trinity santos appreciator

Trinity Santos working as a lead deck hand during the summers of her last years of undergrad on a yacht in Croatia. Trinity spending her summer after graduating undergrad trying to decide whether she needs to take a deferral to save enough money for medical school instead of just starting in the fall.

Yolanda and Baran renting out the yacht as a 10 year anniversary gift to each other.

Trinity trying to keep it professional around Yolanda and Baran who are insistent on flirting with her and touching her every chance that they get.

“Can’t you drive us on the jet ski?”

“No, Santos is going to be on the paddle board with me.”

“Trinity, please put on my sunscreen?”

Baran catches her early one morning with a baseball hat on that is definitely not part of her uniform and Trinity is sure she’s gonna get chewed out by her bosun, but instead he comes to her with red tipped ears letting her know that the boss told him that Trinity was not just permitted but encouraged to continue to wear the hat during this charter.

And God, Trinity is trying to keep it professional because she’s making more money than she’s ever seen working on this boat and she respects the boat owner.

Except they are getting more and more forward with her and she can’t stop blushing around them. Each time they get off the boat, they want Trinity to be the one accompanying them no matter how much it drives her fellow crew mates crazy. Yolanda buying her jewelry when they stop at places that could finance her entire fall semester. Baran grabbing her wrist, her arms, her waist to direct her.

One of the last nights of their charter and they are sitting on the deck while Trinity is cleaning up the toys and she overhears their not at all subtle conversations about anniversary presents until Baran coos at Yolanda that she knows who she wants as a present.

And finally Trinity just says “you’re going to make me lose my job.”

lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub

Each pulse against the pads of her fingers would sooth Trinity in a way that nothing else could. No words from Baran about feeling positive about the meeting with her neurologist, or how Trinity really didn’t have to worry about her, could ever reach the same primal part of her that just needed the beating of her heart against her fingertips.

lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub

She was alive.

And the panic in Trinity’s chest would mostly settle until she could find some resemblance of sleep beside her. On nights that Baran had her son, Trinity would spend twisting back and forth, from side to side in her own bed in an apartment that was no longer feeling quite like home.

Unable to sleep with the unknowing.

How could she sleep when Baran could be dead twenty minutes away just like Marisol had been twelve years—

Sometimes, the wrist wasn’t enough.

Like tonight when that awful thought crawls into her and won’t let go. On those nights, she usually will wait until she’s sure that Baran is asleep, mouth open sleeping, to move her hand up her neck to rest her fingers on Baran’s carotid artery.

Because now she had a new best friend. Someone who she had inside jokes with, someone that slept in the same apartment as her that she had started to sleep with her door unlocked around?

And she’d never admit it, but she had been so lonely before (so lonely she had become kind in it). lonely enough to let in a man after knowing him only during one of the top 10 worst days of her life.

Meanwhile Dennis probably has no fucking clue this revelation is happening and just pauses the TV to ask what the muppets were again.

“Oh my god, I actually don’t know how to explain it to you again.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t grow up with a tv.”

And she’d just laugh but at the same time try to blink away the tears from her eyes without him seeing.