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Trinity Santos had a problem. Which really fucking sucked, because her life was actually going okay for once. For one, she was studying at an out of state school, in a program she loved, and best of all, she had made a solid group of friends whilst doing it.
Most importantly, she’d met Melissa Rose King, figure skater extraordinaire, who for some insane reason wanted to go out with her. Her infatuation with the blonde had snuck up on her, having taken Trinity almost two years of knowing Mel for her to have the realisation that what she was feeling wasn’t anywhere near the realm of platonic.
Their private study sessions at the library almost always forwent extending the invitation to their mutual friends, Mel’s choreography always got the Santos stamp of approval before it hit the ice, and Trinity knew Mel and Becca’s takeout orders as well as, if not better than, her own. But it all came to a head when one of the MS3s on campus tried to ask Mel out on a date.
Although, in Trinity’s defence, there was no reason why a MS3 should have had an ounce of interest in a junior. And that was the reasoning she maintained when asked by her (then soon-to-be) girlfriend why she punched him in the face without hesitating. Between that and the subsequent adrenaline rush fuelled love confession, it was a miracle that Mel didn’t try to punch her.
Thankfully, Mel chose to kiss her upon Trinity blurting out her entire inner monologue. She also then berated her for a solid fifteen minutes about proper punching etiquette and protecting her hands as a future double board doctor, but that only made Trinity want to kiss her even more because she’d remembered.
Mel King had remembered an offhand comment that Trinity had made months prior about her career goals. A comment that Trinity herself barely remembered saying. She’d have struggled to keep herself upright were it not for Mel’s surprisingly strong arms wrapping themselves around her waist.
(An image that her mind conjured up long after the incident was witnessing Mel’s knowledge of how to properly throw a punch first hand. Thankfully, it hadn’t come to fruition just yet, as Trinity would simultaneously melt and combust on sight, but the image had kept her company on many lonely nights without her girlfriend.)
Five months into their relationship, Trinity was still on cloud nine every time she received a text from her, or saw her girlfriend on campus, or almost got rugby tackled into a hug by her. It was an honour to be loved by Melissa King, to know that Mel chose to have her in hers and Becca’s lives, that she wanted to be with her regardless of her trauma and less savoury personality traits.
Which brought Trinity back to The Problem. Contrary to what some people, namely her roommate Dennis, believed, Trinity didn’t enjoy being dramatic, even if she had a flair for it.
However, she was ninety-eight percent certain that she’d land in the category of worst girlfriend ever if Mel found out. If she got to keep the title of being Mel’s girlfriend. But if she had to go to another one of her girlfriend’s competitions and watch her on the ice, Trinity was fairly certain she’d have a spontaneous stress-induced aneurysm.
Which was such a damn shame, because she loved watching her girlfriend do basically anything. Whether she was gracefully dancing in her kitchen, studying first year med-school concepts in the library so she could get ahead, or talking with Trinity’s Lola in her sparse but rapidly improving Tagalog, Trinity was obsessed. It didn’t even bother her when her so-called friends accused her of having a competency kink, not when Mel King did everything so fucking well.
Unfortunately, her penchant for being incredibly talented also translated to her ability on the ice, which meant that Mel’s routines were filled with tricks that made Trinity dizzy just watching her, not to mention fearful for her girlfriend’s life. It wouldn’t be so bad if she just skated solo, as Trinity could just about stomach those routines without her brain spiralling into all of the ways her girlfriend could get hurt. However, seeing as Mel’s strongest competition was her paired skates with Frank fucking Langdon, it meant that any time at the rink was spent hyperventilating and trying not to imagine her girlfriend getting into a gruesome accident on the ice.
Logically, she knew that the likelihood of her girlfriend getting harmed during practice or the competitions was basically zero. However, as soon as she laid her eyes on her girlfriend in those death skates on the ice, her ability to think logically went out of the window. Instead, her inner monologue was a series of screams and emergency department documentaries highlighting the worst case scenarios.
This only doubled in frequency and intensity when Mel became airborne or relied on Mr B- Average to lift and carry her around the ice, which they apparently needed to score points. And look, Trinity could recognise the irony: even though she wasn’t touching college gymnastics with a ten foot bargepole, she had grown up doing the same death defying stunts, just without kitchen knives attached to the bottoms of her feet.
But until she could watch her girlfriend perform without having a visceral reaction, she was absolutely going to make it everyone else’s problem, or die trying.
With it being the middle of competition season, she thankfully had a rotation of their friends accompanying her to the rink, all of them steadfast in supporting Mel (and to a lesser extent Langdon, who was technically part of their circle thanks to Mel). Trinity was lucky to have Dennis and Samira with her today, as it meant she’d have a meat shield and someone to give her a detailed run through of how the routine went after the fact.
Fortunately, she’d had a two hour lecture first thing that morning, which meant she was unable to accompany her girlfriend to the rink. Instead, by the time she got there, Mel and Frank’s practice time had passed, and she could study from her place in the stands (and laugh at her girlfriend’s “competition” during her breaks).
By the time her friends showed up, coffees in hand, Trinity had frozen to her seat, bundled up in a thick winter coat she hadn’t needed until moving to Pittsburgh and a handmade glittery black scarf courtesy of Becca. Even if she’d have wanted to move, she sincerely doubted she could.
“What’s our girl’s chances?” Samira asked as she sat down to the left of Trinity.
“Exceedingly high seeing as the pair from Maine can’t manage to stay upright.” Trinity snorted. “And here I was thinking that they’d have an unfair advantage.”
Samira hummed in response, pulling out her phone to occupy herself until Mel and Langdon took to the rink. Although Trinity was supposed to be studying, she managed to catch an incoming text out of the corner of her eye that almost certainly confirmed her suspicions about Mira’s dating life.
To her right, Dennis was chugging a cold brew like his life depended on it, wearing a short sleeve t-shirt just to rub in the fact that he was used to insane winter temperatures. Despite her lack of adaptation to the cold, Trinity foisted her scarf onto her roommate, claiming she’d feel warmer if he wrapped up a little.
She watched him pause momentarily before accepting the scarf, letting it hang limply around his neck. Just as she went to snark at him for slurping his coffee in an obnoxiously loud manner, the loudspeakers crackled with feedback, and her attention was drawn straight to the ice.
Mel and Langdon were third in the line up, which meant that Trinity’s attention would be fixed on her girlfriend’s opponents for the next ten minutes. As she’d predicted, the pairs from Georgia State and UC Irvine were mediocre at best.
Trinity couldn’t help the endless stream of monologue critiquing them, only furthered by Samira chiming in with additional criticism while Dennis sat there, humming in agreement where needed. But her throat turned to sandpaper once she caught a glimpse of Mel, her hair braided into a half-up half-down style that worked better than any homing beacon.
She ducked her face behind Dennis’s shoulder, a soft “Fuck” muttered under her breath, her body tensing up as the music started. For four incredibly long minutes, Trinity willed her brain to ignore all of the possible injuries her girlfriend could accrue.
And there were a lot - concussion, other head traumas, limb amputation, spinal injury, internal bleeding, broken limbs. That wasn’t even considering the repetitive strain injuries (tendonitis, bursitis, lace bite, jumper’s knee) which Trinity was adamant her girlfriend wouldn’t end up with, even if it meant she wound up as the bad guy.
She may not have been able to erase seventeen years worth of bad habits, but she sure as shit wouldn’t let them carry on.
As soon as the music finished, Trinity shot up from her hiding spot, cheering loudly and applauding in spite of the glares from the nearby coaches, a red tinge growing on Mel’s cheeks. Once the pair exited the ice, and the speakers hissed with the announcement of whoever was next in the lineup, the trio stood to meet their friends downstairs.
While Samira and Dennis took a more sedate pace, Trinity shot up the stairs, taking them two at a time to ensure she could be the first person Mel saw after she got out of the changing rooms. It wasn’t an easy feat, given the literal maze she had to walk through to get there, but she rounded the corner as Mel opened the door, and very narrowly avoided colliding into Langdon as she skidded to stand in front of her girlfriend.
With a wink and raising her right hand, she waited for Mel to indicate how much contact she could cope with. Moments later, she had an armful of the blonde and her arm was settling around her upper back, squeezing her tightly. Distantly, Trinity could hear Langdon bitching about her to Dennis, but all it made her do was rest her head on Mel’s shoulder and squeeze harder.
When Mel’s grip loosened, Trinity pressed a kiss to her collarbone before letting go of her, grabbing her kit bag despite her girlfriend’s protests. As she turned to look at their friends, she found that they had abandoned them for the rink’s coffee shop, Dennis waving his phone in Frank’s face.
“Shall we, mi lady?” Trinity asked, smiling when Mel rolled her eyes in response, her rosy cheeks giving the game away. “So, how’re you feeling about how it went?”
After a couple seconds of hesitation, a habit which made Trinity want to curb stomp every person that had made her shrink, Mel began breaking her routine down step by step. While she wasn’t singing herself her praises, it was a far less harsh report than previous ones. Her hand gestures grew in size as she approached the last third of her routine, and Trinity felt her smile grow as Mel explained everything.
Once they reached their friends’ table, Trinity instinctively pulled Mel’s chair out for her, waiting for the blonde to take her seat before putting the kit bag on the floor and heading straight to the queue. She rummaged around her backpack for her wallet, not wanting to have the awkward scramble at the counter, tucking it safely into her coat pocket as she eyed up the pastry options.
“What can I get you today?”
“Yeah, I’ll have a small honey oat iced latte, a medium peach iced tea, two cold brews - one small, one medium - and a medium white hot chocolate.”
“Any food for you today?” The barista asked, still scribbling down the drinks order.
“Why not? I’ll take an apple danish, a brownie, a ham and cheese toasted sandwich and a grilled cheese.”
Trinity passed her meal card over as the barista rang everything up, thankful that she could afford to treat her friends now that those swipes stretched further than freshman and sophomore year. Funnily enough, having a girlfriend who had access to an oven and a stove, and who happily paid for extra groceries if it meant Trinity would cook for herself, Mel and Becca instead of getting takeout most days, did wonders for her budget.
The barista grabbed the fresh pastries out of the cabinet and handed them over to Trinity, promising to bring everything else over to their table once it was ready. She thanked them before making her way over to her friends’ table, all of them crowding around Dennis to look at something on his phone - probably some shitty pre-med meme he’d already showed her back in their dorm.
Clearing her throat, Trinity watched Dennis retreat into his chair, rolling her eyes when started to splutter and choke on air. Turning her attention to her girlfriend, she pressed a kiss to the top of her head, squeezing her shoulders before pulling a chair from a nearby table and slotting it between Samira and Mel.
“Nothing for me, Trinny?” Frank teased, his smirk sharp as she sat down and set the pastries on the table.
“When you get to Mel’s level, then I’ll consider it Frankenstein. The apple danish is yours, Mira. Huckleberry, you get the brownie.”
“I’d be nicer to Dennis if I were you. Otherwise that little home video might leave his TikTok drafts.”
“Dennis?” Her head swivelled to look at him, glaring at the man who was glaring at Langdon for once in his life.
He shoved his phone across the table, a video paused with a view of the rink. Rolling her eyes at her roommate, she tapped the screen and watched the video footage play through. Almost immediately, the video pans away from the rink to focus on her, clips of her critiquing Mel’s opponents from a variety of previous competitions filling the screen.
“Is there something I should be worried about? Because Mel knows what I’m like.”
“Just keep watching.” Langdon insisted, his smile growing wider by the moment.
Her focus fell back onto the video as the music changed and pivoted to clips of herself that she never knew existed. Instead of it being her shit-talking the other competitors, the screen shows her hiding behind various members of their friend group during Mel’s routines. For the next minute and a half, she watched herself flinching and freaking out, unable to avert her gaze to her girlfriend, whose hand had found its way onto her knee, squeezing it tightly as she flinched alongside her video-self.
As the video finished, Trinity shoved the phone back at Dennis, snatching the brownie back from him.
“Just you fucking wait, Huckleberry.” She snarled, marching out of the coffee shop without a second thought.
Distantly, she could hear Mel calling her name, but between the numerous murder plots and break-up scenarios running amok in her mind, she couldn’t face turning to look at her girlfriend. Not if the disgust she’d envisaged for months now manifested itself on Mel’s face. She couldn’t bear to see that image, not if it was the last time she’d get to see Mel as her girlfriend.
Her headstart unfortunately meant nothing to her athlete girlfriend, who not only caught up to Trinity but took over her and began to drag her into one of the empty storage closets. After a couple of moments of fumbling around for the light switch, they were left staring at each other, Trinity’s eyes watering as she fixated her gaze onto one of the freckles near Mel’s mouth.
“Trinity, what’s going on?”
For a few seconds, Trinity considered not answering, stubborn in her insistence that she wouldn’t dare see Mel disappointed in her. But then Mel inched impossibly closer, her hands cementing themselves on Trinity’s waist, and she knew that disappointment wasn’t on the cards just yet.
“I can’t do it, okay?” Trinity inhaled deeply, her gaze travelling higher, almost meeting Mel’s eyes. “I can’t sit there and watch you perform because I can’t stop seeing all of the ways you could get hurt. I can’t handle it, and I thought I could, but I just can’t. I can’t stand to think for even a second that I might lose you, and when you’re on the ice that’s all I can see.”
“Mahal ko.” Mel said, her tone more endeared than frustrated, her accent unfortunately screaming coloniser despite her best attempts. “I don’t want you to be making yourself uncomfortable just to make me feel better.”
“But you deserve to have people who show up to all of your competitions, you deserve to have your girlfriend in the stands to cheer you on.”
“Don’t I get to decide what I deserve, huh?” Mel asked, gently poking her girlfriend’s side.
“But-”
“And, you show up for me in so many other ways, ways I couldn’t have imagined. If you can’t watch me, then don’t. My love for you isn’t conditional on your attendance. I love you Trinity,” she paused, waiting for her to properly look at the blonde, “I love you, not what you do, that won’t change.”
Biting back a sob, Trinity cupped her girlfriend’s face and kissed her, holding her closer even as her head began to spin.
“I love you too, sunshine, I hope you never doubt that.”
Mel’s cheeks burned bright red, the blonde giggling as Trinity began to press kisses all over her face. They gripped tightly onto one another, even after the laughter faded, swaying back and forth in the storage closet.
“You know, I think I’d be the same way, if you were to take up gymnastics again.”
Trinity hummed quietly, a question of why lingering in the air.
“You told me your best event was the beam, closely followed by the uneven bars. The fact you didn’t end up with a single spinal injury is a miracle that needs to be studied. Medically and statistically.”
Try as she might to retain her composure, a loud cackle burst out of Trinity as her girlfriend’s earnest expression came into her line of vision. This was followed seconds later by an even louder peal of laughter as her girlfriend stumbled over her words trying to elaborate, her scowl fading away at the sight of Trinity hunched over in a fit of laughter.
“Right, if that’s all settled, I’ll leave you to it then.”
As Mel turned to leave the storage closet, Trinity grabbed the blonde’s hips before settling her arms around her waist and her chin in the crook of her neck. She pressed an apology kiss to her girlfriend’s collarbone, motioning with the hand on top for her to lead the way back to their friends.
“Just so you know sweetheart, if your worse half has even thought about touching my grilled cheese, not even Dennis’s little puppy crush will be enough to protect him.”