Work Text:
3:00-4:00PM
Two weeks after Frank-fucking-Langdon fucked Trinity Santos’ brains out, he lost a patient. She watched it happen from outside the trauma room. A little girl, maybe five or six, who’d been hit by a car while she was playing in the residential street she lived on. She’d coded for almost fifteen minutes before Dr Robby had put his hand on top of Langdon’s, stilling his compressions.
Even out in the hall, Trinity could hear the flatline. Then she could only hear the parents screaming, as Dr Robby’s mouth curled around the shape of time of death: 3:44.
Langdon kicked at the cart beside him, letting it crash into the wall. No one spoke in there other than Dr Robby, his hand around the back of Langdon’s neck and his words quiet, heads close together. Trinity didn’t entirely know what was buried there, between them. She thought it was probably four years in the making, one day in the destruction, five months in the rebuilding.
A moment later, Dr Robby came out to speak to the grieving parents and Langdon left, fast and silent. He threw his gloves and paper gown off as he went, glasses following them into the trash. Trinity watched him stalk out of the ED and into the stairwell.
She thought about going after him, but that weren’t that good friends, even if they got along a lot easier now.
She answered the page she received a moment later, and decided to check up on him in a few hours.
6:00-7:00PM
When they were thirty minutes from clocking out, and Trinity had miraculously gotten through all her patients and so had no one to pass over, she slipped down in to the locker hall. She’d seen Langdon go that way a few minutes prior, and true to form, he was sat on the ground, staring at his phone. His wrists rest across his knees, his right foot tapping out a pattern on the linoleum.
She sat down beside him, peered over his shoulder.
He swiped soundlessly through photos. His children, she could tell, from the dark hair and matching jawlines. A little girl with big blue eyes and a small birthmark over her left eyebrow; a boy of maybe four or five who pulled a face in every photo. She rested her chin on his bicep, watching them flick by. Trips to the zoo, to the movies; picnics in the park, in the garden. Her eyes trailed down to his wrist, where the beaded friendship bracelet he wore everyday sat, DAD spelled out in white and pink letters.
It was a strange, complicated feeling she felt. She didn’t associate Langdon with being a father, just with being a loud and annoying doctor, with being her ride home occasionally and a good hate fuck from that one time two weeks ago when they finally started getting along. She knew a bit about his ex-wife, a bit more about his addiction, and nothing about his children.
She couldn’t even hazard a guess at their names.
But it was clear from today that the little girl had rattled him, that it had hit too close to home and knocked him off his game for the following three hours. He had assigned himself to chairs when he’d returned from his vanishing, and settled for easy sutures and stomach bugs without a complaint.
Trinity couldn’t solve this feeling with sex, unfortunately. Not the way she’d solved other feelings before, like passion or lust or acidic hate. So instead, she said, “Are you busy tonight?”
He took a beat before answering, as if he’d forgotten she was even there.
“No. Abby has the kids. They’re going to hockey match.”
She hummed. “You wanna come over?”
He blinked, finally looked at her, chin hooked over his arm and smiling with that trust me, I’m cute and not evil I promise look she had mastered sometime in the second grade.
“I don’t think that will solve this,” he said slowly, and her face morphed into a frown.
“No,” she said, equally slow. “I’m inviting you to girls night. Not the other thing.”
His expression cleared, and he nodded, gaze returning to his phone.
“Not sure I qualify.”
“Whitaker qualifies.”
“Point proven.”
“It’ll only be the three of us,” she said. “Not actual girls night. That’s never happened. Mohan keeps trying to set one up, though, and Collins keeps sidestepping.”
“You need to trap her into it,” he replied, absently, flicking to a photo of him and his kids, clearly taken by his ex-wife. He was in bed, laughing, as his children clambered over him. Probably a lazy Sunday morning back before everything went wrong. “She needs to think she’s attending something else, and then you get her in a room and you lock the door and then you give her a blood orange gin and lemonade – not tonic, she hates that stuff, and not normal gin or pink gin or whatever, blood orange gin – and then she’ll settle.”
Trinity lifted her head. “You say that with the air of experience.”
He shrugged, smiling faintly. “We’ve worked together for years. I could probably estimate all the times of day she’s going to sneeze, too. She does it like eerie clockwork.”
Trinity pushed that information to the side, slipping it into a folder titled Potentially Useless Information I Will Store For Later, As It Might Become Useful. She said, “So, girls night?”
He sighed, looked over. “Girls night,” he said.
Her mouth pulled out into a grin. “Great,” she replied. “You’re driving.”
He rolled his eyes as she climbed to her feet, then took the hand she held out for him. For someone so skinny, he was fucking heavy.
“I’m getting the feeling there’s an ulterior motive here,” he mused. “Sounds to me like you just don’t want to get the bus.”
“Sure don’t!” she said, turning with a skip in her step and letting her ponytail swish around with her. “I’ll go tell Whitaker we’re getting out the good boxed wine!”
7:00-8:00PM
It was strange having Langdon in her apartment again. He hadn’t been back since that one night, always dropping her and Whitaker off on the curb the few times she asked him for a ride home and he didn’t have kids or whatever else to get back to. But then again, it had been strange getting in his car that second time, too. The first time, she had been so nervous and amped up and spiralling through thoughts of what if this is a terrible idea that she hadn’t noticed the panda stickers on the dashboard and the car seats in the back and the window visors on the back windows in the shape of cartoon bears to keep the sun out of his kids’ eyes.
It was like seeing him anew.
Now, as he toed off his shoes in the doorway of her apartment, she could tell he was experiencing that too. He really hadn’t looked last time. He’d followed all her instructions and taken nothing in and spoken not a word to Whitaker – except from the words I’m not allowed to talk to you, according to Huckleberry himself the next morning during the bus ride in – and now he was seeing it for the first time.
She looked, trying to guess what he saw.
Big windows, black-framed squares. The building had once been a factory, a long time ago. They let in a lot of light and a lot of cold and they stretched up to a ceiling so high Trinity couldn’t hang curtains and that meant it was always bright in the open space of the living room-kitchen-diner. The kitchen was bare bones, a little messy, with dishes in the sink and too many magnets on the fridge. The living room had two sofas – one half the size of the other – and the stuffing was coming out of one of the cushions and the coffee table was three wooden pallets stacked on top of each other. The TV was balanced precariously on boxes that contained all the books she owned – which she didn’t mind so much, because she never had time to read and she wasn’t a big reader anyway, so mostly it was just that Percy Jackson collection from when she was a kid and the collectors editions of The Hunger Games because she liked reading about war and fighting and someone woefully unprepared for what life was trying to give them.
The bedroom doors were closed and the bathroom door was wide open, though she knew he’d already been in there.
She shoved him towards the sofas as she went rummaging around the kitchen for the boxed wine and the glasses without the chips in them and maybe even that one nasty bottle of Sourz which tasted like battery acid but she’d swiped it from a party a long time ago as petty revenge for the host being a dickhead and so it was unopened and still waiting to be drunk (and later, thrown up).
As she placed her bounty on the coffee table, she said, “Oh, fuck. Are you like, sober sober?”
Langdon, on one end of the big sofa, already pulling his socked feet (they had days of the week on them; they were not the correct days) onto the cushion, exhaled a smile. “Nah, I can drink. Alcohol was never an issue for me. I just don’t go crazy anymore.”
She nodded, and Whitaker emerged from his bedroom a moment later in comfortable, non-work-liquid covered clothes, flopping onto the smaller sofa and stretching out along it. Trinity looked between them both, and told herself this was a good idea.
Of course it was. It had to be. They were all getting along fine, even if it took a few days for Whitaker to be able to look either of them in the eye again after hearing more than anyone wanted him to. Langdon had actually talked to him on the roof, forcing eye contact and holding onto his shoulders, and informing him that he was a big boy who needed to grow up. Whitaker had said, “Fuck you,” and Langdon had laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Finally. Fuck you, too.”
They were fine. They were going to be fine.
Trinity pulled out her phone and they ordered pizza and she sat at the other end of the big sofa and let Whitaker talk about his day, which he did nearly every day, because he needed to vent somewhere about how life took great big shits on him with respectable regularity, and Trinity cracked open the boxed wine and poured the glasses, listening to him all the while.
When they food arrived, Trinity turned on the TV and put on Gilmore Girls because that’s what they tended to watch every night while they ate. It was easy enough viewing that they didn’t always pay attention and talked over it, yet sometimes got very invested and silent for three hours of episodes.
Half way through, Langdon said, “I hate Jess,” and Trinity laughed.
“Of course you do,” she said. “He’s an asshole like you.”
Langdon made an offended squawk that made Whitaker snort into his pizza.
“We are not the same.”
Whitaker snorted. “You’re more of a Logan, I think.”
Trinity hadn’t yet to meet Logan, but Langdon said, “Good. He’s the best of her boyfriends.”
Whitaker scoffed. “He is not – he’s rich and stuck up!”
“She’s rich and stuck up!” Langdon counters, which doesn’t make sense to Trinity but she’s enjoying watching the argument, especially when both boys starting gesturing wildly with their slices of pizza. “It’s literally part of the plot how she starts getting more reliant on the money and joins the D.A.R.—”
“She’s dating Logan then; he’s a bad influence—”
“That’s her grandmother’s influence,” Langdon corrects, like this is of vital importance. “Logan is the only one of her boyfriends who meets her where she’s at and sees her for who she is and tells her. He’s real and honest with her, and they build an actual relationship with genuine foundations.”
“Why the fuck do you both know so much about Gilmore Girls?” Trinity asked when she saw the twitch on Whitaker’s face that meant he was about to start pacing and the argument wouldn’t be settled for forty-five minutes.
“It’s a good show,” they said in tandem, before glancing at each other in surprise.
Langdon continued, “My wife—Abby—made me watch it years ago and I really got into it. There was a whole back and forth about naming our daughter Rory and everything.”
Trinity saw her opportunity to find out what his children were actually called, but Whitaker got there first with his question: “Did you watch A Year in the Life?”
“Of course.” Langdon took a bite of pizza. “It was shit.”
“So shit.”
“You mean to tell me that we watch like eight years of Rory trying so fucking hard and being such a good student and get every opportunity and leg-up a girl could want, only to discover she turned out to be a fucking loser?”
“Th-thank you!” Whitaker flung his arms up in the air. On screen, Jess and Rory were arguing. Trinity didn’t know what about, but they argued a lot so she figured this wouldn’t be more important than any of the others.
“A very good argument for Rory and Logan however,” Langdon added, making Whitaker roll his eyes and thump his head back on the arm of the sofa. Trinity winced on his behalf.
“Shut up,” Whitaker huffed, and Langdon looked strangely pleased by this.
They went back to watching the show. Trinity kind of liked that Jess was an asshole.
8:00-9:00PM
“It’s on your right,” Langdon said. Whitaker, blindfolded, moved right.
Trinity snickered into his shoulder, watching. “Your other right,” she called.
Whitaker paused, turned right, then left.
“You’re close!” Langdon said suddenly. “Stop right there!” Whitaker froze, hands outstretched. “Turn twenty degrees to your right and then like, lower.”
“Lower?” Whitaker asked, incredulous, from his spot in the kitchen, a good few metres away from the item Langdon was supposed to guide him towards. After Gilmore Girls they had talked and drank wine and Whitaker had asked Langdon if it was hard teaching at work and Trinity had made a comment about Langdon being a bad teacher, and this was apparently the way to prove that he was good at it.
That he could give good instructions to a blindfolded Whitaker, guide him across the apartment and to the PTMC mug that Trinity had placed on the kitchen counter. Along the way, he had run into three items of furniture, tripped over an errant shoe and almost banged his head on the cupboard Trinity had sneakily opened to be an obstacle.
Langdon hadn’t, for a second, even tried to guide him properly.
“It’s lower,” Langdon agreed.
Trinity took his cup, leaned over to the box and poured more wine into it.
“It’s on the counter,” Whitaker insisted.
“Santos moved it,” Langdon said. “She put it on the floor to confuse you.”
“Trin—”
“It’s to make it a harder challenge!” she defended, even though the mug was still on the counter and Langdon was just lying for no reason other than it being funny. She found it funny too, of course. She found him funny when she wasn’t the target of his trainwreck personality.
There was this stark moment, as Langdon said, “Lower, okay! You’re gonna need to be on the floor because she’s opened all the drawers and you’ll have to go under them,” which she absolutely did not do, but Whitaker was blind (literally) and trusting and so lowered himself onto his knees nonetheless, that Trinity thought that maybe, actually, they could be friends.
Not just work colleagues who got along alright but still argued badly, loudly, about three times a week, or post-hook up acquaintances who had to see each other on a regular basis. Trinity could actually be friends with him, maybe, possibly.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder. He didn’t tense, made no move to push her away. Just called, “Okay, man, you’re so close. You just gotta reach out. It’s like, a metre in front of you.”
The two of them laughed as Whitaker’s hand groped empty air, the mug nowhere nearby and Langdon’s teaching abilities in no way proven.
9:00-10:00PM
Trinity was upside-down on the sofa when Langdon checked his phone and swiped open the messages waiting for him. Adjacent to their sofa, Whitaker was trying to glue the mug back together from where he broke it in retaliation to discovering the prank. He’d immediately felt bad and now there was superglue all over his hands. Trinity studied her nails in the air; still tacky from painting them in the only true girls night activity they’d done other than get tipsy on wine.
(Whitaker had produced a second box of it from the cupboard. The Sourz was still unopened.)
Her nails were blue, Whitaker’s orange and Langdon’s the most neon shade of pink she could find.
When Langdon grunted, she glanced over.
“The night shift nurse rumour mill never ceases to amaze,” he said.
“Ooh, what have we got?” she asked. “Oh no, wait! Let me guess!” Trinity pondered for a moment. “Shen got a nipple piercing.”
“No.”
“Robby and Abbot are secret lovers.”
“Nope.”
“Mel is dating a brick shithouse of a man.”
“God, I hope not.”
In the half second Trinity tilted her head a fraction of an inch and filed that information away under Intriguing; To Follow Up On At A Later Date, Whitaker suggested, “Dana and Robby are secret lovers.”
“I’d buy it but no,” Langdon replied. “Give up yet?”
Trinity nodded, and Whitaker peeled glue from his hand.
“I’ll read you the screenshot Perlah sent me. Santos and Langdon spotted in locker hall being very touchy feely.”
Trinity felt her entire body react, swinging her head up to look at him.
“There’s more,” he said. “The message underneath says They’ve barely argued for weeks and they eat lunch together almost everyday. The third message says Pretty sure they’re dating. It has been emoji-reacted to seven times.”
“Dating,” Trinity hissed. “Are you serious?”
“Wait,” Whitaker said, frowning. “You’re not dating?”
Trinity stared at Whitaker. Whitaker stared back. Langdon spent three seconds in silence and then started cackling so loudly Trinity thought her neighbour might bang on the wall.
“Dating,” Trinity repeated, staring at her roommate. Staring at what was functionally her best friend.
“Oh, that’s fucking hilarious,” Langdon breathed through the laughter. When she peered up at him, finally swinging herself right-side-up onto the cushion beside him, she saw he was wiping a tear from his eye. “God, I fucking needed that. That was so funny, man.”
“He’s being serious,” Trinity said to him.
“I know! That’s what makes it funny. Dude.” He targeted that last part at Whitaker. “You think me? And Santos? Would date?”
Whitaker stumbled through several vowels and consonants, his hands flailing in front of him, dangerously close to knocking the mug off the table.
“Well,” he defended. “It’s not that crazy—”
“It is!” Langdon cried.
Trinity rolled her eyes, grinning. “Dennis,” she breathed. “Huckleberry. I told you what the deal was—”
“Yeah! I know! It’s—it was—you know—”
“Sex,” Trinity said. “A one-time deal. A necessary outlet. On the table for a follow-up only if and when it becomes necessary to ensure that we don’t do something crazy like stab each other at work.”
“We’ve actually even got a pretty good track record of not stabbing each other at work,” Langdon added. “Though I can’t say the same for her and Garcia—”
“Do not,” she warned, because she had never fully moved on from dropping a fucking scalpel into Garcia’s foot on her first day. Garcia still brought it up sometimes – a joke, but one that made the mortification rear its ugly head again nonetheless.
Langdon smiled good naturedly at her, his grin a little crooked, and she shook her head, turning back to Whitaker. “Only sex, Huckleberry. No dating.”
“So, so,” Whitaker said, frowning, “like a—a friends with benefits kinda thing?”
Langdon hummed, tipping his hand side to side. “Not quite but miles closer than dating. We’re not dating. We’re not going to do that.”
“But even the nurses think—”
“The nurses think everyone’s fucking everyone,” Langdon replied, with a humour that said he really wasn’t over it and could laugh again at any second. “And they’re connecting dots that don’t need to be connected.”
Whitaker nodded slowly, supposedly turning this information over in his mind. Trinity was still in a state of shock. It had been two weeks since they’d had sex; the bruises were finally fading and the scratches on his back had scabbed over and were starting to vanish. She’d let him keep her spare concealer until the neck hickeys had gone, and her left breast had been tender for about four days from his mouth before it started feeling better.
She had felt his anger when he fucked her. It had rattled through her entire body, shaking her bones. She wondered if he had felt hers the same way; she’d poured it all into pulling at his hair and digging her nails into his back as deep as they would go. Part of her had wanted to suck his dick just to bite down on it, but the rest of her had felt so overstimulated, so wildly undone, that when her anger came apart it shook out of her body in the trembling of her muscles afterwards. When he’d come, and his forehead had pressed against her chest, she knew it had worked; because she’d felt the rage leak out of them both.
She hadn’t said any of that to Whitaker, though. She’d told him in advance, when Langdon was in her room, that he wasn’t to speak of this and he wasn’t to question it and she was sorry if they got loud but this was the only conflict resolution strategy that might actually work for them, and she’d told him the day after, on the bus ride to work, that it had been good, actually. A bit painful, yes, but good, and she had been surprised by how soft and quiet he had been afterwards, how honest he had been in his apology and his gratitude. They had been making eye contact the whole time he’d said it; there was no hiding what either of them felt. And afterwards, they had cuddled and fallen asleep, and there would be nothing more to the story.
He had seemed very confused, and still a little traumatised from having heard it all, and she thought that they were on the same page. But perhaps in the lunches and the getting along since, and in that one time that Whitaker had shown her a patient’s chart and she had said, Oh, ask Langdon. He’ll be able to help, he must’ve put two and two together and made dating.
“So, you’re like, friends?” Whitaker finally asked, Trinity and Langdon sat shoulder to shoulder on the sofa, tipsy and easy and thirty-three minutes post-painting each other’s nails.
“Almost,” Trinity said, before Langdon could answer. She wanted the final say on that one. “We’re going to be.”
Langdon sent her a raised eyebrow, and she purposefully didn’t look at him at all, and Whitaker said, “Sorry for assuming,” to which Trinity replied, “Next time just ask.”
She felt Langdon watching her after that one, too.
10:00-11:00PM
While Trinity opened the Sourz and took a curious sniff, before immediately retching and holding the bottle as far from her nose as she could reach, she eavesdropped. Whitaker was going to bed, because he was a child who couldn’t stay up past 10.30pm without getting too sleepy the next day, and before he went he always poured himself a pint of water and cracked half of their ice cubes into it.
Langdon was leant up against the counter as Whitaker did this, supposedly fetching Trinity’s stash of gummy sweets from the cupboard, but distracted by a work question Whitaker had asked quietly, too low for Trinity to hear. Langdon had answered it in an equally soft voice, only edging louder when he clapped a hand on Whitaker’s shoulder and said, “Talk to Robby, if you need to. I’m not gonna be the best person to have on side right now, considering my reputation’s shot—” Trinity forced herself not to feel bad about having been the one to shoot his reputation in the first place “—but I’m happy to help however I can.”
Whitaker nodded. “Th-thanks, Langdon.” Trinity heard him stumble over Dr before cutting it out. “You’re nicer than I gave you credit for.”
Langdon’s face flew through about six emotions before he smiled easily, shaking Whitaker’s shoulder gently. “Well, we do have something very important in common and that counts for a lot in my books.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re both suffering with the names of eighty-year-old men while not even being thirty-two.”
She caught the edge of Whitaker’s smile. “I’m twenty-five.”
“Fuck you, Dennis.”
“Right back at you Dr—Frank.”
Minutes later, after Trinity had checked her phone for messages (there were none), Whitaker was squirreled away in his room and Langdon was back beside her on the sofa, legs curled underneath him and three packs of gummy worms-bears-cola bottles open between them.
“Lemme,” he said, gesturing to the Sourz she’d complained about. “It can’t be that bad.”
“It’s a toxic chemical,” she informed him as he sniffed and grimaced. “You’ll get your stomach pumped after one sip.”
He shrugged, took a sip, and then pulled a face as he swallowed. “Fuckin—”
“It’s bad, right?”
“Awful. Jesus. Why do you have this?”
“We only have boxed wine otherwise.”
“God, get into beer or something.”
She grimaced. “Beer tastes like rotten bread.”
“Rum, then. Vodka. Gin. Absinthe is better than that shit.”
She grinned, took a swig of the Sourz, and immediately regretted it. Langdon laughed loudly as she tried to wash away the taste with a handful of cola bottles.
“Oh—lemme ashk you shumpthin,” she said, mouth full.
He put a hand on her face, pushing her away and making her laugh.
“If my five-year-old can talk without his mouth full, so can you,” he said.
She wanted to ask what the kid’s name was, and then mentally kicked herself. She’d ask later, she had something else for now.
After swallowing, she leaned back in and asked, “How’d you know about the night shift nurse rumour?”
“Ah, that’s a longstanding deal with Perlah.”
She raised her eyebrows. “She’s a good friend for telling you.”
He shook his head. “I mean, yes, but no that’s not why she does it. We have an agreement that I give her twenty bucks every time she sends me evidence of a rumour about me.”
“Oh. And it works?”
“Sure. I’m practically paying for her kid’s violin lessons singlehandedly. There are a lot of rumours about me. But I want to know them.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, leaning back on the arm and stretching apart a gummy worm between his fingers. “I like to know what people are saying. Before, most of the rumours were like, ER Ken is having an affair with this person, and it would let me know what the vibes were and if I was paying too much time and attention somewhere, you know? Like an external auditing system. Really, I’d started doing it to make sure no one was noticing symptoms of addiction, but no one ever did and it was good to know when the nurses all thought this one doctor was trying to go out with me, because it meant I could extricate myself from that.”
Trinity considered this, humming. “And you were never having an affair?”
The gummy worm snapped in two. “I never cheated on my wife. Never would.”
She nodded vaguely. “You still get the updates, even when you’re clean.”
He shrugged, chewed on one half of the worm. “I’m divorced, out of rehab. There are new rumours. Reputation is unfortunately very important in this line of work. Plus, keeps me up to date on what rumours Robby might hear. Gotta do some pre-emptive damage control to make sure he doesn’t think I’m dating an intern.”
“You fucked an intern though,” she pointed out.
“And we’re all better off for it.”
Trinity snorted, agreeing, and reached for another gummy bear. “Second question.”
“Shoot.”
“Is Huckleberry okay?”
Langdon’s eyebrows rose but he nodded, glancing over to the kitchen where they’d chatted. “He’ll be fine. Med school is hard and teaching hospitals need to be able to support students who are struggling. Robby will help.”
Trinity hummed.
Langdon said, “I didn’t know you two were so close, honestly.”
“Eh. We keep it on the downlow at work that we live together.”
“How long’s that been going on?”
“Since day one.”
Langdon whistled. “What, you just meet on the day and think, yeah okay, I’ll live with the guy who got pissed on?”
She snorted. “Nah. Don’t tell anyone,” she said, lowering her voice, “but he was living in one of the empty patient rooms on the sixth floor.” Langdon’s face twisted with concern. “Med school’s expensive. But—I had a spare room. So I invited him to stay. He doesn’t pay much in the way of rent or anything, but I don’t mind. He’s really good with those coupons and gets a lot of our groceries cheap.”
Langdon’s gaze was drawn to the closed door of Whitaker’s room.
“He’s okay, now,” she said. “I’m looking after him.”
He seemed amused by this, but it was soft and not unkind.
“He’s probably my best friend,” she admitted, because if she couldn’t tell Langdon, who knew about her flower lightshade and dreamcatcher and how she left her clothes on the floor, then who could she tell?
“That’s nice,” he said, tipping his head into the cushions of the sofa. “I don’t have a best friend.”
“No?”
“No. Abby used to be. And I thought Robby was but misread that and then promptly destroyed it. And I pretty much lost contact with all of my friends when med school got busy and I got married. There wasn’t enough in me to keep it up.” He sighed long and slow. “What’s it like?”
“Having a best friend?”
“Mhm.”
She considered Dennis Whitaker. Who, to her, had seemed a lot like a sopping wet cat in a sink. The dampest man she knew. Who, she’d found, had an undercurrent of strength to him. She could jab and prod and poke, and he might whine and complain and sigh, but he never let any of it get to him. He didn’t mind when she called him Huckleberry and he didn’t mind when she got to shower first and he didn’t mind when she hated all his favourite characters in his favourites shows and movies.
He was a mediocre cook and a good rat catcher and an excellent bug killer. He made study cards and had her quiz him on procedures and technique; he tried hard at everything even when it scared him; he loved dancing and singing and joking around even when he did badly at all three.
She said, “It’s the fucking best.”
He grinned at her.
“I haven’t had a best friend in a long time,” she continued. Not since the bad times she didn’t want to think about. She didn’t want those memories tainting this good night. “I haven’t actually had friends in a long time, either.”
“You’re off-putting,” he whispered, quoting her own words from weeks before.
“I’m off-putting,” she agreed. “So, I don’t know. It’s lonely to live in a new city and work a new job and not have anyone to talk to. I’d rather not be lonely.”
“I know the feeling.”
She nodded. She trusted that he did.
“Aren’t you friends with Mel?” Langdon asked. “And Javadi?”
Trinity made an unsure noise. “Mel’s a maybe. She’s very friendly but I always get the feeling she’s just like that with everyone.”
“She is a bit,” Langdon replied. “But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t mean it.”
“You think she does?”
Langdon shrugged. “Listen, if I don’t drive you home, I tend to drive her home.” Trinity blinked. This was new information – how had she never noticed that? She started filing the information as it came. “She talks about you very positively, Santos. She doesn’t like the nicknames so much, but she likes you. She’s just very busy outside of work. She has a lot of responsibilities.”
“Her sister.”
“Exactly. And that takes a lot of time and energy. When we hang out—”
“You hang out?”
“She’s very honest. When I got back from rehab, no one wanted to actually tell me how they felt or what they thought, so it made reintegrating pretty hard. But Mel didn’t like not telling me what she thought, and I appreciated that. So, yeah, we hang out. And when we do, we do it around what makes her life easier, not what would just be fun or easy for me. So like, if you want to befriend her, it’s not actually that hard. Just takes a little effort to show her you mean it.”
“I don’t have a car to drive her home in.”
“Then ask her if you can go grocery shopping with her. Do it on her schedule. I bring her coffee most mornings because she never has time to make one before she leaves the house. Sometimes I just go over in the evening and help her make dinner and then we watch whatever terrible movie from 2007 Becca’s obsessed with that week. I figure you’d be capable of that, too.”
Trinity hummed. She filed it all away. Intriguing; To Follow Up On At A Later Date for investigating Langdon and Mel’s friendship a little more. How To Make Friends for herself.
“And Javadi?” she asked.
“Oh, she doesn’t like you,” Langdon replied, waving a hand. “Don’t even bother there.”
Their laughter was loud enough to make Whitaker text her to be quiet.
11:00PM-12:00AM
They absently watched an episode of 9-1-1, because Trinity wouldn’t watch Gilmore Girls without Whitaker and Langdon would only watch procedural shows for jobs he didn’t do. He still muttered occasionally about the realism of the medical procedures or the technical jargon the EMTs were saying.
While they watched, Trinity scrolled aimlessly down Twitter and played runs of Tetris and Langdon answered long-ignored texts. There were a lot. She peeked. He was in lots of groupchats with colleagues of different configurations: third- and fourth-year residents, most of the men on shift, a nurse groupchat she couldn’t fathom why he was in. He had texts from Perlah as he negotiated a counter rumour to the dating Trinity one, texts from Princess trying to confirm him dating Trinity, texts from Mel about her review of that night’s showing of Elf, all of which implied she’d seen it over forty times.
When she episode ended and the autoplay clicked over, she asked, “You wanna watch another?”
“Sure, Santos.”
She hummed. “You can call me Trinity, you know.”
“Eh. Nah.”
“Nah?”
The new episode started playing as she tipped her head towards him.
“Then you’d have to call me Frank.” He pulled a face. “No, thank you.”
“I wouldn’t have to. I could come up with a nickname. Something better than ER Ken, surely.”
“That sounds even worse. Langdon is fine.”
She muttered, “You can still call me Trinity.”
12:00-1:00AM
“Will you bring me coffee in the morning like you do for Mel?” Trinity asked as Langdon laid on the living room floor, both arms in the air and one leg bent and raised.
“If I bring you coffee then Whitaker’s going to want coffee,” he said, as Trinity linked her hands with his, lacing their fingers together tight, and his foot went into the divot of her hip. “And then Cassie’s going to want coffee and then Samira will start giving me sad eyes if she finds out I’m doing it for everyone else and then Dana will start bullying me, Santos, and we can’t have that.”
She pushed up, and for a moment, balanced unsteadily like the picture of the couples yoga pose, arms locked and legs as straight as she could manage. About half a second later, the balance was lost and she came crashing down onto the floor, half onto Langdon.
He grunted.
“Jesus, your elbow is pointy.”
“Sorry,” she said into the rug, not particularly sorry. “So, no coffee?”
1:00-2:00AM
Sometime around one thirty in the morning, Langdon said, “We’re coming up on the embargo period.”
“The what?”
They were in the kitchen, sat on adjacent counters, their heels kicking against the cupboards. Langdon hadn’t gone home yet and Trinity kind of didn’t want him to. She hadn’t been lying: it had been a long time since she’d had another friend. There was a part of her that was worried that they would go to work and it would all slip away, forgotten. They would argue or fight or she would flout the protocol of reporting to another resident and their next blow out argument would break everything.
She wouldn’t tell him as much, but she liked having a friend. Or, at least, an almost friend.
And tonight had been one of the nicest nights she’d had in a long, long time.
“2am,” he said. “Although that was one of the original ground rules and I don’t know what still stands and what doesn’t. I have definitely looked around your apartment and spoken to Whitaker.”
“We’ll need new ones.”
Despite herself, she yawned.
“I should head home.”
She hummed. “You’ve been drinking.”
“Your fancy wine ran out two hours ago.”
“Still.”
They were quiet for a moment, and Trinity knew that for all his terrible traits (annoying, loud, full of himself despite his very low self-esteem), he wouldn’t invite himself to stay.
“You can sleep here,” she said. “I’m officially disregarding the no sleeping here ground rule.”
“That’s good,” he replied, “considering I already broke it.”
She hadn’t minded at the time and didn’t mind now. She knew he hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but the exhaustion had dragged them both under, especially when she had asked him to turn out the lights so he could see her ceiling of stars. She would never tell him, but she hadn’t slept that well since the night Whitaker moved in.
“So, sleep here,” she said, slipping down from the counter. “The sofa is very comfortable. It’s the best thing I own. I know there’s stuffing coming out but that’s because it’s so loved. I’ll get you a pillow and a blanket. You don’t have to sleep in your jeans – don’t think it’s weird if you don’t. I think it would be weirder to sleep in your jeans than not.” She rattled all this off as she wandered through the living room, Langdon slowly following on behind. She heard his soft laugh; didn’t turn around to look.
5:00-6:00AM
Trinity cracked open her door and peered into the living room. She’d heard the telltale movement of one Dennis Whitaker getting his cereal, and now she watched as he sat on the sofa and stared at Langdon, eating his Cap’n Crunch in measured spoonfuls.
Langdon must’ve woken up, though she couldn’t see him from this angle.
“H-hey there,” Langdon said, his voice sleep coated and a little surprised.
“Morning,” Whitaker said. Paused. Added, “You sure you’re not dating—”
“No,” Langdon groaned, while Trinity pressed her lips together to hold back her laugh. “I’m out here,” he continued. “Wouldn’t I be in there if we were—”
“She’s very particular,” Whitaker interrupted. “I wouldn’t put it past her to make you sleep on the sofa if you were dating.”
6:00-7:00AM
Trinity sipped happily through the straw of her iced mocha frappe, kicking her feet giddily in the passenger seat of Langdon’s car as he parked up at the hospital. In the back, Whitaker hummed around his flat white to the music on the radio, Mel and Langdon’s drinks in the cardboard holder on his lap.
He was first out the door when they arrived, passing over the holder to Trinity and saying, “Thanks for the coffee, Frank!” over his shoulder as he raced to catch up with Javadi, who was walking in ahead of them.
“You got it, Dennis,” Langdon muttered, locking up the car. He joined Trinity at the front, taking the drinks from her, and the two walked in slowly, for once not even close to being late.
“We should do girls night again sometime,” she said. “I don’t know if its efficacy is lessened when it’s not a bad day to start with—”
“That’s what the scientific method’s all about, Santos,” he replied. “Gotta test shit out to find out.”
She smiled up at him, and he smiled back, and this felt like the first hallowed steps of a friendship. She’d been at PTMC for not even six months, floundering in every relationship except the one she’d stumbled into with Whitaker. This felt like the first one she was trying to make and actually succeeding at—but maybe that was because Langdon was trying too.
She remembered his apology. He was grateful for what she’d done, even if it hurt him. He’d apologised for how he’d acted, but she’d recognised those actions for ones she’d made herself, in other situations with other people. They probably were more similar than they thought.
As they crossed into the threshold of the building, only a few corridors from where the ED began, Trinity swore loudly and grabbed Langdon’s arm.
“What?” he asked. “Did you forget something at home?”
“No! No, that’s not it,” she said, pulling him to the side of the corridor so they were out of the way. “I kept meaning to ask you and then getting distracted.”
“What is it?”
There was still concern painted across his face; she felt silly for asking. Still, Trinity squared her shoulders. There were no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
“What are your kids called?”
He blinked, the concern melting into confusion, then into amusement.
“What?”
“What are your kids called?” she repeated.
“Tanner,” he said, “and Kasey.”
Trinity nodded firmly, filing the information away in Important! Do Not Forget!
“Got it,” she replied, then started off down the corridor again.
His shocked laughter followed her. “What the fuck, Santos?” he asked, and she liked how he didn’t say it with the same spite that he might’ve three weeks earlier.
“Come on! We’re gonna be late,” she called instead of answering.
They weren’t, not really. But still. Might as well keep him on his toes.