mads

The first time feels like a fluke.

A rare silver lining of good stroked through the grey devastation that was today; after hours of wading through blood and gore, you at last strike gold.

“You heading off too, kid?” Despite the questioning tone in Jack’s voice, you know it’s an order.

He’s staring down at the park bench, eyes hovering over you and how tightly you’re still clutching that fourth can of beer, zoned out and completely oblivious to how everyone else has already packed up for the night and headed home. Not to sleep, no. It’s doubtful any of you will get much sleep, not after the events of today.

Robby had slipped away first, not without sharing a few final words of wisdom aimed at soothing everybody’s aching soul. Javadi followed soon after, abandoning a half-drunken beer as she went racing off to answer her mother’s beck and call. Mateo, Princess and Samira called it quits together, each heading off in different directions. Even Donnie left eventually, the now empty cooler in tow, his wife waiting patiently for him to crawl back to their newlyweds home and into her arms.

Then there were two.

Abbot and you.

Neither of you dared to interrupt the silence that had rolled in, minds too busy swimming in pools of thought, struggling against violent currents and attempting to escape the deep end.

Moonlight crept through the crevices between the branches above, cicadas came together to sing in disjointed harmony, and the world around you both kept moving, completely oblivious to how your own life had come to a halt. Somewhere between waking up to the screech of your pager and rushing through the doors of the PTMC to find it in a state of chaos, different and bloodier than you’d known it to usually be, you had shutdown.

Jack knew better than to force you out of that state.

He saw himself in your blank stares and the bouncing knees, remembered how it felt to be young, bright-eyed, and finally forced to reckon with how brutal this field could be. He didn’t need to ask to know: this had been your first mass casualty event.

Maybe that’s why he sat with you, the passing of time irrelevant, and let you fester in your shock. Let whatever cracks were forming in your heart deepen, because he knew it was the only way they’d be able to solidify. Let you exist on the periphery of life for however long you needed, his own senses fully intact and ready to watch over your body while your mind drifted elsewhere.

Only when he noticed you stifling a yawn did he act.

Jack, conscious of not startling you, moved slowly. Calmly.

He started with his prosthetic, lifting it off the bench and placing it back down onto the ground before safely attaching it. Then his bag, hands rummaging unnecessarily as though to check everything was in place — he’d already checked before leaving the locker room, but he figured another revision and a few more minutes for you to sit with your thoughts couldn’t hurt. Slinging one strap over his right shoulder, he pushed his frame off the wooden bench and came to a stand, the sickly-sweet gravel of his voice perforating the silence at last.

“Hmm?” Your reply is practically nonverbal, a simple hum. Enough to acknowledge the fact he’s spoken, yet not enough to answer his question.

Hazel eyes zero in on your own, observing how they’re tired, blinking just a little bit too lazily. The beer has warmed your cheeks, sped up your heart, and slowed your mind. Dancing on a tightrope between tipsy and inebriated, the last thing Jack is about to do is send you off home alone.

“C’mon,” he gruffs out, prying the can from your hand and laying it to rest on the bench. He replaces the weight of it in your palm with his touch, thick fingers effortlessly engulfing your own. To his delight, you give way easily, rising to a stand as he tugs you up. “Let’s get you home.”

You attempt some version of, “I’m fine.”

Jack pays it no mind.

Instead, he grabs at your familiar pink duffel bag. Something settles in his chest, dark and sickening, at the sight of dirt staining the bottom of the fabric, ruining your usually polished belongings. How apt it seems, a perfect mirror to how today has the left a smudge on you.

You stare at him all of a few seconds, eyes red. There’s no tears in sight, just the remnants of those that have already fallen. Then, when the older man shifts his weight off his right leg, you finally begin walking.

The journey is slow.

Jack’s unsure if you set the pace to accommodate to him or to put off the inevitable of going up to a lonely apartment, where all that work you’ve done to suppress the storm of emotions building inside you will prove useless the moment you step into the quiet of your home, the furthest place from danger and, yet, where all your troubling thoughts will at last catch up to you.

He thinks he’s better off not knowing, chooses to believe you’re doing it for his sake.

Some of your steps are swayed. The sight of your unsteady feet and teetering body are enough to keep his mind alert, fighting off the exhaustion that threatens to find him soon. This was supposed to be his day off, after all. He was supposed to be catching up on sleep right now, not watching over one of his nurses and worrying himself sick with thoughts of how today’s horrors will linger with you for years to come.

It was supposed to be your day off too, after all.

Neither of you should have been at the Pitt.

One man and a weapon had changed that.

You come to a stop abruptly, catching the doctor off guard and sending his solid frame crashing into your back. Before either of you can stumble too far, Jack’s snaking his free arm around your waist and stabilising you against him.

Maybe it’s the warmth of his palm, large and imposing and seeping through the cotton of your top. Maybe it’s the gentleness behind his touch, the way it anchors your feet to the pavement and silently promises that it- he won’t let you fall. Maybe it’s the weight of today finally shaking your unbreakable self, your arms too weak to keep holding you above water for much longer.

The reason doesn’t ultimately matter.

What matters is you’re finally speaking.

“Did you litter?”

Not exactly what Jack expected you to say.

It startles him for a moment, has him forgetting how today was full of horrors and has him wondering, instead, if you recycle.

It shouldn’t be so easy to picture you, bed head and a wrinkled shirt (preferably one that originally belongs to him), huffing and puffing your cheeks while you shoot around his kitchen, bags scattered along the island as you berate him.

Jack, how many times have I told you. Yellow is for plastic and cans, blue is for paper, green is for glass!

And wouldn’t it be so hard for him to fight back a smile, heart bursting with joy? A lovesick fool, happy to be lectured on the complex recycling system if it means having you, half naked, half awake, frowning at him as soon as you notice the shake in his shoulders.

Sorry, sweetheart. Promise it won’t happen again… And his hands finding your waist, pinning you to the marble counter-top so there’s nowhere for you to run from his mouth, trailing molten kisses up the expanse of your neck, lips lingering just to feel the steady thrum of your carotid pulse, physical evidence that you’re real, and here, and in his arms-

The blaring of a horn pulls Jack Abbot back onto the sidewalk.

You’re still in his arms but his lips are far from your neck and the speed of your heart is testament only to the anxiety speeding through your veins.

“Yeah. Maybe. I- I’m not really sure,” try as he might, he can’t remember if he ever moved your can from the bench. Is it still there now, half empty and waiting for its owner to return? “I’m sure someone’ll throw it away.”

Like you can’t dwell on the thought for too long, you move on, and finally say what’s really been troubling you.

“I don’t know if I-” the words catch on your throat, dry from the beer and raw with emotion. “How do I go back?”

Vague, unspecified.

Jack, with years of becoming fluent in you, understands.

“You find a way.” He wishes he could give you something more helpful, more reassuring. All he can offer you is the truth. “It’ll be hard. Different to how it was before.”

“I don’t think I can-” once more, emotions cut you off.

You’re not crying, not yet.

Stubborn as he knows you to be, steadfast in your need to remain strong until the very end. It wounds him in a way that feels a little too deep for a man who should see you as nothing more than a coworker.

Attending physician. Nurse. Colleagues.

Those are the only three words that either of you should use to describe the other. Jack knows, has known so for years. So, why does he keep having to remind himself?

“I don’t think I belong there, Doctor Abbot. You saw it, I froze. I hesitated. You had to ask me twice for the scalpel, and then- We lost him. If I had just- I should have-”

The hand at your midriff finds your shoulder, turns you around, and then his eyes find yours.

“Stop that, now. That man, he was good as gone when he reached us,” it’s a brutal truth but one that needs to be said. Jack knew it then just as much as he knows it now; that red wristband was destined for peeds. “You could have handed me that scalpel at the speed of light, and it wouldn’t have changed a damn thing, okay?”

You take a steadying breath.

It doesn’t work.

Instead, Jack watches it shake right through your frame. Your eyes drift from his own, like if he stares too long, he might catch a glimpse of every self-blaming thought racing through your mind.

“D’you even realise how many lives you helped save today?” The question comes tumbling out before Jack can stop it, some enate part of himself screaming at him to reassure you, to scramble up all the fractured pieces of you and slot them back together. That’s an attending’s job, right? To keep watch over the crew, to take care of the crew. So what if you’re off-the-clock? “One-hundred and six.”

“I only worked on-”

“Doesn’t matter who you personally worked on. Every one, you hear me?” He gives a squeeze of your shoulder, tells himself it’s because he wants to get you to look at him. If the touch happens to ground him too, it’s a coincidence. “Every life we saved tonight, you had a hand in that. You being there mattered, we couldn’t have done it without you.”

The words settle over you like a blanket, wrapping you in warmth and promising you shelter.

They don’t erase the sadness, don’t make it dissolve into a puddle on the ground, left to be forgotten on the dirty surface of the sidewalk. But they do enough to ease the tension between Jack’s brows and to wipe a layer of uncertainty from your eyes.

Then, unable to help himself, Jack adds, “I know I certainly couldn’t. Can barely intubate without my favourite nurse at my side.”

You laugh, slightly.

It eases something in Jack’s chest, nonetheless.

“Doctor Robby says it’s not right for attendings to play favourites.”

Now Jack is the one laughing.

You take the chance to pry your bag from his grasp, throwing the strap over your shoulder. The first act of Goodnight.

“Yeah, well, come to me again when Robby starts taking his own advice.”

There is no grand goodbye between you.

Just an exchange of fractured smiles, a subtle nod of approval from Jack as you take the first step towards the building’s entrance, and the wave of your hand before you turn fully and dash to safety.

Before you can slip through the crack you make in the building’s heavy door, Jack calls out, “I’ll see you tomorrow, kid.”

Once again, not a question. An order.

The second time is all about convenience.

It’s the last night of your monthly seven-days-on, the kind of shift where the hours stretch themselves impossibly thin and it feels like you’re crawling towards the end, a goalpost that keeps moving an inch out of reach each time you start to feel relief. By the time you officially clock out, shooting off towards the locker rooms before Whitaker can ask you to accompany another patient for a CT or Princess can enquire on any night shift gossip, you’ve worked an extra two hours and the bags beneath your eyes feel so heavy, they may as well be dragging by your feet.

Out of your scrubs, back into clothes that only partially carry the sterile stench of bleach and blood, you busy yourself with cramming things into your bag while trying your best to let Mateo’s generosity down softly.

“It’s fine, really,” even you have to admit that you don’t sound as sure as you mean to be. For a moment, you mull it over, imagine the comfort of letting yourself sit back and relax in the passenger seat of Mateo’s car. The sooner you’re home, the sooner your week off can start, right? Still, something within forces you to decline. He lives on the opposite side of the city and, with gas prices rising and his body’s tank running on empty hours before his next shift, the last thing you want to be is a nuisance. “I don’t mind the walk, gives me the chance to decompress.”

Your fellow nurse looks at you with a level of distrust, doubting the reassuring smile you cast his way.

“Are you sure?” Mateo pushes, dragging his tired body along the lockers until he stands behind yours. His curls, freed at last from the constraints of a hair-tie, peek out from the door. “I really don’t mind taking you. I mean, no offence, but you look like you belong on the set of Night of The Living Dead right now. Don’t wanna send you off just to later find out you tripped over air and wound up back here as a patient.”

Slamming your locker shut and giving his shoulder a shove — with no force behind it and doing little to move the man — you roll your eyes, “I’m fine, dingus.”

“Dingus? What are we, five?”

“I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the one treating me like a toddler.”

“Like a toddler-?! I’m trying to be a good Samaritan. A gentleman!” You dodge Mateo’s hand as it reaches for your duffel bag. “Now quit being stubborn and let me make sure you get home safe-”

Everything happens so suddenly, your brain is forced to compartmentalise every action, step by step, as they unravel.

Mateo reaches for the bag, again.

You dodge it, again.

You glide to the left.

You run shoulder-first into a solid wall of warmth.

And there he is. Jack Abbot, freshly changed out of his scrubs. Hair wet from a shower, an overly woodsy scent clinging to damp skin, black t-shirt stretched a little too tightly over his chest. Despite his attempts to scrub the night away, he’s thrown on the same pair of cargo pants he spent the last fourteen hours rushing around in.

You almost want to chastise his stupidity, until you remember you can’t.

Not only is he your colleague, he’s your senior.

What business do you have telling a man like him to do anything?

“I’ll take her home.”

Never a question, always an order.

Unlike weeks ago, world turned upside down and veins full of sickly beer, you have half the mind to turn him down this time. To inch away from where your body collides with his. To reinforce your grip on the pink strap of your bag. To shake your head and offer a polite, though bashful, smile.

“Doctor Abbot, it’s fine, really! You don’t have to offer me a ride, I really do prefer walking-”

“I’m not offering you a ride,” Jack shuts you up with a pointed look, eyebrows jumping as though he’s daring you to shoot him down again. “Car’s in the garage, something’s up with the exhaust. I’m walking your way anyway, may as well let me keep you company.”

The truth is, you’re not sure why you are so hesitant to accept his offer.

Jack is a good guy, and he’s certainly not a stranger.

You’ve known him since you first stepped foot in the emergency room. Younger and brighter, the both of you. Back then, he was still new. Back then, you were still a student. Time passed, as it tends to do; Jack became a trusted figure of authority, you graduated right into the night shift. Brief exchanges of good morning, good night, and how are you? during the shift handovers blossomed into good job, good call, and I need you with me.

Lena likes to tease you, throwing looks over the top of her glasses every time he saunters up to the nurses’ station, raps his knuckles upon the desk and tilts his head towards whatever room he needs you in.

He likes me because I talk to the patients, is typically your explanation while Lena looks at you otherwise. Keeps them busy while he works.

He likes you because you’re a pretty young thing, Lena never fails to retort between answering the every whim of the staff, like the charge nurse she is. Gives those hazel eyes something to ogle.

“C’mon, are you really gonna run away from a disabled vet?” Jack pushes, shooting you that infamous silver-fox smirk. Damn him and those arms, muscles pulled taut as he crosses his hands over his chest, impatiently waiting for you to give in. “What if I stumble and there’s no one there to catch me? That’ll be on you, kid. Think you can handle it on your conscience?”

“Yeah, imagine you come back next week and find out gramps here split his head open on the curb,” Mateo chimes in from the sidelines, only for the amused expression to melt the moment you pin a glare on him. “What? The man made a good point!”

“Yeah, kid,” you barely have the chance to register how swiftly Jack tugs the duffel out of your grip, staking claim over your belongings and securing himself as a guardian to guide you home. “I made a good point. Now, are you gonna keep me waiting? ‘Cause I’d really like to see the tail end of this place at some point today.”

So you let him walk you home.

Steps less swayed, back more stiff, you try your best not to think about the last time you both walked this path. You, drowning in sorrows; him, swimming effortlessly with his head above the water.

The sun is rising slowly, rays of golden warmth kissing over the city. It’s not enough to fight away the bitter chill of winter, sending your hands diving into the pockets of a flimsy coat, reaching for a warmth they never quite find. Beside you, Jack is unshaken, barely bothered by the way his breath reflects back at him with each exhale.

“You did good today,” Jack says today in place of last night, the true mark of what the night shift does to a person’s perception of the world. Daybreak becomes dusk, while dusk becomes sunrise. Where others prepare to start their daily ritual of adhering to capitalism, you’re crawling into bed and giving in to the sweet relief of sleep. “Calmed that kid right down.”

You know immediately who he’s referring to.

James. A sweet baby boy, barely a day past 6 months, running a fever of a hundred and three, and sporting a nasty ear infection.

Understandably, he had been screaming up a storm.

Unfortunately, a certain patient nursing a headache was screaming even louder, profanities that pleaded for someone to Shut that fucking baby up!

Jack had offered to shut the patient up.

You had a more peaceful idea.

“Oh, uh, thanks,” god, you feel pathetic.

Praise is far from something foreign to you. Patients, colleagues, and friends alike are always firing off at you, sweet words that affirm the simple gestures and quiet good you bring into their lives. Whether it’s through fluffing a pillow, aiding in procedures, or gifting out your time freely; praise always worms its way into your ears.

But this is different.

Jack is different.

Every good job, every well done, every thanks, kid; it shoots right through you. Lightning that electrifies you, takes you from a state of near asystole to tachicardic in as little as the few seconds it takes his lips to shape the words. Your cheeks warm, your palms sweat. Words run from you, leaving you to grab at the few you can manage and stumble over half-formed sentences.

Worst of all, you think he knows.

He has to, right?

A man like him has lived through enough — lived long enough — to recognise the tell tale signs of the effect he has on people. Hardly anyone is immune or safe from his charms, from college kids that wind up in a gurney after having a little too much fun with a fake ID, to elderly women rushed in by their panicking children, afraid a bad cough or a sore back could be the sign of something far more sinister in the aging body.

“How did you know it would work?” It takes you an embarrassing amount of time to realise Jack is talking again, head turned to watch as you walk alongside him rather than focusing ahead. “Flipping him over?”

Right.

James.

The crying baby.

Your peaceful idea.

That’s what you’re both talking about.

“Old wives tale,” you finally answer, mind drifting back to the memory of your quick thinking. The screaming baby, the screaming patient. Your hands, gentle as they picked James up. The questioning look from everyone in the room as you flipped the infant over, face down and hovering a few inches off the basinet. And then, silence. No more screaming baby. “My mum used to do it to me, flip me over when she couldn’t get me to stop. It just, y’know, shocks the system. It’s like flipping a switch, turning the baby off.”

“Huh,” somewhere above, a bird chirps, singing a song of good morning. “I’ll have to remember that.”

And then, before you can think any better or question the possible implications, you open your big mouth, “Why? Thinking of stepping into fatherhood?”

Jack gives you the worst possible answer he could have come up with: “No such thing as too late, right?”

“Yeah, maybe. If you’re a man,” you huff. “I, on the other hand, am running out of time on my biological clock as we speak.”

“Then you should get to work on changing that. If you ever need any help with it, I’m always here.”

He says it so casually, like each syllable doesn’t inch you closer to an imaginary ledge.

But his words aren’t what move you to silence.

It’s the imagery they conjure.

Positive tests and hospital visits.

The cold touch of gel on your belly, the warmth of a hand clasping your own.

Sweat rolling off your skin, limbs tangling with yours upon a mattress.

You have to physically shake yourself out of the… Fantasy? Nightmare? Mortifying hell-scape where you’re envisioning what it would be like to let a very handsome attending bend you over and get you pregnant?

“Oh my god,” you half whisper, half yell. “Doctor Abbot, did you just seriously offer-”

“Oh, you’re a pervert!” he has the audacity to exclaim as he swings your bag and bumps it against your thigh, the mischief in his eye the only thing that gives him away. This is Jack, after all, a notorious and shameless flirt. His words didn’t mean anything beyond making you flustered. “I was just offering up my kind and professional aid, as a healthcare provider and an avid champion behind women’s health.”

Head shaking and shoulders bouncing; you’re caught under the influence of Abbot’s charm. Completely unaware of the false sense of safety he’s lured you into, taking you by the hand and dragging you out to sea, waiting until your feet no longer reach the bottom, and then he let’s go, leaving the currents to pull you under…

In simpler words, he asks you the very thing you’ve been avoiding: “How's therapy going?”

“Good. Great. Yeah, I definitely feel a lot… Better. Thanks,” the words taste bitter on your tongue, bursting out of you with an urgency.

Maybe, you figure, if you say it fast enough, there will be no space to doubt it, no time to notice the lie.

“That’s amazing,” he nods curtly, only for that easy-going lilt on his lips to twist into something a little more sinister, a little more interrogative. “Cause when I spoke to Caleb, he said you haven’t been showing up. You wanna pretend you found someone else, or are you gonna tell me why you’re not using the help that’s there?”

You knew this conversation was bound to happen, from the moment Jack referred you to the PTMC’s trauma specialist, high-strung and hell-bent on fast-tracking your progress to mental wellness.

Jack hadn't known about the nightmares.

Or the sickening doubt.

Or the fact you remember every face you treated that day.

Even then, he knew you enough to notice the shift in your demeanour in the days following the Pittfest tragedy. He knew you enough to pull you aside and introduce you to Doctor Jefferson.

Deep inhale, slow exhale. Eyes focused on the pavement ahead, you finally answer, “I just… I don't like it.”

Jack scoffs.

“Nobody likes therapy.”

“It makes me feel… weak. Like I'm not cut out for this.”

You make it to your apartment building sooner than you expect, despite knowing the exact time it takes to trek from your door to the entry of the PTMC.

Any smarter woman would use it as an escape plan, as an excuse to duck out of a conversation that has you shifting weight from one foot onto the other and searching for anything to look at other than the whirlpools of brown that the doctor has pinned on you.

It turns out, you’re not as smart as you think you are, because your feet remain planted on the ground and there’s a feeling hollowing out your chest at the thought of parting from his side.

You will yourself to strip your bag from his grasp.

“Look, kid, I can’t force you to go. I don’t want to force you.” It would be easier to focus on what Jack is saying, if he didn’t have to sound so distracting. Soft-spoken, deep voice, on the verge of begging at an altar if it will get you to listen. “But I know what this job does to people, how it rots away at us if we don’t cure our wounds. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it. I don’t want that for you. So just… Try, would you? If not for you, then for the poor old attending who really needs the help of his favourite nurse and her magic hands that manage to soothe even the weepiest of babies?”

Echoes of Mateo’s voice ring in your ear, his overly enthusiastic exclamation of The man made a good point! on loop.

There’s every chance you’ve been damned by some higher power, afflicted to live this life with a particular weakness to the man before you. It’s the only thing that makes sense, truthfully, when you find yourself conceding without a fight.

“Okay.”

How unfair it is, for eyes like that to light up so easily, “Okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll… I’ll give it a try.” This time, there’s no bitter aftertaste to your agreement. Just the cold hard truth on your tongue: you’ll take a step down the path towards help, the path Jack put you on. “Can’t make it any worse, I guess.”

“That’s my girl.”

His words hit you like a sucker punch, straight to the gut and leaving you winded.

You stumble, both on your words and on the stairs, as you bid him goodbye and dash into your apartment building.

Safely tucked away at last, a whole week ahead without the threat of mortifying yourself in front of Jack Abbot.

The fourth time is a matter of protocol.

Jack once heard Dana ask Robby, “is it really a shift in the ED if you don’t end it wanting to quit?”

Today more than ever, he feels an itch to see resignation papers.

Not his own.

Yours.

Wrapped up in the active war zone of a multi-vehicle collision, Jack’s hands, eyes and mind were too focused on the woman actively bleeding out on the table to notice you slipping out of the OR, called upon by the charge nurse.

She needed you to check on a patient.

A favour, quick and simple. That’s all it was supposed to be.

There was never supposed to be a grapple for power. Or the clatter of metal meeting the ground. Or the crack of a skull following suit. Or the sickening sound of someone calling code Hula Hoop, when Jack’s hands are too occupied to run towards the source of violence.

It takes him twenty-eight gruelling minutes to make it free from the trauma rooms.

Jack strips himself of the PPE with haste, gloves and gown practically disintegrating under the force of his need to get out of the room and find out what happened, who it happened to.

He knows the answer is you before Mateo even gets the chance to speak.

Lena is on the phone, barking orders down the line. By the few words he manages to catch through his own deafening panic, the police no doubt sit on the receiving end of her call.

There are other patients to attend to, and other matters that are far more pressing — from an outsider’s point of view — that call for Jack’s immediate attention. He brushes them all aside, near blind to any consequence as something commands his feet across the department floor and straight for Exam Room 3, where the tiniest glimpse of you waits behind glass.

Shen is already tending to you, planted firmly by your bedside while the Pitt’s newest resident, Nazely, runs through your vitals. One of your arms is bent backwards, holding a compress to the back of your head. There’s a spatter of blood down the shoulder of your scrubs, splotches of a deep red staining the grey fabric. If Jack looks at it for too long, he’ll throw up, so his eyes shift to your face instead.

When he finds you smiling, a flood of anger finally collapses the immovable dam within him.

Jack frowns before he can even think to stop himself.

“What the hell happened?” Disgust stains each of his words, bleeding all over the room and stiffening the shoulders of those who potter around you, Nazely and the nurses alike.

Only Shen is unmoved by his outburst, turning to meet him with a deadpan stare and a mocking finger pressed to his lips, before he breathes out a gentle shh. “Watch it, old man, my precious patient’s got a nasty headache.”

There’s a likelihood Shen doesn’t get the chance to witness Jack’s eye roll, as the older man slips right through the gap between your gurney and his fellow attending. Without a word of acknowledgement tossed your way, he pries the cold compress from your fingers, commanding you to drop your arm and yield the task of holding it against your head over to him.

This time, Jack speaks a little softer, “Are you gonna tell me what happened?”

“I don’t know, Doctor Abbot, there’s this thing called HIPPA-”

“John, I swear to-”

“It was my fault,” your voice cuts through the bickering of the two attendings, snapping the heat of Jack’s gaze off of Shen and onto you. The frown lines along his forehead ease ever so slightly, against his will, as you insist on flashing him an even bigger smile than before. “Lena, she told me- warned me the guy was in an altered state of mind. I shouldn’t have- I know better than to turn my back on a patient in that state. But it’s fine-”

Jack starts up immediately, hackles rising on the back of his neck as he takes the stance of a defensive mutt, ready to fight tooth and nail to protect its owner, “It’s not fine-”

“I’m fine, Dr Abbot,” pathetically placid, the brush of your fingertips as they graze his arm is enough to neutralise his outrage, nostrils no longer flaring with each puffed out breath of frustration. “He grabbed me, we tussled, and then I slipped on my own untied shoe lace.”

“And where is he now? This altered patient,” his grip slips slightly on the compress, apologies flooding his tongue at the slight wince the action wakes in you. Ignoring your pain, you take more notice of the hostility in his stance, quirking an eyebrow up at him in a silent question. “Don’t give me that look. I’m a doctor, I want to make sure he’s getting the standard of care he deserves.”

When you try to shrug off his interrogation, Shen finally proves he can do something other than get on Jack’s nerves this evening and unveils the truth, “He took off, slipped out the ambulance bay when they called the code.”

“Son of a-”

“CT’s back,” Nazely, quiet as a mouse, had managed to slip out the room unnoticed, and now shoulder-barges her way back in, carrying your results and cutting off Jack’s foul mouth. “Other than a nasty bump, you’re in the clear.”

It’s not that Jack doubts the intern’s ability as a doctor.

And it’s certainly not that he doesn’t trust Shen.

It just so happens that, when the young resident goes to hand-off your CT scans to one of the attendings, Ellis comes knocking on the door, demanding the input of her most trusted attending.

Jack’s never been more relieved to come in second.

Hawk eyes scan over black and whites images, and only once he’s confirmed with his own two eyes that you truly are in the clear does Jack feel that tension in his shoulders begin to unwind.

In a room that now only houses two, he lets himself stand as close to you as he needs, shifting his stance to keep watch on the doors on either side of the room — a guard dog that can never deny it's nature to protect, even as it nestles into its owner.

He doesn’t quite nestle into you, careful to obey that fine line of decorum that exists between colleagues, between a junior and a senior, between a girl your age and a man as weathered as him. No matter the itch in his palm that begs to be scratched by skin no other than your own, he resists the urge to touch you.

Until you move.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Puzzled by the sternness in his usually nonchalant voice, you gaze over your shoulder at him, now sat upright and with both legs swung over the other side of the bed, “To finish… my shift?”

And that is how his hand finds your arm, a grasp that is gentle yet firm, allowing him to guide you back into your previous position. In his other hand still sits the ice pack, as he continues pressing it to your head.

“Uh-uh,” the denial is followed by a tsk, as he slips back into Doctor Abbot mode and puffs out his chest, taking on the persona of big, bad, commanding professional who knows exactly what his patient needs. “Your shift ended the moment that head of yours hit the ground. And since that asshole-” a pointed look shoots his way, warning in your eyes. Jack corrects his previous verbiage, “altered patient who did this took off, new protocol says I can’t let you leave hospital grounds on your own. Now unless you know someone kind enough to pick you up at 4 am, I suggest you take the opportunity to get some rest. I’ll come wake you when the morning shift zombies start strolling in.”

He leaves no room for debate.

He leaves the room, drawing the curtains and switching off the light.

If Jack were even a modicum more brazen, he’d shamelessly have locked the doors, ensuring you can’t slip away to return to your duties. In the end, he doesn’t have to worry about catching you back out on the floor, as when he checks on you some time after five fifteen, Jack finds you curled into the bed, the ice pack now fully melted and discarded halfway down the foam mattress.

By the time he wakes you, the clock has long struck seven and Robby is breathing down his neck, urging him to open Exam Room 3 back up to actual patients and not just that nurse you like to ogle.

Something in your demeanour has shifted.

Quiet, slow, weighed-down. You don’t walk; you drag yourself to the lockers. Head turned to the floor, body pulled in on itself, voice soft as you bid people good morning and goodbye.

Jack follows in your footsteps, hovering in the periphery of your every move, from your locker out into the street.

You don’t acknowledge him, barely even look at him, yet you yield easily to the way he takes the weight of your bag off your shoulder, slipping it onto his own. And so he gives you your space, walks a few paces behind as you both inch along the path back home — your home.

A shiver forces him to break the silence.

It creeps down your spine, from top to bottom, and settles into your hands, a subtle shake that not even shoving them into the pockets of your coat can quell.

“Wait a second, would you, kid?”

Jack’s never fought so hard to keep his voice soft. Despite his efforts, you startle at the interrupted silence. When your feet pause on the concrete, it’s unclear if it’s because of his request or your shock.

Instead of dwelling on the thought for too long, Jack focuses on his self-assigned task, shrugging his bag off of one shoulder and manoeuvring it to lay against his chest, allowing him to observe the contents as his hand riffles through it. Digging way down past rolls of bandage, a tube of specialised moisturiser, a few odd pairs of compression socks, and various other miscellaneous wonders, his fingers finally happen upon what they’ve been seeking: hand warmers.

“Here,” he starts up, as he hastily rips a packet open and shakes the bag. “This should get the cold out your bones.”

Jack has always prided himself on his rationality. Controlled and composed, with eyes that have payed witness to more horrors than the heart can cope with, it is a rare — if not impossible — feat to catch him sporting a heart rate higher than seventy three.

Watching you envelop the warmer in both your palms, soothing out the shake brought on by early morning chills and the residue panic from your attack, he’s tachycardic.

Months of awaiting the rise of an opportunity — since that second time he walked you home and watched you attempt to hide your skin from the wind’s bite with the flimsy pockets of your coat — buying those hand warmers has at last payed off.

He’s not quite finished digging through his bag.

Untangling the ball that has become of his wired earphones, Jack awaits permission before slipping one bud into your ear, the other into his own. He plugs them into his phone, swipes along his catalogue of playlists, and hits play on the first one that catches his eye. Medicine in the form of music, doctor’s orders.

And just like that, you’re both on the move again. The silence between you now carries a soundtrack, a mixture of eighties rock and seventies funk marking the beat of each footstep. Jack no longer hovers a few paces behind, welcomed back to your side by the short string of wire dangling between you.

Halfway through The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, Jack catches himself entranced in the shape of your lips as they mouth along to each lyric, and it strikes him, then and there, that maybe a moment like this is what inspires a musician to write, to eulogise an emotion through the eternal art of music.

For a man who long ago stopped talking to any version of a god that may exist, walking along by your side, hands brushing occasionally, bodies drifting closer to each other’s orbit; it’s as close to heaven as Jack may ever get.

Jack doesn’t leave you at the entrance to your building.

He holds the heavy door open for you, follows you in. Learning quickly that you live on the third floor, he bites back a comment about how shaky the elevator is, enduring the ride up. Following as you weave through the hall, right down to the end, he keeps quiet as you pause outside a door.

For a moment, he thinks that you’re going to say goodbye. That you’re going to thank him for walking you home, again, even after he’s told you it’s no bother. That you’re going to fish out your keys and slip through the door, starting the countdown on the clock of when he’ll get to see you again, later tonight for another shift in the pitt.

What Abbot isn’t expecting is for you to turn to him, cheek already streaked by a rogue tear, with another dancing on your eyelashes and promising to follow soon.

You take a moment to find your voice, lips parting and delivering the promise of your voice, “I’ve never felt unsafe at work.”

He doesn’t answer immediately, wanting to let your words simmer.

You have other plans.

“But when he-” the crack in his heart echoes the one in your voice, lips trembling over silent vowels as you fail to speak.

Tears roll down like waves, crashing against your chin and dripping onto the neckline of your sweater. And all Jack can do is clench his fist, hold it close to his side as blunt nails tattoo their print into the flesh of his palm. He cannot risk letting his guard slip, risk acting on an impulse you might not welcome.

“I was scared.” You breathe out, like the words you utter are a grave sin, the weight of guilt at last ripped off your shoulders. “Which is stupid, I know. I was fine, it was just a- I shouldn’t of-”

“It’s not stupid,” he interrupts, daring to take a step closer, hands still glued to his sides. “You were attacked.”

Like hearing it spoken aloud clicks something into place, gravity kicks in and you finally come crashing down, waves of tears now aided by a storm of overwhelming emotions. Shoulders shaking, breath stilling, eyes landing on every inch of the hallway but the place he stands.

Jack is no stranger to stomach-churning sights.

He’s withstood the horrors of a war zone, watched bullets hit their marks and shrapnel claim countless victims — his leg, to name one. From the brutality of war to the chaos of an emergency department, he’s bit back the acrid burn of bile at the back of his throat; it comes with each life he fails to save. There are nights where he cannot count the dead on both hands, never mind one. He has reckoned with the missing piece of him, where empty space now occupies the flesh that once extended below his right knee. Perched upon a shower bench, or throbbing with a phantom ache, or soothing vaselines and creams into an angry red stump, Jack learned to endure the pain.

But this — you, breaking down before his eyes, barely a step between you both — brings on a pain like no other, something he can't quite describe.

Cracks are forming in his composure, a trait he wears like armour, threatening to spill onto the dirtied floors of the building's hallway. His fingers slip, no longer balled into fists but pressed flat against the top of his thighs, drumming a nervous rhythm into stained cargo. When Jack tries to clear his throat of the ball forming within, he nearly breaks out in a cough, choking on the comfort he longs to speak into existence.

You interrupt his collapse of self-control.

Two steps is all it takes for your forehead to kiss his shoulder. Dampness overcomes the grey fabric of his shirt, your tears staining it a darker shade. Jack freezes at first, hands unwilling to move beneath the growing fear of touching you wrong, scaring you off. Then, slowly, as the weight of you presses deeper into the crook of his neck, his arms find themselves taking full possession of you, fingers splaying up the length of your spine and pulling you tighter against him.

For a moment, the outside world holds no consequence. Jack is not an attending, you are not a nurse. There's no decade of time between the age of your bodies, nor a quiet though respectful history of admiration between you as coworkers. That acceleration of his heart is not a reason to panic but a reason to rejoice, no fear of any wicked woes from years gone by sneaking back up to remind Jack of troubles past.

No, none of that matters in this moment but you, Jack, and the syncopation of your breathing.

One of his hands finds your hair, equal parts warm as it is large when it cups the back of your head and smothers you closer into his pulse point. Suddenly he’s grateful he reached for the expensive cologne today.

Clearing his throat, Jack attempts to self soothe from the sharp pain in his chest that grows with every sniffle from you, “Fear doesn’t make you any less brave.”

Your reaction is delayed, barely acknowledging the fact he spoke at first, until you’re bursting into a fit of subdued giggles.

While laugher wasn’t exactly what he was aiming for, Jack can’t help but feel like he's succeeded at something.

“Who knew you could be so deep, Jack,” he wrestles with his body at your soft reply, willing himself to not imagine you mentioning deep and his name in a much racier setting, preferably splayed out on the navy of his bedsheets, hair a soft halo that further cements your image as an angel… An angel he wants to commit every carnal sin against.

You move too soon for Jack’s liking, who nearly clings onto your figure until logic kicks in and reminds him how pathetic of an image that would paint. There's a streak of colour down your cheeks, stains where tears have dragged away the subtlest hints of makeup, yet Jack swears he’s never seen you in a prettier light than this: beneath the cold, buzzing light of the hallway, stepping back from his arms with a look in your eyes far lighter than the one you sank into him with.

“Easy on the teasing, kid,” the nickname has never felt more like a lie, sour on the back of his tongue. The last thing Jack Abbot considers you is a kid. Younger? Of course, but nothing short of a woman, in shape and in mind. “I stole that quote from my therapist actually, I’ll have you know.”

Then, for reasons less related to muscle memory than he would dare to admit, Jack shoots a wink in your direction.

Goodbyes exchanged and apologies for wet shirts successfully curved, Jack lingers by your door until he hears you twist the lock shut behind you, a solid frame of wood bringing the abstract divide between you into the world of the tangible.

Right then, right there, still running on that same spike of adrenaline from when he first heard the horrid cries of code Hula Hoop, Jack Abbot is struck over the head with a horrific realisation.

One taste of you in his arms is not enough, and it never will be.

Jack needs more.

The fifth time is a matter of routine.

You’ve always been a fiend for structure; a creature of habit. Doctor Jefferson reckons it’s the perfect trait to balance out the chaos your field of work brings into your life — when you reiterate that explanation to Jack, him retying his laces for the third time in a row and you reshuffling the same stack of papers for a fifth time, the attending is quick to agree.

“Have you seen yourself eat a sandwich?” Jack’s defensive retort comes no sooner than a moment after your hand teasingly swats his shoulder. Unbeknownst to you, the sudden sway he gives has less to do with the force behind your hand, and everything to do with how your touch grips at his soul. “You’re the only person I know that takes the exact same order of bites, every time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” your protest is far from filtered through any seriousness, words that are soon followed by an amused snort. “No I do not!”

“Uh yes, you do,” back on his feet and standing straight, Jack’s gaze lowers to meet your own, sitting prudently at your desk and finding any measly task to occupy your hands for five more minutes, if only to continue giving your feet the break they need from running here, there, and everywhere. Force of his own habits, or perhaps a nervous tick, you watch as the attending occupies his hands with the shape of his stethoscope, two fists dangling from his neck as he curls his knuckles and tugs on the object.

With your apparent eating habit now dragged into the spotlight, Jack dismisses himself with nothing more than a cheeky lift of his lips, and a muttered Duty calls! as a set of EMTs come strolling in with a gurney.

The rest of your shift passes in a Jack-less blur, your eyes and ears too occupied as you trail next to Parker.

She had lay claim over you no more than seven minutes into your shift, face lighting up like a Christmas tree at the sight of you strolling out from the locker room, still rubbing the sleep from your eyes as your body familiarised itself with the shape of your scrubs. Without even so much as a hello, Ellis grasped a hand around your forearm and tugged you off towards triage, paying no mind to Jack’s questioning gaze as you both shot right past him. All she offered him was a, “Sorry, Abbot, your girl is mine for tonight.”

Abbot didn’t correct her.

Your girl.

Every part of your psyche is aware it’s a minuscule thing to get hung up on, to feel your stomach fluttering with an unknown anxiety each time you replay the scene; yet it happens all the same.

As you assist Dr Ellis, passing her a scalpel.

As you rip off dirtied gloves and replace them with a new pair.

As you stir sugar into your third coffee of the night, eyes staring blankly ahead while Ellis talks your ear off, venting about her recent misadventures in love.

“And then guess what she said!” Parker’s voice may as well be going in one ear and out the other, because you’re far from listening, eyes too busy following the shape of Abbot as he cuts down the length of a hallway, one of the younger residents glued to his side and pitching their newest case.

Has the casual dominance he wears like another layer of clothing always had this effect on you, firing off error warnings in your mind as you watch him steer his resident out the way of an oncoming gurney — a motion that reads as second nature, not even so much as a moment’s thought running through him before he’s executing the action.

Ellis snaps you out of it, fingers clicking in your face and blinking her back into focus.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Huh? What?” It’s torture not to let yourself get wrapped up in Jack again as he perches himself across from you both, elbows braced on the nurse’s station and arms straining at the seams of a navy top you swear is purposefully two sizes too small. “Yeah, of course I am.”

“Then guess what she said next,” despite the distrusting glint in her eye, Dr Ellis spares you the humiliation of telling you she caught you staring at her attending.

“Uh… That she’s not ready for a relationship, even though you met on a dating app?”

“Worse!” she exclaims, right as you notice Jack’s hazel gaze meet yours, intrigue practically dripping off his eyelashes with every involuntary blink. “I don’t date Virgos. I mean, can you believe that? The girl is navigating her love life by letting goddamn starry shapes guide her!”

“Hey,” you feign a face of offence, hand clasped your chest as though to shield your heart. “Some of us just like the comfort of fixed compatibility.”

You watch as the betrayal settles over Doctor Ellis, glazing over her already dead-pan stare with a look of pure judgement, “Et tu, brute? Go on then, shove your knife deeper, would you ever date a Virgo?”

“I don’t know. I guess? I’ve never really thought about what signs I wouldn’t date,” you pause, the hairs on the back of your neck standing to attention as a strange sensation of being watched creeps over you. But as you look back over in Jack’s direction, you find him engrossed in his phone. A pitiful feeling dawns over you, baptising your heart with a hollow ache only disappointment can conjure. “Weirdly though, all my exes have been either a Pisces or Gemini. I don’t know what that says about me but-”

You finish on time, for once.

No last minute emergencies, no lingering to help Jack as he squeezes one last case into his already-finished shift, no letting your scrubs overstay their welcome; you pry them off like they are caught ablaze. And then you linger.

Hands occupy themselves with minuscule tasks, organising and rearranging the items in your locker; then unzipping your bag and going through each of your belongings. Eyes take the occasional peek towards the entries of the lockers, and ears perk up each time footsteps grow closer.

It’s only when Jack steps through the door at last, defeat written all over his face, that your mouth moves. First, stretching into a smile, and then forming a few words.

“Rough night?”

Relief ripples his features at the sound of your voice — like finding a streak of sunlight on a rainy day— bringing the tiniest spark of joy back into his sunken eyes, “Thought you’d have gone by now, kid.”

You waver, something about his question feeling accusatory, even if he delivers it in the gentlest of voices.

Why haven’t you left?

A troublesome cat, an unfinished box-set, and a bowl of leftover pasta sit in the confines of your apartment, practically begging you to race home back to them and delve yourself into comfort, that momentary pause to the chaos of the PTMC you struggle to find in the hours between shifts. A few months ago, you would already be a glass of wine deep and settling in for just one more episode of many, far from lingering like a bad scent amongst the lockers. But then again, a few months ago, the road home was a lonely one.

At what point did that seventeen minute walk become the highlight of your day?

Something warm meets your nostrils, dragging your attention across to where Jack now stands, spritzing his sweat-ridden neck with a few pumps of cologne. You don’t mean to notice the bottle has less than a quarter of its amber liquid left. You also don’t mean to reminisce on the first time you saw the bottle, clasped in Jack’s hands. The memory was one you thought would be singular, never once before having witnessed the older man groom himself after a shift.

Instead, it’s become his signature.

Clock out, hit the lockers, drown the stench of bleach with a warm musk, and then…

“Do you have any gum?”

You know this scene all too well, you almost get ahead of the script and answer before he even asks. Fortunately, you manage to play it cool, “Uh, let me check… Yes!”

Jack doesn't need to know that you didn’t really need to check.

And Jack definitely doesn’t need to know that you never used to carry gum, not until the first time he asked.

But does he need to move closer, that cloud of freshly sprayed cologne enveloping you in its arms, just to pluck the strip of gum from your outstretched hand?

Mint blankets over the notes of bergamot and black pepper, and Jack washes away the stale coating in his mouth, jaw wound tight as he crushes the white rubber beneath his molars.

He doesn’t inch away, retreat back to where he once stood. Instead, his hand finds your own, fingers bumping against yours and silently commanding you to relinquish control… Of the strap of your bag, of course, index and middle finger hooking beneath the padded fabric and slinging the bag over his own shoulder.

“You know,” you say, because you have to. If you don’t distract yourself with speech, you’ll drown in those hazel eyes, too close for comfort and, yet, nowhere near close enough. “You should really start bringing your own gum. Or a toothbrush, if you’re that scared of having a bad breath. What if I switch to day-shift, huh?”

Maybe Jack scoffs in disbelief, knowing there’s not a version of reality where you elect to work days. Or maybe the scoff is a way of downplaying his irritation at the thought, possessive over the sheer possibility of losing his girl to the likes of Robinavitch, hot-head extraordinaire with a touch of suicidal tendencies.

Whatever his reason, Jack is quick to mask the original expression on his face with an easy smile, one corner of his lips twisting upwards as he shrugs, “It’s less to do with not wanting a bad breath, more to do with the fact I like being in your debt.”

Frozen in shock, mouth slightly agape and brows furrowing, you barely register as Jack starts to make his way down the hall, snapping out your trance only as he calls your name.

Like a dog called to heel, you scurry off to join his side.

Jack stops informing you that he’s walking you home.

Without fail, every shift, he shows up, steals your gum, invades your space, and takes your baggage hostage, guiding you out of the ER with the ghost of his touch against your lowers back, steering you through the crowd of ailing folks and stopping you from diving in to help.

Conversation is no longer something the space between you demands, a comfortable silence settling in; the wind down of a hectic shift sound-tracked by the sound of a city waking up, the smack of your footsteps hitting the ground, and the occasional exchange of words.

Like today, as you pass by a unit under construction and Jack reads over the sign: a soon-to-open sushi restaurant.

“You ever been to Japan?” He asks, curiosity practically beaming from his eyes.

“Never. You?”

“Once, when I was young-” he hesitates, like he intended to add -er to the end of his word but decided against it. “Would you ever go?”

“To Japan?” He nods. “Yeah, maybe.”

His reply arrives like a confession, gentle and lacking the confidence you’ve come to associate with Jack, “I’ve been meaning to visit again.”

Silence keeps you both company the rest of the way, until your feet come to a halt outside your apartment block. Jack doesn’t intend to follow you to your door, not like the last time. Instead, he shrugs off your bag and helps you slip it over your own shoulder, using those large hands to scoop your hair up, rescuing you from the sharp sting of feeling the strap pull down on it.

Then Jack announces, just as lacking in confidence as the last time he spoke: “I’m not a Virgo.”

You stare at him, blinking slow, letting his words settle into the grooves of your brain and sink down until some part of you starts to make sense of them.

The more he speaks, the clearer it becomes what he’s attempting to say, “Or a Gemini. Not even a Pisces.”

Suddenly, those moments as you stood listening to Dr Ellis’ romantic woes, with the nurses station between you and Jack and fleeting glances snuck between nurse and attending, it all feels less innocent, less casual. More intentional.

Jack had been listening, hanging on to your every word as you entertained Parker and pretended to allow astrology to rule over the romance in your life.

“Just, thought I should let you know,” much to your dismay, Jack’s fleeing quicker than you can chase him, a sheepish smile overcoming his face and a hand reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. “In case you were ever wondering.”

Finally, there is the time where lines blur.

“Come on,” the tell-tale whine of a tipsy Trinity Santos rings out of your phone’s speaker, interrupting an intimate evening for three: you, your cat, and a cheesy horror movie, where the only thing scarier than the lacklustre VFX are the plot inconsistencies. “Even Crash- Ow! Sorry, I mean, even Vic is here!”

The last thing you want to do on your night off is to squeeze yourself into a pair of jeans and spend it in the presence of the exhausted day-shifters, four-drinks too deep for you to ever catch up, no matter how many shots you throw back.

Unfortunately for you, the only thing more convincing than Trinity’s pleading is Whitaker’s tipsy bellow of your name, followed promptly by, “I need a karaoke partner! Santos ditched me for Mel!”

It’s only with a groan that you agree, “Okay. Fine, yeah, whatever. I’ll come. But I’m having an early night! No seven am walks of drunken shame like last time!”

“Don’t worry meemaw, we’ll get you tucked into bed before three, latest,” Santos’ laugh rings down the line, the alcohol coursing through her veins amplifying the humour she already finds so easily in her own words. “Now hurry, the bar closes at eleven, then who knows where the night might take us!”

You enter the bar, already braced and ready for the impact of the Pittlings swarming you, like bees drawn to honey, a tangle of arms wrapping themselves around you. Only as Mel let’s you go — the last to do so — do you notice a figure you had not anticipated.

Dr Robby, sat in all his grumpy glory, greeting you with a tightlipped smile and a single wave of his hand. Before you can even open your mouth, ready to return the greeting, you take a step forward, heel landing in a puddle of spilled drinks, and nearly slip… only to find there’s a presence at your back.

Not touching you, but there; hovering, lingering. A buzz of energy trapped in the minimal space between the small of your back and the warmth of a hand.

“Careful, kid. There’s better ways to fall head over heels.”

Without even having to turn your head, you know it’s him.

You do so, anyway, and welcome in the sight of Jack Abbot clad in a pair of dark jeans, dark boots, and a white button up, sleeves rolled below his elbows and with the buttons undone enough to tease the way his collarbones sit dusted by freckles. Familiarity is in his scent, a cloud of his cologne settling into the atmosphere above your head, and the low lights of the bar catch on his pupils, reflecting warmth.

A million thoughts run through your head: how he’s no doubt come to keep Robby company, how the sleeves of his shirt are practically choking his biceps, how wrong it feels to see him surrounded by the Pittlings, how much of a relief it is to see him.

But all your mouth can manage is an unpleasant, “Why are you here?”

The table’s chatter comes to a pause, all eyes on you two as an exchange of chuckles, whistles, and even a soft ouch crawls its way out of Robby’s lips.

“No! Sorry, I-” hellbent on embarrassing yourself, it seems, you groan as your face dives into the safety of your palms, cheeks hot to the touch. “That’s not what I meant-”

Fingers seize your wrists in a gentle grasp, momentarily soothing over your rapid pulse point before they tug your hands away from your face, putting you back on display to the rest of the bar. All you see is Jack, in front of you, biting back laughter and fighting off a teasing grin.

“I know what you mean,” by the grace of something merciful, he lets go of you, sending your hands dropping back down to your sides. “I swapped with Shen. He needs my Sunday off.”

At the mercy of God, or the universe, Samira puts an end to your humiliation ritual and jumps out her seat, lacing her arm with yours, and drags you off in the direction of the bar, “Let’s get you a drink. Alcoholic, preferably!”

A half hour passes in the blink of an eye, clock striking ten and beginning the countdown to the bar’s closure. You down your first drink - a concoction of fruit juice, and syrup, and cheap liquor. The second is one you treat a little kinder, nursing your glass of vermouth and giving it the attention it deserves, each sip a chance to let the flavours melt into your tongue. By your third, the sweet feeling in your chest is enough to counter the bitterness of any drink, and so you move onto the cheap beer Trinity clings to like a lifeline.

Jack sits furthest from you, alternating between sophisticated sips of a bourbon and gulps from a beer bottle his hand engulfs entirely too easily. Despite the fact he sits knee-deep in conversation with Robby — who has spent most of his night complaining, no doubt, about a recent run-in with Gloria — while you lend an ear and a smile to Dennis as he pleads his case to you on why his friendship with a certain widow is perfectly innocent, the two of you orbit each other.

With eyes that wander, drawn from one side of the table to the other. At first, it’s bashful: whenever you catch him, Jack’s neck snaps his attention right back to his fellow attending. But as the drinks flow and time ticks on, it grows bolder, transitioning into a challenge; hazel eyes pinning your own into a staring contest as they watch you over the rim of his glass. You lose, conceding to whatever force draws your eyes down like magnets to the sight of his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.

With fingers that toy a line between distance and friction. When you reach for the handful of nuts at the centre of the table, Jack’s fingers meet your own in the bowl. The graze is minute, barely a whisper of contact between skin, yet it shakes you to the core. Familiar fingers meet your skin as Jack makes his way around the table, excusing himself with needing a trip to the bathroom. It’s as he passes you that he strikes, a teasing drum of fingertips against your shoulder — mimicking the call of someone searching for your attention — that has your head turning to the right, only to find no one there. By the time you catch onto the fact it was Jack, he’s standing in a queue for the toilets and offering you a challenging raise of his brows. What the challenge is, you don’t quite know yet.

You’re not given the chance to dwell on the thought, not when Santos slams an empty bottle down into the centre of the table and declares, “Time to find out all your dirty secrets. Truth or Drink!”

A chorus of groans echo from the surrounding party, yourself included… Yet you all entertain her all the same, no one daring to challenge her pointed stare as she spins the bottle.

It lands on Mel, whose excitement lasts all of the seven seconds it takes Trinity to dish up a question.

Have you ever tried to break up a marriage?

Mel drinks.

Victim #2, much to Trinity’s delight, is Javadi.

Javadi, who already is nose deep in her glass before a question can even hit the table, slamming her empty cup down onto the table with a sheepish smile.

“Dammit, I was gonna tell Mel to ask about Mateo,” comes Santos’ disappointment.

The younger girl is just as quick to reply, “Why do you think I drank?”

Poor Robby ends up roped into the game next, following in the footsteps of the previous players and drinking instead of answering Javadi’s interrogation, “Do you follow me on TikTok?”

It’s when Dennis takes a swig of his colourful cocktail that Samira groans, surprising the entirety of the table as she throws her head back and exclaims, “Oh my God, you people are so boring! All too chicken to answer!”

Jack seems to take that as a challenge, for when the bottle comes to a halt, neck pointed in his direction after Dennis spun it, his arms remain firmly crossed over his chest.

“Shit. Wow, okay,” the younger boy is startled, no question burning on the tip of his tongue for a man he barely knows. So he settles with something simple, something impersonal, something with no deeper intention behind it to humiliate the man: “When was the last time you lied?”

Jack doesn’t answer immediately.

No, he makes a show out of turning his wrist up to his eyes, squinting as they read of the dials and his face settles into an emotionless expression, “Like… an hour ago?”

Quick as a whippet, Trinity dives at the first chance to investigate, “Who did you lie to?”

“That’s a different question,” Jack fires right back, reaching for the empty bottle to spin.

For some reason, his eyes are pinned on you. Even as the bottle lands on Trinity, they linger on your frame, that same unknown challenge in his stare.

The bar spits you all out at four minutes past eleven, bodies spilling out into the street. It’s chaos, voices of strangers mingling in with those of your coworkers. You’re being tugged each and every other way, a million questions fired in your direction.

C’mon, don’t you agree we should go Downtown?

No, no! We have to head to Passion!

Ew, Passion sucks. Every surface is… sticky.

Can’t we just go anywhere that offers karaoke?

Poor, unsuspecting Dennis is left flinching back in shock as a unified bark of No! comes from all the girls, disgusted eyes burning him for so much as daring to suggest such a thing.

“Wherever you kids are going, it won’t be with her,” Jack, emboldened by the booze in his veins, finally lets that hand of his fully press against your lower back. Your head turns to find him already watching you, amused by your puzzled look. “You’re working tomorrow.”

“So are they!” You exclaim, hand pointing out to the crowd of Pittlings. “They have work sooner than I do!”

“And that’s Dr Robinavitch’s cross to bear. You, on the other hand,” a finger drags down the slope of your nose, taping against the tip as Doctor Abbot leans down to your ear, like you’ll suddenly lose the ability to hear him over the noise of the city streets. “You’re my problem.”

It’s hard to breathe; the night air too cold, too thick, too drenched in Jack’s cologne.

You know his reputation; you’ve been victim to it. Jack Abbot, shameless flirt, tongue always locked and loaded with a comment capable of shaking even the most stable of heartbeats. But this is different.

This is his hands on you, this is his voice claiming some form of ownership over you, this is his stare tearing through the fabrics of your being and embedding itself inside your chest, awakening a kind of warmth that even the hottest Pittsburgh summer day would envy.

“Boo!” It’s Victoria who cries out, cutting right through the budding tension between nurse and attending, one-too-few seconds away from blossoming into something far from the professionalism of colleagues. “You’re leaving already!?”

Your mouth opens, ready to answer.

Jack steals the words right out your mouth, “Yes. I think it’s about time we leave, don’t you agree?”

Spotlight pointed at you, he puts you on the spot for the entire group to watch how you fumble over a simple, “Uh, sure.”

The hand against your lower back sticks to you like a magnet the whole way home.

A journey longer than the one you usually stumble down with Jack by your side. It would have made more sense to hail a cab, any rational adult would recognise that, yet neither of you dare to suggest it. Crowds of drunken fools spill out from bars and invade the sidewalk — the kind of stumbling messes that activate a cynical part of you, wondering just how many of them will wind up in the care of your colleagues before the end of the night — Jack answers their invasion by drawing you closer, footsteps fading to the back of yours as he guides you to walk ahead of him, the burn of his hand reminding you that he’s there, that you’re safe, that no wave of foreign faces is going to sweep you up and drag you away.

Even as you make your way up the stairs to your apartment floor, elevator out of service, Jack lingers a few paces behind, watching your every move.

It’s as your fumbling around in your purse, fingers blindly rummaging through loose change and half-empty lip gloss tubes in search of the keys to your apartment, that Jack takes it upon himself to start spewing revelations.

“It was you,” he says, pauses and, when met with your questioning eyes, glancing back at him over your shoulder, clarifies. “The last time I lied, tonight. It was to you.”

A few seconds pass in silence, and then, “Oh.”

“Shen doesn’t need Sunday off.”

“Oh.”

“I knew you were off tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” he leans down, enters your orbit and invades you with the knowledge of how solid his chest feels pressed against your back, and how warm his breath feels, brushing against the shell of your ear as it mimics your repetitive exclaims of shock. “‘S that all you know how to say?” Before you can politely beg him to back up, for the sake of your sanity and your fraying willpower, hanging on by a single thread that seems more than eager to snap and unleash the burning in your loins upon the older man, Jack shuffles a few steps back and takes a deep breath — the kind that has his shirt straining against the growing width of his chest. “It’s not the first time I’ve lied to you.”

“Oh- Wait,” Cut off by your own confusion, you spin on your heel a little too quickly and stumble forward, hand inches away from rediscovering the meaning of balance against his chest. “What have you lied about?”

“There we go, finally using that pretty voice properly again,” if you had known this was what a tipsy Jack Abbot behaved like, you would have offered him a drink months ago. Especially with the way his cheeks sit blushing in red, a shy imagery to contradict the growing boldness in his words. “My car was never in the garage. I even drove it to work that day. But you wouldn’t accept Mateo’s offer for a lift, so I figured I’d need a real good excuse to walk you home.”

Clarity washes over you not in repeated waves, but in one single tsunami.

Overwhelming, a wall of emotions flooding over your being. You mentally retrace each step you’ve taken in his company. Each walk home, each careful conversation exchanged between you. Every cloud of worry that hovered overhead, convincing you of a reality where your presence and the act of accompanying you home is nothing but a burden to Jack Abbot, a simple kindness that’s gotten out of hand and now he does not know how to back out of.

But his words bend that reality, until it snaps in half and ceases to exist. Because here Jack is, telling you he orchestrated reasons to walk you home, excuses to linger in your presence after the night shift came to an end and patients are no longer a force that brings you into one another’s proximity.

Jack Abbot wants to be around you. So why on Earth would you part from him now, just because your finger had hooked itself around a keyring?

“Jack,” in the quiet of the hallway, his name echoes off your lips, uttered more intimately than ever before. “Do you want to come in for a drink?”

Your confidence is a case of easy come, easy go; dissipating before you can even wait for a proper reply from the man. Anxious thoughts dialled up and overloading, you turn back to face your front door, shakily shove the key into the door, and unlock something that feels a little more than just your apartment, a point of no return awaiting in it’s premises should Jack choose to accept your offer.

Walking in before Jack can speak, you get your answer with the gentle closing of the door behind you and the clearing of Jack’s throat, swallowing back what may just be a similar ball of emotion swelling within your own.

If you had anticipated Jack Abbot standing in your living room tonight, you would have at least attempted to tidy up.

Then again, if you had anticipated this, there’s other things you would have done differently… You would have made sure you actually had something to offer him to drink, for starters.

“Uh… I don’t have any beer,” you mutter, more to yourself than Jack, one hand holding the fridge door open and the other rummaging through the half-empty shelves, like you might somehow unveil a surprise bottle of anything-worth-drinking. “I can offer bourbon? Maybe? Or I’ve got leftover wine. Might have gone bad though. Shit, sorry, I really don’t have anything to offer.”

Closer than you anticipate, hovering by the entry to the kitchen, Jack rasps a careful, “Just you is fine. ‘S all I’m really here for.”

Like two opposing magnets drawn together by an unseen force, distance becomes null and void as eyes meet and you both inch closer, devouring the space between you with careful steps. Face to face at last with everything that has been brewing beneath the surface of your interactions, you barely squeeze out a whisper of his name before Jack claims your mouth as his prisoner.

Lips lock like shackles, trapping you in place against the older man. Hands find one another’s frames, his large palm staking claim over the back of your neck and tilting your face into the perfect angle for him to deepen the kiss, tongue teasing with a graze over your lower lip, the beginning of a chuckle bubbling in his chest as you answer his touch with a pitiful whine, before he finally licks into your mouth. Your own hands carve out a path for themselves, sliding over the expanse of his broad shoulders, curling around the tightness of his biceps, trailing down his waist to find the worn out leather of his belt, two finger hooking beneath and drawing his body closer — like any space still exists between you.

He lets you move him all the same, walking yourself backwards and dragging him along until your back hits whichever wall sits the closest. Any memory of the layout to the apartment you’ve spent the last five years living in has melted away in the heat of Jack’s mouth, kissing you like he has something to prove and this is the only chance he’ll ever get.

Squeezed flush against one another, no barrier but clothes sitting between, you feel the shape of him pressing into your hip and making you painfully aware of the fact Jack Abbot, the older attending you forced yourself to learn to observe quietly and cautiously from a safe distance, now has his semi-hard cock straining against you. That realisation must run through you too viscerally, for Jack’s soon tearing his mouth away from you.

“Shit- Sorry,” he just about gasps the apology out, lips incapable of drifting too far for too long, a smatter of kisses meeting the edge of your jaw as you feel Jack angle his hips away from you. “Been a while since I last-” He’s cut off by his own groan, reactionary to the weight of your hand landing atop the bulge of his jeans, palming at the length of him in hopes of finding out just how hard he can grow. “And I’ve just been thinking about this, ‘bout you for so long. Just-” greedy mouthed, even his desperate please for apology are interrupted by the drag of his tongue over your pulse point. “Ignore it, I’ll keep myself in check. Don’t wanna come on too strong, scare you off.”

It’s a bit late to retreat now, is what you want to say, with the way your thighs are squeezing together in search of any friction and the cotton of your panties sticks uncomfortably against your folds.

But Jack is blushing enough as it is, tips of his ears as red as you imagine his hair once was, face burning hot as he burrows it deeper in your neck. So you spare him some kindness and settle on the buckle of his belt, choosing direct action over teasing words.

A switch seems to flip at the brush of your fingers as you reach for Jack’s belt, attempt to dive beneath the waistband of his boxers. The older man stiffens against you, in more ways than one, head rising from your neck like a cobra enchanted by the notes of a flute. Thick fingers curl around your wrist, prying your hand from him gently yet accompanied by the disapproving tut only an authority figure could conjure, moments away from teaching you a lesson.

His chastisement isn’t vocal but physical, dragging your wrist up to his mouth and greeting it with the gentlest press of lips, right where your pulse recounts a soliloquy on the affect this man has on you, heart rate spiking. Jack lingers, face turning to brush the tip of his nose against your skin while his eyes slip shut, like he’s drowning himself in the fading notes of your perfume. Then, he jumps right back into action, manoeuvring both your arms above your head and pinning them against the wall.

“No one ever tell you to keep your hands to yourself, sweetheart?” No man’s condescension has ever sounded so appealing, so soft. A softness he pairs with the brush of fingers, his free hand tracing a path for itself down the length of your torso, catching on the waist of your jeans and lingering, only to continue its descent over the shape of your thigh. “‘S okay, I don’t mind being the one to teach you.”

“Doctor Abbot,” you breathe, something stirring in your bones the longer the man stares at you, eyes spilling secrets of every degenerate thought passing through his mind.

“Really?” Jack reclaims your skin with his mouth, teeth scraping over your clavicle before his tongue tastes your flesh, a slow drag of the wet muscle halfway up your neck. Your pulse, a bass drum thrumming against the restraints of your veins, brings him to a pause, luring him into peppering a series of chaste kisses over the spot. All the while, his hand is familiarising itself with the curve of your thigh, fingertips dragging over the seam of your jeans and following its journey north, inching towards your clothed core. “Still calling me that, even while I’ve got my hand between your thighs?”

Maybe the alcohol is clouding your judgement, eradicating any hint of the usual hesitation that has ruled over past encounters like these, leaving you shy and bashful, and far from the kind of person willing to rip their aching desire right out their chest and present it to it’s new owner, heart in hand and lust in eyes.

The unexpected confidence boost has your hips shamelessly rolling into the palm of Jack’s hand as he engulfs the expanse of your core. Breathing stalls as the inseam of your jeans brushes against your lace-covered clit, pulsing with anticipation of whatever the older man plans to do with you.

“You’re beautiful, y’know that?” It’s unfair, hearing such earnest words falling from his lips, a touch of breathlessness to further sweeten the desperation in his voice; all the while one hand tightens it’s grip on your fidgeting arms and the other, firm and steady, undoes the button of your jeans and begins drawing the zip down at an agonizing pace. “Dangerously so. Might have to file a complaint soon, tell the board how inappropriate it is of you to distract me with just a smile while we’re meant to be saving lives.”

A sigh, delicate as silk, robs you of the satisfaction of replying instantly, body too busy accustoming itself to the intrusion of his hand on your skin, explorative touches that dip beneath your waistband and drag slowly through your folds.

Stealing yourself and silencing the part of you that wants to melt into his hand and let him remould you into something new, you eventually manage an amused, “I can always change departments, Dr Abbot. They’re always looking for extra hands with the inpatients.”

“Do that, and I’ll drag you back, kicking and screaming, if I have to.”

Beneath your clothes, the tip of Jack’s middle finger has taken to dipping between the warmth of puffy lips, collecting a dollop of your liquid pleasure, and lathering it over the desperate nub of your clit in gentle circles. His movement is casual, careless, not a hair out of place or a shaking of nerves evident on the man in front of you. Just the hungry eyes of a man in control, ready to take his time tearing you apart bit by bit, in a way only he can put you back together after.

“Fucking soaked,” Jack’s comment feels aimed at his own ears, a passing acknowledgement of your state that you just so happen to hear as he brings a second finger up to lazily play with your clit, all the while the wet patch soaking into your panties grows, no doubt seeping through lace and staining denim. “‘S actually a little pathetic, kid. I’ve barely even touched her and she’s weeping for me.”

Heat burns at your cheeks, the foul nature of the words leaving his mouth bringing you to a confusing state of embarrassment mixed with the headiness of lust, clouding your better judgements and axing whatever part of your brain is in charge of overthinking, just in time to halt a spiral down into the dreaded pits of sleeping with a coworker, a man you’ll have to continue to see nearly everyday, for better or for worse — everything hinges on how tonight ends.

There’s no time to worry about the end when Jack is just beginning.

Those same fingers that teased at your clit dip lower, nestling themselves between your folds. As though shocked by your warmth, you feel more than hear the man groan into your neck, a half-bitten back string of curses parting from his pretty lips.

“Can I, sweetheart?” His plead for permission pulls you out of your body momentarily, mind drawn away as it attempts to recall the last time a man bothered himself with asking before taking. “Need to know how she feels, ‘s all. Can you let me do that, hmm? Let me fill her with my fingers? Promise I won’t ask for more, won’t push my luck. Christ, already know I’m pushing it now, thinking an old man like me has any business messing with a pretty thing like-”

“Yes, Jack!” Cutting off his rambling mouth, your hips keen into the tantalising drag of his fingers through your slit, a back-and-forth motion he’d spent his whole monologue performing idly, with an occasional torturous catch of his fingertips on your entrance, threatening to delve deep only for him to course-correct and set them back on the track up the length of your slit. “Please, God, just- Touch me.”

“Greedy girl,” he tuts, face winding it’s way out from your neck just for his hazel eyes to observe your face as he finally breaches his fingers past your entrance. “Am I not already touching you?”

Replies are lost to the kitchen air, breath knocked out your chest in one foul swoop as he burrows his fingers knuckle-deep. Your lips part, your eyes roll back, and you grind down against his hand, as if by some grace of god he’ll hit some place deeper inside, fingers already pressing against that spot inside you as Jack curls them towards himself, putting the come in come-hither.

The angle is awkward, movement hindered by the tight squeeze of your jeans around his wrist, yet Jack works through the strain, digits pulling out at a slow, agonising pace, only to slip back inside equally as slow. It’s like he’s making you savour the feeling, imbedding every ridge and wrinkle along his fingers and knuckles into your memory, so the next time you find yourself hot under the blanket and struggling to sleep at night, your own hand won’t bring you half the relief.

His fingers fall into a rhythm, a back and forth tease that sets your nerves ablaze and unravels a ball of desire you long ago tossed aside, four weeks into working at the Pitt and telling yourself that those pesky butterflies you felt every time a certain attending crossed your path were nothing but newbie nerves. Marking the tempo of his touch, the repeated squelch of your cunt being filled by his fingers rings out; the deeper he dives, the wetter you grow. Your moans follow along to his beat, a perpetual huff of half-formed whines and hitched breaths, echoes of pleasure that claw their way out your throat and shamelessly sing him a song of praise.

“Ah, ah,” Jack mimics you, hot breath brushing against the shell of your ear as he feeds your moans right back to you in a tone so condescending, you feel your toes curl. “‘S that all you know how to say?”

Those same words and that same mocking tone from the hall have your skin crawling with need. A need to press yourself closer, until all your frayed edges tangles themselves in Jack. A need to fight against the hold of his hand, wrists squirming and fighting for release in hopes of winding your arms around his broad shoulders. A need to give in to the overwhelm, dive head first into the waves of desire that roll over you… So you do.

Jaw slack, toes curled, head thrown back. An orgasm crashes into you with the force of an ocean, sweeping you under and flooding the palm of Jack’s hand with the sticky sweet evidence of how good he’s making you feel.

His fingers fuck you through the experience, lazily curling and stroking the fire, drawing out your pleasure for as long as your body allows him, until a dry sob racks through your chest and tears dance along your lash line, head shaking as you protest the overstimulation.

The retreat of both Jack’s hands, slipping from the waistband of your jeans and relinquishing the grip on your wrists, it does not grant your poor heart respite, a chance to calm the beating it’s delivering against your chest. Instead, he doubles the speed, raising the fingers stained in your own slick and brushing the tips against your lower lip.

“Say ah,” not a question, a demand. Jack is an expert at ordering you around in a manner soft enough, confident enough to have your head reeling and will bending to his every wish.

Under the effect of his darkened gaze and the intoxicating scent of his cologne mixing with the beer on his breath, how can you do anything but let your mouth fall open?

Your first thought is disbelief, running cold down your spine at the unexpected sweetness that coats your tongue; sweetness that melts into a sharp tanginess, giving way to a thirst like no other, glands going into overdrive and wetting your palate. Drunk on yourself, you let your eyes slip shut and your lips wrap around the stretch of Jack’s fingers, a pleased hum bubbling up your throat as his digits apply the slightest of pressure against your tongue, testing the waters of your gag reflex as he slowly pushes himself deeper in your mouth, soaking himself in your spit.

“That’s it, pretty girl,” Jack’s spare hand has found its way down to your waist, slipping over the slopes of your curves and perching itself atop your hip, where he delivers a firm squeeze. “Made a real mess of my hand, ‘s only right you clean it up.”

By the time Jack pulls his hand back, a string of saliva connects his fingers to your lips and a craving is reawakening between your thighs. Afraid to fracture the fragile atmosphere between you and the attending, you choose to lead with action again, one hand grappling at the buckle of his belt while the other begins to hastily drag your jeans down the swell of your ass, skin-tight fabric stubbornly refusing to give way and grant you the freedom of air against your legs.

You only make it so far, barely managing to pry apart his belt when Jack intercepts your desperate touching, hands reclaiming possession over your own and shooing them away. With a pause for consideration, the mental cogs visibly turning behind his eyes, you watch as the attending descends the path of your body, peeling down your jeans along the way. A hiss is bitten back as he bends his knees, one foot planted firmly on the ground the other — his right knee — kissing into the kitchen floor, prosthetic calf laid behind him.

It’s the brush of a breath against your thigh that has you lurching back into your body, ignoring the worried nagging voice that wants to drag him off his knees for the sake of his health and comfort… and instead focusing on the part that wants him off his knees for a far more selfish reason.

“Jack,” your attempt at protesting is pathetic, a well-intended firm call of his name fracturing midway and collapsing into a whine as the man takes to laving his tongue up the expanse of your inner thigh, inching dangerously close to where you can feel your centre throbbing, crying out for him in morse code, desperate for the simplest of touches so long as the one delivering it is the older man currently kneeling on your kitchen floor.

Fingers wind in greying curls, the faintest burn of auburn and copper tickling against your knuckles. You attempt a tug, gentle enough to do no harm yet firm enough to get the point across of what you want: Jack, up and on his feet.

The man does not take the hint, instead he inches further up your leg, nose nuzzling against your mound. Blood rushes in every direction as you witness him pull in a sharp inhale, flooding himself with the intoxicating scent of your would-be pheromones.

“I want to taste you,” he says it with a fire behind his eyes, words impassioned by an animalistic desire; any woman would be mad to not throw herself at him, plead him to take anything and everything from her, however he should please.

Which makes the confusion burning his features more than understandable as he takes in your shaking head and your gentle mutters of no, followed swiftly by, “I need you to fuck me, Jack.”

Hands seek purchase on your hips, grip squeezing a little tighter as he steadies his prosthetic back onto the floor and brings himself back to his standing height. You can see the hesitation, in his eyes and in his fingers, as he slowly continues the undoing of his belt, slow and calculated movements that drag cracked leather free and loosen the clutch his jeans have around his waist.

“Who knew the Pitt’s sweetest nurse could be so demanding?” he muses, like joking might distract you from the cloud of doubt that has so visibly rolled in and settled above you both.

You entertain him, even if only for a moment, “Only when I don’t get what I want. Are you gonna deny me, Jack?”

“So you’re a brat,” bypassing your question, Jack drags the zipper of his pants down and leans his face in, lips brushing against your own with the ghost of a kiss. “Noted.”

His kisses paint a pretty picture of distraction, peppering affection over inches of skin that had spent so long being neglected, you’d nearly forgotten they existed. Over the swells of cheeks, down the slope of a throat, onto the point of a shoulder and back up to the shells of an ear. While your heart wants to sink into the feeling, fall back and let him lather you in every mouthful of affection he can sear against your burning skin, your brain takes the reins of the situation and forces your hands onto his shoulders.

“What’s wrong?” Direct and to the point, you avoid the time-waste of skirting around the subject and confront the change in his demeanour head-on, the sudden hesitancy. A sense of panic licks up your spine, filling your mind with thoughts of Jack regretting having started this, crossing over the safe lines of coworker and marching across into trickier territory. “If you don’t want- I’d understand, okay? If you say it was just the heat of the moment, and the beer, and that you no longer want-”

“What? Baby, I promise this is anything but- Fuck,” Jack practically collapses into the groan that tears out of him, hand falling over his face and pressing into the corners of his eyes as he struggles to get the words out fast enough, a soul-crushing need to put an end to the rejected twinkle in your eyes as you offer him a gentle smile, the kind offered by politeness instead of happiness. Jack hates it on you. “I don’t know how to explain without sounding conceited.”

“Oh-kay,” your confused exclaim melts into acceptance, though your eyes remain sceptical as they trail over the attending’s face, awaiting further explanation. When it doesn’t come, your eyebrows jump, a visual nudge that has Jack finally spilling confessions all over your kitchen floor.

“I’m… Big.”

And cue the laughing track.

Watching as the tips of his ears bleed a bright red, you bite back and swallow down a comment about how his height is a little over average at best. Because when a puppy-eyed Jack Abbot warns you of his size in a manner that implies real danger, the last thing you should do is turn his panic into a joke.

“How big?”

“I don’t know-” Then he cuts himself off, like reality has struck him over the head and he remembers he is, in fact, a medical professional and, though he may never have measured his own endowment, surely he can guesstimate. “Maybe like eight. Inches, I mean. And, um…” what a thrill to see Jack reduced to a mumbling mess, a man so usually consumed by his flirty nature, a charm so potent that it pours off him in rivers, soaking all who wind up in his vicinity. Yet here he stands, barely enough space for a deep breath between you, shyly detailing the heat he’s packing beneath the waistband of his trousers. “I’m- I mean it’s pretty thick, too.”

Silence haunts the space between you.

A sick satisfaction pools in your loins, knowledge renewed on the fact you’re bare from the waist down yet all the power seems to sit in the palm of your hand in this moment, Jack’s fate hanging in the balance of however you choose to react to his assumed shameful confession.

So when all you offer is cocked head and a tongue poking against the inside of your cheek, Jack just about falters into insecurity, seeking validation before you even have time to utter a word.

“I’m not bragging. Or, you know, talking myself up. It’s just- I don’t want to hurt you, or to-”

“Take it out.”

His neck practically snaps as his gaze flies from the floor to your eyes, hazel rings that grown thinner under the enlarging of his pupils, lust bleeding into his stare as he managed a careful, “What?”

“This big dick of yours,” emphasis to your words, you finally let yourself look down and catch sight of him, firm and heavy beneath the confines of dark blue denim. The view of his bulge alone is enough to have your mouth watering, but you can’t let it slip, not when your grip on the reins is finally secured. “Let me see it, Doctor Abbot.”

The switch is instant.

Bashfulness melts away and the cloud of doubt is blown away as a cockiness overcomes Jack’s features, face splitting into a shit-eating grin. Fingers work fast this time, dipping beneath the elastic of his boxers and granting his cock freedom at long last.

No trace of a lie in his words; Jack is big. Uncut, with a rosie red tip that’s already made itself known, glistening with the rogue drops of precum that smear the mushroomed head. At the base sits a bush of hair, groomed enough to show you he cares enough to trim it yet overgrown enough to tell you it’s been a few weeks, silver locks threaded through a valley of dark auburn. Freckles dust his skin in subtle specs, while a vein draws a colourful line up the length of him.

You can practically feel yourself throbbing, calling out for him with each moment that passes, your eyes glued to the phallic shape. Jack, evil incarnate, has the gall to lick a stripe up his palm, hand wrapping around himself and daring to give a slow pump.

“I’m gonna need you to stop looking at me like that,” Jack cuts himself off with a hiss, teeth taking his bottom lip hostage as a chuckle rustles out from the depth of his chest. In that moment, you swear nothing has ever been more attractive than the gentle disapproving shake of his head as he rakes his stare down the shape of you, eyes clinging to where your thighs sit squeezed together, stealing any amount of friction you can find. “‘Else I might cum all over myself like some desperate college kid.”

You reach your hand out, searching for traction and finding it in the belt loop of his trousers, still clinging to his tree-trunk thighs. And thank god for that, for it allows you to tug the man closer, chest to chest, knuckles brushing over the hood of your clit as he works his hand over his cock one last time.

“Then give me a reason to stop looking, Doctor Abbot,” swallowing back any lingering shame or shyness a less hornier version of yourself possesses, you curl a hand over the top of his and stare into pools of hazel as you speak, “Don’t you want to make my eyes roll back?”

Never has a man looked so eager to part your legs, the skin of his knuckles burning white as he takes a hand to the back of one of your knees and hooks it over his waist. Left with no choice but to keep your thighs spread, you indulge yourself by glancing down at the view. Visual sin, erotica live in emotion, Jack guides the blushing tip of his cock up the length of your cunt, soaking himself in your arousal. A mutual gasp echoes out into the kitchen on his second swipe, head catching on your entrance only to be denied easy access, hips rolling only to watch himself press against your clit.

“Don’t care if it hurts,” bordering on lost in lust, you barely register the words as your mouth moves. Jack, on the other hand, clings to every syllable, awaiting whatever salvation they promise to bring him. “Just wanna feel you, Jack. All of you, please.”

“Shh, shh,” his hushing is full of mockery, like the last thing he really wants is to silence the desperate plea in your voice. He does so, unintentionally, by finally lining himself up with your entrance. “Don’t need to beg, baby. I’m gonna give it to you, all of it. Just be sure to cry real pretty for me if it gets too much.”

Something animalistic comes over you as Jack feeds the first inch into your cunt.

The burn is there, the stretch of long-unused walls remoulding themselves around the shape of Jack. But any pain is sweet, the kind that tickles at your nerves and has your heart speeding up, adrenaline activated and intoxicating your bloodstream.

Jack, conscious of the crease between your brows, is tentative, careful. He gives a barely-there thrust, letting himself inch just a little deeper into the pulsing warmth of your pussy. There’s a vein across his forehead that makes itself known, the force of his concentration paired with an accelerating heart rate drawing it to front and centre stage of his face. All it does is make you want him more, deeper, quicker.

Words cease to serve any purpose as the two of you give in to the physical, hands that grasp and pull and anchor themselves atop one another’s skin. You think you breathe some version of his name, but the letters are knocked out of you as your fingers tangle themselves in grey curls and, in the blink of an eye, Jack’s pelvis sits flush against your own, cock buried right to the deep hilt and face collapsed into your own, foreheads exchanging sweat as his temple kisses against yours.

A pitiful whine claws its way from you, suddenly painfully aware of how well Jack fills you, stuffed to the brim in a way no man before has quite achieved. You feel him in your cunt, in your guts, in your lungs with every shaky breath you pull; you are drunk on the attending and the feeling of his cock pulsing deep within your gummy walls.

“Sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” apologies are overflowing from the fountain of Jack’s mouth, brushing against your cheek in tiny puffs of breath as the older man blesses you with a whimper so pathetic you nearly come undone right then and there, cunt ready to spill all over his throbbing cock. “Didn’t mean to- shit. Wanted to take it slow, ease him in, but god… You’re just so tight. And warm, and- Ahh! And your nails, they- they scrapped against my scalp and you were tugging on my hair and I couldn’t help it, baby.”

How can you even contest or complain, when you feel like a live wire, thrumming with a deadly kind of energy that threatens to burn everything and anything that touches you and isn’t Jack Abbot?

His hips rock back slightly, only for him to fuck back into you, tip to cervix. The leg hooked around his waist tightens around him, holding Jack as close to you as possible. The scene between you plays out with an intensity one could cut with a knife.

Slow and shallow rolls of hips, punctuating each shaken breath you pull and forcing the air out of you in pitiful whines and moans, songs of praise for Jack's viewing pleasure.

Foreheads together, breaths mingling until it’s hard to tell where your exhale stops and his inhale starts. Both nurse and attending, junior and senior, woman and man; whatever title you and Jack may be addressed by, you’re equal measures of the same mess, staining one another with nails that scrape over freckled skin and five o’clock shadows that burn at cheeks.

“Look at you,” Jack marvels, one hand scooping up to cup your face and remind you of how big his hands look — hands you spent weeks wishing would reach for yours during quiet walks home. Yet now one cradles you while the other grips at your body, tilts your hips at angle that drives him just that little bit deeper. “Taking it like a good girl, no whining or complaining that it hurts.”

What really hurts is that he is still moving at an agonisingly slow pace, torturous drags of his thick length along your walls. If you weren’t speechless under effects of his ministrations, you’d maybe find the ability to tell him this.

“You’re just grateful to have something to fill this pussy, huh?” Something catches in Jack’s throat, a fractured groan that raises a sudden alarm. It feels different to previous ones, born from somewhere deeper, more painful in his chest. “If I knew you’d be do eager, I wouldn't have waited this long to come inside.”

You stomach three more measured rolls of Jack’s hips before you cave into the anxious feeling hollowing your pleasure, the wince on his face having grown deeper and more concerning.

All it take is a hand to his shoulder and a barely formed Jack, wait, for the man to tear himself off you, putting immediate distance between you despite the hand that remains on your face, holding it steady as his gaze sweeps over you in search of evidence of your well-being.

“What’s wrong, kid?” Just like that, you watch him slip back into the practised role of a caretaker, Dr Abbot taking centre stage and relegating Jack, the man keen on seeing you come undone at his touch, to the wings. “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry, I told you- Warned you, baby.”

His rambling would be endearing, if you weren't aware of the sudden empty feeling of your cunt clenching at nothing and, worse, the bitten-back wince of pain that pronounces itself across his face as he shifts weight from one foot onto the other.

So you take matters into your own hands to silence his spiralling mind.

Literally into your hand, fingers wrapping themselves around the thick swell of his cock, standing at attention and smearing the evidence of your lust over Jack’s lower abdomen. The reaction is instant: hips bucking into your touch in a stuttered thrust, mouth falling agape and silent as you envelop him in your gentle touch.

“You didn’t hurt me,” quite the opposite, the tight fit of his dick bordering on nothing short of heaven. “But you’re hurting yourself.”

Before Jack can demand a much earned explanation, you trade his cock for one of his hands, threading yourself to him and enduring he can’t let go as you begin guiding him to your bedroom, the gentle jingle of his loose belt slapping against his thigh announcing each step he takes.

Lit only by the silver light of moon, you turn to him as you reach your humble queen size bed and try your hand at that stern yet caring look Jack has mastered — the look that’s held your heart hostage since you first witnessed it directed at you.

“Your leg. It’s hurting,” now you wish you had opted for switching on a light, because you swear you see the subtlest hint of a blush taking over Jack’s cheeks, guilty and caught when he thought he was doing such a good job to mask the dull ache of his limb. “Take it off, Jack. Or at least let yourself rest on the bed, let me do the work.”

Your silver fox puts up little fight, mouth opening and swiftly closing before any empty protest can flee. The mattress squeaks beneath his weight as Jack sits down on the edge, both legs bent at the knee and feet planted on the floor — he makes a conscious effort to keep his boots from touching the small carpet that runs along your bedside, unwilling to taint the cream coloured fur.

As he hunches over, hands peeling back the leg of his trouser to expose the sight of his faux-calf, a fragile quiet befalls you both. You watch entranced as he removes the prosthetic, a practised ritual he performs with the ease of a man who long ago came to terms with the cards that were handed to him. Freed at last, unwinding a strip of bandage from the stump, Jack takes to removing his clothes next, while you take to filing away his previous movements into a part of your mind labelled later, a future in the shape of a question mark, the possibility of some day needing to remove it for him.

There is something decidedly cruel about the sight of Jack Abbot sitting at the edge of your bed, completely undressed and pinning you beneath his stare as his hands now occupy themselves with more nefarious actions, one gripping at his cock and indulging himself in a languid stroke while the other takes claim of the bottom of your shirt, balling the fabric up in a fist as he tugs you close so abruptly, it’s only natural that you slip and tumble into his naked lap.

An awkward repositioning is punctuated by your own nervous laughter, a shy giggle making itself known as you straddle the doctor, the hand between his legs now teasing at your core, dipping into your honeypot just to soak himself in your sweetness before diverting his attention to your clit, pointer and middle finger rubbing an agonisingly slow circle over the nub.

“You’re gorgeous,” Jack whispers, honesty rolling off him in waves as his eyes ravage the newly exposed sight of your naked chest, t-shirt and bra tossed behind you in the blind chaos of falling into Jack. “You know that, right?”

There is urgency in his voice, like his worldview might just collapse if you tell him otherwise, and the desperation is enough to have you giggling all over again, a noise that quickly is intercepted by a gasp, eyes slipping shut as the man welcomes himself to the taste of your flesh, mouth swooping forward to take the right nipple between his lips, “You might have mentioned it before.”

“Then let me mention it again,” mumbled into your chest, he marks the sentence with a kiss to the opposite nipple, “And again,” the next kiss lands back on your right nipple. “And again.”

Both of you groan at the other’s ministrations, your hand threaded back in the silver locks of his hair and tugging at them just sharp enough to have Jack’s hips rutting up into you, bodies searching for the sweet release of friction yet neither of you rushing to give in as you slowly wade into the depths of lust, grinding desperately against one another like a pair of inexperienced college students.

“Jack,” you breathe his name, hand tilting his head back from your chest and granting you the freedom to plant your mouth against him, tongue dipping into the cavern of his mouth, the taste of beer and bourbon still on his lips.

“Hmm,” Jack hums, hand cradling your cheek.

Between you, tensions rise as your folds spread around his cock, rubbing up the length of him as he rocks himself against you.

“Are you going to fuck me,” is all he lets you get out before he drags you in for another kiss. “Or are we going to sit like this all night?”

“I don’t know, feels pretty good to me,” he’s teasing you, enjoying the sight of you growing more and more dishevelled by your own carnal needs, your nails digging into his freckled shoulders. “I wouldn’t mind.”

Sighing with nothing but sexual frustration, you recapture those earlier reins and slip your hand between you both, grabbing at Jack’s cock and lining it up at your entrance, thigh muscles burning as you hover, “Well I would.”

You sink down onto him slowly, eyes incapable of resisting the urge to roll to the back of your skull as you feel that sweet familiar burn of him stretching your walls.

Jack is speechless, but far from quiet, mouth open and singing you the prettiest songs of guttural praise. His hands are on your hips, gripping you in a way that threatens to bruise, all the while you are savouring the flush press of your bodies, your soaked folds kissing the base of his cock with a creamy ring.

When you finally begin to move, a careful raise of hips, you condemn both of you to a world polluted by lust, and pleasure, and the aching need to keep stimulating friction.

The rhythm comes naturally, a slow build-up of you fucking yourself down onto him, stuffing your cunt full to the brim. Jack has given in, handed himself over to you for you to use how you please, while his hands rake over every sliver of skin they can reach. Smoothing over your thighs, grabbing at your waist, pinching at your hard nipples, guiding your mouth down to meet his, a kiss that is more an exchange of breaths than a battle of lips.

A symphony composed entirely of sin, the darkness of your bedroom is set ablaze by the wet slap of skin meeting skin, a squelch punctuating each time he fills your cunt and a new wave of your arousal drips down his thighs and stains your bedsheets.

“This fucking pussy,” Jack speaks like you have personally wounded him, your forehead meeting his shoulder as you let out a squeak, the hands on your waist no longer sitting idle but now guiding you, bouncing you down to meet the upward rut of his hips. “‘S so tight, and warm, and perfect. You’re perfect, letting me stretch this little hole. Taking all of me.”

“Love it, Jack,” You’re babbling into his shoulder, mind turning to unusable mush the faster Jack slams you down on him.

“Love what, kid?”

“Your cock.”

“Yeah?” Oh, the smugness in his voice should be illegal, but you have only yourself to blame. “Who knew my pretty nurse was so good at taking dick. Can’t believe you’ve been holding out on me all this time.”

A chord is winding inside you, drawing tighter and tighter as Jack continues to bounce you down on his cock, pausing every few thrusts to let you savour the full stretch, grinding up and biting back laughter as you greet him with the whites of your eyes.

“Holding- ahh! Out?” Your walls flutter around him as you feel yourself closer to the edge of an orgasm.

“Yeah, sweetheart, holding out,” a kiss lands on the side of your head, as though Jack is incapable of not showering you in as much physical affection as possible. “Ignoring all my flirting, never giving me a sign that you want me just as much as I want you.”

“Flirting?!” Head out from his shoulders, you gaze down at him in disbelief, refusing to take the blame for why it has taken so many months for the pair of your to wind up here, naked and desperate and staining your sheets together. “How was I supposed to know? You flirt with everyone- Jack!”

His name is more shriek than moan, tearing out of you as his fingers press themselves to your clit and send you head-first into an orgasm.

Jack fucks you through it, slower rolls of his hips stretching out your state of euphoria and granting him a longer view of your mouth spewing profanities and your eyes rolling back and your hips bucking atop him, both fleeing from and feeding into his touch.

A sudden bang interrupts the scene, cutting your bliss short and forcing you to swallow back a moan.

Frozen in place, fingers to your clit and cock half-way buried inside, Jack’s wide-eyed gaze watches you with a questioning glance. Silence isn’t given the chance to settle fully between you, as soon another sound — from the same direction as the bang — echoes through your bedroom.

“Hey! Keep it down, some of us are trying to sleep.”

Jack is the first to react, laughter shaking his shoulders. His head tilts back, disbelief gripping him in its clutches. Collapsing back onto your bed, he drags you down with him, sweaty chest pressing to sweaty chest. You follow him into laughter too, your own muted chuckles spilling into his neck as you shyly bury your face away, mortified by the thought of one of your neighbours hearing you and Jack.

Apparently, it has the opposite affect on him.

Because instead of crippling mortification, Jack has already begun rutting back into you, shallow thrusts that he somehow manages to deliver, despite the fact his cock already fills you to the brim. Nerves aflame from a ruined orgasm, your body is quick to submit to him, hips tilting to welcome him deeper, back arching into his body. But the moment your lips dare to part, a chastisement is quick to follow, a disapproving tut coming from the man beneath you.

“Shh,” despite his hushing, he makes no attempt to slow his thrusts, the very cause of your fracturing sanity, mouth no longer in control of the noises you let out. Neighbours be damned, you would happily dare any of them to feel the sweet release of Jack stretching them out and not turn into raving banshees. Well, not quite so happily, for you are very quickly growing not only fond but possessive of the attending. “I know, kid, I know. Feels good, right? So good you just wanna scream, don’t even care if someone hears?”

Whether you realise it or not, you nod along to his mockery, desperate please for more, please, just like that, Jack proving his point perfectly: you don’t care.

The only thing you can do is feel him, all of him.

“That’s it, let it out,” he croons, faux sympathy in his voice while he cups your face and swipes away at a tear, the overwhelm of feeling so full and so close to cumming for a third time finally getting the better of you. Tear gone, the hand on your cheek drifts down to cover your mouth, smothering you into silence, muffling the shriek you let out as his hips grow sloppy, desperate, fucking you deeper, harder, faster each time, his own orgasm creeping over the horizon. “I’ll take you to my place next time. ‘S a detached bungalow, can be as loud as you need to be. And, god, I plan on giving you reasons to be loud, put you in every possible position, make you cum so many times you lose count.”

Every moan and groan and whine of his name that leaves you is muffled by the heavy palm of his hand… Which turns out to be a blessing in disguise when a third and final orgasm collides, head first, right into you, leaving you a mess. As you writhe and wriggle, one of the muscles in your calf cramping as your toes curl and your body pulls itself taut, Jack is fighting his own personal battle, hips stilled and limiting the friction as much as possible while you fall apart atop him.

Fingers tangled in his hair, face engulfed by his heavy hand, thighs squeezing around his hips; the image of you cumming is the kind that pushes a man to pick up a paint brush, all in the hopes of memorialising the art in motion onto canvas. Jack can barely focus on you, however, eyes squeezing shut as he steadies his breathing and struggles to hold back a flood.

“‘M gonna cum, baby,” Jack strains out, pulse near visible along his jugular as his heart rate shifts into overdrive. “Need you to lift these pretty hips off me or else- ahh!”

The whimper you pull from him is damn near heartbreaking, right from the gut and full of a fractured sincerity. Unwilling to so much as let him finish any thought of pulling out, never mind his sentence, you’ve staked your claim, shook your head, and cemented yourself flush atop him, cock stuffed to the brim and left no choice but to spill into the pulsing heat of your walls.

Hot, thick ropes of Jack’s cum flood your pussy, painting a pearly white mess inside of you. Overflowing and with nowhere else to run, you feel the unmistakable stickiness of his cum, now mixed with your own orgasmic bliss, leaking out of you and staining both your skins in the act. Breathless and minds drifting far away from the physical plane, you crash down atop Jack, overstimulated and overspent, and drift into the comfort of his arms enveloping you, holding your sweaty figure against his own in an embrace that says stay without uttering a single syllable.

Frozen in time, the pair of you remain glued to one another. Your breathing falls in sync, each rise of his chest matching perfectly with your exhale, and a gentle rocking remains between your bodies, an invisible stream of desire that ebbs and flows, manipulating Jack into rocking up into you and teasing you into grinding down to meet his movements, in spite of the teeth clenching sensitivity tingling at your skin.

You are the first to move, a careful rise from his chest. Already softened within you, his cock slips out of you and you pull a breath in through a grimace. The muscles in your thighs have turned to mush, more unstable than jelly, and so it is nothing short of a miracle to feel Jack’s steady touch settle itself on your hips, hands supporting the dead-weight of your lax body and guiding you to hover over his lower abdomen. You quickly realise he has less than pure intentions, as you watch satisfaction creep back into his pupils when a string of his cum dribbles out from your cunt and drips down onto his skin.

Admiring the picture you paint over his lower stomach, Jack has the nerve to mock the tired whine he coaxes from you as fingers swipe through the white mess and slip between your folds, feeding his spend right back into your walls.

Back hitting the mattress before you can protest, you struggle over a gasp and a barely stringed together sentence while the attending slips down the length of your body, pausing only when his head reaches your thighs.

“What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” Jack, with reflexes quick enough to match his wit, intercepts your legs before they can crush his head between them, your hips bucking and your heart unsure whether you are trying to chase after or run from the teasing stripe he licks up your cunt. “You cleaned your mess, now let me clean mine.”

Your heads hit the pillow as the Sun hits the horizon.

By nine, birds chirp by the windowsill and sunlight cuts through the sliver in your curtains, forcing your half-asleep form to retreat into the safety of Jack’s chest. He answers your cry for help instantly, arms pulling tighter around your waist as he continues to venture through a land of dreams, lips parted in the softest snore.

By noon, the city is awake. Cars honk their horns, voices fill the streets, doors slam from floors above and below. But in your apartment, not a creature stirs, bodies clinging to one another and sleep with equal fervour. If you drift left, Jack soon follows. If Jack flips onto his front, your palm is quick to flatten itself over his back. Magnets connected by an unseen force, the pair of you toss and turn beneath wrinkled bedsheets.

By four, the bathroom mirror is fogged. You are a nervous wreck contained behind the nervous smile of someone who is trying their best to be supportive despite the shampoo stinging at your eyes and the grown man you are supporting against your frame. Unwilling to let you drag one of your leather dining chairs into the cubicle, Jack had insisted he would be fine to shower standing, so long as you kept him company.

By six, your apartment is empty. Clad in the familiar shapeless clothing that is sure to keep you comfortable throughout your shift, you’re struggling to find the right time to ask Jack to hand you your bag back, too used to his habit of prying it out your hands to even notice he had done so as you both departed from your front door. No choice but to throw on last nights clothing, Jack is silent at your back, one arm pulling you against him as yet another neighbour slips into the confines of the elevator — freshly fixed yet sending a shiver down your spine with each shake it gives in its descent down to the ground floor.

By some miracle, you make it out onto the street.

Which maybe, now that the fresh air hits your cheek, you are beginning to lament. Because this is it, the point of no return; where you go one way and Jack will go the other, trailing home to enjoy the rest of his night off while you no doubt will spend your entire shift dreading where the events that transpired between you — the stolen kisses, the lustful whines, the rolling hips — leave you both standing.

Taking your bag from him seems like the correct first move to make towards goodbye, but when you reach your hand out, Jack answers your silent plea with his empty one threading itself into your hold, fingers entwined in a manner so perfectly it has you reminiscing on how your bodies lay atop your mattress.

The attending has already tugged you halfway down the street before your mouth catches up with your feet, choking out a dumbfounded, “Where are you going? You’re off today.”

“So?” Jack barely offers you a bothered shrug of his shoulders, glancing back at you with a look in his eyes so warm, you worry you might just melt into the asphalt. “That doesn’t mean I can’t walk you to work.”

+ extra hyde!

· this fic was meant to be short, believe it or not... my first proper fic of 2026, yippee! · olivia, girl... never stop making albums for me to cry to. · pov: jack abbot, the biggest flirt who turns into a bumbling idiot when faced with the person he actually wants:

He was nursing a bourbon he’d probably make last the entire night and he was half-listening to Langdon tell some story, his leg stretched out into the aisle, and he hadn’t seen you yet. You had a second. You could have turned around and texted Dana some bullshit excuse of getting the full eight hours and walked back to the parking lot to go home to your dog and half your bed.

You never did, though. You told yourself afterward it was because the leaving would’ve told the table something. But the truer thing, the one you didn’t want to look at directly, was that an evening without Jack had started to feel like a room with the bulb burned out. You’d gotten that bad. 

“There she is,” Dana said, twisting around in the booth, already sliding to make room. “Sit. I saved you the good side. It doesn’t wobble.”

You sat, and the good side put you diagonal from Jack, close enough that his stretched-out leg was a fact you had to arrange your own legs around under the table. He hadn’t acknowledged you yet. He was letting Langdon finish; Jack always let people finish, it was something that made patients trust him and made you, toward the end, want to put a plate through the wall because he’d let you get to the bottom of sentences you’d have killed to be interrupted out of.

But you watched the back of his neck change as his shoulders went from loose to aware. When he turned, his eyes found yours like a bad number on a monitor, faster than he could’ve chosen. For half-a-second, before his face caught up, he looked so completely undefended. Then it was gone and he looked at you like you were weather he'd been told about. 

“Huh,” he breathed, picking his bourbon back up. “They let your department fraternize with the help now, or are you slumming?”

“Dana kidnapped me.” You reached over and took the lime off his rim. He’d never once in his life used it—he hated citrus in bourbon—and only got it because Marlene behind the bar had been putting it in each time. Jack had decided somewhere around your wedding that debating her on it was more than what the lime was worth. 

You bit it and set the rind into his napkin where it went, where it had always gone. 

His eyes tracked you as you did it without any comment. The better half of five years of the lime and he’d never once said anything, only bought you the garnish on his own drink. 

“How was your floor?” you asked.

“Slow.” He turned the glass a quarter-turn on the table, an old tell, the thing his hands did when he was trying very hard to keep his words scarce. “Knock on something.” 

“But I like watching you suffer,” you drawled. 

He huffed at that. “I know.”

That was it. He was good at letting things sit, it was the worst of his habits, the way he could absorb a thing you said and just hold it instead of returning it. Half your sentences to him used to end in a silence you'd eventually have to fill yourself. You'd forgotten how much work it was. You'd forgotten you used to do all the talking and call it conversation.

“You got Kevin this week?” Dana asked from beside you. 

Jack, without a beat of hesitation, said, “She’s got Kilo this week.”

Javadi, the new and curious med student in the ER, looked between both of you with furrowed brows. “Sorry. Kevin or Kilo? Is that—are those two dogs?”

“One dog,” you said.

“Yup. One dog,” Jack agreed.

“Then why—” Javadi started.

“His name’s Kilo,” Jack said.

“No, his name’s Kevin.”

Javadi’s head went between you as though she was watching a tennis match. The table laughed because they’d heard this a hundred times and it never stopped being funny to them; the divorced two doing their oldest bit, the one argument that had outlived the marriage that spawned it.

“His papers say Kilo,” Jack said in Javadi’s direction.

Robby, who’d been completely invested in his own drink, said, “And your papers say divorced.”

“And we very much are, thank you,” you said, picking it up before the laugh had finished.

Jack stayed silent then. Robby, he’d have something for. But this was you saying it, easy and completely certain in front of everyone. The leg that had been stretched into your space this entire night drew back slowly, a small retreat nobody at the table except you could’ve felt. He turned the glass a quarter-turn. 

You’d done it on purpose. You’d felt the whole night immediately tilting into the warm dangerous fiction of it and you’d reached for the one sentence that would shut it, and you’d swung it at the only person who’d actually feel the blade. 

The facts of your divorce were no concern to anyone but the two of you at the table, but you could feel Jack flinch inwardly by the announcement that blanketed it all; that you now lived in separate homes, that the dog was scheduled like a custody hearing; that the word ‘we’ had a tense and it was past. None of it was news. He’d signed the same papers you had in the same flat conference room, with the same pen the mediator kept clicking until you'd wanted to scream. He knew the facts better than anyone. And still you'd watched him wince when you said it out loud.

He'd built a whole life on the difference between a thing being true and a thing being spoken; it was how he ran a trauma bay, how he told a family the worst news in the world in a voice that never broke, how he'd ended your marriage without ever once saying the words that would've made it real, just withdrawing by degrees until you were the one who had to say them for him. He'd made you do that too. He made you do all the saying. And now you'd said this, and he was sitting there absorbing it the way he absorbed everything, quietly, like he'd decided long ago that taking it without a sound was the least of what he had coming.

“Just fucking do it, Jack.”

And he did—finally, finally—push into you with a single long stroke that dragged a sound out of both of you, his coming out through his teeth, and yours into the pillow. His forehead came down between your shoulder blades. He stayed there for a second, breathing, one hand splayed wide over your hip and the other braced into the mattress beside your hips. His weight settled onto the left leg the way it always settled, a decision his body stopped having to make years ago. You could feel him shaking with the effort of not moving yet, of dragging it out, because he always did this, he always made you ask twice. 

“Christ,” he breathed into your spine. “You feel—” he started, and let the words die as his teeth gently pressed into the bone at the top of your shoulder. It was then he started to move.

He fucked like he did everything else with his hands; he was methodical, attentive, and so devastingly present. He went in believing there was always a correct rhythm, and he intended to find it just to ruin you with it. He’d learned by repetition until it stopped requiring thought, until he could play you without looking, and the worst part—the one you’d never say out loud—was that it worked. It always worked. He knew the exact angle that made you stop being a person with opinions about him. 

That long stroke dragged slow on the way out and snapped deep on the way back in, and your whole body misfired around him whether you’d given it permission to or not.

His palm slid up from your hip to flatten between your shoulder blades and pressed, folding you down into the mattress, taking the choice out of your spine. And the new angle had you gasping into the sheets because he’d done it on purpose; he always did everything on purpose, and now he was hitting that place that made your fingers curl and your thighs shake and a thin embarrassing whine climb out you that you’d have died before making it sober. 

Jack felt the exact second your control went and he leaned into it, hips grinding deep and unhurried, holding you right there on the edge of too-much like he was reading everything under your skin. 

“That’s it,” he drawled out, his voice low and even, the bastard, like he had all night, like he wasn’t already wrecked behind the voice. “Yeah, I’ve got you.” And he did. He had you exactly where he wanted you and you let him, because no one had ever taken you apart this precisely, this patiently, like your falling apart was the only thing on his list and he intended to do it right.

The dog tags swung forward and dragged close across your back when he leaned over you, then warm when they settled against your skin, and you thought—stupidly, with the part of your brain that should’ve been offline—that you used to fall asleep listening to that chain shift when he breathed. You thought there had been a version of this where afterward he stayed. You shoved that thought down. You arched your back into him instead and he made a punched-out noise, low in his chest, his grip going tight on you to leave the marks.

“Slow down,” he muttered more to himself than you, but he didn’t. His hips stuttered out of their careful rhythm because this was the one place his composure failed; it was the one place where the sealed-up, gallows humor, watching-you-over-the-glass version of him came apart at the seams. 

You’d figured this out over the months. This was the only place Jack was honest. He’d never say the things across a table, in daylight, with his clothes on. But here, with his cock buried inside of you and his composure shot, the truth leaked out of him in fragments he wouldn’t be accountable for later. 

“Missed this,” he got out, ragged, his mouth at the back of your neck now, words pressed into your hairline like he could bury them in there. “Missed you, fuck. You’ve got no idea, sweetheart, the things I—” 

“Don’t.” You didn’t want it. You wanted it so badly your chest ached and that was exactly why you didn’t want it, because you knew what it was worth in the morning, which was nothing, which was a text about whether you’d remembered to walk Kevin. “Jack. Don’t talk. You can’t—” You let out a gasp as he pressed his hips completely flush against yours, chasing you to the hilt, as if he could physically expel the words out of you. “Can’t fuck me into being with you again.”

You felt him falter at the words, just for a beat, the rhythm catching like you’d reached back and put a hand flat on his sternum. He slowed, dragged himself almost all the way out and held there, trembling, his whole weight coming down over your back so his mouth was now at your ear and you could feel everything against the shell of it.

“I know,” he said, words ragged. “I know I can’t. Doesn’t mean I can’t try.”

His hand moved around the dip of your waist, and he pulled out of you slow, the loss making you bite down on a sound. Then he was rolling you, one palm flat and insistent on your hip, turning you under him onto your back like it was the easiest thing in the world.

“No—” You got an arm up, forearm against your own eyes, because you knew what he wanted, and you weren’t going to give it to him. The face, the looking. From behind, you could keep it what it was; turned over, you’d have to be there for it. “Jack, leave it. I don’t—”

“Hey.” He held your wrist, thumb working into the soft inside of it where your pulse was going stupid. “C’mon. Move the arm.”

“No.”

“You won’t even—” He let out a low laugh, disbelieving, almost wounded. “You’ll let me do every other thing but you won’t even look at me?”

“That’s different.”

“Yeah.” He went quiet for a moment, and his hand slid up the inside of your thigh, holding you open, patient as anything. He knew exactly what the looking was and exactly why you were hiding from it, and he was going to wait you out. “I know it is. Move the arm anyway.”

He braced over you on his arm, the other hand drawing slow idle circles high on your thigh, his cock notched against you and not pushing in, just there, the threat and promise of him, while he looked down at the arm over your face. You could feel him watching.

So you did move the arm, mostly just to spite him by giving him exactly what he wanted. His face was right there—jaw tight, eyes gone dark and fixed on you like you were the only lit thing in the room—and the second you met it, the slight smugness melted clean down the middle and there was just the wanting underneath, naked and his.

“Thank god,” he breathed before pushing back into you. His eyes tracked your face scrunch up at the familiar—too familiar—pleasure like he’d been starving for exactly this. His hand left your jaw and found your knee, hooking it up higher over his hip. He’d always known your left hip sat wrong, that this was the angle that didn’t ache after; the same way you knew, without ever being told, to take the weight off his right side, the two of you arranging yourselves around each other the way you always had. “Knew you were in there somewhere.”

“Don’t get sentimental, Jack” you said, breathless. “You’ll pull something.”

He huffed a laugh against your jaw. Your hand had gone to his left shoulder and you pressed your thumb into the knot that always sat under the blade after a long shift, working it slow while he moved in you. He groaned low and helpless at the unexpected mercy of it.

“Mouthy,” he managed to say. “Even now.”

“You’re so—so insufferable.”

His mouth found the corner of yours and his hand slid up your ribs so his thumb could catch the underside of your breast exactly where he knew; your back came up off the mattress for him. “You married me anyway. What’s that say about you?”

You got your fingers to his hair and scratched once at the base of his skull, the thing that used to put him to sleep in under five minutes, something you’d done about a thousand times in a bed you no longer shared. You watched his eyes go briefly unfocused with how much his body remembered it meant being safe. You hated that you’d done it. 

The easy heat in him went somewhere graver, and his hand came up to cover yours where it rested in his hair. He pinned it there, keeping the touch on him, like he couldn’t bear for you to take it back.

“Why’d you—” His hips stuttered. “Why’d you have to go, huh?”

“Don’t,” you said quickly, and your hand came out of his hair—you made it come down, fighting the pin of his fingers—and you planted your palm against his chest to put an inch back between the two of you. “Don’t talk. Just—shut up. Jack, shut up and—”

He took in a breath, lips still parted like he wanted to talk. You’d expected it. Jack was fabulous at saying everything important while inside you or when he was halfway asleep.

“Yeah.” He nodded shakily. “Yeah. Okay.”

He got an arm under the small of your back and hauled you up into him, and the next stroke was just deep and selfish, like he’d stopped trying to make his point and now was only trying to get somewhere. The slow ruinous tenderness burned off into something with no thought left in it, and your body surged up to meet it—God—yes, this, you could do, this didn’t ask you for anything you’d sworn off. This was just the white-hot animal fact of him and you could be all the way in without losing a single thing. 

“There,” he ground out, forehead dropped to yours, both of you breathing into the same inch of air. “There—fuck—there you go.”

Your mind went black. That was the mercy of getting it like this; the part of you that counted the times he’d said your name, that totted up what the morning had cost, went quiet, drowned clean in the simple overwhelming good of him. You grabbed at his back and pulled him in past where there was room and made a strangled noise.

His hand found yours where it was fisted in the sheet and laced through it, knuckles white, pinning it down beside your head—needing the anchor—and you gripped back just as hard. The bed was loud. Neither of you cared. You'd gone past the place where you could have stopped even if the smarter version of you had walked in and ordered it, both of you just chasing the finish now with a kind of grim mutual desperation, like if you got it done fast enough you wouldn't have to deal with what it was.

“Close,” you breathed. “Jack, I’m close—” 

“I know. C’mon, let me feel it—” His hand let go of yours and dropped between you, fingers finding you without a second of searching, the muscle-memory of you deathly absolute. “Been thinking about this all night.” 

He worked you up to the edge with his face buried in your throat and his hips snapping. The whole thing finally cresting into something neither of you could've talked through if you'd tried.

You went over first, the peak tearing through you with your nails dug into his back and your spine bowed clean off the mattress. He fucked you through every second of it, hips ramming, dragging it up past the point you could stand. And right at the end of yours his rhythm broke and went erratic, deep and grinding and graceless, and you felt the exact moment it caught him.

His arms hooked tighter under the small of your back and hauled you up into him so there was nowhere for him to go but deeper, like the thought of any distance between the two of you right now was a thing he couldn’t tolerate. Your legs wrapped around the backs of his thighs anyway, your heel pressed into the base of his spine.

“Gonna—” His voice came out shredded, into your throat. “Sweetheart, I’m gonna—fuck—”

With a low broken sound, his whole weight crushed down and his hips gave those last helpless grinding pushes, burying himself to the hilt, spilling into you with his face shoved into your neck and his hand fisted in your hair. He continued moving even then, small, greedy rolls of his hips, working himself deeper through the aftershocks, wringing every second out. 

“God.” He shuddered out the word against your pulse, hips still flush, seated as deep as he could get. His arms came around you completely—there wasn’t any inch he wasn’t holding—and he stayed there long after he finished, unwilling to give up the last of it. Greedy even now, especially now. Jack would take every second he was handed and a few he wasn’t.

His heart slammed against your ribs. His breath dragged itself slowly back down. For a moment, you let him have it. You let him stay heavy on and inside you, and you stared at the ceiling. 

After a minute—because that’s all you could grant him, a mere sixty seconds—you put your palm flat on his chest, over the spot where the dog tags had settled cold against his skin, and you pushed.

He came up on his forearms and he looked down at you. That was the hundredth mistake of the night, letting him be that close to your face with the lights of the street coming through the blinds in stripes across him. He looked at you the way he looked at you in the one place he ever did, like you were something he'd been allowed to hold and was already being asked to set back down, and the wanting in it was so total and so useless that you had to look at his collarbone instead.

Then his fingers came up to your chin, tilting your head up gently to meet his eyes again. “I wish you weren’t so cruel to me in front of people.” he said, voice coming out so rough. 

You knew exactly which part of the night he was talking about. He’d carried it the whole way here—through the parking lot, through the drive, through all of this, your body still humming with him—and he’d held onto it the entire time, only to let it out now because now was the only time he could.

“It’s not cruel if it’s true,” you said. “Nobody thought it was cruel.”

“No, nobody thought anything.” He caressed your jaw just slightly, and you stilled under the grazing touch. “I still felt it.” 

Maybe it was the hour, or the drinks still thinning in you, or just the unbearable fact of him looking at you. Regardless of what it was, the lid you kept on the old thing slipped, and you didn't get it back down in time.

“Don’t talk to me about cruelty, Jack,” you said quietly, holding his eyes even though you could feel your own burn. You could do it for once, because he was the one that looked like he needed a collarbone to fix his gaze on. “It was your cruelty that did this.”

His thumb stopped at your jaw. And then, instead of the stillness you’d expected, his hand slid back into your hair and his arm came around you and he pulled you in, the whole weight of him bearing down. His face went into your neck. 

You froze under him, suddenly hating him all over again for making this harder and harder each time.

“Go home,,” you said, and it came out lower than you’d wanted it to.

He let out a shaky breath against your skin. “I’d like to stay with you for one night. If you asked.” 

Your hands came up to his shoulders. You gently pushed. “I’m asking you to go.”

He came up off you slow, by degrees, and the cold rushed into every place he’d just been. He never argued; he only gave you offers where with the condition of you having to ask welded into them. He sat up on the edge of the bed with his back to you and reached for his shirt off the floor.

People at the hospital had a word for you and it was ‘difficult.’ You’d made peace with it years ago. What you didn’t have a word for was the tired. You’d been tired before; this had a different grain to it, bone-level and sitting-behind-your eyes. Twice this week the floor had gone soft and far away when you stood up too fast. You’d put a hand on the counter and waited it out and told no one.

You hadn't eaten, either. The granola bar was still in your bag. So when you stood up from the workstation to walk the corrected units down yourself, the room didn't gray at the edges this time. It dropped. The whole thing tilted bright then dim, your hand reached for the counter and missed it by an inch, and the next clear thing was the floor being closer than it should be and a hand hard around your arm.

“Okay—I’ve got you. Sit.” Dana, you recognized. Of course it was Dana; she had a sixth sense for the exact second a person stopped standing upright. She steered you down to a chair before you’d finished falling. “Head down. Between the knees. You’ve told a hundred people to do this—do it.”

“I’m fine,” you said, voice coming out depleted. “I just got up too—”

“Yeah, you’ve been getting up fast a couple times this week.” " Her hand was on the back of your neck, two fingers at your pulse, and she wasn't looking at your face, she was looking at her watch, counting, and the professionalism of it—the way she'd switched you from colleague to patient without asking your permission—made something cold go through you. “When’d you eat, hon?”

“I ate.”

“When?” When you stayed silent, she said, “That’s what I thought.”

She straightened up and you heard her turn. “Hey! Somebody grab Robby. No, he’s not—just grab him.” She turned back to you, and gentler than you wanted, in a way that told you exactly how bad you looked, she said, “We’re gonna put you in a room. Don’t make a face. We’re gonna put you in a room, run some fluids, check a couple things. If it’s nothing—thank god—then it’s nothing, and you can be insufferable about it for weeks. But you went down, sweetheart, and I’m not arguing with you about it.”

You wanted to argue; you wanted to refuse the chair and go back to work instead of occupying a bed at work. But you were so tired. You were tired, and some animal part of you had already known that for two weeks and had been waiting, with a patience that frightened you, for someone to make you stop.

So you let Dana walk you to the room. You let her pull the curtain. You sat on the edge of the gurney in a department you'd worked in for over a decade and let a colleague put a line in your arm, and you stared at the corner of the blood pressure cuff and did not let yourself think the one thought that had started, very quietly, somewhere underneath the tired, to assemble itself, and would not finish assembling until Robby came in twenty minutes later with your labs and a look on his face you couldn't read, and asked you, carefully, like a man stepping onto ice, when your last period was.

You’d seen him tell a people about death with more steadiness than he was managing right now, standing at the foot of your gurney with a tablet he wasn't looking at, asking you about your cycle like the answer was already on the screen and he was just giving you the courtesy of arriving at it yourself.

“Why?” you asked flatly.

“Just humor me. Tell me.”

You told him and he had no reaction, and that was how you knew. Robby’s face had gone completely neutral.

“Okay,” he said, setting the tablet down. “Your labs came back. Everything’s—the anemia’s mild. That’s the lightheadedness and not-eating. We’ll sort that out.” He paused, took a breath in, and the cold thing that had gone through you on the floor came back and sat down in your chest and stayed. “Your hCG’s elevated.”

You felt your body run cold then.

“That’s the pregnancy hormone,” he said gently. He was a teacher before anything, and that reflex was still on, even with you.

“I know what hCG is, Robby,” you said, the words coming out sharp, voice cracking the last word in half. You saw him nod sharply as he decided to ignore it. “I—I know what it is.”

“It’s early,” he said. “Numbers are consistent with early, which means you’ve got time. That’s what I’m saying. You’ve got time to think about whatever you need to think about.” He was being so careful. “I didn’t put it into anything yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”

Early. You’ve got time. 

He picked the tablet up—done being a doctor about it now, the official part handled—and leaned a hip against the counter, and his voice changed, going off-duty.

“Hey,” he said. “Congratulations.”

You nodded, your mind already distant. 

“You gonna tell Jack?”

Your mind sharpened. For a second, you genuinely didn’t understand the sentence. Your brain refused it wholly, turned it over to look for the trick. There was no way Robby knew—there was no way anybody knew—because you’d been so careful, the whole thing happened in the dark precisely so it wouldn’t seep into the light, so nobody could say a sentence like that. Your stomach dropped through the gurney.

“Huh?” 

Robby looked at you, then shrugged. “I just figured, because you two still talk. He’d want to know. Big life thing.” Then, he added softer, misreading your face completely, “I guess it’s really over between the two of you then?”

You felt your breath hitch in your throat. That was what people would think when it got out, that the door has finally shut. They’d think you were getting clear, a baby with somebody new means the Jack-of-it-all was finally done, mercifully done. That you’d moved on and met someone, that you were building a thing past the divorce you survived. This was supposed to be proof of it. The sad civilized arrangement nobody named, ended at last by a life you were starting without him.

Robby had it exactly backwards and he had no way to know it. It was the furthest thing from over. It was likely the most permanent thing that had ever happened to you, and it had Jack’s name and only Jack’s name. The thing Robby believed to be your way out was the thing that could mean there’d never be a way out. Not anymore, if you chose to have this child. Not ever. You’d be tied to Jack Abbot. A year and a half of getting clear by inches.

You realized Robby was still standing there and that he’d asked you something. He was waiting for an answer you didn’t have the throat for.

“Can you give me a minute?” Your voice came out hoarse. “Just—a minute. Please. And don’t put it into anything yet. Just—don’t let anyone know.”

Robby nodded, probably thinking you needed a beat to let the good news settle, to feel something private and large before the world got its hands on it. “Course. I’ll hold the room, keep people out. Take your time.” 

His hand found your shoulder on the way past, squeezing, and then the curtain rings scraped along the rod and he was gone. 

It all came up at once, fast and without warning. Your hand was flat on the edge of the gurney and you watched it shake, and you made it stop. You could always make your hands stop. What you couldn’t do was make the rest of it stop. The rest of it was the thought you wouldn't think of, thinking itself anyway, and the worst part was the voice it came in, your own, flat, professional, the one you used to walk a frightened patient through their options without ever letting it shake. You could end it. It's early. Numbers consistent with early. You knew exactly how early early was. You knew the window, the way you knew the shelf life of a unit of platelets down to the day. You knew how clean it was, how legal, how completely nobody's business but your own. There was a door. Right now, there was still a door.

There was a door. There was, right now, still a door; it was the realest door, the one that actually led all the way out that would let you walk back into the life where you got clear of Jack Abbot for good and never had to share a child or a custody calendar or a name with him. He would give you Kevin, you knew that. Over would mean over, for good, where in five years you’d be a woman the hospital remembered being married once, to the ER’s night shift attending, you know the one.

You could take that door. It was yours to take. Nobody even had to know. 

You sat in the small bright room and made yourself look directly at the door and waited to feel the relief of it, yet it didn’t come. What came instead, rising up under the grief like a second tide, worse than the first, was a thing you had no word for and no right to and could not, would not, look at straight on, was that it was Jack’s.

You wished you could see it as a curse, and somewhere in the last thirty seconds it had turned over in you and come up as something else; a small, traitorous, and warm thing. It was the exact warmth that had locked your ankles around him, the same warmth that had opened the door for him every night. A piece of him you could get to keep, that no amount of divorce could put back in its box. The one version of forever you two were going to get. And a part of you, a part you despised with everything you had, wanted it. More than the baby in the abstract. His, specifically and unforgivably. 

You put your hand over your mouth as you felt it all come up, and you cried—the real way, the way you hadn’t since the lawyer’s office. You cried a cry that came up from the root and shook you apart, alone, in a place where you worked, with only a curtain covering you. 

You couldn’t have heard the shift change happen on the other side of the curtain. The hospital had kept turning around your little curtained box, that somewhere out there it had ticked over into evening and the day people were handing the floor to the night people. You hadn’t heard any of it. 

You hadn’t heard Dana catch him at the board, and she would have—you know she would have tried—put a hand flat on his chest the second she saw which way he was moving. You only heard the curtain rings scrape against the rod. 

You looked up—ruined, mid-breath, your hand still pressed over your own mouth with your face holding an expression no one had ever seen you do. And there was Jack with one hand still fisted in the curtain he'd thrown back, stopped dead in the gap of it.

He’d come in braced, almost with the same register he came in when there was a level 1 trauma, except this one was a case of lightheadedness. His sleeves were shoved to his elbow, jaw already set, and he’d walked in expecting to find blood or something else equal to that, a thing he’d be able to clean up and fix. He had a hand half-raised for it, and it stayed there, hovering, for it had nothing to fix. 

You knew his face better than your own; there’d never once been a thing he could’ve kept from you, not even when it felt like he was hardly your husband, especially then. You watched the readiness dissipate off of Jack’s face, watched the doctor leave him by degrees until what was left standing was just Jack. 

Just Jack had no protocol for this; there was nothing he’d been taught to do with his face when you were crying because you didn’t cry.

He of all people knew so. He’d sat at a conference table with you while a mediator clicked a pen and you signed your name with a hand that was too steady. He’d carried his own boxes down to the truck while you watched from the upstairs window, dry-eyed, because tears would have made it all real and you refused—out of spite, out of the last thing you had—to make it real where he could see. 

His mouth opened, and his throat worked around words, any word. When he finally spoke, it was just your name, and it came out cracked down the middle, like a plea and a prayer. 

He had no idea. It made you sob slightly louder than you would’ve liked, the realization that he was standing there gutted with fear for you, scared past the edge of himself, and he did not know. Jack could not have known that he was the answer, that you were the answer. If he’d asked you what had happened, the whole truth would have been his name and your own; it would have been the thing you’d done together in the dark a couple dozen times and called nothing. 

“I hate you,” you said, because the only thing you’d been capable of doing was throwing up a wall, driving him out with your own two hands. And it didn’t work, because the words had come out between sobs, wet and wrong, the cruelty falling apart on the way out. 

He didn’t argue it. He never argued the ones he thought were true. He just took it the same way he’d taken every other blow you’d ever landed, without ever lifting a hand to stop it, as though he’d decided a long time ago this was the least of what he had coming.

Still, something moved through him when the words hit, a flinch, a wince that started behind his eyes and pulled his whole face down with it. 

He came the rest of the way to you anyway, and your hand came up between you—far from a hit, there was nothing left in your arm to make one, just the heel of your palm landing against his chest, more sob turned outward than strike. It pushed against nothing. Jack didn’t even rock with it. And then your fingers were curling into the fabric over his sternum instead, gripping when you’d wanted to shove, the same failure of your hands as two weeks ago; pushing him away and hauling him in, your body unable to decide which.

“You—” Another blow, glancing off his chest. “Why did we have—”

“Okay.” He let you continue, letting the first ones land, face stricken and bewildered as he absorbed the blows for a crime he couldn’t name. “Okay. Okay, hey—”

You drew back, and when your hand closed in again, his own came up and closed around your wrist. You could’ve pulled free—he’d left you room for it—but you let him keep holding it there against his chest where you’d been striking him.

“What happened,” he said, words coming out quietly, not even a question. “Whatever it is. Talk to me. What happened?”

He started to move into you, closing the space between you by inches, his other hand coming up to your face, your shoulder, somewhere, anywhere, his whole self trying to fold into your orbit the way it always had. “Just tell me,” he said, closer now, voice dropped lower, into a register it stayed it when it was only the two of you. “Let me—”

“No.” You twisted your wrist in his hand and turned your face away from the one coming toward it. “You can’t just—I won’t let you—”

His forehead had dropped down to hover over your temple, the warmth of him crowding into every place you’d been trying to wall off. “I’m not. I’m not doing anything. I’m just here—let me be here.”

Here. He’d said the word so softly, with so much surety, like it was a small thing to ask, like it had been a place he’d ever once been. The wall you'd been holding with both hands didn't come down so much as it went out from under you, the way the floor had two weeks ago, all at once and without your permission.

You stopped twisting away. You felt him feel the fight going out of your wrist under his fingers and felt the new alertness move through him.

“You want to be here,” you said into his chest, where your fists were still knotted in his shirt, the words coming out muffled aimed at the fabric. Then, through a disbelieving laugh devoid of any humor, you said, “You want to be here?”

“Yeah,” he breathed out. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Fucking—” The laugh that tore out of you was anything but one. “Congratulations, then.” Your forehead pressed down hard against his sternum, your eyes squeezed shut, because you couldn’t say it and knew you were going to anyway. At least you wouldn’t have to watch. “Fuck—You’re gonna be a father.”

Everything that had been moving stopped all at once; the hand at your jaw, the thumb that had been working slow along your wrist, the whole restless warmth of him trying to fold into you went motionless. For a second, he didn’t even breathe.

You forced yourself to look up. You wanted, somewhere mean and small and ten years old, to see it touch Jack. You wanted to finally watch something get all the way through. 

You got it, and it was worse than you’d let yourself imagine.

The first thing that fell of was the part that told you he was ready to fix this, fix you. It fell clean off, his brows furrowing in worry, a tell that looked too tiny for something this large. 

For a second—less than that, before he could pull the reins on it—something that had no business being there moved under the fear. You knew it because you’d felt the exact same thing only a few minutes ago, alone, the warm traitorous thing rising up under the grief. It was there, on his face—unguarded, naked, wanting—and you watched him catch it. You watched his whole face wilt as he understood, in real time, that he wasn't allowed to feel it, that the wanting was obscene standing next to your wreckage, and you watched him put it away. He got it back behind the wall fast, the way he got everything back behind the wall.

Only his hands gave him up. The one at your jaw had started to shake.

He let out a choked sound, like he was trying to lift the words out of his chest but they kept getting stuck halfway. 

“You’re—” He stopped himself and swallowed, not being able to get the back half of a sentence out of his own throat. “We’re—?”

“Yeah.”

His fingers around your wrist pulled it closer to his chest, as if he could press it through his body and into wherever the words wouldn’t come from. 

Deep breath. Grip the steering wheel a little tighter. Focus on the parking lot. Bite down the anxiety that feels like it’s ripping your stomach lining apart.

Five.

You shouldn’t be here. You know that. But…

Four.

You promised him you would never get involved. Not in any of this shit.

Three.

You kind of wish you had a coffee or something. Maybe a shot. The amount of adrenaline coursing through your system is nearly unbearable and you haven’t even started moving yet.

Two.

The passenger door is ripped open, and Craig Cody nearly knocks you into the window with how quickly he barrels into the car.

“Drive!”

“Nope.” Your voice is steady. Firm.

“What?!” What, indeed. You don’t care how they usually do this, but no one is jumping into a moving car today.

One.

Pope moves into the backseat like a wraith, sliding in with a duffel bag over his shoulder and Deran and Jay right behind him.

He opens his mouth, the word ‘move’ a sharp crack from his lips before his dark eyes land right. The fuck. Onto you.

“No.”

“Hey, honey.” Your voice is tight. Too bright. “Long day?”

He’s looking at Craig, now. Oh boy, he might kill him before he kills you.

“She’s obviously gonna get a cut.” Craig says, like that helps, and you grip the steering wheel a little more tightly. Check the rearview again.

“Get out of the car.” He’s speaking to you, and you don’t have time to tell him he’s being overprotective.

“Seatbelts.”

“Are you serious right-“

“Shut up, Craig. Seatbelts.”

You hear four clicks. A few grumbles. You feel Pope’s eyes burning into the back of your head.

You slam your foot on the gas.

-

Within about four minutes, the smell of burning rubber is making your eyes water. The flash of blue lights is making them burn. The feeling of your husband’s eyes locked onto the back of your head is making your skin prickle.

“Fucking - stop it!” You finally shout, whipping around another corner and risking two seconds of releasing the wheel in favor of putting your hand over his face. It’s a childish move, sure, but the weight of his gaze is too heavy and you’re moving too fast to deal with it right now. He catches your hand, squeezes it once in an almost painfully instinctive way, and releases it just before you whip around another corner.

“Jesus Christ! Where did you learn to drive like this?!” Deran shouts, hands braced on the backseat to keep himself steady and eyes blown wide as he looks at you like you just grew a second head.

“I don’t know! Grand Theft Auto?” You try, and you sound a little more shrill than you would like to.

Craig is laughing. Jay is silent. You think Pope might have an aneurism.

“Wall! Wall!” He suddenly shouts, and grabs at you like he might shield you from the inevitable crash.

You swerve out of the way with less than a second to spare, feel his arm locked around your chest from behind your seat, and giggle like an absolute lunatic.

This time, when he looks at you in the rearview mirror, you can barely read his expression. His eyes are wide, filled with panic and surprise, and you giggle again, the fear and adrenaline overflowing from you in what might be the worst form possible.

Yeah, he’s definitely gonna kill you.

-

The moment the car stops, Pope launches out of the back, and you know what’s about to happen before he even makes it to your door.

“You think he’s gonna kill me?” Craig asks, still grinning, still riding the same adrenaline high that’s making your blood hum in your veins.

You look at him, and grin right back. “Oh yeah. You’re dead, dude.”

Your car door rips open, and Craig even reaches forward to unbuckle your seatbelt for you before Pope Cody lifts you right out of the fucking car.

He carries you around to the other side of the building like you weigh less than a paperweight, placing you on your feet in the alley and caging you against the brick wall. His eyes are burning into yours, so intense you can feel the weight of his gaze like a fucking anvil on your shoulders.

“I know you’re mad, but-“

To your surprise, he kisses you. He kisses you so hard that, if it weren’t for his hand flying up to protect the back of your head, the force of it might slam you back against the wall hard enough to concuss you.

His body envelops yours. His hands slide over your cheeks to cradle your face in a way that’s almost more possessive than adoring, lips moving against your own with a desperation that has your knees shaking.

“I…” It is painfully difficult to think when his teeth are scraping over your lower lip, when his tongue is tracing the sting of it like it’s second nature. “Mm, I thought you were mad.”

His hands skate down your body, wrapping around the backs of your thighs and lifting you against him so he can press you more tightly against the wall and kiss you even harder.

“Furious.” He growls, pulling back to brush his nose over the hollow of your throat. “I’m fucking furious.”

“You’re sending some very mixed signals about it.”

His hips grind against yours, and he swallows your gasp of pleasure with another kiss. It’s all tongues and teeth, like he’s trying to taste the lingering adrenaline on your tongue while still trying to cling to his anger that you were driving the car in the first place.

“If Craig calls you on a job,” his hand is sliding up beneath your shirt, supporting you with one arm and still kissing you like you’re the only source of oxygen he’s ever tasted, “don’t fucking answer.”

“He said it was an emergency.”

“I don’t care.”

He hikes you up a little higher, hips grinding against yours, and cuts off your gasp with another rough kiss.

You smile against his lips, and his hands grip your thighs a little more tightly.

“I did good, though.”

He growls at that, pressing you tighter against the wall.

“I could have lost you.”

“But I did good.”

He kisses you again, like he’s trying to change the subject, and you catch his chin to keep him in place.

Because you know damn well why you’re up against this wall, and it isn’t just because he was worried about your safety. You can feel it in the quickness of his breath. In the tight grip on your thighs.

He likes to take care of you, but he knows you’re not delicate. Not breakable. And as protective as he can be, he fucking loves it.

“Say it.” You murmur, a smile still tugging on the corners of your lips. “I kicked ass.”

His eyes burn into yours, pushing forward to press his forehead against your own.

“You did…” oh, he doesn’t want to say it. He doesn’t want to encourage this, but he knows you’re right and he doesn’t want to admit how much it’s turning him the fuck on, “…you did good.”

“I kicked ass.” Your lips brush over his. His hands tighten even more on your body.

“Don’t push it.”

You grin, and when you kiss him again he groans so low that you can feel it in your bones.

And he really might take you right there in the alley, if it weren’t for Craig.

“Yo, put your dick away for five minutes. We gotta get this shit packed up.”

You both turn your heads, both breathless, and whatever look Pope gives his brother has the larger man raising his hands in mock surrender.

“Just sayin’, a public indecency charge isn’t gonna make the rest of this shit look good.”

“Cockblock.” You grumble.

“Adrenaline junkie.” He quips back, smile widening.

Your husband makes a frustrated noise, lowering you to your feet and pressing his nose into your temple in that odd affectionate way he has. You smile, turn your head to kiss cheek, and feel him brush his fingers over your waist one last time before he reluctantly pulls back.

As you walk with him back into the alley, Craig throws his arm over your shoulder, squeezing you hard enough to make you nearly stumble. “You kicked ass.”

You laugh, and lean into his side as Pope turns to glare at him. “Do not encourage her.”

Craig ignores him. Squeezes your shoulders again. “Wanna help load up the car?”

“What’s my cut?”

“Atta girl.”

And, though Pope doesn’t turn around again, still emanating pure rage, you can see the corners of his lips twitch in the smallest hint of a smile.

Well, he may not have killed you, but you’re definitely in for it later, and you’re pretty confident you won’t be complaining.

It comes along with the commanding presence he brings with his title— lieutenant; doctor; officer ( Combat Vet; Senior Attending; SWAT Medic )— that instinctively draws people in, or has them making way for him, has them deferring to him out of well-earned respect.

Physicality adds to it too, ofcourse. 

Biceps taut on his scrubs sleeves whenever he crosses his freckled arms to think, doing that pensive gaze he does where his chin tucks and he looks up past his lashes; shark-like in the tenebrous weight of his narrow stare, lips pursed and dimpling at his stubbled cheeks. 

Nor do the fatigues offer any help, either; they make him look meaner than he already does, you find. Tough. Militant. Imposing. Just a little more rugged, a little more rough-around-the-edges handsome, a little more grittier to the average eye in that classic, old-fashioned way. 

(The perfect archetype of a natural protector: both the shepherd who tends faithfully to his sheep and the dog that mercilessly defends them.) 

And then there’s that damn roughstone voice of his—

“Look at me,” he’d said, after the damage had been done. 

Ordered, it felt more like, though he was pleading. You’re surprised at how swift you’d paid automatic heed to the gravel-deep tone of his voice, riding that razor edge of unraveling concern and blistering anger. 

Well within reason, ofcourse: Abbot’s SWAT unit had been deployed on a gang-violence case. When the storm of a shootout had passed, and they’d ended up having to wheel in one of their own officers to PTMC’s Emergency Department alongside one of said criminal thugs in tow, you’d been the closest medical staff to get caught in the crossfire.

A tattooed blur reaching up from the gurney. A yelp as your hair is yanked down in a fit of blind rage. 

And then—

And then.

A pistol materialises, barrel pressed right between his eyes. 

“Go ahead,” Abbot snarls, an inch from pulling the trigger. “Give me a fucking reason.”

(He doesn’t open fire, of course. That would’ve been ridiculous. Not to mention a mountain of paperwork.)

And so the jarring chiaroscuro that was Jack Abbot appeared in South-22: Nonchalant then, in the way he’d cradled your face to assess you, in the way his fingers tucked a strand behind your ear as if they hadn’t been the same ones carrying a lethal weapon.

You okay? he’d murmured, voice that gravelly undertone that always makes you shudder. 

M’fine, you’d nodded, unable to stop openly admiring him in that dizzying uniform: all camo and tactical and trim, the muted colours working in his favour to bring out the bright of his eyes.

What is it, sweetheart? he’d frowned, shrewd as always. 

You swallowed. Shook your head. If he’d caught your there-and-away glance to his lips, he didn’t seem to comment. 

I’m gonna get back to work, you’d dismissed. It’s nothing, Jack.  

But—

“It’s not nothing,” he brings up, later that night. “This is very much not nothing, sweetheart.”

Straddled at the living room couch under the warm weight of you, Abbot has to physically slide his hands up from your hips and shackle your wrists away from his face. Done, ofcourse, with an alarmingly easy grip. (You file that thought away for later.)

Abbot looks handsome when frazzled like this, you think privately to yourself. A flush that's blossoming up from his chest, climbing his neck and rosing across the bridge of his nose. Even the tips of his ears have gone a distinct pink from your incessant kisses and constant grinding against his lap.

He hisses; lungs expanding, eyes screwing shut when you deliberately attempt to adjust your hips.

“Baby,” he breathes, pupils blown wide half in yen and in pleasant confusion. “What is up with you tonight?”

You ignore him. Waylay him into another bruising kiss instead. Drive your hips down coyly into his camo pants again, enough it makes him groan gutturally into your mouth at the friction of it all— 

Although it doesn’t appear to work: Abbot’s a disciplined man; he wouldn’t have made a good and dutiful soldier if he wasn’t. 

Instead he dodges the next kiss you give him, where it lands on the corner of his lips, much to your chagrin and his childish amusement, and he levels you with that discerning look.

“Tell me,” he murmurs. (Orders, it still feels like. Gruff and demanding. It makes you giddy. He can order you around to do whatever he wishes and you’d gladly—)

“Nothing,” you finally relent. Thumb at his cheek. Trace the slope of his lips down to his stubbled chin. “It’s just…”

Your hands drop to his chest, then further to the hem of his black shirt, where it’s come untucked at the waistline of his cargo pants.

Not once does he break eye-contact with you, and it’s then he reckons something in them.

“Is it my— Is the uniform doing it for you?” he pieces, laughter threading into his words. “It is, isn’t it? That’s why you were looking at me weird earlier. Why you practically jumped my bones when I walked through our front door—”

Heat floods to your face. You wrinkle your nose at him. “Don’t act like you didn’t know,” you scowl, letting him off the hook with that last statement: You had, in fact, practically gravitated and clung to him like a magnet when he’d come home wearing those lethal half-camo-half-civvies combination that hug him in all the right places. 

“I really didn’t,” he swears, unable to stop dimpling at you. And then: “Wow. You’re so easy.”

You scoff out an affronted Excuse me? Let out a stunned laugh as you swat him on the bicep at the boyish sense of pride blooming across his face. 

“I should’ve realised,” he sing-songs, catching your next smack with ease and pretending to nip at your fingertips in defense. “You like me in fatigues. I can’t believe it. You like a military man, huh?”

“I like you,” you correct, pulling your hands back to lay it on his sternum, feel the humdrum of his heartbeat under the broad of his muscles. “…But me pouncing you isn’t just because of that.”

“Oh?” he says, and like an intrigued bird, preens once again. You groan. Bow your head at the obvious delight in his face.

All he does is laugh and tuck the tresses of hair that’s slid along with your downturned gaze. Try to chase your eyes like he always does. You pick at the seam on his collar, a non-existent piece of lint— Just something to buy yourself time while you string your thoughts into something coherent. 

There’s that palpable sense in the space between— the tension you’d get when you feel somebody about to confess something; show you the chink in their proverbial armour, or offer you a plate of their beating heart. 

You’re… nervous, he realises. Sheepish about— 

His brows shoot to his hairline.

“Oh,” he says. Recognises it now: A yelp. A pistol. A threat. 

He lets out a wheeze. Doesn’t even try to hold it this time.

“Alright. I’m ordering dinner,” you deadpan, already climbing off him, where he instantly chimes in with a grasp on your wrist and a half-hearted series of No, no, no! I’m not laughing at you, honey, I promise. C’mere, baby, please—?

Abbot pulls you back in for a fervent kiss. Deep and meaningful as he breathes the scent of you in. Sorry, it translates, playful. I’m sorry. 

“I just…” His eyes squint after, head doing that endearing, fidgety turn and tilt it always does when he talks. “What is it exactly about what I did that turns you on?”

“Oh, now you’re just fishing for compliments,” you snort, twirling a rowdy curl at his nape when he lets out another weak laugh.

“The safety wasn’t even flipped, honey,” he explains, forming an imaginary pistol with his fingers to demonstrate the mechanism. “Hammer never dropped. The gun wouldn’t’ve went off.”

But you shrug anyway, run your nails down his scalp just the way he likes, carving through the salt-and-pepper of his hair as he hums. 

“It’s the thought that counts?” you offer, inadequate. “I… genuinely don’t know what exactly it was, if I’m being honest. Maybe it’s ’cause you were a total badass,” you muse, ignoring yet another laugh from him. “Maybe it’s the way you spoke to him.”

He breaks into a knowing smile. Voice tinged with amusement and something wry. “Oh, you like me a little mean, hm?” 

You laugh, caught. Pinch at his skin in comic retaliation. He doesn’t budge at all, like the tough-as-nails man he is; just stares at you with that hazy, affectionate gaze.

A slow beat passes as you reckon with your thoughts.

“I guess it’s just nice to be protected,” you say at last, the gentlest he’s ever heard. “Nice to feel invincible, y’know?”

Abbot falls quiet at that, blindsided.

Safe, he realises. He makes you feel safe.

Something abrupt tides over him. An impossible urge. An overwhelming desire to kiss and embrace and surround you. To tuck and fold you past his ribcage and into his weathered heart, forever sheltered in the home that is his arms—

“I love you, you know that?” he says, and he finds his voice is mellowed down now. Low, soft. An ocean-in-a-shell whisper when he says your name.

“Jack,” you exhale, a butterfly-wing breath. Abbot etches the divine sight of your smile into his mind. Thinks he could drown in the affection of your voice alone— Would gladly allow it. “I love you too.”

When you dip down to kiss him it's like lighting a wick aflame. The quickfire spark of a flintwheel. Then he’s nosing down and down, mouthing from the seam of your lips to your jaw, your pulsepoint, your collar, your bare shoulder. He’ll mark you up later, he thinks, right now he just wants to feel every inch of you.

Abbot caresses up your arms, pulls your left hand from his cheek to turn it over. And then he’s pressing his lips upon your palm up to your fingertips— a reverent kiss. Like you’re his holy artifact; a Saint’s relic to worship.

“Chivalrous,” you muse mindlessly, tracing down the dent of his cheek, the stippled line across his jaw. You can feel your heart swell. Feel his hands snaking up your skin beneath your shirt— his shirt, actually— that swallows you whole, loose and already slipping one shoulder.

“I threatened to kill a man,” he points out incredulously, voice dropped in that whispery octave again; smoky, dark.

Exactly, you don’t reply, feeling that excitable buzz through your spine once more at the vivid memory: bright blood and gleaming gunmetal; the predatorial growl in his voice and the dangerous expression on his face. Go ahead. Give me a fucking reason.

“For me,” you add, purring against his lips, breath damp and curling with his. You give him a kiss chaste enough that it has him craning closer for more. “You did it for me.”

Then your hands wander, up neath the cotton of his shirt and down his smoldering skin, slow and steady, until they settle at the flesh of his navel; until your manicured nails catch on the buttons of his camo pants. “So let me do something for you.”

Baby, he chokes back, half-desperate already. You press a bruising, saccharine kiss to lean him back as you work him free, revelling in the shudder of his battleworn body when the zipper sings through the air, and you take your time to reach into his waistband to wrap your fingers around the thick of him. 

It’s hot and heavy when you tug his cock out.

“S’for you,” you murmur, sinking to your knees now, between the gaps of his legs. 

He watches you rapt with attention when you lean a cheek into the camo, goosebumps lining his skin at the sight of you— doe-eyed and looking like you’re right where you want to be as a flash of your wet tongue makes itself known.

The breach of his swollen, leaky head into your mouth is divine. 

It doesn’t take very long before his hand is fisting your hair with barely concealed restraint. It’s messy, this time. Forgoing his usual reflex to bunch it into a ponytail for your own ease. (Oh, you hear his dry, biting sarcasm ring in your head, you like me a little mean, hm?) The other sits splayed on the gap between your shoulder blades, running the pads of his fingers up your nape.

“Ja— mh,” you choke, feeling the tip of him reach the back of your throat already. His hips are shifting up from the sofa to meet your insistent pace. Be a little harsher, you want to say, but you’re intoxicated with the scent and taste of him. Nose buried at his happy trail every time you bottom out and scrape your nails against his tense thighs.

You’re practically salivating over his cock and dampening the fly of his pants. He tastes like skin and something masculine. Smells like heady sweat and gunpowder. 

You’re dizzy with delight everytime he curses; everytime he croons. Watching each ripple of his forearms, sinews of muscles flexing under freckled skin as he braces himself from going too far—

“Eyes on me, honey,” Abbot rasps. Orders. There are jittering phosphenes in your peripherals when you meet his gaze, his eyes shadowed into something dark from the angle of the dim light above him. It sends a buzz through you. Forces a wanton, strangled sound from your throat that has him twitching excitedly in your mouth. “God, yeah. That’s it, baby.” 

It’s a touch condescending. Dangerous. That same, clinical way he gets as a senior mentoring his juniors, or in his gaze whenever he’s observing something in a patient; diagnosing. 

“You wanted mean,” he repeats, carefully. Making sure you’re registering each word. “Sweetheart. Want me to use you?”

(Courteous, still. Ensuring. May I? he seems to ask. A gentleman’s instinct.)

He’s pulling you apart from his cock the next second. Abrupt enough you’re gasping for air with a sickening pop of your lips, reflexively swallowing around the invisible shape he’s molded into your throat. A string of saliva connects; sloppy. It makes a frisson run through Abbot at the lewd sight. Answer me. 

“Yes,” you whisper to his question. Then, before the synapses in your brain could fire upon realisation: “Yes, Sir.”

Abbot slams his eyes shut. “Fuck.” Lets out a strained breath of a laugh. “Jesus, woman,” he exhales, flickering back to where your lithe fingers are mindlessly rolling and flexing over the hard length of him: slow strokes, a squeeze, a shy kitten-lick. 

He’d heard the title before, ofcourse. Sir. In his military days and tactical briefings during his moonlighting with SWAT teams, where rank and hierarchy is commonplace and acknowledged without question. A routine structure that never leaves those walls— 

Until now, at least. And even then formalities have never been a thing between you both, neither in the ED. It’s a collaborative affair when someone’s life is on the line— So hearing it now in the walls of home, so eager and so absentmindedly said, hits him square in the chest more than he’d like to admit. 

(On your knees, you look smaller like this: docile. Submissive; easier to handle, to bend into will or obedience. 

It makes him feel— powerful.)

“Go ahead, then,” he says, with newfound clarity and lust-filled amusement. He rakes his nails down your scalp, sets a demanding palm. “Be good for me.”

In no time, he’s forcing his cock past the seal of your lips. It’s wet and messy as you struggle to take the stiff length of him down in one go once more, muffled tiny sounds escaping you in lewd little hums and Mh, mh, mh— when he bobs you further down; makes you take him just that inch more.

Each rise and fall of your head is controlled by his clutch. He doesn’t let you pull back at times now— a new game— testing how long you can hold it before you’re tapping at his thighs, heart skittering in alarm— and even then he dares to tarry a second or two longer just for his own pleasure.

“Deeper, baby. You can do it,” he’d soothe, thumbing away the drool leaking from your lips. “Yeah? Fuck. You feel so good.”

The praises shoot liquid pleasure down your spine; makes you rub your thighs as you whine. Every grunt he makes is a compliment; every twitch and buck of his hips a trophy; every sharp hiss and muttering curse a jewel to your crown.

“Maybe I’ll fuck you in uniform,” he pants, when he eventually yanks you from his cock for a moment’s reprieve. His hand slides down from your scalp to press at both your cheeks, watching the slick dribble to your chin when he taps his thumb expectantly on your wet lips. “S’that what you want, honey?”

Unbidden, the image of Abbot half-feral as he fucks you brutally from behind flashes in your head. He’d command you strip naked for him, you imagine, and perhaps he’d use you for his own personal pleasure, still decked in that olive quarter-zip and taking, claiming, imposing himself onto you by burying his cock in you.

You imagine the sound of his belt— carrying his sidearms— divested and landing on the floor, his camo pants hurriedly unzipped just enough to pull his cock out while he climbs right into you with no prep; the full weight of his chest pressing down onto you from behind so you couldn’t squirm; couldn’t break free from the bicep he’d curl flush around your neck while he bit marks down the hollow of your throat, groaning into your ear as he c—

You whimper. It’s a pathetic sound; begging to be used. Humiliation burns your cheeks. “Yes.”

Abbot’s brows climb. Grip tightens in rumbling disapproval.

“—Sir,” you tag at the last second, gut seizing in half-fear and half-thrill at how quickly he’s already taken to this powerplay. “Yes, Sir.”

“There we go,” he coos, throbbing at how ready you are to heed. He bites his lip, curled at the edges with something akin to a daze and pure enamourment. He’d never have expected this from you— let alone himself. 

The gunpoint confrontation he’d had today with that patient had barely registered as anything remarkable to him. The dizzying cocktail of power and command over anyone, in fact, has never been something he’d given thought to. Sure, it’s satisfying to be feared, and above all out of respect— but it’d been nothing but a job to him. An instinct to move; to make sure no one in the Pitt is hurt.

But today, with the quiet surge of authority that comes with donning his fatigues— an unconscious, private sense of gratification and pride has him intoxicated at how you seem to defer to his competence, to his demands. Especially now, with how quickly you’d dropped to your knees for him in pure admiration, so eager to deign to his unspoken wishes and serve him just because he threatened a man while in uniform—

“You’ve got a job to do first, sweetheart,” he murmurs, meeting the excited glint in your teary eyes. “Finish what you started.”

He brackets your face with the palms of his hands and puts you back to work. Prespend drips down your chin as he feeds himself back down your throat, feels the slip and curl of your tongue as it slides over the veins of his cock. “Hah, f—uck,” he bites out, “Yeah. Attagirl. Attagirl.”

His pace is self-indulgent and cruel. Demanding; just how you’d pleaded it. Sinful approval tumbles from his mouth at how You take me so well, baby, you can do it. You can take it, can’t you? You wanted this, so I’ll give it. Just be a good girl and fuck, take it— a jumbled concoction of praises and condescending quips that has your mind spinning with both embarrassment and appetite.

His grasp turns into a vice as the minutes pass. Coiling around the sides of your face as he anchors you. He smothers and sinks you lower at each hard pump of your mouth around him, thumbing at a stray tear with a huff of a laugh. Spoiling himself with this fantasy of yours; with every gagging whine you make.

“C’mon now,” he husks, sounding breathless. “Almost there, pretty girl. Doing so good.”

You’re carving crescents into his thighs. Lungs searing at the mild hypoxia. An aching heat pooling south beneath you. His brows are pinched into an irritated divot when he allows you up for an obligated sliver of a breath, before fitting himself back into your mouth to fuck your throat into completion. 

Greedy, you think, completely delirious and candidly blissed out from the flattery and the sight of Abbot this way: eyes struggling not to roll as his head lulls from the utter euphoria coursing through his veins. You like him greedy and selfish and mean. 

That innate soldier that he can never shake from the doctor in him, appearing sporadically in flashes over days with combative patients or browbeating visitors. That effortlessly commands a room by sheer militant presence, that doesn’t take no for an answer, that can still be as deadly weaponless and with his own bare hands.

“Baby,” he warns coarsely, memorising the delicious glide of your tongue around his cock. He bites his lip and fights the urge to throw his head back onto the couch. “M’close. So close, sweetheart.”

It’s flattering to hear; to feel. Seeing Abbot looming above you like an eclipse, in complete control over your breathing, yet visibly struggling with effort as you slide your hands up from his thighs to his navel and to his hips; using it as grip to sink yourself deeper and deeper— Fuck, baby, he slurs. You’re so good to me. So fucking good—

“I’m gonna come,” he pants, breath hitching. It’s a primal sound, and for a moment you think he’ll finish in your mouth, paint you thick with him. “Yeah, fuck. M’gonna come—”

But he loosens his grip instead, lets you gasp for air as he pulls out and rests his cock on the tip of your tongue. It’s swollen; An angry, aching red. Fit to burst.

What was it you’d called this earlier? A gentleman’s instinct. Your own Prince Charming. That despite the ironclad hold avarice has over his self, he still courteously thinks of and puts you first; Still can rein in his wild desire and dial in the discipline, prioritise graciousness: 

“Where d’you want me, honey?” he whispers.

Abbot, before he is a deadly man, is a good man.

“I wanna, I—” you fluster, throat raw from overuse as your tunnel vision attempts to re-widen with the burst of oxygen. “Inside. Wanna swallow you. Please.”

Jesus fucking Christ, he doesn’t say, but it’s written in his face. “Yeah?” he assents, twitching in anticipation as he pets at the crown of your head. “Yeah. Don’t have to beg, baby. I’ll give it.”

“I’ll take it,” you nod feverishly, canting your head back into his grip again. His hands ease to your nape, and you let out a moan at the slow tightening curl of his fingers. “I’ll take all of it, Sir.”

His gaze is treacherous as he guides your mouth to his cock again. “Damn right you will.”

The approval makes your head swim. A decree. No room for mistakes or failure. You’ll take what he gives and ten more should he demand it. 

The strangled noises you make in your attempt to appeal to him— gags, mewls, coughs— makes him throb. Stifled moans that vibrate down his cock and knots in his groin. Deriving a depraved pleasure from your troubles to take him to the hilt. (Too big, you’d complained to him once, when he’d stuffed your cunt full of him. You’re so fucking big, Jack—)

The head of his cock grinds the back of your throat. He’s pulsing like a heartbeat. Ready to pump you to the brim. It’s driving Abbot mad how close he is, yet how much longer he wants to prolong this perpetual ecstasy.

“Oh, fuck,” he curses, rutting harder into you. Your name sounds like gospel as he chants it. Borderline a snarl. “I’m gonna come, honey,” he warns. “Y’gonna take it all, hm? Be a good— hah, fuck— be a good girl.”

Please, you keen. Letting him use your mouth recklessly to chase his high, hand at the back of your skull as he shoves you down to meet his thrusts: In. Out. In. Out. It’s delicious. It’s delicious, and you’re just as starved for his cum as he is for the wet, hot seal of your mouth to milk him clean.

“Yeah, I’m—” he stumbles, senseless. Too occupied with keeping you firmly suffocated around him. With the echoing squeak of the couch and the sickly-sweet sounds he’s pulling from your taut lips. “Fuck, sweetheart— Ah—”

It’s white-hot when he comes. Hips flexing. A flood of pure, unadulterated bliss. Suckling him down to the root, cheeks hollowed and nose nestled to the bed of curls led by his happy trail. 

Ropes of his thick cum streak your tongue and throat in rapid bursts, sudden enough it makes you lurch from your gag reflex, makes your back jump and arch instinctively under his domineering grip. Stay still, he means to say, coming out as a grunt. Quit fussing.

Abbot can imagine it as well as you can taste the molten spill of him. Feels the muscles in your throat twitching violently as you work him through it. Picturing the pearlescent mixture dripping down, down, down your pharynx like sin; a mark that brands you as his from the inside out. 

Your chokes are precious. Has him growling out incoherently as he continues to drain all of himself into you in spurts. “Ohh, good girl,” he sighs, looking down at the heavenly sight:

Fanned lashes fluttering. Maintaining that erotic eye-contact the way he likes. Dazed with halcyon and eros at the way he’s filled your mouth impossibly to the brim. He ought to burn this image of you into his brain forever.

Mmph, you hum, jaw aching from the sheer size of him; from the absolute work out he’d just dragged you through. When you pull away with a lingering kiss on his cock, he watches you, captivated; Unhinging just enough to show him the pool of white cum in your mouth, and then, as if coveting it— 

You swallow. Sticky. Tangy. Clicks as it goes down your throat.

“Attagirl,” Abbot drawls, brushing his knuckles at your cheek with tender affection. Collecting the tears rolling down them as a slow minute passes. “Did as I asked. So good. You’re so good, you know that?”

The blatant adoration sits fuzzy in your heart. Warmth settling in your ribcage and comfortably making a home there. You’re suddenly longing to be held— to feel what you felt when he’d propped that gun to the man’s forehead. Safe, you recall. You’ve done the job, after all, haven’t you?

Abbot reads your mind just as intuitively. Knows you better than anyone. 

“C’mon, pretty girl. Up,” he orders, without the bite now; without the rough tone and the manhandling. “C’mere, sweetheart.”

It’s soft. The fantastical image of him being some beastly, unforgiving thing— slows to a crawl and fades away at his behest. He slides his palms to your shoulders and gently helps you up onto his lap, folds you into his arms where he devours you into a doting, winsome kiss, before he lays your head to rest on his collar.

He presses his lips to the crown of your head. Let’s you square your breathing back into reality as his own tachy heart begins to slow in tandem with yours.

“Alright?” he soothes, when the moment passes. He’s tucked you into a cradle-like embrace— shelter, you feel, surrounded by nothing but him and only him— his one hand still busy with smoothing out the uneven tangles he’s made in your hair. 

“Mhm,” is all you muster for now. Unduly spent and satisfied to speak. Basking in the aftermath of sex; melting in his delicate aftercare.

“Too rough?” Abbot asks, the concern he’d tamped down earlier now beginning to surface. He cranes to meet your sleepy gaze; the only way he’d truly be able to discern whether you’re telling him the truth. “You listening, honey?”

That’s impossible, you could never hurt me, you want to say, but settle on a less-taxing: “No, I enjoyed it,” and shake your head, giving him a content smile as you nudge your forehead at his chin. “Just give me a minute before the next round.”

He lets out an exasperated laugh. Bumps his nose to yours. “You’re crazy,” he teases, meeting your lips in another fond kiss: chaste but deep, meaningful. Sits in his marrows like candied honey. “Can we at least have dinner first, sweetheart?”

“Old man needs his sustenance?” you jest, letting out a yelp when he pokes at your waist and burrows his face into your neck to nip playfully. “Okay! Okay. Dinner first, Jack.”

“Then you can have me any way you want,” he agrees, thumbing a stray strand from your face. Painfully domestic, he muses, for what’s just occurred between you two.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” you narrow. But he lets out an amused snort in reply.

“You like when I threaten people, baby. You just proved that about five minutes ago with the most intense blowjob I’ve ev—”

“Dinner!” you override, face aflame once more as you smack a hand over his mouth. “Hungry. Let’s?”

Like every Sunday, Jack sits and listens. Echoes of loud giggles and shouts of singing from two sets of healthy lungs. Watches from a distance; ungraceful twirls, obnoxiously playful dancing, until a small body is standing on the counter and dancing too. 

The girls in apartment seventeen have wiggled beneath his ribcage and into a secret crevice of his heart. The place that warms every time he hears the laughter, every time he watches the most wholesome mommy-daughter time. 

He doesn’t know your name, nor your daughters. But he knows you love music, that it’s bled into your child in the most copy and paste way. She dances like you, uses wooden spoons for microphones, chopsticks for drum sticks, and her imagination for an electric guitar. 

It makes Jack’s heart swell and sting at the same time. 

His wife didn’t want children, a decision that he always told himself he was okay with. They were both slight workaholics, both too selfish to give up the idea of financial freedom. She didn’t think she’d be a good mom, no matter how much Jack disagreed. And then she died. 

Left Jack with nothing but fading memories and a big house that felt too suffocating until he sold it five years ago. He keeps her photo in his wallet, a frame on his nightstand, his wedding band around his finger. Six months married and then she was gone. They didn’t even make it on their honeymoon. 

Perhaps that’s why he relishes these Sunday mornings. He knew he’d never have that life with his wife, he knows he most probably won’t ever…but it’s a secret desire he wishes for. So he tucks it deep away, close to his chest, close to his wife. 

The bitter coffee doesn’t chase the ache away. It still festers beneath his ribs, an itch that he can’t rid himself from. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time just allows you to grow around it.

Jack allows himself five more minutes in the captivity of apartment seventeen before retreating back inside in search of sleep.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆

“Phoebe, Grandma's on the phone!”

You hear the tornado of flat feet smacking against the floor before you even finish your sentence. Your mom laughs on the screen, a screech of excitement tearing through the three-year-olds throat as she barrels onto the couch and snatches the phone from your grasp. 

“Hi, Diva.” She beams wide, panting for breath and attempting to swat the sweaty hair from her face. “Are you coming to my house to play today?”

You bark out a laugh at that, her unashamed favoritism when it came to your mom. 

“Not today, pickle. Grandma is on vacation with Grandpa, remember?” 

Phoebe huffs and nods. “Can you bring me back a fridge magnet?” She asks instead, a question both you and your mom saw coming. 

Your eyes dart over to the refrigerator. Covered in magnets and drawings and post cards… you’ll have to do some reorganising if she wants to fit another one on there. 

“Absolutely, I’ll even bring you back some new shoes.” 

Your eyes roll fondly when Phoebe’s lights up, an excited squeal falling from her lips as she nods her head vigorously. You press a kiss to her head before leaving her on the couch, pulling the phone closer to her face to speak. 

Their conversation is a muffled background noise as you start to clean up the mess of her toys, the thirty-something articles of clothing strewn across the floor from her fashion show this afternoon. Plastic princess heels, a tiara, fairy wings…you’re sure she has a pirate’s outfit somewhere in the mess, too. 

Your eyes flick to the time flashing on the microwave. 16:30. 

Your shoulders drop, heart sinking. Thirty minutes late, you can try to hold out hope. But when it gets to the hour mark, you know it’s yet another no-show. Another night of tears with Pheebs and fast thinking on your part to distract her. 

You learnt your lessons months ago. You know better than to tell her when she’s supposed to be seeing him. It only sets her up for disappointment and resentment. Let her come to the decision about him when she’s old enough to understand. Not when she’s three, upset and feeling like he doesn’t want to spend time with her. 

You’ll shelter her from the truth of him for as long as you possibly can. 

Throwing her outfits into her dress-up box in the corner of the lounge, you turn to your daughter with a heavy heart and the brightest smile you can muster. 

“Alright, Diva. Go put your shoes on, let's go out for pizza.” 

Phoebe doesn’t even offer your mom a goodbye. She throws the phone to the side of the couch and leaps to her feet, little legs scurrying toward her bedroom to no doubt retrieve the bright pink Crocs she’s recently become obsessed with. 

You reach for your phone, sharing an exasperated laugh with your mom before she settles and tilts her head at you through the screen. 

“What’s the excuse this time?” she asks. 

You sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. No calls or texts, just a no-show.” 

Your mom’s lips form into a thin line, a look of disapproval that only ever seems to be reserved for him. “I take it Pheebs doesn't know?” 

You shake your head, toeing your own shoes on as you wait for her. “No, I stopped telling her when she’s supposed to be seeing him months ago. Unnecessary upset, you know?” 

Your mom hums, a contemplative look crossing her features. When she notices the disappointment in your eyes, she softens. “You are all that she needs, baby.” She reassures you. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing by her, and you are. But when she’s older, she’ll realize it for herself.”

Shoulders sagging and heart aching, you sigh again. “I know, it’s just not fair on her. Wish I could shield her from it forever, you know?” 

“I know, but you are doing fantastic. Me and Dad are so proud of you.” 

It’s a struggle to blink back the tears. In truth, you likely wouldn't have coped at all if it weren't for your parents. You were young when you fell pregnant, just shy of turning twenty-three. No real job, no real qualifications. Still living at home and accidentally knocked up by a douche of a boyfriend you were trying to figure out how to break up with. 

But your parents…they were a rock for you. They supported whatever decision you wanted to make. They let you stay at home until you had the money to move out, took you to every appointment, helped you turn your dad’s office into a nursery without a hint of annoyance. 

Your mom held your hand when you were rushed into hospital to deliver Phoebe, and she sang to you softly when you had to go in for emergency surgery. 

Your parents were the ones to encourage you to go back to college. They were the ones to babysit while you worked for your degree, when you had last minute interviews and meetings. And they were the ones you thanked and celebrated with when you finally made it. 

When your first book got published and made its way to a New York Times Bestseller within the first week of its release, they were the ones you celebrated with. It was their mortgage you paid off with your very first cheque. 

It was only at that point that Tom decided he wanted to be in Phoebe’s life again. That he had apparently made a terrible mistake and wanted to be a ‘family’. You’d allowed him access to his daughter but denied him ever having any access to you. 

“Get out of that brilliant head of yours.” 

You blink as your mom’s voice drifts you back to the present and you smile, slightly wonky. “Have a cocktail for me and keep Dad away from the dirty martinis. I doubt half of Cabo wants to hear his Elvis impression.” 

She barks out a laugh at that, blowing kisses to the phone and promising to call back tomorrow before hanging up. 

“Mommy!?” Phoebe calls out to you from her bedroom. 

“Coming!” You call back, feet slowly moving you down the hall toward her bedroom. Stopping short with a sigh when her next words echo from her room. 

“I pooped my pants again.” 

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆

Phoebe’s tummy is filled quite comfortably with a veggie pizza and three scoops of chocolate ice cream. A dinner of champions, in her humble opinion, and a day well spent with you. 

Her legs bounce her along the marble floors of the complex entrance, a skip in her step which is slightly making you regret that third scoop of ice cream. A sugar rush right before bed is not something you have the energy for. 

“Hold up for a moment, baby. Mommy needs to check the mailbox.” 

Her sassy huff is the only response you get, but she listens. Trudges back to your side with less enthusiasm than before. You can hear her clicking her tongue and jumping on the spot when you unlock your designated box, rifling through some letters and the package you’ve been eager to receive. 

The first print of your newest novel. 

It’s not until you’re locking the box back up that you notice Phoebe isn’t to the left of you anymore. Instead, she’s to your far right with her hands behind her back and her small neck craned up to meet the gaze of a middle-aged man walking toward the main front doors.

“Hi, my name is Phoebe." Her small voice speaks at his legs and the man stops short at the sound of it. 

His neck whips down to her, a small kiss of amusement pulling at the corner of his mouth before it morphs into a friendly smile. Jesus Christ. 

He blinks at her. “Well, it’s nice to meet you Phoebe. I’m Jack.” 

His voice is like slowly crystalizing honey. Soft and smooth yet a slightly raw register as he lowers his tone to address the toddler. You swallow as you watch, a little taken back by the sight of him. 

Salt and pepper curls with a mostly salt stubble, slightly tanned skin and bulging biceps that threatened to tear through his––is that a scrub vest—

“Are you a doctor?” Phoebe asks the question aloud that you silently ask in your head.

Jack smiles, nods his head and reaches to pinch the ID badge clipped to the pocket of his pants. “I am.” 

You realize yourself then, tucking the mail under an arm and moving to approach the two. Your hand comes to rest on Phoebe’s shoulder and Jack’s eyes lift up your body before settling on your face. 

“Sorry, she’s a bit of a social butterfly. She’ll chat your ear off all day if you let her.” It’s a slightly nervously laugh that bubbles from your throat and you’re completely unsure why. 

You don’t get nervous. Not usually. But it’s also not every day that your daughter is introducing herself to a hot older man who happens to be a fucking doctor. More than that, and maybe it’s just his age, but it’s also not every day that you meet a man with such intense eye contact. 

The moment his gaze meets yours, it doesn’t look away. 

Jack laughs breathily, offering an open palm just above Phoebe’s head. “Nothing wrong with that. I’m Jack.”

His tone holds a flirty lilt—light and airy and far too comfortable for someone you’ve just met. Your palm meets his in a gentle greeting, skin rougher than yours, palm bigger than yours. You shake his hand with as much mirth as he does to yours.

“Y/N, this is my daughter, Phoebe.” You say softly, retrieving from his hold and resting your hand back on her shoulder again. “I think you’re the first normal neighbor we’ve met. We only moved in like six weeks ago.”

Jack’s smile widens just an inch as his hand moves to the strap on his backpack, his laugh something understanding, like you already have an inside joke. “Seventeen right?” 

Your brows pinch slightly, head tilting. “Yeah… how—”

He points a finger to the ceiling. “I’m fourteen. Your balcony is opposite mine,” he turns his attention to Phoebe with a playful smile. “I’m pretty jealous of yours and mommy’s Sunday morning parties. They sound like a lot of fun.”

Color stains your cheeks but Phoebe grins at that. “We call it Sunday Funk Day. Music, chores, and pancakes for breakfast,” she counts them off on her chubby fingers, her tone slightly bordering authoritative, but Jack only seems more entertained. 

“I didn’t realize we had the music on so loud… I’ll keep it down next time.” You apologize quickly. Another thing out of the norm for you. But you’ve been trying to teach Phoebe to be a bit more considerate of other people the older she gets. 

Jack waves you off with a scoff. “No way, it’s nice to have a neighbor with good music taste. Not like apartment twelve.” He says the last part a bit quieter, like he too doesn’t want to influence your daughter with his less than kind opinions. 

Your eyes widen, the sound of a scoffed laugh scratching the back of your throat. “Is that the crazy bird lady?” You mirror his pitch.

Jack’s lips part. “So that’s what that noise is. I’ve been calling her Chirpy in my head for the last six months.”

You laugh louder at that, stopping yourself just short of snorting. The way he speaks makes you feel strangely warm. His words and voice are relaxed, lazily drawled together with a slight accent that you can’t quite place.

Phoebe scrunches up her nose. “Mommy says people can listen to what they like, but I don’t like screaming music.” She shakes her head. 

Jack has to stifle a laugh, expression mirroring yours as you close your eyes and take an exasperated but fond breath. “While I agree with your mommy, I have to say that I agree with you too, kid.” 

An insistent buzzing echoes through the silence between you. You notice the brief movement of his hand cupping his pocket, realize that he’s being paged or called but too polite to check or excuse himself. 

You squeeze gently on Phoebe’s shoulders. “Okay, we need to get you bathed and ready for bed and I think Jack needs to go to work.”

He offers a tight-lipped smile, one that doesn’t reach his eyes but doesn’t feel forced. His eyes flick between you and Phoebe, a soft look of fondness relaxing his features for a moment. “It was nice to finally put names and faces to the lovely singing voices I get to hear.” 

You smile warmly, albeit a little bashfully, before guiding Phoebe to your side to hold her hand. Jack lets his gaze fall on you again, warmth in his smile as he offers a slight nod. 

“Have a good night.” His voice is tender and soft, heavy with security and you don’t understand how it feels so foreign and familiar at the same time. 

“You too,” you say softly, turning at the same time he does to go your respective ways. 

Phoebe turns her full body to look at him, hand waving frantically in the air. “Bye Doctor Jack!” She shouts at him, despite there being only a ten-foot distance between them. 

You turn just in time to see Jack do the same, a small wave of fingers over his shoulder as he shouts back softly, “Bye Phoebe.”

Then he’s gone out of the complex doors and you’re ushering Phoebe into the elevator, unaware of the small smile that curls at the corners of your mouth. 

“I like Doctor Jack.” Phoebe hums, pressing the button she has learnt for your floor. You smile down at her as the doors close and the elevator begins to hum and shift. 

“Yeah? What do you like about him?” 

She shrugs a shoulder, uncommittingly and swipes hair from her face. “He has kind eyes.” 

Blinking slowly at her, your heart seizes. You find yourself wondering how your daughter comes up with some of the things that she does, how attuned she is to the people around her and the way her judgement of character grows every day. 

You barely know the man, yet you can’t help but agree. 

“Yeah, baby. I guess he does.” 

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆

Cute little meet cute for our single mom, Phoebe, and Jack!! I am almost busting at the seams with excitement for what I have planned for these guys; little moments and big!! There will lots of tiny hidden references in this series that I would love to know if you guys pick up on, and I also have a very comical and painful scene that I've already written for later on in this series hehe.

Thank you very much for reading! Feedback really means a lot so I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for where you think this will go!! Reblogs helps to boost stuff for more people to reach so if you enjoyed it please consider reblogging!!

It’s the early morning, and for once, Jack isn’t coming from his night shift to immediately get himself shot with SWAT. You hear the front door close, then the soft thump of his shoes being placed in the cupboard. Only half asleep, you can picture his after-work routine: a full glass of water downed in one sip, a quick shower, and then a fresh pair of pajamas. Except for the change of clothes and the removal of his prosthetic, none of those things happen before he slips into bed. 

His hands are cold when they find your waist, pulling you close to his chest. You wait for the kiss on your cheek that he usually bestows upon you to greet you, but it never comes. 

“Hi,” you mumble, sleep sticking to your voice. 

He hums a half-answer, not a single word actually discernible. 

You’d blame it on a bad shift if the upcoming Friday wasn’t that date. 

Jack moves a little, and his hands wander up from your side to cross in front of your chest. It’s harder to breathe like this, but you missed him so much you won’t complain. 

Your nipples harden when his fingers brush over your breasts, and heat collects in your lower tummy, along with the slightest bit of discomfort. You would never say it out loud, but you’re terrified he’s imagining her right now. 

He palms you through your camisole, his cool hands gentle but demanding. 

It was one of the first things you noticed about him—how cold his hands always were. He had laughed when you told him and said he was a doctor, that that was just part of the job. And it stayed true to this day; whether he was holding your hand, passing you something, or burying his fingers deep inside you, his skin was always icy enough to make you shiver a little. 

You want to speak up, say something to him, ask him about his day, but the only thing that makes it out of your mouth is a soft moan when he cups your breast and kneads it. 

“Such a pretty sound, baby,” he whispers. His lips brush the outer shell of your ear, chasing goosebumps up and down your arms. His breath ghosts over your face, and your lashes flutter, fighting to stay open as Jack spins his webs of sweet comfort around you. 

He spends so much time working you open and pliant for him—tugging and twisting your nipples until you are writhing right in his arms, desperation turning you into a whining mess. Only then does he move his fingers lower. They drift between the valley of your breasts, then over your belly button, until he meets the edge of your panties. 

“Jack,” you gasp, his name more prayer than anything else. 

He shushes you sweetly, then slips underneath your waistband. You’re warm and wet and gooey, like honey on the stove. His fingers drag through your folds, collecting your arousal that already drenches your underwear. 

“Fuck,” he whispers, “So goddamn wet for me. Missed me that much, hm?”

He has no idea. How much you still miss him even now, while his pointer and middle finger circle your clit, the pressure just gentle enough to keep you eager.

“Jack—yeah, I-I did,” you manage to answer.

With his free hand, he finds your mouth. His thumb swipes across your bottom lip before he tugs it down a little. Your tongue darts out almost instinctively, and he uses that opportunity to press the pad of his finger against the wet muscle. When your lips close around his digit, he moans out loud. 

The pressure in your mouth almost makes you gag, but with his fingers teasing your entrance, all you can think about is how badly you want him. You keep letting your tongue swirl around his finger, sucking him deeper into the hollow of your throat, while his middle and ring finger slip inside of you. 

At first, the fullness is what you’ve been waiting for. Your warm walls stretch for him, accommodating the size of his digits that work their way in and out of you. But when he thrusts his fingers deeper into you, there’s a new coldness introduced, one you wish wouldn’t belong to him.  As he curls his fingers to meet your G-spot, you feel the hard metal of his wedding ring bite against your skin. It’s a sensation you’ve gotten used to, but today, it feels different—just another reminder that there was someone before you, someone Jack would give anything to have again. 

Your jaw grows slack with his thumb still inside your mouth, and part of you wants to tap out, but the heat at the base of your spine grows tighter. The knot unravels as his fingers piston in and out of you, and you cum on his hand with a muffled cry. 

Jack works you through your release until you are shaking from overstimulation and pushing his hands away. 

“That was a good one, huh?” he mutters, and pulls his respective hand from your mouth and cunt.  You are still catching your breath as you nod, tears that won’t spill collecting on your waterline. 

“Yeah,” you whisper. 

Jack hugs you from behind, wrapping his big arms around your middle. You stare at the wall in front of you, waiting for that inherent feeling of sadness to pass. 

“How was work?” you ask.

“Fine,” he answers, then presses a kiss to the back of your neck. “Less busy than usual.”

He clears his throat and tightens his arms around you.  “I’m really tired,” he declares softly.

You swallow hard, the spit in your mouth bitter. 

“You should get some sleep then, my love,” you whisper, “I gotta get up soon anyway.”

--

You’ve learned to only ever cry in the shower when Jack gets like this. It wouldn’t be fair to him to unload your burdens and insecurities on him while he is grieving the life he could have lived. 

As the warm water cascades down your back, and the suds of soap collect at your feet, you let the tears flow until you no longer feel like you are going to choke on them.  The lump in the back of your throat doesn’t exactly go away, but it eases. You breathe a little better, and the tightness in your chest feels more like a memory than an active threat. 

Wrapped in a towel, you stand in front of the mirror and look at yourself. You might look worse than him—dark circles under your eyes, your lips dry and flaky. You pull on the dead skin with your teeth until you bleed, then put on moisturizer and get dressed. 

Jack is asleep, or pretends to be, when you walk into the bedroom. His eyes are shut, his chest rises and falls softly. Your wet hair drips down the back of your neck and drenches your fresh blouse. 

For a moment, you watch your boyfriend. He always looks younger in his sleep, but it is so obvious that this time of the year is tough on him. It’s not that you expect him to just be okay; you’re not that selfish. You simply wish that he would talk to you instead of acting like things were fine. But then again, one might say you are doing the same thing. 

So you keep getting ready for the day and make yourself lunch while this large cloud of things left unsaid hangs over you. 

Work passes by in a blur and drags on simultaneously. It’s a little after 5 pm when you come home, and Jack is up by then. You put your shoes in the cupboard and walk into the kitchen. 

“Hi,” you greet him. 

Jack turns to face you, a tender smile on his lips. He crosses the room slowly, then kisses you briefly.

“Hey,” he answers when he pulls away.  He smells freshly showered, and the tips of his hair are still a little wet. 

As you lean against the counter, he fills up a glass of water and passes it to you. 

“Drink up,” he says. 

The gesture is sweet, but your skin crawls during the entire interaction. Everything feels so utterly performative and unreal that you almost wish he would leave for work early. The word ‘disassociation’ bounces around in your mind, just jumping out of reach every time you try to get a hold of it. 

When you look at Jack, his face doesn’t mirror yours at all. He seems unaware of your emotional turmoil, as if he doesn’t take issue with the situation at all. His face might as well be blank.

Every day, you miss his smug smile, his cheeky remarks, and the way he loves to tease you. All those habits die down every time the date gets closer, and then it takes a few days afterwards until he builds up the courage to slip back into that persona.

Sometimes, you feel like you are being gaslit. Like you’re imagining all these issues, because he just won’t say or show that there is something wrong. 

So you pour a little oil into the fire. 

“Any plans for the weekend?” you ask. “I saw that you’re not working.”

His work schedule hangs on the fridge, this weekend being the only one blank for the entire month.  You watch as Jack freezes in his step, just for a moment, before he fills his mug with tea. 

“Nope, not really,” he answers then. Lie.

“Yeah?” you go on, knowing that you’re treading the line, and leaning dangerously to one side. 

“Yes,” he says, a little sharper than before. His fingers tap against the counter once, twice, before he looks out the window.  “Actually,” he continues, “Maybe I’ll visit the garage with Robby. Check out some bikes with him.” Lie. 

“Oh,” you reply dumbly. 

You watch as the tension builds in his shoulders, and you think you might have him now, but when he turns to face you, Jack is smiling. 

“Yeah, don’t worry, sweetheart, I won’t start riding, too,” he vows quietly.  He holds your chin between his thumb and pointer finger, then kisses you again. There is not an ounce of feeling to it. 

You smile weakly, and he accepts that. 

The hour between your arrival from work and his parting for his shift, you spend in shared discomfort. You start cooking dinner and pack some of it for his ‘break’ that he won’t get, while he hovers in the kitchen like he is scared to leave you alone for too long, but not willing to talk to you either. 

You’re incredibly thankful for the invention of music because you would have fled the house if Jack hadn’t turned on some jazzy playlist to cover the fact that neither one of you had anything to say to the other. 

The second the clock strikes half past six, you pass Jack a Tupperware with his food, then kiss him goodbye.  “Have a good shift,” you mumble when you pull away.  His smile doesn’t reach his eyes as he answers, “Will try.”

The front door falls shut, and dinner tastes like ash. 

--

On Thursday morning, things come to a boil. 

Jack comes home from his shift, the look of death written all over his face. He barely even greets you before he walks straight to the bathroom and locks himself in there for thirty minutes.  You call in sick to work when you hear the water running but never catch him stepping into the bathtub.  Pure fear settles in your stomach, so you pace up and down in front of the bathroom. You know you should tell him you’re there for him and that he can talk to you, but you are too scared to spook him. Your nervous wandering turns into a slow trot before you slide down the bathroom door and sit there in silence. 

It’s almost 10 am when you dare to call out his name.  “Jack?”

You hear a gasp and a soft thump, then his voice follows. “Sweetheart? What- what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at work?”

The thick wood of the door makes him sound muffled, but you don’t miss his tone. Jack usually compartmentalizes well, even after a terrible shift, but right now, he sounds like rock bottom is close, and he is holding a shovel. 

“I took the day off,” you reply. 

He stays quiet for a moment. You picture him in the room, sitting on the edge of the bathtub or leaning over the sink with horror etched into his face, memories he’ll never shake replaying in his mind. 

“Wish I had done that,” he murmurs then. The words are so quiet that you barely catch them, but you do. 

You chew on your lip, trying to think of something to say, anything that might soothe his aching soul, but you can’t come up with anything. So you try the next best thing.

“Can you let me in?”

Your choice of words almost makes you laugh—after all, that is all you’ve wanted for the last few days. 

The other side of the door stays quiet for a long while, and you almost give up hope. Until the lock clicks. You scramble to your feet just in time to meet Jack’s eyes. It breaks your heart to see him like this. Faint tear tracks glisten on his cheeks, wiped away hastily until his skin had reddened.

“My love…,” you mumble, and he looks away instantly. 

“Just a bad shift,” he mutters, his eyes trained on the floor. 

You shake your head and take his hand.  “It’s not just that, is it?” 

You know the answer; you knew it before you even asked the question. Jack’s eyes find yours for a second, and your heart drops as you see his expression: there’s anger in his gaze. Just for a moment. Just a millisecond. It fades into sadness, the one you’d do anything to carry for him. But it was there long enough for you to see it. To read it. To file it away and have it gnawing at your already dwindling confidence until the end of your days. 

But now is not the time for your worries and hurt feelings. 

You pull yourself together and lead Jack out of the bathroom. After situating him on the bed, you bring him a fresh pair of sweatpants and a simple black shirt. You watch him change, watch how his skin is exposed and then covered again by cloth. The faint scars, from training and his time overseas, the ones you know by heart, are a little more noticeable today. 

“Let’s get you into bed,” you whisper to Jack as you push back the blanket. He follows your request on autopilot, slipping underneath the covers. Seeing the blank stare, you almost wish he’d go back to being angry at you. 

“Do you want to eat something, my love?” you ask. 

He shakes his head. 

“Can I keep you company?” you continue. 

You hold your breath as you wait for his answer, and he takes his time. The vacant look in his eyes threatens to trigger tears in your own. His lips part once, twice, before he turns his head and looks away.

“I’d like that,” he mutters then. 

His skin is cold beneath your fingers when you find your place next to him on the bed. Your palm comes to rest on his chest, feeling the sturdy beat below. 

You take a deep breath and try to think of the best thing to say. 

“I know tomorrow will be hard for you,” you begin.  Jack’s entire body tenses up, and his head whips to you, the first sign of life flashing across his face. 

“Don’t,” he pleads. “Don’t talk about it.”

Your lips part, uncertainty making it impossible to think properly. His eyebrows draw together as you struggle for the right answer, and you can almost hear his thoughts. 

“Alright,” you whisper against your better judgment. “Just… just get some rest, honey.”

--

Friday morning, you wake up to an empty bed—not the way you’re used to. In the entirety of your relationship, you can practically count the days you woke up in Jack’s arms on both hands, but today, it’s a new loneliness that greets you as the sunlight filters in through the curtains. 

His side on the mattress isn’t even warm anymore, and you wonder just how much time he had even spent asleep. 

As you climb out of bed, you let your eyes drag through the room and find your favorite photo of all time. Your face is half hidden in it, mushed into Jack’s neck, your nose tickled by his slightly unkempt beard, but it is the happiest you’ve ever looked. You still remember the day as clear as if it had been yesterday. 

It had been taken on your six-month anniversary, just you, Jack, and a small boat he barely knew how to commandeer.  As the salty sea water had sprayed your face with its cold droplets, you grinned at Jack, all smiles and teeth and pure unfiltered happiness. 

He had wrapped his arms around you and whispered, “I love it when it’s just us.” With his chest pressed against your back, you had stared out onto the sea, his warm lips pressing against your cheek.  “Me, too,” you had mumbled fondly. 

Now, you wonder how much of that was still true today.  Back then, you had known that he was a widower but hadn’t known the date of his wife’s passing yet.  

You know it’s wrong to be so jealous of a dead woman—and Jack would probably hate you if you knew just how much you despised her on some days.  But as your fingers drift over the cold, empty space in bed next to you, you allow yourself to wallow in your melancholy a little longer. 

Selfishly, you think you wouldn’t want Jack to move on if you were to die. Of course, no part of you wished to see him sink into depression and utter loneliness as he’d mourn you, but your heart constricts at the idea of him finding love after your passing. You wonder if his wife had thought the same thing, or if she had been a much better person than you and hoped for his happiness—or if the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind at all. 

The sound of the front door closing rips you out of your head. You run to the window overlooking your front yard just in time to catch Jack slamming his car door shut and driving off. 

“Fuck,” you whisper to yourself. 

You think of the past years, of all the anniversaries of her death during which you watched from the sidelines, breath bated. 

On the first, you didn’t even know what was happening. Jack had hidden from you all day, keeping his head buried as he worked a double shift. When he came home, all 24 hours of her death day having already passed, he confessed to you what the date meant to him. 

A year later, you thought you were prepared—you were wrong. You bought flowers and made soup and lasagna, the most comforting food you could think of. When Jack came home that morning (—this time around, you had convinced him not to work all day—), he ate a spoonful before he excused himself and cried in the bathroom. His sobs still echo through your head every now and then when the darkest, deepest part of your insecurities comes to life. 

Eleven months after that, you made the biggest mistake to date. You tried to get Jack out of the city for that week. A booked hotel room, couple’s massages, and room service all went down the drain when you tried to surprise Jack with it. He hadn’t screamed at you—it might’ve hurt less if he had. Instead, he had only muttered that he couldn’t believe you’d think he’d want to do something like that on a day like this.

Which is why you didn’t come up with any plans this year. 

But not doing anything at all feels worse than giving yourself to him as an outlet for his pain. 

The day passes like chewing gum stretches. It expands and grows and keeps giving until you think it might snap, but it doesn’t. Solitude clings to you, burying itself in your bones—it practically settles in your lungs to the point where you’re not sure anymore whether you’re still breathing.

You wander around, fulfilling chores and taking care of things that need to be done, but you don’t remember any of it by the time the clock strikes seven pm. 

Jack isn’t home. 

You are. 

He is chasing a ghost you’ll never be able to replace. 

As you get into your car and drive, it’s an obvious guess where he is. 

--

Wind chases goosebumps down your spine when you open the squeaky gate. Its metal looks old, the rust on its surface rough against your palm. The lush greenery all around surprises you—it’s too early in the year for the shrubs to have that color, but you understand the intention. No one wants to grieve their loved ones in a field of grey. 

The graveyard looks well-kept, some of the graves more than others. Shame fills your chest as you catch yourself wondering how much money Jack might spend on the upkeep of his wife’s one per month.  It could be more than your rent, and she’d deserve every penny. 

He is easy to spot. The silver hairs stand out, illuminated by the gentle evening sun just beginning to settle in for the night. He stands awkwardly, most of his weight shifted onto his left leg, and you feel your heart clench. It’s obvious that he is in pain. You don’t know for sure whether he has been here all day, but you assume so as you walk up to him. 

The bouquet you’re holding trembles in your hands. You take a deep breath before you come to a stop just a few meters shy of him. You try to think of something to say, something clever or loving or maybe even funny. 

“Hi,” is all you can manage. 

Jack flinches—and you wish you hadn’t come. You almost wish he had never even met you. 

Seconds that feel like hours pass where neither one of you speaks or moves. One of the petals of the chrysanthemum in your bouquet falls to the ground. 

Jack’s mouth opens and closes twice, but not a single sound comes out. 

“I…”  You stand there in front of him, feeling like a little kid caught up past their bedtime.  “I hope it’s okay that I came,” you mumble then. 

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he glances at the flowers in your hands and clenches his jaw. 

“I’ll come home soon,” he murmurs. His voice is rough from disuse, thick with tears unshed, or maybe they have been shed already, and he has run out. 

Your heart sinks. 

“You don’t have to,” you reply. “You- you can stay here. I can stay here with you.”

“No.”  His answer is final. It’s not cold or disapproving, just desperate—but so are you. 

“Jack, please,” you beg. “Let me stay. Just… let me help you.”

He flinches as if you shot him. One hand raised uncomfortably, like he’s trying to keep you at bay, he stands there as still as a deer in headlights. You’re the car going ninety. 

“My love, please,” you repeat, taking a step towards him. “I… Just talk to me. Tell me- tell me how you feel, or about her—”

“No,” he interrupts. “Jesus Christ, do you really think—”  He stops himself and shakes his head.  Your worst fears unhinge their jaws as they get ready to feast on you.

“Do I really think what?” you prompt bitterly. “Do I really think that I… that I deserve to know her? That I’m the one who could maybe help you a bit through this grief? I don’t know, Jack, you obviously don’t.”

His mouth falls open. 

“What?” he croaks. 

You shrug helplessly.  “You don’t want me here,” you reply.

“No, I don’t,” he replies. “But not… not because I think you don’t deserve to know her, but because… because you don’t deserve this weight on your shoulders. My grief—my fucking… never-ending grief…”

As his words drizzle out into uncertainty, you’re left to stare at him. 

“I… I just don’t want you to see me like this and think… think that I…”  He shakes his head. 

“That you want her instead of me,” you finish for him. 

“That’s not the case,” he says sharply. 

“Isn’t it?” you counter. 

“No,” he hisses. “She’s gone, and there’s nothing I can do to bring her back. You’re here.”

“Yeah, but if you could—”

“But I can’t!”  His shoulders tremble as he fights to keep his voice down.  “She’ll never come back. Never.”

“But you’ll never stop loving her,” you whisper.

“How can I?” he snaps. “I… I vowed to love her until death do us part, and now—now she is dead, and we’re apart, but I’m still here. And I fell for you.”

He takes a deep breath. “Every day, I’m fucking terrified that I make you feel like… like you have to compete for my love with someone who is not here anymore, and obviously, I’ve fucking done that. And you look at me like… like I’m wounded. You treat me like I’m someone to take care of, so I behave like it.”

“But you don’t let me take care of you,” you reply. “You don’t let me in. You don’t let me help.”

“Because if I do, I’ll have to start talking about her to you. I’ll have to tell you how much I love her and that—I can’t fucking do that to you!” he answers.

“But I’m asking you to do that,” you spit out. “I’d rather hear how much love her than live with her fucking ghost looming over us unmentioned. Like that, I don’t even get to feel second best next to her.”

The world grows quiet at your admission. The wind that was blowing before dies down, much like your bravery. You want to take it back. You wish you could rewind time. 

“Fuck, Jack,” you whisper. “I’m sorry.”

His eyes are glassy as he looks at you. 

“You’re not second best,” he mutters. “You matter as deeply to me as she does. I just don’t know how to show you that.”

“Maybe start letting me in,” you whisper. “Treat me like I’m worth your time. Don’t lie to me about how terrible you feel. Help me help you.” You awkwardly shake the flowers in your hands.  “Let me be part of your grief.”

His eyes follow your hands, and he swallows hard. 

“Did you buy them for her?” he asks quietly. 

“Yeah,” you mumble.  As you walk towards him, it feels like crossing a bridge into unknown territory. Maybe you’re overstepping. Maybe you’re being cruel. Maybe you should be more understanding. 

“They’re… I don’t know what kind of flowers she liked, or… if she liked them at all, but they’re chrysanthemums and Peruvian lilies,” you explain. 

“She would’ve liked them,” he answers quickly. “She liked all flowers.”

He reaches out but stops himself.  “Do you… do you want to…”  He motions to the grave and steps aside. Your path is clear. 

Her grave stone is made from smooth limestone, her name engraved in simple, strong letters.  Beloved wife.

You crouch down and lean the flowers against the stone, then stay there for a second. As you glance over your shoulder, you see Jack looking at you. At both of you. 

“I didn’t get her any,” he mumbles. 

You straighten up and return to his side. 

“Why not?” you ask. 

He stays quiet for a moment before he turns to look at you. “It felt disrespectful to you.”

For a second, it’s like he has stolen all the air from you. The pit in your stomach deepens. And then it eases. 

“Jack,” you whisper, “I don’t care if you get her a million flowers—I’ll deliver them here myself. I just want to know that you look at me and see me. Not her, or her… her successor.”

“I do,” he vows, “I do see you.”

in floriography (the language of flowers), chrysanthemums and peruvian lilies stand for honor, respect, and loyalty