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It was possible that Trinity Santos was fucking cursed, or something.
If she was, it was definitely one of those very specific curses, the type where you had to pay an Etsy witch thirty bucks and write out a whole paragraph in the “additional information” section and also possibly have some DM communication afterwards just to make sure everything was honed in very precisely. She’d narrowed down her list of suspects to a few candidates: ex-girlfriends, mostly; an asshole at the bar that she’d slapped a few weeks back; her mom’s new boyfriend, who she was pretty certain hated her.
But she couldn’t know for sure, because what was she going to do, exactly—send out a mass text to all her enemies that read:
Which one of you fuckers did this???
Good job, it’s working
It was the only reasonable explanation, at the end of the day, for why she was apparently the only person at the whole goddamn hospital that seemed capable of noticing that Frank Langdon was once again Going Through It.
“Why does he look like that,” she muttered flatly to Whitaker one morning, tracking Langdon across the floor with her eyes and noting how stringy his hair looked, how crumpled up his scrub top seemed.
“Why does who look like what?” Whitaker asked, not even looking up from the tablet he was scrolling through the night shift’s charting notes on.
“Langdon.” She brought her paper coffee cup up to her mouth and took a sip. “He looks like shit.”
Whitaker’s eyes flicked up once, briefly, his disinterest apparent. “Looks fine to me.”
Trinity made a noise of annoyance. “You’ve gotta be kidding me, Fuckleberry, look at him! He looks, like—fucking homeless or something—”
“I don’t think you should say that, actually, that’s very—”
“Okay, fine, unhoused, whatever.”
Whitaker gave her a deeply unimpressed look. She crossed her arms and glared stubbornly back.
“He probably just got a bad night’s sleep. Maybe one of his kids is sick, who cares? Just ignore him, Trinity.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but Whitaker had already looked back down at his tablet. “Come on,” he said. “Abbot’s about to start rounds.”
She tried to follow Whitaker’s advice. She really did.
It’s not like Trinity liked this superpower of hers. It wasn’t like she was thrilled to be the only person to clock it every time ER Ken decided to get back on his bullshit. She hated him, okay? Loathed. Despised. More than anything, she wanted nothing to do with him or his problems.
But, goddamn. How was no one else seeing this?
“Does he smell weird to you?”
Javadi blinked at her, confused. “The… the patient?” She glanced down at the unconscious man in the bed. “I mean… maybe? I haven’t really—”
“Not the patient,” Trinity huffed, rolling her eyes a little. “Langdon.” She flapped her hand towards the glass door that he had exited through a few moments ago, and watched Javadi turn her head to stare at his retreating form. “He smells weird, right?”
“I don’t—I haven’t been smelling Langdon, Trinity, why have you?”
Her face went hot. She reached up to twist her hands into the ends of her stethoscope tightly, narrowing her eyes to cover the surge of embarrassment. “It’s hard to miss,” she hissed.
Javadi raised a skeptical brow, not intimidated. “If you say so.”
“He smells like the fucking hospital soap, okay? Like the antimicrobial shit they keep in the supply closets.”
“Okay?” Javadi said, still looking at her like she was unwell. “I don’t know what you want me to say to that. He works at a hospital, and he smells like hospital soap?”
“Yes!” Trinity answered, trying not to get too worked up, failing. “It’s weird! We’re thirty minutes into the shift, why does he already smell like that? Shouldn’t he smell like, I don’t know—his own soap, or something?”
Javadi was sort of smirking at her now, appearing deeply entertained by Trinity’s distress. “Maybe he has the same soap at home.”
Trinity scoffed loudly. “You think that man’s wife—” she jabbed a finger at the glass, “stocks their bathroom with cheap antimicrobial hospital soap that you can only buy by the gallon?”
The pager in Javadi’s pocket buzzed. “I don’t know, Trinity,” she said as she pulled it out of her pocket to read the message, stepping past Trinity towards the door. “Maybe you should ask him.”
It was a week or so later, when Trinity was standing by her locker at the end of her shift, taking her hair down and shoving her stuff into a backpack, that the real evidence started to present itself.
“Langdon!” Abbot called out from down the hall, his voice urgent. “Need you real quick.”
“Yeah,” Langdon yelled back, uncrouching from his spot by the locker with a wince. “Yeah, coming.” He didn’t bother shutting his locker as he rushed off in the direction of the trauma bay, just left the door swinging open, his unzipped duffle bag hanging out of it.
Trinity looked at the duffle bag for a long moment. Then she looked up at where Langdon had disappeared into a trauma room.
“Do not,” Whitaker warned her, already sensing where this was going.
“What?” she said. “I’m just looking.”
“I know you,” Whitaker accused in a low whisper. “You wanna go through his bag. That’s crazy, Trinity.”
“I don’t want to go through his bag,” she shot back spitefully. “I just want to look at his bag, is that such a crime?” She glanced back down at its gaping, unzipped maw, beckoning her. “I mean he left it there. Open.”
“Let’s just have a normal night,” Whitaker implored, near begging. “We can get takeout. We can watch the new episode of Kitchen Nightmares.”
“I’m gonna look.”
He groaned, and Trinity leaned forward, peering into the contents of the beat-up duffle bag that sat half-hanging out of Langdon’s lower level locker.
“There’s a toothbrush in here,” she said, zeroing in on it. “And deodorant. A change of clothes and—and a charger, too.”
“Great,” Whitaker said. “Normal stuff. Can we be done with this, now?”
“Do you know what this is?” She asked, ignoring him.
“No,” Whitaker huffed, clearly exasperated.
“This is a fucking go-bag,” Trinity hissed, looking back up again to check to make sure that he was getting it, that the same realization that’d dawned on her was also dawning on him.
“Okay?” He had a blank look on his face. “Or maybe it’s just—I don’t know, a gym bag? Like for… going to the gym?”
“You brush your teeth at the gym?” she challenged.
“What are you even accusing him of right now?” Whitaker asked, shutting his locker door hard and stepping closer to her, lowering his voice to a whisper as he did it. “What would be possibly need a go-bag for, is he doomsday prepping or—”
“He’s sleeping here.”
Whitaker’s face got white. “What?”
Trinity leaned back, satisfied with her own detective work. “He’s sleeping at the hospital,” she repeated, closing her own locker door and swinging her backpack over her shoulder.
Whitaker looked between her and the duffel rapidly. “You got all that from a bag? I feel like we’re really jumping to conclusions, here.”
Trinity rolled her eyes, not really in the mood to explain to him that no, actually, it wasn’t just the bag, it was the whole thing: the greasy hair, the soap smell, the four-day-old scruff, the way he was walking around like he’d slept curled up into a ball on a thin twin mattress instead of in his own bed. The bag with the toothbrush and the change of clothes and the bottle of extra-strength melatonin gummies was just the cherry on top, honestly.
“Fine,” she said as they walked towards the elevators together, headed towards the parking lot. “I’ll bet you on it. Loser does the dishes for a month.”
Whitaker gave her a sidelong glance, his skepticism still evident on his face. “You’re on.”
Trinity figured that if there was one other person at the hospital that knew what the hell was going on with Langdon, it was probably Mel. She’d tried her best to ignore how buddy-buddy the two of them had gotten, mostly because she actually kind of liked Mel now, which meant that every time she caught them giving each other moon-eyed looks across the trauma bay, she had to hide her scowl behind her hand.
But now, at least, she could use it to her advantage.
“Hey, Mel,” she greeted, sliding into the breakroom the next afternoon, forgoing a nickname in the hopes that it would help her case.
“Hi!” Mel beamed, scrubbing her hands clean at the sink.
“Lunch break?”
“Yeah I’m just waiting for some scans to come back from radiology, so I figured while I had a minute—”
“Mind if I join?”
Mel’s smile widened, surprised but clearly pleased. “Of course!”
Trinity grabbed her leftovers from the fridge and dropped into a chair, watching out of her peripheral vision as Mel unwrapped a sandwich with near surgical precision, folding the plastic wrap into a neat square as if she intended to reuse it.
“So,” Trinity said, around a mouthful of Chipotle. “How’s Becca doing?”
Mel covered her mouth as she chewed, making sure to swallow her bite fully before she answered. Trinity could make out the edge of a small frown behind her hand. “Um. She’s… good,” Mel said in a deeply unconvincing voice.
Trinity raised an eyebrow and Mel sighed, putting her sandwich down on the table. “She’s, um. She’s moving into Middle Hill full time? She wants to spend more time with Adam.” Mel stared down at her lap as she delivered this news, visibly devastated by how well her sister’s relationship was going.
Trinity let out a low whistle. “Damn. Brutal.”
Mel fidgeted in her seat. “It’s not like that, it’s—I’m happy for her, you know? I’m happy that she’s happy.”
Trinity directed her skeptical look down at her bowl, spearing a piece of chicken with her fork. “You’re allowed to be annoyed that your sister’s abandoning you for her boyfriend, you know. My mom did the same shit with me when she started dating again. Drove me insane.”
Mel blinked up at her, a look of alarmed concern flashing across her face. “Your mother abandoned you?”
“Not, like, literally, Mel, god. It’s a figure of speech.”
“Oh,” Mel nodded, genuinely relieved. “Oh, well that’s good.”
Trinity took another bite of her food to smother the smirk that was trying to creep across her face.
“And anyway, my therapist says that it’s probably a good thing,” Mel went on, picking the sandwich back up. She was making a very deliberate effort to be in good spirits about this, Trinity could tell. “It’s important to foster relationships outside of my sister.” Trinity had the distinct sense that the words were being echoed verbatim from a recent session.
“Sure. And how’s that going?”
Mel’s shoulders sank further. “Well she asked me what I like to do with my friends. When I’m not with Becca.”
“And?”
She looked up from under her lashes, eyes huge and wounded. “I told her I don’t really have any friends besides Becca.”
Ugh. Trinity’s heart wrenched annoyingly at the sight. It was like watching a kitten get left out in the rain. Like that one really fucked-up scene from Bambi where they shoot the mom and then make you watch as the little fawn wanders around in a snowstorm calling out for her.
“I’m your friend, Mel,” she said, mostly to wipe the kicked-puppy look off her face.
Mel’s eyes went even wider. “Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
Mel gave Trinity a blindingly bright grin. “You know, Doctor Langdon said the same thing, actually. About being my friend.”
Jackpot, Trinity thought.
“Langdon, huh? Guess you two are pretty tight, now.”
Trinity watched as a pinkish flush grew on Mel’s cheeks. “You—you think so?”
God, this was painful.
Trinity swallowed down her distaste. “Oh, for sure. How’s he doing, by the way? Like, at home?”
Mel blinked at the question, thrown. “At home? You mean like, how are his kids?”
Trinity smiled tightly at her. She had forgotten how impossible it was to pry anything useful out of Mel. It was like those glasses that she wore were permanently rose-colored or something, like she was incapable of seeing anything but the best in everyone she met. Trinity could not think of anything less relatable.
She dropped the coded language and cut straight to the chase. “I mean like has he been acting weird lately? Off? Like maybe there’s something going on with him?”
Something shuttered in Mel’s expression almost immediately—her spine grew rigid, her smile dropped off her face; she fixed Trinity with a very precise look. “What are you implying, Doctor Santos?”
Trinity’s brows flew up her face, the way they always did whenever Mel got stern with someone. “Whoa. Relax, Mel-iciousness, not implying anything over here.”
“Is this about the on-call room thing?” She asked, eyes narrowed. “Because those med students shouldn’t’ve even been in there, really, so—”
“On-call room thing?”
Mel’s mouth snapped shut as she realized her mistake. The cutesy pink blush had turned full-tomato now, crawling all the way up her neck. Mel reached back down and picked up her sandwich again like it might save her. “Nevermind. There wasn’t any—forget it.”
Trinity leaned forward across the table, so close to her prize that she could almost taste it. “C’mon Mel. I can keep a secret. Promise.”
“Doctor Langdon,” Mel said, suddenly very smooth and very professional, not looking up from her food, “is a very good doctor. He works very hard.”
Trinity flopped back in her chair. “You’re no fun.”
Mel’s eyes flicked up, shoulders drooping a bit in obvious disappointment. “I really think you’d both be happier if you just tried to get along,” she counseled in a smaller voice than before.
Trinity scoffed meanly down at her bowl.
“I’m serious. I think if you stopped trying so hard to hate each other, maybe you’d actually feel better, you know?” Trinity grimaced upwards to find Mel staring at her, a pleading look on her face. “As my only two friends,” she implored, blush deepening impossibly further. “It’d be nice if maybe you weren’t fighting all the time.”
Trinity looked at her big brown eyes, her pouty downturned mouth, her scrunched-up little nose, and felt herself immediately cave. “Fine.” She stabbed the bowl again aggressively. “I’ll try.”
Mel’s face smoothed into a smile. “Thank you, Trinity,” she said. “You’re a very good person.”
Of course Trinity staked out the on-call room the very next night. Of course she did.
And yeah, yeah, alright, it wasn’t exactly in the spirit of her promise to Mel to be hunting Langdon down through the halls of the hospital like a bloodthirsty hellhound, sue her. What could she say? She really hated doing the dishes.
She’d sort of expected it to be difficult, actually—half-pictured him slinking around cat-burglar style after the shift, ducking security cameras to find some empty room to nap in.
She’d expected a real challenge. Something that would require subterfuge, something that would end with her going “aHA!!” and catching him red-handed, sneaking out of a single-stall restroom with a toothbrush in his back pocket.
Instead, when she ditched Abbot and tiptoed up to the on-call room at five-forty a.m. the next morning, ignoring the blinking occupied light by the side of the door and badging in anyway, she cracked open the door to find—
Langdon.
Asleep, snoring loudly, starfished out across the twin-sized mattress and half-falling off of it, one tennis shoe still on, the other all the way across the room for some reason. His Carhartt coat was draped over him like a makeshift blanket, and the hospital’s laughably thin pillow had been folded in half to prop his neck up.
Trinity stood there in the doorway, waiting for the satisfaction of being once again correct to finally hit her. But the smugness that she had been hoping for evaded her. Instead, she just felt… bad? She bit down on her tongue hard, trying to snap herself out of it. The sensation persisted.
He looked so pathetic, lying there. Unshaven and clearly exhausted, sort of grimy in a way that suggested he hadn’t had access to high quality bathing products in a while. He twitched in his sleep and the whole bed shook, the frame groaning like it was about to give up and dump him right onto the floor.
“God fucking damnit,” Trinity said to Langdon’s prone, vulnerable form right as he snuffled in his sleep like a bedraggled, runaway lapdog.
She nudged the door farther open with her foot. His duffle bag sat in the corner; his phone plugged into the wall and charging by his head. Her investigative instinct told her to peer inside and have just one look, just in case there was something more incriminating.
His wallet sat open on top of a folded change of clothes. There was a picture tucked inside of two disturbingly Langdon-looking children, a boy and a girl, and the pity hit her again, worse this time.
She sighed deeply and walked to the head of the bed. She took exactly one evidentiary photo on her phone, not for blackmail purposes, not to spitefully laugh at later, just so that she had something to send to Whitaker with the caption you lose sucker, and then she pocketed her phone back into her scrub pockets and kicked the side of the loosely-screwed-together metal bedframe, rattling it hard.
“Wake up, idiot. We need to talk about your housing situation.”
Langdon shot up from the bed with a gasp, his limbs going in every direction at once as he flailed and rolled and fell, directly onto the floor. Trinity stepped back and let it happen.
He blinked himself into focus, pillow creases on his cheeks, bedhead going wild. “I, uh—” he struggled groggily, trying to sit up. “It’s… not what it looks like?”
Trinity snorted. “Yeah, right. Let’s skip this part.”
He shook his head like a wet dog, propping himself up with his palms on the tile, a deeply guilty look on his face. “Wha—what part?”
“The part where you pretend like you’re not sleeping at the fucking hospital.”
He made a groan-like noise in his throat and dropped his head back against the bed, eyes on the ceiling. “Fuck,” he rasped. “Can you just—not fucking tell anyone, please?”
Trinity scoffed at him, crossing her arms.
“What do you even want from me?” he said without looking at her, voice strangled. “I’m not hurting anyone, I’m not stealing anything, I’m not doing anything to even bother you! I’m just trying to do my job, and live my life, and—”
“Can you relax, maybe?” He had a fistful of his own hair, gripped at the root like he was about to start ripping it straight out of his skull. “Unclench, Goldilocks. I won’t tell anyone I caught you sleeping in Little Bear’s bed.”
Langdon lifted his head up and looked at her warily, obviously still trying to piece together some sort of motive. “It was just… temporary, okay? For like, a week or two while I look for a place, or—until Abby lets me—”
“Yeah, yeah, spare me the marriage woes. Sounds like the divorce threats have finally materialized.” She gestured around the room. “Bit of a step down from the couch. Or the guest room.”
He scowled and made a noise like he wanted to protest but had nothing to defend himself with. “I have a—” He got to his feet, bracing a hand on his lower back and making a deeply pained face as he did. “An apartment tour on Thursday. I just have a lot of bills, alright, and I don’t really have the money for a hotel right now, so—”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said. “This is actually not my first rodeo with this sort of bullshit, believe it or not. Unfortunately, the Santos-Whitaker-household is pretty full-up this time around, so as much as I think we’d have such a swell roommate dynamic, it’d probably be better if you—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Will you just fucking text Mel, please?” she spat out, glaring at him at last.
Langdon froze, his throat bobbing as he took a hard swallow. “M-Mel?” he asked, reaching out to grip at the metal edge of the bedframe for support.
“Yes, Mel. You know, our good, mutual friend?”
Langdon’s hand clenched around the bedframe, flinching a little at the reminder that they shared something in common. “What does Mel have to do with this?”
Trinity rolled her eyes at him. “Oh, please. I know you know about Becca moving out. She’s been moping around about it for weeks now.”
He stared at her like she had two heads. “...So?” he said, drawing the word out.
Trinity threw her hands up in exasperation, marvelling—not for the first time—at how utterly oblivious all her coworkers were. “So, she has a room open, dumbass! Maybe go talk to her about it, instead of giving yourself early-onset osteoarthritis from sleeping on a three-inch plastic mattress every night.”
His mouth hung open at her stupidly. “Stay with—with Mel?” His eyes had gone slightly unfocused, a far-off look overtaking his face, clearly imagining it. “Like, in her apartment, you mean?”
“No, like in her dumpster. Obviously, I mean in her apartment.”
When he didn’t immediately move, Trinity raised her eyebrows and gestured aggressively at the cellphone plugged into the wall. “Well? Are you waiting for something?”
“What, now?” He continued gaping. “It’s like, the middle of the night, she’s probably asleep—”
“It’s an hour before her shift starts; she’s definitely awake.” Trinity tilted her head at him and wrinkled her nose, making a face. “And hey—maybe if you’re lucky, she’ll let you come over and shower before you have to go clock in.”
Langdon’s jaw twitched at that, stalking over to go tug his phone out of the wall charger and swipe it open. Trinity hovered by the door for another moment, her arms crossed, watching him as he scrolled through his apps and pulled up Mel’s contact info. Right before he was about to press the call button, he paused and looked up at her, his finger hovering over the screen. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he made an exaggerated face back in response, a why are you still here, face.
“O-kay!” he sassed her, twiddling the phone in the air. “I’m doing it! You don’t have to like, stand there and watch me.”
She wanted to stick her tongue out at him so bad. She spun around on her heels, gritting her teeth to suppress the childish urge. “You’re welcome,” she threw over her shoulder on her way out, snarky.
“Thank you,” he called back, equally petty.
She stomped her way back down to the ED, annoyed at how underwhelming her stakeout mission had turned out to be. She’d better have, like—an enormous karmic payout at the end of all this, was all she was saying.
“Can you eat that literally anywhere else?” Whitaker complained, in the tone of someone who already knew their request would be ignored. Trinity snapped off another piece of her Nature Valley bar, sending crumbs spraying across his keyboard as she leaned over him, reading through his charts.
“You gonna put down that the guy’s on a bunch of drugs?” She pressed her finger to the screen, leaving a smudge.
Whitaker frowned at her, balling up his undershirt into a makeshift sweater-paw to wipe it off. “His tox screen came back negative.”
She smirked. “Probably shrooms, then.”
“You think he’s on drugs?” He looked up from his computer in a startled sort of way, zeroing in on the man in central seven. The patient was sitting quietly in his bed, hands folded across his lap, staring out through the glass wall at the ED with an expression of reverent awe. He had not moved from this position in several hours. “How can you even tell?”
Trinity shrugged and took another bite of her granola bar. “Dunno,” she said. “Same way I know everything. Same way I could tell you were a corn-fed country boy just by looking at you, or that Princess Javadi over there was a PTMC nepo-baby. Same way I didn’t need imaging to come back to know we needed to reverse anticoagulation on that old woman earlier.”
Whitaker gave a skeptical sort of hum, and she could tell he wanted to roll his eyes at her but was resisting the urge. Behind him, Trinity caught Mel and Langdon ducking out of north two. His head was tucked down, murmuring something low to her, visibly soothing with one hand settled on the small of her back.
Mel looked anxious, twisting her hands together tightly like she did when things got overwhelming and loud. There’d been some commotion in the trauma room twenty minutes or so ago, so Trinity could easily imagine whatever sort of tragedy might’ve thrown Mel off her game. Langdon halted, stepping in front of Mel and putting one hand on each of her shoulders, dipping down further to catch her eyes as he spoke.
Mel met his gaze with pink cheeks and parted lips.
God, Trinity thought. Rein it in.
“Same way I know those two are fucking.” She gestured with the granola bar, and this time the crumbs landed on Whitaker’s head.
“What?” He swiped at his hair, following her gaze. “Are you—you’re talking about Mel and Langdon?”
“Duh,” she said. “Just look at them.”
He looked, just in time to catch the tail end of some intensely charged eye contact before the two of them parted ways down the hall. Mel shuffled away with her head tucked down, trying and failing to hide a blush. Langdon stared after her openly, rawly, thumbing at the loose wedding band on his left ring finger.
They’d moved in together on a “temporary” basis about four weeks ago. If Trinity had to pin a firm date on when the affair had actually been consummated, she’d probably guess somewhere around week two. Mazel tov.
“He’s ogling her ass,” she said.
“You’re insane,” Whitaker replied, blind to the indisputable evidence that had just unfolded in front of his very eyes. “Actually insane, Trinity.”
Trinity crumpled up the empty wrapper in her fist and grinned, shark-toothed. “Bet ya on it,” she said.
“You’re on.”