Probably Dancing at the Hard Deck

Jack looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head as his hands went to rest on his hips. When he looked back down, he found you walking toward the nurse and it suddenly made complete sense. 

He let out a sigh. “This has to be a joke.”

His eyes, as they did more often than was appropriate, caught on you, hair coming down loose from where you’d pinned it, the scrubs lopsided at one hip, riding lower than where they’d started at the beginning of the night. You turned to say something to the guy quickly, and the movement caught the slip, your scrub top moving up half an inch, and Jack’s eyes went there before his brain could tell him that was wrong, some groove in him that noticed you before it noticed anything useful. He had a second of pure, unhelpful distraction before his brain reminded him that he was an attending and had things to do. 

“I actually think it’s funny,” Lena said, shrugging.

Of course it had something to do with you. He should’ve figured it out the second he saw the guy standing there with his hands in the pouch of his scrubs, rocking heel to toe like the floor was just too exciting to be standing on. Nobody loitered around the ambulance bay at midnight for good reason. People came through those doors bleeding or they didn’t come through them at all, and this guy had shown up with nothing wrong with him, except maybe a case for some lovesickness. 

“I’m gonna make this stop,” Jack said, already pushing himself away from the nurse’s station.

Lena’s eyes widened slightly. “Don’t say anything that gets you sat down with HR.”

“She can goddamn try me,” he said, and went. Also because Jack was fairly sure you would never report him to HR. 

He crossed the floor and caught the tail-end of your conversation as he closed in.

“ — just tell me when you’re free, that’s all I’m asking,” the guy was saying.

You were already half-turned, already gone as you waved a hand loosely beside you. “I don’t know, I just don’t think we should try again.” 

Jack blew out a breath, standing a few feet short of you, your back facing him. Why was he not surprised? He’d been keeping tally without meaning to, and he knew that was embarrassing. There was the radiology fellow who’d started hand-delivering films that very well could’ve gone through the system; the travel nurse who’d washed through in six weeks and left the floor faintly weird in his wake; the anaesthesia resident who now took the long way around the department if he saw you at the end of it, as though he were a dog who’d learned the fence was electric. And now this one, apparently, Peds with his whole hopeful heart hanging out in Jack’s department. 

“You’re so sweet for coming down here,” you practically crooned at him, shifting on your heels, eyes flicking down to the form in your hand. “But I really do have a whole long night ahead of me, and I know my answer’s not gonna change, so I won’t make you wait around for it, okay?” 

Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes when you said the words with the upward lilt of a woman sending a toddler back to his mother. He wanted to laugh a little when he saw that the guy had taken it standing up like it was a gift. 

The hell of it was that Jack understood the man. He understood every last one of them because he stood next to you fifty hours a week, had been doing so for three years, and whatever the department thought of him after his consistent therapy, he was not carved out of stone. 

Jack was afraid that if he hadn’t been your attending these last four years and a little younger, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he’d have been eating out of the palm of your hand. 

You gave the guy a there-there pat, and it was only then did his eyes land on Jack, who he probably knew was your fucking attending. You turned then, and immediately said, “Oh, Dr. Abbot, I’ve got the guy in six’s labs back, the potassium —”

“Mhm.” Jack’s hands came up and landed on your shoulders before you’d finished the sentence, squaring you off the spot where you stood and turning you bodily back toward the floor like you were a gurney. 

“It is four-point-nine, but the EKG’s good, so I was gonna recheck in —” 

“Let’s recheck it now,” he said. He kept you moving, his palms broad through the cotton of your scrubs, steering you a few feet till your own feet caught onto the idea. 

You grumbled something under your breath, and once he’d stopped you right in front of six, you turned to face him with your brows raised.

“Say something?” he asked, tipping his chin down.

“You seem like you’re mad at me,” you said. 

“Huh. I do?” He let go of your shoulders — noticing, distantly, the exact second his hands came off and suddenly felt too empty — and reached past you to pluck six’s chart off the tray, more to have something to do with them than needing it. “You’re right. You should recheck in ten minutes.”

“You’re mad at me,” you said again, crossing your arms over your chest. 

He blew out a breath, and suddenly felt just a little silly at getting worked up over a nurse by the doors when there was a large, glowing board behind him full of names that needed his complete, undivided attention. 

You were a senior resident, after all, four years deep, one of his sharpest — you’d treated the guy in six, hadn’t you, you’d flagged it and called for the EKG and made the right call on the recheck before he’d even asked, all while dismantling some man’s hopes. Somehow, your mess and competence ran on the same current. You never let the first touch the second. He’d have loved, some nights, to have an excuse to be mad — a missed lab, a blown line, anything he could write up and point at — and you kept declining to hand him one. All of this meant he was left with this vague swampy irritation, and Jack wasn’t the sort of mentor who liked to hound upon that. 

“No, sweetheart, I just love it when you get random men hanging around the department,” he settled on saying, feeling his shoulders visibly loosen a fraction.

You winced, eyes darting over to the emptiness in front of the doors now. “Sorry.” 

“You’d say it won’t happen again, but we both know better.” He shrugged. Then, he reached out his hand — he wasn’t sure why, except that it just happened naturally — and patted you once on the shoulder, then on the second turned you to face the curtains leading to your patient. “Doctor up.”

And you did, the loose, embarrassed shape of you being replaced in the space of a single breath, being replaced by something Jack had watched grow into you over the years and still hadn’t quite gotten used to. 

Trauma called it in nine minutes later, an MVC, unrestrained driver, GCS dropping in the field. Jack was working on a laceration in four when he heard the crackled warning, and by the time he’d looked up out the curtains, you were already moving, gowned and at the head of the bay calling out assignments like you’d been doing this for a decade.

“I need two units O-neg before he rolls in,” you said, voice pitched high enough to carry without yelling, cutting clean through the perpetual noise of the department. “Somebody get me a second eighteen-gauge ready, and I want an ultrasound in here.”

Donnie and Mateo were already moving, and so were the people around you, falling into your orbit like the room had easily reorganized itself around your voice the second it went up. Jack stood by the curtain, gloves from the lac still on, and found he couldn’t make himself move just yet.

The doors banged open. EMS wheeled the stretcher through fast, calling out vitals over each other, and you were already on the patient’s side before the gurney had fully stopped moving, hands moving on his neck, chest, eyes scanning his pupils in a matter of ten seconds. He began walking over, catching your voice as you called out your reads as someone hung the blood and someone else prepped the ultrasound wand. “Page neuro now.”

“On it,” Mateo said, already moving.

You had both hands on the patient, running the primary survey quickly, confirming, checking, discarding possibilities out in short, clipped sentences Jack recognized as the sound of your brain running six steps ahead of your mouth. Sweat had started on your hairline. You called out for OR to be on standby, eyes flickering around the room and landing on Jack. “OR, please,” you said, aimed at him, brows going up. 

“On it,” Jack said, because there was no way he was going to let you be wrong about needing something and didn’t make sure you got it.

The next six minutes went by fast and loud, in bursts and then suddenly quiet, the room narrowing down on functionality. You stood at the center of it; you called it and ran it. You got the man upstairs stable enough that Walsh didn’t sound worried for one second, and that was a compliment from her. 

Jack watched the whole thing from four feet back, arms crossed, and chipping in when your brain had snagged. He was feeling a heat in his chest helplessly and entirely unprofessional, it was always present when he was able to see, in real-time, how far you’d come from your first day of residency when your hands were a second too slow on the central line and how your voice would pitch up at the end of every read, asking for permission every time instead of stating it like a fact, eyes finding him across the room each time, checking.

There was none of that left in you now, he realized, had done so a long time ago. He thought, watching you now, that this was the closest thing he’d let himself do to falling in years, standing uselessly riveted as he watched a woman he’d taught outgrow the need for him in real time, and finding that instead of the loss he’d expected to feel when the day finally came, all he felt was warm and terrifying and too much like pride. 

When the room had started clearing out, he watched your mouth drop open as you let out a heavy breath, eyes going over to him. The second he watched you realize he was still there, your face shifted, the relief turning into something sharper. 

“Why didn’t you jump in?” You crossed the floor toward him in four hard strides, gloves already peeled off and balled tight in one fist, snapping the second one free with a motion that looked terrifyingly like it wanted to be aimed at him. “His pressure tanked for thirty seconds and you just watched.”

“You had it.”

“You didn’t know that,” you said, voice going up an octave, adrenaline still thrumming through you, hands coming up the gesture at the blood-streaked floor. “I could’ve missed something. You’re the attending, Jack, you’re supposed to catch if I missed something —”

“I would’ve,” he interrupted, stepping in close enough that you had to tilt your head back to keep glaring at him properly. “The second you needed me, I would’ve stepped in. I wasn’t gonna take it from you before you did.” 

“You can’t gamble like that with a patient —” Your chest was rising and falling fast, gloves now crushed in your fist, and he could see the fear catching up now that everything around you had gone quiet enough to let it, something that looked more like fear of yourself than for the patient. “What if I’d frozen —?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” He reached his hand out, thumb catching a smear of the blood at your jaw you’d accidentally smeared on yourself, wiping it off carefully with the pad of his thumb, and felt you go still under it. “You don’t trust my judgement?”

“You know I do. You just could’ve said something.”

“I could’ve. He dropped his hand from your jaw only to catch your wrist instead. “Didn’t wanna interrupt you being brilliant. Kinda liked watching it happen.”

Your mouth opened, surely to let out some unnecessary retort, and died there when he pressed one slow stroke of his thumb against your wrist, raising a brow. 

“Relax,” he said, voice going rough as he leaned in a little, forcing you to meet his eyes properly. “Just take the win. That’s an order.”

“Now you wanna give orders,” you mumbled.

He barked out a short laugh, letting go of your wrist. “Only when you’re being stubborn for no reason.”   

It was sometime during the second year of your residency when he’d started catching your drift. It had started with a random Friday shift. He’d seen you at the station, elbows on the counter, telling Lena something conspiratorially. Jack was meant to be reading a chart but couldn’t help how his ears had perked up. Anything to get through the shift, he supposed.

“ — no, but he was perfect on paper,” you were saying, “kept his house clean and everything. He told me he kept his plant alive for six years —”

“So, what happened?” Lena said flatly, like she already knew what you were going to say but wanted to hear anyway. 

“He wanted to take me bowling on the second date,” you said through a sigh. “I know how it sounds, but you’ve gotta hear me out —”

“I’m genuinely not going anywhere.”

“ — for the first date, bowling’s fun. But he took me to a nice dinner the first time, he set a standard, and then the second date he goes bowling, which means the effort’s already —” You created a little downward slope with your hand. “And if it’s already sliding on date two, where’s it at on date two hundred? I can already see my marriage with him and it’s bad.”

It seemed you had a criteria, Jack learned then. It was proven even more when he’d heard you talk about your other failed dates, seen them, and learned — without ever wanting to — what they were, to an extent. 

He knew you couldn’t stand a man who ordered for you without asking. He knew you’d written off a fellow for the way he talked about his mother, and another one — an accountant, a rare specimen who had no clue what an EKG was — over a text message you’d read aloud to Ellis in a voice of complete horror, though Jack had never caught what it actually said, only your face while you read it. He knew you gave people precisely three dates, that this was a rule you held if the first and second date went well, three apparently being the magic number at which a person could no longer hide the demon they were going to turn out to be (your words).

He knew, too, that you only allowed one kiss after the first date, if even that. It was never up for negotiation, no matter how beautifully the night had gone, for you never wanted to end up “emotionally overdrawn on an account you hadn’t even opened yet.”

He knew you a man lost real points if, over the three dates, if it involved drinks, he ordered the same one. He knew a man gained them, silently and instantly, for being able to sit in a lull without narrating his way out of it, and that you considered this the single rarest trait in modern dating.

He knew you were looking for something you had no name for and would recognize on sight, which struck him as a hell of a way to run a search.

He’d have told you, if you asked, that he tuned most of the station chatter out as a matter of survival, for while he enjoyed the occasional gossip, he couldn’t very well absorb everyone’s business. And that was true about everyone’s business but yours, apparently, because yours came in clear.

Your business he retained against his own better judgement, and he realized — once, during a slow shift — that he could’ve drawn you a better map of your taste than you seemed to carry yourself. He could’ve told you, if you asked, exactly the kind of man who’d finally clear your bar, and exactly why he had yet to show up. 

It was almost nice, some nights, watching you try anyway. The ER was a place where everyone was kept tethered to the world by a thread, and everyone who worked in it long enough to develop some version of the same calluses. Jack had grown his years ago, and he wore them invisible, occasionally aching, and had come to terms with it being permanent.

Love, for Jack, had stopped being a real noun before you’d shown up, somewhere between things he used to want and things he’d decided weren’t for him anymore.

You still believed in it. You’d watched this place take everything soft out of grown men twice your seniority and somehow walked through the same fire hopeful, still convinced, against every scrap of evidence, that somewhere there was a person worth all that hoping.

For that reason, he had decided to not interrupt your endeavors, not until now, when he noticed you during hand-off before your night shift with him started, in front of Robby, of all people. 

While Jack loved Robby like a brother, he had a documented, department-wide, actuarially reliable seven-week expiration date on every woman he charmed out of this building. He’d heard intra-departmental gossip about him. There was, Jack was fairly sure, a running joke about it that predated your residency by years. 

He knew you definitely were not finding love in his best friend. But Jack felt the buzzing in his mind go quiet and mean watching how you with him.

You laughed at something and Jack lost, for one humiliating second, the thread of what he’d walked over to say. It happened sometimes, more than he’d admit to anyone. Ordinary noises out of you hit him somewhere in his chest before the better part of him flagged it as a problem, and he had to physically clear his throat before finding his footing again. 

“ — Italian’s always good after pulling a double,” Robby was saying. “But I do love some microwave ramen, too, when I’m missing my med student days.” 

“Oh, so your standards have been raised being chief?” you said, and Jack could hear the smile and wariness in it. 

“For sure —”

Jack let out a huff, something resembling a laugh, as his feet planted him between the two of you. He was close enough that his shoulder nudged yours and you had to step back to keep your balance. He felt your weight land for a second against him with a satisfaction he had no, absolutely no business feeling for something so small. So childish.

He turned to Robby, spreading his hands wide, mock outrage. “My resident.”

Robby looked mildly amused, unbothered, so Jack added, before he could respond, “Go home before I report you to HR.”

“You’d do that to me?” 

“In a heartbeat. Have some shame.” Jack kept his shoulder where it was still angled half in front of you, an old, unexamined instinct keeping the line drawn even though Robby had already backed off.

He tipped his head toward the doors, toward the gold light coming up in them, the day shift draining out around you both. “There’s a whole rich life waitin’ for you out there.”

Robby just smiled and pushed off the counter, giving you a small wave before he left.

Jack turned to you then, brows furrowed. “Seriously?”

You let out a short laugh. “Work hard, play hard?” 

“Soundin’ a lot like a frat brother right now. Never have those words been said in an ER,” Jack said. 

“I wasn’t actually going to do it,” you said, rushing the words out with something more honest in them. “For the record. I know what — he’s got a reputation.” You picked at the counter. “I was just talking to him. He’s funny.”

Jack had to recalibrate for a second. “You were talkin’ sweet to him.” 

“I talk sweet to everyone.” You lifted a shoulder, completely unbothered. “You should try it sometime.”

He rolled his eyes at that. He reached over for your cup of coffee sitting between you — closer to his elbow than yours — and drank a sip, eyes going up to the ceiling at the sheer volume of syrup you’d decided you needed in your bloodstream today. “The hell?” he muttered, turning the cup slightly as if that would help. “Are you trying to embalm yourself?”

“Give it back.”

“In a minute.” He took a second sip, slower this time, and watched you over the rim of the cup. Then, he set it back a few degrees off how you’d had it, just to see your jaw tick.

You pulled the cup back in, thumbed it around until the lid faced you again, and drank from it without breaking your explanation. “I’m offended you think I’ll get wine and dined by the chief attending.” You tilted your head. “Give me some credit here. I won’t be his seven weeks.”

“Huh.” He rubbed the back of his neck, which was warm. “Well, good. Don’t think he’ll clear your bar anyway.”

“See, you get it,” you said, pointing a finger at him. “At least someone around here does.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tipping his head slightly forward that even he hadn’t realized that he had shifted the distance just slightly. “Better than most.”

Your eyes widened slightly at that, and Jack took that as his cue to step back, clear his throat, as he jerked his chin toward the board.

“Alright, time to work. Stop the play,” he said, trying to get his voice the right level. “Go look at chest pain on three.”

“So bossy,” you said, but you were already turning around to go to three.

Well, that’s what he was, wasn’t he? For some reason, he had to remind himself that. 

It was what he had to remind himself as his hands hovered your trembling ones as you tried to pump air into Mrs. Foley’s lungs, knowing she was already gone — had been for a while now, if he was honest — longer than it took you to admit. He knew it, he’d grown the grim ability to recognize when a body stopped being a patient and being someone you were performing compressions on for the family’s sake, for your own need to have done everything. 

He’d let it run anyway, because you hadn’t accepted it yet, and he’d wanted to give you that extra minute to arrive at it on your own. 

Mateo had come up to Jack’s side, snapping his gloves off, the sound of it overshadowed by your own heaving. 

“She has to call it,” he murmured. “You want me to —”

“No.” Jack’s eyes, he felt, could not move away from your distress. “I’ve got her.” 

Mateo looked at him for a moment longer than the moment warranted, and then he stepped back and let Jack be. You were still going, your compressions had gone harder, faster, less like genuine medicine and more like you were pleading with Mrs. Foley herself now. Sweat had gone to the hair at your temple. Your jaw was set in a clench Jack recognized all too well, and for a moment, Jack wished that he didn’t have to be so acutely tuned into watching what the job did to others, the same way it did to him. 

He stepped in behind your shoulder, close, and brought his hand down over yours where they were locked on the old woman’s chest.

“Look at the clock,” he said quietly into your ear.

“One more round —” 

“You’ve done plenty.” He pressed, gently, until your hands stilled under his, and felt your entire body resist it. “You know she was gone before we could’ve even done anything —”

“She’s been my patient for years —” 

Jack knew then that while you may have been an excellent doctor, his senior resident that had bloomed under his mentorship but still could’ve gone without him and done just the same, it wasn’t a good feeling to wonder if the job would dim you the way it had him. 

“I know.” He kept his hands over yours with enough pressure so as to not let you drive them down again. “That’s why it’s yours to call. But you’ve gotta call it, Doctor.”

Your breath hitched as you turned your neck to face him, and there was a pool brimming on your lashline that you kept at bay, nodding. Your hands under his stopped straining upward, and he felt the exact second you accepted it, for it moved through your shoulders and down your spine and left you a little smaller standing there, the fight trickling into the moment after, which Jack always thought was worse. 

“Time of death,” you said, forcing your voice back into the procedural tone, “oh-three-forty-one.” You peeled your gloves off finger-by-finger.

His hand found the small of your back after taking the minute, leading you to the little family consult room with the boxed tissues and fake ficus with a couch that had absorbed more bad news since longer than you or he had worked there. He shut the door with the flat of his hand and let the floor’s noise cut to a hum through the drywall. 

You stood in the middle of the room with your arms crossed, holding yourself, and stayed silent. 

Jack propped himself against the table, arms folded, as he breathed out a small sigh through his nose. He knew you weren’t a talker after the bad ones. Some residents came out of a loss with their mouths running, narrating it into something survivable, and some went quiet and small and had to be waited out, and you were the second kind. So he waited.

You broke it eventually, like he always knew you would have. “I’ve got a butterscotch she gave me seven months ago in my locker still,” you murmured, craning your neck so you were looking at the ceiling. You wiped under your eyes with the heel of your hand roughly. 

“Think I’ve got one, too,” he murmured, wincing as he tried to shift his weight. 

It had been building up for the past few hours, a hot ring of wrong down below the knee where the socket had gone slick and furnace-warm because it was past hour fourteen, when he’d sweated the fit and never changed the liner because there’d been no window that wasn’t already accounted for. He shifted his weight off it, trying again, and reached down to thumb the release, breaking the seal. 

He let out a short, punched out sigh as he pulled himself down onto the chair behind him, one hand balancing himself on the table. “Sorry,” he gruffed out, jaw clenching. 

Your eyes flickered down to the prosthetic limb he was balancing against the pole of the table and you were already moving before he could finish apologizing. You never asked if he needed a hand. You’d learned sometime during your second year that asking him gave him a chance to say no, and you’d quit handing him that chance sometime during your second year, so now you just came. You went down on one knee at the pole of the table.

“Don’t say sorry,” you mumbled, eyes not meeting him.

His jaw stayed tight and he didn’t fight it, fight you. That was a formality and you both knew it, a thing he did with his shoulders and not his hands, but he watched the top of your head and thought — like he always did, each time, and never said out loud — there was no one else on god’s green earth he’d let do this in the way you did. Not the prosthetist, who did it clinically. Not the VA, who did it tired. You did it each time like it was nothing and everything at once, as though this something not worth remarking on. 

He very badly wanted to thank you, despite how small he always felt when you did this. He wanted to tell you that you were, without question, better at this than anyone who was paid to do it.

Your fingers found the socket and went for the liner because you knew the fit went bad and the sweat before it went bad anywhere a person could see, knew he’d have to run it slick and furnace-hot than spend the fourteen minutes off the floor. You rolled it back with the flat of your thumb, easing the trapped heat out of it, and he felt the pressure of the ring of raw below his knee and had to clench his jaw to not let the relief show on his face. You spared him anyway by keeping your eyes down where they’d been.

“You’ll strip your skin doing this,” you said conversationally, the roughness still present in your voice from the code. “You know that. You keep running it past twelve and one of these nights it’s cellulitis and I’m admitting you.” 

“If only I could be so lucky.”

He ducked his head slightly, a part of him wanting to catch the reaction, and he saw how one corner of your lip was barely turned up. 

You thumbed a line of red where the socket’s edge had bitten in, checking it, and your touch went careful around there. “This is new. The edge is catching higher than it was.”

“Went to a new liner last month,” he said, voice low. “Not broke in yet.” 

“Then you break it on your days off. Not on a fourteen hour.” You finally looked up at him, shaking your head with this flat, fond expression he’d come to realize was your favorite way to look at him. “You’d write me up for less.” 

“I’d write you up for a lot less,” he agreed, thinking back on the time you’d fought him tooth-and-nail over staying through a migraine, refusing, point-blank, to hand off a soft rule-out chest pain at eleven when the migraine had started very visibly began creeping up on you. 

He’d caught you before you’d said a word about it because you’d begun squinting at the numbers and pressed the heel of your hand against one eye for a moment too long between patients, thinking nobody was watching. He was, he realized, always watching you in some way.

“Go home,” he’d said quietly, catching you by the elbow outside the curtain. “That’s not a request.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got a migraine.”

“I’ve got a job.” Your jaw had clenched, stubbornly, and Jack had thought that even if he’d put all his strength into it, he wouldn’t have been able to unclench it for you. “I’m not handing off a chest pain because my head hurts. This guy has waited long enough for a bed. I’m not the priority here.”

He’d wanted to tell you that you were, actually, that you were exactly the priority, and watching you white-knuckle forms with your pupils blown different sizes from pain scared him more than any board full of critical pains ever had. But he’d just pulled down the light two notches, told the nurses to shadow eleven’s discharge, and put a bottle of water and two Tylenol on your desk without a word. And thank god, you’d taken the Tylenol and finished the shift standing up because sitting made the room tilt worse, and only taken on non-critical cases. You’d refused until the end that you should’ve gone home three hours earlier.  

Now, you huffed something that was nearly a laugh, your first real once since the code, and went back to setting. And Jack sat there with his arms crossed in the dark with your hands on the worst-guarded part of him and the door shut against the whole floor, and thought about how he believed nobody deserved you. People were vile and sucked and cut in line and let doors swing shut behind them, and you handed out three dates to men who wrote sonnets in your voicemail and couldn’t clear a bar you’d never once lowered for anyone. He’d thought, more nights than he liked to admit, that these people had no idea what they were auditioning for. 

His eyes snagged on you because there was nothing else in this small room worth looking at. There was still salt dried in your lashline from the code. You were a wreck and you were fixing his leg anyway, still half-shaking from a woman you couldn’t save, and it hadn’t occurred to you to stop and put yourself back together first. It never did. Jack had seen the care run out of you before you ever decided to spend it. 

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Foley,” he said.

You shook your head, face still angled down, thumb pausing mid-motion. “I’ll be okay,” you murmured, lifting up one shoulder. “I just hate that she couldn’t get here sooner.”

“You did nothing wrong,” he said plainly. “Family said she’s been feeling off for two days now.”

“I know.” Your voice cracked, betraying the flatness you were trying to present. “Doesn’t make it easier.”

You lifted your head for a moment, then, looking at him with a sad smile he knew you were painting on to get him to stop talking.

He nodded stiffly, tipping his chin down. “Alright. Finish my leg and we’ll run this floor together.”

Up in radiology a few nights later, Jack had gone himself to sort out a reading that had been sitting long and he’d cornered a tech and got what he needed and was already halfway out the door, jacket sleeves still rolled from the last set of compressions, when he saw the guy standing off by the light boxes. 

Younger. A resident, he supposed, in scrubs a size too crisp for someone who’d actually been on the shift long enough to earn wrinkles in them. He’d been watching Jack the whole time — Jack could feel it, the itch of being observed — shifting his weight heel to toe against the linoleum floor. 

“Somethin’ on my face?” Jack said flatly because he really did have to get back to the floor.

“You’re — sorry, you’re Dr. Abbot, right?”

“Last I checked.” 

The guy’s hand came out of his jacket’s pocket, and there was a piece of folded paper in it. Jack looked at it like it was a spider, hoping — no, praying — it had something to do with work.

“Could you give this to her?” the guy asked, and Jack’s hope died, as he stepped closer. “The senior resident on your shift. She’ll — she’ll know who it’s from.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack murmured, brows pulling in together. “You ever heard of texting, kid?” 

“I did,” he said, and Jack could practically feel the heat radiating off of him. “She stopped answering, so I figured, maybe on paper, she’d actually —”

“Take the hint,” Jack grumbled, snatching the paper out of his hand. Then, as he turned to the door, he said, “You know I work in the ER?” When the guy only nodded quickly, he added, “You know she works in the ER?” 

“I — yeah. Obviously.”

“Then you know she doesn’t need this.” He held up the paper between him and the guy. “She’s got enough on her plate without some guy too chicken to call her handing me a note like I’m her mailman.”

The guy opened his mouth, nose scrunching at Jack’s words, but nothing came out. 

“Yeah.” Jack was already walking, note tucked in his pocket, done with the conversation. “Try calling next time. Or don’t.” 

The guy looked at least a little sheepish, a little ashamed, and Jack thought good, he should feel ashamed. He wasn’t sure what the protocol in dating was now — he’d been just a little rusty and out of the stretch for a stretch of years he preferred not to count in single digits — but he was fairly certain that whatever the rules had curdled up to, this could not possibly be inside them.

He rode the elevator down with the note in his pockets, and he could feel the small stiff square of another man’s hope pressing over the outside of his thigh. 

He found you at your desk, hands running restlessly through your hair as you spoke into the microphone, charting. The words were coming out of you bluntly, mechanic and after saying the same variation a thousand times over. There was a pen behind your ear you’d forgotten about and the residue of a lab value gone blue across the back of your hand where you’d scrawled it hours ago and never washed off.

He stood there for a second before you noticed him, and thought — not for the first time and with the same low irritation he always felt about it — that he had no earthly business being the man this got routed to.

Jack leaned down so his head hovered beside yours, scanning your work on the screen, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed yours, head tilted to read your screen at an angle that had nothing to do with actually needing to see it. 

“The man wants an espresso martini?” he asked, furrowing his brows as he read over your notes, right by your ear. 

You jumped just slightly and swivelled on your stool to face him, then back at the screen. “Shit — Jack. Announce yourself.” You scanned the words on your notes, shaking your head and already backspacing. “No, that was me talking to myself. Stupid mic picked it up.”

“Long as it’s just the one,” he drawled, staying there in your space a little longer, watching the side of your face instead of the screen now. “Those things sneak up on you.”

“Speaking from experience?” You turned on your stool to face him fully, chin tilting up to meet his eyes, something playful and a little challenging in it. 

“I’ve got a couple decades on you. Everything’s snuck up on me.” 

You held his gaze a little longer, then looked away first, tongue coming out over your lips for a second. He took a small satisfaction in not being the one who blinked first. 

He blew out a breath through his nose, remembering, with reluctance now, what he’d actually come here to do. “Speaking of sneaking up.” He pulled out the note from his pocket. “I got something to deliver to you —”

You furrowed your brows when he handed it to you. “Secret admirer?” you asked jokingly. 

He barked out a short laugh. “Nothin’ secret about it. You ignoring some radiology fellow?”

You grimaced, opening the note and scanning over the words quickly. He could’ve left, but stayed instead and watched you read it. The frown only pulled deeper, and he saw your eye twitch once as you scanned the words.

Against his better judgement, he murmured, “That bad?” 

“Uh — no, it’s okay.” You shrugged stiffly. 

“Huh,” he breathed out, studying you outright now. “Wonder what you’re doin’ to these guys to get them so wound up.”

You chuckled, mostly to yourself. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”  

His chest tightened at that. It was unfair how you could make anything to him sound like something he’d been waiting to hear. He swallowed. “Suppose I would.”

“That an offer, Dr. Abbot?” 

“Might be,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. 

You laughed — surprised, the tension in your shoulders breaking slightly — and shook your head, folding the note back up. “You’re ridiculous. Well, thank you for getting it to me. I’m sorry he bothered you with this —” You swivelled, placing the note on your desk before picking up your phone. “That’s really weird.” 

“That’s one word for it,” Jack said, and left it there, because you’d already turned and had your phone in one hand and the microphone in the other. The small furrow was back between your brows, and he’d learned there was a point past which pushing you got him a brighter, smaller version of whatever you were covering. 

He drifted toward the far end of the station where Mateo was crouched at the crash cart running his palm along the drawers, checking seals, restocking and checking the fact of it on slower nights like this. 

“She okay?” Mateo asked, snapping the drawer, seemingly having caught the interaction. 

“Oh, you know.” Jack leaned a shoulder into the wall, arms crossing. “The belle of our ball. Can’t clock in without collecting a proposal.”

Mateo huffed. “She loves love.”

“That she does.” Jack watched you across the station, the phone lit against your ear now. “Don’t know why she keeps doing that to herself, though.”

“She’s an optimist.” Mateo clicked a seal into place, then moved down the cart. “Thinks someone’s gonna turn out different.”

Jack hummed, then, because the question had been sitting low and unlovely for a couple hours, he asked, “You two give it a run ever?” 

Mateo turned his neck to look up at Jack. “Me and —” He jutted his thumb behind him to vaguely gesture at you. “Her?”

“Mhm.” Jack kept his eyes on you. “You’re close.”

“Nah.” Mateo went back to the cart, shaking his head as he chuckled softly. “I don’t think I’d pass a single one of her tests. Besides, I got my eye on someone.”

“Apparently I don’t make the list either, I guess,” Jack murmured.

Mateo laughed through his nose, eyeing Jack with something new now. “You want to?” 

Jack caught it, reaching his palm and smacking it against Mateo’s curls with no force. “No. Now, do your job.”

“I am —” He laughed through the words, eyes scanning over Jack’s stiffened posture now. “It’s good you don’t, then. Couldn’t handle her anyway.” 

“Sure, I could,” Jack said immediately. 

Mateo’s head turned again, lips curving upwards at Jack’s words, and he felt momentarily blindsided by his own mouth, entirely too honest for something that had started as a joke. 

“Sure, you could,” Mateo teased, drawing out the words.

“Shut it.” Jack grabbed a box of gloves off the cart and set it down two shelves lower than it needed to go, purely to do something with his hands that didn’t involve reaching for Mateo’s collar. “Wasn’t a real question.”

Couldn’t handle you? As if he didn’t know, without having to think about it, that you took the stairs two at a time instead of the elevator when you were annoyed and needed somewhere to put your extra energy, or that you’d started drinking your coffee black on nights a patient reminded you of someone, syrup and cream abandoned, like sweetness felt wrong to have that shift. As if he hadn’t noticed, months ago, that you hummed the same four off-key notes from a jingle neither you nor Jack could place when a chart was boring you to death, or that you double-checked every single IV line now, ever since one bad mistake in your first year. He could very well handle you, he simply hadn’t been given the chance to do so.

Most of the time, Jack was fine with watching your love life play out in 3D. More often than not, he knew they’d never work out. You were just too good for anyone who came sniffing, and there was a grim comfort in that, in knowing the fellows and the nurses would wash through and out and leave you exactly where he found you, three feet down the counter from him, close enough to keep.

Tonight the comfort wasn’t coming. Mateo’s accidental interrogation had rubbed Jack wrongly, somewhere he had yet to fully locate yet, and was sitting in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting was there until he turned the corner over the night, saw you, and noticed it was there. He should’ve let it stay as nothing, but his brain had apparently decided three hours later was the correct time to relitigate the whole exchange, turning it over at odd intervals between patients like a tongue worrying a chipped tooth.

It was the bad sort of slow in the ER, the sort that let his brain fill up with things he’d have no time for on a real night. Ellis had wandered over to your desk with two energy drinks and placed her arms loosely beside your computer.

Jack was distantly aware he had misplaced labs to hand back to you because they’d gotten lost in the system, and he told himself that was the whole reason his body had started moving in your direction. 

“I got a rundown from Marge,” Ellis said, dropping into an empty stool beside you. “Apparently he wrote it out of the OR.”

“You’re joking,” you muttered. “I don’t understand it.” 

Jack stood there with the labs in his hand, close enough to hear it. 

“I’m still wondering if I should respond,” you were saying, half into your hands. “Is this romantic? This one’s never happened before.”

Ellis laughed slightly with you, and the two of you had built one of those small pockets that slow nights sometimes allowed, thirty seconds of being people instead of clinicians.

Jack set the labs down at the edge of your keyboard harder than he meant to, the papers slapping flat against the desk, and both of you looked up at him like he’d grown two heads. Fuck — had he? It sure felt like he was operating off of whatever chemical cocktail his brain had whipped up for nights like this, some ugly little compound of jealousy and exhaustion. He was fairly sure if you pulled his labs right now they’d look like a man in the middle of a bad reaction to something not yet figured out in the scientific world. 

“Labs on eight got lost.” His palm stayed on the sheet for a few seconds too long, some instinct telling him to keep his hand on something solid before the rest of him did something stupid. “You’ll want to recheck the trop.” 

His eyes cut, against every ounce of better judgement he had left, to the note still folded in your hand, the same one he’d carried down like it was radioactive, the same note that had clearly done something for you that four years of Jack standing next to you clearly hadn’t. An unreasonable, low feeling creeped up behind his ribs at the sight of it, hot and out of proportion to a piece of folded-fucking-paper. 

Ellis’s smile went uncertain as he felt her gaze snag on him. 

You blinked up at him, and whatever had been sitting easy in your face a second ago curdled itself away, the corners of your mouth retreating. He knew this same retreat, had watched you recalibrate your muscles, swiftly, built to be unreadable against anyone who hadn’t spent four years learning your face. 

His stomach dropped and heat climbed up the back of his neck, jaw tightening on its own. He hated that his body had learned to answer you the way it answered a motor alarm. He hated more that some raw, cornered part in him — still smarting about Mateo’s offhand comment and sore from that folded note — felt it wasn’t soothed.

You blinked up at him, and the laugh faded off your face, and you said, easily, warm, “Yeah — course. I’ll get right on that.”

He shrugged up one shoulder, lips pressing into a thin line. He turned, already walking away. “Whenever there’s a gap on your social calendar, I guess.”

He heard the small silence that opened behind him, and he could practically imagine you and Ellis looking at each other. Then, he heard you push back from the desk, the stool wheels catching, and your footsteps coming after him like he’d known they would, because you were the last person to let something like that go. 

“Hey.” You fell into step beside him, voice pitched low, still giving him more benefit than the doubt had earned in the last ten seconds. “What was that about?”

“Nothing.” He tilted his neck up slightly to do a quick scan of the board, some stubborn muscle in his neck refusing to let him meet your eyes. “Got a department to run.”

“And you’ve been running it great. You just became weird right now.” He could feel you working it over beside him, shifting on your feet as you toed the line between resident and the hard-won territory neither of you had ever named. “Jack.” 

“You want to laugh about your shitty dates, that’s your business,” he said instead of letting it go, sounding too far from the man who’d had his hands hovering over yours an hour ago, watching you put in a chest tube, telling you that you’d done well. “Do it a little quieter. This is an ER, not a lunch table.”

His words stopped you for half a step. Jack kept walking, an ugly, cowardly momentum carrying him three more steps before you caught back up.

He heard you recalibrate your voice in real time when you said, “I was charting on a slow shift,” carefully. “You’ve made worse jokes when it’s even more busy. What’s this about?”

“It’s about you treating this place like it’s your dating pool and not your place of work.” The words came out much uglier than he meant, and he didn’t have it in him to call them back. “It’s not professional. It reflects on the department. Reflects on me. Somebody’s gotta say it, and apparently that’s me, since you clearly enjoy it too much to stop.” 

You stopped walking altogether this time. He turned to face your stillness whole, then, and found your eyes narrowed at him, looking like you’d been hit from a direction you hadn’t been completely guarding against. 

He let out a breath, fingers going up to his forehead to wipe at sweat that wasn’t there. “I’m just saying what —”

“I’m sorry,” you said, voice going level and courteous, as you nodded quickly. “You’re right. You’re my attending, it reflects on you. I’ll keep my personal life out of work.” 

“That’s not —” he tried, but you were already turning away, shoulders squared and chin level, professional armor snapping into place just like he’d told you to. It should have made him feel better to watch you take it so cleanly, to not make a big deal out of it. All it made him feel was like something had been surgically removed from him. 

“Stop —” he tried again, to your back now, and the sentence died somewhere between his teeth and the air. That was okay. There was no end to the sentence that didn’t sound worse than the beginning anyway. 

He blew out a sharp breath through his nose, standing in the middle of the floor with his hand still half-raised toward you, fingers curling back into his palm when he realized you weren’t there to reach. Jack felt, distantly, uselessly, like the only thing standing still in the entire building. 

“Great going,” he heard Lena say, trailing past him, a tray tucked against her hip, not even breaking stride. “You got rid of the one entertainment we’ve got around here.”

His shoulders stiffened, and he caught up with her in three steps, jaw working around words that wanted to spill out defensively and came out simply tired. “It’s not entertainment if she keeps getting hurt,” he grumbled. “She’s not a show. Stop treating her like one.” 

“Didn’t look like she was the one getting hurt tonight,” she said, rounding a corner and leaving him standing there.

Jack let out a low groan, running a palm down the lower half of his face, and dropped his hand only when he’d scrubbed enough friction into his jaw to feel it sting a little, which was at least a sensation he’d chosen, at least tonight. He stood there a second longer, staring at nothing in particular. His hands found his hips on reflex. 

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, and dragged both hands back through his hair, gripping once at the roots before letting go. 

He rolled his neck, felt it pop unsatisfyingly, and pushed off the wall he hadn’t even realized he was leaning against. His leg fucking ached, the burn starting behind his knee. He ignored it like he always did and started walking anyway, jaw still held tight, hands shoved deep into his pockets like he could physically hold himself together with the seams of his own black scrubs.

It was by the lockers after hand-off that Jack saw you next. Both of you had conveniently managed to work over-time; he because there was nothing to get home to, and you — he’d heard through the grapevine — because one of your patient’s little sister was coming in toward close, and you simply wanted to talk with her instead of handing the situation off to one of the day residents.

Usually, nobody had asked you to stay when you did. Most times, there was no version of staying that showed up in your favor; he and Shen were gone, so there was no attending grading you on it; no hours that counted. It was just for a kid who was going to get bad news from a face she’d seen before, so you cost yourself hours of sleep you most definitely needed to be the soft spot for a stranger’s little sister, and hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, and he knew you would’ve been embarrassed if he brought it up. 

He found you using the little mirror inside your locker to apply some kind of pink-tubed gloss with one hand while the other ran its fingers through your hair. Jack pursed his lips, eyeing you from the doorway, because he was pretty sure you’d done something different to it in the last ten minutes. 

“Look nice,” he tried, biting the bullet and walking toward his own locker. “Goin’ somewhere?” 

You caught his eyes in the mirror instead of turning around. “Just breakfast,” you said, and there was none of the earlier lilt in it, the warmth that you’d always aimed at him gone functional. You capped the gloss with more force than it needed and dropped it into your bag. 

Jack stood there a second too long with his hand over his own locker without opening it. He’d expected — and he knew he was more optimistic than usual for doing so — your easy back-and-forth, his slip-up from earlier forgotten. He wasn’t sure what to do with the quiet or you not looking at him properly, hairbrush working through your hair in short strokes. 

He’d saved around thirty lives tonight, and that was what he was good at. He was not good, and had never claimed to be good, at the aftermath of hurting a person he’d have put his own body between a stretcher and wall for, without meaning to, over something that had never been about the radiology fellow at all. 

He opted out of opening his locker and chose instead to lean his bicep against the locker, eyeing you in front of him. “Mad at me?” he murmured. 

You let out a short breath, shaking your head, and he tracked all your micro-expressions through the mirror. “On the clock?” 

“Well, we’ve both been off it for a while now,” he said, watching the shape of your mouth in the mirror, waiting for it to give something away. It didn’t. “But no. Asking as your —” He stopped himself, because ‘friend’ seemed not to be the honest word though it was the first one that popped up. “Off the clock. Whatever I am to you right now.”

You set the hairbrush down on the little shelf with more care than the moment needed. “It’s okay, Jack,” you said, shaking your head.

“Don’t think it is. Try again.”

You watched him for a second in the mirror, then you turned. 

“It’s just embarrassing,” you said, and the words came out smaller than anything he’d heard out of you in years. You crossed your arms over your chest. “I respect you and I hate that you’d think for one second I don’t take this place seriously.” Your voice cracked on the last word, just barely, and you pressed your lips together. “So, yeah. It’s embarrassing to have my attending confirming I’m exactly what people think I am.”

He was shaking his head before you could even finish the sentence. “Nobody thinks —”

“You do,” you said, voice rising slightly. “So, off the clock, I’m embarrassed, and tonight, I’m going to be your resident. Because I agree with you. It’s been unprofessional of me to keep dating within the hospital —” You threw your arms up halfway by your side, and you let out a short laugh that came out dry and wrong. “And I hate that you’ve probably been thinking it for four years.”

“I haven’t,” he said too fast. God, he’d come here to make tonight better for you, not to make you re-evaluate all your years working with him. “Sure, I thought it was none of my business how you spend your good nights off. Didn’t stop me from thinking they didn’t deserve ‘em.” 

You rolled your eyes. “You’re just saying that now ‘cause you feel bad.”

“Wish it were that simple,” he said, and chose to leave it unelaborated because it wasn’t that simple and he had no intention of explaining exactly why. “Half the time, you know it’s not gonna work out. You’re breaking my heart by making me watch you break yours.” 

You blinked, and he watched the fight loosen out of you by inches. “It’s just a free breakfast, Jack. Nothing to get your heart broken over.” 

Jack let out a huff through his nose, mouth opening to say what, he didn’t know. “Is that all? ‘Cause I can get you free breakfast for the rest of your life.” 

You laughed, disbelieving, through your nose, some of the night’s weight finally cracking off of you. “You’ve got a weird way of apologizing.” 

“Just to my favorite resident.” He pointed his index finger at you, lazy, and pushed himself off the lockers. His shoulder blades left a faint dust-print on the metal where he’d been leaning. He thumbed in the combination without looking at the dial — muscle memory, years of the same locker — and the door swung open with a rusted squeak. He pulled out his bag. “So?” 

“So what?” 

“You ditch the fellow.” He slung the bag up over his shoulder, close enough now that he caught the tail-end of the perfume you’d lightly spritzed over yourself. “I buy.”

You looked at him for a second too long, lips pushing to one side, as though you were gauging whether this was a bit or not, another line he’d tossed and wanted to let die on its own. He stood there, jaw set and features relaxing to show you he did mean it, more than he wanted to admit, if he was being honest with himself. 

“You’re serious.” 

“Do I look like I’m not?” He nodded once at your locker, your bag sitting on the shelf. “Grab your stuff. We’re going.” 

“Fine,” you said finally, reaching over and zipping your backpack all the way before throwing it over one shoulder. “Can you drive? I’ve been taking the subway.”

“Why?” he asked drily. “You’ve got a car.”

Jack realized, as he watched you slide in across from him and folding both hands around the coffee before it was all the way poured, that he’d never once been on a date where the woman had no idea it was one. 

It wasn’t lost on him what that made him, a man old enough to know better, letting a thing be one thing on his side of the table and another thing entirely on yours, saying nothing to square the difference. But he’d meant what he’d said, and he was going to feed you. 

You ordered a short stack, eggs, hash brown, decaf on loop. She wrote it down, definitely having heard worse from better.

“Thanks for the treat, Jack,” you said when Dina left, bringing the rim of your cup to your lips. “Don’t think I could’ve done another breakfast to let him down gently.”

“We have to make some changes to your lifestyle,” Jack replied, voice rough, as he eyed you. 

“Oh, yeah?” you murmured. “We?” 

“Well, I did have to deliver a note to you today. In all my life working here, that’s never happened.” 

You laughed around the rim of your cup. “In my defense, I don’t think anyone’s wrote me a note out of an OR either. That’s a first for both of us.”

“Glad we share the experience.”

Dina came by with a pot and topped you off without being asked, and placed the food in front of you. Jack watched you reach for the salt before your fork had even touched the eggs, shaking it twice over the plate.

“You’re gonna give yourself a stroke by forty.”

“You’re gonna give me a stroke right now if you comment on my food.” But you set the shaker down after the third shake, which he noticed and had to bite back a smile.

Dina dropped his plate in front of him — bacon, eggs, no pancakes — and you were reaching for it with a piece of your fork before she’d even finished setting his fork down. He gave you a faux-frown, picking up his fork and, without looking, spreading a piece of your hashbrown off the opposite plate in trade. He wasn’t sure when the two of you had started stealing bites and sips off of each other’s stuff, only that it’d started somewhere and calcified into something neither of you mentioned. 

“Rude,” you said, mouth already full.

“Learned it from you,” he muttered, nudging his plate an inch closer to your side of the table, which you took full advantage of. 

Dina’s radio crackled through something twangy and close-to-familiar behind the counter, competing with the clatter of a skillet somewhere in the back, the whole place smelling like batter and grease soaked into decades of countertop, syrup that had dried a hundred small amber rings nobody had ever fully scrubbed off. 

“I’ve never been here before.” You absentmindedly cut the hashbrown in half as your eyes raked over the place. “This a regular spot for you?”

“Since before you joined,” he said easily, but his brows furrowed as he realized he’d been coming here alone for years. He was in the same booth when he could get it, ordered the same order, and it struck to him only now, watching you eat your hashbrowns, how much smaller and less lonely a booth felt with you taking up the other half of it. “Used to be the only quiet I got on some weeks.” 

You hummed. “And now?”

“Guess the quiet’s pretty negotiable.” He shrugged. “I can go without it.”

You smiled down at your plate, something easy working at the corner of your mouth. A thread of syrup had gathered at the seam of your lips — you hadn’t noticed, too busy considering his answer — and before he’d cleared the impulse with the rest of himself, his thumb was already moving, catching it at the corner quickly, no different than when he swiped under your lashline for salt after a bad night.

You stayed still, having gotten used to his hands somewhere during your residency.

“You’re a mess,” he said, wiping his thumb off on the paper napkin folded under his elbow. 

“You’ve got coffee on your scrub top,” you said, eyes flicking down to his chest. His brows furrowed and he looked down, and you were right. “Pot, kettle.”

He’d been about to say something else, he could’ve sworn it, but had lost every word of it watching you smile so unguarded, free enough to let him look at you. He had to reach for his coffee just to have something to do with his hands. 

When the check came, folded in its little plastic tray, you both reached for it at once. Your hand landed flat over his knuckles. Neither of you moved it for a second, for his hand stayed exactly where it was, broad and unmoving under yours, and something unspoken passed through the two inches of fornica between your faces as he raised a brow at you. He slid the tray out from under you slowly.

“Said I’m buying,” he said, shaking his head slightly.

The drive back had been quieter than the one there had been. It was nearing ten in the morning, and he knew both of you had stayed up longer than intended, especially for two people who had to clock back in in a shorter amount of time than he deemed plausible to reset completely.

He’d cracked the window down an inch, and the air coming through carried the smell of wet pavement and the sound of a garbage truck grinding its gears three streets over. Your neighborhood, he was learning, woke up slow; there was a paperboy on a bike, a guy in scrubs different from yours locking up his own car after a shift that wasn’t at the PTMC, and Jack drove through it with two fingers loose over the wheel. Neither of you had bothered with the radio.

You’d gone somewhere billowy around your third cup of decaf, all the sharp edges of the night replaced with something looser and sleepier, and you gave him directions in a voice gone thick from exhaustion as you were likely starting to feel it behind your eyes. 

He pulled his car along the curb and let it idle, one shoe braced against the floorboard, watching the numbers of your building.

“Gonna sleep?” he asked.

“Gonna try.” You were already working the bag strap over your shoulder, hair falling loose out of the knot you’d put it up in at some point at the diner, strands of it catching the early light. “I’ve got no idea how you do this then take SWAT calls.”

“You’d be able to do it, too, if I put you on the field.” 

You mumbled something, letting your head drop against the window for a second, before picking itself back up. “Stop threatening me, Jack.” 

He watched you fight your eyelids, his mouth pulling up at the corners at the sight. “C’mon. Get inside before I gotta carry you up.”

You snorted, half-hearted. “You can’t. You’d throw your hip out.”

“Try me.” He was already rounding the hood before you’d gathered your bearings, boots loud on the quiet street, and you let out another laugh and let him get there first, too tired to argue about who gets to open what.

He walked you up the cracked path, palm settling at the small of your back, and you leaned back into it, half your weight given over without you noticing it. 

At the door, you fumbled with your keys out from under a granola wrapper and a capless pen, missed the lock twice, and gave up trying on the third. You turned to face him instead with your back against the frame and your bag slowly sliding off one shoulder.

“Thank you,” you said, words coming out loose and filtered by the exhaustion even as you tried to meet his eyes head-on. “For the — everything. The explanation. And the breakfast.” 

Jack felt his lips curve up, fingers flexing at his sides. “Anytime.” 

“And for driving me there — thank you. And for the drive back.” 

“Uh-huh. You gonna go inside?” he said, voice going quieter as he looked down at the ground, at how the toes of your shoes were almost touching. “Or keep thanking me until you fall asleep standing up?” 

You cocked your head to the side, your lips moving upwards into a fuller smile. His own mouth curved as he shifted on his feet slightly, closing the barely-there inch between his shoes and yours. 

“Jack?” 

He hummed, and you went up slightly onto your toes before he’d finished deciding what to do with you. Or maybe he’d moved in first, or maybe there was no real order to it at all. His mouth found yours somewhere in that uncertainty, slowly despite it, because he’d already worked out every version of this moment and this one had simply appeared in front of him.

His hand came up to cradle the side of your jaw, thumb settling into the soft hollow just beneath your ears. Your skin was warm despite the cold snap in the air, much softer than he’d let himself imagine, and he felt the exact second your breath caught against his mouth, a small stutter that made his fingers curve around your jaw, index resting against your cheekbone. 

He kept it slow, it was the only thing he had any real control over right now, the pace of it instead of the fact of it. He used what little he had left, dragging his mouth against yours, like he could somehow make up for four years of nothing by refusing to rush the first thirty seconds of something. His other hand found your waist, and his palm felt how your back curved into him, the hitch of your ribs on an inhale, and he pressed you back the last inch against the doorframe more to ground himself. 

Your fist found the front of his canvas jacket, dragging him in the last stubborn space he’d been too careful to close himself, and a sound came out of his chest that embarrassed him a little. He felt you smile against his mouth, and his entire body felt warm at having been caught enjoying this entirely as much as he was. 

He tilted his head so his forehead pressed against yours and pulled his mouth away. His lips jutted out slightly, feeling suddenly empty and unwilling to put the full distance back between the two of you.

Your eyes were still shut, and you were breathing unevenly. “Thank you,” you murmured. 

He huffed a short laugh, and in it, realized how breathless he, too, was. 

You tipped your chin back up, already chasing him.

Jack felt the want knot up inside him, greedy and unreasonably leaning back in to meet you halfway before the rest of him had caught up and made him stop. He made a small sound in his throat and pinched his eyes shut, letting you get right up to the edge of it, breath already tangling with his, wanting so badly to just let it happen, before his finger came up between you, pressed light against your bottom lip to stop you a hair short. It was more for his own sake than the words he remembered you telling someone years ago ringing in his head.

“Ah-ah.” His voice came out rough with want, entirely at odds with his actions. “Your rule. Only one kiss after the first date. I’m trying —” he exhaled hard, almost dramatically, “— trying real hard here to make it to the second.”

“Huh?” Your eyes peeled open. “This was a date?” 

“Best one you’ve had I’m guessing, with the way you’re breaking your rules.” His finger stayed right where it was, and he watched your eyes struggle to focus, still glassy from the kiss. He could feel the warm huff of breath breaking unsteady against his fingertip, could feel your mouth soft and parted underneath it, waiting on him. 

You pressed a peck against his finger instead, your mouth barely dragging against his skin as a shy smile formed behind it that he felt more than saw. “Maybe.”

“Well, good.” He smiled, despite himself, and pushed himself off your forehead, opting instead to press his lips there. “Get some sleep,” he murmured against your hairline, lips lingering a little longer there. “Might be able to get a full seven hours.” 

“Will you?” 

“Doubt it.” He pulled back enough to look at you properly, thumb tracing a line along your cheekbone — his touch feather-light, tracking the exact curve of it, memorizing the route — before he made himself drop his hand entirely, fingers curling loosely at his sides because suddenly he had no idea what to do with them without you under them. “Kinda got a lot on my mind now.”

“Yeah?” You bit back a smile, still not quite steady on your feet. “Anything you wanna share with the class?”

“Not a chance.” He bent a fraction and hooked two fingers under the strap of your bag where it’d slid down to your elbow, dragging it slowly back up to your shoulders, knuckles grazing your arms the whole way. “You’ll find out. Eventually.”

He forced himself to step off the mat — one step back, then the second, putting real distance between you now — forcing ease into his expression that he definitely wasn’t feeling. He stopped a few feet away from you anyway, unable to fully commit to walking away, watching you stunned and still in your doorway, mouth a little kiss-soft. He felt so completely helpless and pleased at the sight. “Text me when you’re up and I’ll get to planning date two.” 

You raised a hand into a wave, fingers curling in the air.

“Bye, Jack,” you said, and his name came out of your mouth softer than you probably meant it to, smooth and cushy the way it never sounded on shift.

It’s hot as balls outside. You’re covered in sweat, which mingles in a sticky and unpleasant mix with the sunscreen you’ve been dutifully applying since the afternoon to avoid frying like an egg. When the sun finally set, you no longer had to worry about the burgeoning threat of skin cancer, but the heat doesn’t break. In fact, it almost seems to get worse, because more and more people arrive to crowd you as night descends and the bigger names with larger fanbases grace the stage.

You’re waiting for Beth outside of the bathroom facilities. She's been ingesting a steady stream of margaritas since sundown, so she leaves you holding the bag, literally. At least it's a nice excuse to separate yourself from the throng of jumping, sweaty bodies gathered by the stage.

It’s nearly two in the morning. You’re hungry. Your feet are killing you. You have a headache from the festival’s sugary cocktails. You’re sweating through the top Beth lent you. And on top of everything else, your ovulation cramps are kicking in like a motherfucker.

Growing desperate, you dig through Beth's bag, searching for the little Altoid tin that she always keeps her pain meds in. At long last, your hands make contact with the metal tin at the bottom of her tote. Nearly crying with relief, you pop an aspirin in your mouth and wash it down with the tepid bottled water you’ve been clutching for the last hour.

Beth's voice rings out from behind you, talking over the din of the nearby DJ set. “What are you doing?”

You turn towards her, and see Beth staring at the tin in your hand. “I have cramps,” you explain, and just as you’re about to shove the tin back in her bag and hand it to her, she grabs your wrist.

“…please tell me you didn’t just take one of those,” she says urgently.

You raise an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because those are not aspirin, babe.”

Your blood runs cold. Your brain quickly does the math — Beth had told you how much she’s looking forward to meeting up with her rave friends tomorrow for the second night of Pitt Fest. Beth has always been quite the partier. And she often partied with her good friend Molly.

Your eyes widen in horror. “Oh no.”

Pitt Fest, as always, is a huge pain in the ass for the night shift.

Handoff gets messy. There's a shit ton of substance cases, even more of heatstroke. Robby stays longer than he should and snaps at everyone, clearly in his feelings remembering last year’s Pitt Fest. Understandable, yes, but it also makes everyone’s life that much harder when they’re within sniping distance of him.

Needless to say, Jack is already over this shift, and it’s not even halfway done. It doesn't help that his favorite resident happens to have the night off, which deposits his mood firmly in the hospital basement. Which, coincidentally, happens to be the location of the morgue.

Now that Robby has been politely ordered to go the fuck home, Jack feels like he can finally focus on his job instead of doing damage control with the med students. As he walks down the hall, Lena catches his attention from the hub desk.

“We have an ambulance two minutes out with a mid-20s female, collapsed at Pitt Fest,” she informs him. “Probable dehydration, likely drug-related, because, well… Pitt Fest.”

This festival truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Jack cracks his knuckles and eyes the ambulance bay doors. “All right. Let's get ready to receive the party girl.”

A few minutes later, the gurney is wheeled in by two paramedics and received by Lena and Parker. Parker shoots an alarmed and confused look over her shoulder at Jack, who steps forward to supervise.

“Dr. Abbot!"

Of all the things Jack expected to see tonight, this is at the bottom of the list. You're strapped to the gurney, scantily clad and gleaming with sweat, a goofy smile on your face and your pupils blown so wide they nearly swallow your irises.

Jack scrubs a hand through his hair. “You're shitting me.”

This is quite the surprising turn of events.

After Lena sets you up in South 16, Jack discreetly shoos away Parker so he can handle your examination himself. He doubts you would be comfortable with one of your fellow residents seeing you like this, considering your condition and your current state of dress.

Jack closes the door behind him and saunters over to you. His eyes snag on your tight, strappy top, and the strategically placed cutouts baring sections of your midriff and chest. He’s holding onto his professionalism by a thread, especially with the way you’re shifting around on the exam table, causing the hem of your miniskirt to ride up.

He has no choice but to focus up. You need medical attention, not the kind of attention his brain and body really want to give you right now. First, Lena takes your temperature and shows him the number on the display. 100.2 degrees F. It's coming down from what the paramedics recorded in the ambulance, and not so high that he’s still worried about heat stroke. But you’ll need cooling down regardless.

“That’s quite the outfit you got on,” he mutters as he gently raises your chin and shines his penlight into your pupils.

“Do you like it?” you ask, beaming up at him even as you squint. “I borrowed it from my friend. She’s so nice.”

Your pupils are so dilated that your eyes are almost completely black.

“Yup.” Jack clicks off the light and sighs, turning to Lena. “She’s rolling, all right. Let’s get a tox to make sure there’s nothing else to be worried about.”

You don’t seem to even register the pain of the needle prick, but you let out a delighted little hum when Lena smooths a bandage over your arm and adds gentle pressure over top of it.

“That feels good,” you murmur with a lazy smile.

“I bet.” Jack crosses his arms and tries to give you a stern look. “Can I ask what my best resident is doing taking ecstasy at a music festival?”

“I didn’t take it on purpose, I swear,” you protest, your eyes widening in a brief panic. “It was my friend’s. I thought it was aspirin, for my cramps.”

“You’re menstruating?” he asks, picking up his tablet and sitting in the edge of the exam table next to you to amend your chart.

You shake your head and say matter-of-factly, “Ovulation cramps.”

His eyebrows shoot up towards the ceiling in surprise. 

You continue babbling, unaware of the grenade you just lobbed at Jack. “She tried to get me to throw it up, but I couldn’t because I don’t really have a gag reflex.”

Jack takes a deep breath to prevent his brain from completely short-circuiting. 

Your face breaks into a sheepish smile, and you giggle, “Oops. Sorry, that was probably too much information.” Leaning forward on the exam table, you bring your face inches away from his and observe with a sigh, “Your eyes are really pretty.”

From behind him, Jack hears Lena snickering under her breath. He clears his throat and straightens up to standing.

Avoiding Lena's eyes, he instructs her, “Let’s, uh, get her some fluids and cooling packs, huh? Maybe a Saf-T-Pop, too. Keep her mouth occupied, so she won’t say any more nonsense she’ll regret in the morning.”

Lena just shoots him an amused look and heads off to gather supplies. Nurses, he thinks ruefully to himself. They see everything.

Movement and sound draw his attention back to you. You're laid back on the exam table, eyes fluttering closed. And you’re running your hands through your hair, letting out a pleased little noise like the sensation is better than sex. 

Jack breathes carefully through his nose. He needs out of this room with you, before this becomes mortifying for everyone involved. His phone buzzes in his pocket, giving him the perfect excuse for escape.

His voice is thin when he speaks, and for a moment, he’s glad you’re too high to notice. “You sit tight, sunshine.” 

As he turns to leave the room, your hand catches the edge of his scrubs.

“You’re leaving?” your mouth turns down into a pout, those huge eyes shining up at him. He very nearly gives in, very nearly reaches out a hand to stroke a thumb across your cheek just to hear the kind of sound it would pull from you. But his phone buzzes insistently, so he briefly pats your knee instead.

“I have other patients to see. But I'll be back before you know it,” he assures you, pulling open the door and diving headfirst back into the glorious chaos.

At least it’ll be a convenient distraction from the thought of you, eagerly waiting in south fifteen for him to return.

He shakes his head in disbelief. Ovulation cramps. You’re gonna be the death of him.

An MVA, a ketamine overdose, and a cardiac event later, the Pitt finally slows down enough for Jack to breathe. Enough to check your tox screen and sigh with relief that the MDMA you mistakenly took wasn’t cut with anything. Alcohol is the only other thing in your system, in levels not high enough to be concerning. Although, combined with the ecstasy, it means you probably won’t remember much of this exciting little escapade.

At long last, he manages to find some time to check on you. 

In his absence, Lena had set you up with a gown to preserve a little more of your modesty. You’re laying on the exam table amongst the cooling packs, an IV attached to your arm and a Saf-T-Pop in your mouth that’s turning your tongue red. 

A smile breaks like sunrise over your face as soon as you see him.

“Hey there, sunshine,” he greets you, approaching you with a little more warmth now that Lena's sharp eyes aren’t here to observe.

“Hi. I missed you,” you sigh.

Jack smirks. “Did you now?”

You nod happily. “Mm-hmm.”

“How are you feeling?” he asks, his gaze attentive, checking you over.

“Cold,” you answer, wrapping your arms around yourself.

He reaches up a hand to feel your forehead. Still warm, but still steadily coming down over time. He’s satisfied enough with your progress. You'll be out of here in no time.

The prospect disappoints him just a little.

“Yeah, your body is having trouble regulating its temperature,” he explains, his thumb stroking delicately along your hairline. “We’ll need to keep these cool packs on you a little while longer.”

Just as his hand retreats, your hand catches his wrist. You press his palm to your cheek, almost nuzzling into it like an affectionate kitten.

“Your hands are so warm,” you murmur, eyelids slipping shut as you revel in the sensation.

The gesture catches him off guard, but he doesn’t pull away. He couldn’t even if he wanted to, and he certainly doesn’t want to.

“Easy there, gorgeous,” he chuckles softly. “I need that hand for doctoring.”

Your eyelids flutter halfway open, and you look up at him with a lazy grin, clearly pleased as punch. “You think I'm gorgeous?”

Jack freezes for a moment. The word had slipped out without him even registering it, familiar and endeared and entirely too revealing. 

“I plead the fifth,” he replies, warmth creeping up his neck.

You giggle again. God, that sound does things to his heart that are medically concerning.

“I think you’re gorgeous,” you mumble dreamily.

Jack blinks in surprise.

He’s been a little too fond of you for a while now, been staring a little too long when you brush past him in the halls. And he’s suspected before that it might not be completely one-sided. He sees how you receive his attention and praise differently than the other attendings, how you look at him with more than just the admiration of a mentor. But suspecting it and having it be confirmed are two different things. Especially since you wouldn’t be saying any of this if you were sober.

He tries to laugh it off before his ego can run away with the compliment. “I think you’re high.”

You shrug. “Maybe. But I always think you’re gorgeous.”

Removing his palm from your cheek, you examine it with fascination, running a finger along the deep set lines. “I think about these,” you say thoughtfully. “All the time.”

Jack is a little ashamed at how quickly that comment goes straight to his cock. His favorite resident, fantasizing about his hands, maybe even touching yourself to the thought of them, wishing your own fingers were his—

He drags his free hand over his face and mutters, "Jesus Christ."

“Can I tell you a secret?” You peer up at him again, that goofy, starstruck smile returning. “I’ve got, like, the biggest crush on you.”

Unfortunately for Jack, there is very little time to process this very interesting information before his phone buzzes again. Just beyond the doors, he can hear the familiar sound of what is likely a high-priority trauma heading into the bay. Voices overlapping in urgent tones, gurney wheels on tile floor, grunts and yelps of pain from a patient.

Jack crosses to the door in two steps, and speaks over his shoulder to you. “Hey, baby, I gotta handle something. Stay out of trouble, okay?”

As the door swings shut behind him, he just manages to catch the sound of you happily mumbling to yourself, “He called me baby.”

Which is how he heads into Trauma 1 with a smile on his face, entirely too cheerful for a man facing down a compound femur fracture. 

The shift that would never fucking end is almost fucking over. And all Jack can think about is you. You and your moony, lovey-dovey eyes and your wide, childlike smile. You gazing up at him and crooning I have the biggest crush on you. You giggling and telling him point-blank that you’re ovulating.

As he rolls out of yet another demanding trauma, Lena updates him on your condition. You’re rehydrated and back to a normal temperature, pretty much ready for discharge if you can be released to someone who will take care of you. He returns to your room, finding you unhooked from your IV and cold-pack-free, happily set up with another lollipop.

“Jack, you’re back!” you exclaim, and then laugh at your accidental rhyme.

Still rolling, he thinks. He checks his watch. According to your best guess of when you took the ‘aspirin’ in your friend’s purse, it’s been about four hours. You'll be due to start coming down anytime in the next two hours or so. He's due to head out, but he can’t bring himself to go home until he knows you’re leaving in capable hands.

“Hey, sunshine.” He offers you a tired but warm smile. “Seems like you’re in pretty good shape here, and you should be tapering off pretty soon. You got anybody to take you home, keep an eye on you?”

A little crease forms between your brows as you think hard. “I don’t know where my friend went when the ambulance came. And I think my phone died,” you add pathetically, gesturing to the device in your lap and its terminally black screen.

Jack pinches the bridge of his nose. He can’t in good conscience leave you to your own devices, especially when you’ve never taken ecstasy before. At worst, there’s still a chance you could have some kind of reaction. At best, the comedown is sure to knock you on your ass. 

He can only think of one thing to do. It's not the best idea. It might not even be a good idea. But his brain is too addled from the long shift to come up with anything better. And you need someone to take care of you.

“Jesus. Okay,” he mutters to himself, then sits on the edge of the exam table, bringing his face level to yours. “Listen up, sunshine.”

You gaze at him intently, attention vacillating occasionally between his eyes and his mouth. Jack has a feeling that what he’s about to say will go in one ear and right out the other. But there’s a chance you’ll retain it, so he says it anyway.

“You're gonna have a pretty serious crash when you come down. All those happy little chemicals that are making you feel good right now?” He gives you a soft little tap against your temple, and you giggle softly. He continues, “They’re gonna go on vacation for a day or two. I don't want you dealing with that on your own. So I'm gonna take you to my place, just to watch out for you until you’re feeling a little more like yourself.”

You’re quiet for a minute, your brain catching up and computing the meaning of what he just said. When it finishes, the lightbulb goes off behind your eyes, and you ask excitedly, “We’re having a sleepover?”

Of course that would be your takeaway. 

He chuckles as he helps you to your feet. “That's right. You got it.”

When Jack drapes his hoodie over your shoulders and guides you out of the Pitt to his car, he’s reminded of all the reasons that this is probably a terrible idea.

He sees the watchful eyes and the knowing smirks of the nurses. He sees Parker and Crus snickering behind their hands. He sees Shen counting up his winnings from the betting pool, because he wrote down molly and tripsitter Abbot.

And he feels your hand clinging to his bicep, sees how you gaze up at him with a dreamy expression as he walks you out to his car. He’s knows he’s really going to need to behave himself for a few hours, because there’s a very good chance that you won’t, and Jack doesn’t want to accidentally take advantage of your… impaired judgement.

You spend most of the ride with your face by the cracked car window, feeling the wind on your face, eyes blissfully closed. Jack thanks his lucky stars that he thought to give the apartment a once-over before shift, so he isn’t bringing you into a total mess.

He walks you into his bedroom and gestures to the en-suite. “Bathroom’s there, if you want to take a shower. I'll find you something a little more… comfortable to wear,” he adds, peeling his eyes away from your tiny little shirt and how you’re already fussing with the straps.

As he turns to his bureau to find you a t-shirt, he feels arms wrapping around his middle, your body molding to his back as you embrace him with a sigh. “Thank you for being so nice to me.”

Jack swallows and delicately removes your hands, stepping out of your embrace and ushering you in the direction of the bathroom.

“Go on, then,” he instructs you. “While you’re still upright.”

You barely even register it as rejection, heading towards the shower and wiggling out of your top before Jack even has the chance to close the door behind you. Which he does, quickly and with his eyes glued to the floor.

His instincts were right. He will very much need to behave himself while you’re here.

He busies himself while you shower by changing out of his scrubs and assembling a meal. It's a humble offering — just a couple of sandwiches and frozen french fries heated up in the oven, but it’s better than nothing. 

After about twenty minutes, you emerge from the bedroom with damp hair and your face scrubbed clean, clad in one of his t-shirts and a pair of his boxers, smelling like his soap. You lean on his kitchen island with a contented little sigh. 

Jack repeats it to himself like a mantra — behave yourself.

“Time to eat something,” he says, sliding one of the plates toward you.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I know. But I'm trying to set you up for success here, so you don’t feel as awful when this is out of your system. When's the last time you ate?” he asks.

You rest your chin on your hand as you think back. “I had… lunch.”

“Thought so.” He puts the plate into your hands and steers you in the direction of the couch with a hand on your lower back. “You and I are gonna eat these sandwiches, drink some water, and watch Planet Earth.”

You gasp in delight and plop down onto the couch. “I love Planet Earth!”

He knows you do. You'd gushed about it being your favorite docuseries at work, and he’d bragged about owning the box set. It had been the first day you and he had really started to bond.

Once the tv is on, it thankfully keeps you occupied. You chew your food slowly, enraptured with the beautiful imagery on the screen. Managing a decent effort with the meal, you eat half the sandwich and most of the fries before you start to lose a little steam.

You abandon your plate on the coffee table, then take Jack completely by surprise as you lean over to lay your head in his lap.

He goes still for a moment, unsure if he should be allowing this. But he doesn’t have the heart to push you away, so he puts his plate aside and lets a hand come to rest on your shoulder.

You sigh happily and snuggle closer.

It's been so long since Jack has taken care of someone like this that he’d almost forgotten what it feels like. How good it feels to be needed. The easy intimacy of sharing a space, sharing a meal, of letting someone melt against you after a long night.

Affectionately, he brushes a stray lock of hair out of your face, and you practically purr in response, leaning into his hand. So Jack keeps doing it, keeps gently stroking his fingers through your hair, preferring to watch your relaxing form instead of the polar bears on screen.

The two of you spend nearly an hour like that, until your breath starts to take on that even, drowsy quality and Jack’s own brain starts calling for rest. He gently eases you off his lap to sit up, takes you by the hand and leads you to bed, already resigning himself to the aching back that a couch nap is going to earn him.

Jack sets you up with a glass of water and the best blankets in the linen closet. As he turns to head back to the living room, your hand grabs his arm, pulling him back.

“Stay.”

Your voice is low and warm. You're sitting up in his bed, his sheets pooled around your knees. Your eyes are dark, tempting, pleading.

Jack knows dangerous territory when he sees it.

Still, your serotonin is due to start dropping any time now, and hurt feelings are only going to be worsened once it does. Jack sits carefully on the edge of the bed, maintaining a few inches of distance, his other hand gently cradling your cheek.

“Sorry, sunshine. Not a good idea.”

You move closer, your gaze fixed firmly on his mouth. “Why?”

Best behavior, Jack. 

“Because you’re still tapering off. Plus, I just worked a long shift and I need to sleep.” He takes in a deep breath as he feels your hand slide across his shoulders. “And I've got a feeling I won't be getting much rest next to you.”

In a move so surprising that Jack is momentarily powerless to stop it, you rise up onto your knees and shift to straddle one of his thighs.

“What if I promise to be really, really good?” you murmur sweetly.

Jack knows he should stop you, and he almost does. But then you rock your hips on his thigh, the tiniest little life-ruining movement, and you let out the softest, neediest little sound. Suddenly, Jack is hanging onto his sanity and self control-by a thread. And that thread is fraying rapidly.

“Baby,” he whispers, half warning and half plea. His hands come to your hips, torn between stopping you and spurring you on.

Your hips rock again, more purposeful this time. “Please,” you beg quietly, so close now that your lips just barely brush against his.

For a few shameful moments, Jack forgets about his fatigue and the ache in his leg and he wonders… how morally reprehensible would it really be to just let you get off on his thigh? You’d said yourself that you’re ovulating, probably making you even needier. Fuck, he can feel how badly you want it, wetness soaking through the boxers you’re wearing and Jack’s sweatpants. Would it really be so awful of him to sit passively as you hump his leg to get the relief you’re clearly so desperate for? To take pity on you and let you use him for your pleasure? 

But he knows it would be wrong, because he’d be getting off on it even if you didn’t touch him. You're not in your right mind, and he doesn’t want to make you come for the first time when you’re whacked out on MDMA.

Summoning the will from deep inside himself, he stills your hips and eases you off of his thigh, ignoring your whines as he nudges you back onto the pillows.

“It wouldn’t be right. I'm not touching you until you’re sober,” he says firmly.

Jack gets to his feet and tucks the blankets around you. “I’ll see you in a few hours. Wake me if you need anything.” He laughs softly at the pointed pouting look you shoot his way. “Other than that.”

“You’re no fun,” you call after him as he retreats into the living room.

Once the bedroom door is shut behind him, he collapses on the couch and wrestles off his prosthetic, punching a throw pillow a few times to soften it before going horizontal. Even after what felt like the longest shift he’s had in months, he’s unsure how much sleep he’ll actually manage to get knowing you’re in the next room. Probably snuggling one of his pillows as if it’s him, probably squeezing your thighs together until the last of the drugs leave your system.

He groans and rolls over, willing his body and his still half-hard cock to go to sleep.

You wake feeling like death warmed over.

You’re in a bed that doesn’t belong to you, but smells familiar and comforting. Same with your clothes. A few memories make it through the fog, blurry and out of order. Planet Earth. Jack’s hand, warm and pleasant on your cheek. An ambulance ride. Lena ruffling your hair and handing you a lollipop. A shower with a chair and a grab bar and soap that smells like Jack.

You’re at Jack's apartment, you realize with a start.

Checking the time groggily, you observe that you've slept from the early morning until late afternoon. Thank god you’d asked for tonight off as well, anticipating you’d need recovery time after Pitt Fest. 

You can vaguely recall the warm, fuzzy feelings you’d experienced last night. In the abstract, at least. Now, you feel mostly guilt and shame and embarrassment and anxiety. How could you have been so stupid?

Sounds of life echo from the kitchen, which means Jack has woken up ahead of you. Your guilt sharpens. Jack is spending his hard-earned downtime taking care of you, because of your own carelessness.

Fatigue clings to your bones as you shuffle to the bathroom. The reflection in the mirror is less than kind. Dark shadows frame your eyes, worse than the usual bags worn by the night shift crew. Your hair is a mess, and you sigh as you comb your fingers through to tame it.

Time to face the music.

You trudge out into the kitchen, where Jack is wearing an apron over a t-shirt and sweats and cooking an omelette, looking awfully chipper for having slept seven hours on the couch. He looks so good that it briefly makes you angry. Fuck him for looking so good, while you look and feel like utter dogshit.

Of course, that annoyance turns to guilt again when he looks up and smiles.

“Hey, lover girl,” he greets you warmly as you lean on the kitchen island. “How are you feeling?”

You rub your eyes and groan, “Like I got hit by a Mack truck.”

He squeezes your shoulder fondly and grabs a plate from an overhead cabinet. “Let’s get some food and water in you.”

“Thank you,” you mutter sheepishly. “I’m sorry about… all this.”

“Don't even worry about it, sunshine.” 

Jack hands you a glass of water and starts making you a plate. You accept it with a grimace. “I'm not feeling very sunshine-y right about now. I can't remember half of what happened after I went down at the concert.”

“I hope we’ve learned not to go digging for meds in that particular friend’s purse.” He smirks and sets a plate in front of you. A vegetable omelette and buttered toast. Your appetite hasn’t yet returned to its normal levels, but your doctor brain knows that you really need to eat, so you reach for the toast first.

“Never again,” you vow as you take a bite.

In the light of day and out from under the influence of Beth's ‘aspirin,’ you get a good look at Jack's apartment for the first time as he assembles his own plate. It's not spotless, but it’s generally tidy, and it’s a very nice place. Good furniture, great windows with better blackout shades, a nice floor plan. Its niceness only makes you feel smaller.

You poke at your omelette, stewing. “Jack?”

“Yes?”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but…why am I here?”

He plates his own omelette and leans a hip against the kitchen island. “You’d never taken MDMA before, and I knew you’d be in for a hell of a drop. I didn't want you to be on your own.”

You resist the urge to frown. This whole saga is doing nothing to remedy your tragic crush on him. Did he have to be so nice and caring on top of everything else? It feels a little unfair at the moment.

“That’s… very considerate,” you mumble.

“What can I say? I'm a considerate guy.” He pops a bite of omelette into his mouth with a wink.

A thought occurs to you that briefly makes your stomach turn. “Does the whole Pitt know?”

Jack's expression tells you everything you need to know before he even speaks. “There… might have been a betting pool on the subject. Shen cleaned up.”

You drop your face into your hands. “Awesome. That's really awesome.”

Every single one of your coworkers knows that you spent the night rolling. Tears prick at your eyes beneath your palms, which only worsens your humiliation. The last thing you need right now is to cry in front of Jack Abbot. Even if it’s just because the chemicals in your brain are out of whack, it doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

“Hey.” Jack's hand finds your shoulder again. “Don’t worry about it. They're good people, no one is judging you.”

Despite your best efforts, a mortifying little sniffle slips out at the kindness in his voice. 

 “Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Come here.”

You can’t bear to look up, but your breath hitches in surprise when Jack pulls you into his arms. Instantly, your brain begins to quiet, focusing on the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath your cheek, the reassuring weight of his arms around you, the slow arc of his thumb rhythmically stroking your shoulder blade.

It's medicine. Oxytocin and dopamine, feel-good chemicals produced by physical touch, bolstering your brain against the sapped well of serotonin the ecstasy left in its wake. It also makes your heart flutter pathetically in your chest.

He holds you for a long moment, his grip tightening when you finally loop your arms around his waist and return the embrace.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” you whisper, allowing the comfort to sink into your skin and fill your lungs. 

“Of course.”

Jack only pulls away when you do, gently swiping a calloused thumb underneath your eye to banish the straggling tear that managed to escape. 

“Let’s get comfortable on the couch,” he says, a hand settling on your back to guide you. “You’re still on the comedown.”

You worry you might be overstaying your welcome. But Jack seems to be in no rush to get you out of his apartment, content to let you rot on his couch as long as you need to. Surely he must have better things to do on his night off than take care of you, but he sits sentry at your side without complaint.

After some consideration, Planet Earth is tabled for the time being — even if you’ve seen it before, animal death is sure to bring back the waterworks in your current state. Flipping through channels, you settle on a cheesy mid-2000s rom-com that you’ve seen before and snuggle back into the couch cushions. 

Through it all, you feel the comfort of his steady presence, his hand rubbing idle circles on your back, like an IV drip of Vitamin Jack straight to your brain. You give into the feeling, too worn out to fight it, curling into his side. Eventually, you feel a gentle graze at your scalp as he idly plays with your hair. It surprises you for a moment, but you’re not complaining in the slightest. You melt into it, eyes fluttering closed until you’re slipping in and out of a light doze.

Afternoon fades to evening, to dinnertime, to nighttime, to bedtime. Even after your intermittent sleep, your fatigue is still bone deep, and Jack insists you can stay the night. You really try to convince him to let you take the couch, but he refuses, insisting that your body needs proper rest to return to baseline. At the end of the night, he sends you off to bed with a smirk.

When you wake up in Jack's bed for the second time, it’s much less disorienting. It helps that you’re much clearer than you were seventeen hours ago. The clock reads 9:05 am — you have the whole day ahead of you to shower, change, and steel yourself for the humiliation ritual that is bound to be your shift tonight.

You stumble into the living room, bleary-eyed. Jack is reclined on the couch with a laptop and readers perched on the end of his nose. Ugh, fuck him again for looking so good.

His eyes find yours over the edge of the screen. “Hey there. You sleep good?”

“Mm-hmm,” you reply, stretching. “I'm feeling much better, I think.”

His mouth curves at the corner. “Good.”

Leaning on the edge of the couch, you sigh and glance at the clock on the wall. “I should probably head home soon, get my life together before shift tonight. Would you be able to drive me home?”

“Sure thing, sunshine.” 

After you eat breakfast and shower off the cast of bedrotting from the day before, you change back into the clothes you arrived in, which Jack took the liberty of washing for you. As much as you appreciate the gesture, you blanch at the idea of Jack handling your underwear, and try very hard not to think about that mental image.

As the quiet car ride progresses, you ponder your looming fate, mentally preparing yourself for the teasing you’ll get from the nurses and other residents. It's disorienting to not know what you’re walking into, to have been mentally absent for most of it.

You can’t resist the urge to ask anymore. “Was I a total mess?”

He nods, amused. “Yes. But a very cute mess.”

“God, this is so embarrassing,” you groan. “What did I say?”

“Are you sure you wanna know?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.

That makes you pause, glancing at him warily. “…was it bad?” 

“You got a little fixated on hands for a while.” Jack pauses, like he isn’t sure how much to reveal, if you’re ready to handle it. “Said you think about mine all the time.”

Suddenly, you feel a bit sick, even though the car is headed in a straight line down the road. If that's just where it starts… if that’s not the worst of it, then what is?

“Oh god,” you whisper in horror. 

“You said you think I'm gorgeous,” he continues, voice thick with amusement. “And that you have a big ol’ crush on me. And… you might’ve tried to seduce me a little at bedtime.”

Your cheeks flare hot. This is quite possibly the worst outcome of the situation aside from death. At the moment, death feels preferable.

You stare straight ahead, sinking in your seat and pressing your hands to your forehead to try and keep your brain from exploding. “Excuse me, I'm just gonna open the door and go lay down in traffic.”

He laughs, the sound warm and fond and doing absolutely nothing to temper your embarrassment. “It's okay.”

“It is completely not okay, Jack,” you protest, turning your body away from him and towards the passenger side door, like that will save you from this conversation.

Jack places a hand on your thigh.

All the systems in your brain go down simultaneously.

His palm rests just above your knee, not high enough to be too inappropriate, but it’s intimate. Especially because your choice of garment for Pitt Fest leaves your leg bare and exposed to his touch. Never once does he take his eyes off the road.

“It was flattering,” he says coolly, his thumb rubbing soothing circles over your knee. “And extremely cute.”

He lets the assertion hang in the silence, and he doesn’t move his hand, letting it rest warm and comfortable against the soft skin of your thigh.

After some considerable effort, you remember how to breathe. Once the oxygen makes it to your brain, you manage to peel your hands away from your face and peek sideways at him. 

“…really?” you ask, because you need the confirmation. Does Jack Abbot — your mentor, the object of all your desires, and the man who just babysat you through an unwitting MDMA trip — really think you’re cute?

He gives your thigh a gentle squeeze. “Really.”

There isn’t much else to say for the rest of the car ride. Jack keeps his hand on your thigh until he turns down your street and throws the car in park. You try and fail to suppress a smile the whole way, and allow him to walk you up to your building’s front step, palms tingling with anticipation.

“I’d like to do this again sometime,” he says as you unlock the main entrance. “Minus the party drugs.”

You grin up at him, slightly emboldened by the revelations that occurred in the car. “You wanna have another sleepover?”

“Very much.” His eyes crinkle at the edges when he smiles back. “See you tonight?”

“See you tonight.”

You turn to head inside, but Jack catches your elbow. “Hey. One last thing.”

Before you have time to register his closeness, a hand slides along your waist, another cupping your jaw, and Jack is kissing you.

A warm, pleasant feeling floods you from top to toe, a high rivalling the chemical one you’d experienced twenty-eight hours ago. He kisses you like he’s been thinking about it that entire twenty-eight hours. It's tender and hungry at the same time. By the time he pulls away, your lips follow after his and you almost stumble forward into his arms.

You open your eyes and blink up at him, feeling a little dazed and starstruck again.

“Had to wait until you were level,” Jack murmurs. He gives you a lingering peck at the corner of your mouth and descends down the front steps to his car.

You beam after him.

Maybe that's why he liked you so much, liked to be around you all the time, because people didn't stare at you strangely or murmur around you. You were merely the pretty girl with the big heart and even bigger smile who enjoyed going for walks on the beach.

It was strange how different you were from each other.

He'd notice how you had to say a quiet 'excuse me' at every opportunity since people wouldn't pay attention to you. Even when you announced yourself, they would barely move for you, as if you were meant to be content with the minimal space they had left available for you. Despite everything, you'd continue to smile and express gratitude.

Unlike Pope, who people purposefully tried to avoid, trying not to touch him at any cost. They'd move away even if they didn't have to, just so they'd show him their hatred, remind him that he wasn't welcome. He knew that later on they'd gossip, talk in whispers about how Pope Cody walked by them today, how they feared for their life.

Invisibility seemed to be a curse for you, while it remained a wish for him. 

He watched your face fall whenever people ignored you. You hated people not acknowledging you. You hated recognizing people from high school and seeing them glance at you in passing like you were a stranger, unable to assign you a name, because they'd never cared enough to find out. You despised the fact that even if they did remember you, all they'd recall was you being the quiet girl in the back, that they'd cheat off and use for assignments, because she was too scared to say no.

It was so different from the image that Pope had, that sometimes he felt like the devil simply for keeping you company. Because despite it all, he knew how much you hated attention. 

All you wanted was to be acknowledged, not to be stared at.

He felt guilty when he'd help you get groceries and watch your eyes dart to the men staring at Pope with both angry and fearful expressions. You'd eye them cautiously, before glancing back at Pope, who would stare back to see how you would react. And all you would do was ask him if he thought this brand of cookies was nice. And he could feel his shoulder relax somewhat in relief. Relief he wasn't supposed to feel because there was nothing to be relieved about.

You were being put in an uncomfortable position because of him, yet you persevered because you were too kind for your own good. He could see your eyes dart back to the men, nervous, like you were afraid they'd start something, like you were afraid he'd start something. 

He couldn't possibly know that you were staring at them wishing they would stop, that for once in his life they'd let Pope have an outing with no stares. That, of course, you were uncomfortable, but all you wanted was for them to quit making Pope uncomfortable first.

It sat on your chest heavily, the knowing that this is what Pope's life was. At home, he could hardly take two steps without Smurf's piercing stare and outside, her influence remained, the poison she'd fed to everyone residing in every oceanside local.

Pope didn't have a home.

At least that's how you saw it. His home wasn't a real home, a home was supposed to be a place of warmth, one where you could go if you were restless, if you were feeling uneasy, to let your emotions out. Smurf's house, instead, was one where his emotions would pile up, where Pope was put through a ringer of emotions: anger, sadness, frustration, depression. 

It seemed like everyone else had an escape. Craig had his friends, Renn, parties. He had an active social life, he was liked and people looked at him with delight, asking him if he wanted to surf, if he was planning to throw a party later this week, if they could show up. Deran's bar had a life of its own. Not just socially, but also financially. And his own place. 

They both had places to go back to.

Pope had nothing and no one seemed to care about it.

So you tried to make your place as homely as you could. Every chance you got, you'd invite him over.

You'd never considered your home to be a home. It was too big and too empty. No one came and no one left. The kitchen only had your finger trips all over it, and so did every other inch of the place. You thought about getting a cat, but you figured you weren't good enough to take care of it. You were all over the place most of the time, had too much on your mind. 

So, instead, you kept cat food at your place. If a stray cat showed up you'd feed it, but that was it. No other heart was beating in your bed. No other living being breathed the same air as you. Everything was one. One frozen pizza. One toothbrush. One pile of laundry.

Neither you nor Pope realized how slowly it happened.

You'd been at the beach, sitting on a bench, thinking about putting your feet in the water, when you'd heard Pope talking on the phone. Ears perking up like a cat, you'd turned and spotted him immediately, leaning against his car, phone against his ear.

You didn't announce yourself, instead turning your body back to the beach, fingers restlessly tapping against your thigh as you watched a little girl be swept up by her feet by her dad and dragged to the water, where she screeched loudly and happily.

You felt a smile form on your face as you watched her and her father get drenched in the water. So distracted you didn't notice Pope approach you, able to recognize you merely from the back of your head. He stepped closer until he was standing right next to your bench.

You glanced to the side, already seemingly having expected him to notice you. Because he just always did.

You greeted him with a soft smile. "Hi Andrew."

"Hey," he glanced at the beach, eyes immediately locking onto the same father daughter duo you'd had been watching. His face didn't form a smile like yours had earlier. No, you saw something almost sad creep into his expression. And you hated to think that this reminded him of Lena.

You spoke up quickly. "What are you doing at the beach?" patting the bench next to you.

"Work," was all he said as he settled down next to you.

You'd been always content enough with that response. You didn't want to know the details, didn't care to know the specifics. You had a vague understanding that the Codys did things that did not strictly abide by the law, but you had no interest in finding out what exactly.

"You?" he asked, remembering his manners that he was so hard trying to work on when it came to you. 

He might've spent one night skipping one of his nature documentaries and instead looked for a channel with a romantic comedy playing. He'd figured he'd learn a thing or two from it, considering you were so very fond of theses movies. 

You always rented them at the library, and he remembered the first time you'd told him about it. He'd furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. "People still use DVDs?" You'd been gravely offended.

He didn't learn anything from the movie, except that he was nothing like those men and that the happy endings just left him feeling hollow. 

"Work was tiring. Just needed to relax for a bit." You smiled at him, finally lifting your eyes from the girl who was still giggling around with her father.

Pope hummed. He would have loved to offer you money to help you out, he'd even tried to get you to move into one of his buildings. But you loved your apartment too much, telling him it wasn't much, but it was close to the beach and the ice cream stand you liked so much. So, instead, he resorted to helping you in small ways. Groceries, ice cream, your books, even paying for your library card.

He tried his hardest to be the gentleman he wished to be. 

No one in his life would describe him as a gentleman, he was sure he'd be laughed at if he ever even attempted to pretend like he was in front of his brothers, but he liked to be imagine that he was for you. He liked to pretend that maybe you looked at him and thought, oh he's chivalrous and generous, that he took care of you, that he was capable of it.

You looked back at the father daughter duo when you spoke. "Might make some pasta at home, you wanna join me?"

Pope turned his head to you, watching your profile, lit up by the sun setting behind you. "Yeah." he said, after taking some time to admire you.

You weren't amazing at cooking, but your food was, as cheesy at it sounded, cooked with love. And that was much better than whatever Smurf put on the table. Smurf's food was filling, but it never lived up to what your food did to him. 

The warmth he'd feel, the solace. He'd understood what comfort food was, the first time you'd made pasta. And it hadn't been amazing. Just normal pasta cooked by the young girl, who'd barely ever had to cook for more than herself.

But it had made him feel better than anything Smurf had ever forced him to stuff his mouth with.

The drive wasn't long. You'd walked to the beach, but Pope insisted on driving you home. So, you slid into the passenger seat, and he'd turned down the music he had been playing before. He'd noticed your tense expression, every time you stepped out of the car with Craig, as if he'd practically blasted your eardrums and made them bleed.

You shot him a grateful look, one he didn't meet because it would be too much for something so small. You always seemed to be grateful for little things. Little things that were just as simple as accommodating you or remembering something about you. Like you were hard to remember.

Pope couldn't remember a single minute since he first laid eyes on you where he hadn't thought of you. You had created a garden in his brain. Filled with flowers, blooming everywhere, while everyone else was growing poisonous vines that stretched throughout his body, killing him with every second. But not you; never you.

When you arrived, Pope turned off the car and quickly muttered. "Wait here."

You looked at him, confused, but you waited, and when you realized what he was doing, you let out a happy breath in the empty car.

Pope opened the door for you, and you smiled so wide at him, he almost believed the sun was rising instead of setting.

"Thank you," you jumped out the car, waiting for him to shut the door behind you.

An hour later, Pope was helping you with the pasta. You'd been worried about your cooking skills, so you'd asked him, and he'd been truthful. 

"It tastes good," he'd said, and you'd said his name in a slow voice. And he glanced behind you at the boiling pot. "I think it's just—needs a bit more… work." He'd tried to phrase it as nicely as he could, and it seemed to work because you'd giggled embarrassed.

"That bad, huh?"

"No—no, not that bad," he'd lifted his hand like pushing the thought away. "Good. Just—it could be better." He almost winced.

But you were still smiling, so he figured he hadn't hurt your feelings yet. "Go ahead then, Gordon Ramsay," you turned your body and pointed with your hand at the pot.

So here he was, stirring the pasta as you sat on the counter, already having given up on being useful. "Is it looking good?" you asked, your legs moving, achilles heel hitting the cabinet below you over and over again. Pope threw you his tenth concerned look this evening, not liking the way you kept hurting yourself. 

"Better than yours," he mumbled, and you let out a laugh of disbelief.

"Andrew!"

And he looked at you, first to see if you were actually offended, but you were smiling and his lips quirked up. "It's the truth," he mumbled, and you giggled, and he wanted to hear it forever.

You jumped off the counter, still shaking your head with a smile. You opened the cabinets, grabbing two plates as you went to set the table. 

You didn't give it much thought as you picked out the plate Pope preferred, or the juice he liked most. He'd always appreciated that your fridge wasn't stocked with beer and drugs like his at home. You didn't think anything of it either, when you asked him if he was okay with using one of the smaller forks, because his fa orite was still in the dishwasher. Neither did he.

Neither of you thought about how you'd made yourself a routine. One in which he became frustrated with Smurf, and went to the beach, somehow knowing that you'd be there. Even if some days you weren't, he knew eventually you would be. The same way, you knew what part of the beach he liked most, where he liked to park his car most. The way coincidentally but also not, you both would meet up without officially planning on it.

You didn't notice how your apartment seemed to transform into a home by the second.

That the things in your cupboard were piling up, that everything had doubled. That the elderly cashier at your usual grocery store had stopped hesitating before reaching for the bill Pope was holding out, but instead watched the two of you with almost an almost nostalgic gleam in her eyes. She'd watch Pope quarrel with you over placing items in the grocery bag because that was his job, taking the bag out of your hands with a disappointing huff. She'd watch you bite your lip shyly, as you handed him the bag, purposefully letting your hand brush his. The cashier's eyes would soften as she'd watch the oldest Cody brother take care of you so gently, almost making her regret the looks she'd given him over the years.

Pope had found himself a home and your home had gotten less empty.

Even if at night, Pope never stayed.

You were happy enough with what you got, like when Pope washed the dishes, not allowing you to move a finger.

Once he was done, he dried his hands and headed for the door. "Thank you—for dinner," he said, almost forgetting to add the last two words. He was thankful for more than just the food.

"Don't have to thank me," you smiled. "You did all the cooking." 

He shook his head. "I just helped," he said, and you wanted to disagree, but he shot you a look.

You bit your lip. "See you around?" 

Pope nodded, and he waited for a second, watching you lean against your door. And you watched him. He looked so pretty, relaxed and content if you even dared to say. Happiness suited him. 

With a racing heart and on the verge of passing out from fear, you stepped closer, placing a hand on the side of his neck before gently kissing his cheek. "Thank you," you whispered. Thank you for spending time with me. Thank you for cooking. Thank you for being so considerate of me. Thank you.

Pope's head nearly tilted towards your palm, wishing for more warmth, more tenderness, more of you. But then you dropped it, too nervous, too scared to ever do anything courageous and stick with it.

He didn't say anything which frightened you. Why did you kiss him? You could still feel his face warm beneath your lips and his pulse quickening under your fingertips, and you almost wanted to do it again, despite Pope's lack of response. 

But then your gaze went to his face, and you noticed the smile there. Barely there, but there was something. And your worried expression faded into a cheerful one.

You took a step back, hand on the door, and he did too. "Bye Andrew." You finally broke the quiet between you, and he managed out a barely audible. "Bye," before turning and leaving

You'd kissed his cheek. You liked him. You were thankful for something he did for you.

He just cooked. He just fed you. All he did was feed you. He didn't even have to put so much effort into it. He didn't have to shed blood, sweat and tears for it.

But more than that, you had a crush on Pope. You were pretty sure he knew what you were doing when you always came over, but he never called you out on it.

You slowly slid the terrace door open, careful not to make too much noise, and you slipped inside. You could already spot Pope, standing at the kitchen counter with his back to you. You bit your lip when you saw his choice of dark button up. You always did like his button ups.

You were about to announce yourself, let him know you were there, when you saw him stare at his palm. He hadn't even noticed you from his peripheral vision, which was saying something because Pope was usually so aware of everything around him.

You stepped closer, about to say something, when you noticed that his hand was scorching red. Red, like he'd just touched the pan next to him while it was still hot and burned his entire palm, red.

"Andrew?" you said carefully, despite your raging worry, you tried to remain calm because he seemed completely out of it. The burn looked really bad.

His head snapped up toward you, and for a second, his eyes looked blank, but then he blinked, and his gaze focused on you.

He quickly turned his back to you, reaching for a cloth and wrapping it around his hand. "Lena's in her room. Pretending to sleep," he said, his tone flat, as he lowered the temperature under the pan.

You dropped the plushies onto the table and walked toward him before you could stop yourself. He was already wiping down the counter, obsessively cleaning and trying to keep himself busy.

He turned just as you finally approached him, and for a moment, you both just stood there staring at each other, neither of you saying anything. And then you looked down at his palm, reaching for it.

You saw him flinch back for a second, but then he stopped, and he let you touch his arm. Your fingers wrapped around his elbow and you raised his arm toward you, bringing his hand closer so you could see it better. Your other hand came up to carefully unwrap the cloth he had put around it.

You bit your tongue when you saw the burn. It was worse than you'd expected. The burn covered his entire palm, spreading up his fingers and down toward his wrist. You could tell it hurt just by looking at it. And you knew, deep down in your gut, that he'd done it on purpose.

You looked up and met his hazel eyes, which were already staring down at you with that intense gaze he always had. You knew exactly what he was doing by staring at you like this. Testing you. He knew what he'd done and he knew you knew, and he was waiting to see if you'd call him out on it.

You decided against saying anything. It wouldn't help anyway.

"I'll help you take care of this," you mumbled quietly.

Pope didn't say anything. He just let you do it, his hand compliant in yours as you gently set the cloth away.

You reached for the sink, turning on the cold water and waiting for it to get properly cool. The sound of the water filled the quiet kitchen. "You'll have to stay like this for at least ten minutes," you said quietly. "Running cold water over it for ten to fifteen minutes helps reduce the swelling and keeps the burn from getting worse."

You paused, tilting your head slightly to catch his eye, waiting to see if he was ready for you to put his hand under the water. He just looked at you for a moment and then he did it wordlessly.

You kept your fingers wrapped around his wrist. "Don't use ice, by the way," you said, your voice casual, like you were just making conversation. "Ice is bad for burns. It restricts the blood vessels and can actually make the damage worse." You kept talking, explaining why water was important, why ice was bad and all the while, Pope just stared at you.

It was late, and he'd been hoping for you to finally show up. He'd been telling himself you weren't going to come, that you had better things to do than spend your evenings with him and that maybe you'd finally gotten tired of him.

He'd missed you a lot, more than he could ever say out loud. You tried to show up at least three times a week at night, and you were the highlight of his day. You were the reason he got through his days, the reason he managed to drag himself out of bed in the morning, knowing that at the end of the day, he'd see you, was what kept him going.

And you looked as pretty as ever as you softly turned his hand under the water. You had your hair free, no braids or anything, just falling around your shoulders. It was cold today, which was why he was rather concerned about your outfit. You didn't have a jacket on you, just some thin shirt that couldn't possibly be keeping you warm. He could see the goosebumps on your arms and the way you shivered slightly every now and then.

"Where's your jacket?" he spoke over the sound of the water.

You brushed a finger gently over his fingertips, checking the temperature of his skin. "Home," you mumbled distracted, squinting at his fingers. It was still red, but the water was helping. "Does it hurt?" you asked, your eyes still fixed on his palm, but you didn't get an answer right away. You glanced up and were met with Pope's naked stare, so you turned away again.

He didn't like that worried look on you. It made him feel guilty, made him wish he could take back whatever he had done that had put that expression on your face. So he forced himself to speak.

"Doesn't hurt."

It had hurt earlier, when he'd forced himself to keep pressing his hand on the hot pot. He'd needed it to hurt.

You glanced at his hand before glancing at the clock on the oven. "I'll be right back," you said quietly. "Keep it under water." You glanced at him, and he could see the worry still lingering in your eyes. You seemed reluctant to leave him alone, but you let go of his hand anyway, and Pope dropped his eyes back to the water, watching the water flow over his damaged skin.

You quickly grabbed the plushies from the table, and Pope couldn't help but notice how you'd put a bow around them, clearly made by you. You'd clearly put in the effort to make it look like a fun present for Lena.

In the process, you started taking off your shoes, hopping on one foot awkwardly as you balanced the plushies against your chest. At that, you shot him an apologetic look. You knew he hated dirt and you'd been, so caught up in the sight of his burn that you'd just walked in with your shoes on. But he didn't say anything, he just followed you with his eyes silently until you disappeared into Lena's room.

He didn't hear you say anything, so he figured Lena had finally fallen asleep. She'd insisted she wasn't tired for hours, that she wanted to stay up and watch cartoons. He was glad to know that she was finally resting.

He stayed the way you wanted him to. He stared at his red hand, watching the water cascade over his damaged skin. It was getting better.

He wasn't sure he liked the pain of his palm getting milder. That was the whole point, wasn't it? He'd done it for the pain and now he had nothing? The emptiness was already starting to creep back in and he could feel himself slipping.

When you came back, you had aloe vera gel and some small bandages with you. "Don't know why Baz has this, but it'll help," you said quietly as you finally turned off the water. The sudden silence was relieving and Pope felt his shoulders fall down finally now that the noise was gone.

You seemed relieved he'd listened to you, a soft exhale escaping your lips as you turned to face him fully. You tilted his hand gently with a concentrated look on your face.

Meanwhile, Pope stared at you again. You looked really pretty.

He hated how there wasn't a smile on your face, usually there always was. Every time you hung out with Lena, you'd help him clean up the kitchen afterward, and he'd listen to you chatter on about your day. He'd occasionally say something, but now there was nothing. It felt wrong and Pope felt uncomfortable in his skin.

But at least you were touching him. Your fingers were still wrapped around his wrist, and he could feel the warmth and softness of your skin against his.

"Let's sit on the couch," you mumbled. You grabbed his other hand and pulled him with you, and he let you lead him there.

He settled down and you sat down there right beside him. The proximity was almost too much. Your thigh pressed against his and your shoulder brushed his. He wanted to stay like this forever.

You grabbed his injured hand and put it on your thigh and he had to look away for a moment to compose himself.

You stared at his palm for a long moment before looking at him, a slightly embarrassed expression on your face. "Any idea how much of this gel I'm supposed to use?" you smiled softly. There it was.

He glanced down at his red palm. "Should be just one thin layer," he said quietly. He noticed how much you were leaning in to see his palm your face so close to his that he could practically see his reflection in your eyes. "Just enough to cover the burn. Any more and it won't absorb properly."

"Okay," you mumbled, and then you grabbed the gel and applied it gently to your fingertip. Pope tilted his head, wondering how on earth you were able to see with your hair in the way. It kept falling forward and you kept having to push it back behind your ear only for it to fall forward again.

So he just reached for your hair. His fingers brushed against the soft strands and you lifted your head immediately, staring at him in confusion. But he didn't say anything, he just grabbed it gently, managing to gather it all with one hand and hold it away from your face.

"So you can see," he said, staring back at you as his fingers brushed against the nape of your neck.

You opened your mouth to say something before closing it again. "Right. Thank you," you mumbled, looking away flustered.

He then watched you as you applied a thin layer over his palm. The gel was cool and you were right. It felt so much better and with your hair in his hand and your shoulder touching his, better didn't feel so bad right now.

If feeling better included you, he might not fear it so much anymore.

Once you were done, you set the bottle aside on the coffee table. Pope dropped his hand, watching as your hair fell all over your shoulders again. His fingers tingled slightly from where he'd been holding it, and he flexed them, already missing the feel of those soft strands between his fingers.

You grabbed tissues and cleaned your fingertip, wiping away the excess gel before tossing the tissue onto the table, missing Pope's slight frown. Then you glanced at his hand again.

"Good?" you asked softly and he nodded in response.

You then grabbed the bandage you had already gotten earlier and quickly wrapped it around his hand. You did it oh so perfectly, it was the same way he'd done it to his brothers so many times over the years.

"Tight?" you asked, your eyes still fixed on his hand, and he shook his head.

You set everything away and leaned back on the couch, staring at nothing in front of you. Pope took back his palm to his lap, resting it on his thigh. He glanced outside, at the dark sky through the window, and then back at you.

"It's late. You shouldn't drive back," he said quietly.

You brushed a hand over your face, rubbing your eyes with the heel of your palm. "Yeah. Long work day."

Pope's eyebrows furrowed. He hated when you talked about work, and you knew he hated it. He hated the way you'd come home with tired eyes and the way you'd talk about bosses who didn't appreciate you.

"You don't have to work. I can give you the money for everything you need." He'd said this before, more times than he could count. It was a conversation you've had almost every single day. He had more money than he knew what to do with and the thought of you slaving away at some job that didn't appreciate you made him want to burn the whole place down.

"Andrew," you said quietly, and that single word was enough. He pressed his lips tight together as he leaned back too, his eyes fixed on the way you pressed your knees tight together. It wasn't like the usual times, where you'd watch something on TV together and you'd softly clink your knee against his.

"Baz won't be here the entire week," he wasn't sure why he was telling you this, but he wanted you to know that you could come over without worrying about running into him.

You glanced at him, leaning your head against the couch behind you as you turned your head toward him. "Good," you said, and Pope felt his mouth twitch at that.

You were such a sweet girl, but you never quite hid your dislike for his brother. He found it entertaining. He knew why, and he knew it stemmed from a good and caring place, so he never felt the need to defend his brother to you. You weren't mean to Baz either, just a tad hostile, and Pope secretly appreciated that you had the guts to stand your ground.

Pope looked down at his bandage, closing his hand and opening it again. It hurt, and he knew it wasn't a good idea, but he did it anyway. There had to be some purpose to why he'd burned his hand. He couldn't just have it stop. But obviously you didn't let that happen.

Wordlessly, you put your hand into his. You lifted it gently from his lap and placed it in yours. He stopped moving it immediately, letting it rest there as you brushed a fingertip over the bandage.

He watched you, not bothering to hide his stare whatsoever. One of the small lights was shining on you and he could see how spaced out you were. It reminded him of himself and of all the times he'd stared at nothing. And he didn't like that. He hated hated hated it.

So he spoke the words that had been desperate to escape all night. "No one will ever have a kid with me," he said, his voice emotionless, like he was talking about the weather.

Your head snapped up at that, your eyes widening as they darted across his face. "What?" you said sounding genuinely confused. But there was also genuine terror in your voice because what a horrible thing to say about yourself and believe.

"Baz said it," was all he said, his voice still flat as he stared at you to know what you actually thought. He didn't want empty platitudes or meaningless reassurances. He wanted the truth and he would only get that by looking at your face.

You opened your mouth and closed it again, your brain scrambling for the right words. Your hand tightened on his palm, almost giving him the pain he'd been craving earlier but then you realized what you were doing and you loosened your grip.

"Your brother might be the biggest jerk I've ever known in my life," you finally said, and Pope couldn't help the small smile that formed on his face. You'd never been this direct about your hatred towards Baz. "He sucks," you added and the bluntness of it made the small smile on his face twitch wider. "He's a terrible person and he says terrible things, and none of them are true."

And then you met his eyes properly. "And he's a liar. Every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie, and you know it. You know he just says things to tear them down and to make himself feel better."

Pope stared at you, his hazel eyes studying yours, trying to find the lie he believed was there. He didn't let much emotion show on his face, but you didn't look away. It was Pope who finally looked away first, which didn't happen very often.

You stared at his side profile and then tapped his bandaged hand lightly, drawing his attention back to you. "Hey, i'm here with you, aren't I?"

He met your eyes again, not saying anything.

"You're here taking care of Lena. Not Baz. You're here making her food. Not Baz. You're the one who picked her up from school. Not Baz," you said quietly as you held his stare. "You're the one who stays up with her when she has nightmares. You're the one who plays with her and makes her laugh and reads her bedtime stories. Not Baz."

You paused, swallowing hard, your hand still resting gently over his bandaged one. "You're a better dad to Lena than Baz will ever be," your voice cracking slightly.

As he kept looking at you, you pushed yourself to hold eye contact. "You start taking Lena to the park more regularly and the moms will start throwing themselves at you when they see how good you are to her," you said, a small smile tugging at your lips. "They'll be lining up to get your attention. You'll have to fight them off with Lena."

His lips twitched at that and it made your heart flutter.

"Don't listen to him," you said, and there was so much contempt for his brother, that he found it endearing. "Don't listen to a single word that comes out of his mouth. You're too good for that."

Pope stayed quiet as his eyes drifted to the coffee table. He stared at your tissue for a while before looking back at you. "You think someone would want me?" he would never dream of asking a vulnerable question like this to anyone else, but you.

You didn't even hesitate. "I know someone would want you."

You watched him as he fixed himself again against the back of the couch. His eyes wandered far away and you could see him trying to decide if he believed any of it. You brushed a finger over his hand, as you waited for any reaction whatsoever.

"Thank you," he finally said quietly.

You looked at him and smiled softly. "You don't have to thank me for pointing out the obvious," you said softly, leaning back so your shoulder pressed hard against his. You knocked your knees against his. "Any kid would be lucky to have you as their dad, and any woman would be lucky to have you as the father of her kids."

You said that part quietly and then you looked away. You could feel your cheeks warming and you focused on the bandage on his hand. Pope watched you for a long moment, drinking in the sight of you, and then his fingers lightly reached upward until he tapped the back of your hand.

You looked up, your eyes meeting his and he didn't say anything. He just stared at you and you stared back, and you knew what he wanted to see. His nose twitched at what he saw. He was great at reading facial expressions, too good sometimes.

You let him see that you'd be one of those people who would consider themselves lucky to have him as the father to her kids. You watched the realization flash across his face and you dropped your eyes immediately.

When you dropped your head to his shoulder, you felt his sigh of relief and you smiled to yourself.

Eventually, you felt his arm shift, and then his hand came up to rest on your shoulder, his fingers curling gently around the curve of it. You leaned into it, letting him know it was okay, and his fingers tightened slightly, pulling you just a little bit closer.

"You should get some sleep," he murmured. "I'll get you some blankets."

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

“Motherfucker!”

You angrily hit the coffee maker that has been causing the entire emergency department trouble for the majority of today’s shift. Langdon had watched you struggle earlier this morning before swooping in to fix the problem with a swift hit to the side of the machine and an off hand comment about having the ‘magic touch’. So, you imitate his actions now — hoping another dose of caffeine will help get you through the last couple hours of your shift. The machine stops its incessant beeping just as it had hours ago, but instead of brewing a fresh cup of mediocre coffee, the interactive screen goes completely black. 

Great. 

You squeeze your eyes shut and take in a deep breath. If Jack were here, he’d miraculously show up beside you with a latte in hand. You don’t know how he does it, but the man just knows exactly what you need and when you need it — you’ve taken to calling it his ‘sixth sense’. In reality, that’s Jack — observant and steadfast. 

You miss the night shift.

It’s not that you dislike the day shift. In fact, you happily accepted Dana’s request for your help covering for Donnie during his paternity leave. In Robby’s words: they needed another nurse practitioner on the day shift and there’s only one that he trusts. A part of you thinks that it was just flattery to get you to come to the light side, but deep down you know that Robby only knows how to speak honestly. Lena wasn’t necessarily happy to let her best help switch shifts for an extended period of time, but she also knows that the ED is a team — sure the staff is split between day shift and night shift, but things only run smoothly when the shifts help each other out. 

Jack wasn’t too keen on the idea. 

He couldn’t stop you of course — Lena is your supervisor, not him. But that didn’t stop him from voicing his concerns. Jack Abbot has always been protective of his nightcrawlers, but there was something verging on possessive in the way he told Robby that this is simply a temporary arrangement after he realized he couldn’t change your mind. 

“Should I call Ahmad to escort the caffeine criminal off the premises or do you have a handle on the situation?”

Robby’s voice breaks through your thoughts. You let out a sigh before turning to face the day shift’s senior attending. His expression, usually threaded with deep exhaustion and stoicism, is teetering on the edge of playfulness while a small smile tugs at his lips. 

“Y’know what, Robinavitch? We never had this problem when we had the old machine. Mr. Coffee only had three buttons and never betrayed me.”

Robby lets out a breath through his nose — not quite a laugh, but the closest he’ll get to one this late into his shift. Gloria had decided to get the department a fancy new coffee maker that makes individual cups instead of a full pot a few weeks ago to celebrate improved patient satisfaction scores. What was meant to be a gesture of goodwill from upstairs has become the staff’s worst nightmare.

“You sound like Jack.”

You roll your eyes, but you also know no one has been more upset about this change than the night shift’s senior attending. Robby has always brought his own coffee from home, but Jack has been relying on the emergency department’s supply of shitty coffee for the entirety of his career at PTMC. You’d asked him about it once when you first started working together and he’d revealed under fluorescent lights that there was something comforting about the way it reminded him of the coffee rations he’d receive during his deployments. 

“Have you talked to Jack recently?”

Robby attempts to sound nonchalant; however, you know him better than that. You’ve come to terms with the fact that he’s worse than the night shift nurses. Always needing to be in the know about everything and everyone. He swears that it’s because he’s the senior attending, so it’s his responsibility to keep an eye and ear on all of his staff. But Jack isn’t like that. He’s always been reserved and professional during shifts, always keeping his staff at a distance so he doesn’t get too attached — everyone except for you. In between cups of coffee and rooftop conversations, you managed to slip through the cracks of that cool, steely exterior.

“We talk during handover, but that’s not exactly the same as working a twelve hour shift with someone. Why? Anything I should be concerned about?”

Robby’s lips pull into a tight smile at your response, but anxiety finds its place in your chest. During handoff about a week ago, Mateo had pulled you aside to ask if you had any idea what was going on with Jack. Your brow furrowed as Mateo filled you in about Jack’s sudden change in demeanor with his staff — the once calm and collected attending has been increasingly impatient and scattered. You’d reassured Mateo that it was probably just stress related since Jack hadn’t had a day off in months — and even then he spent his rare off-call moments volunteering as a SWAT medic. You figured that Jack had finally hit a wall and was running on fumes, but Robby’s words were now making you second your assumptions.

“Nothing of concern, just looking out for you and Jack.”

Robby has this tone that makes it seem like he knows more about your relationship with Jack Abbot than you do. You know about his history with the night shift’s senior attending physician, but Robby hasn’t been there for the close calls at three o’clock in the morning when Jack puts his complete trust in your hands without a second thought. He hasn’t been there for the nights that seem to drag on for days when it seems like the sun will never rise again. He hasn’t been there for the hushed conversations in stairwells when the night feels darkest and the only comfort to be found in PTMC is in each other’s presence. 

It’s not a bond built on flirtation — God knows, Jack Abbot flirts with everyone. And does that make you a little jealous? Maybe. And were you hoping that the distance created due to being on day shift for a few weeks would help you create some boundaries with the man? Possibly. But here you are, still infuriatingly infatuated with a man you have absolutely no chance with. 

“I can assure you there’s no Jack and I.”

“Mhm.”

That damn tone again. You want to smack that smug look right off of his stupid face, but before you get the chance to fire back a commotion outside abruptly ends your conversation. The two of you move in tandem, Robby holding the door to the break room open as you duck under his arm before surveying the scene. Your eyes immediately widen as you spot Langdon attempting to keep two infuriated men on their separate gurneys as they yell over each other. He meets your eyes before moving his gaze to Robby, relief flooding his features.

“A little help here?”

You and Robby share a brief, knowing look before dividing and conquering the situation. Robby steps in, wheeling one of the men away while you follow after Landgon who is moving with the other. 

“What’s the story here?”

You have to shout over the man’s incessant yelling, but Langdon ducks his head down slightly as he navigates the gurney through the ED to hear you better in the chaos. From not too far away, you hear Robby yell for Whitaker to take over his unruly patient so he can go find Ahmad for back up. Langdon’s shoulder bumping into yours pulls your attention back to your own situation.

“Bar argument gone ugly.”

The man laying on the gurney is bleeding profusely from lacerations on his forehead, but is cognescent enough to keep loudly threatening the other patient that came in with him. You manage to get a closer look at his wounds once Langdon locks the gurney in place and through the deep crimson you see little, semi-translucent pieces of debris. Your brow furrows as the light catches one of the pieces.

“Is that glass?”

Langdon nods before meeting your eyes with a crooked smile plastered on his face. 

“Beer bottle to the head. Told you it got ugly.”

You let out a breath before gloving up with Langdon. As the two of you attempt to assess his injuries the man begins to fight you both off, pushing your hands away before either of you can start getting control of the bleeding. You pull back hoping to get the man’s attention so that Langdon can start giving him the care he needs. 

“Sir, I’m gonna need you to calm down so that we can take a look at your injuries. Can you tell me your name?”

Finally, the man’s eyes land on you but they are filled with nothing but unbridled fury. You fight off the urge to take a step back from the situation and, instead, stand your ground. 

“What I need is to get my hands on that son of a bitch who tried to fucking kill me. Can you help me with that?”

You raise both of your hands as the man fights off Langdon once again. He gives you an exasperated look as his shoulders slump in annoyance. 

“I can not, this is a hospital not a fighting ring. What I can help you with is getting your bleeding under control and taking that glass out of your head before you get a nasty infection. How’s that sound?”

Your tone is stern but gentle as you attempt to talk the patient down. For a moment, his face softens in understanding and you almost let out a sigh of relief after having gotten through to him, but then Whitaker’s voice tears through the moment.

“I’ve got a runner, incoming!”

“Oh, shit.”

Langdon’s tone makes your heart rate spike, but before you get a chance to turn towards the commotion Whitaker’s very angry patient shoves you into the wall.

“We need some help in here! You good?”

Langdon’s worried eyes are locked on you as he tries to keep the two patients from tearing each other apart. Your shoulder took the brunt of the impact, but you had managed to stay on your feet which saved you from any additional trauma. After catching your breath, you leap in to help restrain the patient who just assaulted you.

“Sir, please. We need you to calm down!”

Your words fall on deaf ears as he continues to lunge at your patient who is now being held back by Langdon. What a fucking mess. You haven’t had a situation like this since last year’s Fourth of July night shift when two drunken men came into the E.D. after one of them practically eviscerated his buddy’s legs after shooting off a firework directly at him. Your eyes desperately meet Langdon’s, hoping he’s in the same boat as you, and he gives you a similar look of bewilderment.

“Whitaker! Ahmad! Anyone!”

Langdon’s voice is strained as the man in his arms struggles against his hold. You’re using all of your strength to pull Whitaker’s patient away from your own, but he’s got at least a foot and a hundred pounds on you. Keeping him restrained is taking all of your strength. Finally, Whitaker’s shoes squeak as he slides into the room.

“Woah, what can I do?”

Langdon gives him a ludicrous look before his eyes land on you.

“Give them a hand, will ya?”

Whitaker immediately jumps in to help you. You were hoping the additional body could help even the odds with these men; however, they seem to be getting more violent by the minute. The man in your grasp reels back and shoves Whitaker, who stumbles back. Now with only you holding him back, he takes this as a chance to take a swing on Langdon. 

“Absolutely not!”

You grab his arm and pull back before he can land a punch. The man lets out a desperate, angry cry and swings his arm back hard. His elbow connects with your nose with a loud crack. The room explodes further than you thought was possible as you spit out the blood draining into your mouth due to the blow. The searing hot pain blooming across your face blinds your vision. 

Fuck, that hurt. 

You blink once, then twice — your eyes finally adjusting to the damage. Your patient has seemingly settled down enough to be left alone, while Langdon has your assailant in a chokehold as Whitaker tries to pin his arms behind his back. 

“What the hell is going on in h—?”

Robby’s words die in his throat once his eyes land on you. His face twists into concern for a brief, fleeting moment before a dangerous rage washes over his hardened features.

“Knock it off before I knock you out.”

Robby’s voice is ice cold and it suddenly pauses the entire room. The only noise filling your ears is everyone’s heavy breathing. Robby lets everyone cool down for a moment before barking out orders.

“Ahmad, get this man out of here. Whitaker, take over the patient who didn’t attack one of our nurses. Langdon, with me.”

Everyone complies instantly and you let out a relieved sigh as the tension in the room finally dissipates. Robby makes his way to you in two large strides with Langdon behind him. He drops his head to meet your eyes which have regained their comforting warmth.

“How you doing, Slugger?”

“I’m fine. It’s nothing, really.”

Robby raises a brow as you spit more blood on to the floor, narrowly missing his sneaker. Langdon gives you a similar incredulous look. Obviously, your attempts to brush off their concern have fallen on deaf ears. Great. Two hours from shift change and now you’re a patient. 

This day can’t get any worse. 

Robby takes another step forward and carefully places a hand on your chin and gently tilts your head up toward the ceiling. You grimace immediately at the bright, fluorescent lights above you.

“You’ve got two black eyes, a broken nose, and you’re bleeding all over the floor. This isn’t nothing.”

His voice is surprisingly gentle and his features soften into a look you can only describe as brotherly concern. You sigh defeatedly, squeezing your eyes shut as the adrenaline in your body begins to subside giving way to an invasive and persistent shooting pain in your head. Robby’s hands find your shoulders — you aren’t sure if the physical contact is meant to provide you comfort or a precaution in case you pass out. Either way, you appreciate the way his delicate hold grounds you back into this moment.

“I’m going to have Langdon take you to an empty room and do a full exam. Okay?”

You open your eyes again and nod at his question. Robby’s posture relaxes slightly, obviously relieved that you didn’t stubbornly push back against his orders. He rubs your shoulders reassuringly for a moment before speaking again.

“We’re going to have to document all of this. Dana is dealing with a situation in chairs, but I’ll have her come find you when she’s done.”

You nod again, pursing your lips together into a straight line. You don’t love the idea of making a big deal out of this, but you also know that violence against health care professionals is at an all time high. The last thing this department needs is you trying to push this under the rug. Finally, Robby releases his hold on your shoulders and allows Langdon to step in.

Robby runs both his hands through his hair as he watches Langdon lead you towards a room at the back of the ED. He moves towards the hub in the center of the large room, gripping the countertop as he allows himself a moment to gather his thoughts. This is a nightmare. He needs to call Gloria about the situation that just happened. There’s  a stack of paperwork that needs to be filled out. Someone has to alert the authorities. And worst of all, he needs to call Abbot.

Hopefully, the asshole that assaulted you will be off the premises before the night shift attending rips through the emergency department. Not because he cares for the wellbeing of your assailant — more so that he doesn’t necessarily want to bail his best friend out of jail tonight. Robby sighs as he digs his phone out of his pocket. He finds Jack’s contact easily in his favorites and presses the speaker to his ear. To his surprise, the call immediately goes to voicemail. Robby knows that Jack has the day off; however, he’s always easy to reach — especially if you’re on shift. So, he dials the number again and presses the phone to his ear. But just like before, he is once again met with Jack’s voice apologizing for missing the call. That’s odd. His brow furrows, but before he can think about his friend’s odd behavior further he’s distracted by a concerned voice behind him. 

“I heard about what happened. Dana’s almost done in chairs. How can I help?”

Robby turns to look at Perlah who is currently trying to catch her breath from her obvious sprint over to him.

“Do you know who their emergency contact is?”

If he can’t get ahold of Jack, he might as well let your other loved ones know what happened. Perlah side steps the attending and logs in to one of the computers on the other side of the counter. It only takes a couple seconds to pull up your digital file and a smile spreads across the nurse’s features as she spots the name listed.

“Abbot.”

Of course he is.

“I can’t get a hold of him.”

Perlah’s expression reflects his own confusion for a moment until she remembers a conversation she had with you in the break room earlier this morning. 

“He’s gone fishing.”

Robby’s eyes shoot to his hairline as a laugh bubbles in his chest. He attempts to picture his friend in a boat by himself on the river with a fishing rod in his hand, but his mind cannot seem to compute that absolutely ludicrous concept.

“Abbot is fishing?”

“Apparently they convinced Abbot to actually take a day off, put his phone on do not disturb, and find a hobby that doesn’t involve getting shot at.”

Robby’s eyes drift to the room he watched Langdon escort you to as he attempts to wrap his head around the information he was just given. Jack Abbot is fishing on his rare day off because you asked him to find a hobby that doesn’t involve putting himself in harm’s way — and he listened. He wants to be impressed, but instead he’s just annoyed at the two of you — he’s fucking tired of watching the two of you dance around your feelings for one another. He looks down at his phone again, still confused at how his paranoid best friend could actually relax when he’s unreachable while you’re still on the clock.

Oh. 

The realization hits him like a slap to the face and he looks up at Perlah who is still anxiously waiting for the attending to start barking out orders. 

“Do you think you can manage to get their phone?”

Perlah frowns for a moment, confused by his question. And then her face lights up as she comes to the same realization as the attending standing in front of her. A smile pulls at her lips as she nods at Robby’s request.

“I think I can manage that.”

Jack Abbot enters the emergency department like a hurricane — his presence immediately disrupting the fragile peace they’ve managed to establish since your assault. Robby meets him at the door, stopping him before he can cause any unnecessary damage. 

“Where is she?”

Robby frowns. Abbot’s voice is lacking its usual warmth — in its place is a fiery, impatient intensity. 

“Let’s just cool down for a second. She’s alright — getting checked out by Langdon as we speak. Okay, Jack?”

Abbot’s brown eyes darken at Robby’s words. His posture stiffens and he’s suddenly aware that he’s no longer looking at his best friend. No, the man standing before him is a devoted soldier with one mission and God help anyone who gets in his way — he certainly isn’t dumb enough to stand between the two of you. 

“Exam room 11.”

Abbot brushes past Robby without another word and marches toward the back of the emergency department. He finally feels like he can breathe again as he enters the doorway and watches Langdon press an icepack to your nose. You flinch away from him and Frank lets out an exasperated sigh.

“You are a horrible patient.”

“Well, you’re a horrible nurse. You have to be gentle.”

Abbot leans against the doorframe, his body relaxing now that he’s heard the sound of your voice. A smile pulls at the corners of his lips at your defiance. Eventually, Langdon pulls the icepack away from your face and his blood runs cold as he gets a look at your injuries. It takes every ounce of what’s left of his self control to stay put, instead of forcing Robby to let him know who did this to you.

“I’ve got it from here, Langdon. You can get back to work.”

Both of your heads snap towards the attending standing in the doorway, but Jack’s eyes never leave yours. He watches as your expression shifts from confusion to relief before taking a few steps into the small exam room.

“Hey, Abbot. I’m actually almost done here. The rest of the exam will only take a minute.”

Jack finally regards the other man in the room, but his demeanor shifts to annoyance as Langdon continues to occupy your personal space — as he watches another man’s fingers glide gently over your cheek while he’s standing right there. The sight makes him sick to his stomach as a pervasive, ugly feeling claws at his chest.

“Langdon. Out. Now.”

Langdon’s movements suddenly still and the room immediately feels too small for the three of you. Luckily, the resident does what Jack says and exits the room without sparing you a second glance. Jack’s cold demeanor melts as soon as he hears the door close behind Langdon. 

“Hey, sweetheart.”

Jack’s voice fills the room and you finally feel safe. You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding as you hear his boots take careful, calculated footsteps move towards you. This is a dream — it must be. Jack’s fishing today, unreachable until after your shift ends. But then he’s standing in front of you, invading your personal space in a way that’s so undeniably him. You finally look up, meeting his piercing gaze and you swear his jaw ticks slightly as he takes in the full extent of your injuries. 

“It looks worse than it is.”

It’s a lie, but all you want is to smooth out the worried creases on his forehead. Jack tilts his head slightly at your words — considering them for a moment. His hands move slowly allowing you time to pull away, but you let him cradle your face with a tenderness that feels misplaced in this environment. His thumb gently brushes under your eye, where deep purple bruising has made its temporary home, and you flinch away from his touch before he even makes it to the worst of your injuries. Jack pulls his hands away from you and you involuntarily frown — a smirk plays at the corner of his lips as he watches the way you chase his touch. 

“Do me a favor?”

You nod at his question — not fully trusting your voice at this moment. Jack bows his head slightly, meeting you eye to eye. His gaze is a raging wildfire of emotions. It’s a stark contrast to his calm demeanor and steady hands.

“Don’t lie to me.”

You roll your eyes at this as he stands to his full height again. His hands find their way back to you again, settling on your knees as he begins assessing your injuries further. You lean in closer to him without even thinking about it — it’s like Jack Abbot is the sun and you’re simply a planet trapped in his orbit.  

“How are you here?”

Jack’s brows knit together at your question, like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. His thumb absentmindedly rubs gentle, grounding circles against your scrubs as his gaze trails over every visible wound on your face. 

“What do you mean?”

“You’re supposed to be fishing.”

His face scrunches at your words, but he doesn’t stop his careful assessment of your condition.

“I got a call.”

“Your phone was on do not disturb — you were unreachable.”

“To everyone other than you.”

Your breath catches in your chest at his words. He says it nonchalantly, but the significance of that statement lands harder than the elbow you took to the face. You’re the only person that Jack would let interrupt his day off. Hell, you’re the only reason he took a day off to begin with. 

“But how… Perlah.”

Jack’s head tilts as he watches you put the pieces together. Not too long after Langdon got you into the exam room, Perlah found the two of you. She helped Langdon with the exam for a few minutes before cursing that her phone had died before she made an important call. You had offered her your own, thinking nothing of the interaction. But now you understand exactly what transpired when Perlah left with your cell. 

“Yeah, scared me half to death when it wasn’t your voice on the other end.”

Your frown deepens at that. You can only imagine the fear that clawed its way back into Jack’s chest — can only imagine the unwanted memories it brought up. Your eyes glance down at his left hand, where a silver wedding band permanently resides. You remember the morning on the roof when Jack finally told you about his late wife after a particularly difficult shift. The two of you had lost a young woman whose vehicle had been struck by a drunk driver. You watched Jack go above and beyond for the woman in a way you’d never seen before. And you noticed the way his entire demeanor shifted once he had to call it after an hour of compressions. Jack slipped out of the ED the moment that the day shift showed up and you followed after once you completed handoff. You found Jack on the edge of the roof — not surprising on any other day, but a concerning visual after what you just witnessed that night. He knew you’d find him — you always do. And as you took your usual place, leaning your elbows against the railing right behind him, he finally opened up about the worst day he’s ever experienced. You listened as he told you about how his wife was in an accident. How she was dead on impact and EMS found her phone on the scene. How Jack was her only emergency contact. How he despises that the last time his wife called him he never even got to hear her voice. How he knows he’s your emergency contact. How his heart can’t go through that again. 

“I’m sorry, Jack. The last thing I wanted was for you to worry about me on your day off.”

Jack’s brow furrows at your words.

“Sweetheart, all I do when I’m not with you is worry.”

You both let that sentence linger in the room for a few moments. Jack continues to trace shapes into your shrubs as you attempt to calm your nerves as you realize how intimate this conversation feels. Finally, Jack breaks the silence.

“Can you just come back to the night shift so I can stop freaking out every time my phone rings throughout the day?”

You almost smile at that.

“Donnie comes back in two weeks.”

You mean for that to be comforting; however, this only makes Jack’s body stiffen in response. His head drops as he lets out a long sigh.

“Two weeks is too long.”

“You’re not my boss, Jack.”

Jack pulls his hands away and you watch as he runs them through his short, grey curls. He looks exhausted — and you suddenly feel guilty that his relaxing day off has turned into this. 

“You’re right, but sweetheart, I can’t do this without you anymore.”

A part of you wants to throttle him because of that nickname and how easily it falls off his lips — how it’ll only feel right when it’s his voice saying it to you. 

“Do what?”

Jack looks at you and his face twists into confusion as he realizes your question is genuine.

“Get through the fucking night.”

A beat passes. You desperately want to just say yes. It’s what you want isn’t it? Returning to the night shift — returning to him. But that’s also the problem. What is this? You thought your switch to day shift would give you some sort of explanation, but your time away has only made you more confused. Would it actually just be easier if the two of you only saw each other during handoff? No domestic moments between cups of coffee, no more mornings spent side-by-side on the rooftop, no more stolen, fleeting touches as he passes you on your way to the hub. You know what you are to Robby — to everyone on day shift. It’s simple. But with Jack — it’s never been simple and maybe that’s the problem.

“What if I want to stay on the day shift?”

Jack recoils like you just threw a punch at him. Guilt claws up your throat as you watch his face fall. It’s a lie — you know that it is. You love everything about the night shift, but you also don’t know how much longer you can keep playing this game with Jack before you simply fall apart. 

“Why would you want that?”

“Because at least I know where I stand with everyone here.”

Jack’s brow furrows — you hate that it’s cute. That everything about him draws you in.

“You don’t know where you stand with me?”

You shake your head and he scoffs — the sound is surprisingly cold. He looks at you, brow pinched into a scowl. And then he realizes that you’re serious. Your expression is nothing but unashamed honesty and his head cocks to the side at that. Do you really think he’s been stringing you along this entire time? That this has all been meaningless flirtation? That you mean nothing to him?

He takes a step forward, slotting himself between your knees. Your breath catches as he reaches up and gently cradles your face. His touch is different than before — all professionalism has been cast aside and is now replaced with his overwhelming adoration. Without thinking your fingers grab the hem of his black t-shirt. He smiles as he feels you nervously pick at a loose stitch before he ducks his head and his lips finally meet your own. Your grip on his t-shirt tightens as he moves his hands through your hair. Now this is a dream. The kiss is soft and restrained — you know he’s holding back due to your injuries. The last thing he wants to do is hurt you. Jack pulls away too soon for your liking, but he doesn’t move away. Instead, he places his forehead against yours. 

“Sweetheart, I’ve been yours since the minute you walked through the fucking door.”

You bite your lip as you attempt to hold back the giddy grin that begs to spread itself across your face. 

“You never said anything.”

Jack pulls away at that, not far — just enough to get a good look at you. The look on his face is incredulous — like it’s absurd you don’t know that his entire life revolves around you at this point.

“I thought I made myself abundantly clear.”

You laugh at that and Jack steals a kiss from your lips just because he can.

“I take it Robby gave you the rest of the day off?”

You nod, smiling as you feel Jack thread his fingers through yours.

“He told me to go home after Langdon finished my exam — who you should apologize to.”

Jack’s jaw clenches slightly as his brow furrows. 

“Him being here was unnecessary.”

You watch him for a moment, trying to understand what happened between the two men that never seemed to have any sort of animosity prior to today. And then your hand tightens around Jack’s as you realize what happened.

“You were jealous.”

Jack rolls his eyes.

“I have no reason to be jealous.”

You raise a brow at his statement. He’s not wrong — he has no reason to be jealous of Frank Langdon, but you know the resident somehow got under his skin. He may be able to maintain his facade of nonchalance to the rest of his staff, but you see right through him.

“What makes you so confident?”