a definitive click. Usually up at 5:00 for yoga anyway, the work alarm had no power against the woman, though the warm body next to her did change that a little bit.
Trinity tried to beg for 5 more minutes of sleep, but after months of dating Baran, who would take any opportunity to get up for a run or yoga, she knew it was no use. Finally rolling over to face the older woman, she could see the dim morning light shine through her thin curtains, framing the beautiful woman’s face like an angel. It had been months since they had crossed the line from co-worker to whatever this was, and she was still struck by her beauty like this, stripped from the scrubs and professional aura. She was just soft and warm. And hers.
“Your attending will be very mad if you’re late, Dr. Santos.” Baran teased, sitting up, blocking Trinity’s eyes from the morning sun.
Trinity leaned in, pressing a lazy kiss to her bare arm. “I’d expect nothing less.”
They stayed just like that for a few minutes, wrapped in the quiet of Trinity’s bedroom. She loved these mornings where they did not have to sneak around. Huckleberry had left to the farm after his shift the evening before, claiming Amy needed help with the animals.
An empty apartment meant she and Baran did not have to be careful, sneaking around or worrying about the bed creaking or keeping the door shut. She loved it.
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Eventually, the reality of the impending 12 hour shift dragged them out of bed.
The next half hour was a well practiced, synchronized dance that they’d perfect over the last few months. Although she’d only been at Trinity’s apartment a few times before, Baran knew which kitchen cabinet they kept the good coffee beans in, and busied herself with preparing their travel mugs. Trinity took the bathroom first, splashing some cold water on her face to wake up.
By the time she emerged into the kitchen, black scrubs on and hair tied half-up, half-down, the smell of a dark roast drifted up to her.
“You’re a lifesaver”, she said, walking up to her lover, already dressed in her own scrubs, as she handed her a mug.
“Thanks, honey. It is kind of my job,” she replied, cheekily. She reached out, pulling Trinity flush against her. It was so easy for Trinity to rest her head on her shoulder, wrapping her arms around her, feeling the steady thrum of her heart against her own chest.
“We really have to go,” Trinity whispered against the side of her neck, though she made no effort to actually step away from the warm arms surrounding her.
“Two minutes,” Baran whispered back, pulling her even closer. “We’re early, the roads should be clear enough.”
“Actually, they’re completely blocked, there was a big collision.”
Trinity froze. Baran went rigid.
The deep voice hadn’t come from either of them. It had come from the living room.
Moving in horror, they both turned their heads. Sitting on the couch, half hidden in the shadows coming through the windows next to the tv, was Dennis. He was still wearing his thick flannel jacket and worn jeans, as he relaxed on the couch, nursing a mug of tea.
Silence descended on the entire apartment. It was so quiet that Trinity could hear their neighbour’s AC running. Baran dropped her hands from Trinity’s waist.
“Huckleberry,” Trinity squeaked. She cleared her throat, trying to seem confident. “You’re… not at the farm.”
“My truck blew a tire at midnight,” Dennis said smugly, taking a sip of his tea. His eyes flicked from Trinity’s flushed face to Baran’s terrified one.
“Had to catch a ride back. Didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Right,” Baran said, her voice soft and scared. She frantically tried to step away from Trinity, trying to seem casual.
Dennis lowered his mug. He looked at them with an expression that was completely unreadable, letting the agonizing silence in the room stretch for even longer.
“We were going to tell you! I swear, I just wanted to find the right time, and you know, our jobs aren’t exactly helping us either-” Trinity rambled, trying, and failing, to get control over the situation.
Dennis cuts her off. “It’s okay Trin. I’m not gonna say anything. I kinda get why you didn’t want to tell me.”
"Oh, thank God. If you tell anyone, I’m telling Robby about your little crush!” Trinity threatened, though it didn’t sound very convincing. She’s just really relieved that he won’t expose her, and ruin the best thing that’s happened to her in years.
“Yes ma’am,” is the only sentence he can get out before Trinity grabs Baran by the wrist, dragging her toward the front door as fast as possible, her face burning hotter than the coffee in the travel mug she’d grabbed.
“Have a nice shift!” Dennis called out cheerfully, before the door slammed shut.
ii.
The thing about Pittsburgh in July was that it didn’t so much get hot as it got heavy. Especially at the Pitt.
By five in the evening, the temperature had barely dropped from its midday peak, and the air outside the ambulance bay was thick against the skin, making scrubs cling against your skin.
Trinity Santos took the first hit off her blue razz lemonade vape before the door had fully swung shut behind her.
She didn’t vape often. She’d be the first to tell you that. In fact, she’d told a respiratory patient exactly that six hours ago. Only when things get very overwhelming. Or she couldn’t sleep. Or when she was bored. You get it. Today had more than earned a couple hits. Three pediatric traumas before three, a 3 car collision and her girlfriend who’d had a seizure, a fact Trinity was still white-knuckling her way around thinking about too directly.
She exhaled slowly and watched the smoke blow away, as she let her back find the brick wall. The concrete was still warm from the sun hitting it.
The door to the side of her spot opened.
She didn’t turn her head. Whoever it was, she wasn’t in the mood. If it was Huckleberry, she’d bully him into going away, and he would. After 10 months of living together, he’d learned when to leave her alone. If it was Crash, she’d-
“That’s not very good for you.”
Dana’s voice was certain and completely uninterested in whatever you’d been doing before she arrived. She lit her own cigarette. Trinity snorted before taking a long drag from the blue plastic.
They stood in silence for a moment. That’s what Trinity liked about Dana: she never filled silence just because it was there. Most people Trinity had ever talked with couldn’t tolerate a pause in conversation without rushing to patch it. It drove her insane. Dana let things breathe. She’d been in enough rooms with enough frightened people to understand that silence was sometimes what a person needed.
“Hell of a shift,” Dana said eventually.
“Yeah.”
“Dr. Al-Hashimi’s okay.” It wasn’t a question. It was offered gently, almost carefully, like Dana had been holding it back until she’d assessed the situation.
Trinity’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “I know.”
“She was up and arguing with neurology within twenty minutes. You know how she is.” A small sound, almost fond. “Couldn’t just rest.”
“Typical,” Trinity replied, the word coming out with more warmth than she’d intended to.
The silence that followed was different from the one before it. Trinity registered the difference approximately one second before Dana turned to look at her with an expression that Trinity recognized as her ‘I know something you think I don’t know’ face. An expression that, in Trinity’s 28 years of experience, generally preceded something she was not going to enjoy.
“Okay,” she landed on, flatly. “What?”
“Nothing.” Dana was the picture of innocence. Dana had not been innocent a day in her life. “Just standing here.”
“You came out here specifically to”
“I come out here every shift. You can verify that with literally anyone.”
“Dana.”
“Trinity.”
She said her name the way she said everyone’s name when no one is listening. It should have been irritating. It usually was. Right now, it did something different, something that sat uncomfortably close to motherly, and Trinity did not like that.
She took one last hit from her vape, holding the smoke in her mouth until her throat started burning. “How long have you known?”
Dana looked like she’d been waiting for exactly this, which she had. “Two months.”
“Two.” Trinity stopped. Reassembled. “What gave it away?”
Dana put out her cigarette on the brick wall behind them, and turned to face Trinity more fully, arms crossing. Not accusatory; the stance was almost relaxed. She had the posture of someone settling in for a chat they’d been looking forward to. “Three weeks after her first day. You girls ran that case together. When she handed the chart back to you afterward-”
“She handed me a chart!”
“She touched your hand when she did it.” Dana’s voice didn’t carry anything pointed. It was observational. “And you didn’t pull back.” A small pause. And then you looked at the floor for about three seconds, which is not something Trinity Santos does."
Trinity opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"I look at the floor."
"You look at the ceiling when you're thinking. You look people dead in the eye when you're annoyed with them. You look at the floor," Dana said, enunciating with patient precision, "when you are trying very hard not to react to something."
Trinity shook her head. One more hit then.
“This is..” She stopped. Started again. This was way out of her comfort zone. “Nothing has happened at work. You have to believe that!”
"I know that." There was no hesitation. No judgement in it.
"We're not.. she's not.. " Trinity turned to face Dana properly then, and the expression on her face was something Dana would privately categorize as rare, visible and involuntary and entirely unlike the armored stature Trinity wore through every other hour of every other shift. "It's not a thing that affects patient care. It doesn't! It has nothing to do with anything that happens inside those doors."
"I know," Dana said again.
"And nobody else knows?"
“As far as I can tell, no.”
"How are you not?" Trinity stopped, recalibrated. "Why aren't you lecturing me?"
Dana looked at her steadily. "Why would I?"
"About the dynamic. The hierarchy. She's an attending, I'm a resident, there's a whole list of reasons why it you should be so mad"
"I'm aware of how a hospital works, Santos." Dana's voice was dry. "I've been doing this for longer than you've been a doctor." She seemed to think about it. "You're not her student. You mostly work under Robby, so she doesn't really evaluate your performance, she doesn't write your boards. You're not under her supervision in that way." A beat. "Is she good to you?"
The directness of it caught Trinity off guard in a way that very little did. She looked at Dana for a moment, really looked at her, past the charge nurse's confident composure, past the professional efficiency, into the part of Dana that was asking a genuine question and intended to listen to the answer.
"Yeah," Trinity said. Her voice was quieter than it had been. "She's.. yeah."
"Good." Dana said it simply, like that was the only thing that mattered, because as far as Dana was concerned it mostly was.
"This is terrifying," Trinity said abruptly. "I want you to know that."
"I know."
"I don't do" She gestured vaguely, a hand turned palm-up toward nothing. "This. I don't."
"I know that too." Dana's tone didn't change. Steady. Even. Like a hand on the back of someone who wasn't sure they needed it. "You're doing it anyway."
Trinity was quiet for a moment. Then, in a voice that did not waver but came close: "She had a seizure today."
"Yes."
"And I had to just" Her jaw worked. "Stand there. And be a resident. And watch them take her back, and clock back in, and run a freaking trauma on a man who blew up his own hand, and just act like she’s not important to me."
Dana didn't say anything. She also didn't look away, which Trinity realized was what she needed. Not comfort, not reassurance, just someone who would let the weight of it exist for a second without trying to immediately fix it.
"That was a very hard thing to do," Dana said at last.
"It sucked."
"Yeah." A pause. "She's alright."
"You said."
"I know. I'm saying it again."
“Are you going to tell anyone?" Trinity asked.
"No." No performance to it. Just a fact. "Not my thing to tell." Dana unfolded her arms, stood up straight with decisive efficiency of someone who'd been managing other people's crises for thirty years and had learned to take her moments of stillness while she had them. "Are you going back in?”
"Yeah," she said. "Two minutes." Dana nodded. She was already at the door when Trinity spoke again.
"Dana."
The charge nurse turned back. Waited.
Trinity had her hands in the front pocket of her scrubs now, chin tipped up just slightly; the posture she wore when something cost her to say. "Thanks."
Dana Evans looked at her for a long second, and the expression on her face was one Trinity couldn't quite name, something quiet and knowing and completely without condition.
"Don't mention it," she said. "Two minutes, Santos."
The door swung shut behind her.
iii.
The supply room off the east corridor was, objectively, too small for more than one person. It was the kind of space that had been designed for exactly one task: a nurse or a tech, in and out, pulling what they needed and moving on.
Though, if, hypothetically, a very beautiful attending with brown curls and a tight Lululemon jacket were already inside, Trinity Santos, of course, had no choice but to squeeze in too. She really just needed to get some meds. It was but a coincidence if their arms kept knocking against each other, and their faces were close enough to feel each other’s breath.
Just a coincidence.
That is what she’d told Perlah, when she’d pulled the door to the dark room open and had the shock of the week. It’d taken everything in her not to scream, to run and pull Princess over, though it wouldn’t last more than 5 minutes before she’d know too.
Trinity scrambled to follow Perlah up to the hub, softly begging her not to tell anyone. “It’d be disastrous!” It was pathetic, really.
It didn’t take long for Perlah to find Princess, sitting at the desk, Trinity hot on her feet.
She respected the young doctor enough to switch to Tagalog, when telling her best friend about her discovery in the med room.
Of course they’d noticed. Princess and Perlah noticed everything. They saw the extra cup of coffee Dr. Al-Hashimi seemed to carry in, almost every morning. They’d seen the soft conversations they’d have at the hub. How Trinity’s face seemed to change when Dr. Al-Hashimi is around. The soft hands on waists when walking past each other. They just hadn’t had a real confirmation until now.
The girl in front of them now seemed small. Unlike the confident stature they’d gotten to know in the past year or so, she seemed scared. She, too, switched to Tagalog.
“Please, you have to understand.” She started. “No one can know about this.”
Princess had to only take one look at her begging, and took pity on the girl. They’d been here for a long time, and it definitely wasn't the first time a steamy romance had taken place in the Pitt.
"Mabait ba siya sa iyo?" she asked.
(Is she good to you?)
It was almost exactly what Dana had asked, a handful of shifts ago, outside the ambulance bay, with a half-smoked cigarette in her hands.
"Oo," she said.
(Yes.)
Princess nodded. Just once, just slightly.
"Sige," she said.
(Alright.)
And then, in English, with her usual dry delivery: "We don't know anything."
v.
Garcia was pissed. It was only 40 minutes into her shift, and she’d already been called down to the Pitt twice. This time, She'd been called down for a consult, a splenic lac on an idiotic motorcyclist who did not care about his own life, let alone others. The kind of case she could assess and hand off in under twenty minutes. She got through the door of trauma bay two and found what she expected: a controlled room, a clear board, competent hands on the patient.
She also found Trinity.
"Santos." Purely professional. She'd gotten good at that.
"Garcia." Equally as professionally. Trinity didn't look up from the blood pressure cuff. "Grade two. CT shows no active extravasation. BP's been holding since we got him."
"Let me see the scan."
Trinity handed her the tablet without ceremony. This, at least, had not changed. Santos had always known how to work, had always understood that the job took priority over whatever was or wasn't happening in the space between them. It was one of the things Garcia had respected first, before she'd started noticing other things.
She studied the images. "I want you to watch him for thirty minutes before we decide to take him up."
"Already charted for observation." Trinity took the tablet back, also without ceremony.
For a moment they stood on opposite sides of the patient, doing their separate jobs, and it was fine. It was good, even. The kind of relationship Garcia had told herself they could have, had told Trinity they should have, when she’d stopped asking to hang out just after the fourth of July.
She was still thinking about this, in a not-quite-conscious way, when Dr. Al-Hashimi came through the trauma bay doors.
Garcia had crossed paths with the new attending multiple times since her arrival at the Pitt. She was competent. Focused. The kind of doctor who made you aware, in a way that wasn't quite comfortable, that they were always running at least two calculations you weren't. They'd had patient handoffs and one brief argument about anesthesia protocol that Garcia had not particularly enjoyed losing.
"Garcia." Al-Hashimi glanced at the patient, then at the scan on the secondary monitor, then at Garcia's face in that rapid sequential way she had. "Observation?"
"Thirty minutes."
"Agreed." She moved to the chart station at the side of the bay and started typing. Routine. Nothing for Garcia to look at.
Except that Trinity Santos was looking at her.
Garcia knew that face. Had seen it often in the nine months they’d been whatever they’d been.
It took Al-Hashimi approximately fifteen seconds to finish charting and leave.
Trinity watched her go.
Garcia watched Trinity watch her go.
Then Trinity seemed to remember herself, looked down at her chart, and said nothing.
────────────
She caught up with Trinity in the east stairwell twenty minutes later. It reminded her of better times.
The east stairwell connected the surgical floor to the ER level and Garcia had patients to check on and it was the fastest route, and if she happened to come through the door at the moment Trinity Santos was coming down the stairs, that was the geometry of the building. Coincidence, if you will.
“I'm not stalking you," Garcia said, because it needed to be said immediately.
"Okay." Trinity looked at her evenly.
"I'm going up to three."
"I'm going down to two." Trinity gestured at the stairs behind her. "We're standing in each other's way."
Neither of them moved.
"How long?” She finally landed on.
Trinity went very still. "How long, what?" she said.
"Santos."
A beat. Then Trinity's chin came up, slightly: the particular tilt Garcia recognized as I'm not backing down from this but I'm not sure yet where I'm going. "A while."
"Is it" Garcia stopped. Reconfigured. She had not, she realized, thought through what she actually wanted to ask. She'd walked in here on reflex, and reflex was for the OR, not for this. "Is it serious?"
The question landed differently than she'd intended it to. She heard it a half-second after it left her mouth. She heard the implication of because it was never serious with me threaded through it like a wire she hadn't meant to leave exposed.
Trinity heard it too. Garcia could see her hear it, the slight shift in her eyes.
"It is," Trinity said. Not defensive. Just honest.
Something in Garcia's chest did a thing she decided not to name.
Trinity was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had dropped, not softer, exactly, but less defended. The register she used when something was costing her. "You told me to keep it casual."
"I know."
"You told me it wasn't a big deal."
"I know, Santos."
"So I don't know what you.."
“I know.” Garcia said. She had known. She'd known what she was saying when she said it, and she'd known what she was choosing when she chose it, and she was standing in a hospital stairwell on the Fourth of July holding the completely predictable consequence of that choice, and she was good enough at math not to pretend otherwise.
She looked at the wall for a moment. Looked back.
"Is she good to you?"
"Yeah," Trinity said. Quiet. "She is."
Garcia nodded slowly. She found it difficult to be angry about that. Mostly she found it complicated. The specific complication of a decision she'd made rationally and would make again, pressing up against the less rational part of her that had noticed Trinity Santos on day one and kept noticing her.
"I kept it casual," Garcia said, "because I.." She stopped. She considered finishing the sentence multiple ways. Discarded all of them. "It doesn't matter why. What matters is I did. And you didn't owe me anything after that."
Trinity was watching her carefully. Garcia laughed. A short, genuine sound that caught her slightly off guard. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, composing herself, and when she lowered it she felt lighter. The specific lightness of a thing that had been sitting in the chest unnamed finally getting called by its name, and the surprising discovery that named things were smaller than unspoken ones.
"If anyone gives you grief," Garcia said, "about the attending thing.. come to me."
Trinity raised an eyebrow. "You're surgical."
"I know everyone here." She said it simply, because it was true. "You're good, Santos. You were good before I told you you were, and you'll be good when the next person who should've said it sooner eventually does." She held her gaze for one deliberate second. "Don't let anyone make that complicated.
"I'm sorry it wasn't," Trinity stopped. Seemed to debate it. "I'm sorry it turned out to be the thing that it was. For you. I don't think that was.. I don't think either of us meant for it to go the way it went."
Garcia looked at her for a moment. At the person she'd noticed on day one and kept at arm's length because it had seemed like the sensible thing to do, and who was apparently now being carefully, genuinely good at being loved by someone willing to let her.
"No," Garcia said. "We didn't."
She went upstairs.
Below her, she heard the stairwell door open and then fall shut.
She stood on the landing for three seconds with her hand on the rail before she kept going.
v.
The restaurant was called Altius, and it sat on the top floor of a building next to the South Shore, with wide windows that faced the river and a menu that did not list prices on the version they handed to Trinity.
She noticed this immediately.
She noticed it the way she noticed things in the ER: fast, catalogued, filed, and then she looked across the candlelit table at beautiful Baran Al-Hashimi, who was studying the wine list with the calm of a person completely unbothered by the possibility that any individual item on it cost more than Trinity's biweekly grocery budget, and she made the decision she'd been making in various forms since this whole thing had started: she was not going to say anything about it.
She was also not going to order the cheapest thing on the menu in a way that was visible.
These were the quiet negotiations of dating someone whose tax bracket was not yours. Trinity was adapting.
"The lamb," Baran said, without looking up from the wine list, "is the right choice. If you're looking at the lamb."
Trinity had not been looking at the lamb. She had been trying to read the prices off the sommelier's copy two tables over. "I was considering it," she said.
Baran set down the wine list and looked at her. Her brown eyes did the thing they sometimes did, the rapid, quiet assessment that in the hospital meant I'm three steps ahead of whatever you're about to say and here, at a table with candles and cloth napkins, meant something softer and more specific. Then the corner of her mouth moved. "You're reading the other table's menu."
"I'm not."
"You are. The couple to your left. The man has the prix fixe, you've been tracking it."
Trinity put her own menu down. "I was doing no such thing."
You do this at the hospital too." Baran's voice was even, but the amusement in it was right there on the surface — the dry, precise warmth that she did not deploy in trauma bays or attendings' meetings but had, over the past few months, deployed with increasing frequency in Trinity's direction. "When you think someone knows something you don't, you find a way to get the information without appearing to look for it. It's actually quite good. Clinically." A pause. "Less subtle socially."
"Thank you for that comprehensive assessment."
"You're welcome." Baran reached across the table and turned Trinity's menu over. "Order the lamb. It's actually good here, I've been before. And stop worrying about the prices."
"I wasn't"
"Trinity."
She said her name the way she said very few things; without performance, without the layer of professional distance that they both carried through twelve-hour shifts like a second set of scrubs. Just her name, in a voice that was asking her to stop pretending for five minutes. It sounded suspiciously like the tone she uses in bed.
Trinity closed her mouth. Looked at the menu. Ordered, in her head, the lamb.
"Fine," she said. "The lamb."
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The wine was good. The lamb was, as advertised, actually good.
Baran had spent the time waiting, running her finger over Trinity’s open hand on the table. It was very distracting.
They’d chatted about everything and nothing at the same time. Med school, Baran’s son, who’s conveniently spending time with his babysitter overnight, Huckleberry’s attempts at cooking an actual meal, the works.
Once dessert arrived, they’d spent two hours working each other up, impatiently waiting until they could leave and spend some more time together in Trinity’s bed. They’d ordered a single plate of something involving dark chocolate that had been Baran's decision and that Trinity was, without a doubt, eating most of, when the maître d' walked a couple to the table by the far window, next to the entrance.
Trinity glanced up out of reflex.
She looked at the couple being seated.
She looked away.
She looked back.
Across the table, she watched Baran perform the same sequence approximately two seconds later, with the precision and control of a woman who had spent decades not reacting visibly to things. Which meant that when Baran's hand stilled on her wine glass and her eyes went very still and attentive, Trinity knew she'd seen it too.
Dennis Whitaker, her Huckleberry, was wearing a beige button-down shirt, which was objectively, a fine choice, except that Dennis Whitaker in a button-down shirt at a restaurant like this looked like a very earnest farm boy trying extremely hard.
He was laughing at something.
Dr. Robby, seated across from him, was the one who had apparently said the thing that was funny.
Trinity put down her fork.
Baran set down her wine.
For approximately four seconds, neither of them said anything.
"That's.." Trinity began.
"Yes."
"And he's with.."
"Yes."
A pause.
"Hm," said Baran.
"Yeah," said Trinity.
They both looked back at their dessert plate, then at each other, and then, because the table geometry made it unavoidable and because the restaurant was not large enough for the comfortable fiction that they had not seen each other, they looked at the far window table at the exact moment Dennis happened to look toward the room.
The three seconds that followed were a masterclass in human facial expression.
Dennis went from recognition,to joy, then to the specific horror of a person caught. His smile did not disappear so much as freeze, suspended somewhere between its natural conclusion and whatever his nervous system was currently doing.
Trinity gave him the smallest possible nod.
He gave her the smallest possible nod back.
Then Robby, following whatever had just happened to Dennis's face, turned to look at the room.
He found Baran first. She was, Trinity had long since acknowledged, hard not to find in a room full of people, and something in his expression moved through several interpretations before arriving at a kind of exhausted, knowing irony that Trinity had mostly seen him deploy in the aftermath of a bad code. He looked at Trinity. He looked at Baran. He looked at Dennis.
Dennis looked at the table.
There was a beat.
Then Robby picked up his menu and looked at it with the focused attention of a man who had decided that whatever was happening required a moment.
────────────
They ran into each other at the coat check.
It was inevitable; the restaurant was one floor with one exit, just next to the men’s table. Whoever had designed it had not accounted for the possibility that two separate secret couples might need to not acknowledge each other. Trinity and Baran had asked for the check while Robby and Dennis were still looking at the menu, which had seemed like the best solution, except that they’d still needed to exit the room.
“Huckleberry,” Trinity said, standing awkwardly beside their table.
“Trin,” he replied, noticeably cringing.
A beat.
“Dr. Al-Hashimi,” Robby said, in the voice he used when he was being carefully neutral about something.
"Dr. Robinavitch," Baran said, in the voice she used when she had already done the math on a situation and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Another beat. Longer. The coat check attendant looked between the four of them and sensed, correctly, that she should take her time finding the jackets.
Robby looked at Trinity. Trinity looked at Robby. Baran looked at Dennis. Dennis looked at the coat closet.
"So," Robby said.
"So," Baran said.
"Nice restaurant," Trinity said.
"It is," Dennis said, with the energy of someone contributing earnestly to a conversation that was not really about the restaurant.
Robby looked at the two ladies for a moment, and something settled in his expression. Not resignation, exactly. More like a person recognizing the shape of a situation and deciding to be pragmatic about it.
"I don't see anything unusual about this evening," he said.
Baran looked at him steadily. "Nor do I."
"Two colleagues, separate dinners."
"Completely independent of one another."
"I was here for the lamb," Baran said.
"I was here because Dennis found it on.." Robby stopped and looked at Dennis.
"Yelp," Dennis supplied, at a slightly too high volume.
"On Yelp," Robby confirmed.
"It's a very good restaurant," Trinity said.
"Wonderful restaurant," Dennis agreed.
There was a pause in which all four arrived, collectively and without further discussion, at the same destination. No one was to ever talk about this again.
“I trust we’ll have the apartment to ourselves tonight, then?” Trinity asked, looking pointedly at Dennis, who could do nothing but nod.
The coat check attendant materialized with two coats and looked extremely focused on a point somewhere above their heads.
Baran tipped generously. Trinity suspected she always did.
+i.
Trinity Santos had, over the course of her time at the Pitt, developed a finely calibrated sense for the emotional state of the people around her.
This was not sentimentality. It was pattern recognition: the same skill that told her a patient's affect was slightly off before the vitals confirmed it, that clocked a family member's distress three seconds before they started crying, that read a room on entry the way other people read a headline. The entire ER ran on it. She ran on it.
So when Mel King appeared at her desk when she’s dictating her notes, at the tail end of a Thursday 12-hour shift, Trinity knew before Mel opened her mouth that this was not a clinical question.
Mel had a specific look. Her shoulders were held too carefully, she seemed painfully shy. She was twenty-six and forthright and still surprised, sometimes, that the world didn't always appreciate directness. For her to come up to Trinity, something really had to be the matter.
Trinity saved her chart, turned in her chair, and said nothing. Just waited.
Mel sat down in the chair next to her, silent for a second like she was deciding how to start. It seemed like even though she and Trinity had gotten closer after that brutal Fourth of July shift, she was still a bit scared of her.
“Can I ask you something?” She asked.
“You just did, Melituria.”
Mel had her badge in her hands. Had pulled it off her jacket, and was turning it over between her hands. Trinity clicked it and said nothing.
"It's not a clinical thing," Mel said.
"I know."
"It's kind of personal."
"I gathered."
Mel looked at her for a moment. "You're not going to make this easier, are you."
After a short breath, that was almost a laugh. Mel set her badge down on the table and straightened up slightly, the way she did when she was committing to something. "Okay. So. There's.. there's someone. At the hospital. And I have, it's not, I don't know what to do about it and I can't talk to anyone who knows him without getting back to him and you're the person I trust most who is also," She stopped rambling. "Discreet."
Trinity looked at her steadily. Him. She ran the list of males in their near vicinity before landing on the one that made most sense. Frank. It landed with the certainty of a diagnosis that had been obvious for weeks. She'd watched it accumulate the same way she watched anything accumulate; quietly, peripherally, without comment.
"Okay," Trinity said.
"I don't even know if he..," Mel stopped again. Picked up the badge again. Put it back down. "I'm not someone who doesn't know what to do. That's not, I'm not that person. I make decisions. I act on things. I don't just sit on something for three months and run circles around it."
"Three months," Trinity said.
Mel looked at the table. "Almost four."
Trinity was quiet for a moment. The room around the central hub, the shift was winding down. The familiar sounds of the ER settling into its night shift, the slightly different rhythm of night handoffs beginning, someone's monitor alarm two bays over resolving itself.
She was thinking about a locker room in November, and a coffee that had appeared on a trauma bay cart without explanation, and a smooth hand very briefly finding hers in a corridor outside radiology, and about standing outside on a warm night saying I don't do this, I don't to a woman who had just said I know, you're doing it anyway.
She was thinking about Dana asking “is she good to you?” in the ambulance bay, about Princess asking the same thing. About Garcia’s hurt look but resigned stature.
She was thinking about a restaurant, and Baran's hand extended in the streetlight, and how easy it had been to take it.
She made a decision.
"Can I tell you something first," Trinity said.
Mel looked up. "...Sure."
"It stays in this room."
"Obviously."
Trinity looked at her. Really looked at her, the way she looked at people when she was deciding to trust them, which she did not do carelessly or often. Mel met her eyes with the direct, slightly-puzzled steadiness that was default Mel, and Trinity found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she wasn't bracing against it.
"I'm seeing someone," Trinity said. "At the hospital."
Mel blinked. "...Okay."
"We've been together for a few months." Trinity kept her voice even. This was, she noted somewhere in the back of her mind, the first time she had said together to anyone. Out loud. In a sentence. Without being cornered into it. “But we've kept it quiet because the optics are what they are and neither of us wanted to.." She stopped. "It's been quiet."
Mel was staring at her. Not in a bad way. More the way of someone recalibrating everything she'd filed under Trinity Santos, just like all other med students and residents, does not have a personal life. "Who?"
"Al-Hashimi," Trinity said.
Mel stared for another second.
Then: "Oh my God."
"Yes."
"Dr. Al-Hashimi."
That annoyed Trinity. "Do you know another one?"
"I" Mel pressed her hand over her mouth briefly, and Trinity watched her work through about six emotions in the space of three seconds. "I mean, I knew she.. I thought she seemed.." She stopped and laughed. A genuine, slightly helpless laugh that she pressed back down immediately. "Sorry. Sorry, I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at myself because I've been sitting here spiraling about my situation and you've been together for.. how long?"
“Five months.”
Mel laughed again, quieter, and pressed her fingers to her forehead. "Okay. Okay." She looked up. "Are you.. how is it? Is it good?"
Trinity considered this. "Yeah," she said. "It is."
The words came out without the usual resistance, without the half-second delay she'd gotten used to, the pause where the armoring happened, where her walls rebuilt. They just came out. Simple and true.
Mel looked at her with an expression Trinity couldn't entirely name: something fond and a little startled, like she was seeing a new angle of a person she'd thought she knew the shape of. "She's really good, I think. As a doctor. As a person, from what I can tell."
"She is."
"And nobody knows?"
"A few people." Trinity ticked them off briefly: Dennis, Dana, Perlah and Princess, Garcia,Robby, and she watched Mel's eyes get slightly wider with each one.
Mel was quiet for a moment. "Why are you telling me?"
It was a direct question. It deserved a direct answer.
"Because you came in here with something you've been carrying alone for four months," Trinity said, "and you needed someone to tell you that the thing you're scared of isn't automatically a reason not to do it." She held Mel's gaze. "And I thought it might land differently coming from someone who did the thing rather than someone telling you in theory that it was possible."
Mel was very quiet.
"It’s hard," Trinity said. "I'm not going to tell you it isn't. The optics are real. The work is harder because of it in certain ways; you're more careful, you're more deliberate, you can't turn to the person in the middle of a bad case the way you might want to." A pause. "But if it's the right person, and you're sure it's the right person, then all of that is just logistics."
"Logistics," Mel said.
"Everything's logistics," Trinity said. "The question is whether the thing is worth the logistics."
Mel looked at her for a long moment. Something in her face had settled: the careful composure had come down incrementally, the badge-turning had stopped. She looked, Trinity thought, like a person who had come in needing permission and was in the process of understanding that the permission had always been hers.
"For what it's worth," Trinity said, "Frank is, he's good, for you."
Mel went very still. "I didn't say who it was."
"No," Trinity agreed.
A pause.
"How long have you known," Mel asked.
"A while."
"Does anyone else.."
"No." Trinity met her eyes. "That one I kept."
Mel let out a long breath. "Okay," she said softly. "Okay." And then: "Thank you."
"Don't mention it." Trinity turned back to her computer. "Go home, Melittin. It's the end of the shift."
────────────
Baran found Trinity at the hub twenty minutes later.
Most of the day shift had cleared out. Baran had finished her sign-off, had dealt with some charts needing to be finalized, and had made her way back here by the particular internal compass she'd developed over the past several months that tracked, with an accuracy she'd given up analyzing, where in the hospital Trinity was likely to be.
Trinity was still in the same chair she’d last seen her in an hour before, in the same posture, but she was not working. She was looking at the middle distance with the expression she wore when she'd been thinking about something real.
Trinity looked up. The expression changed, not into something guarded, the way it used to, but into something that made room. "Hey."
"Long sign-off," Baran said.
"Mm." Trinity watched her come in. "Mel was here."
Baran pulled the other chair out and sat. "I know. I saw her leave." She looked at Trinity. "What was that about?"
"Nothing." Trinity turned her chair slightly to face her. "I told her. About us."
A small pause.
"On purpose?" Baran said.
"Yeah." Trinity's voice was level. "She came to me for advice. About her and Frank." She watched Baran process this and file it in the way she filed things; quiet and complete. "I thought it would help her to hear it from someone who.." She stopped. "I wanted to tell her."
Baran looked at her for a moment. "How did it feel?" she asked.
Trinity considered it honestly. She'd been sitting with the answer for twenty minutes and she knew the shape of it. "Like, there’s less weight," she said. "Like putting something down that I didn't realize I was carrying upright until I set it down."
Baran nodded slowly. "I've been thinking that," she said. "For a while, actually."
"About telling people?"
She rubbed her wrist; a habit Trinity had catalogued alongside all her others. "I'm not.. I don't have a history of doing this well. Letting people in to things. It's easier not to. Easier to just manage it privately and move forward." A pause. "But I think I've been confusing managed privately with handled correctly and they're not the same thing."
Trinity was watching her. "No," she said. "They're not."
"Mel is good?" Baran said.
"She was great, actually." Trinity felt the corner of her mouth move. "She laughed at me a little."
"Did she."
"In a nice way."
"I imagine you took it graciously."
"I sat here quietly while she did it,” Trinity laughs.
"I think I'd like to do more of that," Baran said. "Telling people. On our terms." She looked at Trinity steadily. "Not because someone caught us off guard in a corridor, or a restaurant, or a.."
"Supply room," Trinity supplied.
"Or a supply room. But because we chose to."
Trinity looked at her. At the woman who had spent four months being quiet and careful and steady in all the ways that the ER required and a handful of additional ways that Trinity had not been prepared for. Who had appeared in her life as an attending and become, by increments and without announcement, something she hadn't had a word for and now did.
"Yeah," Trinity said. "I'd like that too."
Baran stood. Held out her hand.
It was the same gesture as the South Side sidewalk, the same easy extension, the same unhurried certainty, and Trinity took it the same way she had then. Without hesitation.
"Food," Baran said. "I know a place."
“Oh, yeah? Is it your kitchen?” Trinity teased, carefully avoiding the pinch on her ass.