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1.
Growing up is like drowning.
That’s what Jane tells her, anyway. Trinity isn’t sure she agrees, but she’s only eleven, so she figures she has a few more years to figure it out.
Jane is two years older. Thirteen looks small on her. Her clothes are loose, but even the bagginess can’t hide the way her bones jut out from under her skin. She doesn’t smile much, but when she does, it looks sewn onto her face. Trinity savors it all the same.
They’d met so long ago that neither could remember exactly when. Their parents were friends, in that standoffish way that parents of similarly-aged children often were, and Trinity and Jane got along just well enough to justify the playdates that morphed into hangouts as they grew older.
Jane tells her the thing about growing up when they’re on a walk. They’re not going anywhere in particular. In a town this small, there’s nowhere to go. Trinity has to be back before the streetlights turn on, but Jane’s parents either don’t care or Jane has fought for her right to roam after dark. It’s one of the things that Trinity knows better than to ask.
“I dunno about that,” Trinity says, kicking a rock. It pings on the rusty side of an old railroad track. For the longer walks, they stick by either the old railway or the river. It's easier to find the way back that way. “I haven’t drowned before. Or grown up, I guess.”
Jane laughs. She has a nice laugh, even though not a lot is nice about her. It sounds like the way early summer mornings feel, when the birds are still singing and the sun is just a kiss on skin. She’ll never tell Jane that, though. Jane would only make fun of her.
“What, you think I have?” Jane balances on the rails while they walk. Her arms spread out like the wings of a bird.
Sometimes Trinity forgets that Jane is only a little older. She seems so much bigger, somehow, even though they’re the same height. She knows everything that everybody else in this town is too scared to say. She’s like God, in that way, even though Trinity would never say that out loud.
“I just think about what it’d be like, sometimes,” Jane says. She wobbles back and forth on the tracks. She’s always on the edge of falling. She gets mad when someone tries to catch her, so Trinity has learned to just let her fall, even when Jane skins her knees on the rusty metal. Trinity understands, after all. She understands more than most why someone might not want to be touched.
This time, Jane rights herself before she trips. Her hands are still scabbed from last week. Trinity is never allowed to catch her, but she can patch her up. She’s good at that. Good at fixing things, even if they don’t want to be fixed.
“What? Growing up?” Trinity asks. There’s only a few months of summer left. A few more months of freedom.
They don’t talk about it. Her and Jane. Not about him. Not really. Not the way his hands are smooth, like he’s never done a day of work in his life. Not the way that the shame sits like twin regret in their stomachs. Not the way it hurts more than she thought anything could hurt.
Trinity and Jane tell each other everything, but some things just aren’t meant to be put into words.
“No,” Jane says. “Drowning.”
“Oh. Why?”
“I dunno,” Jane says. “Not the dying part. But the stuff that happens before. When it’s all quiet, and everything’s blurred, and it’s kinda like sleeping but under water. And you can’t think of anything except for how much you want to breathe. I think about that.”
Trinity presses her lips together. She’s never had a friend like Jane. Sometimes she thinks she’ll never have a friend like her again.
“But you wouldn’t,” Trinity says.
“What?”
Trinity frowns. She could let it go, but it feels like the sort of thing that’s important to say out loud. “You wouldn’t leave me,” she says. “Like—if you drown, you would be leaving me, so you wouldn’t.”
Jane’s face does something weird. She steps down from the railroad tracks onto solid ground. Her sneakers used to be white, but they’re more of a brown now, permanently stained from mud and grass. They’re a size too small, which Trinity knows because Jane had said once she gets a new pair, Trinity could have these if she wants. She’d been saying that for a year.
Maybe when they were younger, Trinity wouldn’t have asked Jane whether she’d stay. Of course Jane would be there. Jane was always there when Trinity wanted her to be. They went everywhere together and did everything as a pair, and when Trinity tried to think of her future and the husband she could never quite picture, Jane was always present, sitting on the counter, eating dinner at the table, a piece of her life that was too fragile to name.
But they were older now. Jane didn’t smile as much. Sometimes, after school, when she’d bitten her lips until they’d bled, she’d have this look in her eyes, like she wasn’t all the way there. Like she was somewhere far away. Somewhere Trinity couldn’t follow.
“It’s you and me,” Jane says now, holding her hand out like a promise. Her other hand is hidden from view. Are her fingers crossed? Jane always means what she says, but sometimes she doesn’t mean it in a way Trinity wants her to. Her hand is trembling as their fingers brush. “You and me until the end.”
“Okay,” Trinity says, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
Jane kills herself two years later, and Trinity thinks she might finally understand what she meant when she said growing up was like drowning.
2.
High school is a blur.
She’d be in class and suddenly taste something familiar, something rotten, and she’d have to run to the bathroom with a hand over her mouth. The man was fired after Jane killed herself. He’d been named in her note. Of course, Trinity had already known. She’d known just as well as Jane had, but all the rest of the girls knew was that the weird girl in the back of the gymnasium offed herself and suddenly their favorite coach was gone.
They keep their distance from Trinity after that, as if she has a sickness they could catch. Maybe they’re right. In the years following Jane’s death, Trinity is rougher, sharper, a dog that bites before the outstretched hand can help or hurt. It’s as if Jane’s fate had woken her up from a bad dream only to throw her into a bad life.
Sometimes Trinity resents Jane for telling. Maybe that’s not fair. Jane wasn’t any more powerful than Trinity was. She was scared and fifteen and all she knew was that she didn’t want to feel that way anymore, so she did what she had to.
She still hates Jane for leaving.
Sometimes, she thinks about what would have happened if Jane had asked her to join her. She’s not sure what she would’ve said. Back then, she wasn’t very good at saying no to anyone. She can almost picture it now, standing at the edge of the lake, pockets full of rocks, holding hands and wading deeper, eyes open to watch each other choke, only thinking of air, only thinking of their hands grasping each other like it could help them breathe.
She continues gymnastics out of spite, mostly. It’s a point of pride when she can complete a routine without seeing his face behind her eyelids. At night, when she’s exhausted and clutching the same stuffed bear she’s had since she was a kid, she thinks of Jane, of her brown eyes, of drowning, of the way that Trinity is now older than Jane ever got to be.
College is a chance to escape.
She rejects the community college thirty minutes down the road for one of the big universities across the country. Financial aid covers a good chunk, and despite Trinity’s rough start to high school, she’d managed to smooth out most of her grades by junior year, so she gets a few merit scholarships as well. What isn’t covered by aid, she takes out loans for, biting down on her tongue when she sees the bill. She’s going to make this work. She has to. She’s been drowning in this town for years, and she deserves this, to get out into the big city and make something of herself, as cliche as it is. She deserves to kiss a girl and not think less of herself for it. She deserves to crawl out of here, dirt and blood underneath her nails like evidence, all to find a purpose, to do something great, to be someone that proves, unequivocally, that Trinity Santos is worth the work it is to love her.
She chooses a school in Boston. The city is gray and cold and standoffish and Trinity loves it. No one knows her here. No one cares. In this city, she’s a student amongst thousands, and she can be as prickly as she wants.
Her classes are bland for the most part. Every week, she has to go to a seminar for undeclared students, where they go over majors and career paths. When someone asks her what she wants to do, all Trinity can think of is the quiet moments spent patching Jane up, bandaids like forgiveness. Briefly, she considers social work, but she’s self aware enough to doubt she has the preferred disposition for the career. So for now, she sits through her general education classes, taking notes and acing exams not because she cares, but because she wants to prove that she belongs here.
On weekends, she goes out and forgets who she is. She takes whatever drinks are offered to her and downs them in long gulps. She dances, unsteady and uncaring, skin pressed against her own, sweat dripping down the small of her back. It’s a slow descent into madness. All she wants is a moment to breathe, to forget about the guilt ever present in her stomach, to black out and forget who Trinity Santos might have been without the scars of her childhood. It starts with the drinks, and then it’s the weed her roommate offers her, and then, one memorable night, it’s something stronger.
She’s not sure what she takes. Someone presses a pill on her tongue and she swallows it. She’s been desperate all her life for a break. For the quiet that Jane had described, all those years ago, when all you can think of is your next breath.
The party blurs. Neon colors, laughter. Everything is faded. Everything is bright. She’s drowning on dry land. She’s dying. She’s never felt more alive.
That night, Trinity goes home with a girl because she can. She’s warm and soft and tastes like liquor. The sex is awkward, fumbling, laughter mixed into sloppy kisses, like the only way Trinity can breathe is if it’s in someone else’s mouth. She doesn’t remember the girl’s name. Maybe she never asked. Hands are drifting across her skin, up the sides of her torso, teasing under her bra strap, unrelenting in their gentleness. Trinity wonders, vaguely, looking into the girl’s brown eyes, whether this still counts as her first time. There’s a mouth on her and she’s sinking, deeper and deeper, pleasure like an anchor tied to her legs. It’s been so long since she’s felt like this. Lust crawls into her as nausea and lays its eggs deep inside her stomach. She’s close. No, that’s not right. She’s far away, deep at the bottom of the lake Jane died at, and her desire is the water in her lungs. When she comes, it’s like she’s finally let go of that final desperate breath, water rushing in, dead as the girl who haunts her.
She doesn’t realize she’s crying until the girl wipes her tears for her. “Was that okay?” she asks.
Trinity can taste blood in her mouth. Her limbs are splayed out wide on the bed. The room is unfamiliar. Guilt is creeping into her stomach, potent and nauseating. The high from the pill is beginning to subside. It leaves her mouth dry and head pounding.
She blinks. The girl is in front of her. “Sweetheart?” she asks again, and Trinity wants to scoff, because she hasn’t been called sweet in a long, long time.
“I want to sleep,” Trinity says, voice cracking. Her composure fractures into violent slivers. She’s left sniffling, eyes rimmed red, hands trembling. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she forces out, because the girl didn’t. It’s not her fault that Trinity can’t fuck someone without remembering his fingers inside her.
Unsteady, Trinity tries to rise and collect her clothes. Everything is crashing down. God, if her parents knew what she was doing, they’d be mortified. Her hands won’t stop shaking.
The thing was: it had felt good. So, indescribably good. It was sickening. Some nights, when she couldn’t erase the taste of ash from her mouth, she’d look in the mirror and see that little girl from ten years ago staring back at her. He had made it good sometimes too, when she was too young to really understand what was happening.
She’s horribly aware of her bare skin against the sheets. She glances at the floor. Her clothes are spread out on the carpet, inside-out and crumpled.
A hand curls around her wrist. She instinctively flinches back, but the girl’s grip doesn’t falter.
“You can stay, you know,” the girl says instead. Her eyes are as brown as the mud Trinity had once tracked across her mother’s new white rug. “I’m not that much of an asshole.”
She grins. Her teeth are sharp.
Trinity wonders what it would feel like to be eaten alive.
“And,” the girl murmurs, rubbing her thumb into the pulsepoint of Trinity’s wrist, “you weren’t a half-bad lay, anyways.”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m serious!” The girl is laughing. She has blonde bangs that fall unevenly against her forehead. Her mouth is still wet with spit. Trinity can’t stop looking at her. Desire is an unquenchable thirst in the back of her throat. Some nights she wishes she’d die untouched. Other nights, she burns with it, lust like fire, a girl’s mouth against her own like penance.
Trinity sighs. Her mouth is dry. “I don’t even know your name.”
The girl just smiles. “Leigh,” she says, holding her hand out like an offering. “And you are?”
“Trinity.”
Leigh mouths her name. Despite all of Trinity’s protests, it looks sweet on her lips: like wine, like blood, like regret. Then, Leigh turns to her, head cocked. “So, stay? I could go for another round in the morning. Could even be convinced to make you breakfast, maybe, if you’re good.” She smiles the way a shark bites through bone. Trinity is helpless to disagree.
—
Leigh, as it turns out, only goes to school part-time. In her free time, she bartends, and makes a killer mimosa to complement her pancakes.
“I take it I was good?” Trinity asks, a small smile twitching on her lips.
Leigh just smiles again, still sharp, still merciless, and desire burns like an omen.
The following months are a blur. She spends half her time at Leigh’s shoebox apartment and the other half at clubs, drowning her memories in the cheapest drinks she can find. Sometimes she chickens out before she drinks anything at all; she comes back frustrated and twitchy and begs Leigh fucks her until she can’t think of anything but the hands on her thighs. Neither of them mention the scars, not even when the wounds are so fresh she bleeds as Leigh runs her hands up her leg. One morning, she tries to make Leigh breakfast as a token of gratitude and nearly sets off the fire alarm. She does the laundry instead.
As for school, Trinity settles on pre-med—biology, to be specific—after a short conversation on Leigh’s bed. It’s only a twin, so they’re half on top of each other. Leigh is writing an essay for her anthropology class. Trinity is tracing the freckles on her stomach. They look like the stars back home. Like the sky before Jane’s death. Bright, beautiful, a constellation she would never grow sick of tracing a finger across.
“So,” Leigh says, still typing. It’s an awkward position; she’s upright but sprawled back, her laptop on Trinity’s back. “What are you going to do?”
Trinity frowns. “I dunno. Why do you care?”
Leigh hums and waits for Trinity’s teeth to retreat.
“I was thinking,” Trinity whispers, like it’s a secret, “about becoming a doctor.”
Leigh is silent for a while. The sound of clacking keys is a pounding heartbeat. “That’s a lot of school.”
“Sure,” Trinity says, “but, I don’t know. I like my anatomy class, and we got to shadow at a hospital last week, and…”
And she saw people on the worst day of their lives. And she saw them being put back together. And she knew, intrinsically, that she wanted to be the one to do that. To be the one to fix things that didn’t want to be fixed, because she was still mourning, would always be mourning, would always be haunted, would always wonder if she could have stopped Jane that day, if she could have noticed the signs, if she could have finally caught Jane before she fell.
“And you liked the blood and gore,” Leigh concludes. It’s not exactly wrong, but isn’t really right either.
“Sure,” Trinity says, because she gave up being understood a long time ago, and the conversation ends there.
Their timid attempt at a relationship comes to an end like a tidal wave hitting the beach.
It goes like this:
Trinity is at Leigh’s door, again. She’s drunk, again. She skipped her last few meals to save up for the shots, so she’s a little woozy, too, and wants nothing more than to be fucked to sleep.
She’s still chasing the bliss of that first night. The moments of pleasure before the disgust crept in. The high, the sinking, the way Leigh’s eyes had looked like Jane’s, if only for a moment.
Leigh opens the door. She’s mad. Trinity is good at telling when people are mad. It’s in their body language. Leigh’s jaw is set, shoulders set, familiar in a way that makes bile climb up her throat.
“Jesus,” Leigh mutters. She pulls Trinity in the door. “Did my neighbors see you?”
Trinity blinks. Slurs. “Thought you didn’ care about their opinions.”
“About the gay thing, sure,” Leigh waves, like it’s nothing, “not about my fuckbuddy showing up at the door drunk for the third time this week.”
Trinity chokes on her next inhale. There’s so many things to pick apart she doesn't know where to start.
“‘m not drunk,” she lands on, because that’s the important part, because there’s a part of her that’s always known that she’s the one who loves too much, too early, always tolerated where she wants only to be desired. It’s not like she’s an alcoholic. Those are the people who are on the streets, on the corners, camping out under bridges. She just likes to party, sometimes, likes to shut off her brain and let herself drown. God knows she deserves it.
Leigh smiles. She’s the opposite of Jane, somehow. Everything on the surface is nice about her, except for her smile. It’s an ugly thing. Like the baring of teeth. “Sure,” she says.
The words sound off. Discolored. Everything is spinning. The world is rotating, and it’s forgotten to take her with it. “Yeah,” Trinity says. She could stop. She just doesn’t want to.
Leigh doesn’t seem satisfied. “You can’t keep doing this,” she says. “At first, I thought maybe you were just adjusting. Everyone makes a bad decision or two during their first semester. But you keep doing it, Trinity. Over and over. And you go out every night and come back drunk again with dreams you know you won’t achieve and I tolerate it, I tolerate you, but you’re on a collision course, and I can’t spend the rest of my life playing pretend with you.”
Trinity blinks. The words aren’t really making sense to her. They slide off Leigh’s mouth and into the world like oil on water. Had Leigh always felt that way? She doesn’t remember much from these nights besides Leigh’s spit in her mouth. “I could stop,” she says.
Leigh laughs. “Right.”
“No, really,” Trinity says, because this is her chance to start over, this is her chance to make things right. She could stop, because she was always going to. This was temporary. Is temporary. She’s going to be a doctor, and doctors can’t black out every weekend, so she won’t either. This was the last time, the same way the last time was yesterday, and the week before, and the week before that.
Leigh is looking at her the same way a hunter looks down the barrel of a gun. “I think you should go.”
It’s a shot to the chest. Her lungs are burning. Maybe she’s drowning. Maybe she drowned a long time ago. “No,” Trinity says. “No, it’s—I’ll stop. I said I would. Give me a chance. I can fix this. It’s—don’t you want to fuck me before I leave? One last time. You know I’m good for it. Or give me a week. I’ll sober up. This was the last time. I swear. I just—I wanted to party. I’m young. I didn’t want to think about anything.”
Her hands are trembling.
“I’m doing this for you,” Leigh says, like there’s something Trinity isn’t quite grasping. “It’s—we were never going to work out, anyways, and—”
“No?” Trinity asks, before she can bite down on the words.
Leigh just looks at her. That same ugly smile. “You need help,” she say. Quietly. A mercy kill.
Trinity blinks and she’s out of the apartment and blinks and she’s on the street and blinks and she’s in the club again and blinks and there’s liquor on her tongue and blinks and she’s in another girl’s bed and blinks and she wakes up alone, always alone, always wanting, always drowning. She never sees Leigh again.
3.
Medical school is a distraction as good as any.
She goes through her rotations easily enough. She’s abrasive, maybe, but she doesn’t need anyone getting too close, doesn’t need another Jane, doesn’t need another Leigh. Surgery was her first choice for residency, because then she wouldn’t have to deal with anything beyond the scalpel in her hand, but she’s far from upset about her placement in emergency medicine.
Pittsburgh is fine. She doesn’t feel any particular way about it. She gets an apartment with the money she had carefully saved through medical school, complete with a spare room to rent out if she’s really strapped for cash.
On the day she begins her residency, she gets ready in record time. She shows up to the Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Center with a smile to rival the sun. She can do this. She knows she can. If she’s meant for anything, it’s to hold someone’s life in her hands, proof that she’s good at something, that she’s finally making a difference.
Trinity has been told many times that she’s cocky. It’s not that she disagrees. Maybe she is cocky. But she has the skills to back it up. She doesn’t doubt herself, because she can’t afford to. She has to be good at this. There’s no other option.
And then she meets Dr. Langdon.
If Robby is the god of this ED, Langdon is his most revered saint.
He can do no wrong. She questions him, and he berates her. She does a procedure alone, because she’s always been good at fixing things by herself, and he wrings her out to dry. She saves someone, and he only has the words to tell her how useless she is, how unwanted and undeserved, the sneaking insecurities she’s held inside since she was a child who didn’t know she needed to ask for help.
The tampered vial is still in her pocket. It feels a little like his blood on her hands. She could wash it off. She could forget this, if she really wanted to, and at moments she does, because she’s played this game before. She’s been the timid little girl afraid to tell on a man so much bigger and better and experienced than her. She’s seen the way the others ostracize you, blame you, hold you accountable for something you didn’t even really understand.
Dr. Robby pulls her aside towards the end of her shift.
His voice is measured. He asks her the questions no one ever cared to ask. The whole time, Trinity is running her thumb over the vial. It rests in her pocket like a heart under the floorboards. The weight of it burns her. If she tells Robby, what would happen? Would he cover for Langdon? Would he report him? Would he get her fired?
Maybe she really is destined to pay for men’s mistakes.
With enough prodding, she confesses. It’s for his own good, she reminds herself. The words are eerily familiar, though she can’t place them. Langdon is falling apart as it is. He needs help. This is for him. She’s always been good at fixing things that don’t want to be fixed; this is no different.
In the end, she tells Robby and only Robby. By doing so, she saves Langdon without ever meaning or really wanting to.
Langdon leaves that day. Her skin itches. She wonders if he’ll ever be back. Does anyone care? She’s used to this, the endless leaving, the forgiveness extended from people who were never hurt. Langdon leaves, and she didn’t really want him to stay, but she still feels the guilt like water in her lungs.
4.
Garcia is a bad idea. Trinity knows that.
She’s a bad idea when she’s looking at Trinity over the bloody bodies in the Pitt. She’s a bad idea when Trinity drops a scalpel into her foot like a warning. She’s still a bad idea when Trinity takes her home, kissing violently, teeth scraping against each other, Garcia’s biting down on her lips until they bleed, vicious and mean and cruel.
That first night, Garcia takes her apart with surgical precision. It’s fitting. She moves without sympathy or hesitance. A hand up her shirt like a scalpel through skin. Trinity stays still, a dog who is tired of fighting, tired of biting, tired of tasting blood. Laying down on her bed only to wake up in the operating room, faceless people all above her like minor gods, finally fixing the one person she never could.
She opens her eyes and Garcia is below her. Her hands are fire on Trinity’s skin. She must see the scars, but she doesn’t ask, just kisses over her hips and presses her down to the mattress when she starts squirming. She’s a body on the operating table, and Garcia is going to bring her back fixed. She’ll sew up the wounds left by Jane’s absence and Leigh’s condemnation and Langdon’s mistreatment and bring her back whole.
Trinity blinks. There’s a mouth on her, sharp in its sudden gentleness. She’s split open, laid bare, ready to be examined and diagnosed and cured with steady hands. This is going to fix her. It has to. She’s not sure what else could.
It’s the best sex she’s had in years.
Garcia waves her off when she tries to return the favor. “Maybe another night,” she says. She’s smiling. The expression takes five years off her. “But I could use a shower before I head back.”
Trinity blinks. “Uh—yeah. Of course. Down the hall, on the left.”
With a nod, Garcia leaves. The shower turns on a moment later.
Alone, Trinity lies spread out on her bed. She’ll have to change the sheets. Dennis is out of the apartment for the night. He was with Amy, probably, praying over her husband, or maybe he’d found a diner to camp out at and do his schoolwork. She hadn’t given him much detail as to why she wanted him to leave. He hadn’t asked.
She hasn’t had a friend in a long time, but Dennis might come the closest.
There’s a dream she sometimes has about being a kid, back when she was young and hopeful, before she met the man that would ruin her, before she put a blade to her thighs, before she stuck a pill under her tongue. She was whole then. She’d dress up as a princess or a fairy and run around and chase Jane up the stairs. Jane never had any dress up clothes of her own, so she’d squeeze into Trinity’s, and they were a size too small but she never said anything about it. They’d make-believe about being older, faceless husbands and silent children, life like a fairytale.
She’s twenty-six now. She’d still give anything for one more day of pretending.
The shower water turns off abruptly. Trinity scrambles to cover herself with the sheets. Garcia kissed every part of her, but somehow seeing herself bare is too intimate with the lights on.
Garcia is dressed when she pops back in. “I’m going to head out,” she says. Besides her damp hair, she is perfectly composed. A carefully cultivated image. She’d taken Trinity apart and tried to put her back together, and when the pieces inevitably didn’t fit, she’d left her there, parts disconnected, like roadkill still breathing on the freeway. Maybe she would come back for her. Maybe she’d try again. But it wouldn’t work. The thing that was wrong with Trinity was chronic, everpresent, untreatable. She’d go under the knife again and again and again and wonder whether the pain ever made it worth it.
“You could stay,” Trinity offers awkwardly. She was never any good at asking for what she wanted.
Garcia’s smile is thin but genuine. “I’ve got plans tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.”
Garcia shrugs, uncaring. It was fitting, in that way, her stoic exterior. They were perfectly incompatible. They weren’t people you’d fall in love with. They were women that you’d fuck violently, kiss until it made you nauseous, blood like a pact between their lips that eventually, one day, any day, they would leave.
Trinity had long since given up on her dreams of marriage. Maybe if that little princess was allowed to grow up, she would have found someone. Instead, she met a girl who was everything and then nothing at all. She met a man and dreamt of his sweaty hands inside her. She met the version of herself who didn’t know how to hold something without breaking it, who could fix all these things that wanted to stay broken but couldn’t fix herself, who was mean and cruel and lived her life as if to prove that she deserved everything that happened to her.
Besides, love is awful. Painful. It makes her selfish, obsessive, changes her in a way that makes her wonder if the men who had hurt her thought they had been in love with her, once. The thought nauseates her so violently she can barely breathe with it. Love is for other people. Not for them.
“You want me to grab you some water on the way out?” Garcia is looking at her, head cocked, as if she can smell the weakness on her. Blood in the water.
“It’s my apartment.”
Garcia’s smile is sharp. Trinity never seemed to choose the women with soft smiles. The teeth were always at a point, like they needed to tear through skin, like she was always going to be eaten alive, made into some palatable, faded and small and just like the memory of the drowned girl who sometimes seemed more alive than she did. “And if I did my job properly, you shouldn’t be able to walk tomorrow. Getting you water is the least I could do.”
Trinity scoffs. “They weren’t wrong about surgeons and god complexes.”
“It’s only a god complex if I’m wrong,” Garcia says. “I’m never wrong.”
”And never humble,” Trinity mutters under her breath.
Garcia looks at her for a moment. The apartment is quiet. The city around them is humming with life. Cars honk and tires screech. Someone shouts. Sirens fill in the background like primer on a canvas. The apartment only has room for the sound of their breathing.
“I’ll get you the water,” Garcia finally says. The spell is broken. The apartment carries on with the rest of the world, as if it had never stopped. She walks to the kitchen with the same confidence she would navigate her own home. Trinity’s throat is tight.
When Garcia returns, she places the water on the bedside table. The table, an uneven thing Dennis had found at a yard sale, wobbles dangerously. Trinity reaches out to steady it. Garcia’s fingers, attempting to do the same, brush her own.
For a moment, they just look at each other. The moon filters through the window shutters and paints its light across Garcia’s face.
“I had a good time,” Garcia says. “I’ll see you again, okay?”
Trinity blinks. Garcia’s hand still covers hers. Her hand is cold from carrying the water.
“Okay,” Trinity rasps out, like she’s okay with all this, as if this is all she could ever want. Sometimes she’s not sure whether that’s a lie. She’s seen what happens to her when it becomes something more. After all, she can’t be abandoned by someone who she never thought was going to stay. So she says her goodbyes before they can, and leaves the door open for them to crawl back in, and dreams of the little girl who wanted someone to love her so badly she’d bled for it.
Garcia leaves.
It’s not the last time she’ll do so. In the following months, she comes back like a revolving door. The lines blur into something that gives her motion sickness. Garcia is there when she needs to be fucked to sleep, and then she’s gone without so much as a note. She’s back when Trinity just wants to sleep but ends up between Garcia’s legs anyway, because she’s never been able to understand what she wants from others, and then she wakes up next to her and makes her breakfast. She watches the shitty television that Trinity secretly adores and scoffs at all the right places. Sometimes she even hangs out in the living room with her and Dennis. For a moment, it’s something domestic, something warm and comfortable, and then Trinity blinks and remembers the days that Garcia ignores her.
It’s casual, she says, and Trinity agrees, because she’s never asked for what she’s wanted, and she’s not going to start now.
Garcia leaves again and again and again, and Trinity thought drowning was something you leave behind in childhood, but some nights, she still can’t breathe.
5.
Dr. Robby leaving is something she hadn’t expected.
Maybe she should’ve. Everyone leaves eventually. Maybe they wait until you expect them to stay. It’s something that Trinity had learned years ago, but she keeps somehow thinking things will turn out different.
They never do.
She’s met men like Dr. Robinavitch before. Many worse than him, too. Robby is far from perfect, but he is honest. Straightforward. It’s something that she can respect. In many ways, she sees herself mirrored in him and his abrasiveness. They are twin hounds, always poised to bite.
It’s not until Robby is in the process of leaving that it begins to be real. It had always been referred to as some far off possibility, something to be scoffed at and discarded.
It was the sort of song and dance that’s typical in the emergency department. Someone was always leaving, someone was always arriving. The people here are temporary. It was something she had taken comfort in, once upon a time. Now, the thought of it made her nauseous.
Robby, of all people who worked at the PTMC, was meant to be somewhat stable. Not on a personal level, of course—the two of them were too hardened to demonstrate anything beyond professional courtesy—but they circled each other, silent, watching, monsters acknowledging their reflection. She had trusted him that day with Langdon. That meant something. Some part of her had expected him to ignore it; she was smaller, lesser, a blip in the history of the emergency department, and Langdon was his golden boy. It wouldn’t have been the first time she had been punished for spilling someone else’s secrets regardless of when they coincided with their own.
But Robby had listened. He had criticized Langdon for harping on her. He had thrown him out when Trinity snitched. Though his disposition changed from minute to minute, he was the sort of unpredictable that could morph into steadiness. Trinity knew that when Robby was here, he wouldn’t let any of the bullshit pass. He was a screen for which misdeeds had to pass through, and he was strict with what he allowed. More than anything else, he understood her and her rough edges. They regarded each other from the sidelines of life, never to broach the topic, but always to understand that the other knew them; that the other was well versed in biting where they were meant to accept praise.
And he was leaving.
“Hey, Crash,” Trinity asks one shift. It’s not slow, exactly, but she has time to breathe in between patients. “How long do you think Robby’s going to make it?”
Javadi rolls her eyes at the nickname. She’s typing away into the computer. Always perfect, always measured, a prodigy with all the opportunity and all the talent. She was everything that Trinity would kill to be without ever trying. “What? I don’t know.”
Trinity smiles. She thinks, when she was smaller, that she used to have a kind smile. The sort that reaches your eyes. Now, she’s mirrored all the mouths around her, sharp and biting and cruel, and it’s more of a facade of violence than anything else. “You must have thought about it. C’mon, everyone else has put in their bets.”
“Oh, I don’t gamble,” Javadi says, an awkward smile on her face. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Her purple sweatshirt suits her, though Trinity would never say it out loud.
“Just tell me, then. Our little secret.” It’s sardonic and biting, but Trinity likes keeping other people’s secrets. She had grown up keeping the biggest secret of all, and it had burrowed the guilt into her, and when its weight was lifted, the void remained, aching to be filled once more. So she asked Dennis why he had left Nebraska and kept Langdon’s tampered vial in her pocket and asked McKay why she had been on house arrest when most others danced around the uncomfortableness of it all. She asked things that were harsh and personal and rude, but most of the time, they told her. Whether it was the truth, she didn’t know, but she held onto it all the same. Secrets and blood were both water in her lungs. It was all salt, all drowning, all memories of a little girl who couldn’t open her mouth in time.
Sometimes it grates at her. She thinks about that dream she has sometimes, where she’s both twelve and twenty five and all she can do is stare at herself. The bruises and trembling hands and outbursts. Looking back, she was so obvious. So why didn’t anyone save her?
“Santos?”
Trinity startles. Javadi is looking at her. Her eyes are big and wide, like those of baby animals. She reminds her of a startled deer at times, comically obvious expressions almost cartoonish in their sincerity.
“What?” Trinity snaps.
“You asked me a question,” Javadi replies. She never backs down from Trinity. Not anymore. They weren’t exactly friends, but they were something close.
“And? You still haven’t answered it.”
Javadi’s answering glare is almost audible in its intensity. With a sigh, she rolls her eyes, and turns to look at her. “I overheard Dana saying that…” her lips pinch together.
Trinity blinks. “What?”
“She’s worried,” Javadi says, each word carefully enunciated, “that Robby might not come back.”
Trinity blinks again.
Of all the things she had thought about Robby, that hadn’t been one.
And maybe it should’ve been. God knows they were too similar. He’d snap at a coworker and she’d give one a shitty nickname. He’d make a hurried call and she would race to the operating room. This emergency department was nothing more than a temporary bandaid over an arterial wound, but Trinity and Robby held the plaster down with desperate hands. If this couldn’t fix them, what could?
But maybe, Trinity thought to herself, quiet, remembering a girl with constant bags under her eyes and bruises on her hips, Robby didn’t want to be fixed anymore.
“I give him a month,” Trinity says, always smiling, always painting the picture of the girls that she had loved and lost, voice strained and thin.
Javadi blinks. “You don’t think—”
“I think you don’t know what you’re fucking talking about,” Trinity bites. “Bet or don’t. I don’t care. But he’s coming back.”
He has to, Trinity repeats silently to herself, and then she rushes to the next patient, the bandaid always decaying, always thinning, her hand tired of holding herself together.
-
Later that week, Garcia takes her to bed. It’s quick. Hurried. Messy. Her spit in Trinity’s mouth tastes like blood. She didn’t stop Robby. Would anybody stop her?
+1
“That was the worst shift of my life,” Trinity confesses, sprawling out on the couch. It’s an exaggeration: she doubts anything could top Pittfest.
They’re back at the apartment. Dennis looks five years older. Maybe she looks the same.
In the comfortable light of their living room, she pointedly doesn’t think of Garcia. Of her harsh words, of her gentle touch, of the way she ruins her without ever meaning to. After the Fourth, the line between them had been thicker than ever. It was a simple routine. Garcia texted. Trinity let her in. She drowned in the sensation of a mouth against her own. Each morning, she woke up to an empty bed and ignored her shaking hands.
Tonight, Javadi is there in the apartment with them, sitting awkwardly on the couch. Mel was busy with her sister today, so it’s just the three of them, somehow too exhausted from the shift to sleep.
“Yeah,” Dennis agrees, “it wasn’t great.” He’d made some sort of casserole for dinner earlier. (Trinity had been disgusted by the concept, but after trying it, she had reluctantly conceded that it was good.) It’s a balance they have; Trinity pays, Dennis cleans. Trinity pays, Dennis fixes the creaky pipes. Trinity pays, Dennis makes dinner.
With a resident’s paycheck, Dennis had been adamant that he’d begin to pitch in; his insistence had grown as he spent more time away from the apartment with Amy. Trinity wasn’t necessarily angry at his absence—it did make her traipses with Garcia a little less awkward—but the apartment was cold and empty without him. Of course, objectively, it was also a pain when Trinity found a huge spider in her bedroom and lacked a roommate to take care of it for her.
There’s the smaller stuff too. The understanding that went unsaid despite its importance. The way that some nights, Trinity won’t sleep. She’ll sit up by the window, coffee in hand, and stare at the stars. On the nights he catches her, Dennis never says anything. He just brews a fresh pot of tea. Other nights, when her hands are shaking too violently, she drags him with her to the nearest bar. She only ever has one drink there. He always pays for it.
Sometimes, when she imagines her life in five years, Whitaker is still there, sitting on the counter, eating her avocados. In all of her adulthood, she had vowed not to count on anyone staying. Still, she can’t help it. Maybe that’s what friendship is: believing in someone despite all reasoning.
“You should be out at a bar right now,” Trinity says, breaking herself out of her reverie. Javadi just looks at her. She’s in casual clothing: jeans and a blouse. She rarely sees her so laid-back.
“Probably,” Javadi concedes with a shrug. “But I don’t, well, um, have anyone to go out with, really. And you offered to host.” She says the last part quickly, like she has to justify her presence.
Trinity throws her head back and groans. She opens the fridge and grabs two beers; one for Javadi, and one for herself. Dennis could get his own.
The fridge is mostly empty. There’s no produce. In theory, Trinity had agreed to grocery shop this week. In practice, they’d probably be living off take-out for at least a few more days.
“Here,” Trinity mutters, shoving the beer into Javadi’s hand. Their fingers brush; her hand is warm against the refrigerated can. “It’s not quite a night out, but it’s the best I can do.”
From his spot perched on the couch arm, Dennis raises his eyebrows. “Playing nice?”
“Fuck off.”
Dennis raises his arms in surrender.
“I’m always nice,” Trinity mutters, sprawling out across the middle of the couch. She can feel the warmth of Javadi’s skin just inches from her head. After the chaos of the emergency department, the low humming of the city seems silent in comparison. “What’re we watching?”
Dennis looks at her, his smile poorly hidden behind a hand. “Greys?”
“Anything but fucking Greys.”
“Wait, you guys watch it too? What season are you on?” Javadi cuts in, sitting up straight.
Internally, Trinity groans.
The two chatter about it for a few minutes, and Trinity lets herself fade above it all. The apartment is warm. Summer is ending. A few weeks from now, she’ll see the leaves begin to fall and rot, death making space for a new beginning.
The telltale vibration of a mobile notification buzzes against her thigh. Without even looking, she tosses the offending phone across the room into the old ratty armchair Dennis had helped her carry up from a yardsale.
There’s only one person that texts her at this time of night.
Dennis doesn’t even flinch. Javadi makes a hesitant noise in the back of her throat.
“Don’t ask,” Trinity says. She presses her palms against her eyelids. “Jesus. Fine. Sure. Let’s watch Greys.”
With her blessing, Dennis lunges for the remote.
Javadi, on the other hand, is hesitant. “If you don’t want to…”
“She does,” Dennis interrupts, flicking on the television. “She just likes to argue with me.”
Eyes still closed, Trinity flips him off.
Dennis only laughs. No one has bothered to try and understand her in a long time, but Dennis probably comes the closest. He pulls up an old episode and Trinity lets herself sink into the couch. The texture scratches against her smooth skin. Dennis slides down from his spot on the couch arm, and Trinity begrudgingly moves her legs over his lap to make room. It pushes her head back until she’s leaning against Javadi’s thigh.
The room is quiet but for the television and the sound of their breathing. Trinity wants many things, all of which she’s too scared to say out loud. Some part of her had never expected to get so far; had wanted to drown with Jane, with Leigh’s coaxing words, with Garcia’s sharp teeth. But she’s here now, all these years later, Dennis’ hand on her ankle and Javadi’s soft breathing like a song.
She wasn’t meant to rely on anyone staying. All she had was herself and her grit. Still, the last of summer’s heat blows through the apartment, soft as a kiss. Anticipation smells like Javadi’s perfume in the air and sounds like Dennis’ blithe commentary.
For once, in the soft light of the apartment, Trinity thinks that she might allow herself to hope.