Trinity was asleep. Awake, she was an avenging angel in black plastic and sunglasses, power and righteousness personified. Asleep, she was just an angel. Neo shifted a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. Her eyelids fluttered, but she did not wake.
Neo had learned from Trinity that there were countless ways to touch a person you loved: sweaty hands clasped together as you walked down the street; fingers grazing the small of your back as the other passed by; the softness of her curled body against your back and the warm weight of her arm on your side, hot breath fogging your neck, as you fell asleep; her back in turn pressing you against the wall when you woke up; the faintest shadow of a touch on your breast, becoming firmer and firmer as the hand circled it, ending with a squeeze as pleasurable as it was painful; a kiss on your cheek on the way out the door; a peck on the lips with other people around just to prove you could; hands tangled in your hair as she pulled you down for a deeper, more private kiss; a surprise ass squeeze while you tried to cook eggs; an iron grip pinning you to the floor at the end of the ensuing play-fight; hands tracing the widening flare of your hips, working their way to your fly; the resonance of her name on your lips when she was inside you; legs tangled sweatily together, afterwards; cool dryness on your eyelids from the brush she used to do your makeup; arms locked around you and head on your shoulder, both bodies swaying in the pitch black of the club; a tap on the shoulder; an eyelash kiss; her hands, legs, breasts, lips a deliciously tangible affirmation of your own.
Her parents had held her, of course, as a child. She had had girlfriends, before, even tried dating a man once; none of it felt like this. The people Neo had been with had been the Muzak in the elevator that was her life, set elements for a video game character to interact with. With every touch, Trinity made Neo’s body more real.
There were difficulties involved with wanting for the first time to live in your body. You couldn’t disappear into a locked fortress whenever someone you cared about was angry with you, for instance. You had to sit down with the other person and talk it out.
Once, Trinity introduced Neo to some of her and Morpheus’s friends, one of whom — Jerome — had been her lover. Neo had watched Trinity trade inside jokes with them, carelessly drape her arms over their shoulders, and she had known with gut-wrenching certainty that she wasn’t special at all, that Trinity was equally lovely to everyone she interacted with. She’d withdrawn into the lines of code on her desktop monitor to wait it out until Trinity inevitably decided to leave her.
In the past, no one had ever really interfered with this strategy. This time, it lasted about three days.
“I cannot read your mind, asshole,” Trinity snapped during the consequent fight.
“But I want you to,” said Neo, wildly. “I wish you could.”
Trinity grabbed her hand. “The only way I am ever going to come close to knowing what you’re thinking is if you talk to me,” she said. Her blue eyes bored into Neo’s. “I want that, too. But you have to help me.”
Neo knew that as much as Trinity wanted to be with her, for whatever insane reason, she’d suffocate if she was her only friend. So Neo started up regular sparring sessions with Morpheus again, sent IM’s to Tank in between coding sprints. She posted bits and pieces of what might someday be songs to message boards and was shocked when people asked her permission to sample them.
Morpheus was a surprise, too. He genuinely seemed to like Neo, beyond their shared political goals. Their training sessions got longer and longer as they tacked on coffee and drinks afterward. Morpheus gave Neo books, Nkrumah and Feinberg and Le Guin; Neo returned them dog-eared, annotated, carrying on conversations with Morpheus’s own notes in the margins.
It didn’t seem right, somehow, that Neo should have this many people who cared about her. What had she done to deserve it more than other people, who, like her before, had no one? It was an embarrassment of riches.
One night, Neo and Trinity rewatched Alien together. They usually talked all through the movies they watched, cracking terrible jokes that made them shove each other and yelp with helpless laughter, but this time both were too riveted to say a word. At the end of the final standoff with the xenomorph, Neo realized they were clutching each other.
Impulsively, she seized Trinity’s face and laid a dozen close-lipped kisses all over it. Trinity giggled and squirmed away.
“What’s with you?” she said.
“I just… love you, Trin,” said Neo. She realized she must be grinning stupidly, and a mischievous smile spread across Trinity’s face in reply. They stayed awake a fair bit longer, and fell asleep sated, flushed with exertion.
Neo knew on some level that she was accruing more and more of Trinity’s physical characteristics. She traded in her button-downs for blouses with scooped necklines, like hers; as her hair grew out, she brushed it back, keeping only her bangs as a difference. Tank once darkly joked that they’d be buried in the same coffin. Trinity had slapped him, but secretly Neo didn’t think it sounded too bad.
They talked all the time; Neo had always thought herself quiet by nature, but she soon realized that she was a faucet of words and all she’d needed was for Trinity to turn the handle. They didn’t talk much about their pasts, though. Neo didn’t want to pry, and Trinity seemed to feel the same.
One day, though, they walked by a little ramen shop that Trinity mentioned offhandedly had been a place she’d visited all the time “when she was a boy.”
Neo couldn’t imagine talking about herself that way — she didn’t think of herself as having been a boy, or really anything, before — but she knew other people who did, and she trusted Trinity to know herself better than anyone else could. “Did you go with anyone I know?” she asked.
“I think you’ve met Jerome, but pretty much everyone else I hung out with then kind of drifted away,” she said. “It’s okay. We weren’t really close. We had a lot of big experiences together, but I couldn’t tell you what any of them thought of themselves or anything like that.”
“When was this?” asked Neo.
“Hmm… around five years ago,” said Trinity. “I was really big into the club thing then. And then I started figuring myself out, and I met Cypher, and he just started taking up a lot more of my time. He was how I met Morpheus, you know.”
Neo had not known this. She didn’t really know what to do with this information. Next to Agent Smith, the pig who’d interrogated her the last time she’d skirted arrest, Cypher was probably Neo’s least favorite person on the planet.
“I guess I should be grateful to him for that, at least,” Trinity said ruefully.
“No, you shouldn’t,” said Neo, more sharply than she’d intended. Trinity stiffened and stopped walking, surprised. Neo folded her arm around Trinity’s shoulders and pulled her against the wall under an Armenian grocery awning.
“You would have found Morpheus anyway,” she said, looking at Trinity hard. “I just know it. You didn’t need him. There’s nothing he could have done that would make how he treated you right.”
Trinity laughed, a hesitant, wondering chuckle. “Thank you, Neo,” she said. They kissed, harder and longer than they usually did in public. When they surfaced, Neo noticed a couple of guys over Trinity’s shoulder glaring at them; she instinctively reached for her piece, but they turned and walked away, apparently loath to start trouble in the crowded street.
Neo wanted more than anything to create for Trinity the same sense of safety that Trinity gave her. She knew Trinity loved the fried rice she made, so she started making it even when they didn’t have leftover rice from another meal. She paid attention to what Trinity ordered when they got takeout and brought home the same things when they were both too busy to cook. On Trinity’s birthday, she made up a little scavenger hunt that only Trinity would be able to figure out — a note in her locker at the gym, then a clue she’d have to ask Morpheus to find, and finally a document hidden on Neo’s laptop — that led her to her gift in the hall closet: a package in shiny silver paper, containing a new pair of leggings and a round of bullets for her clip.
When Neo stepped out of their bedroom, Trinity ran to her and kissed her, vowing to one-up her when her own birthday came around.
“You’ll have to figure out when it is first,” Neo retorted.
“Is that a challenge?” Trinity asked. Neo smiled. Her own birthday had come and gone two months ago, and while Trinity would be duly disgruntled if she knew, Neo had wanted to be the first of the two of them to plan a birthday surprise. She didn’t know or really care if it was chivalry or if she subconsciously had a point to prove or anything like that. She’d just wanted to, and so she did.
Trinity listened to more music than Neo had thought possible for a human being to listen to, and she was always sending Neo links and files and things. Neo was pretty much exclusively a Ministry-NIN-Slipknot girl, but occasionally she’d like one of the weird electronic songs Trinity sent her so much she’d listen to it on repeat for hours. She started playing around with her own stuff using some of the techniques she noticed, even singing a vocal line sometimes to autotune later. She hadn’t known Trinity heard her when she did it, but then one morning after Trinity had left to train she found a new mic sitting on her desk. “Borrowed it from Steve’s boyfriend,” read the legal pad sheet next to it in Trinity’s slanting, spiky hand. “Don’t worry about keeping it in good shape he’s richer than G-d. Love you XOXO.” It worked like a dream, and, contrary to instruction, Neo took fastidious care of it.
It wasn’t like everything was perfect now that she had Trinity, of course. They were still functionally on the run from the government, which could get stressful, and Neo still sometimes had those weird moments where for an hour or two she was locked out of her own brain. But she’d never before had someone to be there to talk her through it, to worry about her when she was gone from the apartment for too long. Neo guessed her college roommate had maybe come close to Trinity’s assiduity, but he hadn’t understood Neo at all, just felt some obligation to the poor slob who was sleeping three feet away from him. Trinity was different. She could read Neo’s heart and speak back in the same language.
More often than she ever had before, Neo fell asleep not queasily anxious or cruelly exhausted but drowsily content. She felt this way now as she lay on her side and watched Trinity’s body rise and fall with even, unconscious breaths. But before she went to sleep, she just wanted to watch her for a little bit. They had been dating for a year, but taking her in — her arched eyebrows, her pursed mouth, the muscled length of her arm — showed no promise of getting old.
Trinity’s eyelids suddenly quirked open, and a grin stole across her face. In less than thirty seconds she had Neo pinned.
“You asshole!” said Neo, trying and failing to muster up a disapproving tone, instead dissolving into giggles as Trinity wriggled her fingers into her armpits. “How long… were you… awake?”
“Long enough to know you were staring at me like a whack job,” said Trinity. She planted a breathy, wet kiss on Neo’s neck. “It’s okay, though. You’re a cute whack job.”
Neo closed her eyes and smiled, burrowed deeper into Trinity’s arms. She was so riled now she probably wouldn’t drop off for another hour. She didn’t care, though. For the first time in her life, her daydreams were far nicer than the ones in her sleep.