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"Just so you know, I'm not a superstitious person," Parker said, folding her arms. "I do not believe in tarot, astrology, numerology, or avoiding the number thirteen. But you do see how you're responsible for this, right?"
"How is this my fault?" Trinity said, jabbing at the button for the Pitt's floor over and over again. Nothing doing. It, like the rest of the buttons on the elevator panel, stayed stubbornly dark. Fuck.
"It's half an hour before the end of our shift," Parker shot back, "and you thought it made sense to turn to me and say 'hey, nice to have a quiet night for once, right'? The goddamned Q word, seriously?"
"Well it is!" Trinity protested. "Or it was." It had been. The rain was just heavy enough to keep people indoors, but not so heavy that it was going to bring them an uptick in cases of drowning or hypothermia. Fewer people went out and got hammered on Sunday nights in October anyway, so they didn't have as many bar-fight head lacs to suture or night club rest room overdoses to try to reverse. No paeds cases, thankfully; a couple of STEMIs, both good candidates for PCIs, like the guy they'd just ferried up to Cardiology.
There was a time when Trinity would have called a shift like this one boring, and it wasn't that she was second-guessing whether she should have opted for a nice dull life in dermatology instead of actually getting to do cool shit in EM, but after a week of shifts dominated by the nasty strain of norovirus that was currently ravaging the city's public schools, she'd been glad of a breather. Glad, too, of the chance to work alongside Parker—because why be painfully aware of just how utterly hot your cool co-worker was if you couldn't torment yourself through twelve hours of continual physical proximity to her every once in a while?
Hooray for a rewarding career in emergency medicine.
"Try the emergency call button," Parker said, but when Trinity pressed it all that happened was that the intercom spat out a staticky buzz. She pressed it again, and this time it did nothing, just like the elevator itself.
"Are you kidding me?" Trinity gave the thing a love-tap, and then a slightly less gentle one, but nothing happened. "Why won't the goddamned emergency button work in an emergency?"
"PTMC," Parker drawled, "Always putting patients and staff first through its investment in cutting-edge technology." She dug her phone out of her scrubs pocket and frowned at the screen, then waved the phone around. "One bar. Here's hoping."
Once Parker tapped 'call', it took several seconds for the ringing noise to actually start, and it felt like another age again before someone answered. Trinity could make out the cadence of Lena's voice as Parker explained to her what had happened and asked if she could send someone from maintenance ASAP. "I guess we're somewhere between the fifth and the fourth floors," she said. "It started moving and then stopped almost right away."
Lena said something and Parker nodded and said, "Uh huh, uh huh."
Trinity wrapped her arms around her waist and wished that it was easier to pace in an elevator. She wasn't claustrophobic or anything. She wasn't. She didn't have any issues with tight or enclosed spaces, this was fine. Lena would let Maintenance know where they were, someone was probably already on the way to let them out. This was fine.
"And the ETA?" Parker said, and Trinity watched one eyebrow shoot up. "Okay. Okay, sure, well, you know where to find us, I guess."
Parker ended the call and met Trinity's expectant look with a grimace. "They know about the issue, something major mechanical has blown somewhere, but it hasn't just stopped this elevator, it's taken out all of them."
Trinity groaned. "Both of the ones going down to the Pitt? That's going to make for a real shit show."
"No, across the entire building."
Trinity's jaw dropped. Stopping to count up exactly how many elevators were in the hospital wasn't her particular dysfunction, but there had to be at least a couple dozen of the things in PTMC, divided across several different banks and wings and extensions. This place was huge. It was one thing for staff to get their steps in traipsing up and down the stairwells, but no ED patient in urgent need of an OR was capable of walking up one. "But they know what the problem is, so we're getting out of here soon, right?"
"They know what the issue is," Parker said, putting her phone back in her pocket, "but whatever it is, it means they can only bring the elevators back on line sequentially, one by one. They're prioritising ones with patients in them. Apparently Nazely's by herself, manually bagging someone over in the south elevator."
"Oh shit," Trinity said with a grimace. Nazely was solid, Trinity knew she'd be trying her best, but that was a shitty situation for any R1 to be in. "Sucks to be her."
"Sucks worse to be the patient," Parker said dryly.
Despite the elevator's size, Trinity tried to pace for a while, then gave it up for a stupid idea and sat on the floor opposite where Parker was already sitting cross-legged, eyes closed and face relaxed.
"How are you being so calm about this?" Trinity asked.
Parker tilted her head to one side, eyes still closed. "Will panicking get us out of here any quicker?"
"It might!" Trinity said, knowing it was a ridiculous thing to say but unable to stop herself. She wasn't claustrophobic, she was fine, but okay, so maybe she didn't as a rule like spending an extended amount of time in confined spaces. There was nothing irrational about that. She hugged her knees to her chest. She said, before she could second-guess herself, "Distract me."
Parker opened her eyes at that. "And how do you want to be distracted, Trinity Santos?"
"I don't know," Trinity said, tapping her fingers against her legs. "Talk to me. I spy. Twenty questions. Whatever."
"Could be dangerous," Parker said, a note in her voice that Trinity couldn't quite read. She paused for a moment and then said, "Okay, dangerous it is. Two truths and a lie."
Trinity winced. "I don't know about—"
"You were the one who said distract me, you were the one who said whatever," said Parker. "Or are you backing down from a challenge?"
"Oh, that's low," Trinity said.
"Like the ancient proverb says, don't hate the player." Parker pursed her mouth for a moment and then said, "Okay, here we go. Two truths and a lie. My minor in undergrad was Theatre Arts and Performance. I was the point guard on my high school basketball team, all four years. My first year here, I was Dr Abbot's roomie."
"Ugh, okay," Trinity said, marshalling everything she'd gleaned about Parker Ellis the past year and change. She'd heard Abbot and Parker get deep into the stats weeds about the Storm and the Comets enough to know that basketball was Parker's game, and if she'd ever imagined what Parker's arms looked like in a basketball jersey, that was no one's business but Trinity's. "Well, I know for sure that basketball is one of the truths, so I can take that off the table right away."
Parker smiled a tiny little smile that made Trinity think of the Mona Lisa. "Maybe, maybe not."
"So that leaves your undergrad major being—"
"My minor was Theatre Arts and Performance," Parker said, with the deliberation that said she was wise to any attempt at catching her out in a contradiction or inconsistency. "I majored in Biochem, which you already know."
"Right," Trinity said slowly. A few weeks ago, she'd been wolfing down a very late lunch in the break room while Parker had chatted with a younger sister of Makedah from Administration and Records, who was considering a career as a forensic tech and had been wondering if majoring in biochemistry was the best way to get her there. "That does fit with the existing evidence—but maybe it fits too well?"
Parker's placid smile didn't falter.
"So if you minored in Theatre Studies—"
"Theatre Arts and Performance."
"—that, then you would have had to appear in stuff, right?"
A gracious nod of the head. "Correct."
"You were in a play?"
"More than one."
Aha, well there was an opening. "Can you name any of those plays?"
"Yup. One of them you won't have heard of."
"Convenient," Trinity said.
Parker arched an eyebrow. "It was a local playwright's remix of some ancient Greek myths. It was terrible, ran for a week to almost empty seats, but I was reliably informed that my Orpheus was pretty good."
Trinity's knowledge of ancient Greek myths basically began and ended with a battered VHS copy of Disney's Hercules, so she couldn't think of a useful question to ask there. "And the other one?"
"My junior year, I was Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing."
Trinity blinked. "Shakespeare? You?"
Parker's smile turned sharp and she said, in what sounded to Trinity's inexpert ear, at least, like an excellent English accent, "I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me."
"Uhhh," Trinity said, because she was presuming that was a quotation from the play but her memories of AP English were fuzzy and she was still trapped in a very small space, and paying too much attention to Parker Ellis' mouth in a workplace setting was a thing that Trinity tried very, very hard not to do because one big gay disaster of a workplace situationship turned out to have been enough for a lifetime, thank you very much, but god, she was hot. Focus, self. "And you were doing all these plays, supposedly, while you were also taking pre-med courses?"
"What can I say? Stamina."
"Haha, okay, not touching that one," Trinity said, because her mother hadn't raised a total fucking idiot. "And then the other option is that you were Abbot's roomie?"
Parker shrugged. "Technically his tenant."
"Is there a difference?"
Parker waggled a hand from side to side. "I rented his basement, which has a separate entrance from the main house, but there's no kitchen down there so he was fine with me using the one upstairs. We'd chat sometimes while I was cooking. Guess that qualifies me as a roomie rather than a straight-up tenant."
"So did you ever walk in on the, you know..." Trinity waggled her eyebrows significantly. "The yoga?"
"Why are you saying yoga like that?" Parker frowned. "Like an evangelical who thinks it's a Satanic creation?"
Trinity rolled her eyes. "Nice deflection! But if you'd actually lived with him for a year, you'd know all about the naked yoga."
"The... what?" Trinity had known Parker long enough by now to recognise that when her face went totally blank like that, it was a way of hiding that she'd been blindsided by something. Or pretending to be, if she was being very tactical during a game of Two Truths and a Lie.
"Huckleberry told me that Robby told him that Abbot does naked yoga that scares the neighbours." That was an unimpeachable chain of evidence in Trinity's opinion. Abbot and Robby were like two matched peas in the old white dude pod.
"Dr Robby said that, huh?" Parker made a considering face for a moment, then laughed softly to herself and shook her head and said, "Okay, we're going to file that one away for later, and get back to the topic at hand, Dr Santos. Two truths and a lie: which is which?"
"Basketball makes sense," Trinity said slowly, trying to parse her way through what she knew and given the fact that in her experience, most people were bad at making up lies on the spot. "Not sure that I can picture you on stage, but you do seem to know some Shakespeare off the top of your head, so there's that."
Parker's smile had taken on that enigmatic quality once again.
"And you get on with Abbot and you know how he likes his coffee, and—wait, you said your first year here?"
"Yup."
"So how would you have... you moved here from D.C., how would you have known him to rent from him, and you are not the kind of person to make a move without everything being planned in advance. Ha." Trinity nodded to herself, satisfied. She was going to go with her gut on this one. "Okay, true you were on your high school basketball team and that you were a theatre minor, false that you lived in Abbot's house."
"You know, I've heard Dr Robby praise your diagnostic skills highly," Parker said, but as she nodded the expression on her face morphed from 'begrudgingly impressed' to 'impish'. "But in this case... wrong."
Trinity's jaw dropped. "What?"
"Was never on a basketball team other than pick-up games here and there," Parker said. "No softball teams, either."
"Wait, this means you for real lived in Abbot's basement? Okay, I have so many questions like—"
Parker held up a hand. "Uh uh. The time of questioning me is over. You're up."
"I—"
Parker raised an eyebrow.
Trinity subsided. Crud. "Okay, okay." She tapped her fingers against her knees. "One time in high school, me and a few others on the gymnastics team went and gave a teacher's house the works—TP, eggs, you name it—only it turned out we got the house number wrong and it was some total stranger's place instead. Once I won second prize in the Patchwork/Pieced Quilt category at the Wyandot County Fair. I went to McConnell's last weekend and I saw Abbot and Al-Hashimi getting real cosy in a corner booth."
Parker shook her head slowly and then said, all confident enunciation, "The last one, that's the lie."
Trinity narrowed her eyes. That had to be a bluff. No way Parker could pinpoint the lie without asking her any questions at all. "What makes you so sure? Two attractive, single people with dramatic personal histories whose eyes met across a crowded trauma bay, they—"
"Because," Parker said, "there's a difference between a lie and bullshit."
Trinity stared at her.
"I'm right, aren't I?"
She was.
"Doesn't prove anything," Trinity grumbled. "It was plausible, wasn't it?"
"Nope," Parker said cheerfully. She pulled out her phone and checked the time. "Congrats, we're now officially off-shift."
"What difference does that make?" Trinity asked, shifting her position a little. This floor was not made for sitting on and she could feel her ass starting to go numb. "We're still stuck here."
"Principle of the thing," Parker said with a shrug. "Plus, means I can do this." She pulled off her scrub top, folded it into a neat, fat rectangle and, using it as a pillow, lay down on her back with her legs steepled and her eyes closed. She wriggled her shoulders—left bare by her tank top—against the floor and, apparently satisfied that that was as comfortable as it was going to get, laced her fingers together on her belly.
"Are you seriously thinking of napping right now?"
"Not thinking about it," Parker said. "Going to do it."
"In the elevator?"
Parker's sigh seemed to roll up from the soles of her feet. "Unless you've been working on a secret plan to double-board in emergency medicine and elevator maintenance, not sure we've got a lot of other options here, and I've worked 75 hours in the last seven days so I'm calling a time out."
"But what if—" The lights flickered and Trinity looked up out of instinct and then the whole elevator juddered and dropped, short and sharp, before the lights went out. Trinity didn't scream, but only because her mouth went so suddenly and utterly dry that no sound would come out. All she could hear was her own heaving respirations, too deep and too fast, she was hyperventilating, she was—
A sudden bright light. Parker's phone, lighting up the elevator. A hand, smooth and cool in Trinity's own, holding it gently. Parker's face, starkly beautiful in the upward glow of the phone; Parker's honey-warm voice, counting out breaths for her. "There we go, that's it, you got it, you're doing it."
Gradually the panic receded, leaving Trinity feeling shaky and mortified. "Sorry," she croaked out. "Sorry, I'm—"
"You're good. The only people I need apologies from are the people setting the maintenance budget for this place," Parker said, and the dry amusement in her voice was shot through with a faint thread of genuine anger. "I'm going to turn the light off now to save battery, okay?"
"Sure," Trinity said, forcing a bravado into her voice that she didn't feel. The light went out, but Parker didn't remove her hand from Trinity's.
If Trinity had more of a spine, she'd have sat up straight, pulled her hand away, cleared her throat and started to talk about something totally unrelated just to prove how much of an unbothered badass she was. If she was stuck in here with Yolanda, that was for sure what she would have done—not that Yolanda would have held her hand in the first place. Trinity wasn't sure that Yolanda would have cared that much if Trinity had vasovagalled right in front of her.
Hell, she might not even have cared if Trinity had an MI in front of her—not a surgical case.
(It was possible that Trinity was still just the teensiest bit bitter about how things had ended between her and Yolanda—not so much with a bang and a whimper as with two last amazing fucks after the Fourth and then a text message from Yolanda that said she was going to be exclusive with Mortensen from Neurology from now on, when Trinity hadn't known before then that Yolanda was being inclusive with Mortensen from Neurology.
Or was it bitterness? Trinity didn't want Yolanda any more, not with the same scrabbling desperation for her touch, for her attention, that she'd still felt in July, at least. What she wanted was—
She was trapped in an elevator, in the dark, with Parker Ellis holding her hand, she was exhausted, and she had no idea of when they'd be getting out of here. This was not the moment for her to be thinking about what she wanted.)
"Could you, um, could you talk?" Trinity stared straight ahead of her, trying to keep her awareness focused on Parker's grounding touch and hoping like hell that Parker wouldn't take that away from her. "Please."
"About what?"
"Anything," Trinity said. "Just... Anything. I like the sound of your voice." She squeezed her eyes shut after that, mouthed fuck! to herself in the dark, because what was she doing, taking lessons in how to be smooth from Huckleberry? Telling Parker that she liked hearing her talk?
Parker hummed to herself for a moment and then said, "I got some really nice apples at the farmer's market yesterday."
"Apples?"
"You said 'anything'."
A fair cop. Trinity subsided.
Parker talked her the whole way through the different kinds of apples she'd chosen, and which varietals she liked best, and her grandma's recipe for the best damn apple turnover you'd ever have, and how the last time Parker had made it she'd switched up the spice mix she'd used and she thought it turned out pretty well.
"I didn't know you baked," Trinity said.
"I contain multitudes," Parker said, sounding pleased with herself.
Trinity snorted.
"Course, so do you," Parker said, and Trinity didn't know what to do with that.
"You don't have to say things just to be nice to me," she said after a moment's silence.
Parker said, "When have you ever known me to tell people things just to be nice to them?", and squeezed Trinity's hand very gently.
The air inside the elevator felt like it was getting warmer. Trinity's undershirt stuck to the clammy skin of her back. It felt gross. She was going to make a gross, unsettling corpse, and while a macabre little voice in her head thought that sounded awesome, hashtag goals, the part of Trinity that had helped her make it to her twenties and out of Michigan and the fuck away from Division I gymnastics really didn't want to die in here. She didn't want to die.
The elevator let out a sudden, electrical whine. Trinity braced herself but it didn't shake or jolt again. Instead, one of the lighting panels in the ceiling came on, letting out a weak orange glow.
"Emergency lighting," Parker murmured. "Could be a good sign."
"What time is it?"
Parker checked her phone. "About twenty til eight."
"That's all?" Trinity could have sworn that they'd been in there for hours—days.
"You want us to be spending even longer in here?"
"No, of course not, it's just that, like, time moves differently in here or something." Trinity looked down at the floor, away from Parker who somehow managed to be hot even in this lighting. Those cheekbones weren't fair. "All quantum or... something. I don't know, this is the kind of hardcore physics nerd shit you'd need Dr Robby for."
That man was such a fucking dweeb once you got to know him.
"Maybe you can ask him," Parker said, "when he gets back from his sabbatical."
"Maybe," Trinity said, though she was pretty sure when she next saw Robby walk through the doors of the Pitt, there were a hell of a lot of other things she'd want—need—to tell him before that point.
Parker's phone screen lit up: two, three messages arrived in quick succession. "From Dana," she said as she scrolled through them. "We're next on the list. If everything goes smoothly, we're looking at 15 to 20 more minutes."
"If," Trinity said darkly.
Parker shifted, moving forward and twisting so that she was able to look right into Trinity's face. "Serious question. What would happen if you stopped performing pessimism for five of those minutes?"
Trinity blinked at her. "I don't—"
"Oh, but I think you do," Parker said softly, and ever after Trinity could never explain why she'd done what she did next. Whether it was something to do with the quiet half-light they were sitting in, or the sheen of sweat just visible on Parker's collarbone, or some kind of temporary adrenaline-induced psychotic break, or a little bit of ha, I'll show you optimism bravado, or simply Trinity's steadily growing sense of how much she admired Parker—how much she just flat-out, cringily, no-chill liked her—whatever it was, Trinity leaned in and kissed her.
It was a quick kiss, brief and dry and not what Trinity would call her best work, and it made her toes curl in her socks.
"Well," Parker said into the echoing silence that followed the kiss, "we're going to have to work on your timing."
"I'm sorry, I—" Trinity's attempt at an apology was cut off by Parker kissing her—kissing her back—and holy shit, the next time Trinity did karaoke she wasn't going to need any primal scream therapy songs, she was going to be pioneering the new genre of joy yodelling or something because Parker knew how to kiss. This kiss wasn't quick or brief or dry. It was an indulgence. There was tongue. Trinity made the most embarrassing little sound and tilted her head back and was on the verge of finding out just how far she was willing to go in a workplace setting when the elevator made a whirring noise.
Every light and button flashed once, and then the overhead lights stayed on steadily while the button marked 'A: Emergency Department' glowed and the elevator purred downwards as smoothly as if nothing had ever happened.
Trinity blinked, scrambled to her feet, tried to tug her scrubs into some kind of order. She hoped it wasn't going to be too obvious what they'd been up to; even though it hadn't been a very long kiss, she was still very aware of her mouth and how it tingled. "So, uh, I'm fine if you want to be like, what happens in the elevator stays in the elevator, or whatever."
Parker looked faintly amused. "Just so we're clear, that's not how I roll." The elevator came to a stop with a ding; the doors slid open smooth as you like.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Dana said with a relieved sigh as Parker and Trinity stepped out of the elevator. "I go away for three days, this place falls apart. Glad to have you back among us. This an OSHA form situation or can I just let you gals walk it off?"
"All good, Dee," Parker said. "Just going to head on home, I think."
"We can be grateful for small mercies, I guess," Dana said, patting Parker on the shoulder, and then turned and caught sight of something and called out, "No, Antoine, I said the other cart! Oh, for the love of God," and plunged back into the maelstrom that was the Pitt on a Monday morning.
Parker and Trinity made for the lockers, fetched their coats and bags, and then Parker cocked her head at Trinity and said, "You coming?"
"You mean to your—"
"Yup," Parker said, and so maybe Parker didn't believe in tarot, astrology, numerology or the power of the number thirteen, but Trinity could recognise good luck when it was right in front of her. She went out the door hard on Parker's heels.