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Yolanda knew that today was going to be a bad day the minute she opened her eyes and found her alarm clock blinking 06:17 back at her in angry red letters, a whole forty-seven minutes after she was supposed to be up. She can count on one hand the amount of times that she’s strayed from her extremely rigid morning routine in the past ten years, and nearly all of them, bar one or two hangover-slash-illness related anomalies, were pre-planned the night before.
Needless to say, this morning’s diversion was not pre-planned.
She had pushed through the frustration, however, convinced that her phone must have glitched or something, or maybe died overnight. Obviously, it wasn’t possible that she had forgotten to set it the night before, or, worse, slept through it — no, that wasn’t possible at all. Yolanda’s never slept through an alarm a day in her life. It’s a point of serious pride for her.
Resigning herself to a trip to the Apple Store on her next day off, she’d rushed to get into the shower, already calculating in her head just how much time she’d have to shave off of it if she still wanted to complete her usual, seven step skin-care routine, and had been greeted with a sight so diabolical, angry tears had almost sprung to her eyes: her bottle of shea butter body wash sitting on the shelf, empty but for the tiniest drop.
Of course. She had meant to swing by the store to pick up some more last night, but traffic had been hell, her takeout had been cooling in the seat next to her, and she’d said fuck it and gone straight home instead. She could have sworn there was more in the bottle than that, but, okay, whatever, guess not.
After the world’s most unsatisfying shower, body now smelling infuriatingly like the years-old Old Spice shower gel her little brother had left last time he visited, she’d had no choice but to skip three of the seven steps, and breakfast entirely. By the time she got to work — at 6:57 a.m., thank you, she’s never been late to work a day in her life and she wasn’t going to start today — metaphorical steam had been coming out of her ears, and it was only made even worse by Al-Hashimi, pulling her in to assist on a gnarly MVC before she even had time to go up to the surgery floor and put her shit away, still dressed in her street clothes.
Maybe that one’s her own fault, just a little, for choosing to enter through the ED first, even when she had no real reason to. Whatever. So what if she’s finding it a little hard to break out of that particular habit? Fucking sue her.
The guy had died ten minutes later, anyway, even with her help, and all the diversion had done was make her late for the appendecetomy she had scheduled first thing, which is literally the worst possible thing you can be when it’s Shamsi’s name first up on the board.
But she’s not thinking about the appendectomy. Fuck the appendectomy. The appendectomy is the whole reason she’s in this mess in the first place, straining under the harsh overhead lighting of South 15, being poked and prodded at by an inexperienced, wide-eyed child, all while Dana waves her hand around irritatingly close to Yolanda’s face, as if she won’t fucking bite her fingers off if she steps any closer.
“I’m fine, Dana,” she insists, for what must be the millionth time in the last ten minutes. “Would you just go away and do your actual job, already? There has to be something more interesting going on out there.”
Dana just purses her lips, sending her a thoroughly unimpressed look, the kind she usually only whips out when Robby is saying or doing something particularly insane. “How many fingers, Garcia?”
That’s what she said, a familiar voice supplies in her head, but she forces it out immediately. No way is she going down that rabbithole right now.
She forces herself to focus, squinting her eyes over at Dana’s blurry figure, and doing her best to, as Tri— Santos would put it, lock in. She gets as far as three before she’s hit with a wave of nausea so violent she has to squeeze her eyes against the feeling of it, hand coming up to cover her eyes, jaw clenched tightly. The kid — Ella? Emma? Anna? — is at her side in a second, emesis bag outstretched eagerly in her directions, but she scuttles back off to the computer on the other side of the room, tail between her legs, when she sees the scowl Yolanda shoots at her.
“You good?” Dana asks, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Fuck off,” she bites back. With a heaving breath, she presses her palm against the flat plane of her stomach, willing the rest of its contents to stay in this time, and decides to chance it, looking back at her through glassy eyes and asking, “Four?”
“Yeah, you’re done, kid,” Dana sighs, arms falling back to her side. “Time for you to go home.”
“Wait, what?” Yolanda splutters. “I can’t have been that far off!”
“Garcia, I was holding up two hands.” Fuck. “Come on, time to accept defeat. You can’t work like this.”
“But I have patients,” she tries to argue. God, Shamsi is going to kill her. As if she wasn’t mad enough already about her having to duck out of the surgery early to come down here in the first place. “I’m meant to be taking out some guy’s gallstones in an hour.”
“Yeah, and what are you gonna tell him when he wakes up and finds out his surgeon was so concussed she barfed into his open body?” Yolanda scowls at her, but says nothing. Dana seems to take this as some kind of acceptance, because she raises a smug eyebrow, and says, “That’s what I thought. Now, have you got someone that can come pick you up?”
“What?” Yolanda asks, face scrunching up in confusion. The pounding in her skull is getting harder and harder to ignore, and Dana’s incessant questioning is not helping matters. “I… no, I drove here.”
“Obviously,” Dana says, rolling her eyes. “But you can barely sit up straight. No way in hell are you driving yourself home.”
“It’s fine,” she grumbles, rubbing soothingly at her temples with her fingers. “I’ll just get an Uber.”
“Come on, you know the rules.” Jesus Christ, if this even a fraction of what it like to have Dana as a mom, count Yolanda fucking lucky that she wasn’t subjected to it as a kid. She would have totally lost it by thirteen. “Supervision for the first twenty-four hours.”
“Dana, I’m a doctor,” she sighs. “I think I know how to look after myself. It’s a mild concussion, at best. I’ll be just fine on my own.”
Unfortunately, she should have known that trying to get her own way with Dana was never going to work. She levels her with yet another Robby-specific look and shrugs, unflinching. “Rules are rules. Either call someone to come get you, or I call your emergency contact. It’s up to you.”
God, this is humiliating. Thirty-three years old, and she’s going to have to explain to Dana fucking Evans, of all people, that actually, she doesn’t have anyone she can call for help. Family all a six hour drive away, friends she’s barely spoken to in months, no girlfr—
Nope. Not going there.
“They’d be the same person, and she can’t come,” she says instead, refusing to let herself dwell on that thought. At Dana’s confused look, she expands, “It’s Walsh. And considering Shamsi just had to call her up to come finish my appy, I think her hands might be a little tied at the minute.”
“Jesus,” Dana sighs. “You doctors, never socialising with anyone outside of this damn hospital.” She steps back, clearly thinking, before eventually saying, “Alright, just stay here for a minute. I’ll call up to Shamsi, see if she can spare her for the day.”
As if she has anywhere else to go.
Yolanda settles back on the bed, wincing when the cheap, disposable paper cover rubs against her bare skin. She’s never been here in this capacity before, and if she’s being honest, all it’s doing is making her a little more sympathetic to all of the asshole patients that pass through the doors every day; if she had to lie in one of these pieces of shit for hours and hours with no end in sight, she’d probably end up biting some poor nurse’s head off, too.
Just before Dana can leave the room, though, there’s a little squeak from the other side of the room, immediately grating. Yolanda groans at the sound of it, and covers her eyes with her forearm, making sure to press extra hard against her ear this time.
“Um, Dana?” Ella-Emma-Anna says, voice a little wary.
What on Earth she has to be wary about, Yolanda couldn’t tell you — last time she actually looked her way, all she was doing was pulling up her chart, and she can’t imagine there’s anything in there to be particularly scandalised about. Maybe she just can’t believe Yolanda’s actually creeping into her mid-thirties; she smiles a little to herself at the prospect.
“You okay over there, Emma?” Ah. Emma, it is, then.
“Um, yeah, totally fine! Just— um. Could you come look at this…?”
Yolanda thinks she should probably be a little more concerned than she is about whatever it is Emma’s seen in her chart to have her calling in reinforcements, but instead, she just lets it wash right over her. The arm across her face is providing her some much-needed relief from the lighting, and for the first time since her skull got bashed in, the nausea has finally wound down enough that she no longer feels the need to white knuckle a sick bag. It’s the first moment of relative peace she’s had in what feels like hours, and she’s not going to waste it.
“What is it, hon?” she hears Dana ask, followed by the sound of a mouse clicking, a scroll wheel spinning restlessly. Then, an exasperated sigh. “Christ alive. Of course.”
“Sorry,” the kid says. “I just didn’t know if…”
“No, no, you’re all good.” Yolanda squeezes her arm tighter against her ear, a futile attempt to block Dana’s voice out even more. “You stay here while I go hunt her down, alright?”
An agreeable noise from the kid, some more shuffling, and then finally, blissfully, silence. Or, well— as close to silence as she’s going to get, laid up in the world’s most poorly managed emergency department, where it seems like every single other patient has made it their life’s goal to make as much noise as physically possible.
She wonders if it would be pushing it a little too much to ask Emma to go fetch her AirPods for her from her locker.
She’s not sure how long she lays like that for, head pounding, arm blocking out the world around her, but it must not be that long, because nothing much exciting seems to be happening outside the room— no sirens, no incoming traumas, no arguments loud enough to draw her attention. She lays perfectly still, hopeful that if she just pretends everything’s fine, maybe she’ll be able to get rid of this stupid concussion by sheer force of will, and Dana will clear her to go back to work. Mr. Howard’s aren’t going to remove themselves, after all.
The plan seems to be going well, until:
“Seriously, D, what is it? I have shit to do, I don’t have the time time to be going on wild goose hunts.”
Yolanda shoots up out of bed so fast it feels like her brain rattles against her skull, vision going blurry. She knows that voice — all too well, unfortunately — and she also knows there’s no fucking reason she should be hearing it right now. She didn’t even think Santos was working today.
“Trust me,” Dana is saying, an amused lilt to her voice that has Yolanda wanting to jump out of bed and strangle her. “You’re gonna wanna see this.”
Yolanda squeezes her eyes shut, counts to ten very slowly in her head, and does her best to control her breathing. It won’t do her reputation any good to be seen attacking the world’s most beloved charge nurse, even if it would be worth it.
It’s easy to tell when Trinity first sees her, even with her eyes closed, because she immediately cuts herself off mid-sentence, voice dying halfway through whatever rebuttal she’d been giving Dana. Yolanda grits her teeth, prepares for what she knows is coming.
“Yolanda?” she asks. Her eyes widen when they land on the bruise on Yolanda’s forehead, mottled purple and probably growing by the minute. “What the hell happened to you?”
Before she even has the chance to open her mouth, Dana is cutting in, all too pleased to tell her, “Hotshot over here picked a fight with a surgical lamp and lost.”
It’d be bad for your reputation, she reminds herself, as a thin, annoyed breath whistles out of her nose.
Trinity snorts, loudly. Rude. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly.”
“It’s not my fucking fault they had it adjusted wrong,” she finally snaps, eyes flying open and, unfortunately, meeting Trinity’s. She can’t remember the last time they were actually this close, rather than just staring at each other from across a room, and apparently, she’d severely underestimated just what it would feel like to be in her proximity again after so long. Her stomach lurches, fingers twitching in the direction of the emesis bag. “What are you even doing here, anyway?”
“Dude, I don’t fucking know.”
Dude. Her skin crawls irrationally with the casual, borderline friendly nickname— irrational, because even when they were still sleeping together, Trinity called her it at an almost alarming frequency. She once overheard her on the phone calling her dad dude; it’s not at all indicative of her feelings towards someone, and yet it stings nonetheless. That’ll be the concussion, she reminds herself, and immediately feels a little better.
“Dana?” Yolanda asks, making sure to shroud her voice in her most accusatory tone.
“Well,” Dana starts. She turns to face Yolanda, eyebrow raised, and says, “Walsh is not your emergency contact, missy. Santos here is.” Then, to Trinity: “Congrats, kid. You just won yourself the rest of the day off.”
Trinity immediately blanches, and Yolanda could swear she can feel all of the blood rush out of her body. What the fuck, she thinks, right as Trinity voices that exact sentiment.
“Emergency contact?” Trinity stammers. Her face is turning that particular shade of rosy pink that Yolanda always loved to make fun of her for, spreading from the tips of her ears right down her neck. God, she looks pretty, Yolanda thinks, before forcing herself to snap out of it. So not the fucking time. “What are you— why would I be—”
“You’re not,” Yolanda grits out. God, she really is going to barf again. “She’s not,” she insists to Dana.
She had been, once, sure, but there’s no need to bring that up now. She knows for a fact she’d changed it back to Walsh, can still remember the embarrassment that had radiated through her body as she’d filled out the form, fingers gripped firmly around the pen, less than three months after she’d changed it in the first place. It hadn’t even been Trinity long enough for her to figure out how to tell her, for fuck’s sake.
“It says here that you updated it from Dr. Walsh to Dr. Santos on the… seventeenth of May,” Emma ever-so-helpfully supplies, a bright smile on her face that immediately wilts when Yolanda redirects her glare from Dana to her.
“In May?” Trinity repeats. “But we weren’t even…” She lets her voice trail off, eyes darting self-consciously around the room, clearly wary of revealing too much in present company. Thank God for small mercies.
“I did update it,” Yolanda admits, jaw clenched so hard she’d be surprised if she doesn’t wake up with an ache in it tomorrow. “But I changed it back in July.”
“Um, well, it doesn’t say that on your chart,” Emma says, much meeker this time. “It still says in case of emergency, contact Dr. Trinity Santos.”
“Well, it’s wrong.”
“Listen,” Dana cuts in with a sigh, her eyes darting to the clock above her head. It’s clear to Yolanda that, while she was enjoying making her squirm at first, probably as some kind of karmic revenge for whatever snippy comments she’s accidentally made at her during traumas lately, she hadn’t realised exactly what kind of dyke drama she was reigniting by dragging Trinity into the room, and is already getting bored of it. “You said it yourself: Walsh is stuck covering your surgeries for the day, and Shamsi ain’t letting her out to play babysitter. Meanwhile, we’re overstaffed as it is out here. Looks like you don’t have many other options.”
“So, what, you’re just cutting me for the day?” Trinity cuts in, brow furrowed. “I don’t get a say at all?”
Dana stares at her, unimpressed. “I literally just heard you telling Princess how bored you are. This is overtime for you as it is, Santos. You can’t seriously be telling me you’d rather spend the rest of your day here.”
“Well, yeah,” she says hotly. “But that doesn’t mean I wanna spend the day with my— my—”
She swallows, and cuts herself off yet again. Better for both of them that she doesn’t finish that thought, probably, even if it does sting just a little, not
“Charming,” Yolanda says, hoping her dry tone will be enough to mask the sting behind them. “I’m fine, by the way, Santos. Thanks for asking.”
Trinity’s eyes widen, her face softening into concern as she lets her gaze roam over Yolanda, probably registering just how shit she actually looks. “Sorry,” she says, voice quiet, small. “Sorry, I…”
Yolanda immediately feels bad for snapping, and then hates herself for it. Why is she the one feeling bad right now? She’s the one lying in a hospital bed, concussed as all hell, while Trinity acts like the mere prospect of spending a couple of hours with her is on par with catching the plague, or something equally as bad. As if she’s not the one who broke things off between them in the first place; Yolanda should be the one protesting right now, if anything, telling Dana that she’s insane for even suggesting it.
So why isn’t she?
“Sounds like you two have a lot to discuss,” Dana says, in a voice that makes it extremely clear that this is not the place for them to do it. She stretches her arm out in Yolanda’s direction, palm up, and commands, “Keys.”
For some reason entirely unbeknownst to her — concussion! she remembers just a second too late — Yolanda complies immediately, lifting her ass off the seat and fishing around in the pocket of her scrubs to pull them out and give them to her. It’s a good thing after all, she guesses, that she barely had any time to put her stuff in her locker this morning and ended up forgetting them.
Dana immediately passes the keys off into Trinity’s hands. “I’m guessing you know where she lives?” Her cheeks are flushing, but she nods. “Great. Go get her discharge papers from Princess and get her out of here, unless you want her riding this concussion out in here until Walsh can take her home tonight.”
Trinity’s face does something complicated, like she’s genuinely weighing the pros and cons up of both options, but Yolanda isn’t surprised in the slightest when she curls her fist around the keys in her hand with a begrudging sigh, nodding her head in agreement. She always was too kind for her own good, too willing to put anyone but herself first. Yolanda would like to say that, were it Trinity in her position, she would do the same, but finds that she can’t, at least not with a hundred percent confidence.
“Come on,” she sighs over at Yolanda, still barely meeting her eyes. “Let’s go.”
Yolanda must doze off pretty quickly after they set off, because one minute, she’s watching out of the corner of her eye as Trinity adjusts what feels like every single mirror and seat in her car, and the next, they’re stationary, a tentative hand reaching across the console to shake her awake.
“We’re here,” Trinity says — a little uselessly, if you ask Yolanda. As if she’s so concussed she was going to assume that she just parked up in the middle of nowhere for fun, or something.
Yolanda blinks the sleep out of her eyes, and frowns at what she sees when she peers out the window. “This isn’t my apartment.”
“Uh, yeah.” She scratches at the back of her neck awkwardly, once again looking anywhere but actually at her. “It’s… my place was closer, and I still have some of your stuff here, so. Thought it would just be easier.”
“Oh,” Yolanda sighs.
Part of her wants to fight, demand Trinity turn the car around right now and take her back to her own place, leave her there alone, but she doesn’t. Later, she’ll blame it on the exhaustion settled deep into her bones, but the truth is, she’s always found comfort in Trinity and Farm Boy’s tiny, ramshackle apartment. The thought of being allowed into it again, getting to rest up on their shitty Marketplace couch, bathed in the warm glow of Trinity’s ridiculous Snoopy-shaped lamp, even just for a few hours, is so tempting an idea she finds she can’t even pretend not to want it.
“Okay, sure.”
Trinity lets her lead the way up the stairs to the fourth floor, following close behind her, a hand hovering in the space just beside the small of her back. She wants to tell her to back off, give her some space, but, predictably, doesn’t do that, either. It’s nicer than it should be, the reminder that she still gives a shit at least a little, even if the only thing she actually cares about is making sure Yolanda doesn’t trip and eat shit for the second time today. It’s easy enough to pretend that it’s more than that, anyway, with her head as fuzzy as it is.
The apartment looks exactly as she remembers, right down to the mugs left on the coffee table, Whitaker’s shoes kicked off at the door. It kinda feels like, if she just blinks hard enough she’ll be transported right back to June, sprawled across the couch with a book in her hand, Trinity’s warm body curled up against her. She tries, but all that happens is a single, traitorous tear starts building in her eye, and she immediately wishes she’d never bothered in the first place, wiping at it furiously.
If Trinity notices, she says nothing, immediately jumping into hostess mode, flitting over to the kitchen and pulling out a glass for some water, the extra-strength Advil she keeps hidden in the spice rack. Yolanda ambles aimlessly towards the living room, saying nothing, and finds she’s too tired to fight the urge to sink down into her old spot, humming appreciatively at the soft, plushness of it. If she wiggles back far enough, she could probably find the exact outline of her ass still moulded into it.
Maybe later.
“Here,” Trinity says, suddenly reappearing by her side, the aforementioned glass now in her hand. She holds it out to her along with two of the pills, and watches intently as Yolanda swallows them down, eyes fixed on the bob of her throat as she swallows, the way she stretches her neck out afterwards.
“Thanks,” she rasps, taking another long gulp of the water.
A long silence, until:
“Do you want to—”
“Do you mind if I—”
Trinity laughs awkwardly, rubbing anxiously at the back of her neck. “Sorry, I’m— um. You go.”
“Do you mind if I have a nap?” she asks. The pounding behind her eyes is reaching unbearable levels now, and even with the painkillers she’s just taken, she knows it’s going to take at least another twenty minutes for it to kick in. The prospect of rawdogging that in this awkward, awful stasis with Trinity sounds less pleasing than an honest-to-God kick to the stomach right now.
“You should probably wait a while,” Trinity says, teeth sinking into her bottom lip, worrying at it. “Make sure your concussion doesn’t get any worse.”
“I hit my head off a lamp, Trinity, I didn’t headbutt a brick wall,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be fine. I’m just— tired.” Trinity’s eyes narrow, considering. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, so Yolanda adds, “You can sit here and watch me sleep, if you’re really that worried.”
Her cheeks flush prettily, and the eye contact that she’d finally made is immediately cut off, eyes darting to some other point, just above Yolanda’s head. “That’s not— I never—” She clears her throat. “Um. Okay, yeah, sure. Do you…”
“Do I…?”
“God,” Trinity murmurs under her breath, eyes slipping shut for just a second before she forces them back open. Yolanda hates how endearing she still finds her almost terminal awkwardness, even after all this time. The knowledge that she’s one of the few people who has ever gotten to see her like this, nervous and stumbling over her own words, only makes it worse— makes her feel pathetically special, for some reason, even though it absolutely shouldn’t. “Do you want some more comfortable clothes? I still— you never came and picked up your stuff.”
No, she didn’t. At the time, she’d reasoned that it was simply because she hadn’t left anything here worthy enough of the time it would take to go through the whole, painful rigamarole of re-exchanging things. Maybe, if she were a little more inclined towards honesty, she’d admit that it was mostly because she didn’t want to have to give back the contents of her Trinity drawer, a collection of old, faded t-shirts and boxers, didn’t want to have to give up on the illusion of her one day coming back for them. Trinity had texted at least three times asking her to pick a time that would work for her, and Yolanda had been able to do nothing but breathe a sigh of relief when she’d finally given up on it, realising her attempts were futile.
“Yeah, sounds nice,” she shrugs instead, letting out a shaky breath when Trinity turns to leave, heading back in the direction of her bedroom. Then, yet another thing she’ll later blame on the concussion: “Do you still have that Dodgers hoodie?”
Trinity’s footsteps slow to a halt, and Yolanda can picture the look of confusion on her face, brows adorably furrowed, without once having to look over at her to confirm it’s there. “Uh… do you mean my hoodie?”
“Yeah,” she sighs, refusing to elaborate any further. Trinity can connect the dots herself, she's a smart girl.
“Yeah?”
Okay, maybe she can’t. Fuck.
“It’s soft,” Garcia expands. “Comfier than anything I left here.”
She refuses to embarrass herself any further by actually putting her request into words. Concussion or no concussion, Yolanda Garcia is not pathetic enough to actually ask her ex-whatever out loud if she can wear her sweater when she’s sick. Even she has her limits.
Silence fills the room yet again, stilted and awkward. Yolanda’s just about to take it back, say never mind, bring me my silk set instead, when the footsteps start up again, and she sighs, burrowing further into the cushions. Great. This, paired with the whole emergency contact thing — she looks like the clingiest, most pathetic ex in the world. And they weren’t even fucking dating.
Or—
Maybe not, actually, because the next thing she knows, a pile of clothes is being dropped softly into her lap, and when she opens her eyes to look at them, she sees that Trinity’s not only brought the hoodie in question but also her softest pair of pyjama pants, the red and white flannel ones that Yolanda always used to steal from her. Oh. She feels pathetically like crying again, which categorically can not happen, not if she wants to retain even a single inch of street cred.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” Trinity says, turning to walk away again, but Yolanda stops her, getting to her feet and tugging the waistband of her scrubs down before she can leave.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says, kicking her legs out of her pants and reaching for the bottoms. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”
When she chances a glance over at Trinity out of the corner of her eye, she sees she’s bright red, eyes looking anywhere but at her, until she finally cracks for just a second, unable to stop herself from lingering on the sight of long, bare legs, pupils dilating just the slightest bit. Good, she thinks proudly. Upper hand regained. She does turn her back to Trinity to slip the hoodie on, though, because, after all, she’s not a total asshole.
“Do you need anything else?” Trinity asks as she settles back onto the couch, lying on her side and tucking her legs up under herself.
All Yolanda can find it in herself to do is shake her head, staring up at Trinity’s wide, unblinking eyes, searching desperately for something, anything in them that she can recognise.
Nothing comes.
“Okay,” Trinity hums eventually. “I’ll set an alarm, come check on you soon.”
This time, when she turns to walk away, Yolanda doesn’t stop her.
The next time she wakes up, she’s significantly warmer than she’d been before, and also.. lying on something?
Her head still hurts like a motherfucker, but the Advil seems to have finally kicked in, because what once was a painful throbbing has ebbed into more of a dull ache, one that at least doesn’t have her teeth set on edge. The nausea seems to be mostly gone, too, stomach settled after what feels like an age. She smiles a little to herself as she pushes herself up slowly, body still a little sluggish, until—
Jesus Christ.
The something in question is apparently Trinity’s thigh, and she’s got her head sprawled right against it like it’s a pillow, and this is still something she’s allowed to do. At some point, Trinity must have draped a blanket over her, too, because there’s about a hundred little upside-down visages of Spiderman staring back at her, tucked up to her neck.
“Sorry,” she says, attempting to sit up a little more forcefully, but she’s subdued almost immediately with a soft hand against her shoulder, pressing her back down into her previous position.
“It’s okay,” Trinity says, voice gentle. She looks remarkably unfreaked out by this chain of events, as if this isn’t the same woman that once avoided Yolanda in the hallways at work for two days after accidentally taking hold of her hand in public. Has she woken up in the Twilight Zone, or something? “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Yolanda says groggily. Her throat is dry as fuck, but she’s not going to risk trying to sit up again to get the water, not if Trinity’s going to let her stay like this. It’s not that she’s missed the closeness between them, obviously, but she’d be an idiot to turn down the offer of a soft, comfy thigh in favour of a lumpy, decade-old sofa.
“Good,” Trinity murmurs. Her hand reaches out, hovering over the mess of Yolanda’s curls against her lap for just a second, before she seemingly thinks better of it and recalibrates, dropping it back to her side.
“How long was I out?”
“Just over an hour.” Yolanda watches in her peripheral vision as Trinity fidgets nervously with her fingers, twisting them around anxiously in her lap, nails digging into the palms of her hands. The urge to reach out and cover them with her own, soothe her, is almost physical, and she only just manages to resist. “Are you hungry?”
Yolanda shakes her head, ignoring the resounding throb it gives out at the sudden movement.
“Thirsty?”
“A little,” she admits. Immediately, Trinity leans forward to the table, grabbing at a flask of water she’d apparently filled up for her while Yolanda was out. She flips the straw up and carefully guides it to Yolanda’s mouth, holding it steady against the sofa cushions until she pulls away, throat bobbing. It’s only as she’s watching Trinity place it back on the counter that she realises the flask is hers, too— yet another thing left behind, apparently. “Thanks.”
Silence falls over them once again, as seems to be the theme for the day. Or, at least, it was, until Trinity has to go and ruin it. She clears her throat, clearly hyping herself up to say whatever it is she’s thinking, and eventually asks, “So… are we going to talk about it, or…?”
Yolanda sighs. She doesn’t need to ask to know what it is.
“Do we have to?” she asks, maybe a little petulantly. Sue her, she’s concussed and lying on her ex’s lap — she thinks she’s allowed to act a little childish right now. “It was a mistake, okay? I meant to change it back to Walsh. I will change it back to Walsh.”
“Well, yeah, but…” She lets out a shaky laugh, and rubs a hand over face. “I mean, fuck, Yolanda, the fact that you made it me in the first place is pretty crazy, isn’t it?”
Yolanda frowns. “I wouldn’t exactly call it crazy.”
Trinity laughs again, but there’s no humour to it. “What, you don’t think it’s at least a little insane that you wouldn’t even call me your girlfriend, but wanted me to be the one they called if you were in an accident?”
Okay, so when she puts it like that…
Even still: “Don’t do that, Trinity,” she scoffs. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
Yolanda forces herself up finally. She can’t have this conversation like this, sprawled across Trinity’s lap like everything's still normal between them, nothing’s changed. She ignores the sinking feeling she gets in her chest when she catches the despondent look on Trinity’s face at her movement, the immediate emptiness she feels at the sudden lack of contact. It won’t do either of them any good to dwell on it.
“Act like I was the only one avoiding talking about shit,” she says. “Sure, maybe I could have been a little more upfront with you, but I didn’t exactly see you jumping to clarify things.”
“A little more—” Trinity balks. “Jesus Christ, Yolanda. Are you being serious right now?” At Yolanda’s frown, she scoffs, and gets up from the sofa, starting a quick pace around the living room, hands balled into fists at her sides. “I never knew where I stood with you. Ever. You’d be all over me one week and then the next it’s like, boom. Nothing.”
That’s not how Yolanda remembers it, or at least not entirely. All over Trinity one week, yeah, sure— but the rest?
“No, I would say something too real, and you would freak out over it, so I’d give you some space,” she argues. “I thought that was what you wanted.”
“Well, it wasn’t!” Trinity snaps. Yolanda can’t help but wince at the volume of it, fingers coming up to rub soothingly at her pulsating temples. Trinity seems to soften the minute she clocks the movement, exhaling a deep, rattling sigh from her lungs, and stopping her pacing. “Fuck. Sorry, I’m— you’re concussed. Shit. We can talk about this later.”
“No, it’s fine,” she groans. It’s not, actually, not really, but this is the most conversation she’s gotten out of Trinity in three months, and she’s a little terrified that if she lets it drop now, she’ll never get this chance again. “Just— can you sit down?”
Trinity complies immediately, perching gingerly on the other end of the sofa, like some kind of old, homing instinct to follow Yolanda’s orders has suddenly awoken in her. Even through the haze of her foggy brain, it’s hard for Yolanda to not feel at least a little smug about that.
But now Trinity’s here, sitting, she realises she doesn’t know what to say. There’s a part of her, a bitter, ugly one, that wants to validate every one of Trinity’s assumptions about her: tell her that she’s right, she doesn’t care, she never did, that Trinity knew the score from the start. It would be a lie, sure, but it would be vindicating, just a little, to prove her right. Become the villain that she’s so clearly painted Yolanda as in her head over the last few months, the awful, uncaring bitch who never felt a thing for her at all.
She won’t do that. She could never, not to Trinity.
Trinity, with her soft, open face, her beautiful, expressive eyes. For all the front she puts on to everyone else around her, Yolanda thinks Trinity might be one of the most gentle people she’s ever met; the idea of being yet another in the long line of people who have stuck the knife into her has her nausea from earlier resurfacing, rolling low in the pit of her stomach.
“My little brother got into an accident in May,” she says instead, poking her tongue against her cheek, eyes zeroing in on the plush carpet beneath her socked feet. “Nothing serious, just a fender bender. Idiota wouldn’t know a speed limit if it smacked him in the face,” she grumbles. “But they called me, because I guess I’m still his emergency contact, and I had to give them our mom’s number to call instead.”
“Okay…” Trinity says, clearly a little lost.
“Anyway,” Yolanda says with a little shrug, as if playing it off will make what she’s about to say any less honest, any less terrifying. “It just had me thinking— if I was in an accident, who would I want to be there at the hospital with me?”
She can hear the shaky little breath that Trinity exhales from across the couch, can feel it in the air. She wants, desperately, to reach a hand out for her to hold, but doesn’t.
When Trinity says nothing, Yolanda rolls her eyes up to the ceiling and says, begrudgingly, “It wasn’t Walsh I wanted there, okay? It was you. I would want you to be there.”
“Well, you didn’t seem that happy to see me today,” Trinity says, of course pointedly ignoring everything else Yolanda just admitted. She honestly doesn’t know what else she expected.
“Because you haven’t looked at me properly for months, Trinity,” she sighs, running a hand through her bedraggled hair. “You won’t even look at me now.”
Slowly but surely, Trinity’s gaze moves from the TV to the spot beside her, only stopping when she meets Yolanda’s face. Yolanda resists connecting with it for a minute, a little terrified of what she’s going to see when she does, but eventually relents, dragging her own away from the slightly blurry mess of ceiling tiles overhead.
“Hi,” Trinity breathes out when they finally lock eyes, voice small. Yolanda can’t help but smile at the sight of her, curled into the side of the couch, a shy smile on her face; it only grows tenfold when she notices what she apparently changed into during Yolanda’s nap, her very own Brown Soccer t-shirt staring right back at her.
It’s not much, as far as apologies go, or olive branches for that matter, but Yolanda recognises what it is for Trinity, how hard she must be finding it to give her even this. She’s probably fighting against every instinct in her body right now, telling her to run, get away from this conversation, hide; it’s hard to be upset with how little she’s giving her, when she’s at least giving her something at all.
“Hey,” she replies, exhausted.
Trinity sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, working at it anxiously as she considers her next words. Yolanda just waits, gives her the time to figure out what it is she wants to say— Trinity needs patience sometimes, she reminds herself. She can give her that.
“I would have wanted you there, too,” she says eventually, heat blooming prettily against pale cheeks, as though she just gave some kind of all-out declaration of love or something, rather than just mirror Yolanda’s own sentiment back to her. “I mean— Huck’s my emergency contact, and he’d probably kill me if I changed that, but. You know. I probably would have asked him to call you as soon as I woke up, or whatever.”
Yolanda laughs softly, she can’t help herself. Infuriatingly, she continues to find herself charmed in ways words can’t put into words by this bumbling, beautiful mess of a girl sat in front of her. She aches to reach out and touch, hold her properly for the first time in months, relearn the feeling of her body pressed against hers, warm and forgiving. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Trinity affirms with a tiny nod of her head.
She brings her hand up to her mouth, gnawing anxiously on her thumbnail; Yolanda reaches out and swats it away on instinct, and then their hands are touching, and God, it’s better than she remembered. She feels a little like a virgin, practically trembling over something as small as brushing hands with a pretty girl, but— whatever. Concussion, remember?
“Okay,” she says softly. “We can work with that, I think. If you want to.”
“I do,” Trinity says quickly. “I do. I— miss you, or whatever.”
Fuck. Yolanda thinks she might be in love.
“Yeah,” she laughs, bright and happy, the first real one she’s had to give all day. “I miss you too, or whatever.”
“Shut up,” Trinity grumbles, face now a bright, beautiful pink. She fidgets with her hands for another couple of seconds before looking back up and asking, “Um— you still seem kinda wiped. We could like, have another nap, if you wanted. Talk more after, maybe.”
Yolanda knows her too well to see the segue as anything but the out that it so obviously is, clearly overwhelmed from all of the emotion sharing. She doesn’t exactly mind, though— she is wiped, and she hardly likes talking about her feelings any more than Trinity does. Plus, if she’s offering what Yolanda thinks she might be…
“Taking advantage of my concussion to sleep your new day off away, are we, Santos?” she teases, arching an eyebrow over at her.
“Uh, duh.”
Yolanda smiles, and stretches her legs back out over the couch, bumping against Trinity’s in the process. She opens her arms out and nods down at the space it creates against her chest, looking over at Trinity expectantly. She feels like her heart is going to take flight in her chest when she almost immediately moves to shift into it, wrapping an arm around Yolanda’s waist and tucking her face against her chest, right above the uneven thud of her heartbeat. Yolanda pulls the discarded blanket up over them, coccooning them in together, and leans down just a little to brush a tentative kiss against the crown of Trinity’s head, squeezing her arms around her even tighter.
The last thing she hears before she falls asleep is Trinity, voice muffled, clearly halfway there herself, saying, “You don’t have to change it back to Walsh.”
And thank God for that.