Bath tub
Prompt: What's better than a bathtub with your two girlfriends? Nothing, except that you've worked twelve hours and tend to have low blood pressure.
TW: fainting, sex (is that a TW?), absence seizure
Trinity Santos x Baran Al-Hashimi x reader
You don’t think you’ve ever been this tired in your entire life. You feel your limbs grow heavier with every step, the phone in your right pocket weighs more than usual, and every step of the three flights of stairs you’re forced to climb every day — before finally crossing the threshold of home — feels like a gym workout your body never asked for and flatly refuses.
Your fingers struggle to find your keys, rummaging blindly through the bag hanging from your shoulder. They protest too; you feel your knuckles crack like an old door as you finally close your hand around the keys. You tremble slightly, from exhaustion, and what should take a few seconds stretches into a full minute.
You open the apartment door with the same joy of a pirate finally getting their hands on the One Piece. You quickly rid yourself of your shoes and every unnecessary layer of clothing. Your jacket, your bag, your hospital badge… you throw it all on the floor, and a small smile tugs at your lips at the thought of your older girlfriend seeing the mess you’ve left behind and regretting getting involved with “two teenagers” — her words. You’ll clean it up later, you swear. (You won’t)
You realize Baran is already home from the pleasant smell of chicken and pomegranate that floods your nostrils the moment you step into your apartment. How much you can love that woman, you truly don’t know. Fesenjan is one of the traditional dishes from her home country, and also the one you and Trinity fell hopelessly in love with the first time you tried it. Baran always makes it for special occasions, and your heart skips a beat at the thought that you’ve forgotten some anniversary of yours that you weren’t aware of.
As you mentally run through every important date in your relationship, your gaze falls on the shoe rack beneath the entryway mirror, and another smile tugs at your lips, pushing away the worry from a moment ago.
Trinity is home too; her sneakers are tossed carelessly in the rack, right next to the ones you just set down. Maybe Baran is right — you really are two teenagers.
“We Fell in Love in October” plays in your ears as you walk toward the kitchen. You cross the entryway in a few steps and trail your fingers along the back of the couch as you pass through the living room.
The moment you slide open the kitchen door, you have absolutely no doubt about what your oldest girlfriend has been cooking.
Baran is at the stove; Trinity, meanwhile, is pretending to help, scrolling through her phone — probably a Spotify playlist — while she follows Baran around with the same devotion of a duckling trailing its mother. Although you doubt a duckling slaps its mother’s butt every chance it gets.
They haven’t noticed you yet, so you take the opportunity to watch them. You lean your shoulder against the door frame in a precarious position that Baran would call dangerous. Boomer.
If someone had told you that after ten years of grinding through textbooks you’d find not one, but two incredible women — both doctors, no less — well, you would have asked them to share whatever they’d been smoking. Altruism is fundamental in a doctor, after all.
They’re stunning.
It’s a stupid thought — you’ve known them for years, loved them for years — and yet every time you watch them without them knowing, you’re overtaken by the same feeling as when you kissed for the first time, and then, on days like the one you’ve just gotten through, you look at what you have with the same delicacy you’d handle something made of glass. As if it could break.
Baran stirs something in the pan with that absolute focus she brings to everything she does, from medical reports to the embroidered edges of the throw pillows she sewed herself — the ones you and Trinity regularly flatten by throwing yourselves onto the couch with the enthusiasm of two wrestlers. Her dark hair is pulled up in a soft updo that’s loosened over the course of the day, a few strands falling against her neck, and she’s wearing that burgundy sweatshirt that Trinity constantly steals from her, three sizes too big, yet she wears it with a dignity that borders on unjust. The marks from her protective goggles are still pressed around her nose — you can see them from here — two thin reddish lines on her olive skin, which tells you today wasn’t a walk in the park for her either.
Trinity is completely different — in posture, in energy, in everything. She stands next to the stovetop with that distracted grace she always carries, her chin tilted up slightly as she looks at her phone screen, one foot tapping rhythmically on the floor in time with the playlist playing through the kitchen. She’s wearing her university sweatsuit, her hair up in a messy bun with a few rebellious strands that have broken free and settled against her face. On her neck, just below her left ear, you can see the small purple mark Baran left there a week ago — the one Trinity covers every morning with a flesh-colored bandage when she goes to work, with the air of someone who is absolutely not doing anything suspicious.
You love them in an embarrassing way. It’s a fact. You stopped fighting it the day Trinity showed up at your night shift with two coffees and a ham sandwich at three in the morning, saying “Baran told me you don’t eat when you’re stressed, so—” as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if bringing food to the girl your girlfriend won’t stop talking about, at three in the morning, wasn’t already a declaration of love in and of itself.
You’re lost in this thought when Trinity looks up from her phone and sees you.
“Well, look who finally made it home… hey, baby.”
The way she says it warms your heart like a hot drink. She moves toward you with that energy that seems inexhaustible even after twelve hours in the ER — only when she’s around you two, for the record — and stops halfway to set her phone down on the counter, then closes the distance in three steps and hugs you with the strength of someone who’s needed to do this for hours.
She wraps around you completely. Her chin rests on your shoulder, her arms circle your waist, and for a moment you let yourself go entirely — the weight of your body against hers, your breathing slowing, your eyes closing.
“Jesus, are you okay? You look like shit,” she murmurs against your neck. It’s not a rhetorical question; she needs to make sure you won’t become one of the people she treats every day in the ER for a physical breakdown from work.
“I’m just tired,” you answer. Your voice comes out rougher than expected. “Really tired.”
“Me too,” she says, and then she pulls back just enough to look at your face, her hands sliding down to your elbows as if to hold you still, to study you better. It’s a professional habit she can’t turn off even outside the hospital — that clinical gaze, the quick assessment that is really just concern dressed up as medicine. “Did you eat today?”
You’re about to answer when Baran speaks up, without even turning from the stove.
“She had half a sandwich at one and probably nothing else.”
You turn toward her. “How do you know that?”
Baran turns around. The wooden spoon is still in her hand, her expression that of someone who has answered this question too many times to find a way to make it interesting anymore.
“Because I know you,” she says simply, and then adds, with a half-smile that manages to be simultaneously affectionate and slightly accusatory: “And maybe also because I saw your tray in the cafeteria when I stopped in for a coffee around two. Half a tuna sandwich and an empty cracker wrapper.”
Trinity looks at you like this confirms something.
“Babe.”
“It was a rough day,” you defend yourself, your voice carrying the exact tone of someone who knows they’re wrong but has no intention of fully admitting it. “I couldn’t stop for more than five minutes.”
Baran sets down the spoon, steps closer, and takes your face in her hands with a gentleness that is almost surgical. She turns your head slightly, studies you — pupils, color, the tension around your eyes — and then kisses you, brief, on the lips. You don’t know how you manage it, but you hold back the groan you feel rising in your throat.
“Sit down,” she says. “Dinner’s ready in ten minutes.”
It’s not a request.
You sit at three sides of the round table you chose together at a flea market a year ago; Trinity had called it “perfect” and it became the table in your apartment without further discussion.
Baran serves the Fesenjan with that quiet care she puts into every domestic gesture — the basmati rice on one side, the pomegranate and walnut sauce on the other — and for a few minutes, you eat in silence.
It’s not an uncomfortable silence. It’s the silence of three people who know each other well enough to know when someone needs quiet.
It’s Trinity who speaks first, and she does so with her mouth still half-full, in exactly the way that horrifies Baran every single time.
“Okay, I have to tell you guys something or I’m going to explode.”
“Please finish chewing. I don’t want to perform emergency procedures at home too. At least at work they pay me for it,” says Baran, with total resignation.
Trinity swallows theatrically. “Done. Okay. This morning, nine-seventeen, a guy comes into the trauma bay — twenty-three years old, traumatic brain injury from a scooter fall, no helmet, obviously —”
“Obviously,” you and Baran say in unison.
”— and while me and Whitaker are working on him, the mother, who had been walked out by Dana, decides the wait is unacceptable and so —” dramatic pause — “she lets herself into the trauma bay. And not only does she come in, she starts directing things. She literally tells me to move out of the way so she can get a better look at what we’re doing to her son.”
“No,” you say.
“Yes. And then she also told me I was stitching wrong! The stitches, the ones I’ve been doing since we started first-year residency, and —”
Baran sets her fork on the edge of her plate. “What did you do? I’m not sure I want to know, Trin. You know we need to improve our patient satisfaction scores and you, babe, are really not —”
“I just dropped a few pointed remarks, telling her she should have worried about raising her son properly instead of telling me and Dennis how to do our jobs.”
Baran shakes her head theatrically, swallowing the lecture she’d technically be obligated to give, and shoots you a glance hoping for backup. She doesn’t find it — in fact, you’re barely holding back a laugh.
“Did she leave?” asks Baran.
“She left.” Trinity goes back to eating. “Whitaker looked at me like I was some kind of supernatural phenomenon.”
“Dennis still has a pretty low threshold for awe,” you say, snickering. “He hasn’t fully grasped your immunity to human nonsense yet.”
“Does the immunity develop?” asks Trinity.
“In some cases it becomes cynicism,” says Baran, smiling. “Try not to get there.”
You laugh — the first real laugh of the day — and feel something loosen in your chest. This. This is what you needed: sitting here, eating food Baran cooked, listening to Trinity tell her stories, watching Baran try to be serious and failing because one corner of her mouth always gives away a smile she hasn’t authorized, when it comes to the two of you.
“So I,” you begin, planting your elbows on the table in the way that makes Baran despair but that she’s long since accepted as part of the package, “had an organizational breakdown of biblical proportions this morning because someone — I’m not naming names, but they work in this ER — had restocked the supply room following a logic that was neither alphabetical, nor by category, nor by frequency of use, but apparently by” — you pause — “aesthetics.”
“Aesthetics,” repeats Baran, flat.
“Aesthetics. The tourniquets were next to the colorful band-aids because, and I quote, ‘they went well together.’”
Trinity bursts out laughing. Another thing you love about her: she laughs with her whole body, leaning slightly forward, eyes falling half-closed, and the sound is genuine and a little unruly and absolutely irresistible.
“Who was it? Javadi? Please tell me it was Crash.”
“One of the new residents. Samira already handled it, though. With that principal energy she has — understands everything, judges everything, never raises her voice.”
“Samira is terrifying,” says Trinity, admiringly.
“Mohan is efficient,” corrects Baran. “There’s a difference.”
“She can be both.”
Baran considers this. “Yes,” she concedes. “She can.”
You spend the rest of dinner talking about your afternoon — four coded patients in three hours, an ambulance arrival with missing paperwork that required twenty minutes of phone calls, an elderly woman who kept you for half an hour talking about her grandchildren while she waited for her test results and who was, somehow, the best part of your day — and you listen to Baran describe hers, her voice dropping toward the end the way it always does when she’s talking about something that stressed her, a pediatric case that hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped but that had ultimately resolved well — ultimately, ultimately — but that interval between “not how she’d hoped” and “well” you hear in the way she pronounces the words.
Under the table, you reach for her foot with yours. She doesn’t say anything, but the pressure that answers back is unmistakable.
After dinner you wash the dishes the only way that works in this kitchen: Trinity washes, you dry, and Baran puts everything away, because neither you nor Trinity have ever learned exactly where each thing goes, and she stopped trying to teach you after the seventeenth attempt.
“It’s pointless,” she’d said six months ago, with the serenity of someone who has reached acceptance. “I’ll do it myself. It’s faster.”
“You’re depriving us of the opportunity to learn,” Trinity had said.
“I’m depriving you of the opportunity to put the glasses in the wrong spot for the eighteenth time.”
No response had seemed adequate.
You’re drying the last dish when you feel Baran’s arms wrap around you from behind. She’s a few inches taller than you, enough to rest her chin on top of your head, and she does. Her breath is warm against your hair.
“How are you, really?” she says, softly.
It’s not the same question as before. Before it was an assessment. This is something else.
“Tired,” you answer, honestly. You set the dish on the counter. “But better. This helped.” A pause. “You two helped.”
You feel her smile against your head even though you can’t see it.
“Good,” she says.
Trinity, who had been draining the sink, looks at the two of you with that expression of pure love you’ve learned to recognize over the years, and then says:
“Bath?”
There’s a story behind the tub.
Two years ago you came home after your shift and found the bathroom transformed. Not literally — but almost. Baran had arranged, during those ten hours while you and Trinity were at work on her day off, for a tub to be installed. Not the small, slightly sad one that had been there before — the one you only used in emergencies because it looked like a relic from the eighties — but an enormous tub, deep, with antique-white claw feet, taking up nearly a third of the bathroom, and clearly chosen with the same care Baran brings to everything.
You’d looked at the tub. You’d looked at Baran. And “I love you” had left your lips before you could stop it.
“As an anniversary gift,” Trinity had added, standing beside you, who seemed far less surprised and was therefore clearly in on it.
“You knew?! You didn’t say anything?”
“Trinity is hard to surprise,” Baran had said, with what was unmistakably affection disguised as criticism. “I needed someone to keep an eye on the bathroom dimensions while I was at my appointment with the tile guy.”
It had taken you a few seconds. Then you’d hugged Baran, your face against her neck, and she’d held you back with that quiet naturalness that is her mother tongue for things that matter.
Two teenagers, she still calls you. But she’d picked that tub with claw feet because she knew Trinity had always loved claw feet. And she’d made it big enough for all three.
The bathroom fills slowly with steam.
Trinity has connected her phone to the small speaker on the shelf beside the sink — Mitski, “My Love Mine All Mine,” begins playing through the bathroom — and she’s adding something to the water, one of the bath salts Baran buys from a perfumery near the hospital, the kind that fill the bathroom with a scent that’s halfway between lavender and something warmer, spicier, hard to define but immediately recognizable as home.
Baran stands by the tub, checks the water temperature with her wrist, then straightens, satisfied.
You undress slowly, with that ease that only comes with people around whom you feel completely safe. You don’t think about it anymore — you never thought about taking your clothes off in front of them, or rather, you did think about it the first few times, that first summer together when everything was still new and beautiful and slightly terrifying, but now it’s simply part of this, of you all. As a teenager you were embarrassed by even the thought of undressing, but with them you weren’t afraid. You didn’t feel judged.
Baran pulls off the burgundy sweatshirt and Trinity, who has already dropped everything on the floor, watches you as you pull off your shirt.
“You’ve got a bruise on your side.”
You already know. You got it this morning against the corner of the supply cart during a dash down the hallway. It’s nothing.
“I know.”
“How’d you get it?”
“Cart.”
Trinity makes that face she makes when she wants to say you’re a disaster but chooses not to say it out loud, because she knows she’d hear the same thing back and the conversation would never end.
“In you go,” says Baran instead, with that voice that is always both an invitation and a directive.
The water is perfect.
You get in first; Baran holds your hand as you step over the edge — an automatic gesture, unrequested — one that makes you feel simultaneously cared for and, briefly, like you’re eighty-two years old, but then you sit down in the warm water and every objection dissolves immediately.
The heat wraps around you like something physical, real — a gentle pressure on every muscle you’ve kept tensed for the last twelve hours. You feel your shoulders drop. Your back surrenders. Your breathing expands.
“Oh,” you say, in the voice of someone who is reconsidering their life’s priorities.
“Right,” says Trinity, climbing in after you with the ease of someone who’s done this enough times not to care how it looks, settling on the other side of the tub, her knees bent, her feet brushing yours. “Every time I forget how good this tub is and every time I remember.”
“It’s a bathtub, not a spiritual experience,” says Baran, who gets in last with that quiet composure she brings to everything.
“With you two it becomes one,” Trinity answers, whispering. You stroke her knee with one hand, sending a not-insignificant wave through the water, while Baran leaves a kiss on her forehead before settling in beside you.
For a few minutes you simply stay in the water. Mitski sings something sweet and slightly melancholy, the steam makes everything at the edges softly indistinct, and you have your head resting on Baran’s shoulder with your eyes half-closed, and you feel Trinity find your foot with hers beneath the water and stay there.
This, you think again. This is everything.
You’re not sure exactly who moves first.
Maybe it’s you, turning your head toward Baran and finding her already looking at you — those dark, attentive eyes that never stop studying everything but that, when they land on you, on Trinity, finally stop being on guard. Maybe it’s Trinity, who somewhere in the warm water finds your ankle and slowly moves upward. Maybe it’s the music, or the exhaustion loosening every pointless resistance, or simply the fact that you’re all here, all three of you, alive and whole after a day that could have been worse than it turned out to be.
The kiss with Baran starts slow; she never rushes things, she has a patience that is almost an art form and a form of torture, in those moments when you just want her to — well. Her fingers come up to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear before she even leans in, as if she needs to clear away every distraction first. Her mouth is warm and tastes like tea — she had tea after dinner, she always does — and she kisses you with that absolute focus she puts into everything, as if you’re the only thing that exists right now, as if everything else can wait.
Trinity reaches you from the other side, her hands in the water, then on your shoulders, then in your hair, and the way the three of you move together has become as familiar as choreography learned by heart. You’ve figured out how to share this space without elbowing each other in the face.
The water stirs slightly. The steam grows thicker. The music plays on. You lose yourself in this — in the warmth, in the contact, in the absolute familiarity of the two of them: Baran’s hands, always precise even when they’re not precise at all; Trinity’s short laugh that breaks off against your shoulder; the way you hear your name sometimes, in one of their voices.
The bathroom is warm. Too warm, maybe, but you don’t feel it yet, not really — you’ll feel it later, when your body decides to present the bill.
Trinity pulls Baran into a hungry kiss that makes desire pulse through you and the heat in the room feels suffocating. Your hands caress the oldest woman’s breasts, drawing a moan from her. Trinity’s lips quickly find your neck, biting and sucking while you gasp for more, desperate for more than what they’re giving you.
Baran’s fingers slide down your body and dip beneath the water, reaching your clit with a confidence that only comes from years of experience.
You lose the thread of every coherent thought.
There is only the heat — of the water, of them, of the steam thickening in the air — and between your legs those fingers of Baran’s, those goddamn magic fingers that always know exactly what they’re doing, with that quiet precision that has never needed to be guided. Trinity holds you still, her mouth still at your neck, her arm around your waist like an anchor as you writhe trying to get more, and you let your head fall back against her shoulder because you have no other choice, because your body has already decided for you.
“Please… baby —” you manage; more, more, faster.
You feel Baran smile against your skin and murmur something — you can’t make out the words, the steam and the pulse of blood in your ears drown everything out — a “patience, azizam, good girl,” and Trinity laughs against your neck, that small, warm laugh she has when she’s pleased about something.
The water churns. The steam rises.
Baran’s fingers don’t stop — they increase in speed and pressure — and you stop trying to keep your eyes open. Trinity’s lips find your breast, her mouth closing around your right nipple, and the peak of pleasure finds you.
It happens without warning.
Or rather, there had been a warning — you’ll understand this afterward, retrospectively, with the frustrating clarity that hindsight provides: the accumulated exhaustion, twelve hours on your feet, not having eaten enough, the warmth of the tub that had dilated the peripheral blood vessels, the blood pressure dropping silently and progressively while you weren’t paying attention, and the orgasm.
The warning had been that faint ringing in your ears, a few minutes earlier. You’d attributed it to the hot water. You’d noticed your vision make a microscopic shift, as if someone had slightly adjusted the brightness on a screen, dimming it, and you’d thought I’m just tired.
Then the orgasm takes you — warm and long and already different from the others in a way you can’t quite identify in the moment it’s happening — and right after that, the world does something strange.
It tilts.
Not metaphorically. And your body decides, unilaterally and without consulting you, to stop being a problem you have to manage.
You feel Baran’s arms before you even understand what’s happening.
“Y/N.”
Baran’s voice is close, too close, and it has a tone you’ve never heard before, or that you’ve heard very few times.
“Babe, answer me.”
You blink. The bathroom ceiling is above you. You’re still in the water, but your head is out — someone is holding it out — and your back is against something warm and solid that takes you a few seconds to identify as Baran’s chest. Her arms are under yours, holding you up.
“I’m here,” you say. Your voice comes out strange — hoarse and slightly distant, as if it’s coming from a few inches further away than usual, as if it isn’t yours but an echo.
You sense Trinity before you see her. Her fingers find your wrist beneath the water — three fingers on the radial side — and then you notice the small concentrated silence that falls when someone is counting.
You look up. Trinity is kneeling on the edge of the tub, the top half of her body leaning forward, her hair falling to one side, looking at you with those eyes that at work are the most reassuring thing you know, and that now carry that same shadow but multiplied by something that isn’t professional — it’s pure, simple fear.
“You passed out,” she says. It’s not a question.
“I…” You swallow. “Yeah, I think so.”
“No ‘you think,’” says Baran, from behind you, her voice firm against your hair. “You passed out. How long, Trin?”
“Twenty seconds, maybe twenty-five.” Trinity doesn’t stop holding your wrist. “Mild tachycardia. Regular rhythm.” A pause. “Eighty-nine, ninety.”
“Blood pressure.”
“I can’t measure it here, but peripheral perfusion —” Trinity studies your hands, your lips, your eyelids — “is acceptable. Lips aren’t blue. She’s responsive.”
“I’m responsive,” you say, attempting a normal tone but coming out somewhere between defensive and mortified. “I just felt a little off, it was probably just —”
“Y/N.”
Baran’s tone is the same one she uses with patients who are about to do something counterproductive to their own health. You know it well. You use it too, sometimes.
“I’m fine,” you try.
“You lost consciousness for twenty-five seconds in a tub full of water,” says Baran, and her voice is absolutely flat — the kind of flat that isn’t an absence of emotion but the precise containment of one she can’t afford to let out right now. “You’re not fine.”
You consider this. You have all the tools to argue; you’re a doctor too, you know the pathophysiology, you know exactly what happened and why, you know it was probably a vasovagal episode from a combination of factors and that you feel better now — but you’re having this conversation with your bare back against Baran’s chest while she holds you up in warm water and Trinity is counting your heart rate, and there’s something about this image that makes it difficult to carry the argument with the conviction it requires.
“Orthostatic hypotension,” you say finally, as a compromise. “Probably. Accumulated fatigue, poor hydration, vasodilation from the heat, the —”
“I know what it is,” says Trinity, and her voice carries that sharp gentleness she knows how to use when someone is trying to rationalize their way out of confronting a problem. “We all know what it is. That doesn’t change what happened.”
You pause.
“I’m sorry,” you say, and you’re not entirely sure what you’re sorry for — certainly for scaring them, for not listening to your body, for not eating enough, for all of these things together.
Baran’s hold shifts; her arms no longer hold you like something to be kept from falling, but like something precious she wants to keep close.
“Now we get out of the water, and then we can talk about apologies.”
It’s Trinity who sees what’s about to happen.
Baran helps you up; her hands are on your forearms, her grip firm, the movement slow and controlled, and for a second you’re fine — or you think you’re fine — or rather, your brain is telling you you’re fine and your circulatory system hasn’t finished sharing its opinion yet.
You straighten up. The blood follows gravity at a slightly faster rate than desired. Your vision does that thing again and your left knee decides, without consulting you, to bend.
You don’t fall — or rather, you’re falling, you’re falling forward, the edge of the tub is right there beneath your eyes at a distance your brain calculates as too close and this is going to hurt a lot when Trinity’s hands catch you.
She doesn’t catch you gracefully. Her arms close around you with a snap, her body absorbs your weight by shifting sideways, a dull impact against the tiled wall that sounds like a shoulder sacrificing itself for someone’s head. The edge of the tub passes five centimeters from your forehead.
Five centimeters.
You both stay still for a full five seconds, and then Trinity says, “Okay.” Her voice is completely steady. Only someone who knows her can hear that it isn’t steady at all. “Okay, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
“Christ,” says Baran from behind you — under her breath, in Persian — and that alone is enough to convey the level of alarm she’s reached.
“Trin, are you okay?”
You’d like to joke that you don’t weigh that much, but you’re not in a condition for that yet.
“Yeah.” Trinity doesn’t let go. Her arms are around your shoulders, your forehead is against her neck, and you can feel her heart beating faster than her tone of voice would suggest. “Let’s get out.”
You dry off in the hallway; Trinity keeps a towel around your shoulders while Baran gets the rest, and then you make it to the bedroom.
“Sit,” says Baran, and the moment you do, she disappears into the hallway.
You sit on the edge of the bed. Your head is still slightly foggy, sounds too. Your blood pressure is still coming back up.
Trinity is beside you in a second, her right hand resting on your cheek.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Better,” you say. And it’s true — you can feel your cardiovascular system returning to something resembling normal. “Really, I feel better.”
“Mm.” Trinity doesn’t seem entirely convinced, but she lets it go for now.
Baran comes back with two glasses of water — she brings them both to you, naturally — and then goes to get a third and fourth for herself and Trinity. But you notice she has a strange expression, an expression that is… angry. Not at you, or not only at you — she’s angry at the situation, at the fact that this happened, at the fact that you’re smiling awkwardly instead of — what, she doesn’t even know.
“Baran,” you say.
She looks at you.
“I’m okay.” A pause. “Really. The water was too hot, it was a rough day, and I didn’t eat enough. I don’t need to be admitted.”
“I didn’t say you need to be admitted.”
“But you were thinking it.”
A moment. Then: “I was thinking that out of all the ways this evening could have gone, this wasn’t high on my list of favorites.”
You want to laugh. Not because it’s funny — or maybe it’s a little funny, in the way that frightening things sometimes become laugh-or-cry situations.
“I’m sorry,” you say. And this time you say it for her, not for the situation in the abstract.
She sighs and comes to sit beside you on the bed, on the opposite side from Trinity. She takes your hand and, for a few seconds, says nothing.
“You didn’t eat enough,” she says finally. “You were already running low before you got in the water. The heat did the rest.” A pause. “That’s what you said, and you’re right.”
“So I’m a competent doctor.”
“You’re a competent doctor who passed out in the bathtub, so —”
“Technically I passed out after the orgasm, I was —”
“Y/N.”
“Okay.”
Trinity makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “Can you two please get under the covers, or this night is going to be longer than it already has been.”
It takes a few minutes to settle in; you in the middle, as always — it had been one of the first things that emerged naturally in those months when you were all figuring out how to be physically together, how to occupy the same space, and you in the middle had become the arrangement, the one that worked; Baran on your right with the book she opens and then won’t actually read; Trinity on your left with her phone, scrolling Instagram for a full ten minutes before leaning her head on your shoulder.
The lamp on Baran’s nightstand is on; the bed is big and soft and the blanket is the heavy one you pulled out in October and that Baran folds every morning.
You lie back. Your muscles surrender into the mattress with the total resignation of someone who has nothing left to defend.
“Okay,” you say, to the ceiling. “This is definitely better.”
“This is where you should have been an hour ago,” says Baran, turning a page of* The Handmaid’s Tale.* Though you doubt she’s really reading about June’s struggle against Gilead right now.
“Baran.”
“I’m reading.”
Trinity looks at you, and you share that mischievous glance the two of you exchange like kids speaking in code in front of a parent. “How much she loves being right.”
“So much,” you agree.
“I can hear you. I’m older than both of you but I haven’t reached the age where I can’t hear what you’re saying,” says Baran, without lifting her eyes from the book.
A solid twenty minutes pass in which the situation seems to have settled in the most pleasant way possible; you’re in the process of deciding whether to fall asleep immediately or stay up a little longer, Trinity has put her phone down and turned on her side toward you, her hand resting on your stomach, while Baran is actually reading now, her shoulder against yours, her breathing steady.
It’s in this fragile equilibrium that your brain — always optimally timed — produces a thought.
You turn toward Trinity.
She feels the movement and opens one eye.
“What?”
“Nothing,” you say. Then: “I was just thinking that I slept for twenty-seven years without you two and I don’t understand how I did it.”
Trinity looks at you for a moment, with that half-asleep expression, and then smiles — the kind of smile you give when you’re looking at the person you love.
“I don’t know either,” she says.
Baran lowers her book an inch. Doesn’t turn. But says, softly: “Neither do I.”
And as you watch them, the warmth of the love you feel filling your chest, another idea comes to mind and you decide to act on it. After all, everyone deserves to feel relaxed in this house. Not just you. Besides — they’re goddesses. You couldn’t keep your hands to yourself even if you tried.
It’s Trinity who notices what you’re trying to do.
You’re not being particularly subtle about it, or maybe you are trying to be, but Trinity Santos has a capacity to read people’s movements — something she developed in her own adolescence — that is simply off the charts.
You’ve turned toward her. Your hands have shifted. Your intention is pretty clear.
“Babe,” says Trinity.
“I’m just —”
“No.”
On the other side, Baran sets her book on the nightstand.
“I was trying to —” you begin.
“I know what you were trying to do,” says Trinity, and she sits up slightly, her shoulders squaring. She is very serious right now. “And the answer is no.”
“It doesn’t make sense for you two to just —”
“It makes perfect sense,” says Baran, to your right, her voice soft — firm but not angry. “You passed out an hour ago.”
“I’m not —”
“Out,” she repeats, calmly. “For twenty-five seconds. In a tub full of water.”
“You’re better right now,” says Trinity, her voice gentler, her hand returning to your stomach but differently now — not that earlier distracted contact but something that sounds like a kind of boundary. “But you’re okay right now because we got out of the water and you lay down. Not because the problem disappeared.”
“The problem was the water being too hot.”
“The problem was that you hadn’t eaten enough and you’d been on your feet for twelve hours and your body had already hit its limit,” says Baran, “and we weren’t paying close enough attention.”
This stops you.
You turn toward her. Her expression is hard to read right now, but there’s something underneath — something you recognize as guilt that she’s carrying quietly.
“It’s not your fault,” you say.
“I didn’t say it was our fault.” She looks away briefly and pauses. “I said we weren’t paying close enough attention. It’s not the same thing.” She looks at you. “I should have noticed the water was too hot. I should have pushed you to eat more at dinner. I should have —”
“Babe.” You sit up slightly — Trinity doesn’t stop you but keeps her hand on your back as you do, a discreet monitoring effort that’s slightly below her usual standards. You move close enough to Baran to take her hand. “Are you okay?”
She looks at you. There’s a moment of silence and then her eyes go glassy and your stomach drops.
“Baran.”
Baran’s eyes stay open. Fixed. Pointed at a spot slightly to the left of your shoulder that doesn’t exist, that has nothing interesting about it, that is nothing. Her mouth has stayed slightly parted. Her hand is in yours but it’s no longer squeezing — it’s just there, still, like an object left on a table.
The silence lasts maybe two seconds.
You only realize you’ve been holding your breath when Trinity, from the other side of the bed, says softly: “Y/N.”
She doesn’t need to say more.
You already know. You both already know, because you’ve seen this before, because Baran explained it to you: I have epilepsy, absence seizures, they’re short, they pass on their own, they’re very rare, I get them when I’m particularly stressed or worried about something — and because since that day you’ve both learned to recognize that interruption. You don’t move.
This is the first point in the unwritten protocol you’ve built together over the years: you don’t move abruptly, you don’t shake her, you don’t put anything in her mouth, you don’t call her name out loud as if you could pull her out before it’s over on its own. You wait. You watch. You count.
Trinity is already on her knees on the bed, her hand moving toward Baran’s wrist. Count.
One. Two. Three.
Baran’s eyes don’t move. Her mouth is still slightly open.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
Then Baran blinks.
Once. Twice. The third blink lets you breathe again slightly. Her hand in yours squeezes lightly. It’s not a conscious gesture — it’s the reflex of return — and then her eyes find yours.
It takes her a second.
Just a second, but it’s a second in which you see the exact moment she understands where she is, who she’s with, and what just happened.
Her expression doesn’t change dramatically. It never does. But there’s a subtle thing — a millimeter adjustment of her jaw, a breath that comes in just a little faster than usual — that says everything she won’t say out loud.
“Baran,” you say, quietly.
“Yeah,” she answers. Her voice is normal. Almost perfectly normal. Only someone who knows her hears that there is something underneath, reassembling in real time, like a house of cards that tilted and that she’s straightening piece by piece without anyone seeing the hands at work. “I’m here.”
Trinity says nothing. But the hand on her wrist stays.
“How long?” says Baran, after a moment.
It’s the question she always asks. Not what happened — she already knows that; the duration, however, is the information she can never collect on her own.
“Eleven, twelve seconds,” you say.
She nods.
“Are you okay, babe?” says Trinity, softly. Her fingers, which moments ago were measuring the older woman’s pulse, rise to her cheek. Baran lets herself be soothed by her touch, and then nods, just slightly.
“Are you okay?” you whisper, your heart still racing from the fear that, every time — no matter how many times you’ll see her like this — grips your chest and your soul.
Baran holds your gaze for a moment and then nods again.
“Yes, azizam. I was stressed, and stress lowers the threshold. You both know that —”
“We know,” you say.
“There’s no point in you worrying every time.”
“And yet…” says Trinity, with a smile.
Baran opens her mouth. She closes it.
It’s the reaction of someone who had a ready argument and walked straight into a response that leaves no room for arguments.
“We’ll worry every time anyway.” You smile, just barely. The adrenaline is crashing hard after the seizure, and your body isn’t making it easy on you.
Baran looks at you. Trinity still has her hand on her cheek and you still have her hand in yours.
“Azizam,” she murmurs, and it’s not clear who she’s saying it to.
Then her eyes shift to your face and change.
You know that look.
“Y/N.”
“I’m —”
The world turns.
Not like in the tub — not that abrupt and definitive tilt that precedes the dark — this is gentler. The lamp on the nightstand multiplies for a second and your hands find the sheets, gripping them as if that single hold could anchor you.
“Oh,” you say, in the voice of someone who is updating their assessment of the situation.
Baran is already moving before you finish saying it.
“Sit up, sit up, wait — no —” Her hands are on your shoulders, guiding you back. “Lie down. Right now.”
“It’s just a little dizziness —”
“Lie down, Y/N.”
It’s not a request. It’s a tone that doesn’t allow negotiations, so you lie down.
The ceiling stops spinning almost immediately — or at least it slows down, which isn’t the same thing but is enough to let you fix your gaze on the patch of plaster in the corner and use it as an anchor point.
Trinity already has the decorative pillow in hand. The one Baran bought — the one you two use as a projectile at the wrong moments and that is now being slid under your ankles.
“Legs up,” says Trinity, unnecessarily, given that she’s already lifting them.
“I got it.”
“Good.”
Baran is sitting on the edge of the bed at your side. Her fingers find your wrist.
Outside the window, Pittsburgh makes its nighttime sounds. Inside there’s only your breathing, still a little too shallow, and the weight of Baran’s fingers on your wrist, and Trinity who has knelt on the mattress beside you and is watching you with that sixty-percent-calm expression you can now read all the way down to its depths.
“Ninety-one,” says Baran, after a few seconds. Her voice is flat and precise. “It’s coming down.”
“I told you it was coming down,” you say, to the ceiling.
“It was going in the wrong direction,” she says.
You don’t have an adequate response to that.
“Breathe,” says Baran.
“I am breath —”
“Consciously.”
You breathe consciously. Four seconds in, six seconds out — and the ceiling stops spinning for good. The calcium deposit in the corner stays right where it should be.
“Better?” says Trinity.
“Yeah.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” says Trinity.
“For —” You make a vague gesture that encompasses more or less everything: the tub, the dizziness, the legs propped up on the decorative pillow, the fact that it’s eleven at night and none of the three of you can manage to stay still even when your bodies stop doing you the courtesy of functioning correctly. “This.”
Baran doesn’t answer right away. Her fingers are still on your wrist — no longer counting at this point, but not going anywhere either.
“You could eat lunch,” says Trinity.
“You could,” Baran agrees.
You’re about to respond when the ringing in your ears drops another notch and you realize you’ve had your eyes slightly half-closed for the last few minutes without having made that decision.
“How long do I have to stay like this?” you say.
Baran checks your pulse one more time. “Until I’m satisfied,” she says.
“Parameters?”
“When you stop asking me about parameters.”
Trinity laughs, and you close your eyes completely.
It takes a few minutes.
Baran doesn’t move from the edge of the bed, her fingers staying on your wrist. Trinity has settled in beside you, her head on the pillow next to your shoulder, and every once in a while you feel her breathing shift slightly.
“Eighty-four,” says Baran, at some point.
“Better.”
“Better.”
You open your eyes; the ceiling is still and the nightstand lamp is just one.
“Can I —”
“No,” they both say, simultaneously.
A moment.
“I didn’t even say what I wanted to do.”
“No,” they repeat, with the same implacable synchrony.
You spent ten years studying medicine and you have a specialization in emergency medicine and you cannot convince two doctors that you’re well enough to sit up. There is something deeply, specifically humiliating about this, and also something you can’t call by any other name but love — even if you would not say that out loud right now.
Baran slowly lowers your legs and then holds her hands on your ankles for a few seconds, as if she’s waiting for a response your body needs to give.
“Sit up slowly,” she says.
You do.
Baran looks at you for a long moment, then smiles, nodding just slightly, and lets her fingers trail over your ankles.
“Good.”
Trinity wraps an arm around your shoulders and leaves a kiss on your temple.
“The day was rough,” you say.
“Yeah.”
“Yours was too.”
“I know.”
“And we’re all three of us in bed at eleven at night with low blood pressure and absence seizures and we didn’t eat enough.” You pause. “We’re a disaster.”
A moment of silence.
Then Trinity, from the other side of the bed, says: “We’re three doctors who don’t know how to take care of themselves.”
“Doctors are the worst patients,” says Baran.
“You tell us that at least once a week.”
“Because it’s true at least once a week.”
You want to laugh and you hear Trinity laugh against the pillow; Baran smiles and make that sound she makes: the half-sigh that contains a laugh she didn’t authorize but that came out anyway.
Baran picks her book back up but holds it lower than before, at an angle that lets her look up soundlessly. Trinity resettles with her head on your chest, in the exact spot she nestled into the first time you all slept together and which has been hers ever since — without negotiations, by right of discovery. You feel her breathing slow against your shoulder within a few minutes.
Baran’s hand finds yours in the dark, beneath the covers.
You stroke Trinity’s hair absently, whispering an “I love you” into her strands as you hold her close. Her ability to fall asleep will always be the envy of you.
“Tomorrow you stay home if your blood pressure is still low,” Baran whispers, with a glance that says “I’m your attending and I have no intention of watching you pass out again.”
“My pressure won’t be —”
“Y/N.”
A pause.
“Okay,” you say.
“I love you,” Baran murmurs, and you lean toward her — without shifting Trinity on top of you — to leave a kiss on her lips.
“I love you too, so much,” you whisper, letting your noses touch before finally laying your head on the pillow and closing your eyes.
You’re grateful every single day for these two.
Heyyy, thanks for reading! I know, I know — I’m terrible at the spicy parts, I know. Let’s not talk about it, okay? Anyway, it took me two weeks to write this so I hope you appreciate it (lol), I have more ideas in mind and I love the dynamic between these three in my head way too much so… there will be more. Thanks again for reading, you all know requests are very welcome, and have a great day! Ko-fi link if you want to and can support me. Otherwise a like and a comment are more than enough!
P.s: I’m sorry for the medical inaccuracies :)
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