Archive of Our Own

2026

"I'm a whiz at this shit, budge over," Trinity said, plopping down next to Whitaker on the sofa and pulling his computer over onto her lap. "You know, I once got a scholarship from the Coffee Roaster Society of North America's Scholars of Promise and Integrity Educational Fund, and I don't even like coffee all that much. I just wrote an essay with the vibe that I like coffee and boom: ten grand. There's got to be some Needy Huckleberry Fund out there we can apply for."

"I'm not needy," Whitaker said, hands fisted against his knees.

"Relax, buddy, I grew up in a single-wide in Battle Creek, no judgement." The judgement had always come from people who weren't her, in Trinity's experience. She opened up a new browser tab and typed in an address. "Okay, I always had good luck with finding things on this site. Good filtering functions, you can find all kinds of obscure scholarships no one else would know to apply for, if they even qualify for them."

"I doubt there's anything," Whitaker said with a shrug. "My parents always made a little bit too much for me to qualify for most need-based things, and I don't have any special talents or anything. If I apply for the loan—"

"You let me be the judge of that," Trinity said, and then quizzed Whitaker on his education, upbringing, geographic origins, hobbies, ancestry, group affiliations, religion, majors, and minors, checking off boxes as she went. She jabbed a finger at one line in the search results. "Aha, look! I told you. This one is an educational scholarship only for members of the Northern Reformed Congregationalist Church, Midwestern Synod. How many of you can there be?"

"Um, well actually—"

"Ha!" Trinity clicked through to the fuller details. God, she loved the buzz of a successful search: Google, PubMed, random database, you name it, she could make it her bitch. "The Jedediah Glass Scholarship is offered to members who, blah blah, attended an undergraduate institution in Nebraska, blah blah, intends on a career of service to society. Well that's you, Huckleberry! Hit that apply button."

"You need to go back one blah blah," Whitaker said dryly, making her scroll back up. "See? Awards will be given to men who are NRCC-MS members, 21 years or older at the time of application, and who are married."

"Two out of three ain't bad," Trinity said. A foot in the door was the key thing, as far as she was concerned. She scrolled back down. "And look at how much they're offering, possibility of renewing it to the end of your residency, and shit, all you've got to do is "pass any required educational and/or training assessments" and show up at this annual luncheon thing of theirs. You'd be an idiot not to apply for this."

"Again," Whitaker said, "I'm single."

He hadn't exactly been a Chatty Cathy about his life before coming to Pittsburgh, but Trinity had gleaned the key stuff over the past few months. He'd once planned to go into the ministry but then realised he didn't have the depth of belief for it; he'd either come out to his parents or been outed to them in some kind of weird, botched way that meant they didn't want much to do with him even if they hadn't like, dramatically disowned him in the street or anything. Whitaker had made noises about looking for a boyfriend, but Trinity suspected that a long-term relationship was still as largely theoretical for him here in Pennsylvania as it had been back in Nebraska.

"And even if I wasn't," he continued, "I can guarantee you that they mean marriage the way the Church means marriage, which is one man and one woman only."

Trinity shrugged. "So marry me."

Whitaker stared at her. "You're a lesbian and I'm the opposite of a lesbian."

"Like that's stopped anyone before," Trinity said. She'd taken a history class in her time; she knew how people like her had been able to hide in plain sight. "Look, I don't want to fuck you. There will be no fucking. But I'm fine with faking being straight married to you for a while if it helps you get one over on The Man."

"Thank you for the offer, I guess," Whitaker said, with all the sincerity of a man who knew he was supposed to be polite but wasn't entirely sure how the etiquette worked in a situation like this. "But it'll be years before I'm done with residency. What if you meet someone? Want to be with her?"

"Pfft," Trinity said, handing the laptop back to Whitaker. "I'm never getting married for real. Marriage is a tool of the patriarchy, and fuck the wedding industrial complex. But getting that scholarship will let you eat something other than mac and cheese from the Dollar Store on the reg, and like no offence but I'm starting to legit worry about scurvy."

"Yeah, but—"

"Also, I'm not being self-sacrificing with this," Trinity said. "We will be filing taxes jointly for those sweet, sweet deductions and you will like it."

"Yes, ma'am," Whitaker said.

"Ugh, we talked about that," Trinity said. "No ma'am-ing."

She wouldn't offer to fake marry just anyone, of course. Trinity had standards. But in the months that she and Whitaker had been living together, she'd discovered that they actually got on together pretty well for two people whose main points of commonality were "queer" and "working a high-stress, long-hours job."

Whitaker cleaned up after himself without having to be asked, his taste in music was acceptable, and he had the uncanny ability to pick up on all the best gossip floating around the ED. (Trinity's suspicion was that he just had the ability to be so unobtrusive that their co-workers forgot he was there and said things entirely unguarded around him.)

Yes, sometimes he got on her nerves a bit, what with the whole "true forgiveness is a demanding virtue" and "maybe you shouldn't have called that guy who cut us off a pussy" shtick, but every so often he could come out with something so coolly judgemental that it was fucking delightful.

Also, he had this one hoodie that was the cosiest thing ever and Trinity had maybe kind of sort of appropriated it for whenever they spent their evenings on the couch in a tired stupor, watching slasher movies and yelling at the stupid people not to go into the basement of the abandoned house all alone.

"This is how you end up coding on the table in my ED," Trinity said as one guy took a meat hook to the chest.

Whitaker shook his head in sad agreement.

Trinity and Whitaker went halves on the marriage license fee, and did the required pre-interview together over video call from the break room just before they went on shift on Monday. They managed to convince the clerk that they were sincere and sane and who they said they were, and after ten minutes she gave them a polite smile and said, "There's a required wait of three business days, and then you can pick your license up in person at the Marriage License Office on Grant Street."

"Thank you very much, you have a good day," Trinity said, in her best 'see, Ma, I can too get along in civilised company' voice, and closed her laptop to find that Mel was standing in the doorway, staring at them with her mouth agape.

"Oh gosh," Mel said, hugging a lunch bag to herself, her eyes as big as some cartoon woodland creature behind her glasses. "You two—I had no—oh, but this is wonderful! Congratulations!"

"Slow your roll," Trinity said, "it's only technically what it looks like."

They explained things to her, which went about as well as any conversation did that involved the phrases it's not actually fraud and sometimes when a lesbian tolerates a country mouse, but by the time they all left the break room, Mel had not only come around to the idea, she was somehow going to be the officiant. Trinity and Whitaker had opted for the kind of marriage license which let you marry one another, no one else required other than two witnesses—God bless Pennsylvania's funky little Quaker heart—but Mel had been appalled at the idea of a marriage taking place without any particular formality at all.

"It's always nice to acknowledge new life stages," Mel said later as she sat charting next to Trinity. "Do you have a preferred poetic form? Sonnets are an obvious choice for this kind of occasion, but there can also be something very charming about a villanelle."

"Jesus," Trinity sighed. The demands of heteronormativity were endless.

Whitaker picked up the marriage license on Friday afternoon, and he and Trinity were married on Saturday morning at sunrise.

"If you think about it," said Mel, who was bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet and clutching a small sheaf of index cards, "you can see this as all a quietly romantic testament to the power of friendship and platonic love. The morning sun is a metaphor!"

"Uh huh," Trinity said, who'd picked the time solely on the basis of the shift change and being able to snag an affable Shen to be the required second witness. Bless a man who would respond to a co-worker flagging you down as you finished up a 12-hour shift and asking "Are you over 18, mentally competent, and got five minutes?" with a simple "Yup, yup, and yup."

Still, when they said their vows (the bare minimum) and Mel said her piece (anything but, in Trinity's opinion), Whitaker reached over and took Trinity's hand in his. There was something kind of nice about that.

Here they were, doing this wild thing together.

Whitaker got the scholarship—of course he did, Trinity had given him very detailed comments on his first draft—and so she dragged him out to Thursday-night karaoke at a local gay bar to celebrate.

"Consider this like our honeymoon," she told Whitaker as they waited for the first song to queue up.

"This place has a lot more poppers than I ever imagined being available on my honeymoon," said Whitaker, wide-eyed, which showed a shocking lack of imagination.

"Pfft, young Dennis," Trinity said, feeling the well tequila special starting to kick in, "time to live a little." She lifted the mic and proclaimed to the bar, "Ladies and gentlequeers, tonight we're starting with an oldie but a goodie!"

Their duet on "Old Town Road" got them a standing ovation from their little huddle of tipsily cheering co-workers. They were swiftly followed by Shen (a wholly non-ironic "Don't Stop Believin'"), Samira and Javadi (a Taylor Swift medley duet with some incredibly off-key harmonies), and Princess (a rendition of "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" so good it got the whole bar on its feet).

"Is this always what it's like, to be in the club?" Javadi whispered reverently when they were tottering en masse to the nearest taxi rank in the small hours of the morning. She had glitter smeared all along one cheek, and Shen had lost a shoe.

Trinity laughed and did her best Bogart impression. "You ain't seen nothin' yet, kid."

2027

The terms of the scholarship required the recipient's attendance at a yearly thanksgiving luncheon hosted "in or near his hometown, as is practicable", but made no mention of his wife being required to attend.

"I can just say that you couldn't get the time off work," Whitaker said, "it's fine, it's not a big deal." Several months of not having to stress about bills, or whether he could afford to go to the dentist, had done wonders for his complexion and his under-eye circles. (Hadn't fixed his hair, but Trinity was working on it. Either commit to the mullet or don't do it at all, that was her motto.) The email reminder he'd received about the luncheon had, however, made that muscle below his right eye start to twitch again.

"Are you kidding me? There's no way I'm going to miss a glimpse of your origin story, Huck," Trinity said, and she meant it. She meant it after a hellish layover in O'Hare complete with a two-hour delay; a flight on a tiny plane to central Nebraska and what was apparently the world's smallest airport; and then an hour in a rental car north through some flat, flat countryside to the bustling metropolis of Broken Bow.

She meant it even when Whitaker pulled into the forecourt of a gas station called, and was she dreaming this, the Whoa and Go, and she got out of the car to find herself wrinkling her nose at something that smelled incredibly biological.

"What the hell is that?" Trinity asked, wafting her hand in front of her in a futile effort to disperse some of the smell.

"Oh, the wind's coming from the feedlot," Whitaker said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "Couple of miles south of town. It's actually the biggest in Nebraska."

"Wow," Trinity said. Sure, she was from the Midwest, but she clearly wasn't from the Midwest in the way that Whitaker was from the Midwest. "I'll be sure to squirrel away that fun fact for trivia night."

Whitaker's parents had found out through the church grapevine that he'd gotten married, and to a woman, and were confusedly happy enough about that to agree to attend the luncheon, but not so happy that they'd offer to put him and Trinity up at the farm.

"Too much dick touching under ye olde bridge for you to be righteous in the sight of the Lord?" Trinity asked, in her best attempt at a TV preacher's cadences.

"Something like that," Whitaker said as they drove the last stretch from the gas station to their hotel. His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Trinity got it. She wouldn't be heading back to Michigan any time soon, either, even though her dad was now dead and buried and good riddance.

The hotel was shitty, but in the way where it was clean and safe, just run by people who had no taste and had never met a penny they didn't want to pinch. Dull shitty. Old-school Republican shitty.

"I feel like we're in that beginning part of The Wizard of Oz," Trinity said as they let themselves into their room, "you know, where everything is brown?" She wasn't exaggerating. The walls were beige, the thin curtains and carpeting were a deep brown check, the cheap veneer furniture was faux cherrywood, the headboard was espresso, the pointless bolster on the bed was tan. Everything was brown, but somehow none of the shades of brown quite worked together. It was like paying $160 a night plus tax to stay inside the architectural equivalent of a tension headache.

After all their travel, neither of them were fit to do much more than walk across the parking lot to the Dairy Queen for a takeout dinner, which they ate sprawled on the room's lone bed while watching Scream. It was probably the umpteenth time they'd seen it together, but while Trinity enjoyed it as much as always, Whitaker was unusually quiet.

You didn't have to be a top-notch diagnostician to figure out probable contributing factors here. While they'd been waiting for their food in the DQ, the manager had spotted them and made a clear point of delivering their order himself. He was around Whitaker's age, maybe a couple of years older, and built like a guy who'd been a football player in high school and still prided himself on it. His name badge had read TANNYR, and as he'd handed over the paper bags, he'd leered, "Welcome back, Dennis," in a way that had made Whitaker duck his head and Trinity's flesh crawl.

She'd noticed that Whitaker hadn't suggested meeting up with even one old friend while they were in town, and hell, if Trinity ever did have to go back to Battle Creek for some reason, she'd at least try to meet up with Marlyse and Levi for old time's sake.

Trinity took her phone out and, discreetly, used some burner accounts to leave a few pointed Yelp reviews. "Saw this evening's manager use the restroom then come out without washing his hands and go straight back to the kitchen. Gross"; "Dude called Tannyr SNEEZED all over the fries wtf bro that's NASTY." Satisfied, she polished off the onion rings, then got up and started getting her toiletries and her PJs out of her suitcase. A shower after a long day's travel was always the best.

"You know," she said as she rooted around in the depths of the case for her favourite fuzzy sleep socks, "I think I'm just going to pretend that tomorrow is like going to prom."

Whitaker blinked at her.

"Or what I imagine going to prom is like." There'd been a big gymnastics meet in Milwaukee the weekend of Trinity's senior prom, and her father had insisted she attend it. Even though she'd already been scouted, had several competitive college offers, that hadn't been enough. You can't let them think you're not serious about this. You already fucked up the Olympic trials, I'm not going to let you fuck up this as well. She pushed away the memory. "You know, kind of awkward. Everyone's in uncomfortable clothes. Lukewarm food. Terrible music."

"There won't be music," Whitaker said, picking at the last of his fries. "NRCC doesn't really believe in music."

"Oh, so this is going to be super terrible," Trinity said with a grin as she headed for the bathroom. "Awesome! See, I like to think of these kinds of things as like, a game of how much you can subvert them and fuck with people without them realising that's what you're doing." She popped her head around the bathroom door and said, "And I'm going to shave my pits for this, dude, so you'd better work with me."

There was a moment the next morning when Trinity was genuinely worried that Whitaker was going to puke up his shitty complimentary hotel breakfast, but he rallied, and to his credit, he mostly didn't look like he was going to pass out during the thanksgiving luncheon.

And that was despite the fact that it was all as amazingly awful as Trinity had hoped for. She tried to make a mental note of as much as possible to tell the group chat about later. How the luncheon was held in a church basement with some sad streamers pinned to the low ceiling. How they all had to join hands for grace before the meal, which included both a blessing for the president and a wish for the conversion of the heathen. How sincerely she'd said, "Why no, I haven't had lasagna with cabbage in it before!"

Trinity threw herself into the part of Whitaker's adoring and god-fearing wife with aplomb, if she said so herself. More than once, his foot pressed down on hers under the table and he cast her beseeching looks, but Trinity didn't believe in half-assing things. Go big or go home, and she was already wearing a shapeless plaid shirt-dress she'd paid $5.98 for in Goodwill.

Whitakers' parents were a quiet couple who didn't so much look old as they looked like the decades had increasingly leached the colour from them. Trinity thought they'd probably look right at home in the beige hotel room. They greeted their son for the first time in two years by shaking his hand and saying they hoped the flights hadn't been too bad.

Whitaker's dad didn't say much beyond that, but put away his plate of food at an eyebrow-raising rate for a man that short and skinny. His mom smiled tentatively at Trinity and said that it was nice to meet the other Mrs Whitaker.

It took Trinity maybe five seconds too long to realise who the other Mrs Whitaker was. "Oh, you meant me," she said, and then when Whitaker's mom blinked at her, she went on, "Sorry, I was raised Catholic."

Whitaker's mom seemed to accept that as a rationale; Whitaker himself sputtered quietly behind his glass of water.

After the meal, Whitaker had to give a short speech, and so apparently did several other indistinguishable men in bad suits, who spoke about service and community and faith, and praised Whitaker for being a model representative of his hometown.

All the Whitakers looked mildly uncomfortable at that: Whitaker almost certainly because he was mortified at being singled out for praise, his parents because they didn't think a maybe-gay man could be a role model. Ugh. Still, Trinity was having a great time. She'd be telling stories about this trip for years.

The speeches were followed by what even she had to admit was a pretty baller sheet cake. It was topped with maple frosting and toasted pecans. She didn't protest when one of the little old ladies present insisted on them taking some pieces with them for later, though Trinity swiftly abandoned the clingfilm-wrapped paper plate on the floor of the rental car when she spotted the museum on the way back to the hotel.

"You can't be serious about actually going in here," Whitaker said, even as he was turning into the tiny parking lot out front of the even tinier blue building. A model dinosaur stood out front, and a sign proclaimed Boneyard Creation Museum.

"A wingnut science museum? Of course I am. This is a gift. A contradictory gift."

Inside, the dinosaur models were unsettling, the assertions unsourced, the facts twisted. It was kind of camp, and kind of funny, and kind of fucking depressing all at once. Trinity took a picture of the two of them together in front of a scale model of a T-rex menacing the Tower of Babel, and sent it to the group chat with the caption "Date night!"

They reached a case containing coprolites, and Trinity read the label aloud while her eyebrows steadily rose towards her hairline. "'A historical record is much more reliable than fossils and that is what we have in the Bible'? You grew up believing all of this?"

"Yep," Whitaker said quietly.

When they were walking back to the car, Trinity reached over and took his hand briefly, squeezed it gently. "I'm glad you got out."

2029

2032

The thing was that getting a divorce involved paperwork and fees, neither of which was a thing that Trinity was fond of. And then being married didn't seem to actually change their lives all that much, plus they both got offers of attending positions in Philly—Trinity at Penn, Whitaker at Temple—so even once Whitaker's scholarship came to an end, they just quietly shrugged and stayed married.

"Saves me having to tell my parents, too," Whitaker said. "I think mentally for them it's better to have plausible deniability about things, even if no one else in the family's fooled."

They were lugging more boxes out of the back of the U-Haul and into their newly purchased rowhouse. It was a fixer upper, but that didn't intimidate Trinity. She knew her way around a toolbox, and anyway, any excuse to hang around the aisles of the local Ace Hardware and try to pick up a hot butch or two was welcome.

"But you know, also, I think I'm starting to grow on your mom," Trinity said. "Last time we were in town, she told me that my outfit was very different and unusual." The sceptical look on Whitaker's face at that had her laughing hard enough that she almost dropped the box she was carrying.

Being a fully-fledged attending in a new-to-you hospital was exhilarating and intimidating in equal measure. Trinity got to take lead on some challenging cases, real puzzle-box stuff that tested her knowledge and her ability to think quickly and laterally, but she'd also come to realise that part of her job now was to stand back and let others do and learn while she supervised. She got it intellectually, but it made her kind of itchy at the same time. She took to going on long jogs around the neighbourhood to burn some of that energy off and think things through.

If this was what maturing felt like, then maturing fucking sucked.

2036

They went to Cancún for their tenth anniversary.

"The internet says that the traditional ten-year anniversary gift is tin or aluminum," Trinity said. "Screw that. Let's treat ourselves. I want sunshine and tequila."

They splashed out on adjoining rooms with an ocean view at an all-inclusive, adult-only, and queer-friendly resort. Clothing-optional too, they discovered when they got there, which made Whitaker turn hilariously pink for someone who saw human bodies in all levels of undress for a living. What was wrong with people freeing the nip?

"That's different," Whitaker hissed, "that guy over there wants me to see his penis."

Trinity glanced at the guy in question, who was definitely giving Whitaker the once over. "Oh yeah he does, buddy!"

The week settled into a pattern. The two of them would meet up for a very late breakfast and then go for massages or lie by the pool or drink wildly elaborate cocktails at the swim-up bar. One afternoon they went out to look at some Maya ruins, which were pretty cool, but mostly they just indulged in the one deadly sin that neither of them got to do a lot: sloth.

Whitaker enjoyed a pleasant running flirtation with a guy called Dave who worked in marketing in Denver. Trinity didn't get the names of any of the women she hooked up with—a gorgeous redhead from Brazil; a stone butch with incredible strap-on skills; a woman with long braids and a mischievous smile who let Trinity live out some of the filthiest fantasies she'd nurtured about Parker Ellis, back in the day—but she thanked them all for their service.

On the plane home, Trinity stretched luxuriously and looked over at Whitaker and said, "You know, I think we do this whole being married thing pretty well."

When Whitaker decided that he wanted to be a dad, they sold their house and moved out of the city, but not that far and only so that they could afford to buy houses next to one another. Trinity had no issues with Whitaker being a dad, but she definitely didn't want to be a mom.

("No way, no how, not with my uterus involved or without it," Trinity had said around a mouthful of huevos rancheros when Whitaker floated the idea to her. For some reason, he'd chosen to do so over breakfast in their favourite diner on a Saturday morning, when the place was bustling.

"Well, obviously," Whitaker had said, wrinkling his nose, which was kind of rude. If Trinity ever did decide to spawn, she would produce some excellent kids. "No, Trevor's mom's cousin has a granddaughter who's sixteen and pregnant and doesn't want to be, but only admitted to herself that she was pregnant in her twenty-seventh week."

"Bummer for her," Trinity said. The limit was still Week 24. "So what, you're going to adopt the kiddo?"

"That's the plan," Whitaker said, and his eyes were shining. "I know it's short notice and not a lot of time to prep and there's the solo thing and, yeah. But I think I can do it. I think I can be a dad to this kid.")

She did laugh her ass off, though, when it turned out that the game of telephone from Trevor's mom's cousin's granddaughter all the way back to Whitaker hadn't been entirely accurate. "Twins!" she hooted, while Whitaker sat staring at the ultrasound image on his phone, mouth agape.

Trinity refused to change diapers, but she was a ninja at assembling cribs and double strollers and on her days off she was happy to take the twins on walks through the local park. It gave Whitaker an hour or so to himself to take a shower and a power nap, but more importantly it gave Trinity the most incredible tiny wing-people. It was truly amazing the number of women who would stop to coo over the babies, and Trinity liked to think that a very respectable percentage of them could be encouraged to flirt with her.

"You are incorrigible," Whitaker said when Trinity dropped the twins back one day, with a woman's number on a Post-It note tucked into the pocket of her leather jacket.

"Nah, not that. I prefer to think of myself as bringing like, a sort of irresponsible aunt vibe to things," Trinity said with a grin.

For As Long As We Both…

"So hold on," the other woman in the line for ice cream said, clapping a hand to her head to stop her straw sunhat from being whipped away by the ocean breeze. "You're saying you've been married for 15 years, but he has kids and you don't? Young kids?"

Trinity looked across to where Whitaker was helping the twins build a sandcastle. Trevor was helping them, scooping sand into buckets in accordance with imperious toddler commands, but Eve was sitting in the shade of the beach umbrella and slathering on sunscreen. "Yup."

"And you live next door to him with your girlfriend, who knows about all of this, and the guy in the rash guard is your husband's boyfriend, and you're all just like... here together at Atlantic City? Having a beach day?"

Trinity looked back at the woman. "Yes? Why is this difficult to understand?"

"Huh." The woman was making a clear, good-faith effort to process all of this, but given how she was wearing a Lilly Pulitzer sundress, Trinity didn't have a lot of hope that she'd get there. "Well, I suppose bisexual people can be polyamorous," she said, pronouncing 'bisexual' and 'polyamorous' with all the care of someone handling live grenades.

"Oh, no, only my girlfriend is bi," Trinity said, resettling her sunglasses on her nose. "My husband's gay and I'm a lesbian. We're married, we just don't fuck. Never have."

Lilly Pulitzer Woman stared at her open-mouthed, paid for her ice cream, and walked off without another word.

Trinity collected her own order and went back to her group. The sundaes were greeted with enthusiasm all around, and Eve leaned over and kissed Trinity on the tip of her nose. "Thanks, babe. You were getting all social in the line, huh?"

"Eh," Trinity said. "Just talking to a woman who didn't know what a family is."