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“YOU
YOU
YOU OUGHTA KNOWWWW!!!”
The WOOOOOOOO that erupted from the karaoke crowd was loud. In fact it was louder even than Mel and Santos had just been, and that had been pretty loud. Wild-eyed and wide-mouthed, hair hanging in her face and spirit swept along in the moment, Mel was WOOOOOOOOing right along with them. After the day she’d had she needed a fun night. She supposed the screech coming out of her own mouth was the sound of the steam escaping.
She turned to Santos and got hit with a surprise hug. It nearly knocked what was left of her wind out of her, cutting her off mid-WOOOOOOOO.
“Okay!” she said, hugging Santos back.
“WOOOOOOO!” said Santos right into her face.
“WOOOOOOO!” said Mel right back.
She turned to the crowd, quickly raised her arms in triumph, and just as quickly lowered them again. Okay, that’s enough. Amid the dwindling applause and general din of a crowded bar on a big drinking holiday she fumbled to put her mic back in its stand. “WOOOO—oops,” she said, realizing the microphone was still picking up her screaming.
She felt Santos take her arm and escort her off the stage back to their nearby table. They were sharing it with some guy they’d just met, who’d offered to film them on Mel’s camera. She’d given him her glasses after the first chorus, too. Normally she wouldn’t entrust her phone and glasses to a stranger, but Santos had stressed that karaoke was a community.
The guy was young, with a mustache and a loud button-downed shirt that reminded Mel of Frasier. “Here you go!” he shouted over the noise, handing her glasses back
“WOOOO!” Mel shouted. “I mean, I mean thank you!” She put them back on in time to see her phone in his outstretched hand, with the start of their performance cued up. “That was really nice of you to film it for us. Did it come out okay?” She began fumbling with it to check.
“Yeah, it looks great!” the guy said cheerfully. “Can I buy you guys a drink?”
“No!” said Santos just as cheerfully. In one swift movement she grabbed the phone from his hand, grabbed Mel around the arm again, and whisked her off toward the ladies’ room.
Mel whipped her head back and forth from Santos, to the guy, to Santos again. She had barely gotten her glasses on her head, and her hair was caught behind one lens. “Wasn’t that kind of rude? And also, don’t we want free drinks?”
“Not from that guy. He looked like a Rick and Morty fan.”
“Is…is that bad?”
Santos stopped and shook her head. “You have a lot to learn.”
Mel looked back at the guy again. He was slumped over his phone. “But you said karaoke was a community—” she began, before realizing Santos was nowhere in sight.
She reached the back of the long line to the ladies room — apparently quite a few people had waited until their performance was over to go — and craned her neck to see if Santos was ahead of her. The woman in front of her in line looked back, then loomed right into Mel’s face. She had an American flag painted on one cheek. “You guys were honestly so amazing!” she said.
Mel’s mouth wiggled and warped itself into something approximating a smile. “Th- uhh, thank you,” she said.
“She’s not used to the spotlight, but she’ll get there.” Santos’s voice came from behind, along with the sudden impact of her arm around Mel’s shoulders. “Won’t you, Melodrama?” A clinking sound pierced the low rumble of the bar. Mel looked and saw that Santos was somehow holding two full bottles of Yuengling in each hand. She’d lost sight of her for a minute at most.
“How…” she began, fixing her glasses. “How did you—”
“Take yours,” she said, clinking the bottles she was holding in the hand hanging over Mel’s shoulder. The sound was piercing, but like music, not just noise. “My hand’s getting tired.”
“Okay.” More beer, more glorious beer. Quite a lot of beer, actually. Too much, honestly, Mel.
Then she heard Langdon’s voice in her head as clear as day. You are under no obligation to drink all of it. There’s no beer police.
Mel smiled. “Beer police,” she chuckled to herself, taking a swig from the bottle she held in her right hand. She’d take it one at a time, that’s all.
“‘Beer police’?” Santos leaned against the wall and drank, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Is this dive getting raided?”
“Oh no, no,” Mel said, eager to clarify, especially after what had happened to Jesse and that patient today. “Just something Langdon sai— well, he didn’t really say it, but in my—“ She winced, paused, and settled down. “It’s hard to explain.”
Santos rolled her eyes. “Everything is with that guy.” She looked at Mel with genuine bafflement. “What do you see in him?”
The question made Mel uncomfortable. She didn’t like having to defend a friend against another friend. Not that she and Santos were friends, not yet, though she hoped they would be. It was definitely nice of her to invite her out to karaoke, and that’s what friends—
“Hello?” Santos looked at her expectantly.
“Yeah, what I see in him,” Mel said, refocusing. She thought of today, how good he’d been with her after that criminal patient (who was otherwise very nice!) knocked her on her head. As mad as she’d been with him at the time, or jealous, she knew he’d be great with her sister, too.
“You picked him over me to treat Becca,” Santo said, like a mindreader. Fortunately, mindreading is impossible. “Don’t think I didn’t notice, Melificent.”
“It just…I had to go by experience,” Mel said, more apologetically than defensively. “She’s my sister, and I had the deposition, and I just, I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, I get it. I’m just busting balls.”
“Oh,” Mel said. “Well…alright then.” She drank.
“You still haven’t answered the question, though. You met Langdon, what, once before today? He comes back and you’re BFFs. I know he’s allegedly ‘hot’—” She did air quotes around the word hot, which was frankly impressive considering the number of beers she was still holding — “but it’s gotta be more than that, right? I mean, a bright girl like you?” She took another drink. Mel watched the condensation on the bottle drip down her fingers.
She answered sincerely. “People think I’m a good doctor, I know that,” she said. “Earlier today Robby said something like that, and it really meant a lot to me. But…”
Santos raised an eyebrow. “But Robby’s gone.”
Mel swallowed a mouthful of lager. “It’s not that. It’s what people don’t say. Not Robby specifically, but…” She took a deep breath. “I may be a good doctor, but I’m a funny doctor, a quirky doctor, a good doctor despite…” She trailed off.
Santos, suddenly serious, nodded. She understands what I mean. She usually does when she listens. “And Langdon?”
“He actually tries to get me,” Mel said.
The words felt huge coming out, like they’d been cramped up inside like balloons and then released into the sky and they were all bigger than she was. They came pouring out now. “He wants to understand what it’s like, you know, to be me. And then he makes life easier for me. But not like a patient, or, I don’t know, a sidekick.”
“No, he’s got Whitaker for that.”
“I mean like a friend.”
Santos, who hadn’t taken her eyes off Mel through that whole word explosion, raised her bottle to her mouth and drank. She relinquished the bottle with a wet gasp of air that the sound of the bar muffled. “Well, I can’t argue with that,” she said finally. “Much as I’d like to. I’m argumentative, have you noticed this?”
“Have I — that you — are argumentative? Ummmmm, y- welllll, you, you, you have a tendency to get a little heated with people sometimes, maybe? When warranted! When warranted. But argumentative? Argumentative, hmmm. Would I s—”
Santos, still holding a Yuengling in each hand, put them on Mel’s shoulders anyway. She could feel the cold bottles against her shoulder blades through her ratty green t-shirt and her long, dirty blonde hair. “Melraiser,” she said, “it’s okay. Just be careful how far you trust him, alright?”
Mel wasn’t sure what to say, so she didn’t say anything. She felt there was something more at work here than just Santos being Santos. She was about to ask what when something held her back. It wasn’t awkwardness or reticence. It was a sense that she’d rather find out from Langdon.
Her eyes shifted back to the karaoke stage. A beautiful woman with red hair was singing “Fancy” by Reba McIntyre. Mel’s whole face lit up. “Oh, I love this song! Our mom used to play it in the car all the time. It’s about a single mom who…well, that’s not important. Anyway, our mom adored it, so. Do you think she’s sing it because of the hair, or—”
“So let’s hear it then,” Santos said, finishing one of her Yeunglings and staring at Mel expectantly.
“What, me?”
“You oughta know,” she said, dropping the empty on the hand railing that lined the hallway with a thunk.
Something in the way she looked at her made Mel feel brave enough to do it. I mean, if Santos wants to hear it…
“SHE SAID ‘HERE’S YOUR ONCE CHANCE, FANCY, DON’T LET ME DOWWWWWN!’” Mel sang at the top of her lungs.
Santos jumped. “Jesus!” she said, laughing.
Maybe a little too loud, then. “She said, ‘Here’s your once chance, Fancy, don’t let me dowwwwwn!’” she sang again as the line repeated, much quieter this time. Then she started laughing too.
“You’ve got some set of pipes on you!” Santos said over the music. They were protected from the full blast of it by the little hallway they were in off the main bar, for which Mel was grateful, even if she did like the song.
“My sister and I do a lot of singing together,” she said. “Or, we used to, to Encanto and Moana, until she got on that Elf kick at Christmas. And actually—” She stopped herself. The thought sucked.
“That around when she got that boyfriend?”
“Yes it is,” Mel said. “Maybe she sings with him now.” She looked down into her bottle of Yeungling. “God only knows what else they’re doing.” She drank, and as she lowered the beer she noticed to her surprise that she was close to finishing it. “Oh,” she said.
“What are they doing? Not to pry, but also, yeah, to pry.”
“They’re having sex,” Mel said. “Lots of sex. Great sex.”
“And that’s…bad?”
“No, it’s great! I mean, it’s not great, I wouldn’t say it’s a subject I have a lot of investment in, but of course I’m happy for her to have found someone she can bring into her, her life.” Drink.
“Yeah yeah, no one likes to think of their family members fucking, but you’re very enlightened.”
Mel brightened. “Thank you. You know, often I think that I—”
“I’ve heard the way your sister talks to you. About you. That woman’s never abandoning you, even if she does have a boyfriend.” Mind-reading again! “She’s autistic, not an asshole.”
The comment made Mel laugh — immediately drooling beer down her chin onto the floor. “Oh no!” she cried, laughing some more as Santos joined her. “Ahhh,” she said, settling down. “Ah, this, this is fun, this was a nice idea.”
“Agreed. So tell me: When was the last time you got laid?”
This time Mel choked on her beer.
“Jesus, I’m sorry!” Santos said, clapping her between the shoulder blades. Mel recoiled. “Sorry, sorry, shit.” She laid off as Mel recovered her breath.
“It’s okay, I’m okay,” Mel said with a last sputter. “Just swallowed the wrong way.”
“I’m gonna let that one pass. But I’m still gonna need you to answer the question.”
Mel blushed. She was a doctor, she wasn’t squeamish about sex. I’m embarrassed about my lack of it.
“A while,” she said. “Yeah, a long while? I’m very busy.”
“Malefactor, it’s 2025, everyone’s busy.” Suddenly her eyes narrowed. “You’re not a…”
A virgin? Should I be insulted? Probably not, she’s a nice person underneath it all. “No! I’m not lying to you, it really has just…been a while.”
“Alright,” Santos said, in the tone of voice of a woman out to solve a problem. Mel sometimes heard herself use it. “What kinda while are we talking about here. 3R?”
Mel put her beer to her lips, saying nothing.
“2R?”
She tilted the bottle.
Santos’s eyes went wide. “Intern year?”
She tilted her head to one side, then tilted the bottle higher.
“Two y—Mel, there’s not even any beer in there anymore, here.” She snatched the bottle in Mel’s hand away and replaced it with a full one in a single seamless motion. Mel wasn’t sure how many beers Santos was capable of carrying at any given time, but it seemed like it had to have been at least five. Maybe that’s why her jeans have such big pockets. She drank.
“Two years is a long fucking time, dude. Or a long time without fucking.”
Mel nodded. “It’s both.”
“At least she acknowledges it.” Santos grinned.
“It’s just, with work, and with Becca, I…It always feels self-centered to me? Like I really ought to be focusing on something else. And it’s not a fun feeling, soooo…” She drank. “I don’t think about it.”
“Ah,” said Santos. “Now that’s where I think you’re lying.”
“Trinity, I—”
“‘Trinity’ now, is it? You know, you studiously avoid calling me anything but ‘Dr. Santos’ at work, and since we got here you haven’t called me anything at all.”
Mel hadn’t really been sure what Tr— what Dr. Santos had wanted to be called, or what she felt comfortable calling her. Apparently, she’d avoided the issue entirely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was rude of me.”
“It’s cool,” Santos said. She was working on that new beer pretty hard. They slid down the hall as the line moved up.
“I just — I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Oh, I know. I think the only person you’d lie to is yourself.”
Mel did a take. She started to speak but just sort of…sputtered, like an angry reindeer.
“You think your freakout about Becca’s got nothing to do with your lack of action?”
“Do I — My lack of action doesn’t—”
“What about your thing for Langdon?”
Now Mel was really flustered. “Dr. Langdon?”
Santos snorted. “He gets the off-hours ‘Doctor’? He’s like if a Marvel Chris starred in Scrubs. Whatever dude, I saw how you looked at him today.”
How I looked at him today? How did I look at him today?
“I—”
“We all saw it.”
“Who—”
“Anyone with eyes, Melonballer.”
“Saw me…”
“Looking at Langdon, yes.”
At his hair…his eyes…his hands….
Santos continued. “It’s not like I’m one to talk here.”
“Oh!” Mel was grateful for the redirection. “You mean you and Garcia.”
She watched Santos’s face fall. “I dunno, do I? After today I’m not sure. Kinda think we might be dunzo.”
Suddenly overwhelmed with concern for her…her friend, Mel reached out before she realized she was doing it. The skin of Santos’s arm was warm and soft. Distractingly so. “I’m sorry,” she said, quickly letting go. “I didn’t realize.”
“Yeah, well.” Santos finished her beer with a theatrical ahhhh. “It is Independence Day.”
“Oh right! Ha, yeah, that is fitting.” She paused, screwing up her courage. Then she sang — at a manageable volume this time — “All my independent women, throw them hands up at me!”
Santos grinned at her. “You are alright, Dr. King.”
Mel beamed. “Thank you, Dr. Santos. You are alright too.” She went to sip from her bottle.
“May I?” Santos put out her hand and grabbed the bottle. Compared to the cold, dewy glass, her fingers were warm against Mel’s.
“Uhhhhh…” But Santos was already pulling the bottle toward her mouth, and Mel’s hand along with it. She angled the bottle and took a drink. It’s like I’m pouring it down her mouth, Mel realized.
It was the most comforting thought she’d had all day.
I loved it when Robby said what he said, and Langdon too. I loved having Langdon back. But that, just now, was…
What was it?
The same feeling she got from listening to her favorite songs, watching her lava lamp app, and scratching an itch after working on a patient for two hours straight, only more, and deeper down.
“Thanks,” Santos said. Somehow she had the bottle now. She scooted toward the bathroom door as a woman in a t-shirt reading “STOP STARING AT MY EYES” squeezed past them in the narrow hall. They were next in line now. Someone was singing: “…give me a reason to be…a woman.”
Santos extended the hand with the bottle in it. “Here you go,” she said. But when Mel grabbed it, she still didn’t let go. Instead she raised the rim to Mel’s mouth. “There’s still some left.”
Together, they poured it into her mouth. She drank. It was delicious.
I’m starting to really, really wonder what is happening here, she thought, an uncertainty that could give way to anxiety if she let it. She’d had just enough beer not to let it.
“Thank you, Trinity,” she said crisply, but the feeling inside was amorphous and hot.
Santos looked at her for a while.
“You know what? Fuck it,” she said, and kissed her.
Mel fell back against the wall, the railing pressing into the small of her back. It forced Santos to lean in, and forced her own pelvis out; she felt Santos’s press against hers, but there was no aggression in it. Trinity’s kiss was sudden but tender, even careful.
She knows I’ve never done this with a woman before. She wants to get it right. She wants to get me right.
With that thought, Mel kissed her back.
They were as delicate with each other as two tiny drunk women, only one of whom was even queer, could be — at first quite a bit, and then not very much at all. Hesitant tongues became insistent. Hands reached through long hair, fingers lost in it. Mel was surprised when Santos grabbed her ass, but not upset.
The bathroom door opened. “Excuse me,” said the woman exiting, who took one look at them and none-of-her-business’d it out of there.
Simultaneously — mind-reading is not real — they watched her walk down the hallway back to the bar. When she left, they were the only people there.
Santos looked back at Mel, looking her right in the eyes. I understand ‘deer in the headlights’ now.
“I’m gonna take you into the bathroom now,” she said, her voice low and hazy, “and I’m gonna make you cum.”
I felt that.
“It doesn’t have to be a big thing.” Kiss. “We don’t ever have to do it again.” Kiss. “But I think we both need it now.” She tilted her head and whispered right into Mel’s ear, sending tingles through her entire nervous system. “Don’t you?”
Something switched on inside Mel then, like it had on stage minutes earlier. But whatever this was, she felt it way further inside. That thing with the bottle had cracked it open. Ha.
“Yes,” Mel said, grabbing Trinity by the waist. Her friend half pulled, half shoved them both through the door bathroom, which closed behind them.
The bathroom was tiny, meant for one person only, and not a large person either. Almost every available surface inside was covered in stickers for bands, beers, causes, total mysteries. The single toilet had a black-horseshoe plastic seat and a metal flush handle extending from the perspiring pipes. There was a wastepaper basket overflowing with crumpled-up paper towels, and a row of toilet paper rolls suspended on a chain dangling from one wall. The mirror had been mostly kept free of stickers but it was covered in inscrutable graffiti. The bare lightbulb in the ceiling was red, casting a crimson glow on everything inside.
Which now included Mel, shoving the door shut behind her with her ass, fumbling for the lock in the doorknob with one hand.
Trinity leaned in and did it for her, then kissed her neck. Mel gasped. She was in Mel’s pants in seconds, her hand finding her already wet.
“You did want this,” Trinity said. “Good girl.”
There was that feeling again, the flash of bliss you get from cracking your knuckles or your neck or your back. But this was sexual, indisputably so. She’d been turned on before, even if it had been a while, but it had never felt like this, like some kind of light switch flipping on in her brain.
Yet she knew, even as Trinity swung her up against the sink and started working her jeans and underwear down past her hips and ass, that there was something beyond even what she felt now. This was close, so close to what she needed, and for now that would have to be good en—
She felt Trinity’s tongue brush against her labia.
It’ll be good enough.
“Up on the sink,” Trinity said from between her legs. Mel braced herself against the (hopefully!) sturdy porcelain and hoisted herself up, then plopped her bare butt down. The surface was cold, and a little wet. It was not her favorite feeling.
Trinity licked her clit.
Ahhh, now that might be it.
Trinity was making satisfied animal sounds down there. She — ugghhh — might be enjoying this more than I am. But that wasn’t true. Mel was in heaven. It really had been a long time, too long. Who was she denying herself for? Becca? Her sister was enjoying herself. Why shouldn’t I?
Tentatively, she spoke. “E-eat my pussy, Trinity.”
She looked up. In the red light the wetness around her mouth looked like blood. “Oh, good girl,” she said.
Mel reeled. She was figuring it out now. As Trinity made her body feel better and better her mind felt clearer, about this one thing only for this one moment only. Taking command, she realized. Like someone who doesn’t feel like they have to justify their presence in the room.
She groaned as Trinity slid a finger inside her and reached down to grab handfuls of her hair. With my eyes closed this could be anyone’s head between my legs. Anyone’s thick, brown hair in my hands. Anyone’s beautiful mouth against my pussy.
Anyone’s.
The final click of the gears was this: I’ve been a good girl for everyone for so long. Maybe someday, someone will be good for me.
That was the last coherent thought she had. The suddenness of it all gave her mind no time to turn itself inside out. She was able to fully enjoy every sensation, every shudder, every flick of her friend’s tongue against her clitoris. There was no end to it.
Only there was an end, and it was wonderful, and it didn’t matter whose face she saw in her mind when it happened.
“How was that, Mellifluous?” came a voice somewhere in the red room, as her mental systems came back online.
Mel smiled. “I saw fireworks.”
Trinity licked the finger she’d fucked Mel with clean. “Ah, because of the Fourth of July, good one,” she said.
“Thanks.” She was really just so nice sometimes. Oh, right! “Do you want me to, uh, uh, reciprocate?”
“It’s cool.”
“Because I’m a quick learner—”
“Mel, it’s cool, I’m good. There’s some conversations I don’t feel like having tonight.”
“Conversations…?”
Trinity stood. “Forget about it. I’m a complicated woman with a dark and troubled past.” Her tone was not serious, even if her words were. “I just want you to remember this as the night your beautiful, awesome, extremely generous friend went down on you in—”
“—a theater.”
“Oh, she is on fire tonight!” Trinity stuck her head out and kissed Mel on the nose. “A fun night. Right?”
Mel nodded, smiling. “A fun night.” She paused. “I’m gonna pull my pants back up now.”
“Yeah, do that.”
Mel got herself dressed again with the practiced efficiency of someone who’s used a locker room a lot. As she was buttoning up her fly, she looked at Trinity in the mirror.
“So yeah, that thing where you kind of took charge? That was interesting.”
Trinity laughed. “I kinda noticed you thought so, Dr. King.” Then she gave Mel that narrow-eyed look again. “I wonder about you.”
Mel looked at them both in the mirror as they finished straightening up. After a moment, she said, “I wonder about me too.”
Trinity opened the door and they stepped back into the hallway together. The cameraman was waiting for the men’s room and saw them exit together. “I can’t even be mad at it,” he said as they walked past.
Trinity laughed. Mel froze, then smiled brightly. You’re in charge now. “Neither can I,” she said.