Work Text:
It was her first time in weeks to have the luxury of 48 consecutive hours off at the weekend, so Trinity did the obvious thing: she put on the red top that made her tits look really great and looked up the address of the lesbian bar that Parker had told her about. To hell with the mound of laundry that was sitting just inside her bedroom door, or the fridge that needed to be cleaned: she needed to live a little. Trinity wanted to dance, she wanted to get a buzz on, she wanted to grind up against someone on the dance floor for a while and forget a shift where nothing had gone her way.
"Don't wait up," she told Whitaker, who was sitting on the sofa with a bowl of cereal on his lap and some Netflix documentary on the TV. She was gone through the door to meet her Uber driver before he could respond.
The bar was just the right amount of dive-y. The dance floor was a bit sticky beneath the soles of Trinity's boots, but she didn't think she was going to get tetanus from being here. Always a plus. The price of the cocktails was obscene, but the well tequila was decent and meant that within fifteen minutes of getting there, Trinity was licking salt and citrus from the forearm of a hot blonde with a tongue piercing. Excellent.
But when she got out onto the dance floor, it was a leggy brunette who Trinity found herself drawn to. She was dressed a bit like a Calvin Klein model, all angles and detachment, and dancing like there was something she was trying to purge out of her body. Trinity swayed closer to her, and the woman pulled her in, one arm slung around Trinity's waist as they moved to the beat. She kissed mean and wanting and let Trinity run her hand up under her skirt, and when she put her mouth to Trinity's ear and asked if she wanted to get out of here, Trinity could only nod mutely.
The woman called a car, gave the driver an address in a pretty nice neighbourhood, and then proceeded to make out with Trinity for the rest of the trip. By the time they got to the house, Trinity's head was swimming—tequila and so many hours awake and the way her lips already felt bruised—so she wasn't focusing on much else other than following the woman upstairs and then making very good use of the very big bed she found there.
Trinity woke up sometime around dawn, mouth ragingly dry in the way that always happened with a tequila hangover. The woman was still stretched out beside her, fast asleep and even prettier in the morning light. There were some burgeoning fingerprint bruises on Trinity's inner thighs and she felt more relaxed than she had in months. Who needed yoga, she'd long thought, when you can just have good sex instead?
Startlingly good sex, in this case.
She gathered up her discarded clothing as quietly as possible and let herself into the attached bathroom. Both bedroom and en suite were decorated to look like something in a catalogue called Coastal Living or something: tasteful and muted and expensive. Not exactly Trinity's vibe, but one day she knew she was going to be able to buy a place of her own and hire someone else to decorate it and it would be hers and no one else's.
Trinity dressed, drank from the tap and washed her face and hands, swilled her mouth out with mouthwash. She pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail with a hair elastic she found in one of the neat containers ranged along the countertop. The leggy brunette could consider that the price of what, if Trinity said so herself, were a couple of very good orgasms. She inspected herself in the mirror. She didn't look that obviously someone about to embark on a walk of shame. Mission accomplished.
She tiptoed back into the bedroom to find that the woman was still asleep. Excellent, no requirement for Trinity to make small talk or pretend this was anything other than what it was. She padded quietly down the stairs, her boots in one hand and her phone in the other. The screen told her it was 06:38 and she was on 23% battery and that at 11:59, Whitaker had messaged her Have a good night, going to bed, have left porch light on. Trinity snorted softly to herself. What a Cinderella, off to bed before midnight.
The stairs led down to an eat-in kitchen. Through a glass pane in the door, Trinity could see a small porch and a leafy street beyond while she ordered a ride to pick her up. It was a bright morning, but her weather app told her it was cool out still; while the red top made her tits look great it wasn't exactly the warmest thing in her wardrobe. Tommy in a white Prius wasn't due to arrive for another 19 minutes, so Trinity decided to risk hanging out in the kitchen, which she soon realised was a mistake.
Because having 19 minutes to kill with no immediate task to do while also having to be quiet in someone else's fancy house made Trinity feel fidgety. Her younger self would have gone through the kitchen drawers, part curiosity and part hunt for a souvenir more valuable than a hair tie. It would look worse for a doctor to be caught engaging in petty larceny than it had for a foster kid, though, so she settled for studying the framed photos that lined one wall of the kitchen. They were all identically framed, and whoever took them has a good eye, at least as far as Trinity could tell: some landscapes, the same two kids at various ages, and then—
"We're separated," the woman said from the foot of the stairs, as she cinched a pale yellow bathrobe more tightly around her. "Most of the way to officially divorced, actually. So you're not a home wrecker, if that's what you're worried about."
Trinity looked back at the photo of two laughing kids on a lush lawn treating an equally laughing man like their jungle gym. A man who was unmistakably Dr Frank Langdon, formerly a resident at PTMC and whose current whereabouts Trinity had avoided enquiring about too closely for several months now. Which meant that this, this was the Abby that Trinity had overheard Perlah and Princess gossip about: the one whom they didn't really like but whose haircare routines they debated and envied.
"That's, uh. Not what I was worried about," Trinity said.
Trinity cancelled on Tommy in the white Prius when he was 14 minutes away, which she knew was going to bring down her rating in the app, but Tommy could go fuck because Trinity was currently trying to navigate one of the weirder Saturday mornings in her life. Abby Langdon was moving around her nice suburban kitchen, making Trinity coffee and eggs and toast like it was no big deal, because as far as she was concerned it was no big deal.
Trinity hadn't been this morbidly amused in ages.
She sat on a stool and ate the eggs—which were pretty good even if Abby apparently didn't believe in serving them with hot sauce, the way god intended—and munched the toast and thought about how Langdon had probably sat in just this spot. Maybe even sipped coffee out of the exact same mug. Jesus. It was awkward and hilarious and weird and Trinity focused on absorbing every single detail of it because she knew this was going to make for a great story to tell people one day.
No one who'd ever been within a mile of the Pitt, of course, because even Trinity had some self-preservation instincts, but to people who would appreciate the weird coincidence of her having been eaten out by the ex-wife of an ex-work enemy.
Abby at least was easy to talk to, not as coolly focused on release as she'd been last night and with a surprisingly sharp sense of humour. They chatted idly: about a dumb action movie they both watched on Netflix recently, a free concert they'd apparently both been to at the 15th Street Plaza, the epic couple's fight that Abby had witnessed in the Whole Foods produce section that had resulted in apples being thrown. It was nice.
The tan line from Abby's wedding ring had almost entirely faded, and Trinity tried her best not to stare when Abby went up on her tip-toes to get something from a cupboard and her robe rode up enough to show her mid thighs. Sure, Trinity had seen it all last night, but there was something about the inadvertent tease of it that had her shifting on her stool.
In another life, if this wasn't all messy as fuck and if Trinity were into women who had kids, she'd probably ask for her number, see if she wanted to hook up again. But not this time around. She'd just save the memories up for use in future showers. Abby clearly had no expectations, either, because as soon as Trinity was finished eating she called her a cab with a mildly apologetic, "My ex is dropping the kids back around nine."
"Gotcha," Trinity said, and waited at the door for the cab to arrive. It showed up quicker than she expected; also unexpected was the way that Abby kissed her goodbye before she left, a lush, drugging press of her mouth that had some part of Trinity's hindbrain wanting to get down on her knees and make promises.
"I hadn't been with someone new in a long time," Abby said when she pulled back. She smiled. "Thanks for making it fun."
"You bet!" Trinity said, at least an octave higher than normal, and fled out to the cab.
On the way home, she braved her almost depleted phone battery and messaged her cousin Vanessa, who was the only person she knew guaranteed to be awake so early on a Saturday and to appreciate all of this.
Today
Sent Message: You are never going to believe who I picked up last night and how it went 8:04 
Received Message from:Vanessa
That one rugby player with the thighs? 8:06
Omg wait no you were the one to finally turn Charlize?? But what was she doing in Pittsburgh??? 8:07
Sent Message: Haha please 8:07
Sent Message: I wish 8:08
Sent Message: No I went to a club and picked up someone totally random, went back to her place 8:08
Sent Message: It was great 8:09
Received Message from:Vanessa
🙌🏽 8:09
Sent Message: Like really really good 8:10
Received Message from:Vanessa
Girl GOOD 8:11
You DESERVE 8:11
Sent Message: Only 8:12
Sent Message: Vanessa 8:12
Sent Message: It turns out she’s 8:12
Sent Message: The ex-wife of that guy I technically got fired a few months ago for all the drug stuff? 8:12
Sent Message: Like, the mother of his kids. 8:13
The screen filled up with a stream of emojis, mostly of the cry-laughing kind, plus Vanessa asking why the hell Trinity would drop this kind of news on her when she was in the check-out line at Kroger's and couldn't call her. As the cab turned onto Trinity's block, her phone buzzed with one last message.
Received Message from:
Vanessa
8:21
Vanessa was a drama queen, but this told Trinity that her first instinct was right: this was going to be one of those one-night stands that would make for a great story.
Trinity got in the door, showered, and napped, coffee in her system be damned, and woke up feeling like she'd mainlined something pretty illegal but highly effective. A good orgasm always left her feeling energised, and she'd had more than one. She did her laundry and vacuumed the apartment, browbeat Whitaker into cleaning the fridge, and made a huge batch of adobo that she portioned out into meals for the week ahead. The rest of the day passed like that, things marked off her to-do list: check, check, check. By the time she got into bed that night, she felt like she'd successfully hit the reset button on not just her day or her week but her whole month.
That week at work went smoothly. Dr Robby was actually using some vacation time—which judging by Dana's reaction was some kind of minor unprecedented miracle; Dana seemed to be only part-joking when she said it was down to a novena she'd offered up for the intercession of St Jude—and Abbot was in charge in his absence. It made for a different vibe in the ED, and if you asked Trinity, a better one. She got to do two chest tubes and diagnosed a case of pernicious anaemia that other, lesser doctors before her had missed. By the time she finished her Thursday swing shift, she was an odd combo of tired but wired. She headed back to the apartment, put on some workout clothes and her headphones, and headed out for a run.
Trinity didn't run as much as she used to back in undergrad, but she still enjoyed getting to just pick a direction and go, zoning out to the beat of the music and the rhythm of her feet on the sidewalk and the feel of the breeze through her hair. She went a couple miles, looped back, and stopped off on her way home at the coffee shop that may have been a gentrifying cash grab but was also a gentrifying cash grab that made really good boba, so who was Trinity to judge.
Except that when Trinity paid and stood off to one side to wait for her drink, she looked idly around and realised that the woman standing next to her was Abby Langdon. She was dressed like she'd rolled around in an Ann Taylor store for a bit and then had someone put her thick dark hair up in one of those French twists that looked deceptively simple and that Trinity had never managed to achieve. She had pearls around her neck and a crocodile-skin handbag dangling in the crook of one arm, and less than a week ago she'd been clenching, desperate, around Trinity's fingers.
Trinity was entirely incapable of stopping herself from saying, "Oh shit."
Abby looked over and Trinity would give her credit for this: she had one hell of a poker face. Only a quick dart of her eyes over to a table of people who were all dressed like they're going to a particularly boring local government meeting in the late '90s gave her away.
Trinity wasn't enough of an asshole to out someone in front of their work colleagues—at least not unless they really deserved it—so she just settled for saying, "I mean, so nice to see you again, Abby."
"You too, um..."
The barista called out, "I've got a boba tea for Trina?"
Trinity rolled her eyes but took the drink.
"Nice to see you, too, Trina," Abby said.
"Trinity," Trinity said. "They messed it up. My name's actually Trinity."
"Ah," was all that Abby said, and then the barista called her order (skinny vanilla latte for Abigail) and when she went to pick it up from the counter, Trinity saw that she was wearing her wedding ring again.
Trinity was suddenly acutely aware that she was sweaty and flushed and wearing workout clothes she got in an Old Navy sale three years and a cross-country move ago. "Well, uh, see you," Trinity said, and the boba tea was nice but no matter how aggressively she slurped on it as she walked the last few blocks home, it didn't make her feel any better.
There was no logical reason for Trinity to be irritated by any of this. It was a one-night stand with a slightly more pleasant walk of shame than normal. They'd never exchanged names. They'd never swapped numbers. Trinity didn't know if that politely noncommittal look on Abby's face had been because Langdon had mentioned her name at some point in the aftermath of Pittfest, or if it was because Abby just really didn't want to cross the streams.
And honestly, either of those things were perfectly fair reasons not to want to have anything more to do with an anonymous hook-up almost a week later. Plus if Abby was one of those women who thought of their queerness as a phase or a secret little annex to their nice regular heterosexual married life, or if she'd gone back to Langdon, it was a lot better for Trinity to know that now rather than nurse any little fantasies of what might have been.
But it was maybe just that Trinity had seen that kind of look on people's faces before: when they found out that she'd been a foster kid, or had lived in a double-wide, or that she was the scholarship girl, or that she bought her clothes at Goodwill, or that her dad didn't speak English that well, or that her dad wasn't white, or that her mom—well, she'd just seen that careful, polite disengagement before. That moment where they thought they knew you and they'd summed you up and you're never going to measure up.
Well fuck that, Trinity thought. The sex wasn't even that good anyway.
Not long after, word got around that Langdon's stint in rehab had finished and that he'd been cleared to return at the beginning of July, when he'd start his fourth year over again. Trinity knew that he'd paid his dues, and to be fair to Dr Robby she didn't think he'd let Langdon return if he thought he was still a danger to patients.
Trinity didn't have to be super happy about it, though.
She rounded out a busy swing shift with Perlah, attempting to reduce a tricky lateral knee dislocation. It didn't go smoothly and left both of them irritable with one another and trying not to show it in front of the patient, who was clearly terrified of hospitals.
By the time Trinity was getting her stuff from her locker, she was full of that kind of irritable energy that she knew she needed to get out of her system as soon as possible or she would be in a foul mood between now and bedtime. When Parker, also finishing up a rare daytime shift, invited Trinity to join in a game of pick-up basketball that some of her friends would be having in a few hours in the park over by Parker's apartment complex, Trinity accepted without hesitation.
She went home, showered quickly to get rid of the hospital stank, and had a snack before heading over to Parker's neighbourhood. It was a step up from where Trinity was living, leafier, and the basketball court was just part of a whole collection of well-maintained sports fields and kids' play grounds. Parker had lived in Pittsburgh most of her life, so the people they were playing with were mostly people she knew from outside of work, and it was nice to just goof around and chat and score points off people who didn't know an aortic dissection from a hole in the wall.
But then Jazmin tripped over her own feet mid-shot and sent the ball ricocheting off the court until it eventually rolled to a stop at the feet of a kid who was walking past.
"I will get it!" the kid said, with all the confidence and volume control of a four- or five-year-old. He picked it up, tongue poking out with the concentration required to brace the basketball against his belly, and rocketed over to them at high speed.
Trinity started to jog over to meet him at the same time that she heard a woman's voice call out, "Tanner! Come back! You know you're not supposed to go anywhere by yourself!" It was a familiar voice, and Trinity realised that Abby Langdon was approaching. She was part of a small gaggle of women, young kids, and strollers that seemed to be leaving the playground across the way, all controlled chaos in tasteful pastels. The women were mostly blonde and all light-skinned, their hair in sleek high ponytails and wearing what Trinity was going to guess was most of this year's collection at Lululemon. Just looking at them felt like a micro-aggression.
"I caught the ball," Tanner said with complete indifference to his mother's views.
"That doesn't matter," Abby said firmly. She was pushing a stroller which contained a toddler in a lavender dress who was intensely asleep, her brow furrowed with concentration, and who had a stuffed monkey in one fierce, sweaty grip. "You stay with me, we've talked about this," she continued, and then did a clear double take when she recognised Trinity in turn.
Not on her poker face A-game this afternoon, then. But she looked tired, Trinity realised with a pang, under-eye circles clear despite her concealer and a couple chips in her pale pink manicure.
She wasn't wearing a ring.
"Hi," Trinity said, resisting the urge to play with her hair.
"Oh. Um, hi," Abby said. She blinked, but she made no move to leave.
"I have mud on my hands," Tanner said, dropping the ball at Trinity's feet and holding up his palms for inspection. They were indeed a bit grimy.
"Well, thank you for bringing our ball back, buddy," Trinity said, in her most small-kid-appropriate voice, picking up the ball and tossing it back over to Parker.
Parker lifted her eyebrows in a way that Trinity knew meant You good?
Trinity nodded back in a way that she knew Parker knew meant I'm good, you keep going without me.
"It was nice to see you the other day," Abby said when Trinity looked back at her, although now she was peering at Parker like she was trying to place her. "It was a work meeting so I couldn't really—"
"No, yeah, I get it," Trinity said, folding her arms.
"—and that group of clients was from a very conservative background, it's better if they don't think I'm divorced. They'd want to work with someone else at the firm and I need the billable hours right now."
Trinity couldn't stop herself from looking at Abby's bare ring finger. "Oh."
"Just in case you thought that I—"
"No, no, it was fine, I didn't—"
"Tanner James Langdon, you stay with me, do not wander off!" The kid was walking along the painted boundary of the court, arms spread wide and one foot placed precisely in front of the other, wobbling his way along like he was a tightrope walker high above the crowd. Abby turned back to Trinity and said, "I have to get them home for dinner but I thought maybe... If you wanted to meet up sometime? For coffee or lunch? Even just to talk."
This is probably a bad idea, Trinity thought. "Yes," she said.
They swapped numbers and made a tentative arrangement to meet on their next mutually free day. The Langdons left and Trinity jogged back to the game, which had morphed into some kind of weird truth-or-three-pointer thing in her absence.
Parker raised an eyebrow at Trinity while Letícia was taking her turn and said, "Was that Frank Langdon's wife?"
Trinity hoped she wasn't flushing too badly. "Ex-wife."
"How exactly do you know Frank Langdon's ex-wife?" Parker said, in a tone of voice that implied she had her suspicions as to how.
"Uh, socially?"
"And are you planning to see her again, socially?" Parker said, catching the ball when Jazmin threw it to her.
"Maaaaybe?" Trinity said. "Yes."
"Girl," Parker said, and threw her the ball just a bit more forcefully than Trinity thought was justified.
Today
Sent Message: On a scale of one to ten 11:12
Sent Message: One being ‘not the stupidest thing you've ever done’ 11:12
Sent Message: And ten being like 11:12
Received Message from:Vanessa
Oh god what did you do 11:13
Sent Message: The equivalent of getting back together with Kelsey 11:13
Received Message from:Vanessa
NO 11:13
NO 11:13
DO NOT 11:14
Sent Message: How would you rank me hooking up again with the asshole co-worker's ex-wife? 11:14
Received Message from:Vanessa
… 11:15
Well it wouldn't be a ONE 11:15
The sign outside called this place a diner, but it wasn't the kind of diner that Trinity was used to. She showed up in jeans and a long-sleeved top that she thought did nice things for her tits but was also, like, lunch-time appropriate, and nursing a mild craving for a club sandwich and an iced tea. Inside, there was an old-school long counter, but all the booths looked like they were made out of repurposed wooden pallets and the menu made a big deal about how they only served artisanal ketchup. Trinity didn't understand what was wrong with Heinz, but she also didn't understand half of the words on the menu. You put together a sandwich to eat it, surely; why would you then "deconstruct" it?
Abby didn't look taken aback by any of this. Tired, still, but at ease in a white shirt dress. She stood to greet Trinity with a kiss on the cheek and made practised small talk with her until the server arrived with their food.
"I just felt like there was maybe some... possible confusion," Abby said, drizzling a very small amount of dressing on her salad. "And I don't like it when there's confusion about things."
"Okay," Trinity said, while trying to figure out how to reconstruct her deconstructed Reuben.
"My marriage is very definitely over," Abby said firmly. "It was over when I went to that club. I just needed to blow off some steam."
"Uh huh," Trinity said.
"Not that... I know that sounds a bit..." Abby waggled her fork around vaguely. "I've been aware that I'm bisexual for quite some time, even if I haven't acted on it since my undergraduate days."
Trinity's eyebrows went up, very slowly, and she took a deliberate bite out of her cobbled-together sandwich.
"God, that sounded worse, didn't it?" Abby sighed. "How is speaking in court easier sometimes... Look, I was with Frank for the better part of a decade. It was fun at the beginning and my parents liked that he's a doctor, even if they didn't exactly approve of his family. And we have the kids, and I wouldn't trade them for anything."
Trinity sensed a but coming.
"But more and more I felt like we hadn't gotten married for the right reasons. Everyone just expected it and it seemed like the next step and I couldn't think of a good reason not to, and my parents were going to cover the down payment on the house and the renovations—"
Trinity's eyebrows might just stay permanently affixed to her hairline.
"—but then afterwards... I'm not saying he's a bad dad, the kids love him, but he looked at me and thought that what I needed right now was a dog to house train."
"Oof," Trinity said.
"And then I'd just spent a whole day working with a client who doesn't understand that not only will they lose if they decide to sue but that the judge could well fine them a lot for bringing a frivolous lawsuit, and the afternoon trying to figure out child care after my childminder decided to move to Alaska with no notice."
Trinity cocked her head. "Who just ups and moves to Alaska?"
"She's going to live with a guy she met three weeks ago on a K-Pop message board," Abby said crisply. "They apparently have a spiritual connection."
"Wow," Trinity said, mouth twitching. "Will you agree to appear on the inevitable Dateline episode?"
"And then," Abby continued, barrelling on like Trinity hadn't spoken, like she just needed to get it all out at once, "Tanner decided to draw on his bedroom wall in crayon and so that night... I just wanted to feel like I was back in my own body again. I just wanted to feel like I was me."
"So you went to the club?"
"I like dancing," Abby said with a shrug, and then after a pause and a forkful of her salad and a flash of a smile that had got more than a bit of mischief to it, "And there you were, and you were hot."
Trinity felt herself flush.
She took another bite of her sandwich and chewed it thoroughly, needing the time to think things through. "So why do you need there not to be any confusion?" she asked eventually. "We had a fun night, but like... It's a big city. You might not ever see me again. And a one-night thing doesn't come with a prenup."
"No," Abby said. "But I thought maybe we could see one another again. It wouldn't have to be anything serious, but..."
"Huh," Trinity said. In the past, she'd been content to let her one-night stands stay one-night stands, but she was self-aware enough to admit that she'd put on this particular top for a reason. Abby was hot and who had Trinity been kidding, the sex was really good, and they seemed to enjoy one another. It probably wasn't a very smart idea, but no matter what Vanessa said, it'd also be far from the worst idea that Trinity had ever had. But. "There's one thing you should know first."
"God, please don't tell me you're married," Abby said, sounding halfway serious.
"No. No, uh, I'm an R2 at PTMC," Trinity said. "In the Emergency Department."
"Oh," Abby said, and set down her fork.
"I only ever met your ex one time, one day," Trinity said. She took a deep breath. "But I was maybe kind of sort of the person who realised what he was doing and got him suspended?"
Abby said, flatly, "You are fucking kidding me."
"No, uh, that was me!" Trinity maybe landed on inappropriately jaunty in her tone. She winced. "I saw the pictures in your kitchen and I put two and two together and I figured you should know.
Abby stared at her for a long moment, and then started to laugh.
It turned out that Abby found Trinity's confession first hilarious and then, unexpectedly, a turn-on. She put enough cash down on the table to pay for their food and leave a hefty tip besides and then took Trinity by the hand, tugged her into the diner's little restroom, and locked the door behind them.
"I know this is nuts," Abby said against Trinity's mouth; panted, "I've never, ever, done anything like this before," as Trinity's hand pushed up underneath the hem of her dress, stroking against the warm smooth skin of her inner thigh.
"You've, uh, you've been going to the wrong clubs," Trinity said as Abby unzipped her jeans. She closed her eyes as Abby cupped her through her underwear, stroked her gently where she was starting to get wet. She shivered
"Have I?" Abby said through slow, lush kisses. "Would you take me to the right one? Show me off to people on the dance floor so they look at us and know we'll be fucking later?"
Trinity swallowed hard.
"Because I'd let you do that," Abby said, tugging Trinity's jeans down her thighs and her underwear to one side. "Shit, you saw through him in a day, and for months every time I expressed the slightest doubts or worries to anyone I was being irrational. But you..."
Abby pressed Trinity back against the sink so that her bare ass was resting on the cool marble, pushed her fingers into her, worked her just right. "Fucking magnificent," Abby said, and Trinity focused on the fullness and the friction of it, the knowledge that one of the fingers now inside her had that stripe of paler skin on it where a wedding band used to rest, that she was wresting this from him, and she was coming so hard that she couldn't breathe for a long moment, seeing stars behind her eyelids.
"That is so hot," Abby breathed—and then someone knocked on the bathroom door and cleared their throat, very deliberately.
"Yinz finished in there yet? Because we got some folks out here waiting."
They didn't quite get kicked out of the diner, but it was real close. Trinity didn't care.
It was a little after nine when the first lull in the night shift hit and Trinity could start to chip away at her charting. Shen was her attending and technically should have been setting a good example for her, but instead he was fiddling with some small device that beeped and chirped intermittently.
"What is that thing?" she asked after she'd squared away her second patient chart (bar fights involving broken beer bottles got nasty fast, and this guy was going to be getting real familiar with his friendly neighbourhood maxillofacial surgeon).
"A Tamagotchi," Shen said, pressing a button repeatedly, his brow furrowed. "Obviously."
"Oh, that's like a vintage toy, right?" Trinity said.
Shen looked up at her, very slowly, and stared at her. "Come again?"
"A vintage toy? I mean, they were a thing before I was born." She shrugged.
Shen stared at her. "These are the times that try men's souls," he said in hollow tones, stood, and headed for the break room.
With Shen absent and the ED as quiet as it got, Trinity felt able to check her phone. She had a few message notifications.
Received Message from:Huckleberry
I will replace the shower curtain, I promise 19:08
Please don't ask. 19:08
Trinity was not planning to.
Received Message from:Vanessa
Auntie Reyna's birthday is next week 20:03
Do not forget to chip in for the cake/gift! 20:03
Thank you! 20:03
Also if you think I haven't noticed your radio silence about whatever you've got going on with the Hot Single Mom in Your Area 20:06
You are WRONG 20:06
Trinity sighed.
Received Message from:Abby
Thinking of you and last night 20:59
Just got the kids up to bed, we got here a half hour ago 20:59
Not looking forward to this weekend 21:00
Mom's already done that passive-aggressive complaint thing to me about how she'd already got me and F. monogrammed linens for our next anniversary 21:01
And now she can't return them and am I sure I want to go back to being a Patterson? 21:01
🙄 21:01
Call me in the morning maybe? Mom's going to take the kids. 21:02
Abby was spending the Fourth with extended family at her parents' beach house. There was no way Trinity had ever been going to go with her, for a bunch of reasons—she had to work; it was way, way too soon for Trinity to even think about meeting Abby's kids, let alone go somewhere with them—but seeing as how every time Abby mentioned something about her mother, it seemed to indicate that she was a total bitch? Trinity wasn't actually too sad about that.
She did miss Abby, though, with a depth and sincerity that kind of surprised her. Trinity didn't really do feelings in relationships, but whatever impulse had first drawn Trinity to Abby on that dance floor just didn't seem to go away. She kept thinking about her, and she knew that part of it was just that it had only been like a month. But Trinity also knew that there were very few other people for whom she would ever willingly sit through an extended, vehement rant as to why some opposing counsel needed to be disqualified, complete with references to a whole bunch of Pennsylvania state law—and not just sit through, but nod sympathetically at.
Sent Message: Will call on my way home tomorrow 21:17
She hesitated and then added:
Sent Message: Miss you too xx 21:18
Working the Fourth was exactly how the veterans on staff had warned Trinity it would be.
They dealt with a steadily rising number of patients as the day wore on: a bunch of college students with heat stroke who were all some liver-floating level of drunk by noon; most of a family reunion felled by food poisoning, and getting shouty in Chairs as to whether Aunt Maureen's potato salad or Cousin Joanne's mac and cheese had been the culprit; a homemade raft that sunk in the middle of the Allegheny and left two DOA and a bunch of other idiots soggy and shaken.
And of course there was the crescendo of fireworks injuries, ranging from little kids sobbing from sparkler burns all the way up to an idiot who was holding one in his fist when it goes off, and who was now minus four and a half fingers on his right hand and had burns all along the right side of his torso.
"Blast, burn, avulsion, crush and laceration injuries all in one," Trinity said as the idiot, now stabilised, was wheeled up to surgery. "Wow. Well, I guess if you're going to go for it, go for it."
"You think this is bad," Robby said, binning his gloves, "you should have been here back in '08, last time the Steelers won the Superbowl."
"Real big fireworks?" Trinity said.
"I'll give you one piece of life advice," Robby said. "Never try to use your rectum as a launch pad for a bottle rocket.
"Sick," Trinity breathed.
But before the patients started piling up, the early hours of the shift were quiet. And that's when she saw Frank Langdon again in person for the first time in the better part of a year. His hair was cropped shorter than it used to be, and he was very carefully shadowing Shen like he was keen to show that he could do a good job while also somehow not drawing attention to himself at all.
Whatever, Trinity thought.
When they first ended up at the board at the same time, Trinity kept looking up at the list of cases—the one in North 9 looked promising—and said, without so much as glancing his way, "So you're back, huh?"
"Yeah." There was a pause and then Langdon continued, "I know I owe you an apology, and if there's a time we could speak or—"
"Yeah, I'm good," Trinity said. She took a breath. She was still angry with him, but it was an anger that was tempered by time and an awareness that maybe, maybe, she had some issues with addicts that long pre-dated her arrival in Pittsburgh. Also she didn't want Robby to get pissy with her for going off on a co-worker in front of patients. "Just don't compromise patient care and we'll stay good."
There was another, longer pause. "But—"
"Look at the time, guess I've got to go treat some patients," Trinity said loudly, and walked off.
That was the extent of their work interactions for the week, which made it very funny when Trinity parked outside of Abby's house around ten next Saturday morning, just in time to see Langdon buckling his kids into their car seats. He only noticed her when she started to walk up the driveway, sunglasses on and her travel duffel slung over her shoulder. She resisted the urge to say Boo!, or to say that she was here for a surprise inspection. Give her a medal.
"Dr. Santos—what are you doing here?"
From the car's back seat, Tanner bellowed, "HI, BASKETBALL LADY."
If she were a slightly worse person, Trinity would dig out her phone and take a picture of the look on Langdon's face. She settled for giving Tanner a little wave and saying, lightly, "I'm here to see Abby."
"How do you know Abby?" Langdon asked, sounding very confused.
She said nothing, just stood there, smiling in the way that more than one teacher had told her was deeply irritating and disrespectful, and waited for him to put it together. He looked from her, to her bag, to the kids that he was going to have for the next 48 hours, and back to Trinity.
"You are kidding me," Langdon said, aghast.
"Daaaaad," Tanner whined. "Reagan's eating her boogers."
"You are joking," Langdon said, not turning away from Trinity.
"You have a fun weekend!" Trinity said brightly and crossed the lawn. This was complicated as all get out, she knew that, just like she knew that there was every chance that what she and Abby had got going would blow up or fizzle out before the year was through. But what the hell, she thought, as a smiling Abby opened the door to her: better to live a little.