Chapter Text
Halloween, Santos had decided somewhere around her fourth costume-related injury, was the one night a year the whole city agreed to be stupid at the same time – and the Pitt was where the bill came due.
“Bed four is a guy who got bit by his own dog,” she announced, dropping into a chair at the hub and spinning it to face the mounted screen. “Dog was dressed as a hot dog. Guy was dressed as a bottle of ketchup. I’m just saying the dog made a call, and I respect it.”
“More clinical.” Dana didn’t look up from her triage sheet. She had a paper skeleton taped to the front of the desk, a witch’s hat perched on the monitor, and the voice of a woman working her thirty-first Halloween who fully intended to survive it. “Less open mic.”
“Lac to the forearm. Needs irrigation, a tetanus booster, and somebody to debride his ego. Whitaker’s already in there getting his life story.” Santos cracked her neck. “What else you got?”
“You’re a vulture.”
“I’m efficient.” She was reading the board upside down, triaging it in her head faster than it updated.
“You didn’t even dress up,” Dana said. “You’re allowed to, if that wasn’t clear.”
Santos plucked at her scrub top. “I’m wearing scrubs on Halloween. Dana…I am the costume.”
Al-Hashimi came out of Trauma Two stripping off her gloves at that exact moment, Dana’s response lost in the haze, and Santos went quiet in a way she hadn’t signed off on. Dana simply arched a brow, then rolled eyes after clocking the situation – and left Santos to drown in her own misery.
Six weeks. That was how long Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi had been covering Robby’s sabbatical, and how long Santos had been in trouble. She’d arrived talking about throughput and patient experience scores, and half the department had her filed as a corporate plant in scrubs by lunch. Santos had filed her there too – right up until week two, when she’d watched the woman burn forty minutes she didn’t have fighting three layers of bureaucracy on behalf of a malnourished guy in handcuffs everyone else had written off. She’d won. She’d done it without raising her voice once, flat calm all the way down, with something underneath the calm you could’ve warmed your hands on, and Santos had stood there holding a suture kit and thought: Oh…Oh fuck.
Flirting, she could field in her sleep. Garcia had been looking at her across trauma bays for months like a procedure she wanted to scrub in on, and Santos gave as good as she got. This wasn’t that. This made her go quiet, and Trinity Santos did not go quiet.
So she’d done the math, because she always did the math. Attending – her attending – that was a wall. Married to the job and to the system she kept threatening to rebuild – another wall. And the last wall, the cheap one, the one she’d built out of nothing because it held without inspection: women like that weren’t gay. Poised, pressed, forty-something, right about everything. That was a closed door, and Santos didn’t walk into closed doors.
She’d filed the whole thing under hopeless, kept her mouth running and her eyes mostly to herself, and for six weeks it had worked.
“Santos.” Al-Hashimi crossed to the station and traded her gloves for a tablet. Up close she smelled like antiseptic and something sweeter underneath it. “The pelvic in Two. You read the films?”
“Stable fracture. She doesn’t need an OR, she needs pain control and a social work consult, because the story she’s telling about how she fell doesn’t match her bruising. Somebody at that party did this to her.”
Al-Hashimi looked up. Something small recalibrated behind her face. “You caught the bruising.”
“I catch everything.”
“You spelled her name wrong. It’s two N’s.” She was already moving, already three patients downstream, but she gave the rest of it over her shoulder. “You caught the part that matters, though, and that part can’t be taught. Fix the spelling. Get the consult.”
And she was gone, cutting through the noise like she had somewhere better to be, and Santos sat there with her face doing something she was glad nobody could see.
No fucking way, she thought to herself, and fixed the spelling.
The merciful thing about a busy shift was that it didn’t leave room. She couldn’t pine over an attending while she was elbow-deep in a drunk pirate’s forearm, and Santos was grateful for the pirate.
By five the bay had cycled through the pirate, two costume falls, and a teenager who’d glued cheap vampire fangs to her real teeth with what turned out to be actual dental adhesive. A man dressed as a hot dog – a different one; the city was apparently crawling with them – came in with a heart rate of one-eighty that Santos called as cocaine from across the room. The tox screen agreed twenty minutes later. Al-Hashimi signed it without comment and then talked the guy down off the ceiling in the register she saved for frightened patients, pitched so low Santos had never once made out the words. Only the shape of them.
“You enjoy this,” Al-Hashimi said. They’d ended up at adjacent sinks in a rare lull, hot water running over both their hands. “The chaos. You light up. I’ve been watching.”
I’ve been watching. Santos’s pulse tripped. She stepped on it.
“In here there’s a problem, and then the next problem, and nobody needs you to be a person about any of it,” she explained. “You just have to be right. It’s the only honest room in the building.” She shut her tap off. “What do you like? Besides the brochures.”
“I like the brochures.” The corner of her mouth moved; she had a whole vocabulary in that one corner. “I know none of you believe me. I like fixing things everyone has decided are supposed to be broken. This room is full every night because of a thousand wrong things upstream that nobody called wrong.” She pulled paper towels and dried her hands without hurrying, which should have been impossible in this department. “You go downstream fast. It’s a good instinct. The river still has a source.”
“That’s very TED Talk of you.”
“It’s very true of me,” she said, unbothered, and Santos had to look at the towel dispenser.
That was the trap with her. Santos would brace for a vending machine of corporate phrases and walked away having been seen instead, and Santos hated being seen. She’d built a whole personality to prevent it.
“You’re doing it again,” Al-Hashimi said.
“Doing what?”
“You go somewhere.” She balled up the towel and dropped it in the bin, and looked at Santos the way she’d looked at the films. “You do it when you think nobody’s watching. I won’t ask where you go. I just thought you should know that it shows.”
She walked off before Santos could lay a single brick against it, and Santos stood at the sink with her clean wet hands and one clear, terrifying thought: I’d tell you. If you asked, I’d tell you. That’s the whole problem.
“No fucking way,” she said, out loud, to the paper towel dispenser.
The dispenser kept its opinion to itself.
—
Dana went still first.
It was a thing Santos had learned in her first month – that half second of stillness before the bad ones, like the whole building dropping a degree.
“Peds coming in.” Her voice flattened into the register that meant everybody. “Five-year-old male, fall from height, witnessed LOC on scene, came back around in the rig. Scalp lac with active bleeding, possible left forearm fracture. GCS thirteen on pickup. Mom’s riding along. Three minutes out.”
Santos was on her feet before she’d decided to be. She’d been an athlete before she was a doctor, and her body remembered: see the problem, take the shot, don’t wait for the whistle. Peds did something extra to it – shut the mouth off, dropped her temperature, woke up something older and harder underneath. Everyone knew she got strange about kids. Robby had pulled her aside about it once, and she hadn’t argued, because the thing it came from wasn’t fixable. It was just old.
“Trauma One.” Al-Hashimi was already pulling a gown. “Santos, with me – you’ve got the primary survey. King, you’re on access, and get the warmer running before he’s through the door, the little ones dump heat. Where’s peds?”
“Backup’s twenty out, stuck in an appy,” Dana said.
“Then it’s us.” Al-Hashimi’s eyes found Santos’s. “Kids compensate beautifully right up until they fall through the floor. Eyes on his breathing the whole time, even while you’re working. Especially then.”
“Got it.”
“King?”
“Warmer’s on,” Mel said – already gloved, already gone into that uncanny Mel quiet that meant there was nothing left over to be nervous with.
For one clean moment the three of them stood in the cold bright readiness of Trauma One, gowns crackling, every tray laid out, everything in its place.
Then the bay doors opened, and the screaming came through ahead of the gurney – which was good, screaming meant airway, screaming meant a kid with enough pressure left to be furious – and Santos turned toward it with the scream already filed under reassuring.
The first thing through the doors wasn’t the gurney. It was a woman with a boy clamped to her chest who would not be put down. Small. Spider-Man costume, dark and stiff down one side. The mask was shoved up off his face so the eyeholes sat crumpled in his curls, and he was screaming, and what he was screaming was not Mom.
“Maman!”
Al-Hashimi stopped.
Santos felt it more than saw it, the way a person stopping is a pressure change in a room. The boy twisted in the woman’s arms, found the doctor in the gown, and his whole bloody face cracked open with relief and terror at the same time.
“MAMAN!”
And Baran Al-Hashimi made a sound Santos had not known she had in her. It wasn’t loud. It was the opposite of loud. It was the sound of all the air leaving a body that had not been ready to let it go.
“Cyrus,” she gasped.
Santos’s brain, which was very fast, did three things in the space of a single heartbeat, and it would never quite forgive itself for the order it did them in.
First – clinically, automatically, the part of her that was always on – it logged the patient: airway intact, screaming, perfusing, mechanism witnessed fall with transient LOC, scalp lac, presumed fracture. Good. Working.
Second, it understood: that’s her kid. That’s Al-Hashimi’s son. Her attending has a son and his name is Cyrus and he is the patient and oh God oh God this is so much worse than a normal bad one–
And third – and this was the one, this was the betrayal, this was the thought that arrived uninvited in the middle of a pediatric trauma and lit a match it had no business lighting. Santos looked at the woman carrying him. She was tall and beautiful in the specific frazzled way of a parent at the worst moment of her year. Blood to the elbows. And she was looking at Baran across the top of the boy’s head with a face full of a particular kind of grief, an intimate grief, a grief that had a history in it, and she said, in a voice cracked clean down the middle:
“Baran. Baran, he fell, he ran ahead in the dark, the mask, he couldn’t see. I turned around for one second–”
And Santos’s mind lit three traitorous thoughts:
Wife.
She has a wife.
She’s gay.
There was no time to look at what was on the other side.
“Santos.” Al-Hashimi’s voice was rebuilding itself word by word, a seawall going up with the flood already at her knees. Her hands were on the boy, easing him out of the woman’s arms and onto the bed with a tenderness that had nothing to do with protocol, and the blood found her gown, her sleeves. “Look at me.”
Santos looked at her.
“He’s my son. I can’t examine him. If I put my hands on him, I’ll find what I’m terrified of instead of what’s there.” A breath. “So here’s how it works. I’m still the attending – every order comes out of my mouth. But you’re my eyes and my hands, because mine can’t be trusted right now. You do the survey. You tell me everything you find, out loud, including the parts you think I don’t want to hear. Especially those.”
“I can’t–”
“You’re not running anything. I am. I’m running it on your eyes.” Her voice cracked once and reset itself. “You caught the bruising on that pelvic earlier. You said you catch everything. So catch everything. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And Santos.” It came out raw, stripped of every layer she owned. “My name is Baran. I don’t have it in me to be Al-Hashimi while my child is bleeding. Now stop looking at me like that and use your hands.”
So Santos used her hands.
Afterward she couldn’t have given the order of it back. The order was drills, burned in deep enough to run without her. What came back later came back in pieces, lit too bright.
Mel, getting a line into a screaming five-year-old’s thread of a vein on the first try – a thing Mel did and would never once mention – her voice a low unbroken murmur the whole way. You’re so brave, Cyrus, it’s one little bee sting and then it’s done, count with me, one, two, three…
His scalp, opening up under Santos’s gloved fingers and a fist of gauze. Scalps bled like murder scenes; everyone knew it, and it spiked Santos’s heart rate anyway. She got pressure on it, got the edges apart, and her knees went briefly loose with relief. Ragged, ugly, shallow. The skull underneath it clean and hard.
“Scalp lac, bleeding’s controlled,” she said, in a voice that didn’t shake, which was the most expensive thing she owned right then. “Skull’s intact under it. He needs staples and that’s all he needs. King, what’s he doing?”
“Sats ninety-eight, heart rate’s coming down. He’s mad,” Mel reported. “He’s really mad.”
“Good. Mad means his brain’s getting enough blood to be furious.”
“You like mad.” Baran stood at the head of the bed, where the parent stands, both hands cradling her son’s face so he’d look at her instead of the needles, her thumbs moving over his cheekbones in a slow rhythm older than language. The tremor in her voice was fine and controlled, a wire pulled almost to breaking. “You told me that once.”
“Mad’s a love language.” Santos got to his arm and her stomach turned over – swollen, angled wrong below the elbow. “Forearm. Deformity, distal third.” She dropped to his eyeline and found the voice she kept for kids, the one that came from somewhere she didn’t show anybody. “Hey. Hey, web-slinger. Wiggle your fingers for me. Like you’re shooting webs – pew pew.” His small fingers moved. “Good job. Perfect webs. He’s perfusing past the break.” She straightened. “He needs films of the arm, and with the LOC he needs a head CT, and a monitor with neuro checks until somebody clears him.”
“You heard her.” Baran didn’t take her eyes off her son. “Head CT, forearm series, monitor, neuro checks every fifteen. Princess–”
“Ortho’s paged and the scanner’s holding a slot,” Princess called from the wall where she was hanging up the red phone. “Keep going.”
“His head first,” Baran said. “He went out on scene.”
“I know. Let me check his eyes.” Santos clicked the penlight on, staring down into brown irises the exact same as Baran’s. “Pupils equal, reactive. Cyrus. How many fingers, buddy?” She held up two.
“Two,” Cyrus sobbed. “Maman, it hurts, I want to go home–”
“I know, anak. I know it does.” The word came out of her without permission – her lola’s word, the one her grandmother had used on her – and she heard Baran’s breath catch over the top of the bed and had no room to wonder what it meant. “We’re gonna make it stop hurting, okay? You’re doing so good. You’re doing better than the pirate we had in here earlier, and he was a grown-up.”
That got a wet hiccup that was almost a laugh.
“GCS fifteen,” Santos said. “Oriented, tracking, protecting his airway. He came all the way back up.” She looked across the bed. “What did he fall off of? What did he hit?”
“He fell off a retaining wall.” The other woman spoke from where Princess had steered her back against the wall, hands pressed over her own mouth, leaving prints. “Four feet, maybe. Onto the flagstone. Baran, I was right there and I still–”
“Solange.” Baran didn’t look up from their son. “Stop, it’s okay. Children fall. You didn’t do this.” Then, lower, in French – Santos didn’t catch the words, a thing worn smooth from being said across a thousand smaller emergencies – and the woman against the wall folded a little at the knees, and Princess caught her elbow.
Four feet onto stone. Seconds of LOC, fifteen now. Santos ran the math she’d run a hundred times, and then she made herself say her name.
“Baran.”
Saying it changed the temperature of her whole body. Baran’s eyes came up off her son – exhausted, wet, wide open, nothing left in them but the person – and Santos understood she was looking at the room under the room. A locked door standing open, because a five-year-old had kicked it off its hinges.
“He’s going to be okay,” Santos said, quietly. Just for her, across inches of her screaming kid. “Clean survey. The LOC was seconds and he’s a fifteen – the scan’s a formality. I’d bet my license it’s clean. His arm reads like a buckle fracture. It’ll heal so completely that in two years you won’t find the line on a film. Hey. Look at me. He’s okay.”
And Baran Al-Hashimi – who had stayed flat calm through a man split open on a table, who had never once let this department see the bottom of her – looked at Santos over her bleeding son, and her face came apart all at once, in total silence.
“Okay,” she said, with no floor under her voice at all. “Okay. I believe you. King – go up with him.”
—
The scan was clean.
Santos read it herself, standing in the dark of the imaging suite with the radiologist, both of them leaning in: no blood, no shift, no fracture. The arm films lit up the buckle fracture she’d called from the bedside – a clean cortical wrinkle that would heal in a month and buy him a cast to brag about all November.
She crouched to his eyeline afterwards and told him the staples in his head were going to be like a little zipper, and he stopped crying long enough to ask whether the zipper would beep at the airport, and she said “definitely,” because lying to kids was the easiest lying there was, and he nodded like she’d confirmed something he’d long suspected about the universe. She then handed him to Ortho.
She passed the neuro-check schedule to Princess. She was, the whole way through it, a professional.
She made it back down the hall to the ED before it caught her.
It came sideways, the way it always did. Her heart first, going hard for a reason her body declined to share. Then her hands gone cold and far away, like they belonged to somebody else. The hallway lights pulsed. She got herself through the heavy door into the back stairwell, the concrete one nobody used, the one that smelled like old smoke and floor cleaner, and the door shut behind her with an industrial clunk, and she sat down hard on the bottom step and put her head in her hands.
The kid is fine. You did the job. So what the hell is–
But she knew. That was the worst part of being fast: she couldn’t outrun herself. Her own head was always already waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
It wasn’t the trauma. She’d run peds traumas before; falling apart after wasn’t her malfunction. It was the half second when Solange had said Baran like a word with a whole life inside it, and the thing Santos had felt – in the middle of a pediatric trauma, God – was relief. Relief so hard it had nearly sat her down. And she didn’t get to feel relieved about a colleague’s family unless the wall she’d built had been holding something back.
Unless hopeless had been doing a job.
Hopeless had been safe. That was the entire engineering of it. Hopeless meant feeling the pull of Baran Al-Hashimi without ever risking the reach. She couldn’t fall through a door she’d decided was a wall. She couldn’t get left if she never arrived.
“Fuck,” Santos said, out loud. Her voice cracked on it.
The stairwell had heard worse.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw colors. Get up. Go be normal. Help with the discharge paperwork, and do not, under any circumstances, do the thing your whole chest is yelling at you to–
The door at the top of the stairs opened.
Santos was on her feet before she’d registered moving, dragging the back of her wrist across her face, hauling everything into something that could pass at a distance for fine.
“He’s clear.” Baran’s voice, coming down. Tired to the bone, but the wire in it had gone slack. “Clean scan – you called every part of it. The reduction went perfectly, he’s casted, and he is currently negotiating to keep the broken mask as, quote, a battle trophy. He also wants to know if you’re the doctor who said the zipper would beep at the airport, because he’s planning to tell his entire kindergarten.”
“It absolutely does not beep,” Santos said, to the wall. “Don’t tell him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. He’s going to be a legend.” Baran came around the half landing, and saw her.
Santos watched her see it – the red eyes she hadn’t gotten dry in time, the locked shoulders – watched her land on it, and then, in the next second, decide exactly how careful to be. The care was worse than anything. The care undid her more than blunt force ever could have.
“Santos.” It came out very soft. She stayed up on her step, not crowding. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Your kid’s fine, you just said so, I’m just–” She blew out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “Decompressing. Privately. In a stairwell, like a healthy adult with excellent boundaries. It’s a whole wellness initiative, you’d love it, I’m thinking of writing it up–”
“Santos.”
“–there could be a brochure–”
“Trinity.”
Her first name had never once been in that mouth, and it landed like a hand laid flat on her sternum, and for the first time in living memory Santos had nothing.
Baran came down the rest of the stairs, and then she sat on the bottom step a hand’s width away. She folded her hands in her lap and went still.
“You were extraordinary in there,” she praised her like it didn’t cost her anything. The words hit somewhere in Santos’s chest. “That gets said first, because I can see this is about to land on you as something you did wrong, and you didn’t. He’s whole, and a great deal of why is your hands. So whatever this is, it isn’t that.” A beat, and then the question arrived as quiet and precise as the one about the bruising, in what seemed like a lifetime ago after that peds case. “Are you shaking because of the trauma? Or because of something it knocked loose?”
“You don’t…” Santos’s voice came apart on the first try. “You don’t get to just ask me that.”
“I ask invasive questions for a living.” It was so far from unkind it was hard to stand near. “And you’re hiding in a stairwell with a face like you just lost an argument with yourself. I’ve lost a few of those on these exact stairs. I know the posture.”
“I’m fine,” Santos tried to reassure, and it came out so small that it stopped being a wall and became what it had secretly always been, which was a white flag.
Baran was quiet a moment.
“Her name is Solange,” she said then, evenly, like she was reading it off a chart. “Since you’ve clearly done the math, and you’ve done it right, because you catch everything. We were married for nine years. We’ve been divorced for two. She’s from Montréal – that’s the Maman and Mama of it. I’m Maman, obviously. Cyrus refused the English word from his crib, and we surrendered on that around the same time we surrendered on each other.” She gnawed on her lip. “We’re a better team than we were a marriage. He’s the best thing either of us will ever do.”
Santos said nothing. Her heart was loud enough she half expected it to echo.
“And tonight,” Baran continued, her voice losing its floor one stair at a time, “Dana said five-year-old, fall from height, and I turned around, and it was him. That’s the most afraid I’ve been in my life. Maybe ever. And you took it out of my hands so I could hold my son, and you didn’t flinch, and you got him laughing while you set up to staple his head shut.” She looked over. “So. That’s who Solange is. In case the not-knowing was part of what’s down here on the floor with you.”
Santos sat back down. Her legs just did it.
“This is so embarrassing,” she said, wetly, after a while.
“It’s a little embarrassing,” Baran agreed, pinching her index finger and thumb together; the smallest gap between the two. “You’ll survive. We survive nearly everything that embarrasses us. It’s one of the more reliable findings in the literature.”
A laugh punched out of Santos, ragged, half a sob. She dragged both hands down her face, then she did the most dangerous thing she’d ever done. She told the truth.
“I thought you were straight.”
Baran didn’t dignify that revelation with a response yet. She waited, hands still in her lap.
“That’s the dumb part. That’s what I’m down here being a disaster about.” Santos kept her eyes on the fire door, because she could say it to the door. “I had you buried in my heart. Week two, I had you under hopeless, and hopeless was great. Hopeless meant I never had to do anything about it. And then your kid screamed Maman, and Solange said your name with a face of intimate familiarity, and what I felt was relieved. In the middle of a peds trauma. Which I know is insane. I have the self-awareness to know that. I’m just apparently not in charge of it.” Her voice dropped. “And relieved only works if hopeless was the thing keeping the lid on. So…lid’s off, and now I’m crying in a stairwell in front of my attending, because it turns out I don’t know what to do with something I’m actually allowed to want. I’m not built for that.”
The stairwell hummed. Santos stared at the door and waited for the catastrophe.
“Trinity. Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“You ran a trauma without flinching. You can turn your head eleven inches. It’s a much simpler procedure.”
Santos turned her head.
Baran was looking at her with the searching gone out of her face and only the found left in it. Warmth, plain and undefended. There was a smudge of her son’s blood dried at her hairline where she’d pressed her mouth to him. She was the most tired and the most real thing Santos had ever sat this close to.
“I’m going to tell you several things,” Baran said. “In order, because I’m exhausted and I’ll lose them. One. I am not straight. I have never been straight, not for one hour of my life, and I’d genuinely like to know what you based it on.”
“The…everything. The whole–” Santos waved a hand at all of her. “Your posture…” Saying it out loud now, Trinity cringed at how fucking stupid it sounded.
“My posture…” Baran absorbed that, her nose scrunched in confusion. “We’ll revisit your reasoning process some other time. Two.” Her voice gentled. “I noticed you in week one.”
Santos stopped breathing.
“You caught a non-accidental injury that two seniors had walked straight past, and you were furious about it. Really furious. The kind of furious that isn’t theoretical.” She set it down carefully, where it would bear weight, and she didn’t pull at it. “You go strange about children. It’s the one place your armor comes all the way off and something much older runs the room. I’m not asking what’s behind that. I won’t ever ask. It’s yours, and you’ll open it or you won’t, in your own time, to whoever you choose. But I saw it. And I saw that the person underneath all the speed and the terrible nicknames–”
“Huckleberry is a gift–”
“–the person underneath,” Baran barreled on, unbothered, “feels everything at a volume that would flatten most people, and built a very effective system to make sure nobody ever finds out. I recognized the system. I built one too. Mine has better branding.” The corner of her mouth lifted, and then more of her face followed it, worn and soft. “I was a sick kid in a country that kept getting my name wrong. I learned that if I was correct enough about everything, nobody looked any closer. Competence is my version of your jokes. We’re the same animal, Trinity. We just picked different coats.”
Santos was crying again, openly now, not fighting it – a thing she had not done in front of another person in so long she’d forgotten her body could do it without the world ending.
“At the sink,” Santos said. “You said you wouldn’t ask. And then you just…stood there, and didn’t take anything.”
“There was nothing to take. I wasn’t trying to get in.” Baran said it like the most obvious thing in the world. “I wanted you to know the option existed. Those are very different things, and I don’t think many people in your life have known the difference. Which might be the saddest thing I’ve learned about you in almost two months, and I’ve learned a great deal.”
Santos pressed her wrist to her mouth and didn’t trust herself with anything.
“I’m aware of the complication, before you say it.” Baran’s hands finally moved, smoothing once over her own knees. “I’m your attending. That’s real, and it matters, and there’s a responsible, very boring conversation we’ll need to have about the right way to do this – if it’s a thing we both decide we want. Schedules. Disclosures. Doing it correctly, because we’ve both worked too hard to get here to be careless.” She breathed out, and the last of her composure went with the breath – not into grief this time, but into something younger and more frightened and more hopeful. “But that conversation is for when we’re off the clock. Right now my son is asleep in a cast, holding half a Spider-Man mask like a teddy bear, with his Mama beside him, and I have about ten minutes before I have to go be a doctor again. And I would very much like to not be careful. For thirty seconds. If you’d let me. I’ve been careful my whole life, and tonight I’m so fucking tired of it.”
Santos felt, for the first time she could remember, no rush at all.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was wrecked and quiet, and it didn’t deflect, and it didn’t joke, and it didn’t cover one single thing. “Yeah. I’d let you.”
—
Baran reached up first – only her fingertips, tracing the sharp edge of Santos’s jaw with a touch so light it felt like a question she was still deciding whether to ask. She held there, patient, giving Santos every chance to step back, to laugh it off, to pretend the weeks of charged silence between them hadn’t led exactly here.
Santos didn’t move.
The first kiss was barely there at first. Just the warm press of Baran’s mouth against hers, soft and unhurried, tasting of salt. Baran’s lips lingered, brushing once, then again, learning the shape of her with careful attention. A small, broken whimper slipped from Santos’s throat before she could swallow it. Raw and startled, the kind of sound she would’ve buried on any other night. The kiss stayed gentle, almost reverent, but it sank into her anyway, warm and slow and impossible to ignore.
“You’re so beautiful,” Baran murmured against her mouth, voice low and rough in a register meant for Santos alone. Heat flooded Santos’s cheeks, fierce and immediate, racing down her throat and spreading lower, thick and undeniably pink.
Baran’s hand slid from Santos’s jaw to the nape of her neck, fingers curving warm and steady there, thumb stroking once behind her ear in a touch that made Santos’s breath catch. She kissed deeper this time. Slow, thorough, the way she did everything else, nothing skipped or rushed. Her mouth moved against Santos’s with patient intent, lips parting, the slick heat of it drawing a full-body shiver that Santos felt all the way to her knees. Santos’s fingers curled into a fist in the front of Baran’s scrub top, twisting the fabric hard under her knuckles as she pulled her closer without realizing she’d moved.
Baran made a quiet groan of approval into the kiss and tilted her head, changing the angle so their mouths slotted together more fully. Baran’s tongue traced the seam of Santos’s lips in a slow, deliberate invitation. Santos opened for her with a soft, helpless sigh she couldn’t hold back. One kiss bled into the next: the occasional gentle drag of teeth against Santos’s lower lip that sent sparks down her spine, the wet sound of their mouths filling the quiet.
Somewhere in the middle of it the invisible brace Santos had been holding her body in for years simply let go. She only recognized it had been there by the sudden, dizzying freedom of its absence. Her body softened into Baran’s without resistance, hips shifting forward to close the last sliver of space between them. Her free hand came up to wrap around Baran’s wrist where it rested at her neck, anchoring them both as she kissed back with quiet desperation, like someone who had been waiting without knowing it. The heat low in her belly coiled tighter with every slow slide of Baran’s tongue, every shared breath, every small moan that escaped her when Baran’s hand tightened gently at her nape.
They broke apart only when the need to breathe forced them to. Foreheads came to rest together in the quiet, their breathing ragged and loud at first, then gradually syncing into something slower and shared. Santos kept her eyes closed, lips tingling, the taste of Baran still on her tongue. Her grip on Baran’s scrub top loosened but didn’t release. Not yet. She could feel the rapid flutter of Baran’s pulse where their skin touched, or maybe it was her own – she couldn’t tell anymore. She didn’t want to. The world had narrowed to the warmth of Baran’s forehead against hers, the steady strength of her hand at Santos’s neck, and the low, steady ache Baran had left burning under her skin.
“That was longer than thirty seconds,” Santos managed.
“I rounded up.”
“It was–” Her voice did several things at once. “It was the hottest kiss of my life.”
She felt Baran’s laugh more than heard it, a warm shake against her own face.
“Hey.” She pulled back enough to look at her. “Your kid’s okay. I keep needing to say it.”
“You did bet your license about it in the trauma bay.” Baran’s eyes were wet. “It was the most attractive thing anyone has said in my presence in a number of years I won’t be disclosing, and I’d like it noted that I was completely professional about it at the time.”
“You were so professional. You called me by my last name and everything.”
“I’m going to call you Trinity from now on,” Baran said. “Off the floor. I’ve decided. You should brace for it.”
“Okay,” Santos nodded, and the word came out of her the way she’d handed it to her kid, the way Baran had handed it back to her over the bed.
Baran stood, finally. She rolled her shoulders, smoothed the front of the ruined scrub top like that would accomplish anything, and Santos watched her attending reassemble, piece by piece, her spine and then the even floor under her voice. She found she didn’t mind. She’d seen what it was built over now, and she couldn’t unsee a thing like that.
“Neuro checks every fifteen on Cyrus for two more hours,” Baran said, “and then he goes home with Solange. If you’re the one rounding on him – he’ll try to convince you his favorite candy is black licorice, to find out if you’ll fall for it. Don’t fall for it.”
“Noted.”
“And Trinity.” Her hand was on the door, the noise of the department leaking through the gap. “Eat something that isn’t half a granola bar. I watched you. You’re no good to anyone if you fall over, and I need you upright later, because I owe you the least romantic conversation of your life, and I intend to mean every word of it. We’re going to do this correctly. You’re worth doing correctly. Understood?”
Santos looked up at her from the bottom step. Almost two months of hopeless, gone, and the building was still standing. Standing better, somehow – the way a chest works better once you finally let out the breath you forgot you were holding.
“Understood, boss.”
“Baran.”
“Understood, Baran.”
The door swung shut behind her on its slow heavy hinge.
Santos sat alone for one more minute in the smoke-and-cleaner smell. Then she turned her hands over under the bad fluorescent light, and got up. She bought a sandwich that was technically food, and ate the whole thing standing in the hallway like a person who fully intended to keep being alive, and to be upright after shift.
At the 9 o’clock neuro check, Cyrus Al-Hashimi blinked up at her from a nest of hospital blankets, one arm in a fresh cast, the broken Spider-Man mask clutched to his chest, and informed her with five-year-old solemnity that his favorite candy was definitely, absolutely black licorice.
Santos looked him dead in the eye. “Nice try, web-slinger.”
In the chair by the bed, Solange smothered a tired laugh. Outside the room, at the nurses’ station, looking up from a chart she wasn’t really reading, Baran watched her not fall for it – and smiled. The whole thing, those bunny teeth. Nothing held out of it.
Santos dug a fun-size Snickers out of her sweater’s pocket and handed it over instead.
He lit up instantly.