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She froze the first time they tried to sleep together.
She wanted it, god she wanted it, she'd never wanted anything more than this. Never wanted anything more than Garcia's hands under her shirt and on her ribs, never wanted anything more than her mouth on her mouth and her lips on the line of her jaw. It made her shiver with desire, made her blood run hot and wild, made her feel like there was bass pumping through her bones.
"Bite me," she hissed to Garcia, tilting her head to the side to give her better access to her neck and collarbone. Garcia gave a low, rumbling laugh and traced along her sternocleidomastoid with her tongue. She was crouched over Trinity, her palms bracketing her chest as Trinity arched up into her touch. Trinity closed her eyes and gave a trembling exhale, and Garcia's lips were on her jugular, and then
— fuck, she couldn't breathe, there was no inhale to follow that exhale, there was nowhere for her lungs to go, her ribcage was closing in like the walls around her, and she pushed against Garcia with both hands, shoving her away as she scrambled out from beneath her, gasping for breath.
Trinity was shaking now, her hands icy as she locked her fingers onto the carpet beneath her (she'd fallen off the couch somehow, and her knee was smarting where she'd struck it against Garcia's coffee table), and Garcia was rocked back on her heels, stung, confused, then tried to move towards her to check if she was —
"Stop," Trinity managed, feeling the words scrape from between her teeth, and Garcia froze immediately. Trinity had bitten the inside of her lip, she thought around the taste of iron. "I can't…I'm sorry, I need some air," and then she grabbed her shirt and fled.
—
Garcia's apartment had a nice view of the city lights and of their reflections splashed against the surface of the river. They swayed gently with the current, blurry orbs of light stark against the blackness of the water.
Trinity was shaking, but she couldn't tell if it was from the wind or from the low whine of the imaginary siren scything through her nerves. Her fingernails bit crescents into the outsides of her arms, though her hands felt numb and weightless. Her whole body felt a bit like that, like her mind was floating a solid six inches above it and observing the experience below.
She didn't know how long she'd been out there when the door slid open, making her flinch away. She heard more than felt it when Garcia paused in the doorway.
"I can take you home," she said quietly. "Or call you an Uber, if you don't want to, you know...be in the car with me."
"No, it's — fuck." Trinity's exhale was jagged, and she could feel her body locking into hard lines again, but she needed to say something. She needed Yolanda to know that it wasn't her fault. "It's me, I'm sorry, I'm — fucking broken, or whatever."
"Can I…?"
Garcia was holding a blanket, Trinity could see now, and she nodded. Garcia stepped slowly towards her, like she was approaching an injured bird, then gently draped the blanket around her shoulders. Trinity clutched it close, leaning into the pressure of it around her unsteady bones.
Garcia had taken another step back, and Trinity could feel her watching her. She forced herself to make eye contact, to offer a shaky smile, but her lips wouldn't cooperate, and she gave up the fight.
"I'm sorry if I was too forward," Garcia said, and her own voice sounded so rough and broken that it jolted Trinity from her own hell. She shook her head quickly.
"No, everything was great, it was super great." She raked a hand through her tousled hair. "I just…kind of freaked out. And I'm sorry about that."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Trinity shivered on a laugh and shook her head again, more sharply. "Not today. Not now. Maybe later. Can you, uh…" she swallowed and pulled the blanket more tightly around herself, "still take me home, maybe?"
"Will you be by yourself?" Garcia asked quietly, gently.
"No, Huckleb— Whitaker, he'll be there." She swallowed. She didn't know what he'd do when she showed up hollow-eyed and haunted, but at least there would be another person in the house.
That seemed to be what Garcia was after, and she nodded. "Okay. Whenever you're ready." She ducked back inside, leaving Trinity alone in the night air again.
She hated it. She hated that all these years later, her body remembered what her mind had so aggressively fought to forget. She couldn't now, but she knew at some point she'd be able to cry — to cry for herself, to cry for her tarnished youth, to cry for Lexie — and that until then she'd feel like someone had scraped out her insides and left her empty.
(She knew she'd hate herself later too, and that she'd burn with shame, and that at some point she'd have to apologize to Garcia profusely for melting down on her like a stupid traumatized teenager who'd never had sex before.)
She laughed suddenly, her breath puffing grey in the air, because fuck, Garcia lived twenty minutes across town. That was going to be a fun car ride.
But the blanket had helped slow her shivering, and making herself laugh, even in irony, was enough of a reset to her system that after a few minutes she was able to breathe steadily enough that she could go inside again.
Garcia was silent for most of the drive, but she let Trinity mess with the radio and put on some pop punk, and when she dropped her off back at her house she paused and asked, "Will you text me later and let me know that you're okay?"
No one had ever asked Trinity to do that before.
She managed a surprised, "Okay," and then let the car door close behind her.