˚ .ೃ࿔ 𝜗ৎ .✦ ݁˖

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You raise an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because those are not aspirin, babe.”

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

Your eyes widen in horror. “Oh no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dr. Abbot!"

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

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

This is quite the surprising turn of events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His eyebrows shoot up towards the ceiling in surprise. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi. I missed you,” you sigh.

Jack smirks. “Did you now?”

You nod happily. “Mm-hmm.”

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

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

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

The prospect disappoints him just a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack blinks in surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course that would be your takeaway. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not hungry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You sigh happily and snuggle closer.

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

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

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

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

“Stay.”

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

Jack knows dangerous territory when he sees it.

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

“Sorry, sunshine. Not a good idea.”

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

Best behavior, Jack. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You wake feeling like death warmed over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to face the music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His mouth curves at the corner. “Good.”

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

“Sure thing, sunshine.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh god,” you whisper in horror. 

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

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

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

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

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

Jack places a hand on your thigh.

All the systems in your brain go down simultaneously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See you tonight.”

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

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

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

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

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

You beam after him.

You were at the gurney in an instance, Robby joining the herd in the pushing of the bed. It took you less than a second to see through the bag in the neck and the blood and the uniform to recognise the one on the gurney. “Hiro? What happened?”

“Warehouse robbery gone wrong,” said Jack with almost absent of mind. He said the words and promptly seemed to realise who he was talking to and looked up- at you- again. “You're working today?”

“Oh no, I just hang around in hopes of seeing you in unfiorm.”

Next to you, Robby chuckled and beyond Jack you gave quick greeting to your laughing buddies, clad in SWAT uniform.

You were what could be called, a floater.

By all educational means you were a doctor and a damn good one too. You had every certificate you needed and all the flying colours you could get. You just didn't have a permanent job. You were a sub. You worked mainly at PTMC and on the field but had been known to go to the dark side, a.k.a, Presby.

“Okay, on my count,” you begin. “One, two, three-”

You helped lift him over to the bed.

“Did you intubate him?” you asked,

“Yeah, under active fire,” said Jack.

You looked at Jack. Sweat on his forehead, flecks of grey hair sticking to him and the shirt under his army vest hung lose. He was dishevelled in away romance characters presented on books covers. To lure you in. “You were shot?”

“Shot at.”

“You need to be looked at?”

“No. I'm fine.” His lips were pursed, focus on Hiro.

“Did you see the chords when you intubated?” asked Robby, floating around the two of you as Jack refused to leave Hiro's side and you stayed by Abbot. He'd seen it a dozen times before. A disaster where there was one, there was the other.

There was the occasions he'd hand over to Jack, go home, sleep and come back to find Jack had called in you. You who was always ready to go at the first buzz of your pager. Wherever it was, whatever you had to do. And Robby would look through the patients that night, check the board and understand they hadn't really needed your help all that much.

Jack had.

Now, Robby saw the way you looked at Jack and had seen the gap that existed between the two of you.

“Yeah, I did but it was hard to miss when I cleared them.”

Jack reached and you watched as he stretched, wincing at the pull in his shoulder.

“You should get that looked at,” you told him.

“I'm fine.”

“No, you're not.”

There was a small roll of the eyes as Jack's gaze rose to meet yours through his goggles. There was almost a tiny hint of a smirk- your favourite kind but it disappeared as soon as it appeared.

“Yeah, c'mon Abbot!” said Charlie, calling from the back of his room where he stood with Diaz, two of the SWAT officers you were most frequent with. “Let doc work you up.”

You chuckled low to yourself, trying to catch Jack's eyes to share the joke but he looked away, his jaw clenching.

So, he wasn't in the joking mood.

“Alright, fellas, out!” leaving the wounded's side you ushered them out in spite of their protests and their giddy, hopeful optimism that Officer Hiro would pull through. “We'll let you know any changes, out!”

You pulled on a gown and cleared a way over.

“Demanding,” said Robby.

“You should hear me in the bedroom,” you teased with a wink.

Over on the other side you caught a small click from Jack's tongue. A disapproval voiced loud enough for others to hear.

You grasped the ultrasound wand from the nurse, circling it around the wound at Hiro's neck while Jack pulled away the gauze he'd packed, carefully minding you. “Good lung sliding, no pneumo-”

The last gauze peeled away in a bloody mess and a rope of blood shot out directly at you for vengeance.

“Geez- woah!”

“Pumper!” you announced, clamping your hand over the wound.

The streak of red cut through the skin on your neck, your gown and the doctors coat you liked to wear just like they did in tv shows. You had a draw full of them at home for instances like that.

“Hey, hey,” Jack was at your side quick as you loomed over the body. “Move back, get yourself cleaned up.”

“I can handle a little blood, Abbot.”

“I know that but-”

“- this is a transected trachea now-”

There was little else time to worry about blood on your gown and coat when the intubation was pulled out, the hole in his throat open.

There was a lot people said about you, with words and looks alike but none of which passed you or bothered you. You knew some thought you abrash and loud, you were, you knew it true. On the field the teams you worked with always thought you as one of them, 'one of the guys' but damn it- you were a good doctor.

You ordered everything correctly, you took them and worked them without so much as a blink and Robby stood behind you approving of everything you did.

It was one of the reasons he always called you in.

“Well done, good breaths sounds, stats are up: in the nineties,” approved Robby.

Jack hummed, pulling off his gloves as you all backed away. “Not bad.”

Your carried your smirk with you and over to him. “Is that the great Jack Abbot stamp of approval?”

“You know I think you're good at you're job,” he said, plainly.

You did know that. You knew that Jack admired your skills. He was one of the only ones who'd seen your skills on the field when sometimes all you had left in your kit was the dregs from other procedures or in the hospital when everything was pristine. He'd worked closest to you, probably out of everyone in either one of your jobs.

But there was always something about Jack that kept him far away. He was always a man that was so calm, which in the the face of conflict wasn't a bad call. Yet, it was the quiet moments in between- the way his footfall would slow to match yours, or the glances he'd steal at you half way across the ward, or the extra snacks he'd pack that had you searching rooms for him, checking shifts to see if you'd be around him.

Then when you were, Jack pursed his lips, clenched his jaw, acted like he wanted to be anywhere else sometimes than at your side.

He was a complicated man. Annoyingly that's what added to your attraction- and everyone knew it.

Once the two of you told Officer Charlie and Diaz that Hiro was stable enough to be taken to surgery you followed after Jack.

“You sure you don't want me to look at that shoulder for you?”

“Hmm? Oh, no, it's fine,” he excused.

“Don't want the paperwork?”

“Something like that,” said Jack, still shifting around in pain as he tried to roll his shoulder out.

“Okay, okay, but get it looked at!” you called off, ready to shed your coat or at least try and rub off some of Hiro's blood.

There was a mutter from Jack before he went another way.

You looked back to him once, watching as he walked off with a small limp that probably wasn't detectable to anyone that didn't analyse him like you did. It was a brutal sort of thing, SWAT, and with Abbot's sleep schedule you knew it was only worse. Eight- maybe ten hour shifts for so little sleep to get thrown back into the fire- literally. You wondered how he did it.

And, why.

Jack flexed out his shoulder at the press of the q-tip to his back.

He meant it, the wound really wasn't that bad. It had grazed through his clothes and vest but still hit just enough to leave an angry welt and bruising. He was content to hide away and sort it himself if it weren't for the fact he couldn't reach.

Then Samira Mohan walked by and offered her help. He was already tired, annoyed that those punks had thought it a good idea to rob a warehouse in the middle of the day, already worried about Hiro and his recovery. Then- there was you, with your snarky comments while saving his life, not batting a lash at the blood that got splattered on you in the mean time and still having time to flirt with Robby.

And prancing around in this scrub pants that were surely just a bit too tight.

Jack was wound up, which was why he admitted surrender and allowed Mohan to clean out his wound.

“Why do you do this?” she'd asked.

Jack had folded his arms over his chest, suddenly very aware he was shirtless in front of her. “My therapist says I need a hobby. I suck at golf.”

She hummed. “Funny.”

“Thank you.”

He made conversation to be polite, asking about the fellowships he knew others were already applying for. Crus had been telling him about them and he knew Mohan was searching to.

They were chatting was all when Robby walked by, looking in to check.

He frowned when he saw Mohan and Abbot, pausing in his fly by with a hand in the door way.

Jack watched as Robby looked around again at the ward, undoubtedly searching for you.

“We're almost finished up here,” said Mohan.

Robby held up his hands. “I didn't say anything,” he said, leaning in the doorway. He passed Jack a nod. “You good?”

“Getting there, thanks to Doctor Mohan's capable hands.” Jack kept his eyes averted from Robby as if he'd done something wrong. He hadn't. He'd told you the wound didn't need looking at because he was going to handle it.

Robby looked at him the sort of way he looked at patients when he knew they were lying about their scale of pain. “Can you give us a second?”

Just as Jack was about to push himself up Samira moved behind him.

“Er, yeah, sure. No problem,” she said, pulling off her gloves and listing off post-care instructions from instinct. “Keep it clean and the dressing fresh.”

“Can do, Doctor Mohan. Thank you.”

Robby stepped out of the way for Mohan before walking in, staring at Jack with his hands in his pockets.

Jack found his shirt discarded on the floor and pulled it over him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Clearly,” said Jack.

“Are you avoiding her, now?”

Jack didn't need to ask who he was talking about and Robby didn't need to specify. “Course not.”

“Did she do something?”

“No.”

“So what was all that? Back in trauma?” asked Robby. His eyes were beady, waiting to pick up on any shift in Jack or anything that might betray him. But Robby wore his heart on his sleeve. He might think he doesn't or thinks he's good at hiding such emotions away but Jack and everyone else sees them anyhow.

Jack had his heart buried deep down. “I dunno, man,” he huffed, ignoring the burning sensation as he pulled his shirt back over him. “Maybe I just didn't feel like joking around when my buddy was bleeding out on the table.”

Robby shook his head, eyes creasing. “People bleed out all the time.”

Jacks lips pursed as he worked on tucking his shirt back into his pants. Anything to keep him occupied and averted from Robby’s knowing gaze.

“I haven’t seen you this worked up since you first met her,” he teased.

“Now I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Abbot grumbled.

Robby chuckled low in his throat, leaning back on the wall comfortable like he was watching his favourite show. “When two consenting adults like each other very much-”

“I don’t,” said Jack, abrupt. “I don’t… like her.”

“Jack, c’mon-”

Jack turned to Robby. He considered his confusion. Sure, you were a great doctor and even better on the field. Something about the chaos seemed to focus you, bringing out your best self. You were funny, even at the worse times.

“She’s not it for me,” he said, trying to mean those words.

Your smile first thing in the morning didn’t warm him. The fact you knew his coffee order after only two days of working together didn’t make him feel special. You were incredibly intelligent. Beautiful.

Jack twisted and turned around his wedding band.

Robby watched, heaving a sigh. “Brother…”

Jack couldn’t keep you in his heart when his dead wife still held a place there. It wasn’t fair to you.

“She’s not it, Robby.”

“And why not?” He asked, pushing and prodding against his bag of lies like he knew he was carrying it.

“She’s different- we’re two different. You know with my- with my wife we worked. She wasn’t a doctor, she didn’t throw her life away on field missions. She wasn’t… she wasn’t ruthless, she was soft. Perfect for me.”

He pressed down against the metal band branding him.

“You’re not gonna give yourself a chance to be happy because she’s not like your wife?” Asked Robby.

Jack glanced back at him. “I know what works for me. I can’t be with someone as loud or… bash. She’s-she’s brutal, you know.”

Robby nodded but there was a furrow between his brows. “We all have our own ways of dealing with things.”

“Her way is drinking every weekend, out with the guys, there’s no healthy habits there,” argued Jack. Why he was arguing about you with Robby he didn’t know. Why he was defending himself with words that fell like led on his tongue he had no idea.

“Okay,” said Robby in a way that marked defeat.

But Jack didn’t believe what he was saying. He heard himself and frowned. “And I don’t even think she’s a person who could settle down. Hmm, I mean look at her job? She’s constantly in between them.”

“She’s a sub, that’s what she does-”

“- scared of commitment,” corrected Jack.

Robby scoffed out a laugh of disbelief. “Okay, you’re in a mood or something.” He pushed himself from the wall.

“No, I’m not,” he argued a little too quick and a little too harsh to be okay with what he was saying. “She’s a good person she’s just not my person. You know she-she doesn’t even like flowers, who doesn’t like flowers?”

“She’s more than a good person, Jack,” said Robby with an air of defeat about him. With one last look back to Jack he left, closing the door gently behind him.

In the seconds the door was open Jack sort a peek out. You were at the nurses desk, leaning over a tablet, the blue glow illuminating you. There was a troubled look to your face, scrunching your brows and marring your usual unflappable gaze. Jack almost wanted to see the chart himself and ask what was bothering you, but he knew you never told him, only ever let it be yourself that saw your problems.

Another thing he couldn’t stand. You’d never ask for help.

Even if, Jack couldn’t admit it out loud, he’d help without an invitation too.

You suppose you shouldn’t have been surprised, yet doctors ran on hope. Without hope trauma rooms became morgues and body’s became empty vessels. You’d built hope into your system, kept somewhere between your heart and stomach.

That’s why you felt it plummet.

She’s not it for me.

There was no intention to listen in on a conversation that clearly you weren’t supposed to know about. You'd just been passing by when you heard your name from Jacks mouth. That was enough to stop you in place. If your feet weren't frozen you would have moved, made yourself busy or call up to surgery to check on Hiro.

But as Jack went on your heart plummeted.

She's brutal.

It wasn't until you heard Robby defend you that you moved away, hiding with your back to the exam room and hunching over a tablet that held no chart.

You'd always assumed Jack was just harder to crack then some of the other SWAT guys. You could read most of them within days, know their moods from a glance. You'd never been able to read Jack and maybe it was because he didn't want to be known by you.

You thought seeing Hiro with a hole in his neck would be the worst thing of the day but you caught your reflection in the black screen of the tablet and resented the way things blurred around you.

She's not it for me.

“Hey-” Robby was behind you and you tucked your head into your chest. His hand squeezed your shoulder. “Central twelve when you have a chance.”

“You got it, boss.” Luckily your voice remained steady despite the waver in your throat.

Robby gave a nod and left you to it.

Had Jack had hatred for you since you knew him and just never said a word? Did you do something for him to harbour these feelings?

Besides from not being his wife.

The door closed again and on instinct you looked over your shoulder, catching Jack adjusting his belt. He looked up and found your gaze, offering you a pulled smile.

It was like every other smile he'd ever given you.

You'd been so blind with affection to not see it. What a fool.

You couldn't even pull your lips back up, you just walked away.

Weeks went by in flashes of sleepless nights and lonely days.

The sick and injured didn't wait for you to get over yourself, instead they helped.

You offered yourself like a lamb to the slaughter in Presby and even Westbridge. You pulled doubles, catching small naps in any empty exam room or on-call room you could find. You started to learn staff names when you'd never cared before.

A group of nurses at Westbridge even invited you out for drinks.

“Drinking every weekend, out with the guys, there's no healthy habits there” you remembered Jack's voice and declined their invitation.

When SWAT called you had an excuse. A plumber was coming around... you were re-modelling; suddenly your apartment was going through half a dozen makeovers and all your childhood friends were visiting.

“You know you're not a very good liar,” Diaz had said when he called you for a drink and you declined. That day you were taking your mom's dog to the vet (your mom was a cat person and in another state)

Your apartment became a cave and you became a shell of yourself, un-ironically listening to the high school musical soundtrack and crying.

And still you couldn't find it in yourself to be angry at Jack. Of course he wouldn't want you- he had a wife. And a memory of that wife to keep him walm. What could he do with you? If you weren't his type, you weren't his type. If it was just that maybe you could have moved on.

But he didn't like you as a person and that stung more.

You didn't know how long it had been since you were last at PTMC, only long enough that you started to scramble corridors in your mind and forget what some of the nurses sounded like.

“We have a mass casualty event,” said Robby on the phone one Sunday morning. His voice sounded different, but you supposed time played tricks on your memory. “School bus incident. You in?”

You were in pyjamas at home, some crappy tv on low. “I'll have to check, Presby might need me.”

Robby scoffed down the line. “Have they called yet?”

“Well, no-”

“Then get your ass over here.”

“Robby-”

“Please, please get your ass over here,” he said down the line, sighing heavily. “I.... I could really use another set of hands.”

Robby didn't say please. Ever. So how could you say no.

Within the hour you were dressed an,d thrown into the anarchy.

You got through the ambulance doors, was thrown a gown and got to work. You didn't even see Robby to let him know you were there, you just found Langdon and worked beside him.

“I need some help over here!” yelled out a paramedic.

At once you and Langdon were at her side, pushing along the gurney.

“Kid, fracted tib-fib, pupils mid range and sluggish- couldn't get a line we had to intubate.”

“Dana what's open?” called out Langdon.

“Room in trauma one!”

Mass casualty meant trauma rooms doubled up, pushed up against either wall. Mass casualty meant extra hands called in- like you. Still, when you pushed through the door and found Jack's eyes look up you spared half a second in apprehension.

“You're here,” was all he said.

You didn't know what to say. There was some snarky comment on the tip of your tongue as you settled the boy in the corner but you remembered you weren't supposed to be that person.

Jack didn't like that person.

“Yeah, in the flesh,” replied Frank instead.

“Chest trauma on the right!” you assessed. “We need an X-ray in here.”

“X-ray's backed up,” Jack called from where he hovered over another patient.

“Then get me an ultrasound!” you called out. “Push five migs of epi down the tube and hang a unit of O-neg on the rapid infuser.”

“BP'S eighty over fifty, pulse is at one-twelve!” called out Princess.

You felt someone bump in your shoulder and knew by inhale it was Jack. He was close at your side, pulling off and on another pair of gloves.

“What have you got?” he asked.

It wasn't instinct to move away from him. It was practised control that had you swapping sides with Frank, practically pushing him into Jack.

“Chest trauma to the right, he's tacky,” he explained quickly.

You pulled out your stethoscope, listening closely. “His breathing's stridor, I need a thoracotomy tray!”

“A thoracotomy?” asked Jack, voice oddly quiet in the trauma as if it was whispered just next to you. “You sure you can handle that?”

“I'm a good doctor, if I'm nothing else,” you bit out, swinging your stethoscope back around your neck. You weren't going to allow yourself to fall back into old habits, of questioning what Jack didn't like so much about you. You focused on the un-conscious boy under the mercy of your hands. You ordered the right tools, made the cut neat and precise, pushing more pain relief.

“Any tamponade?” asked Jack.

You checked the boys blood pressure. “No, pericardium's dry.”

“Okay, start an-”

“- start an internal massage-”

You and Jack said at the same time.

Frank seemed stuck in headlights before he reached through the incision in the boys chest and slowly started to work the heart.

“Pulse?”

“Barely.”

Jack frowned, looking over at your work. “Cross clamp the aorta, and push another mig of antropine.”

“I need suction!”

“Got anything for surgery?” asked a new voice, Doctor Walsh checking between the patients in the room.

“Oh no, we've brought the OR down to us,” said Jack.

Doctor Walsh rounded, catching the suction and the message of the heart. “Are you doing a thoracotomy right now?”

“Don't look at me,” said Jack, surrendering.

Before anyone could argue with you, question your capability you snapped out. “I know what I'm doing!”

Jack was silent, Frank smirked and Walsh rose a brow.

“Clamped,” said Princess.

“Someone push in another of antropine and get another unit of blood in,” you ordered.

There was a sudden buzzing as all eyes averted to the monitor.

“He's going into V-fib!”

You wiped your bloody and gloved hands down your gown. “Okay, I need internal panels!”

They were handed to you and Jack rushed to your side.

“You want me to-” he started but you already had the panels in hand and were ordering their charge.

“Charge to thirty! Clear!”

Like you were cupping the heart with your own hands you nudged the panels on either side and shocked. There were little miracles sometimes in the ED and with a bus full of school children you needed miracles.

“There! He's stable!” said Princess.

“We've got a girl coming in, needs stabalising and an ortho consult!” said Lena, throwing the door open. It seemed everyone had been called in.

“I'll take this guy, don't want you getting all the credit,” smirked Walsh as she and the team wheeled out the boy. She looked back at you, almost waiting for you to say more- some funny joke or flirtatious tease.

You only waved past her to get the young girl into the room.

Everyone in the room looked at you as you honed in on the next casualty, ignoring the pang in your heart at Jack's gaze.

When the girl for ortho came in you could only work on stabilising her before Park the Shark descended and took her up, assuring the bag was on ice. He gave you a less ten friendly look. Seemingly Jack wasn't the only one who couldn't stand you.

The hours ticked by in bodies of different kids, in shades of blood and traumas. By the time you got outside for some fresh air it was night and one lonely ambulance sat with you.

You were catching your breath when you heard the doors slide open and shut again. You imagined it was someone else wanting some peace and air, or a paramedic heading back out on the road.

“You were impressive in there,” said Jack, coming to stand next to you. There was a large enough gap that another body could have fit there.

“Thank you.”

He gave one short nod. “Robby call you in?”

“Yeah.”

“Same here,” he said, not that you'd asked. “You know, Hiro's doing well.”

You paled in the night. Lost in your own self-loathing you hadn't even asked about Hiro, or gone to see him. You'd heard he was okay when he dropped a message from the ICU but that was as far as it got. “Oh yeah, I know, I heard.”

“What, from the guys?”

You nodded, lips pursing as you crossed your arms over your chest in the light chill.

“You know they told me you haven't been around much,” said Abbot. “I've noticed it too. We all went to Larry's the other night, your invitation get lost?”

Was it a test? Was it a joke to him?

“No, I just didn't want to drink. Trying to cut down, it's not so healthy,” you said, kicking one foot in front of the other.

“One or two's not bad,” he said. “Couple of us are gonna grab a beer once this is all over. You joining us? Usual spot.”

She's brutal, you know.

You looked to him first. He was already looking at you, eyes creased like he was trying to see through you. It was real and earnest and making his words from weeks ago hurt even more.

“No thanks, Jack.” You almost reached to his shoulder but thought better of it.

Heading back in seemed the safer option.

Jack turned when you did. “Noody's seen you for weeks-”

“- I've been busy-”

“- except those nurses in Presby, they see you all the time apparently-”

“- they've been busy, they've called me in-”

“- I called you three times last week, you didn't answer-”

“- I didn't think you'd want me.” It was about the only honest thing you'd said in weeks. Your trainers squeaked on the ground just before the hospital, the automatic doors ready to welcome you back.

Jack was at your side, close enough you could see the lines of confusion in his face. “Why would you think that?”

You tried to think of a quick excuse but every word died prematurely in your throat. You chocked on them.

“Hey-hey-” Jacks hand fell to your back, soothing it in calming rubs.

You allowed yourself to bask in one circular motion of his hand and your back before you stepped away, backing up from the doors that slid shut again on instant.

“What’s going on?” Asked Jack, following in your steps.

“Nothing, nothing.”

Jack made a disgruntled noise. “C’mon, talk to me.”

He let you think about what to say, stewing in silence where your mind became alive with everything he’d said, with every terrible thing you’d already thought about yourself. You imagined every time you’d cracked a joke that was maybe too perverse. You tried to picture Jacks face but came out blank. Was it loathing? Contempt?

Your voice betrayed you with a shake as you spoke again. “I do like flowers.”

“Huh?”

You wiped at your eyes and turned to him. “I like flowers,” you said, stronger. “Nobody’s ever brought me flowers but I- I like them.”

For anyone else it would’ve took time to click. They’d have stood there, looking at you like you’d gone mad, spewing out words that out of context meant nothing.

But Jack was not just any other clueless guy. He was the guy who always packed left overs and left them in the fridge, he always cooked enough to make sure he’d have left overs. He was the sort that always checked in on pedes patients and made sure they had enough colourful bandages for them.

Jack knew what you were saying immediately. His jaw tensed. “I- I shouldn't have said that.”

“You said a lot of things,” you said, holding yourself tighter. “Sounded like you meant them.”

He gulped. “I didn't mean-”

“-what, for me to hear it?”

“No, I didn't mean for what I said to come out as- as bad,” he said.

“Well it didn't come out as shining praise either.” You turned from him, looking out to the building and lights. Somewhere n the distance a siren wailed.

“Robby- Robby was saying things, teasing, I just waned to shut him up.”

You chuckled with loathing. “No you didn't. It's okay, Jack, you don't have to like me, I just wish you didn't make it seem like you did.”

“Hey!” he said, coming to stand in front of you. He was without a scrub top and his t-shirt clad to his biceps, his muscles flexing as his jaw worked. “I do like you.”

You rolled your eyes. “No you don't.”

“I do-I do-” Jack grabbed the top of your arms, stopping you from walking away. His grip was tight, not enough to bruise but enough to beg you not to leave. “I do like you.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It does, it does.” Jack crouched enough in his knees to get a look at your face that you kept trying to turn away from him.

“You know the worst thing is? It's that I know,” you uttered, voice quiet. You didn't trust yourself to shout- even if you really wanted to- in fear your voice cracked, humiliatingly.

Jack's eyes softened, his thumb drawing up and down in comfort. “Know what?”

“I know that I can be a lot. I go out with the guys, I drink, I make jokes when things get bad because what else am I supposed to do? Cry? Let the grief of the job swallow me up?”

“No. No, of course not,” he said, lips pulled down.

You hated that you still wanted to make him smile. “I could keep a job if I wanted to but I like meeting the people-”

“- I know, I know you do-”

“- and now I'm here defending myself to a guy who probably doesn't even want to hear it!” Trying to turn in Jack's hold was feeble, his grip was strong and he moved with you.

“You don't have to defend yourself, you have nothing to defend!”

“You know what the worst part is?”

Jack shook his head, waiting.

“It's the guy you liked and admired the most seeing everything you hate about yourself and hating you for it too.”

Jack flinched as of you'd slapped him. The chill in the air grew colder around you and all the light from the dim glow of the lamps shrunk away, leaving you and Jack in a self-made darkness. You felt his grip weaken and savoured the feel of him a moment longer.

It was only when you couldn't stomach it anymore that you retreated back into work.

Jack had fucked up.

There was no easy way of putting it. There was no clinical way of looking at it, no diagnosis to give other than he had fucked up.

He'd never heard himself speak and hated the sound of his own voice. Never caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror with tired eyes and a pale expression and loath to see the sight. When he looked at himself, all he saw was your own face heart-broken. When he heard himself talking he remembered everything he'd said.

He could have blamed it on the pain in his shoulder, the worry over Hiro, the lack of sleep he'd been struggling with for days but he had a therapist for all that. You didn't deserve that burden.

He was un-focused the following week in work. Patient satisfaction was at an all time low with him. He'd opened up to his SWAT buddies over a self-pitying pint and had been shunned.

“What's your problem?” Charlie had said, two beers deep and a haze over his eyes. “She's a fucking saint. She'd lay down her life for any one of us- what the fuck man?”

“She won't return my calls,” Jack told them. “Can you just... just call her?”

They'd refused, with good reason.

He'd tried texting his apology. He'd tried calling you in but he found from a contact at Westbridge you'd been covering nights while their attending was on holiday.

It was a brash decision to call in to PTMC and tell them he'd be late, he was running an errand. Nobody questioned him.

Westbridge was darker than the hospital he was used t, built up on top of each other but they were no less busy than himself. Patients were lined up in corridors and there was hardly a seat left in chairs when he walked through.

“Can I help you?” asked the nurse at reception, eyeing Jack and the bouquet of flowers he held.

He said he was looking for you.

“She's in a trauma right now, can I take a message?”

“Can you tell her Ja-Jack's here.” For a moment he debated lying, saying it was Robby wanting to see you, or maybe you didn't want to see Robby either. Deceit wasn't going to be his friend.

Jack waited and tried not to look around, tried not to let himself get caught in the heavy bustle of another hospital as he waited for you. He ignored the coughing from the waiting room that definitely sounded like it would require a chest CT.

There was a crash of doors and he caught sight of you rushing out, protective goggles over your eyes and bloodied gown clad to you.

“Jack, what is it? Are you okay?” your eyes were frantic, searching him.

Ah. Of course you'd think something had happened. When you hear someone's in the hospital it's very rarely to just say hi. “I realise I should've specified,” said Jack, rubbing the back of his knuckle against his brow. “I just- I wanted to see you. And give you these.”

Sensing this was a conversation she definitely wanted to be around for yet probably wouldn't be allowed to, the nurse at reception left the two of you to it and Jack sat the flowers down on the counter in-between you.

You eyed the shades of red roses, of yellow tulips, the violet of the iris and the pink of the peony.

“I didn't know what you liked so, I kind of got one of everything,” he said, sighing to himself. He should have got two of every flower the florist had on hand. “I didn't get Lilies, the lady at the shop said it's a show of death and sunflowers aren't in season, apparently.”

“They're very nice, thank you,” you said.

“They come with an I'm sorry:” said Jack. “I'm sorry.”

You wet your lips and pursed them, nodding slowly. “Okay.”

Jack looked down to his boots. “It's not, I know it's not, nothing I said is okay and I didn't mean it.”

You didn't say anything at that, only taking in a quivering breath.

He ignored the irritation in his prosthetic as he crouched to catch your gaze. Jack wasn't used to having to search for your gaze, usually he always found it already on him. He only realised how much he valued finding you in the middle of the storm when you wouldn't look at him.

“I didn't mean it,” he enunciated every word, begging you to hear them.

Your gaze studied around Westbridge, hoping for a distraction.

“I messed up, it's on me. It's not you.”

“The classic it's not you, it's me?” you dismissed.

Jack winced. It was cliché, damn him. “Yeah, I guess so.”

He watched as your fingers brushed over a flower petal, picking it off like plucking a string on a guitar. He felt his heart pound in his chest.

“Can I get back to work now?” you asked, gently.

What was he thinking? Turning up to where you were tying to do some good. Where you were doing good- it was what you did. Did he expect the flowers to fix everything? No. Only he could. But he'd grovel, he'd beg, he'd crawl after you for the rest of his miserable life and do it all while building you a rose garden.

He'd do all of that for one minute of your eyes on his.

“Just promise you'll come back. To the Pitt. Whole place is going to crap without you.” He tried to joke but it was a pathetic thing.

“Okay. Yeah.” Your shoulders lifted in in-difference.

“And don't ignore the guys. They're going out for drinks tomorrow night. I won't be there. They all pretty much think I'm a dick anyway.”

There was a glimpse of a smile.

Jack played on. “I'm a total, total dick, a jerk!”

An elderly lady being escorted by with a nurse and an IV trailing her paused and glanced his way.

“Sorry,” he uttered.

You hid your chuckled behind your mouth but he caught a second of it.

It was enough for now.

Your name was called down the corridor.

“He's in V-tach!” a nurse announced before disappearing again.

“Go,” said Jack, taking himself out of the equation. “Just, please. Don't be a stranger.”

Jack wasn't lying when he said the place was going to crap without you. How they managed on shifts without your charm to work fretting family and friends down, or your terrible singing in between exams he didn't know.

Walking through the ambulance doors for his shift there was already paramedics pushing an empty and slightly blood stained gurney back into their rig. There was a crowd of elderly patients in beds and gowns left at the side and phones were ringing, drilling into his eardrums.

“Where the hell is she?” barked Robby, spotting Jack and no you.

Jack dumped his bag at the counter. “What happened here?”

“Nursing home caught fire, now where is she? We're swamped her, I thought you were going to get her and bring her back?”

Jack grumbled, frowning at the counter. “She's busy at West.”

“West? God-” Robby groaned, looking around the place and cursing. “Listen, I don't care what you have to do to make it up to her, buy her a florist, give her a ring, get down on your knees, I don't fucking care- I need her here.”

“You think I don't?” Jack snapped.

Robby eyed him, hand clenched on the counter. “Tell her the truth-”

“-Robby-”

“-no, you tell her you didn't mean a damn thing you said. That you were scared loving someone that isn't your wife.”

Glass. Jack was made of glass. If Robby could see through him so clearly why couldn't you? Why couldn't you see the truth? That Jack liked you, liked you more than he'd liked anyone. That loving you meant leaving the life he lived with his wife behind, yet carrying a part of her with him always. He didn't want to do that to you. He didn't want to make you live with a ghost or carry his grief. There were days where it was too hard for him to handle.

Robby sighed. “You think she'd want you to be happy?”

A muscle in Jack's neck tensed as he went to nod but was held back by himself.

“Talk to her,” said Robby clamping him on the shoulder quickly before disappearing.

Hiding away wasn't going to solve anything. That's what Robby said to you in a desperate plea to get you back to helping him out with shifts.

Truth was you weren't hiding away... as much.

Drinks with the guys had been hours of them telling you Jack was wrong, after Jack had exposed himself to them, laying the situation on the table. As promised, he wasn't there but every conversation revolved around him so much so it felt like he was at your side. You defended Jack when they argued against him. You told them you knew you were loud at times, maybe you shouldn't joke around as much as you did.

They'd laughed, thinking it was a joke itself.

They told you not to change.

It was hard not to. Every time you heard yourself get loud or get a look from people at the other table your instinct was to shrink. When Diaz tripped on the curb out the bar you laughed instead of helping him and was left with your own guilt when you got home.

Un-learning habits was hard. Learning to live with them was harder.

You started with baby steps. A day shift here, a day shift there, by hand-offs you were always gone. Yet, in the staff lounge there sat a fresh bouquet of flowers every morning. As soon as they started to wilt another fresh bunch was placed over night.

Nothing was said. Nothing ever had to be.

“Shen's out, food poisoning,” said Robby over the phone another day. “You know I wouldn't ask if there was no otherway.”

Which was how you ended up working a night shift. The first in months.

Jack's eyes lit up as you walked in, it was impossible not to notice. The only eyes to rival his sparkle was Lena's when she saw you.

It was the sort of night that held your attention. That roped you in and demanded you listened. Not overly busy but not quiet enough to cause you and Jack to be held captive in the same room. Only seconds passed in hallways when he looked like he was going to say something before being called away, taunt in the neck and gripping his stethoscope for the life of him.

“Am I going to need surgery?” asked the young boy in five who you were examining. A nasty accident in his dad's garage ended up with a laceration to the foot.

“Not surgery but a couple stitches to bring the skin back together, and you're gonna have to stay off your feet for a while,” you said.

The boys eyes grew wide in joy. “So, no school?”

You chuckled as his mom pinched his shoulder playfully. “Well, I can't be the deciding factor on that, I'm afraid.”

You put in the orders for stitches.

“Is it gonna hurt?” asked the boy, shrinking back in his bed.

“We're gonna numb you up so you don't feel anything,” you assured. “Tell you what, I have a secret stash of candy that I only share with my favourite patients, how's that sound, you want something?”

The boy tried not to be too eager in his nodding but it took less than two second for him to grin.

You didn't expect anyone in the lounge when you went in search for candy usually lying around.

Jack was hunched over the table, pulling out the dying flowers and arranging fresh ones. He stopped when you walked in, the door closing gently behind you. “Hi.”

“Hey.”

“I was just... maintenance,” he mumbled.

You nodded along, a thick awkwardness engulfing the two of you. “Maintenance... yeah... sure...”

You moved around him, keeping a good distance around the space of him like he was a poisonous snake. The cabinet was high up, the tin an old sewing one where you hid your most precious protein bars and sugar packed candy.

“Here, I can-”

His body was sturdy against the back of you as he reached up for the tin. Few select people were allowed to know about its contents and Jack was on of the first ones you trusted. He raised his arm and you watched the freckles along his arm move and ripple. Upon inhale you took a deep breath of lingering cologne, mixed with the hearty sterile hand wash of the ED.

Jack's own head tilted down and your heard him inhale, deeply.

The tin fell into your hand.

Jack stared down. “Oh- er, there.”

“Thanks.”

It was about all the conversation you got with Jack your shift was over. The morning was just breaking through the clouds at six, bringing with it a down pour. You'd already punched out, handed off your patients to McKay and was left standing under the small awning of the ambulance bay, trying to out wait the rain.

It took ten minutes for Jack to follow you out.

“You heading out?” he asked, hands shoved in his pockets.

“Yeah. I'm just waiting for my uber.”

Jack frowned. “What happened to your car?”

“It's in the garage.”

“Well... I can give you a lift,” he suggested.

The rain hammered down harder above you, steady streams falling from the awning to at your feet. As discreet as possible you checked the location on you uber. Just around the corner. In the rain it had taken longer.

“No, it's okay, you don't have to.”

“I'd like to,” said Jack, stepping closer. “I'd like a chance to talk to you. To tell you everything that I meant by my words.”

You'd almost hoped you could carry on as you were: extremely avoidant.

“You don't have to, Jack.”

“I do- I do!” he insisted, hands out in front of him as if desperate to grasp you. He held himself back. “Please let me.”

Stomaching more of his words, whether it be excuses as to what he meant to say or just doubling down and insisting what he said was true. You didn't think you were strong enough for either.

Your phone buzzed in hand as a slick back black car pulled up, window rolling down and calling your name.

“No, wait-wait!” said Jack, holding a hand up to you with all the authority of an attending still on duty.

“Jack, what are you-” You were struck in place, watching him lean through the window, rain dampening his shirt as he un-folded a few bills and handed them to the driver.

“We don't need you know, sorry man,” Jack mumbled.

Your jaw hung open as you stepped out into the rain, bottom of your scrub pants dampening at once. “What?”

The driver tutted. “I still want me five star review!” He drove off quickly, splashing the two of you as he went.

“Oh- serious?” Jack gritted. “Now I wish I hadn't given him such a tip.”

The puddles of rain were seeping into your trainers as you walked off, out of the way of ambulances and cars, pulling your jacket tighter around you.

“Wait! Wait!” Jack called after you, boots slapping in the water. He all but jumped in front of you, stumbling lightly at the shift in his bad leg. “Wait.”

“I don't know what else you want to say to me, Jack?”

“Nothing I say can excuse what I said-”

“-so why try?”

“Because it's killing me being like this!” he snapped. The rain was pouring down, falling down his cheeks and nose. “It's killing me to look for your smile and not see it. It's killing me to hear a joke and you not laugh. Everything I said, it-it re-plays in my head and I'm sorry.”

“I know you are, Jack, I just need time!”

“I'll give you time,” he said. “I'll give you anything you need. But just let me say one thing. You owe me nothing, I'm begging you.”

To prove a point Jack crouched, starting to get down on his knees, hands already clenched together. To spare you the embarrassment and him the ache in his leg you tugged him back up.

He stared at you, breathless. He was as drenched as you, the both of your scrubs stuck to you.

“I haven't loved anyone since my wife,” said Jack. “I haven't tried, I didn't want to try. I was... not happy, but content to just carry on with her here-” he curled a fist at his chest. “And then you... and I couldn't not feel anything for you. I tried- I really tried.”

“Okay. You tried. I get it,” you mumbled.

“But I started to love you and I hated myself for it. It felt like I was betraying her by wanting someone else. By wanting you. And I did- I do want you. Every terrible joke you made, Jesus, I couldn't laugh in front of patients and their families. When you go out drinking with us and the guys in our team and you sing karaoke badly-”

“Excuse me?”

Jack winced. “I mean great, great karaoke.”

You chuckled.

“I can't take back the fact you're different from my wife, you are, but I don't think that's a bad thing- it's not. Because I still love you. I love that you're loud, I love that you draw attention to yourself as soon as you walk into a room, my attention is always on you anyway,” he smiled, sadly. It was the kind of smile a lover would give as they watched the love of their life leave them. “I shouldn't have made my grief your problem. I shouldn't have hated myself for feeling love again and I shouldn't have tried to convince myself hating you. I mean, that was just- just impossible.”

You looked down to your trainers, seeing the darkening colour where the water soaked in. “I've loved you for so long now, Jack.”

He waited, catching his breath, for more.

You looked up at him. “I'm sorry. About your wife. I can't imagine how hard it is for you. But I don't want to fall in love with a man who constantly advertises me next to his wife.”

Jack nodded, looking down.

The rain was probably helpful, hiding any tears you'd give away.

“I love you, separate to how I love my wife. And I loved her, I did. But I don't want to spend the rest of my life dead inside. Be on my death bed when I'm eighty looking back at all the times I should've kissed you.”

His words pulled at your heart, your feelings that you'd been burying deep inside clashing together inside of you.

“By the time you're eighty, I'll be like, in my sixties?” you said.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“And looking to settle down.”

Jack laughed, and you laughed and for a second that was almost enough. The rain had made the grey in his hair darker, almost making him look younger. “I'm not saying I won't fuck up, I probably will, I have a therapist for a reason.”

“Therapy is good,” you said.

Jack's eyes were lighting up slowly with every teasing comment you made. Something akin to hope flickered between the two of you. “But I will never draw comparison to you and my wife. I'll never make you feel like second choice. I'll never dump my grief onto you. If you just give me one chance, just one chance at making this right.”

As sorry's went... as love confessions went.

“I'm scared what it means to love you, Jack,” you said, slowly, feeling the words around your mouth.

“I know, I know,” Jack reached over, clumsily brushing back your damp hair from your cheeks. In spite of the rain, his skin was still soft and hot on you. “I am too.”

You searched his eyes before whispering. “Can I kiss you?”

He smirked a little. “No.”

Your heart dropped.

Jack's hands tilted your head back before you could tuck yourself away. “Can I kiss you?”

His lips were slick and wet from rain but no less sort after from you. He didn't push or prod for more, he just laid his lips against yours with enough pressure for you to know he was there. For you to always remember he was there.

You could have stayed like that for hours, practically standing on each others toes as your own hands came up to clutch his biceps, fingertips digging into his freckles.

You pulled away only when you needed to catch your breath.

Jack's lips chased yours, body tumbling into you slightly as his eyes took seconds to open like coming out from a dream.

You ran your hands up his shoulders. “I love you.”

He closed his eyes and soaked in the words.

“Will you let me?” you asked.

“Always,” he promised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On it,” Mateo said, already moving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You had it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now you wanna give orders,” you mumbled.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m genuinely not going anywhere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For sure —”

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

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

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

“You’d do that to me?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give it back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One more round —” 

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

“She’s been my patient for years —” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If only I could be so lucky.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got a migraine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Last I checked.” 

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

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

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

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

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

“I — yeah. Obviously.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That an offer, Dr. Abbot?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mateo huffed. “She loves love.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure, I could,” Jack said immediately. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t think it is. Try again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what?” 

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

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

“You’re serious.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, yeah?” you murmured. “We?” 

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

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

“Glad we share the experience.”

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

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

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

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

“Rude,” you said, mouth already full.

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

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

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

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

You hummed. “And now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gonna sleep?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jack?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tipped your chin back up, already chasing him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn him and his gaze. Even after 6 weeks of dating — and pining for a lot longer than that — he sure could still make you feel like a puddle.

You're only able to speak once he turns to his phone again. “Uh, excuse you, I'm a very fun person, thank you very much. Yesterday, I put a fake ‘your computer is down’ screen on Shen's laptop,” you tell proudly. 

“Dear god. He did not go into a cardiac arrest from your…prank?” Jack's voice caught on the word “prank” as if it deeply amused him.

You narrowed your eyes at your boyfriend (still hard to say that), shifting close enough to him on his couch that your knee knocked against his thigh. Your entire body faced him, while his faced the front — a tiny whine left your lips.

Jack turned his attention back to you as you spoke again. “You know it's the loss of control I hate. Don't you think I also feel like getting all loose-lipped and dancing on top of tables and flirting with strangers?”

His eyes softened a fraction when he saw the small frown on your lips. He sets his phone face-down on the arm of the couch, before shifting so his upper half faced you too. “Okay, what brings this on? You know I just like teasing, I don't think there's anything wrong with being an alcohol virgin.”

You rolled your eyes at his choice of words. “I want to know what it's like. It makes everyone so…” your hands do a weird dance in front of your chest, trying to find a proper word. Your attending swiftly moves his cup a bit to the left, so your hands wouldn't knock it all over yourself. 

“Joyful,” you finished.

“Okay, but let's not dance on table tops and flirt with strangers,” he takes off his reading glasses and perches them next to his phone. When his eyes find you again, they're equal parts amused, and that softness that only seems to show up when you're in the room.

“I would never, I'd feel bad for giving you stress at your age.”

He lightly smacks your hip that's not smushed against the couch, “Brat.”

You grin widely, “You'll be there, right?”

“With a camera and a mic. My beautiful, sensible, nurse, looking like an absolute fool,” he tugged at a loose strand of your hair, his eyes shining with endearment.

Your little baby blue sling looks absolutely ridiculous hung over his shoulder. “What did I tell you before leaving?” His voice strains with the effort of all the workout he got in today. He's struggling with unlocking the door, because your purse keeps slipping down his arms.

You were a disaster. While your favourite doctor made sure you only stuck to fruity drinks that gave you a pleasant buzz and not regrets — you still managed to outdo yourself in terms of being a mess.

You challenged a man twice your size in an arm wrestle. You advised 3 different women to break up with their boyfriends, “Mine's handsome and kind. You guys stay safe, though.” And, finally, broke the heel of your left boot making you even more unbalanced than you already were. 

“That Dr. Robby is a little shit with no self-preservation inst-”

“The other one, honey.”

You went silent for a moment, searching your hazy brain as the door opened in front of you. Jack gently guided you in, before locking the door with a sharp click. His rough hands sneak up your arms, tugging the jacket at your shoulders, and shrug it off you to safely hang it on his coat rack.

“That I shouldn't carry my bag if I couldn't keep it safe?” you say, looking down at him, as he sets his knee on the floor. His hands that cut and heal skin with such precision, are deftly working the zipper of your boots. He gently helps your feet out of the pair, patting your calf, before rising to his full height again with a groan.

Without your size boosters, your head was once again leveled with his chest. Jack nodded, leaning his head down so you didn't have to crane your neck as much.

“But I had my ID and pepper spray in there,” you justified, your lower lip jutting out in a pout.

Jack's hand pats the right-side pocket of his hands, “ID,” his voice rumbling as if coming straight from his chest. “And you don't need pepper spray. You have me.”

But you're not registering a word he says, not when he looks like this. His salt and pepper curls are all ruffled from your bar visit. His simple black tee is pulled taut across his biceps, making them look just as delicious as they do in his SWAT uniform.

His fingers snap in front of you, “Eyes up here, sweetheart.” You look in his honeyed eyes again. God, why haven't you guys had sex already? You seriously can't remember why.

“Why haven't we fucked?” You blurt out. Oh, the alcohol doesn’t make you Joyful. It makes you blunt.

Your boyfriend freezes for a second, before letting out a deep, throaty laugh. His hands settle on your shoulders. With a slight bend of his knees, he manages to stare completely and directly into your eyes. “Wow, thought we went to the bar, not to a seminar for clear communication.”

You capture both his hands and slide them down, so they're firmly on your hips. After humming in satisfaction, you take a step closer to him, your chest brushing his. “Answer me.”

As if suddenly realizing you both are still standing in the entryway, Jack starts walking you backwards, swiftly maneuvering you so you don't hit the kitchen counter. “I'm your attending, honey, I don't answer to you,”

You furrow your brows, staring up at him with irritation. You press yourself even closer to him, your palms settling on his hard stomach. “Like hell you don't. I want to know why me and my gorgeous boyfriend haven't made good use of every room in this too-big-for-you house.”

Jack sighs deeply, his fingers unconsciously tightening around your hips. He takes a seat on one of the low kitchen counter stools, so he doesn't have to keep looking down at you. His arms completely wrap around your waist, pulling you in until you're standing between the hard muscle of his thighs.

“Because we work at a hospital, we're either busy or tired. And…it's hard to find a footing with sex. You tense up whenever my hand slips under your shirt, you've talked about how insecure you get. And me…well, I'm not what I used to be.”

Your eyes soften, “But do you want me?” Your lips graze his jaw, your hands palming the hard plane of his chest.

Jack shifts in his seat and takes a deep breath, “What do you think, baby?” his right hand moves an inch lower with exaggerated slowness, settling on the top curve of your ass, his thumb stroking the curve.

You let out an entirely pathetic whimper at his breathy voice, his lips brushing your temple. You move back your face, so you can watch him again. His eyes look darker than they actually are.

“I see this as a good opportunity that we should seize, doctor.” His throat catches at the ‘doctor’. Oh, you are not a fair player.

“Well, I don't like my medical staff being inhibited. Perhaps, sometimes when you're horny and sober, we can continue the procedure.” His breaths are coming in shallow, his hard thighs squeezing around you to completely lock you in. His hands have not stopped moving, the one on your waist has moved north to tangle in your hair at the nape of your neck.

A petulant whine leaves your lips as you bury your mouth in the crook of his neck. “But-”

“No buts. I have no intention of being between your legs in a state you won't even remember anything in.” The rasp in his voice so close to your ear directly travels to the your belly, already coiling tight with tension.

The imagery makes you groan: His mouth working between your legs, his jaw shining under the dim lights, stopping for a moment to say, “Louder, baby. Your doctor can't hear you.”

Your lips slip from his neck, replaced by your forehead. His lips brush against your hair, the gentleness so different from what his body is suggesting.

“Kids and their hormones,” he teasingly says. That makes you pull yourself back. Because that's rich coming from a man whose pants are getting visibly tighter.

“Is that so, grandpa?” Your eyes are entirely fixated on his lips. Your own bottom lip has caught between your teeth.

His thumb comes up to free your lip so you don't hurt it, “Careful, brat.” His hand stays on your face, and you lean heavily into his palm, blinking at him. The strap of your top has conveniently fallen off from its place, and Jack is staring like a man who's just discovered shoulders, tracking the soft curve of it, following the slope of your neck, where your pulse thrums rapidly.

Leave it to him to have a gaze that weights at least a 300 pounds.

Your palms drop from his chest to his waist, brushing your fingers against the waistband of his pants. A soft “uh-uh” leaves his mouth as he slowly shakes his head, though he makes no move with his hands to push you away.

“You're palming at me like you're a little girl, and I'm your favorite barbie doll.”

“You are my favorite barbie doll, Dr. Abbott,” it leaves your mouth in a soft, needy, whine.

His shoulder shake slightly from laughter, the comforting rumble filling the room, subsequently reaching every tensed part of your body, and taking its place there too, perfectly fitting every crook and corner.

“I am a 50-year old man with a military background, who spends his nights managing an entire floor of medical staff. My day hobbies include being a buddy to SWAT and getting shot at.”

You look at him, as if to say “so?” and hearing the adoration — despite the choice of words — in your voice completely decentres him. “Glad to be your favourite barbie doll, honey.”

He finally freezes when your wandering palm brushes against the hard ridge in his pants, practically begging to be freed. You let out a little gasp as you feel his size, even with a barrier of rough fabric.

A low groan leaves him, his hand sharply capturing your bold wrist against his own chest, heaving up and down. For someone just talking about being 50, the man's heart is sure beating with a fast thump-thump-thump, like a teenage boy catching his crush in a 2-feet vicinity. Your name leaves his mouth, dirty and like a prayer at the same time.

“Let me help you, doctor. Please” you say sweetly, voice coated in silk and need and whatever poison this man mixed in your drinks.

A pause.

He gets off the stool in a sudden motion, his hands grip your forearms, and starts walking you backwards in the general direction of the bathroom.

“You are a pain in my ass. And, frankly, a horny mess.”

“Speaking of horny and my ass-”

He doesn't let you complete the sentence before turning you around, his broad chest hovering over your form from the back. “Nope. You have lost the privilege of looking at me before you've taken a cold shower.”

You tilt your head back to look at him, excitement glinting in your eyes, “together?”

“No, you pervert.” Your boyfriend opens the door to the bathroom and lets you both in. Before you can even complain, his rough palms are gripping the back of your thighs, swiftly lifting you up on the counter. You let out a little squeal, squeezing your thighs at the display of his strength.

Show-off.

So fucking hot, though. It's like he was made by Lana Del Rey's mind.

Jack doesn’t stop, though. He finds his way behind the glass that separates the shower from the rest of the bathroom. His practiced hands mess with the settings until he's satisfied, and comes back.

He stands in front of you again, crossing his arms over his chest. His muscles strain at the motion, trying to escape their way from the tight shirt. You pout at his slut-ishness. A walking, talking, thirst trap. If he was an actor, he would surely have his fare share of editors.

“How am I supposed to not get wet when you manhandle me?”

“Jesus,” he mumbles, pressing the heel of his palms into his eyes to lull some of his composure back into him. He silently thanks his military discipline, or you would currently be spread on the soft sheets of his bed, waking up his neighbours.

He takes a deep breath, eyes scanning you again. His fingers come up to pinch your chin in a soft embrace, “Shower. Clean. Mind and body both. And then, we will sleep. Got it?”

Heat pools low in your belly at his authoritative voice. God, how did you land this man?

“Sir, yes, sir.” You watch his gaze get heavy at the word. He leaves his hold on your chin, pats your hip, and exits the bathroom.

Guess you know what you'll be calling him, when he finally lets you do what your body is begging you to do.

You find him on his bed, wearing only a pair of low hung worn-out sweatpants. His back is slumped against the pillows, fingers locked behind his head as he stares at the ceiling.

He finally looks at you, crawling on his king-sized bed, trying to make your way over to him. It seems the shower un-possessed you. You look soft, sleepy, tired, and utterly his.

He holds out his arm and you immediately curl up into him, your icy-cold nose finding the hollow of his neck. “Hold me,” you murmur.

“One second, honey.” Before he can properly embrace you, he pulls up the thick duvet and arranges it to cover both of you. His left arm is trapped under your body, fingers pressing against the small of your back to pull you closer. His other hand brushes the hair back from your face, watching your heavy eyelids.

“There you are,” he softly rumbles before pressing the softest, most lingering kiss on your temple. A low sigh of satisfaction leaves you. You're still inhibited, but the tiredness has caught up.

“You didn't like the freaky me?” You ask, your jaw cracking with a yawn right after. 

“I like every-you, unfortunately. It's a weakness in the ED.” His fingers are still moving in your hair, scratching your scalp in a way that turns your brain to mush. You push your face even deeper in his neck. Hell, you would live inside his ribcage if he ever allowed it.

You let out a soft giggle, hiking your thigh over his hip so no part of you is separate from him. “Can we have a proper conversation about sex tomorrow?”

Your boyfriend murmurs a “yes, baby,” against your forehead. 

“Okay, goodnight. Gonna have some good wet dreams.”

“Shut up, and go to sleep, sweetheart.”

As he pushed through the front door of the hockey house, the familiar scent of stale pizza, laundry detergent, and whatever Tucker had cooked earlier greeted him. He kicked off his shoes near the entrance and rolled his neck, already mentally planning his evening. That's when he noticed you and Garrett sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the kitchen island, textbooks spread across the countertop.

Dean slowed, not because Garrett was studying, that wasn't unusual lately, but because Garrett looked utterly miserable. "Jesus," Garrett groaned, dragging a hand down his face. "Remind me again why you want to pursue a career in this?" His eyes narrowed at the open psychology textbook like it had personally offended him. "Not memorizing the difference between operant conditioning and classical conditioning isn't the end of the world, G."

Dean couldn't help smiling. Somehow, whenever you were around, the house felt lighter. Before either of you could react, he crossed the room and made a beeline toward the kitchen island. Garrett spotted him first, a knowing smirk immediately tugged at his mouth, one which Dean blatantly ignored it. You barely had enough time to look up before all six-foot-two of him folded himself around you.

One arm slid around your shoulders, the other wrapped around your waist as his face buried itself in your hair as he let out a long, exhausted groan. "If you're having trouble distinguishing classical and operant conditioning, just make flash cards," You advised Garrett, as though you weren't currently trapped beneath an oversized hockey player. "Handwritten ones. They always helped me."

Without even thinking about it, your fingers slipped between Dean's where his hand rested against your stomach. The gesture was entirely unconscious. Dean's tired brain barely registered it, but Garrett's definitely did. "Are we not going to address the overgrown golden retriever currently hanging off your shoulder?" Garrett questioned, motioning toward Dean.

In response, Dean didn't move, in fact, his hold only tightened around your waist. You rolled your eyes at both their antics. "Are we not going to address the fact that you're here 'studying' on a Friday night because you refuse to admit your feelings for Hannah and couldn't stand the thought of her going out with Justin tonight?" The reaction was immediate, Garrett immediately went red, really red.

His jaw clenched as he snapped his attention back to his notes with exaggerated concentration. "Your girl is disturbingly insightful, Di Laurentis." He muttered which made you scoff as you playfully nudged his shin with your foot from across the table. “Damn straight she is.” Dean’s answer came instantly, low and smug, with a kiss pressed to your forehead that you unconsciously leaned into which made Dean's stomach do something profoundly embarrassing.

For a few moments, only the rustle of paper and the hum of the refrigerator filled the kitchen. Then you reached across the counter and squeezed Garrett's hand, your expression softening. "Hey, G," You muttered softly as Garrett's eyes slowly lifted to meet yours. "For what it's worth, I don't think Hannah likes Justin nearly as much as you think she does." Garrett squeezed your hand back, hope flashing across his face before he could hide it.

Dean watched the exchange quietly, body still wrapped around you. He didn't notice the way his thumb kept tracing small absent minded circles against your waist. He did notice that when you smiled at Garrett, he felt oddly jealous of his best friend for getting that look. And for the first time in a very long time, Dean couldn't help but wonder if maybe his attachment to his childhood "friend" wasn't quite as platonic as he'd always pretended it was.

2. Self-Care Day with Summer

Safe to say Dean had a shitty day.

All he wanted now was you. He wanted to kick off his shoes, collapse onto his bed, and bury himself in your arms while your fingers lazily carded through his messy hair. He wanted your soft voice filling the silence, your hand rubbing slow circles across his back until the tension seeped from every tight muscle in his body. The guys would never let him live it down if they knew, but Dean really couldn't bring himself to care.

As he pushed open the front door of the hockey house, the familiar sounds of shouting commentators and button mashing greeted him. Logan and Tucker were planted on opposite ends of the couch, controllers gripped tightly in their hands as they battled it out on the TV. An empty pizza box sat abandoned on the coffee table, surrounded by half-empty Gatorade bottles and crumpled napkins.

Dean barely spared them a glance, his eyes immediately sweeping areas where you'd probably be. The kitchen, empty. The dining room, nothing. No backpack tossed over one of the chairs. No oversized sweatshirt draped over the counter. No mug of tea you'd inevitably forget to finish. "Looking for your girl?" Logan's amused voice pulled him from his search. Without taking his eyes off the television, a knowing smirk spread across his face.

Dean didn't even bother correcting him anymore. "You seen her?" He asked, already craning his neck toward the hallway as if you might magically appear. Logan shrugged one shoulder. "She was here with Wellsy earlier. Upstairs probably." That was all Dean needed. He took the stairs two at a time, each step creaking beneath his weight. His exhaustion momentarily forgotten, as he headed straight for his bedroom.

"Y/N?" He called, knocking lightly before twisting the doorknob. The room was empty, bed neatly made, and the hoodie you'd stolen from him last week was nowhere to be found. Dean frowned. Without even realizing what he was doing, his phone was already in his hand, your contact pulled up from muscle memory. His thumb hit the call button before he had a chance to even think twice.

The phone rang twice before: "Hi, Dicky!" Dean physically recoiled. "What the hell— Summer?" His eyebrows shot toward his hairline. "What are you doing with Y/N's phone?" An exaggerated scoff crackled through the speaker, he could practically see Summer rolling her eyes. "Contrary to popular belief, Dicky," Summer huffed. "She doesn't belong to you. She was my friend first."

Dean pinched the bridge of his nose, a fresh headache blooming almost instantly. "Just give her the phone, Summer." He heard muffled voices, the sound of the phone changing hands, and then: "Hi, Dean." It was amazing what two simple words could do. The knot between his shoulder blades loosened. His jaw unclenched. The lingering frustration in his body eased just from hearing your voice. A smile tugged at his lips before he could stop it.

"Babydoll," He murmured, unable to hide the relief in his voice. "Where are you? And why on earth are you with my hellion of a sister?" Your soft laugh drifted through the speaker, warm enough to make him wish you were standing beside him instead. Somewhere in the background, Summer barked an offended, "Dick." You laughed harder before finally answering. "She called me this morning after my eight a.m. class. She was having a bad day, so I drove into Manhattan to spend the day with her."

"You drove all the way to Manhattan?" Dean blinked. "Of course I did, Summer needed me." His heart did that stupid thing it always seemed to do around you. You hadn't hesitated. Summer needed someone, and you'd simply gone. No complaints. Just packed your things and made the drive because someone you cared about asked. There was another shuffle on the other end before Summer snatched the phone back. "Retail therapy works wonders, Dicky," She announced proudly.

"She'll be all yours tomorrow, but today?" Summer continued, smug satisfaction dripping from every word. "Today she's mine. Love you. Bye!" Seconds later, the line went suddenly dead. Dean stared down at his phone for several long seconds before letting out a disbelieving laugh. Of course Summer would steal your phone. Of course she'd hang up before he could get another word in.

But none of that was what stuck with him. What lingered was the realization that the second his sister admitted she was struggling, you'd dropped everything and driven nearly four hours just to make sure Summer didn't have to be alone. No hesitation. No expectation of anything in return. Just because that's who you were. Dean had always known you had the biggest heart of anyone he'd ever met. Today, though...

Today, he caught himself wishing he was more than just a friend.

3. The Injury

"Let her through! She's with the team!" Garrett's authoritative voice cut cleanly through the chaos surrounding the arena tunnel, commanding enough that even over the frantic chatter, blaring arena speakers, and the lingering roar of thousands of fans filing toward the exits, everyone nearby turned their heads. However, you barely heard him. Your heartbeat thundered so loudly in your ears it drowned out almost everything else.

"I'm the captain of this team," Garrett interrupted sharply, stepping between you and security. "She's family." The guard hesitated only a second before stepping aside. The moment the path cleared, your feet carried you forward before your brain had a chance to catch up. Garrett fell into step beside you, one steady hand settling against the middle of your back as if he could feel the way your entire body trembled.  

"How is he?" Your voice barely sounded like your own. Garrett's jaw tightened. "The medic thinks he'll be out at least two weeks." His expression darkened. "Mild concussion and a fractured ankle." Hot fury ignited beneath your ribs. Not at Dean, but at the player who had recklessly swept his stick between Dean's legs. You'd watched it happen. There'd been no attempt to play the puck. It was just a cheap shot.

A dangerous one.

Your hands curled into fists as the replay flashed through your mind all over again. "He keeps asking for you," Garrett continued, his tone softening. "Won't let anyone get a word in." Despite everything, the corner of your mouth twitched. "He's being more annoying than usual," Garrett added with a tired sigh. "Logan and Tucker are about five minutes away from knocking him unconscious themselves."

That definitely sounded like Dean. "I should probably go micromanage before they make good on that threat." Garrett chuckled under his breath and pulled open the door to the medical room. The sight waiting on the other side nearly made your knees buckle. Dean sat propped awkwardly on the examination chair, his hockey pants and jersey still on, shoulder pads discarded in a heap beside him.

His normally perfect blond curls were damp with sweat and flattened where his helmet had been, several loose strands sticking out in every direction. A medic knelt beside him, carefully supporting his injured ankle while a PT intern shined a light into his eyes, checking his pupils. Logan and Tucker both stood on each side of him, still wearing their jerseys, neither looking remotely interested in getting changed until they knew Dean was okay.

"Garrett went to get her, just wait." Logan reminded him patiently, keeping a firm hand planted on Dean's shoulder the second he tried to stand again. "Let the medic finish checking you out, man." Tucker coaxed like the mother hen he was. Dean opened his mouth, ready to argue then his eyes found yours. It was almost eerie, like he'd sensed you before you'd even stepped through the doorway.

The tension visibly drained from his shoulders. Relief flooded his features so quickly it made your chest ache. "Babydoll..." He breathed, every ounce of stubbornness disappearing. "Thank fuck." He sank back into the chair, extending both hands toward you without an ounce of hesitation. "C'mere... please." There wasn't a universe where you wouldn't. You crossed the room in two quick strides.

The second your fingers slipped between his, Dean gripped them like a lifeline. Like he'd been holding himself together by sheer force of will until you walked through that door. Your eyes immediately began searching him. A faint scrape along his cheekbone. Fresh bruising already blooming beneath one eye. A split lip. The ugly swelling around his ankle. "You scared the hell out of me, Dean." You whispered, your voice catching despite your best efforts to keep it steady.

Dean's thumb swept absentminded circles across the back of your hand. Whatever pain medication they'd given him had softened the hard edges around his eyes, leaving him wearing a crooked, hopelessly boyish smile that somehow made him look younger. "How's your head?" You asked gently, your free hand lifted almost on its own, brushing one stubborn blond curl away from his forehead before tucking it back into place.

Your fingertips lingered there for a heartbeat longer than necessary, wanting the reassurance that he was really here. Dean leaned unconsciously into your touch. "Never had any complaints, babydoll." He punctuated the line with an exaggerated wink. An audible chorus of groans filled the room. "Oh my fucking God." Logan muttered, eyes rolling. "He's concussed and still flirting." Tucker complained, rubbing both hands down his face.

You felt heat instantly flood your cheeks, but ultimately chose to ignore it. "Oh, you're absolutely fine." You huffed, rolling your eyes as you tried to tug your hand free. Only Dean wasn't having it. His fingers tightened around yours and with one gentle pull, he drew you closer until you stood between his knees, your bodies only inches apart. The teasing grin he'd been wearing slowly faded.

Something quieter settled over his features, something almost fragile. His thumb continued tracing slow circles across your knuckles, grounding himself in the simple fact that you were here. That he could still hold your hand. "Thanks for being here." The words came quietly. Without the usual confidence. Without a joke to soften them. Just plain, raw honesty. You didn't even have to think about your answer.

Your other hand rose to cup his cheek, brushing over the rough stubble beginning to grow along his jaw. "There's nowhere else I'd be." Dean's breath caught. Those five simple words landed somewhere deep inside his chest, slipping past every wall he'd spent years carefully building. He'd spent so long convincing himself that what he felt for you was just harmless, a silly crush that would eventually go away.

But watching you burst through security with tears threatening to spill down your cheeks. Feeling your hands check every bruise like you could somehow erase the pain. Hearing you tell him there was nowhere else you'd rather be. It unraveled him. The feeling he'd been trying so desperately to bury came rushing back all at once, stronger than ever. Because for one terrifying moment on that ice, he'd thought he might open his eyes and not get to see you looking at him like he was the only person in the room.

4. Tucker’s Deathbed

Dean: Might wanna stay away tonight, Tuck’s got one hell of a cold.

Respectfully, there was no way in hell you were listening to that text. Your psychology paper on stress sat half-finished on your laptop, several journal articles scattered across your desk, but they could wait another night. Tucker couldn't. Besides, you knew exactly why Dean had texted you. He wasn't trying to be controlling, far from it.

He knew how often you caught whatever bug was going around campus, and the last thing he wanted was for you to spend the next week sniffling and miserable. It was sweet, but it was also completely futile seeing as your mind was already made up. You quickly shoved your laptop shut, gathered your keys, slipped your feet into your sneakers, and headed out the door before you had the chance to think twice about it.

Ten minutes later, you were pulling into the familiar driveway of the hockey house. The porch light cast a warm glow over the worn wooden steps, and the second you let yourself inside, the usual atmosphere felt...off. There was no music blasting from Logan's room. No laughter echoing through the halls. No Tucker humming while experimenting with whatever recipe had caught his attention that week.

Closing the front door behind you, your gaze immediately landed on the couch. "Oh, sweet Tuck." Your voice softened into something almost maternal. Tucker looked absolutely miserable. He was cocooned beneath two thick blankets despite the thermostat being turned up, curly hair sticking out in every direction, cheeks flushed an unhealthy shade of pink. A mountain of crumpled tissues littered the coffee table beside half-empty glasses of water and an abandoned mug of tea that had long since gone cold.

Setting your purse onto the nearest chair, you crossed the room quietly until you stood beside the couch. Your hand found his forehead with featherlight pressure, careful not to startle him awake. The warmth beneath your palm made you hiss. His skin was damp with sweat, far warmer than it should've been. He cracked one sleepy eye open before lazily batting your hand away with all the strength of a disgruntled toddler. "You're gonna get sick, Y/N." He mumbled, voice rough from congestion.

"Have you taken anything? Eaten?" You asked, purposely ignoring him. A weak shake of his head made you frown as he burrowed farther beneath the blanket until all you could really see was the top of his head. Without another word, you disappeared into the kitchen. Opening cabinet after cabinet, you smiled when everything was exactly where you'd expected. If there was one thing Tucker took almost as seriously as hockey, it was cooking.

Rolling up your sleeves, you got to work. Butter melted with a quiet sizzle before onions, carrots, and celery joined the pot, filling the kitchen with the comforting aroma of sautéing vegetables. Garlic followed moments later, its rich scent curling through the house. You shredded leftover rotisserie chicken Tucker had prepared earlier in the week, added handfuls of fresh herbs from the windowsill, poured in the homemade stock, and let everything simmer low and slow.

Nearly twenty minutes later, the soup bubbled gently on the stove, filling every room with warmth. Which was probably why the front door swung open. Logan stepped inside first, Garrett followed, and Dean came in last. All three stopped dead in the entryway as the unmistakable scent of homemade chicken noodle soup drifted toward them. Dean's gaze found you almost instantly, it was second nature nowadays.

You stood at the stove in one of Tucker's aprons, sleeves pushed to your elbows as you stirred the soup with practiced ease. Something deep in his chest squeezed painfully the more he looked at you. God, you looked like you belonged there. Like you'd always belonged there. His stomach flipped at the domestic image. The thought came so naturally it almost scared him. He could picture this years from now: Coming home after practice. Finding you in a kitchen making dinner, scolding one of the guys for skipping lunch.

It was such a simple fantasy, one he had absolutely no business imagining. "I thought I told you to stay home." Dean's voice carried equal parts exasperation and concern as he crossed his arms against his chest. "Last I checked, none of you know how to cook," You replied matter-of-factly while ladling soup into bowls. "Tuck needs homemade soup not whatever sodium-packed excuse for soup you three would've heated up from a can." Their silence spoke volumes.

Oh how you loved being right.

You slid two steaming bowls across the island toward Garrett and Logan who were openly salivating. "Sit and eat." Both men obeyed immediately, neither needed to be told twice. "You're my favorite person ever." Logan declared, already reaching for a spoon. "I've been saying that for years," Garrett chimed in, grinning as he accepted the bowl. "Thanks, sweetheart."

Dean watched the exchange in silence, eyes never leaving you as he watched you carry another bowl into the living room. You crouched beside Tucker, placing the soup carefully on the coffee table before setting cold medicine and a bottle of water beside it. "There we go." Your fingers brushed his forehead once more. "A little less warm." Tucker managed the weakest smile imaginable before taking a tentative bite.

Within minutes he looked noticeably more alive. Color slowly returned to his face as warmth spread through him. Dean, however, couldn't stop watching you. Couldn't stop noticing how naturally you slipped into caretaker mode. You remembered everyone's favorite meals. You always noticed when one of them skipped breakfast. You always looked after them without ever expecting anything in return.

It was simply woven into who you were.

"Serious question." Logan's voice pulled everyone's attention back toward the dining table. You looked up, brows furrowing and mentally preparing for what Logan was about to say. He pointed his spoon toward you. "Why has literally nobody wifed you up yet?" Your eyes widened, heat creeping up into your cheeks as you blinked at him processing his words. A nervous laugh escaped as you simply shrugged one shoulder instead of answering.

Thankfully, Logan accepted your non-answer. "Wild." He muttered before returning his full attention to the soup in front of him. You let out a quiet breath of relief, completely missing what happened across the room. Tucker slowly lifted his gaze as Garrett did the same, both men turning towards Dean in perfect synchronization. Dean was already glaring at them, if looks could kill both hockey players would already be six-feet under.

Garrett bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from smiling and Tucker looked seconds away from bursting out laughing despite the gruesome cold. Because they both knew. They'd watched Dean stare at you from the second he'd walked through the front door. Watched his eyes follow every movement you made. Watched the way his expression softened whenever you smiled his way.

Logan, blissfully unaware of the silent conversation unfolding beside him, happily shoveled another spoonful of soup into his mouth. Dean barely noticed, because despite his two smartass friends smirking at his obliviousness, his attention had drifted back to you. Back to the way you tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear as you rinsed dishes. Back to the quiet hum you made under your breath while cleaning Tucker's kitchen.

Back to how effortlessly you took care of people you loved.

You were a catch. Dean had always known that. He'd known it long before anyone else started noticing. Long before Logan blurted it out over dinner. The problem was, other people were starting to realize it too. And someday, someone was going to look at you the way Dean already did. They'd flirt with you. Take you out. Learn your coffee order. Memorize the little wrinkle that appeared beside your nose whenever you laughed.

Most importantly, they'd get to call you theirs. The thought alone lodged itself beneath his ribs like a skate blade carving into fresh ice. It shouldn't have bothered him as much as it did. You were his childhood best friend. He should've been thrilled if someone made you happy. Instead, all he could think was: I hope they don't. And that terrified him far more than any hockey game ever could.

5. The Male Gaze

"Hey, Y/N, is it true that Archer Beckett asked you out?" The question left Beau's mouth so casually you'd think he was asking you about the weather. Dean, on the other hand, nearly inhaled his beer. He coughed violently, setting the bottle down with a little more force than intended as carbonation burned the back of his throat. Beside him, Garrett didn't even attempt to hide his grin, his shoulders already beginning to shake with silent laughter.

Across the table, you took another leisurely sip of your piña colada, completely oblivious to the internal crisis unfolding three feet away. "He did." You confirmed, shrugging nonchalantly. Dean's entire body went rigid, his jaw locked so tightly he could feel his molars grinding together. Archer Beckett, of course it had to be Archer fucking Beckett. The lacrosse captain had been circling you for weeks like a damn shark.

Every time Dean turned around, Archer was "coincidentally" showing up wherever you happened to be, outside the psych building, in line at the campus coffee shop, even at Malone's after games. Dean had noticed, he noticed everything when it came to you. "What'd you tell him?" Hannah wondered from across the table, tucked comfortably beneath Garrett's arm.

Dean sat a little straighter without realizing it, every muscle in his body tensed as he waited for your answer. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Garrett and Beau exchanging identical shit-eating grins. Again. Lately they'd been doing that a lot. Assholes. You swirled the straw around your drink absentmindedly before answering as though the conversation couldn't possibly be less important. "I told him I wasn't interested."

Dean forgot how to breathe. Relief washed over him so suddenly it nearly made him dizzy. It came in one overwhelming wave, loosening the knot in his chest before he'd even processed why. His shoulders relaxed and the death grip he'd had on his beer bottle eased. A part of him, a part he'd spent months trying very hard to ignore, felt absurdly, ridiculously happy.

"The guy's relentless," Garrett observed, lifting his beer toward his lips. "I'm honestly surprised he backed off that easily." Dean caught the smug smirk Garrett aimed directly at him over the rim of his bottle. The silent message couldn't have been clearer: You hear that, Di Laurentis? She turned him down. Make your move, idiot. Dean responded by silently mouthing, I'm going to kill you to which Garrett's grin only widened.

Thankfully, you remained blissfully unaware of the silent death threats being exchanged across the table. "I need another drink." You stood, gathering your empty glass before pointing toward the bar. "Anyone want a refill?" Everyone but Hannah declined. Dean opened his mouth to offer to go with you, but the opportunity disappeared before the words reached his tongue because you were already weaving through the various crowds of people toward the bar.

His eyes followed instinctively as they always did. He watched as you smiled at Allie the second you reached the bar, leaning comfortably against the polished wood as the short brunette reached over the counter to squeeze your hand before beginning your drink. Dean couldn't help smiling too. "Dude, you're so whipped." Beau's voice yanked him back to reality. Dean managed to drag his gaze away from you just long enough to glare murderously at his best friend.

"At least pretend you're listening to us instead of staring at her like she hung the moon. You've watched her walk to the bar like four times already, man." Garrett interrupted, amusement dancing across his face. Dean scoffed at Garrett's words, opening his mouth to rebuttal before Hannah held her hand up stopping him. "Dean, at least try to hide it better." Hannah teased, smiling far too knowingly.

"Wellsy, don't encourage them." Dean groaned dramatically. "I'm not encouraging anything." Hannah's smile only grew. "I'm just observing." Dean rolled his eyes dramatically before looking back toward the televisions mounted behind the bar. Or at least, that was his intention. Instead, his attention landed on you again, watching as your eyes were fixated on Shane Hollander as he carried the puck through the neutral zone while Ilya Rozanov shadowed him stride for stride on the television screen.

Dean smiled despite himself, only you would get distracted by hockey while ordering drinks. Then he noticed them. Three guys at the opposite end of the bar. One of them glanced your way, then another. A fourth turned completely around in his stool. Dean's smile vanished instantly. They weren't watching the game, they were watching you. His grip tightened around his beer bottle until his knuckles turned white.

One of them, a tall brunette with an easy grin and far too much confidence nudged his friend before climbing off his stool. Dean's pulse immediately picked up as he watched the guy walk straight toward you. "I just love it when he gets territorial." Beau snickered as Hannah immediately elbowed Garrett in the ribs hard enough to earn an exaggerated grunt, though the smile she was unsuccessfully trying to suppress betrayed her.

They'd all noticed. Of course they did.

Dean didn't bother with them, his gaze was solely on you, stomach twisting unpleasantly. He had absolutely no right to feel possessive. You weren't his girlfriend. Hell, you weren't even remotely close to being his. You could flirt with whoever you wanted. Accept drinks from whoever you wanted. Go on dates with whoever you wanted. The thought alone made something ugly twist low in his stomach.

Jealousy.

Because it wasn't just that he didn't want Archer Beckett asking you out anymore. He didn't want anyone asking you out. He didn't want another guy making you laugh. Didn't want someone else memorizing your coffee order. Didn't want someone else bringing you flowers during finals week because they knew you were stressed. Didn't want someone else being the person you instinctively reached for.

He didn't want to be just your best friend anymore. He wanted to be the man sitting beside you. The one whose hand you'd reach for beneath the table. The one you'd kiss goodnight. The one you'd introduce as yours. Thankfully, after a few gruesome minutes which really seemed like decades, he watched as the brunette returned to his friends a few moments later. Empty-handed; no longer smiling and head hung low. Only then did Dean realize he'd been holding his breath.

You followed shortly after, balancing two frozen piña coladas with practiced ease, once again, completely oblivious to the emotional crisis currently unfolding inside Dean's head. "What'd he want?" The question escaped before Dean could stop it. You slid Hannah's drink across the table before answering. "Oh," You shrugged, hand waving dismissively as if it was no big deal. "He wanted to buy me a drink, but I told him my boyfriend was waiting for me."

Silence.

Dean stared, his brain stopped functioning altogether.

"Boyfriend?" He echoed weakly. You looked at him as though the answer was obvious, a tiny smile tugged at your lips. "I knew he wouldn't question it if I pointed at you." Dean's heart slammed against his ribs. You'd said it so naturally, so effortlessly. As if pretending Dean was yours had come as easily as breathing. You reached across the table without thinking, your fingers wrapping gently around his forearm, the simple touch nearly undid him.

"You don't mind, do you, Dean?" You looked almost worried, like the possibility of upsetting him genuinely bothered you. Across the table, Garrett looked ready to burst into laughter. Beau had outright stopped pretending to hide his grin. Even Hannah pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. Yet, Dean barely noticed. He was too busy imagining what it would've felt like if your words had actually been true. My boyfriend. God, he wanted to hear you say that again.

Not as an excuse, not to get rid of some random guy at a bar, but because you meant it. The realization settled over him with startling certainty. He wasn't just protective. He wasn't just attached because you'd been friends forever. He wasn't just comfortable around you. He was hopelessly, irrevocably in love with his best friend. And judging by the three idiots trying and failing not to laugh across the table, everyone seemed to know it before he did.

He swallowed hard, giving your hand a gentle squeeze before forcing himself to smile. "Course not, babydoll." You smiled back, satisfied with his answer, completely unaware that the tiny lie had just shattered what was left of his resolve. Because the truth was, Dean minded more than he could ever admit. Not because you'd called him your boyfriend, but because he wasn't. God, he wanted to be. More than his next championship. More than hockey. More than anything.

+1 The Hat Trick

The sharp November air nipped at your cheeks the second you stepped out of the car, your breath curling into soft white clouds as you made your way toward the entrance of the Briar arena. Even after countless games, countless Friday nights spent wrapped in Briar blue, there was still something magical about hockey nights.

The bright arena lights reflected against the freshly resurfaced sheet of ice, music boomed through the speakers as students flooded into the stands. Your eyes immediately searched for one player in particular. Dean, it was always Dean. The knot that had lived in your stomach for the past two weeks loosened the moment you spotted number sixty-six gliding effortless laps around center ice during warmups.

He was back. After the concussion and the fractured ankle. After countless days of sitting beside his bed while he complained about being benched, insisting he was "perfectly fine," and begged you to sneak him out of physical therapy. The team medic had finally cleared him that morning. Watching him skate again should've filled you with relief. Instead, your traitorous brain decided to notice how his practice jersey stretched across his shoulders every time he leaned into a stride.

How the muscles in his thighs flexed beneath his hockey pants as he dug his edges into the ice. How one damp blond curl escaped beneath his helmet while he stretched against the boards. You tore your eyes away with an embarrassed cough. Absolutely not. There was a hockey game to watch, not Dean Di Laurentis looking unfairly attractive while doing literally anything. Beside you, Hannah caught the direction of your gaze, hiding a knowing smile behind her cup of hot chocolate.

Thankfully, the referee's whistle echoed through the arena, signaling the start of the game before she could say anything. The opening puck drop snapped your attention back where it belonged. The first period against Harvard flew by in a blur of hard checks and blistering speed. Dean looked like he'd never left the lineup. He was everywhere. Breaking up passes through the neutral zone. Winning puck battles along the boards. Setting crushing screens in front of Harvard's goalie.

Even when he wasn't scoring, he dictated the pace every time his line hopped over the boards. Midway through the first period, Garrett intercepted a sloppy pass just inside Briar's blue line.Without hesitation, he banked the puck off the boards toward Logan, who exploded down the right wing with Tucker keeping pace on the opposite side. The three connected like they shared one brain.

Logan faked a slapshot which allowed for Tucker to intercept, cleanly sliding the puck into the goal. The red light flashed, the goal horn erupted, and the arena exploded. You shot to your feet along with Hannah and everyone else, cheering until your throat burned. Dean was the first one to reach Tucker, wrapping an arm around his shoulders before shoving his helmet affectionately.

By the middle of the second period, Logan buried one of his own after Dean fought through two defenders behind the net to feed him a perfect no-look pass. A few minutes later Tucker struck again on the power play after Garrett rifled a shot from the point that bounced straight onto Tucker's stick. Everything Briar touched seemed to turn into goals tonight. The chemistry between the four upperclassmen was almost unfair to watch.

Every pass landed tape-to-tape. Every line change happened seamlessly. Every player seemed to know exactly where the others would be before they even got there. At the end of the second period, Briar held a comfortable 3-1 lead against Harvard. "Dean is going to lose his mind when he sees you in his jersey tonight." Hannah leaned closer with an unmistakably mischievous smile, which made a blush climb up your neck as you instinctively glanced down.

Dean's navy blue jersey hung almost to the middle of your thighs, the sleeves swallowing your hands completely. You'd borrowed it from Beau after he'd insisted Dean deserved a little 'extra motivation'. "He hasn't even noticed." Hannah smiled knowingly, eyes twinkling with mischief. "Trust me babe, he'll notice." Before you could ask what that cryptic statement meant, the buzzer sounded meaning that the third period had officially began.

Harvard came out desperate. Every shift became increasingly physical as the numbers of the clock counted down. Bodies slammed into the glass hard enough to make the boards rattle. Unfortunately, the referees' whistles remained suspiciously quiet. You hated when games turned like this, knowing that the desperation made players reckless. Halfway through the period, Dean carried the puck through the neutral zone with impossible speed.

One defender challenged him, luckily Dean was able to effortlessly slip around him effortlessly only for a second to step up. Dean toe-dragged the puck between the man's skates. The crowd collectively rose to its feet, only before he could shoot, a Harvard defenseman drove him shoulder-first into the plexiglass. Your breath caught as the impact thundered through the arena. Dean, however, bounced off the boards, somehow maintaining possession before spinning away from another defender.

He never even looked shaken, instead he cut toward the slot. Garrett anticipated the play perfectly. One crisp pass was all it took for Dean to snap a wrist shot through the two defenders. The net rippled as the goal horn blared yet again. You were already on your feet before you realized you'd moved. Dean pointed toward the student section as his teammates swarmed him in congratulatory helmet bumps. For one irrational second, you could've sworn he was looking directly at you.

When you finally sat back down, Hannah's grin could've powered the entire arena. "Told you." You shoved her shoulder, which only made her grin widen. "Oh, shut up." Only, you were smiling too hard to sound annoyed. Barely ninety seconds later, Dean struck again. Logan forced a turnover at center ice and immediately passed to Garrett. In response, Garrett threaded a pass between two Harvard sticks that had absolutely no business making it through.

Dean picked it up in stride, one fake forehand made the goalie drop in anticipation to which Dean calmly pulled the puck back to his backhand and slid it between the goalie's pads before anyone could react. Another goal and another explosion from the crowd. Your hands hurt from clapping, voice embarrassingly hoarse yet you couldn't find youself to care. The scoreboard now read 5-1 which in turn made Harvard's frustration boil over.

With just over two minutes remaining in the third period, one of their forwards blindsided Logan long after he'd dumped the puck in the net. Gasps echoed around the arena as Logan crashed awkwardly into the boards. Dean was halfway across the ice before Logan even climbed back to his skates, Garrett and Tucker followed immediately after seeing Dean shove the Harvard player backward with enough force to send him stumbling several feet.

Luckily, the freshmen on Briar's bench dragged the upperclassmen away before punches started flying. One minute remained. The arena buzzed with nervous anticipation despite Briar's lead, your lip was caught between your teeth watching as Garrett and Dean wordlessly communicated with one another. No words were exchanged. Years of playing together had made communication almost instinctive.

Garrett stole the puck near Briar's blue line and Dean was there in an instant, already alert. Garrett feathered a perfect stretch pass through the neutral zone. Dean caught it in stride without breaking rhythm. One defender remained, shifting left as the the defenseman followed. Dean snapped the puck back right through his own skates, slipping around him with breathtaking ease. The goalie lunged. Dean, however, waited until the last possible second lifting the puck cleanly beneath the crossbar.

The red light flashed and the horn sounded. For a heartbeat, the arena went completely silent, then every single person inside exploded. "A HAT TRICK BY #66, DEAN DI LAURENTIS!" The announcer's voice echoed through the building. Without thinking you threw your arms around Hannah, the two of you laughed as you nearly toppled into the row in front of you, hugging each other while the entire team tackled Dean beneath an avalanche of helmets and gloves.

Six-two. Final. Dean Di Laurentis. Hat trick.

You'd never been prouder. By the time you and Hannah reached the tunnel, your heart was still racing, body buzzing with adrenaline. Players filtered through in small groups, laughing loudly as they relived every goal. Garrett appeared first and Hannah didn't hesitate. She practically flew into his arms, you couldn't help but beam as Garrett caught her effortlessly, spinning her once before pressing a kiss against her forehead before dipping down and pressing one to her lips.

Then, Dean walked through. His helmet had disappeared somewhere during the celebration, blond curls damp with sweat, sticking up in every direction, cheeks flushed from exertion. When his eyes caught yours, everything ceased to exist. The coaches. The teammates. The reporters. The noise. There was only you. In two quick strides he was right in front of you. One second there was a few feet separating the two of you and the next, his hands were around your waist, lifting you effortlessly off the concrete.

A startled laugh bubbled from your lips as your feet left the ground. Instinctively, your arms wound around his neck, fingers brushing against the damp curls at the nape of his neck. He held you impossibly close, burying his face against your shoulder for the briefest moment as his heartbeat hammered wildly against your chest. He'd just scored a hat trick. The arena had chanted his name. Thousands of hats had rained onto the ice. Yet none of it compared to this. None of it compared to having you in his arms.

You melted into his embrace without hesitation, holding him just as tightly. "That was amazing!" You laughed, pulling back just enough to cup his flushed cheeks between your hands. Your eyes sparkled with so much pride that it stole what little breath he had left. "A hat trick, Dean! I'm so fucking proud of you." Dean couldn't remember the last time someone had looked at him with so much unfiltered admiration. Maybe no one ever had.

His eyes drifted downward before he could stop them and his breath caught. You were wearing a jersey, but not just any Briar jersey. His. His last name stretched proudly across your shoulders, and the white number on the front rested directly over your heart. Something inside his chest squeezed so painfully he almost winced. It really shouldn't have affected him the way it did. It was just a jersey. Just fabric. Except, it wasn't. Seeing his name on you awakened every selfish, possessive thought he'd spent months trying to bury.

It looked right. Far too right.

"You're wearing my jersey." The words escaped almost reverently. Your gaze followed his before a rosy blush crept across your cheeks. "Oh." You smiled sheepishly, smoothing the front of it with your palms. "Beau practically insisted. He claimed it was good luck since you guys are only two games away from another Frozen Four." Yet, Dean barely registered your explanation. His thoughts were spiraling too quickly. His jersey. Your smile. The way you'd waited for him in the tunnel instead of celebrating with everyone else.

The way you'd hugged him before anyone else had the chance. The way you'd looked absolutely radiant cheering for him from the stands. His mind replayed every moment from the last few months in painful succession. You showing up with homemade soup when Tucker got sick. Driving hours just because Summer needed a friend. Holding his hand while the medic checked him over after his injury. Calling yourself his girlfriend just to get another guy to leave you alone.

Every forehead kiss he'd lingered on a little too long. Every hug he'd held a few seconds longer than necessary. Every excuse he'd made just to have you close. He'd spent months convincing himself that wanting you around all the time was normal. That missing you after only a few hours was normal. That getting irrationally jealous every time another guy looked at you was normal. Only it wasn't. It had never been normal. He couldn't keep pretending anymore, he wouldn't.

"Dean?" Your voice was soft, tinged with concern now that he'd gone completely quiet. Your thumb brushed gently across his cheek. "You okay?" His eyes found yours again. God. How had he been so blind? He was so unbelievably in love with you it almost hurt. A helpless laugh escaped him as he shook his head once, mind made up. "Fuck it." Before doubt had a chance to creep back in, he surged forward and captured your lips with his.

The kiss was soft at first, almost hesitant. As if he was giving you every opportunity to stop him. You didn't. Instead, your surprised gasp melted into a smile against his mouth before you kissed him back with equal certainty. Every ounce of fear he'd carried for months dissolved in an instant. His hands slid more securely around your waist, holding you like he'd dreamed about doing for far too long.

Not because he was afraid you'd disappear, but because after wanting this for what felt like forever, he couldn't bear to put even an inch of distance between the two of you. Your fingers disappeared into his blond curls, gently scratching at his scalp as your tilted your head deepening the kiss, tongue sliding against his. Dean nearly melted. The one thing he'd imagined over and over whenever his feelings became impossible to ignore. The reality was infinitely better.

When the kiss finally broke, neither of you moved very far. Your foreheads rested together, noses brushing. His eyes searched yours almost nervously, as though waiting for someone to tell him he'd imagined the whole thing. Instead, you smiled completely enamored. "Took you long enough." You whispered, your lips brushing his as you stole another quick kiss simply because you could. Dean let out a breathless laugh. "You mean," He searched your face in complete disbelief. "We could've been doing this the whole time?"

A sheepish grin spread across your face as you nodded. Dean stared at you for a long moment, then groaned dramatically. "God..." He dropped his forehead against your shoulder. "I really am such a clueless bastard." You laughed, the sound vibrating against his chest as he buried his face in the crook of your neck. "It's okay, I still love you." Dean practically tackled you into another kiss, finally hearing the words he'd been waiting for months to hear without knowing it. "God, I fucking love you too, babydoll." He muttered against your lips.

Finally. Finally. Finally.

Off to the side, Hannah bumped Garrett's shoulder with a knowing grin. "See you guys at Malone's?" Dean didn't even glance in their direction. "Sorry, Wellsy." His answer came automatically, one hand absentmindedly tracing circles against your back. "I've got a lot of lost time with my girl to make up for." Because, now that Dean had you, there was absolutely no way in hell he was letting you go anytime soon.