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It’s been a no good, terrible, horrible, fucking very bad day. Alexander would shit himself to have the kind of day Trinity’s having.
Whitaker is out for the evening. She’s come home to a dark apartment. It’s very quiet. The breakfast dishes from this morning are still out on the counter, the sink left full after she and Huckleberry looked at each other and agreed later.
She sits on the edge of her bed. It’s unmade; she’s always thought it was a waste of time to make it up every morning when it’ll just get slept in again the same night.
She pulls a wrapped scalpel from her pocket—retrieved, rescued, from a suture cart on the floor—and adds it to her growing stash in the top drawer of her bedside table. She doesn’t always use the ones she takes. Sometimes she just likes to look at them and think about it.
She leaves the drawer open. Her jaw clenches. Her fingers itch to move, to draw a blade across her skin. She knows it’s fucked up. She knows she shouldn’t. Isn’t it so juvenile? Something girls did in high school but one day grew out of?
Why is it so much harder for her to give up? She’s twenty-seven, for fuck’s sake. She’s a doctor. She knows all the ways it can go wrong.
But she also knows how to do it right.
Clean, easy, precise. Hardly any mess at all. She knows the major veins to avoid, the arteries that would kill her in minutes. She always cleans up thoroughly. She’s never gotten an infection. She’s never even left a stain on the duvet cover.
She’s not suicidal. Really, she’s not. Sometimes, though, that old ache comes up from her stomach and threatens to choke her, makes her feel dizzy and unsteady like she’s stepped a half inch too far to one side of the balance beam.
A triggering case. Several. A father gripping his child’s shoulder just a bit too tightly, her gaze locked on the floor. A baby, abandoned. Two codes before nine a.m., a malnourished teenager, an assault. Blood running down a pale thigh from underneath a little pair of shorts. The hollow eyes of people who’ve seen some of the worst of humanity and now stand in front of her, asking her to fix them. It feels almost disingenuous, herself in pieces so much of the time, spending her days putting other people back together again as though she has any leg to stand on. Her heart lives in her throat; she imagines people can hear it beating whenever she opens her mouth.
She continues to eye the drawer and its contents. She swallows hard. Shame licks up the inside of her chest; guilt curdles in her gut. For her weakness, for her lack of willpower. Grief, for every other time she’s done it and wished she hadn’t.
She chews on her lip. She makes a decision. Maybe not much better than the act itself, but this way she can tell herself it’s different. It means something different.
Trinity texts Yolanda to come over. A request on top of several read texts gone un-responded to. A plea. Yolanda says give me thirty.
Trinity waits. She makes her bed, straightens the duvet across the top so both sides hang evenly. She turns on her most ambient lights. She holds a match to a stick of incense, blows it out, watches the smoke start to curl up and out the cracked window. She wishes she could follow it, feel her body drift and separate into nothingness, fall upward into the universe, join the stars in the night sky. She wonders if Lauren is up there, somewhere. She never really believed in heaven. She might just be nowhere. She wishes she could see the stars from the city.
She clears off the top of her bedside table. On it, she arranges a packet of antiseptic wipes, two scalpels, still unopened, a pair of latex gloves. A box of bandaids. Q-tips, antibiotic cream in the yellow tube. Yolanda, surgeon that she is, doesn’t mess around with hygiene.
She goes to the living room to wait. She sits on the couch. She picks at her cuticles. She peels the skin inside her lip with her teeth.
A knock at the door. She answers. Yolanda is there, a bottle of wine in hand, a bag over one shoulder, hair still up from her work day. A little smirk playing around her lips. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Trinity whispers. Her throat feels tight. It would be embarrassing to cry, so she doesn’t. She takes the wine—a nice red, more expensive than she would ever buy for herself—and turns away to bring it to the kitchen. The bottle is cool, pre-chilled. Yolanda never wastes any time. She pours two glasses, downs her own in one before pouring another, all before Yolanda’s gotten her shoes off in the entryway. She screws up her face and coughs. She’s really not all that into wine, but Yolanda always brings it over, and she’d feel silly and too young pouring herself tequila neat while Yolanda goes on about tannins and full bodies. Yolanda goes to wineries on the weekends and thinks about pairings. Trinity only recently stopped blacking out on those boxes of Franzia from the discount store.
(She still does, sometimes, when she has more than one day off in a row and Huckleberry is elsewhere occupied, if Yolanda has other plans. The cashiers at the liquor store a block over know her by name, but that’s neither here nor there. Is it so terrible to not want to be in her body for a while?
And she doesn’t buy it for the wine-iness, has no taste for complexity or mouthfeel or even the difference between sweet and dry, really; she likes that she can get two for ten and not even have to buy dinner if she starts early enough. Sometimes she’ll stand in front of the bathroom mirror after several glasses, turning this way and that, examining all her features one at a time and then all together, wondering if she looks very much more like her mother than she did the day before. She used to get this same empty, glassy look in her eyes, too. Maybe Trinity’s just projecting.)
Yolanda comes up behind her, slides her hands around Trinity’s waist. She pulls her hair aside, kisses the back of her neck. “Missed you,” she murmurs. Trinity stifles the twinge of annoyance, of guilt, of desperation—tries to just feel appreciative. Wanted. She knows Yolanda didn’t really miss her, only missed the way Trinity offers up her body for taking. Easy pickings. But it’s better than not being wanted at all.
She turns in Yolanda’s embrace to connect their mouths. “Missed you too,” she says between kisses. She lets it heat up, opens her mouth for Yolanda to lick into, tightens her fingers around Yolanda’s biceps. This is what she wants. This will make her feel good.
Yolanda steps back. She reaches behind Trinity to grab the second glass, takes a long sip from it as she assesses Trinity. She swirls the wine around in her glass, one hand crossed under her other elbow. “Living room?”
“Bedroom,” Trinity says. “Please.” She’s already waited long enough. Her skin is buzzing, her blood pulsing hot through her veins.
Yolanda raises one eyebrow and smirks. The tip of her tongue comes out to play around the corner of her mouth. “Eager.”
Trinity shrugs and pushes off the counter to head back towards her room. She lets her hips sway, knows Yolanda will be watching her. Her breath comes short with anticipation.
In her room, she sits on the edge of the bed facing the door, hands folded in her lap, feet flat on the floor. Yolanda, only steps behind her, comes in carrying both glasses. For a moment, she only has eyes for Trinity. Then Trinity watches her gaze flick over to the bedside table, the lamp illuminating the supplies she’s set out. Yolanda stops. She sighs.
“That kind of day, huh?” She sets the glasses down on Trinity’s dresser. She’s not smirking, anymore, her lips set instead in a funny moue that pulls out faint lines around her mouth. Trinity looks away. She shrugs again.
Yolanda lets out a dry chuckle. It’s not a humorous sound. “I’m starting to think you only invite me over for this.”
Trinity clenches her jaw. “Are your motivations so different?”
Yolanda crosses her arms over her chest. “I like to fuck, yeah. But this...I don’t know, Trinity, it’s kind of a whole other thing. Like you’re using me to punish yourself for something.”
“Why does anyone do anything?” Trinity can feel defensiveness rising in her chest, making her words come out hard. She’s not the weird one. She hasn’t done anything wrong. She clasps her hands together, digs her nails into the thin skin. She closes her eyes and swallows, resigns herself to begging. “Please," she forces out, teeth gritted, "I just—I need to feel something else. I need you.”
Yolanda’s lip curls unhappily. “Do you?”
“Yes,” Trinity whispers. She stands and moves to position herself in front of Yolanda. She rubs her hands up and down her arms, wraps them around the back of her neck to feel the stray curls escaping from her updo. “I want you. Please.”
Yolanda’s shoulders heave with another sigh. “Trin…”
“Please,” Trinity whispers again. She buries her face in Yolanda’s neck, peppers little kisses and bites into the skin there. She licks up the side of her neck, curls her tongue up around her earlobe and feels her shudder. Her shoulders come down in increments, and Trinity knows she’s getting somewhere.
“Okay,” Yolanda sighs at last. “Fuck. Fine. Jesus Christ, girl.”
Trinity pulls around so that they’re face-to-face and kisses Yolanda, hard and fast. “Thank you,” she breathes into her mouth. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
She feels Yolanda’s lips curl under hers. “You’re fucking weird, Santos. Get on the bed.”
She does so, laying herself out on her back for Yolanda to rake her eyes up and down. She puts her arms above her head, letting her cropped t-shirt lift and expose her midriff. Yolanda’s eyes pause at the sparkle of jewelry in Trinity’s navel, hover around the curl of ink around her hips, only just peeking out from her athletic shorts. Nothing she hasn’t seen before, but it feels just as good every time to see her affected by it. To feel wanted, desired. She shifts her hips against the bed, pushes her chest out.
(Yolanda, for her part, is comparatively unaltered—a few scattered piercings, here and there a small, unassuming tattoo. But then, from what Trinity’s learned of her, she tends away from the receiving end of sharp objects.)
Yolanda gulps from her glass, two, three, four times. When she returns the glass to the dresser with a dull clink on the wood, her mouth is stained red. She walks over to the bed and stands next to it, looking down at Trinity. She runs a hand up one bare thigh, dragging her nails against the skin and raising goosebumps in their wake. “Where do you want it?” She asks, voice low.
“Anywhere,” Trinity breathes. “Anywhere you want.”
Yolanda nods. “Okay. Give me a minute to scrub in.” One eyebrow raised, a hint of a joke in her voice. She slaps the outside of Trinity’s thigh lightly and disappears out the bedroom door to the bathroom down the hall. The distant sound of water running reaches Trinity’s ears, and she smiles—Yolanda is nothing if not thorough. She might even be scrubbing under her nails with the little brush Trinity keeps hanging in the shower.
After a few minutes, Yolanda returns, arms up like she’s coming in for a surgery. “Gloves.”
Trinity can feel her cheeks redden, her mouth filling again with saliva. She rushes to comply with the order, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and retrieving the latex gloves she’d laid out earlier. One at a time, she pulls them over Yolanda’s hands, letting the elastic snap around her wrists. Yolanda makes steady, unerring eye contact the whole time. When she’s appropriately covered up, she bids Trinity again lay back.
“Take off your shirt and shorts.” Her words are short, clipped, orders given like a military general.
Trinity does. Her thoughts already are beginning to soften around the edges. She will do whatever Yolanda asks of her. She wants to. It feels good to be good.
Now just in her sports bra and boyshorts, she leans back against the pillows, eyes low as she watches Yolanda prepare. A hand hovered over the arranged supplies. Strong, sure fingers tearing the antiseptic packet. Coolness spread over her skin where Yolanda drags the wipe—over her thighs, across her belly, around the edges of the tattoos on her hips. Her whole body buzzes with anticipation, flames of desire and desperation and something else unnameable licking up her esophagus and filling her lungs.
Finally, Yolanda joins her on the bed, swinging a leg over Trinity’s hips to straddle her. In her right hand she holds one of Trinity’s scalpels, still wrapped in plastic. As Trinity watches, Yolanda peels open the packaging. The crinkle strikes a chord in Trinity and she sucks in a breath.
Yolanda pauses and puts her other hand down on Trinity’s sternum, light pressure holding her down. “Still good?”
Trinity nods quickly. “Yeah. Still good.”
A nod of affirmation from Yolanda in turn. “Okay.”
The blade is freed from its confines at last, gripped in confident fingers. Yolanda places the sharp edge against Trinity’s skin on her belly just below the left side of her ribcage. Trinity holds herself very still. It takes effort not to flinch, not to breathe too deeply, not to grind her hips under Yolanda’s weight. She keeps herself still. She’ll be good.
Finally—finally, finally—the scalpel sinks into her. At the first sharp drag, all the air rushes out of Trinity’s body. The tension she’s been holding all day loosens. She peers down past her nose to watch Yolanda’s gloved hand move steadily in short, even, stinging lines. Not deep enough to wound terribly, barely enough to scar—though a part of her hopes it does—just enough to split the skin horizontally in thin red stripes, tiny crimson drops welling up in the aftermath. With each stroke, the pressure seeps out of her further, making her limbs feel heavy and relaxed. Trinity closes her eyes.
“How’s that?” Yolanda asks. Trinity keeps her eyes closed, but she can picture the look on Yolanda’s face. Stern, steady, unsmiling. Taking this task as seriously as she does her day job.
“Good,” Trinity says. Her heart is beating fast. “Keep going. Please.”
She feels Yolanda shift atop her, weight moving from her hips down her thighs.
A beat—the dropping of weight onto the bed next to her, Yolanda bracing herself on one hand—then another sweet sting above her hip. Trinity’s mouth falls open on an inhale. She doesn’t open her eyes to check Yolanda’s work, knows she knows to avoid the lines of her tattoos. A far more expensive coping mechanism, too much to mar with a blade. They’ve done this enough times, now. Trinity might feel guilty about it, but then Yolanda keeps coming over. And because it’s Yolanda doing it, it’s something different. Not a bad habit, not something to hide, not a cry for help. Rather, a shared experience. A kink, a Pornhub category, something to get off to. Functionally the same, just re-framed. Who cares? It’s not like Trinity talks about this in her admin-mandated trauma counseling sessions.
(Does it count as self-harm if she’s not the one holding the knife? She asked for it, she’s letting it happen, wants it to happen, but this way she can pretend it’s out of her hands. Not something she’s doing to herself, not something she wants so badly she can feel the urge vibrating under the surface of her skin.)
A hand on her cheek. The latex pulls ever so slightly at her skin. “Hanging in there?”
Trinity opens her eyes. She nods. “C’mere,” she whispers. She presses her mouth to Yolanda’s when she bends down to meet her, wraps her hands around her waist. Yolanda kisses back for a moment, runs her tongue along the seam of Trinity’s lips, then pulls back and sucks her teeth.
“One thing at a time, huh?” The smug, proud look has returned to her face; they’re starting to meet in the middle. Trinity pushes her hips up lightly, lifts one thigh under Yolanda where her legs are parted across Trinity’s body. The heat from each little line rushes down to her core, all her signals getting mixed up, endorphins and dopamine flooding her brain and sparking at all her nerve endings. She runs one finger across the length of one cut under her ribs. Just before she can stick the finger in her mouth, Yolanda grasps her wrist and tuts. “Did you even wash your hands?”
Trinity widens her eyes. Yolanda rolls hers.
“I should report you for poor hygiene practices. Probably causing infections left and right.” She sucks her teeth again. “I hope you’re better with your patients.”
Trinity pulls her bottom lip into her mouth and pushes her thigh up harder. They’re not at work right now. They’re in Trinity’s bedroom, and Trinity is mostly undressed, and Yolanda’s dark eyes are glinting under the soft lights, and through her thin pants Trinity can feel heat pulsing against her thigh. Yeah, right, I’m the fucking weird one, Trinity thinks. “Keep going,” she rasps.
Yolanda drops Trinity’s wrist above her head, pushing it down into the bed before propelling herself backwards, further down Trinity’s legs to her knees. Trinity hisses when Yolanda knocks against her bad knee, the one she hurt years ago. It still twinges when she’s on her feet too long, aches under her scrubs after long days. “Sorry,” Yolanda says and cups one hand around the patella, a far gentler touch than Trinity expects. She adjusts, shifts over to the other side. “Better?”
“Better.”
The cool touch of metal to her thigh. She doesn’t flinch, anymore. A slow, precise drag across the top, joining the cluster of other cuts in various stages of healing. Some self-inflicted, some by Yolanda’s hand, the oldest of them long gone silvery and tough. But those were made a long time before she met Yolanda. She slides her eyes shut again.
A slice. Pause. A finger pressing into it, lightly, pulling back. Another cut. The sting of it grounds Trinity, pulls her back into her body. Sinks her, heavy, into the mattress. She feels calmer than she did all day. Nothing can get her, when she’s in here. Another, the line of succession moving down her leg towards her knee, one on top of another, neat as always. Yolanda is really good about that. The same pride she takes in her work on display in the careful hatches decorating Trinity’s skin.
Trinity’s brain has stopped buzzing so loudly, her thoughts coming more slowly. Quieter.
She’s so grateful Yolanda replied to her text. She doesn’t always. Trinity doesn’t know what she does, if she’s seeing other people. She’s not sure she wants to know. She doesn’t know if it would change anything. It’s good enough to be wanted at all.
The tip of the scalpel drags on the skin of one inner thigh without cutting, just the barest hint of sensation in one of the most sensitive places on Trinity’s body, only ranking below the backs of her knees and the hollows behind her earlobes. A little moan escapes her mouth, catches at the back of her throat, and her legs part on instinct, as far as she can with Yolanda’s on either side of her, trapping her. She tilts her head back, hearing going slightly muffled when she sinks into the pillows. Muted like her thoughts. She opens her eyes.
Yolanda has been waiting for her, gaze glued to Trinity’s face. When Trinity meets it, her mouth curls up into a little smile. Trinity might think it looks almost sweet, if she didn’t know better. Imagined fondness from a woman who only comes over to fuck and indulge Trinity’s worst habits. She smiles back anyway. Yolanda really is doing her a favor.
Yolanda makes one, two, three more tiny cuts on the inside of Trinity’s thigh, making her whimper. Tears prickle in the corners of her eyes and she blinks them away quickly. She doesn’t want to cry in front of Yolanda.
Finally, Yolanda leans over and off of Trinity. She stands, scalpel still in hand. “I’ll be right back.”
Trinity waits, looking up at the ceiling. There is a sharps bin in her bathroom under the sink. Yolanda knows where it is.
The other woman returns after a few minutes, glove-less and minus her instrument, holding instead a washcloth in one hand. She re-settles herself on the bed. Trinity watches as she takes the washcloth in damp swipes to each little patch of cuts, cooling her skin and soothing the memory of the sting. She waits for it to dry. She puts one hand on Trinity’s shin, just below her knee.
Gentle fingers squeeze antibiotic ointment onto Q-tips, cotton buds running softly over broken skin. Those same fingers peel open bandaids, smoothing them one at a time over each line, hiding them from sight. Trinity’s never seen someone so in control of their movements, so intentional and sure. She’s never once seen Yolanda’s hands shake.
Yolanda crumples the paper wrappers in one hand and drops the ball onto the table. She lays down on her side next to Trinity. She runs her hand up Trinity’s torso, the other supporting her own head. She doesn’t say anything, just slides her hand softly up and down. She waits.
Trinity lets herself float for a little while. She doesn’t know how long. Yolanda doesn’t rush her. It takes however long it takes. She moves her focus, what little she has, from one sore spot to the next, imagines each little stinging cut stitching itself back together. All the parts of her body working in tandem to heal her, to keep her upright and breathing and moving around, and this is how she repays their efforts.
Well. It wasn’t really her, was it?
So it’s different.
As her brain starts to come back online, so too do other parts of her body. Truthfully, she’d be content to stay laying here, curled up with Yolanda, and have this be all they do tonight. Maybe they could watch a movie on Trinity’s laptop, finish the wine, fall asleep together and wake up all intertwined like any of this means something. But that’s not what Yolanda came over for, and Trinity’s gotten hers.
She follows her body’s train of thought down, down, down, lets herself feel the warmth reignited in her gut and between her legs. She shifts her weight, feels her nipples harden against the confines of her bra. Alright. Time to pony up.
She turns on her side to face Yolanda, still just watching her, blinking slowly. Like a cat sunning itself in a window—maybe it knows something you don’t, but it hasn’t decided yet if it’s interesting enough to think all that hard about.
She pushes in for a kiss, meeting Yolanda’s mouth a little desperately. Her brain is still sleepy, but her body is catching up quick. Yolanda, not well known for her patience—although she’s been remarkably magnanimous with Trinity, tonight—kisses back hungrily, forcing Trinity’s mouth open and licking into it. Trinity doesn’t mind, actually likes when Yolanda is a little bit messy with it. She’d probably let Yolanda do just about anything to her. Whatever she wants from Trinity, she can have.
And Yolanda isn’t shy about what she wants, not from the first time they ever hooked up. Cool, cutting, acerbic in a way that makes Trinity feel not so alone in any room she’s in with her. Bold, brave. A woman who’s had time to figure out what she’s about and takes it whenever it comes close enough to grab. Trinity moans into Yolanda’s mouth, and Yolanda responds by rolling on top of her, pressing her weight down into Trinity and straddling her. She pulls back and looks down the bridge of her nose to survey Trinity, flushed and panting below her on the bed. She smirks. Trinity doesn’t know if she’s ever seen her smile any other way.
“What do you think, Santos? You or me first?”
“Whatever you want,” Trinity gasps.
“Right answer,” Yolanda grins. “I’d put you on my service if you answered every question like that.”
She places one hand at the hollow of Trinity’s throat with just enough pressure to make Trinity’s eyes fall low, not enough to restrict her breathing or to hurt. It’s a message more than it is an action, punctuated by that hawkish look Trinity is so affected by. A reminder of who’s in charge—as though Trinity could ever forget.
Yolanda leans in again to kiss Trinity, the tips of her long fingers contracting against Trinity’s skin. Trinity imagines bruises in the shape of that same hand, of those lithe fingers, on the pale column of her own throat, first red and angry and then purpling, fading into that ugly yellow-green-brown of old wounds. Marks, reminders left behind not out of vitriol or violence but out of care, out of desire. Out of someone wanting her, someone she wants in return.The thought makes her pulse, wetness gushing out of her and soaking her underwear.
“Yo…” she whispers into Yolanda’s mouth. She places one hand atop the one at her throat, holds it in place. She looks up through her lashes at the woman above her. “Please.”
(She never says please so often as she does here, with Yolanda. Never begs, never cowers, never lets anyone else get the last word. Some people call her a bitch. Some people call her worse than that. Yolanda only smiles like they’re in on a joke together and gives it right back even harder. They could do that, escalate and ramp each other up and go down together in a whirlwind of fists and razor-sharp tongues—and they have. But sometimes, when no one else is looking, it’s nice to give in and roll over. It still gets her what she wants, and usually a lot faster than if they have a whole back-and-forth about it first.)
One sharp eyebrow goes up. “Please, what?”
Trinity swallows against the light pressure just above her clavicle. Her face feels very hot, her thoughts slightly muddled. Her mind races to land on what Yolanda might want her to say.
“Please...touch me. Or let me touch you. Please.” She gulps.
Yolanda’s eyes narrow. The silver rings in her ears glint in the low light. “Can’t do both at the same time, rookie. Or, I could, but I won’t. Which is it?”
Trinity’s mouth drops open of its own accord, her breath punching out of her hard and fast. She doesn’t have an answer. She’s so tired of making decisions. Medication doses, courses of treatment, uncertain diagnoses. When to speak up. When to hold her tongue. She needs one to be made for her.
Yolanda’s eyes drop to Trinity’s open mouth. Her pupils, what Trinity can see of them, eclipse the dark brown of her irises, turning her eyes nearly black. She nods, a tiny movement, almost to herself. She pulls her hand away from Trinity’s throat and unseats herself from across her hips just long enough to pull off her own pants and underwear.
Trinity takes a deep breath, another, then one more, feels the air rushing in and out of her lungs, and then Yolanda is above her again, hovering with her knees on either side of Trinity’s head. “You want it?”
Trinity can only nod, words escaping her, vision blurry with need.
“Prove it.” Yolanda puts one hand in Trinity’s hair, gripping tightly at the roots. “Take it.”
She settles herself fully onto Trinity’s face, onto her open mouth, and begins to move. As it often is with Yolanda, Trinity is expected to do nothing more than lay there and take it. Whatever Yolanda feels like giving—or taking—it’s simply not up to Trinity. It doesn’t have to be.
Out of everything in her life—every hard choice she’s ever had to make, every insignificant either-or that felt like Just Too Much on top of everything else, every time a hookup or a date had hemmed and hawed and looked at Trinity with wide-eyed expectation—here is the one place she doesn’t have to decide. Doesn’t have to be responsible for her actions, doesn’t have to wonder about implications or consequences or whether or not she’s doing enough, if she’s doing too much, if she’s good enough.
Here, all she has to do is let Yolanda lead her. Give up the reins for a while, take her hands off the wheel. Trust, however tentatively, that this woman will keep her out of harm’s way—well, so to speak—in the interim. It’s a role Yolanda inhabits beautifully, naturally. Guiding Trinity’s head where she wants it, pushing her mouth open, gripping her hair to hold her in place. If she needs to move, Yolanda will move her. There’s no finesse to it, no skill required, no thoughts at all. Only her mouth held open, her tongue out, letting Yolanda grind herself down for however long she wants, whichever way she decides. Even when her jaw starts to ache and her nose gets a little snuffly from all the fluids smeared across the lower half of her face, when one arm starts to buzz from where Yolanda’s got a knee pressing down onto it, when the hand in her hair tightens near painfully and brings to mind distant, less pleasant memories of a plastic hairbrush frantically and violently scraping her long hair back into a tight, high bun before meets, she lets herself be taken. It feels good not to have to think.
Already foggy from Yolanda’s skilled handiwork with the scalpel, there’s hardly any room left in Trinity’s brain for anything beyond immediate sensation. Her tongue, flooded with the now-familiar musky, salty-sweet taste of Yolanda; her scalp, prickling where Yolanda’s hand is tightly guiding her, tugging her along like a bridled horse; her cunt, pulsing and throbbing with need gone unaddressed while the woman above her uses her for her own pleasure.
“Fuck…” Yolanda grunts, pushing herself into Trinity’s mouth, her hips moving faster and less smoothly, movements going jerky on odd beats. “You’re so fucking good. So. Fucking. Good.” She punctuates each word with a thrust of her hips, the headboard behind them hitting the wall in time.
Trinity moans right into Yolanda’s cunt, the words of praise sending a lick of fire down her spine and pooling in her gut, her pounding clit, in the wetness she can feel dripping out of her and smearing between her thighs where she rubs them together, seeking any kind of relief.
Yolanda knows it. She must be able to see it in Trinity’s eyes, feel it in the way she starts to lick up into her, desperate and needy, moaning and huffing and gripping Yolanda’s ass with renewed strength, following and aiding her frantic movements across Trinity’s face. Maybe she just knows Trinity. It wouldn’t be unheard of, after nine and a half months of...hanging out.
Her eyes fall low, sultry. Her hips continue to move, back and forth. She slows down, draws it out. “You like that.” It’s a statement, not a question.
Trinity nods as much as she’s able to, her head in the vise of Yolanda’s thighs and her mouth otherwise occupied. She moans a muffled mmhmm.
Yolanda drops her hands to the headboard, supporting the weight of her upper body while her hips continue their single-minded mission. Her gaze stays locked on Trinity’s. “My good girl. So good for me.” Her voice comes out breathy with exertion. “You wanna come too?”
Another moan. It’s out of Trinity’s hands, just like everything else. Yolanda smirks through a groan of her own. “So do it.” She closes her eyes, tilts her head back, and moans, “Touch yourself.”
Trinity obeys with hardly a thought, moves one hand off the side of Yolanda’s ass and shoves it under the band of her own underwear. She swipes her fingers up through the slickness pouring out of her and starts to rub her clit furiously. She has it down to a science, at this point, getting herself off—tight, counterclockwise circles, firm pressure, Yolanda on top of her, using her mouth, her nose, her chin as she would any other tool in her operating room. Her fingers quicken in time with the movement of Yolanda’s hips, and she feels heat rising in her as Yolanda’s breathing gets more labored, the sounds coming from the back of her throat higher-pitched and choked off, the taste flooding her tongue sharper and more intense as Yolanda approaches release.
With a final, guttural grunt, Yolanda’s hips lock in place over Trinity’s mouth and her thighs clench and shake on either side of her head; Trinity’s slick fingers fly over her clit, her own breath starting to catch as her toes flex and curl, all her muscles tensing in anticipation of relief. Coming scarcely seconds behind Yolanda, forearm burning, she groans up into the body atop her, still sensitive, and is rewarded with a shudder and one last, sharp tug to her hair before Yolanda dismounts and flops onto the bed beside Trinity.
“Shit, Trin,” she pants, throwing an arm over her face and propping one foot against the bed with her knee up. “Your mouth....ay.” She puts her other arm across Trinity, lays her palm flat against the center of Trinity’s chest just above the line of her bra. Trinity wonders if she’s counting the beats per minute, if it comes second-nature to Yolanda now the way it does to Trinity. She wonders what her heart might be giving away, if anything.
She pulls up the corner of a sheet to wipe her face. She turns her head on the pillow to look at Yolanda. Her eyes are closed and she’s breathing slowly, deeply. Trinity watches her chest rise and fall. There’s a thin sheen of sweat across her forehead, her upper lip, the dip of her collarbones. Trinity wants to run a finger through it, put it in her mouth. She wants to bury her face under Yolanda’s arm and huff. She wants a gentle hand in her hair, raking against her scalp until she falls asleep. She does none of this, doesn’t ask. It was enough that Yolanda came over at all.
Instead, she runs the tips of her fingers across the overlapping bandages on her thigh, imagines she can feel the scabs forming. They never last long; Trinity, with restless fingers, always picks them away until she can see blood well up again.
“Um. Are you hungry?” Trinity asks when they’d laid silently for at least five minutes. Maybe she’d like to stay longer. Watch a show or something.
One brown eye pops open to peek at Trinity. “I could eat. What d’you have?”
“Uh…” Trinity runs through what she remembers seeing in the kitchen last. Old noodles. A container of rice past its safe consumption date. Half a jar of pickles. A box of cereal. “Doordash?”
One side of Yolanda’s mouth curls up. “Okay. Just not from the place we ordered last time. I found a hair in the stir fry.”
. . .
After dinner, three and a quarter episodes of The L Word watched in bed on Trinity’s ancient laptop, and a shower (taken only by Yolanda, Trinity too exhausted to make the trek from her bed to the bathroom and back), they are again laying side-by-side, now in the dark but for one small, hanging lamp that Trinity keeps eternally lit, electric bill be damned.
(Sometimes Yolanda spends the night. Sometimes she doesn’t. Trinity’s stomach aches when she does. Her heart pulls when she doesn’t.)
Trinity can feel the warmth of Yolanda’s arm, inches away from her own on the mattress. Yolanda doesn’t reach to bridge the divide. Neither does she.
(Yolanda isn’t a cuddler. That’s fine with Trinity. She’s only ever felt stifled when someone held her too long, short of breath when someone was too soft with her without first balancing the scales with a sharp palm to her cheek, a hand at her throat, pinching or biting or bruising. Kindness alone is too foreign to her. She doesn’t know what to do with it, how to arrange her face in response to it, where to keep it—all her boxes are full, her pockets bursting already with grief, with anger, with a downturned mouth and tired eyes from another life. A teenaged face gone blurry with time.
That’s why this thing with Yolanda works. She’s not soft without an equal and opposite hardness. She doesn’t ask more from Trinity than she can give.)
“Trinity…” she says lowly, just when Trinity’s eyes have begun to droop and her thoughts have started to blend together in the way that means she’s close to sleep. “What is this?”
Never mind.
A stab of panic in the center of her chest. She’s wide awake, now. “What do you mean?”
“You wanted something casual. That’s fine.” Yolanda is quiet for a moment. Searching for words, maybe. “I like casual. Casual is fun.” Next to her, Trinity can feel Yolanda fiddling with the bedsheets between them. Surgeon’s fingers—picking, picking, picking. “This thing you do...that you have me do. I don’t mind it, you know that. Everyone’s got their thing. But it doesn’t feel casual.” Her voice is even, neutral.
Trinity’s palms are prickling, the back of her neck hot. The dinner she’d eaten is suddenly leaden in her stomach. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you,” Yolanda laughs, a disbelieving little sound, “to tell me what you want. Be consistent. Casual, serious, whatever, I like you. What I don’t like is pretending that this is something it’s not. I’m too old to be playing games.”
Words catch in the back of Trinity’s throat, too tight to let them out. For the better, probably; she doesn’t know what she wants to say. She doesn’t know if she could say anything real, right now. Something that she means and won’t want to take back in the light of day.
She wishes Yolanda would make this decision for her, the same way she decides what they do in bed. Take control, tell Trinity this is what we’re doing now. Trinity would chafe, she would complain, she’d be an animal in a trap, gnawing at its own leg in a desperate bid for freedom—and then she would settle, the course set for her. It would be so much easier than having to parse through her own thoughts, wade through years of poor decisions and dodged accountability. Please, she thinks, as though Yolanda could hear her if she thinks it loudly enough, just tell me what to do.
Yolanda allows them to lay in silence for several beats. A minute, two. She sighs. “Okay.” She rolls over, away from Trinity. The distance between them now is a chasm.
After a while, her breath evens out, deepens, slows. Through the dim light, Trinity can see her shoulder lift slightly with each inhale, drop again when she breathes out.
Trinity’s mind churns. She wiggles her toes under the covers. She clenches and relaxes every muscle in her body in turn, one at a time. She looks at Yolanda’s back, turned away from her. She presses her fingers into each new smattering of cuts, a burning kindness, a favor. She wonders how long it’ll be before Yolanda is tired of Trinity’s reticence, her inconsistency, the doors she keeps closed.
It’s not that she doesn’t want a relationship, doesn’t want someone to be serious about her. Doesn’t want someone—Yolanda, maybe, or someone else, she doesn’t know—to eat dinner with, to go grocery shopping, to curl up with on the couch in the evenings, feet in a lap, a shared blanket. She thinks about it sometimes when they wake up together, on the nights Yolanda sleeps over. How nice it might be.
But Trinity’s never really been in a relationship before, never got near enough. Isn’t sure how to hold something close without burning herself. The thought of being someone’s girlfriend makes her feel kind of itchy, the concepts of commitment and longevity and mutual vulnerability curling around her lungs tightly, sparking uncomfortable nausea low in her gut.
What if someone—Yolanda, in this case—sees her, really sees her, turns over rocks to examine all the fragile, squirming parts of her, pokes at the worms and the grubs and the little leggy things that scuttle away from the sunlight—what if she uncovers the parts of Trinity that she’s not so sure are even likable at all, the things she thinks might make her a bad person, and agrees with her?
It’s one thing to think those things about herself, plagued with insomnia late at night, laying supine and staring up at the dark ceiling of her room—Huckleberry long asleep, not around to bother and distract herself with—to press her thumbs into her own bruises and wince at the ache. Wholly another to let someone else in for a look, to get up under her skin and rummage through all the boxes she’s stacked around herself, and have them say after everything that actually, Trinity is too much, and not very worth the effort.
Yolanda can cut Trinity open. She can take a scalpel to the soft parts of her, peel away layers of a bad day, indulge her in some of her worse habits. She can smooth bandages over the scrapes, sit beside her on the couch with boxes of take-out in hand, talk shit about one bad plot line or another in one of the reality shows they watch with Whitaker on nights they all have off. But Trinity is the only one to watch the scabs form, to see those soft, open parts close over and toughen up. She alone gets herself up in the mornings, pulls her tired body through the days, puts herself to bed at night when her brain finally stops spinning enough to rest. No one else will do that for her.
It takes her a very long time to fall asleep.
. . .
Trinity wakes the next morning with a little gasp—it’s always jarring, to be forced back into consciousness. Yolanda isn’t in bed next to her, anymore. The covers are pushed back, and the sheets are cold where her body had been.
Trinity finds her at the kitchen table, clutching a mug between both hands, her eyes tired. She raises her eyebrows slightly in acknowledgment, grunts a little in good morning. Trinity pours herself a cup of coffee from the pot Yolanda’s made and sits across from her. All her chairs are rickety and mismatched; the one she occupies now leans to one side with her weight. They don’t say anything. Yolanda seems to be waiting for Trinity, and Trinity still doesn’t know what to say. So they sit, and they drink, and they watch the morning sun come up slowly through the cracks in the blinds across the room.
When Yolanda leaves, she gathers her items slowly. The clothes she’d removed in Trinity’s bedroom, the travel toothbrush she’d left on the sink in the bathroom. Trinity still can’t find the words. She knows Yolanda is waiting. She doesn’t know how long she’s going to wait. Trinity imagines the thread connecting them pulling from her grasp, loose and slippery. Shifting sands beneath her feet. She doesn’t know how to get her feet on solid ground again.
Yolanda stands just outside the door to the apartment. Trinity clutches the open edge of it with one hand. “Will I, um...see you soon?” They’re the first words she’s spoken all morning. Her voice is crackly with disuse.
Yolanda narrows her eyes, briefly, before her expression smooths out. Neutral, again. She rummages through the bag on her shoulder. She doesn’t look at Trinity. “Like, at work? Probably.”
“No, like...will you come over again? Tomorrow? Or soon. Whenever.” She knows she sounds desperate. It’s humiliating, to be begging after she’s left Yolanda hanging all night. She doesn’t even know what, really, she’s begging for. Time, maybe. But she can’t stop herself from asking.
“Maybe.” Yolanda looks down the hall. “I’ll have to let you know.” She ducks in to plant a quick kiss on Trinity’s cheek and gently slaps the side of her thigh close to her ass. It might be sweet, in another life. It might be sweet now. Trinity feels like she’s trapped inside a revolving door, watching the world outside it spin and spin and spin.
“See you, Dr. Santos.” Yolanda turns and heads away down the hall. Trinity watches her go. When she’s out of sight, she shuts the door. She puts the remainder of the wine away in the fridge. She turns out all the lights Yolanda had turned on. She brushes her teeth, too vigorously—she spits in the sink and it’s tinged pink. She goes back to her bedroom and closes the door. The sound of it echoes through the empty apartment.
She pulls back the covers on her bed. She climbs inside. Under the sheet, she presses one hand to the array of bandages under her ribs, feels the skin underneath burn and pull. She stares at the ceiling.
Her phone pings. Her heart leaps. Maybe Yolanda does want to see her tomorrow. Soon. Maybe she’s forgiven Trinity’s inability to say a thing out loud. She rolls over to pull her phone from the bedside table.
[Fuckleberry]: Hey, Trin. Don’t go shopping, I’m bringing home eggs from Amy’s, and I’m gonna pick up some stuff at the store on my way back. I took a photo of the list. Let me know if you want anything else.
[Fuckleberry]: See you later. Hope you’re doing okay.
Trinity rolls her eyes. (If she smiles a little while texting him back, no she doesn’t, and mind your business, actually.)
[Me]: why wouldn’t i be
[Me]: dried mangoes pls
[Me]: 🖕
She turns her phone off. Her smile fades and drops. She thinks about the drawer filled with scalpels next to her bed. She breathes deeply, counts each inhale-exhale as it passes through her. She closes her eyes.