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Trinity had never actually seen an infant so dehydrated they cried without tears. The baby’s little face puckered up, sunken eyes squeezed shut as she wailed and wailed while they got the pediatric IV in her. It was unsettling, and Trinity blinked back wet tears of her own. The baby’s mother had sticky cheeks, too, and kept repeating some nonsense about how her daughter wasn’t latching. Trinity would have felt badly about her perceived failure at proper motherhood if it hadn’t precipitated a very real failure of actual motherhood.
Standing in the stairwell, Trinity tried to even herself out so she wouldn't say something to the baby’s mother that would get her pulled into a stupid meeting with Al-Hashimi and Admin. Al-Hashimi had pulled her aside during her last shift, because Trinity told a loser with medial epicondylitis who kept asking her when the real doctor would see him that she was “a real doctor, dipshit.”
Al-Hashimi had said, in her steady, precise cadence, “I understand how frustrating it can be, and you do not need to accept disrespect in this ED. Not from anyone. However, you cannot call patients names. Always feel free to pass them off to someone else if need be.”
Trinity had thought, fuck that. Why should she capitulate to some loser with golfer’s elbow, handing him over to a “real doctor” like Whitaker, which is what he had meant, just because he was being an asshole? Fuck that.
It hadn’t even been a week, and she was already hoping Robby would give up his sabbatical, walk back into PTMC, and save her from more insultingly unnecessary advice.
The stairwell doors pushed open, and Garcia entered the space, calm and nonchalant, mouth pulling up at one corner. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Trinity said. “What’s up?”
“Got called down for a consult that didn’t need consulting.” Garcia rolled her eyes. “Nothing new.”
Trinity nodded.
Garcia looked at her, a casual checking out from face to feet and back up again, and Trinity’s insides squirmed around, hot and liquid and easy. Garcia asked, “You free later? We could get a drink.”
Trinity was, in fact, free later. She was also acutely aware that being free last minute would be embarrassing. She would appear desperate after Yolanda cancelled on the Fourth, like she was always staring at her phone, waiting on a text. “Nope,” she said, popping the “p” in a way Yolanda pretended to find annoying. “Sorry.”
Shrugging, Yolanda said, “Another time, then.” Before jogging up the stairs, she brushed her fingers so gently against the inside of Trinity’s wrist that Trinity could almost believe she hallucinated it.
Fuck. Now she needed plans.
It wasn’t that Trinity expected Yolanda to follow up. She had made it abundantly clear how uninterested she was in Trinity’s personal life. Outside of a bar, pressed shoulder to thigh and sipping on beers, outside of her bedroom, sweaty and sated, Yolanda didn’t inquire about Trinity’s friends (other than laughing at how red Whitaker had turned when he bit into a whole, red pepper in his Chinese food), or her day at work (any answer other than “Fine” was unwanted), or her past, which Trinity was actually grateful for. The past was the past, and she didn’t want to think about it while Yolanda curled a strand of Trinity’s hair around her finger until it pulled against her scalp and shot straight to her cunt.
Trinity needed to have an answer to a question that would never be asked to curb her own sense of pathetic loserdom.
Mel was laughing with Langdon at the hub, so Trinity clenched her jaw and walked by without seeing if she was free for more karaoke. Huckleberry, she knew, had the day off. She’d dropped him at Robby’s this morning to make sure nobody had broken in and the place hadn’t burned down, and Amy was picking him up in the afternoon for lunch and a playdate at her house. From experience, this meant Trinity wouldn’t see him until after 10 in the morning tomorrow.
As she rounded her way toward the west computers, she spotted Victoria, lip pulled between her bottom teeth, typing. Victoria paused, held down the backspace key, and typed again.
“Crash!” Trinity crossed her arms and leaned into Victoria’s space. “Want to get a drink after work to celebrate being squeezed out of your mother’s brilliant vaginal canal?”
Victoria frowned and scrunched her nose up, all adorable. “Can you please stop being so disgusting?”
Trinity hummed, tilting her head back and forth as though seriously considering it. “Nah. More fun to watch you make that face.”
Victoria rolled her eyes. “Whatever, and my birthday was two days ago.”
“Right, I forgot you’re only allowed to drink on your 21st birthday, otherwise you develop a severe case of alcohol dependency.”
“I didn’t drink on my birthday.” Victoria leaned forward so her eyes were less than six inches from the computer screen. The blue light washed her face pale, and her eyes blinked, owlish. She hit the backspace key again.
“Are you serious?”
Victoria nodded, typing and refusing to look at Trinity.
“Now you have to come out with me! You have to let me buy Baby Crash her first legal drink.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Victoria said. What a brat. She reread what she wrote, submitted it, and badged out of the computer. She looked at Trinity, and Trinity raised an eyebrow, folding down her smile when Victoria’s mouth twisted in consideration. “Fine.”
“Great.” Trinity slapped the counter with her palm. “I’ll drive.”
“You’re not going to take me someplace shady, are you?”
Trinity waggled her eyebrows. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
Victoria sighed, put on, and Trinity was feeling much better already as she began walking back toward the hub to pick up another patient, Victoria catching up with her and mumbling something about not telling her mother.
“Your car is old.” Victoria reached forward to fiddle with the radio. “You still have like, an actual key.”
Trinity smacked her hand away, hitting the first preset to take them back to the adult alternative station. “Dino is a great car,” she insisted. Dark blue, all wheel drive, just over 100,000 miles when she purchased it during her third year of med school. She’d pay it off by next spring.
“You named your car?” There was a laugh tucked into Victoria’s throat, and Trinity could hear her shuffle her feet, could feel her shift to look at her.
“Huckleberry did,” Trinity said. “Do you even know how to drive?”
Victoria’s silence lasted an entire verse; Liz Phair singing she was clean as a whistle. Victoria said, “There’s public transit, you know. And it’s better for the environment.”
Trinity hummed. “Did your mom drop you off at work today?” She glanced at Victoria, hair still tied back but changed out of her scrubs, chagrined slant to her mouth, eyebrows sloping. “Oh, she did.”
“Carpooling is also good for the environment.”
“Hey, no judgement. I just like being the one with the car.”
As a birthday gift, Trinity did not ask to be included in this mommy-daughter carpool.
Quiet settled over them, but not silence. Repeated I never said nothings from the radio, a car somewhere nearby honking their horn, the whoosh of traffic drifting through glass. Trinity flexed her hands against the wheel, speeding up when the next light turned yellow.
“Is the car called Dino because it’s as old as the dinosaurs?” Victoria asked.
Trinity rolled her eyes, hand over hand as she made a left turn that had Victoria clutching at her armrest. “I don’t think you want to be making old jokes, because it really opens you up to zygote ones.”
Victoria tilted her head in Trinity’s periphery, fingers loosening. “And yet you haven’t been able to think of a single one.”
Snorting, Trinity slowed as a car pulled out of a spot a block away from the bar. Perfect. “You make it too easy, and I prefer a challenge.”
Trinity held the door open for Victoria and watched her look around the bar with her wide, brown, baby eyes. The place smelled like dust, Pine-Sol, and sweat, the wood floor worn and lacquered like a school gym. Half-full tonight, plenty of open seats. A guy on the karaoke stage butchered a Madonna song, and someone else knocked their glass over, giggling as it spilled across their fingers and began dripping down the table.
“Very classy,” Victoria said, but if she intended bite, it wasn’t there. There was a delighted sparkle in her eyes, and Trinity remembered she didn’t have a real college experience. Victoria never got gussied up on Thursdays to get shitfaced with her friends before waking up for a Friday morning class, subsisting on ibuprofen and caffeine before crawling into bed at noon and sleeping for four hours in preparation for Friday night.
“Let’s get you that drink.” Trinity splayed her hand across the small of Victoria’s back and pushed her forward. Victoria stumbled a step before weaving her way through the sparse crowd, and Trinity kept her hand out, hovering.
Victoria slid onto a stool and rested her feet against the bottom rung. Her jean shorts rode up her thighs. Trinity leaned against the bar, looked at the ring stains on the wood, and swiped her pointer finger through condensation someone’s glass had left moments before.
“What’re you having?” the bartender asked, her rag sliding across the counter.
Victoria looked at Trinity, biting at the corner of her mouth, and then back at the bartender. “Shirley Temple, please.”
“What?” Trinity asked.
“What?” Victoria repeated with reflexive annoyance. Her eyes were so wide and dark, warm from the lamp dangling above them, and anxious with fear of faux pas, or, maybe, the idea that she had ordered something overly strong.
“There’s no alcohol in that, Crash.”
“Right.” Victoria’s mouth twisted, deep in thought.
Trinity exchanged a look with the bartender, Claire or Clarissa or something. She really should have known her name by now, but Trinity had either been exceedingly distracted by Yolanda’s hand creeping up her inner thigh, or an immediate need to get hammered, and therefore had been unable to commit it to memory.
“Vodka lemonade?” Victoria ordered.
Claire or Clarissa turned to Trinity. “The usual?”
Trinity nodded and handed over her card to start a tab. “Thanks.”
When the bartender turned to grab their order, Victoria said, “The usual?”
Trinity shrugged. “I like to get a beer. This place is cheap.”
“Okaaaaay,” Victoria said, an all-knowing, judgmental twinkle in her eye. It was excessively annoying, but before Trinity could decide how to respond, Victoria continued, “I didn’t even get carded.”
“Maybe you look old,” Trinity said. A wrinkle formed between Victoria’s eyebrows as she frowned, deep and deeply funny. “Maybe it’s your pout lines.”
Victoria huffed and ran a finger over a warp in the woodgrain. “The oldest zygote in the world.”
Trinity grinned as Claire or Clarissa, or maybe it was Cecilia, set their drinks down in front of them, sliding Trinity’s card back to her. “There you go. And,” she began, making eye contact with Victoria, “if you want, we can do any drink clean or dirty.” She smiled before moving along to the next patron.
Victoria wrapped her lips around her tiny straw and sipped. Trinity had never seen someone drink out of the stir stick before, and she looked at Victoria’s mouth, and then very decidedly did not look at Victoria’s mouth. “What does that even mean?” Victoria asked, licking at her bottom lip.
“What?” Trinity gulped down a quarter of her beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.
“Clean or dirty?”
“She was hitting on you,” Trinity said. Which, really, wasn’t entirely true, but Victoria sat up straight, squaring her shoulders, a delighted smile curving her mouth as though the alcohol had gone straight to her head. “And she could make you an alcoholic Shirley Temple.”
“Oh, right.” Victoria took another long sip of her drink, spinning in her chair to watch a duet of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” that was cloying in its sweetness and courageous in its lack of tune.
Victoria shimmied a little, twirling her straw around her cup. When the number ended to middling applause, she spun back to Trinity. “So, nobody else was invited to my big birthday bash?”
“No one else liked you enough to come,” Trinity said. Mel had plans with Becca, McKay needed to get home to her son, and Mohan looked at her like she was crazy. Trinity had gotten caught up in a MVC, and by the time she exited Trauma 1, Joy had already left.
Victoria narrowed her eyes. “Or did you just want me all to yourself?”
Trinity scoffed, and her stomach knotted like when she was seven and stole a cookie from the jar before dinner. She took another sip of beer, allowing it to sit on her tongue before swallowing. “I would’ve asked Ogilvie, but I thought you might kill me.”
“And him.”
“I’m less concerned about that, honestly.” Victoria’s mouth quirked up, and Trinity smiled in return. “So, what did you do for your birthday?”
Trinity was off the last two days. She went on late morning runs, watched too much television, and checked her phone every ten minutes to see if anyone had texted. She drank so much coffee her left hand developed a slight tremor, her eye twitched, and her head pounded. Dennis came home last night with takeout, put on Schitt’s Creek, and nudged her with his foot every time he thought a joke was funny. Which was a lot of nudging.
“Perlah and Princess gave me a birthday girl sash and tiara to wear at work.”
“Oh my god, please tell me you did and there’s photo evidence.”
Her nose scrunched and her lips pursed. Very cute. “Only for five minutes. And obviously. Princess took a bunch.”
Trinity would need to track those pictures down later. “How would all your patients know it was a very special day for our little Crash?”
“Shut up.” Victoria rolled her eyes and took another long sip.
“And after work?”
“Dinner with my parents,” Victoria admitted through gritted teeth. The accompanying smarmy smile was very familiar.
Trinity laughed. Fuck, Victoria’s parents had given her so much it rankled. Unfair, Trinity thought. And yet the idea of being forced to spend your 21st birthday with your parents, probably at some fancy restaurant while being served an expensive glass of wine that you didn’t like and didn’t drink, felt like a distinct version of Hell.
Abandoning the bar for a free booth, Trinity and Victoria sat next to each other, so they each had a clear view of the stage. Trinity’s head was pleasantly fuzzy, electric buzz tingling at the top of her spine. She felt her shoulders relax as the tension drained from her jaw and neck. The air was warm, satisfying, as if she were laying out on a beach instead of tucked into the corner of a bar.
Victoria, as it turned out, was a mean tipsy. Mean in her assessment of karaoke performances (“I didn’t know it was possible to be a squeaky baritone.”), and commentary on outfit choices (“Do you think she’s colorblind? .5% of women are, you know.”), and in the sharp, disgusted way she turned to Trinity and said, “The pleather is sticking to my thighs.”
Trinity had always liked a mean woman.
When a lull hit the stage, Trinity, elbow on the table and warm cheek in palm, turned to look at Victoria, who angled her body to look right back. Victoria’s eyes were dark, pupils dilated and bright. Her ponytail hung over one shoulder, and there was a sheen of sweat at her hairline.
“You’re welcome,” Trinity said.
“For what?”
“Paying for all your drinks.” She didn’t really care. It was nice to have someone to elbow in the ribs and bet whether or not the couple singing “I Will Always Love You” would attempt the high note (a wash: the man did, and the woman didn’t).
“I can Zelle you.”
“Do you have your own bank account or will I get a payment from Shamsi?”
Victoria huffed, carding her fingers through her ponytail. “I’m an adult, okay? The only thing I can’t do is rent a car.”
“You can rent a car,” Trinity corrected. “That 25 thing is a myth.”
“Like bigfoot,” Victoria said, stirring her straw around her glass. Melting ice cubes clinked against the sides.
Trinity laughed. “Sure, yeah. Exactly. Like a manananggal.”
Victoria stared at her, forehead wrinkled in concentration. It was a very serious, unblinking stare that Trinity returned, tucking her bottom lip into her mouth to keep from laughing. She felt so loose and nice. Her beers had blurred the edges of her bad day, of her bad week, of the dark shadows constantly lurking in the corners. Instead, there was Victoria’s focused, steady gaze, and Trinity’s mind zeroed in on a single point, a single goal.
Victoria blinked and Trinity said, “You lose.”
“Are you tired?” Victoria asked it like a clinical question. Like she had started taking a patient’s history.
Trinity smirked and aimed for condescending: “Close. I’m tipsy.”
“I’m going into psych,” Victoria said, like that meant shit. “And you’re so angry. I should call you Madtos.”
“Clever,” Trinity snorted. “Good use of that big brain of yours.”
Victoria licked at the corner of her mouth, tongue wet and pink, lips parted. She shifted forward so her knee pressed against Trinity’s. Trinity was grateful she was wearing sweatpants that precluded skin-to-skin contact. “There is something seriously fucked up about you, you know? Like, I’m telling you that you need psychiatric help and your eyes are going all smiley while you glower at me.”
“Glower at you?”
“Yes,” Victoria confirmed, head bobbling on her neck. Trinity wanted to laugh again. “Like you want me. Wanttos.”
“How drunk are you?”
“I’m not.” Victoria pushed her drink across the table and shuffled closer. Trinity heard her skin peel away from the tacky pleather, felt the pressure against her knee increase, expand. Trinity slid back until she hit the wall. It coiled tight in her stomach. “Are you?”
“I’d bet my student loans I have a higher alcohol tolerance than you, Crash.” Picking up her glass, she took a sip. It served as a kind of scale reference: Victoria’s face was one and half beer glasses away.
“Why do you think everything's a competition?”
“Isn’t it?”
Victoria made a sound in the back of her throat, half-agreement and half something else. She leaned in: one beer glass away. “Who’s winning?”
“I am,” Trinity said, even though she felt off-kilter. She wasn’t sure what kind of drinking game Victoria thought they were playing, but her face was so close Trinity felt cross-eyed. The humidity in the bar coated her skin, pants itchy against her legs. Victoria’s spaghetti strap had fallen down her shoulder, so Trinity reached out and righted it.
“I don’t think you are, Trinity.”
Victoria raised an eyebrow, and Trinity felt trapped.
She would go home to an empty apartment with no clean spoons. She would wash her face and brush her teeth, wriggle out of her sweats and sleep in her underwear. She would forget to turn off her alarm and wake up at six in the goddamn morning. She checked her phone ten minutes ago just to confirm that Yolanda hadn’t responded in over 72 hours, as if she could forget.
The air was so thick it was hard to breathe, and someone had started screeching “I Will Survive.” Trinity tracked the pink of Victoria’s tongue as she poked at the corner of her red mouth.
Trinity said, “Happy Birthday,” and she meant it like: I am letting you win. It felt like calling mercy.
Victoria groaned, a small, low sound that sank into Trinity’s gut, base and primal.
Let the record show that Victoria leaned forward and Trinity’s head knocked against the back of the booth when their mouths collided. Their noses bumped, and Trinity breathed, “Ow,” against Victoria’s mouth, but when Victoria pulled back, breath a hot puff, Trinity followed.
Trinity’s hands found Victoria’s face, cheeks so warm beneath her palms. Victoria tasted sour, and she kissed sweet. A giddy, unpracticed excitement to her searching mouth. Victoria palmed at Trinity’s elbows, and her hands slid up her biceps to her shoulders, leaving sweaty fingerprints in her wake.
Someone wanting to leave traces of themselves on her body was not new to Trinity. Sometimes it made the acid in her stomach roll and crawl up her throat, sometimes it pulsed like a heartbeat between her thighs, and sometimes it did both. She was also well-acquainted with the fiction she told herself about people wanting evidence of her own touch in return; Yolanda had asked if she was in high school when Trinity left a hickey next to her belly button.
Tracing Victoria’s bottom lip with her tongue, Trinity dipped in to feel the soft, wet inside. Gentle and light, teasing swipes. She felt Victoria adjusting, learning but not yielding, mouth becoming less frantic but no less intense.
Victoria’s fingers pressed into her shoulders as she lifted herself to straddle Trinity, and Trinity’s hand slipped around her waist. Victoria was a lovely, solid weight in her lap, and her tongue was hot inside Trinity’s mouth where the muscle brushed against her soft palate. The knot in her stomach untangled into something alive and squirming. She squeezed Victoria’s hip.
Sliding her hand into Trinity’s hair, Victoria palpated her skull. A pleasant, static feeling spread through Trinity’s forehead and down toward her eyes. She whimpered into Victoria’s mouth. The pressure of Victoria’s answering smile paired with her blunt nails working Trinity’s nuchal groove. Trinity shivered.
“I’m winning,” Victoria whispered, taunted.
Trinity bit at her mouth, bit at her chin. She felt herself starting to get slick between her thighs, as if to confirm Victoria’s conclusion.
Victoria rolled her hips, and then she gasped.
“Are you going to be embarrassed about this tomorrow?” Trinity asked. She licked at a drop of sweat beaded at the curve of Victoria’s jaw.
“About what?”
“Public indecency.” More people had filtered in, probably undergrads possessing great familiarity with PDA and lacking shame.
Victoria lifted her head and looked around. Trinity could see the faintest hint of flush on her skin, eyes blown and mouth wet. She blinked and looked back down at Trinity. “I’ve never been in a bar before,” she whispered, dazed. “I’ve never been kissed in a bar before.”
Her words settled sick and dirty in Trinity’s ear, and she swallowed them down like a pill.
“I get to do things,” Victoria said. “I get to want things.”
She kissed Trinity again, an urgent, coveting sort of kiss, like Trinity had something Victoria wanted. Trinity could easily imagine what. Victoria’s hand covered Trinity’s on her waist and pressed down harder. Trinity pretended that Victoria wanted it to bruise, and the thought pulsed between her legs.
Victoria’s mouth was open against Trinity’s mouth, tongue brushing slowly and deliberately, and she moved her hips. Just once. A small little grind. Trinity heard herself whimper and the embarrassment of it had her fingers digging painfully into Victoria’s skin.
“You, too, Trinity,” Victoria said. Her voice had gone breathy, and Trinity couldn’t follow. “It’s okay.”
In Trinity’s experience, someone saying, “It’s okay,” meant it wasn’t okay at all. It meant they were about to hurt her more than she knew.
She let Victoria kiss her again, anyway.
She kissed Trinity slow and deep, a quick study, and Trinity felt every slide of Victoria’s tongue in her cunt. Whenever Victoria’s hips shifted, she made an abortive, surprised sound in the back of her throat that made Trinity’s heartrate jump. She slipped her hand up Victoria’s tank top, splaying her palm across the small of her back to press her closer. Her skin was smooth and soft and hot, and Trinity felt jagged and grimy in comparison. She wanted Victoria to press her flat and clean, grind her into nothing, swallow her down and keep her safe in her belly.
There wasn’t enough space for Victoria to grind against her in earnest with the table at her back, nailed to the floor, and Trinity was certain they were both cognizant of the people around them as neither had even attempted so much as a boob graze. Still, the feel of Victoria on her lap was grounding, the nip of her teeth a sharp awakening, the hand still in her hair making her head blissfully hazy. It was like all the edges had been sanded down and everything was slick and easy.
They kissed like that, open and wet, tongues heavy in each other’s mouths, breathing harshly through their noses, hands flexing against muscle and bone, until Victoria pulled back and said, “I have to pee.”
“Bathroom’s to the right of the bar,” Trinity responded. She sounded winded.
Victoria scrambled off her, hair tie so loose it looked one head spin away from falling out entirely. Her shirt was wrinkled, and she tugged at the hem of shorts. Trinity gulped down the rest of her beer, mouth kiss-sore and bitten, body tense.
The night was over, Trinity knew. Victoria would come out of the bathroom, hair down, elastic around her wrist. Her eyes would be blown, her mouth red, and she would say she needed to get home. Trinity would wonder if there would be a thin red line below her pisiform bone from the hair tie and would ask if Victoria had missed curfew. Victoria would scoff, but there would be some thread of truth in it. Like she had checked her phone to angry texts and missed calls from her mom.
Trinity would drop Victoria off at an exceedingly nice apartment complex. She would wish her a happy birthday, and Victoria would get all flustered trying to unbuckle her seatbelt. She would thank her, and Trinity would wait until she was through the glass doors before driving away, driving home to a cold, empty apartment.
Still tucked inside the bar, Trinity listened to the girls onstage sing half a One Direction song, waited until her toes stopped tingling, and slid from the booth to close out her tab.
All she had done was prolong the inevitable.
When she touched her raw mouth, she would feel that she had done something unforgivable.