writing fuels the soul

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.

8:21. 

You checked your phone for the millionth time. 

You were supposed to meet him at the restaurant at 7pm, and he was almost an hour and a half late. 

Well, you hoped he was late. You hadn’t yet accepted the probable fact that you’d been stood up. I mean, you were no stranger to chaotic schedules, unplanned overtime, and last minute catastrophes that had to be dealt with. Residency often rendered your social life moot; you could barely keep up with your commitments at the hospital, let alone a vibrant dating life. Maybe he had an equally demanding job; maybe there was a plausible excuse for why he left you stranded in this Italian restaurant without the decency of a “sorry, not interested anymore” text. 

You looked at your phone again–8:26. Okay, you’d give him 4 more minutes before you decide to pack it up. You try to subtly survey the restaurant for any sign of him, but are met only with the pitying looks of the waitstaff, who would, in all likelihood, be the only ones benefitting from this humiliation ritual. The hostess checked in with you at the bar regularly, the bartender had given you a glass of merlot on the house, and a very kind server brought you a charcuterie board to nibble on–had even brought you extra olives when you commented on how they were your favorite. They were all getting fat tips–or at least as fat as you could afford. 

8:31. Despite your best efforts you felt tears pricking at the corners of your eyes and your throat got that tight, achy feeling that precedes a sob. You felt so foolish. 

You looked up at the ceiling, blinking the tears away and tried to even out your breathing. 

You didn’t even want to go on this date. You’d all but sworn off of dating, the ROI not worth the emotional whiplash you were subjected to more often than not. It was becoming harder and harder as you got older to open up to people, expose your vulnerabilities and greatest fears, only to have them spit back in your face when things didn’t go their way. 

So you stopped with the apps, stopped the meaningless dates that were nothing more than a hookup vehicle for most. But your friends had convinced you that you needed to get back out there, that things would be better in Pittsburgh–the proverbial ocean filled with different, better fish than your hometown. And perhaps they were tired of hearing you wax poetic about the hazel-eyed night shift attending that you had no chance with. 

But you did want to find that person. As much as you were an independent, capable woman–doctor, even–the truth was you were lonely. Your days consisted of going to work, where you spent 12+ hours caring for Pittsburgh’s sickest, and coming home to microwave whatever sad frozen meal you had in your freezer. Sometimes you had the energy to join some of the night shift for post-shift breakfast, but that was about it. 

You wanted someone to share your life with, to ask about your day or if you’ve eaten. Someone who knew that your favorite flower was lily of the valley, but since they were too expensive you would settle for a bouquet of peonies; that you loved horror movies even though they scared the daylights out of you; that knew you loved olives but hated pickles. Someone who knew you, inside and out. 

There was a chasm in your chest that ached, that yearned for someone to take care of you–not financially, though you wouldn’t be opposed to that–but emotionally. To tell you that you were good, worthy, that you weren’t too much or too clingy. That wanted you as much as you wanted them. That felt the tension leave their shoulders when they looked at you, because you just being there made things better. 

Was that too much to ask for? 

It’d been so long since someone had even flirted with you, and even longer since you’d hooked up with anybody. Your dry spell was bordering on sahara levels of arid. Hell, at this point, you think you’d cum for the next guy who called you pretty. 

You shake yourself out of your pity party, dabbing your eyes with a napkin and gathering up the courage to ask for the bill, when you hear someone calling your name. Great. You’re halfway to a breakdown over some stupid guy who stood you up, and now you would have to sit through pleasantries with someone when you desperately wanted to go home and cry into a bottle of wine.   

You turned, fake smile plastered on your face.   

The person you least expect to see is the aforementioned hazel-eyed attending. He’s standing by the hostess stand, off to the side, dressed in dark blue jeans and a tight black shirt. It was unfair, really, how good the man could look in the most basic outfit. His shirt was pulled taut across his chest, muscles straining against the fabric and outlining the planes of his pecs. His hands were tucked into his pockets, his strong, freckled arms on display, and sinful thoughts ran through your head at how those arms would feel around you.  

You smiled and waved at him, reluctantly making your way over. It’s not like you can avoid him at this point, though these are less than ideal circumstances to meet him outside of work. 

“Small world,” he joked as you approached, a soft smile gracing his features. 

“I guess so,” you said sullenly, not up to your usual banter.  

“Big plans for the night?” he asked, eyes skating over your form, taking in the pretty red dress you’d donned for the evening, the light coat of makeup you applied, the hairstyle you wrangled your locks into. In any other scenario, you’d be preening under his watchful eye, giddy that he was eyeing you up and down.  

Now, though, you wilted under the attention. The humiliation from the night and the tingly feeling pooling in your gut at his gaze swirled together in some rancid amalgamation of emotions. You didn’t know if you wanted to laugh or cry or both, but ideally not in front of him.  

Your silence, apparently, concerned him. He looked at you seriously now, his eyes getting that clinical, assessing look in them as he took you in, “You okay?” he asked, genuine concern lacing his features.  

It was the one question you did not want to be asked. Because, for some reason, you could keep it all inside, bury the feelings as deep as they’d go, as long as someone didn’t ask if you were okay. The barest expression of concern had your lip trembling, throat tight as you managed to squeak out a meek, “I’m fine!” 

You could feel a tear tracing down your cheek, and you wiped it away furiously. Your eyes focused on a spot over his shoulder, unable to bear the pitying look that was undoubtedly on his face.  

“You don’t look fine,” he said softly, hand coming up to rest lightly on your upper arm.  

You shook your head, powerless to staunch the flow of tears now running down your face. “Sorry, I just, uh, I had a date tonight and he didn’t show, so,” you made a helpless gesture, your shoulders shrugging in feigned nonchalance. You felt ridiculous, crying over being stood up in front of your attending who was just trying to make small talk with you. 

You let out a garbled laugh, “Shit, sorry,” you hiccup, “this isn’t your problem, I don’t wanna interrupt your night any more than I already have. Have a good night,” you said, moving to push past him and scurry out the door.  

He grabbed your wrist, his grip firm but gentle, his body blocking your exit. 

“You’re not interrupting. I was just about to place a to-go order,” he said, a hesitant look crossing his face before he continued, “But, uh… would you like to have dinner with me instead?”

You're taken aback. It’s the last thing you expected him to ask you. I mean, it’s not like you haven’t thought about him in this context. On the contrary, Jack Abbot had been the subject of many a ‘boyfriend’ dream over the past year you’d worked with him. He was kind and generous and funny, his humor as dark as yours. He was steady in the face of chaos, a lighthouse in the foggiest of days–a man you could depend on when shit hit the fan. It’s part of the reason you switched to nights. You always felt calmer in his presence, more assured of your capabilities because he believed in you. 

And he was undeniably gorgeous–his fine wrinkles and graying curls set your body ablaze each time you looked at him, your panties soaking through in record time. You loved especially when he went a day or two longer without shaving, his scruffy cheeks looking like a delectable place to sit. 

Your mind was plagued by obscene fantasies of him, the sinful images assaulting you at the most inopportune times. You knew he’d treat you right, wouldn’t prioritize his pleasure over yours. He was older, experienced, not a kid fumbling around in the dark, searching for your most sensitive spots and coming up empty. You imagined the way his stubble would feel on your skin, his jaw scraping down your neck as he pressed kisses there, moving lower and lower until he was nestled between your thighs, mouth hot against your aching pussy. The way he would stretch you out and fill you up, have you desperate and begging for more. 

You’re snapped out of your lustful daydream when he says your name, an inquiring tone meant to prompt a response. Oh right, he asked you a question. 

You shook your head, not because you didn’t want to have dinner with him, but because you didn’t want to do so under these conditions; you didn’t want to be a charity case. 

“That’s very kind, but you don’t have to have a pity dinner with me. I’m a big girl, I can handle a little rejection.” 

“It wouldn’t be a pity dinner,” he shook his head immediately, “come on, you got all dressed up, let me at least buy you dinner for your trouble.” 

He cleared his throat, “Unless you really don’t want to, obviously, and I’ll let it go,” he said, “but I’d hate to see you go home cryin’.” And he looked so sincere, his pretty eyes so soft and squishy, all but pleading for you to accept his offer.  

You chewed on your lip, considering it. It wouldn’t be the worst way to spend your night. As of now your plans for the rest of the night were getting sadder by the moment. Things could only go up from here, you supposed. “Yeah, okay. If you’re sure,” you nodded. 

“I’m positive,” he said, hand coming up to rest on the small of your back, guiding you back up to the hostess stand. “Table for two, please.”

The two of you were sat at a corner booth near the back of the restaurant, the section secluded and not too loud. It was a classic Italian restaurant–warm, dim lighting illuminated the space from antique sconces on the wall, the walls were a beautiful exposed red brick, and the tables were candlelit and laid with red and white checkered cloths. The leather of the booth was soft but worn, the cracks spidering out and indenting into the back of your thighs a sign of how well loved this place was. 

The booth forced you close together, your thighs not quite touching each other, but close enough to feel the heat radiating off him. His scent is intoxicating, all warm amber and oud, mixed with a hint of citrus and his natural musk. It took all your power not to burrow your nose into his neck and inhale deeply. 

You were lucky to have the same waitress that checked on you at the bar, though you did have to assure her that this was not the man who stood you up. You were honestly a little concerned at the death glare she gave him at first–a true girls girl. 

“So, Dr. Abbot, how was your day off?” you asked, fiddling nervously with the hem of your dress. Despite your easy rapport at work, it felt awkward to be sitting here with your attending, especially when you were desperately trying to keep your feelings for him at bay. 

“Oh it was fine, picked up a shift with the SWAT unit and didn’t get shot at, so, you know, all things considered,” he said, then waved his hand dismissively, “and please, call me Jack. We're not at work,” a slight blush spreading across his cheeks. 

“Okay, Jack,” you laughed, the tension easing a bit as you threw formalities out the window.  

“I would ask you how your day off was, but I think I have a pretty good idea,” he said with a teasing lilt.

“Yeah, not my best moment. This is partially why I stopped dating, I hate getting my hopes up,” you said, a little more vulnerable than you intended but you supposed you were past that now. 

“If it makes you feel any better, I think whatever man decided to let you slip through their fingers is a fuckin’ idiot.” 

You sputtered a bit at that, your cheeks heating up. It was a kind platitude, and you wished that it made you feel better, but it did little to alleviate the pit in your stomach that made you feel small; that screamed that you weren’t good enough.

“But enough about that asshole. Do you want to order an appetizer?” he asked, scanning the menu. 

“Oh no, I’m okay, thank you.” 

“You sure? My treat, remember, don’t worry about prices.” he looked up, concerned. 

“I’m fine, really,” you bit your cheek, reluctant to spit it out, “our waitress may or may not have given me a pity charcuterie board at the bar.” 

His face was still for a moment before you saw the edge of his mouth betray him, quirking up in a suppressed smile. 

“Don’t you dare laugh,” you warned, your own resolve already breaking as you took in how pathetic the situation actually was. “It’s not funny!” you laughed, smacking him lightly on the shoulder with the menu. 

“No, no, definitely not,” he intoned, a look of mock-seriousness on his face before he broke out into a laugh, “I’m sorry! But it is objectively a little funny,” he hedged, hands held out defensively to block another menu attack.  

“It is not! It means that the poor waitress had to go talk to her boss and ask if they could comp an appetizer for the miserable sad sack at the bar!” 

“She probably didn’t call you a miserable sad sack. Maybe sad puppy dog girl, but not miserable sad sack,” he teased. 

You gasped exaggeratedly, “I am not a sad puppy dog girl!” 

“Oh yes you are. It’s the eyes. And the general obedient demeanor," he smirked. 

Oh. Your tummy twisted at that, but you quickly filed it under things that I simply do not have enough time to unpack right now. 

“You’re mean,” you pouted, lip jutting out and arms crossed. You weren’t really upset, but it felt fun to play it up a little bit.  

“Aww,” he pouted back at you, his tone just a tad condescending, “let me make it up to you. What do you say to some good wine and garlic knots?” 

You gnawed on your lip, considering his offer, “what the hell, let's do it. It’s not like I’m going to be kissing anybody tonight anyway,” you said, a little bitter, before realizing that was probably not an appropriate joke to make in front of your boss. 

“You never know, we could always pull a Lady and the Tramp,” he joked, not looking up from the wine menu. 

You were a little stunned at that. Was he… flirting? No. Definitely not. This was a strictly platonic date. Right? I mean, the puppy comment you could explain away, but this… this was different, wasn’t it? Who just jokes like that about the most romantic canine kiss in history? A joke, you settled on. Because you’d already gotten your hopes up enough for one night. 

Dinner was nice. Really nice. 

Conversation flowed freely, starting out in neutral territory with updates about patients, work gossip, whatever the fuck was going on with Robby. But you soon moved out of the work realm and into personal matters. You told him about your childhood–where you grew up, your favorite childhood pets, how much trouble you got into as a teen. 

And you learned a lot about Jack. That he came from a military family that moved around a lot, but spent a large chunk of time in North Carolina. He had two sisters, both older than him. One stayed in North Carolina and the other lived in West Virginia. Both married to military men, and both notorious for giving Jack shit about everything. But they were his rocks when he lost his leg, and then again when he lost his wife, and he was endlessly grateful for them. 

You both loved 90s alternative rock, which surprised you because you took Jack to be more of a classic rock fan, to which he merely glared at you and said that he wasn’t that old. You both had childhood crushes on Winona Ryder; his borne from her role in Heathers, and yours from Girl, Interrupted. He surprised you with the fact that he was a good cook, a fact that seemed unfathomable to you based on his general vibe. 

Now, though, you’d moved to med school stories, and Jack was regaling you with stories about him and Robby back in the day.  

“We must have been… god, I must have been a third year med student, and Robby was… an R2? and he had really pissed me off that night. I don’t even remember what he did, I just remember being so annoyed at him,” he laughed, shaking his head at the memory, “It was a quiet night, so he snuck off to the on-call room to catch a few hours of sleep, leaving me to do all the scut. So, I recruited the help of the charge nurse, Carol, and our attending, Mark, and we applied a cast to his right leg while he was knocked out.” 

He’s cackling now, almost unable to finish his story between wheezing gasps of air, “we paged him, like, 10 times until he answered, and next thing we know he’s bursting out of the on-call room and onto his ass before he even realized what happened!” 

You’re laughing hard now, too, trying to picture a younger version of Robby gracelessly tripping over an unnecessary leg cast in his hurry to answer his page. It sounded so unlike the self-assured, stoic version you knew him to be.  

“Oh my god,” you wheezed, “how mad was he?”  

“Oh he was pissed. Not because of the cast, but because 5 minutes after we paged him, a 15-car pile up came in and he got benched until he could get the cast off. He had to wait for it to dry before he could saw it off, and the whole time he just sat there glaring at me.” 

“Did he get you back?” you asked, hungry for more crumbs of their life before you, before the Pitt as it was now.    

“Yeah,” he rolled his eyes, “the fucker taped nails to his shirt, took an x-ray, and switched out the real film for the fake before I noticed. I was freaking out to Mark, yelling about how this patient needed surgery before they perfed. Meanwhile Mark was in on it, and made me feel crazy when he pulled out the perfectly normal x-ray for my patient. He said, ‘I don’t know what they’re teaching you in school these days, but this looks like a perfectly normal x-ray,’” he said, in an impersonation you could only assume was Mark.

“That’s fucking crazy,” you giggled, “can you imagine someone doing something like that in the Pitt? I think Robby’d actually have an aneurysm.” 

“Yeah, the old man’s lost a bit of his whimsy over the years,” he shook his head. 

“Old man, huh? Those are fighting words from a man merely 3 years younger than him,” you teased, “and much grayer,” you added with a wink.  

“Watch it, missy,” he warned, then, quieter, “not too old to teach you some manners.”

Feeling emboldened by the wine, you leaned a little closer, “don’t make promises you can’t keep.” Tracing the rim of your wine glass, you looked up at him. You swear his eyes drifted to your lips, but before you could do anything about it, he cleared his throat, steering the conversation back into safer waters.  

“So, why did you get into emergency medicine?” 

You thought about it for a moment, considering how honest you wanted to be. “I wanted to meet people where they were at, help them in a real, immediate way. The traumas are great and exciting, and there’s nothing like making a pickup that saves someone’s life. But I like the less exciting stuff, too. The mundane care that doesn’t save a life, but makes someone feel better. Helps them get over a cold, or helps soothe a burn; suturing up a lac, or removing foreign objects from patients and not making them feel worse about their predicament. That stuff is just as important as the traumas.

Especially with how fucked healthcare is in this country, people come to us when they’re at their most vulnerable, and usually don’t want to be there. I just hope that I can make things less scary for patients when they come in, make sure they feel like they’re cared about and not being judged for coming to us.” 

It’d been a long time since you’d answered that question honestly. Usually, you had your stock answer that you pulled out, which was a more eloquent version of “I want to save lives!” And that was still true, but there was so much more to working in the emergency department than just saving lives. It was paperwork and insurance and bed shortages and nursing shortages and all the other fucked up shit in the world that inevitably contributed to the cases you saw come through the doors at the Pitt. 

“What about you? Was emergency medicine always it for you, or did you ever consider going into something else?” you asked. 

He shook his head, “Not seriously, no. Considered switching to critical care after my leg. I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the hustle and bustle of the emergency room after that. But it was the only place I wanted to be, so I figured it out, did what I needed to do to get back to where I was before the accident.” 

“Well, for what it's worth, I’m glad you stuck with EM. I couldn’t imagine working at the Pitt without you. I don’t think I’d be half the doctor I am without you,” you said, looking up at him. 

You hadn’t realized how close you’d gotten, his arm slung over the back of the booth and your thighs pressed against each other. 

“Don’t sell yourself short, you’d be amazing with or without me,” he said, tucking an errant strand of hair behind your ear. “You know, I’ve taught a lot of residents in my years, and you… you’re really cut out for this. Not everyone is.” 

The praise made you preen, the proximity of his hand to your face doing nothing to calm your rapidly beating heart. For a brief moment, you think he might lean in, might press those pillowy pink lips to yours, kiss you until you can’t think stra–

“Hi, sorry to interrupt but we’ll be closing in 15 minutes. Here’s your check when you’re ready,” the waitress said, setting the check down and scurrying away. 

You checked the time on your phone: 11:15. Did you really spend almost 3 hours talking to Jack? It certainly didn’t feel like it. 

“I guess we should get out of here before they kick us out,” Jack said, sliding out of the booth and offering you his hand.

You’re giggling at another one of Jack’s jokes as you leave the restaurant, the bill graciously paid by him despite your best efforts to split it. Your limbs were loose from the wine, goosebumps springing up on your arms from the early summer air turned chilly. 

“Thank you for dinner. You salvaged an otherwise shitty night,” you laughed. 

“It was no problem, really. I had a nice time,” he said, leaning against the brick wall, arms crossed.

You mirrored him, shoulder scraping against the gritty brick, and looked up at him. 

“Hold on, I think you have a little sauce on your face,” he said, and before you could grab a tissue from your purse, he reached out. His thumb gathered the sauce at the corner of your lips, going further to brush the pad of it across your bottom lip. The movement dragged your lower lip down slightly, your mouth parting involuntarily with it. You’re not sure why, but your tongue darted out, licked the pad of his thumb and the residual sauce.

Jack’s breath hitched, the sharp intake of air the only thing you could hear despite the sounds of car alarms and drunk party girls on a Friday night in downtown Pittsburgh. 

You looked up at him, tongue still pressed flat against his thumb, and searched his eyes for a sign that the heat building between you is mutual. 

Fuck it, you decided. 

Without thinking about it too much, you leaned up and pressed your lips against his. And god, did they feel nice. They were soft, but firm, and he tasted faintly of the wine you’d shared earlier mixed with the slight acidity of the tomato sauce from his dinner. Your hand tangled in the curls at the base of his neck, and they’re so soft, but also a little stiff. You wondered, briefly, if he uses mousse, or hairspray, or if he’s got a whole curly girl routine down before realizing that oh my god he wasn’t kissing you back. Oh no, oh fuck. 

How did you misread this situation so horrifically? You thought you were getting all the right signals, thought that he liked being with you, that he was flirting with you. But maybe it really was just a courtesy, a pity dinner. 

Your cheeks are hot when you pull away from him, shame sitting thick and heavy in your stomach, numbness prickling up your arms in staticky goosebumps. And Jack is just standing there, the dumbfounded look on his face doing nothing to assuage your embarrassment.  

You backed up, trying to create some distance, to lower the temperature between you that apparently only you felt. 

Looking down at your shoes, unable to make eye contact, you babbled out, “I-I’m so sorry, that was completely inappropriate and I don’t know why I-” your voice cracked and it felt like your lungs weren’t properly inflating with oxygen, “I don’t know how I misread things, but I guess I did so again, I’m so sorry. I’m gonna go home and pretend this never happened,” you said, turning around and starting down the street, despite the fact that you most certainly needed to Uber home, not walk. 

You’re trying not to cry for the umpteenth time that night when you hear him calling your name, “Wait!” 

He caught up with you, only a few strides away from where you were standing, and grasped your arm gently. “Wait, I’m sorry,” he said, a little breathless, “I just… you surprised me.”

“Surprised you?” you laughed, “I damn near sucked your thumb, Jack,” you said, genuinely confused how a man like Jack Abbot could be surprised that a woman would try to kiss him; that the next logical step from erotic thumbsucking would be a kiss. “And you flirted with me all night! You made a Lady and the Tramp joke! How else am I supposed to take that?”  

He rubbed at his jaw anxiously, a slight blush coating his cheeks, “I mean, yeah, I was surprised. I’ve liked you for a while now but then I heard you talking to Santos about how you didn’t want to go out with that cardiology attending and just assumed I didn’t have a shot,” he admitted sheepishly. “And maybe I got a little brazen with my flirting because I thought you didn’t see me like that anyway, figured it couldn’t hurt.” 

It’s your turn to be surprised now. You hadn’t realized he heard that conversation, or that he’d taken the wrong idea from it; the opposite idea, actually.   

You took a step closer to him, wrapping your arms around his shoulders, fingers finding his curls again, “Well, if you recall, snoopy, I said that part of the problem was that I just didn’t want to fuck that cardiology attending,” you said, looking up at him and batting your eyelashes, “that isn’t the case with you.” 

He looked shocked, but recovered quickly, his confident air returning to him. “Oh, is that so?” he asked, lips quirking up into a smile as he backed you up against the rough brick wall. His hand rested on the wall next to your head, the other on your hip, stroking you through your dress. 

“In that case, please allow me to make up for my rude behavior,” he said, dipping down to kiss you properly this time. 

You’d pictured this moment countless times before, but nothing compared to the real thing. Jack Abbot is a no nonsense man–a wartorn vet who understands more than most the importance of not wasting time. You expected your first kiss with him to be hungry, maybe a little sloppy, but when his lips meet yours, he’s achingly tender. It wasn’t uncertain–there was no question underlying his kiss–it was deep and languorous, like he was content to take his time up against this brick wall and savor the slide of your lips against his because he knew he had you right where he wanted you, finally. 

He commanded you, his hand cupping your jaw to angle your head back, deepening the kiss. His tongue swept across your bottom lip, and you instinctively opened up for him. The slide of his tongue against yours was delicious, the slick muscle curling around yours before moving back to your lips, sucking at your bottom lip and biting down gently. Your mind felt fuzzy at the way he handled you, guiding and taking you how he saw fit.

Some of his restraint dissipated, your mouths moving feverishly against each other. You couldn’t get enough of him; you pulled him into you and hooked your leg around his waist to draw him as close to you as possible. Pathetic, embarrassing whines and whimpers escaped you involuntarily, your body unable to mask how this man was making a mess of you.

His hand fell to the thigh wrapped around him, calloused fingers sliding up under your dress and gripping the bare flesh. He pulled you close, his pelvis rolling against yours sinfully. You could feel the hard outline of his cock against your cunt, your hips thrusting forward to meet the friction. A frustrated moan fell from your lips at the clothes separating you, at the inability to feel his skin against yours. 

You pulled away only when air was necessary–and because you were very close to being cited for public indecency if things went any further. 

“Sorry, I probably taste like garlic,” you said dumbly, fingers tracing over your spit slick lips, numb and swollen from Jack’s attention. 

He laughed, forehead resting against yours, “you taste incredible,” he said, pressing a kiss to your nose, then your cheek, and then under your ear. “I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but my place is a couple blocks from here, if you’d like to come home with me.”  

You nodded, a giddy smile breaking out across your face, “I would very much like to go home with you,” you said, already grabbing his hand and dragging him down the street. 

The entryway is dark as you stumbled into Jack’s townhouse, the walk talking longer than it should have due to your need to drag him into searing kiss after searing kiss every dozen or so steps. 

Jack navigated the two of you through the dark, your bodies unceremoniously plopping down on his couch. You fell onto his lap, knees sinking into the leather cushions and thighs stretching over the wide berth of his hips. Your kisses had devolved from slow and deep to fast and hungry, teeth nipping and clashing against one another, your breathing ragged from the exertion.   

He was rock-hard and throbbing under you, the outline of his cock pressing deliciously against your pussy. The only articles of clothing separating you were the thin, lacy excuse for panties you were wearing and his jeans. Your eyes fluttered closed as you ground your hips down on him, the combination of rough denim and the drag of his cock on your aching cunt forcing loud moans and whimpers from your lips. 

Jack was just as loud, his hips canting up to meet your rolling hips. His hand travelled to the back of your dress, fingers playing with the zipper, “this okay, sweetheart?” he asked against your lips. You nodded, too caught up in his lips to give a verbal answer. 

He chuckled as he pulled the zipper down, easing the sleeves down next and pulling away to get a look at you. He let out a sharp breath, the air stolen from his lungs as he took you in, hands gripping your waist tight and rolling his hips hard against you.  

Your pretty tits were held up in an unlined white bra, your hardened nipples peaking through the barely there lace. He threw his head back against the couch, pupils blown wide as they fixated on your chest. ““My pretty, pretty girl. Was this all for him?” he asked, thumbs running in circles around your areolas. You nodded shyly, a bit embarrassed that you’d put on your good lingerie for some random guy. But it wasn’t all for nought, if Jack’s reaction was any indication. 

“What a fuckin’ idiot,” he mumbled before enveloping your nipple between his lips, sucking the bud through the lace. He captured the other nipple between his thumb and forefinger, tugging and pinching it, then soothing it over in soft circles. The sensation was dizzying. His mouth was hot and wet against your skin, and he knew exactly the right pressure to ride the line between pleasure and pain.

But the lace was getting in the way; you couldn’t feel the scratch of his stubble like you’d dreamed of for so long. You unclasped your bra, tugging on his curls and pulling his face back just enough to let the garment fall down between you. 

A guttural sound left him as he dove back in, lips suctioning onto your nipple and sucking hard, cheeks hollowed out and tongue swirling around the bud. Your hand tightened in his curls, arching your back and pushing your chest against his mouth. He alternated between the two, sucking, licking, and biting at one and kneading, flicking, and pinching the other. You could finally feel the scrape of his stubble against your sensitive skin, your eyes rolling back in your head as your hips doubled their effort, grinding hard against his cock. 

He released your nipple with a wet pop, “you know how hard it’s been keepin’ my hands to myself, pretty girl? and all this time you’ve been hidin’ this pretty set of tits under your scrubs,” he shook his head in disbelief, “don’t think I’ll be able to think about anything other than stuffin’ my face between these tits when I see you at work.”  

His lips returned to your chest while his unoccupied hand moved under your dress, his rough palm gripping the fat of your ass and guiding you over his length faster. Every grind of your hips had your clit bumping up against the head of his cock, the pressure exquisite. Your slick was dripping down your thighs and seeping into his jeans, the schlick schlick schlick steady background noise among your moans and groans.  

You didn’t realize how fast your orgasm was building until you were nearly on the precipice of it, letting out a strangled moan and, “I’m gonna–” before the wave crested. Your thighs trembled, a dull ache forming from keeping them stretched around Jack’s bulk, but it only added to the pleasure that zipped through you. That staticky feeling radiated through you, your pussy contracting and fluttering around nothing. 

You’re panting into the crook of his neck as you ride out the aftershocks, your hips still grinding against his clothed cock, your lips letting out tiny gasps and whines. 

“Did you… did you just cum, sweetheart?” Jack asked, a stunned look on his face. 

You could feel how hot your cheeks were, shame curling through you because yes, you did cum from a little nipple play and grinding on his cock. 

“I-i’m sorry, it’s just been a long time and no one’s touched me in so long and you feel so good, I didn’t think that would happen so quickly,” you said, panicked, “I’m sorry if I ruined things.” 

“Hey, sweetheart, it’s okay,” he said, thumbs brushing away the embarrassed tears you weren’t even aware had fallen, “you didn’t ruin anything, okay? I was just surprised, is all. I’m sorry if anyone’s made you feel that way, but you don’t ever have to be embarrassed with me. Never,” The sincerity of his words triggered a new bout of tears. You buried your head in the crook of his neck again, his scent a calming balm to your nerves. 

“Plus, do you know how much of an ego boost it is to know I had such a pretty girl cummin’ on lap in under five minutes? That’s the stuff of dreams, baby,” he teased, pulling you out from your hiding spot and pressing kisses to your cheeks.

You laughed, still sniffling a bit, “gosh, I’m sorry I’ve been such a crybaby tonight.” 

“It’s okay, honey,” he said, then, teasing, “but I can think of much better reasons for you to be cryin’, and none of them have anything to do with you being sad or embarrassed,” he said, kissing you properly now, tongue licking deep into your mouth. 

You moaned into his mouth, then squealed as he hoisted you up, carrying you to his bedroom. He set you down at the edge of the bed, then properly removed your dress from where it was awkwardly gathered at your waist.

He didn’t waste any time, dropping to his knees and parting your legs, pushing them up toward your chest. “Hold 'em there for me, baby, wanna take a good look at you,” he murmured, eyes fixed on the damp fabric between your legs. You did as he told you, hooking your hands under your knees and spreading yourself open for him. You felt exposed, but the awestruck look in his eye as he examined your pussy sent shockwaves through your body. 

“This all because of me?” he asked, thumbing at your center over the fabric, pressing lightly against your clit with each stroke. Your panties were soaked through, the tiny scrap of fabric doing nothing to obscure your puffy folds that were sticky with a mix of your slick and cum. “What a mess you made, honey. Guess I’m gonna have to clean you up,” he said, pulling your panties to the side and licking a broad stripe from your hole to your clit.

You moaned, hips lifting off the bed and chasing his mouth. The contrast of his hot tongue on your cool flesh was blistering. His hands grabbed the back of your thighs, his fingers digging into the soft skin there and stopping any movement of your hips. You whined at the restriction, your hands fisting in the soft sheets instead.

“Waited so long for this honey, shit, fuckin’ dreamed about how you’d taste,” he moaned into your pussy, mouth lapping and sucking at your folds, gathering all the spend and slick and swallowing it down like nectar. His face was nestled deep into your cunt, tongue exploring every crease and crevice your cunt had to offer, licking, sucking, biting–and taking note of what made you scream. 

And once he discovered it, he didn’t just eat you, he devoured you. He was a man possessed, with no regard for his own need for air. His tongue assaulted your clit, alternating between rubbing tight circles around it, short kitten licks, and long, languorous licks that had him shaking his head between your thighs. Every now and again he wrapped his lips around your clit and suckled it, the light leaving your body every time. Your hips rocked against his mouth despite his hold on you, wrecked moans falling from your lips.  

“Fuck, jack, please–r-right there!” 

“That’s it, baby, let me hear you, tell me how good I’m makin’ you feel,” he said, pulling back just far enough to spit onto your cunt before running two fingers up your slit, pushing them in without preamble. The stretch was delicious, his thick fingers curling deep into your wet heat and finding that sweet spot in no time. He exploited it mercilessly, massaging it with the pads of his fingers. His lips returned to your clit, sucking harshly now, giving you no reprieve from his ministrations. 

“Feels so good Jack! Never felt this good before!” you cried. 

The slurping and squelching was lewd, your moans and breathless cries of his name intermingled to create an obscene symphony that you’re sure the entire population of Pittsburgh could hear. 

“You gonna cum on my face, honey? Gonna give me another one?” he asked, fingers massaging your g-spot. “Wanna–fuck–wanna feel this tight cunt squeeze my fingers when she cums.” 

“Y-yes, please Jack, ‘m gonna cum, feels sosososo good” you cried out, your second orgasm crashing over you. Stars burst behind your eyes, back arching uncomfortably off the bed and walls clenching so hard around his fingers you’re not sure how he hasn’t lost circulation. Your legs clamped around his head, trapping him there as you rode out your orgasm, hips rutting against his mouth and fingers. He didn’t mind, licking and sucking you through it, his fingers keeping pressure on your g-spot until you were pushing him away.

He peppered your body with kisses as you came down, starting at your thighs and making his way up over your tummy, ribs, and breasts. He came to rest above you, a dopey smile on your face as you pulled him in for a lazy kiss. His face was soaked with your spend and you could taste the tang on his tongue when he kissed you. 

“You’re stupidly good at that,” you whispered, body still boneless and floaty. 

“Yeah? Want me to show you want else I’m stupidly good at?” he asked while finally shucking his shirt off. 

“Yeah?” you said absentmindedly, eyes glazed over at the majesty that was Jack Abbot’s chest. You immediately began pressing kisses across the newly exposed skin–to his neck, collarbone, pecs, and tummy. You’re even able to scrape your teeth across a nipple before he holds you back at arms length, laughing.   

“Yeah, honey,” he laughed between your frantic kisses, “but you gotta let me breathe for a sec, gotta take care of my leg.” 

“Let me,” you said, slipping down to the floor and sitting back on your heels. You ran your palms up his thighs, hands coming to rest on his belt before going any further.

“You don’t have to do that, honey.” 

“I know,” you said softly, “but I want to. If you’re okay with that.” 

He cradled your face in his hand, thumb stroking your cheekbone. You turned into it, kissing the palm of his hand to assure him that you wanted to do this. 

“I care about you Jack, and this is part of you. I just wanna help you, wanna make you feel good,” you said earnestly, giving him your puppy dog eyes.

“Yeah. Okay, honey, go ahead,” he nodded, sitting back on his elbows to watch you. You grasped his belt again, unfastening the buckle and pulling the belt through the loops, discarding it somewhere behind you. You moved to the button of his jeans, deftly popping it open and hooking your fingers into the waistband, tugging them down with Jack’s help. 

Your breath hitched at the sight of his dark gray boxers, a wet spot front and center that made your mouth water. You learned forward and kissed the damp fabric, moaning at the slight taste of precum that danced across your lips. 

“Careful, sweetheart…” he warned, but there wasn’t much heat behind his words. 

You just grinned up at him before getting back to the task at hand. Your fingers travelled down to the sleek metal attached to him, getting a feel for the mechanism before unlocking and twisting it off. The liner came next, tossed to the side before you pressed your fingertips into his skin, massaging the skin to get some blood flow back into the residual limb. You pressed sweet kisses to his flesh, from the front of his knee to the scarred flesh of his leg, tongue dipping out to trace the prominent scar just above his amputation site. 

Jack breathed heavily above you, tiny groans escaping him unbidden. A look flickered across his face, and you think, briefly, that this may be the first time you’ve seen him truly vulnerable. It wasn’t a secret that he’d lost the lower portion of his leg in the war, but he didn’t flaunt it either. You wondered if there was an insecurity that lay deep within him, despite his overt confidence; if other women had reacted differently, cruelly even to the sight of his prosthesis. It made your heart ache to think about it, to think of someone doing anything but worshipping his beautiful body the way he deserved.  

“So pretty, Jack,” you whispered, kisses inching higher up his thigh now, “wanna taste you now.” 

When you’re met with the sight of Jack’s cock, you’re well and truly speechless. You knew he was big from your time on the couch, but seeing it was different. He was thick and veiny, the tip flushed a deep red and leaking precum furiously. It rested against his belly, curving slightly to the left. And did you mention that he was thick? Mouth agape, you wondered how you were going to fit him in your mouth. Or pussy. 

You’re not sure how long you’ve been sitting there, hands perched against his thighs, just staring at his cock, until Jack tilts your head back, fingers tightening in the strands of hair at the nape of your neck. 

“Thought you wanted a taste, honey. You just gonna sit there and stare at it all night?” he asked, a smug smile on his lips. 

“Maybe,” you mumbled, tongue darting out to wet your lips. 

Before you can do anything of your own accord, his hand is guiding your head forward, the head of his cock pushing gently against the seam of your lips. You take over from there, pressing an open mouthed kiss to his tip, the precum gathered there salty and sticky against your lips. Your tongue dipped out to caress the spot just below his head, running the flat of your tongue along it before moving back to his head, spitting a glob of spit onto him and wrapping a hand around his base. You started with long, slow strokes, squeezing and twisting on the upstroke, your hand meeting your lips where they suckled at his tip. 

You moaned at the steady stream of precum invading your mouth, “taste so good Jack,” you said before taking more of him into your mouth. You're only about halfway down and your lips are already stretched tight around him, spit leaking from the corners of your mouth in filthy waterfalls. You hollowed your cheeks out, bobbing your head up and down his shaft, your tongue massaging the underside of his cock. 

“Fuck, baby, who knew you had such a filthy fuckin’ mouth on you,” he groaned, hips rutting up slightly. 

His tip occasionally hits the back of your throat, causing you to gag and tears to prick behind your eyes, but you don’t care; the feeling of him weighing heavy on your tongue is reward enough. 

You feel a light pressure applied to the back of your head, “deeper, baby, know you can take it,” he groaned. You obliged, breathing deep through your nose and sinking down further onto his cock until you felt him hit the back of your throat and your nose was nestled in the trimmed grey curls at his base. Your hand grappled for his where it was perched on your head, using it to push harder against your head, trying to convey to him that you wanted him to take over; to fuck your face. 

He groaned, hips jerking involuntarily as he realized what you wanted. He gathered your hair in his hands, hips shallowly trusting into the wet heat of your mouth. His mouth was slack, grunts and groans loud as he fucked your face. His pace builds, his cock roughly pistoning in and out of your mouth. Tears are falling freely now, your mouth stretched to capacity and throat being used and abused by his fat cock. 

“See? These tears are much prettier, baby,” he huffed out, thumbs brushing the trails where they fell. “So fuckin’ pretty, crying with my cock in your mouth.” 

You moaned around him at that, the praise and shame swirling in your tummy. Your hand came up to cup his balls, massaging and squeezing them gently between your fingers. 

You’re suddenly pulled up off his cock and into his lap, spit stringing from your shiny, swollen lips. You whined at the loss of him, your mouth feeling uncomfortably empty now. 

“Fuck–you feel too good, honey,” he grunted, setting you back against his pillows, “can’t cum in that pretty little mouth tonight, need to be inside you.” 

He grabbed a condom out of his drawer before moving back to you, sitting back on his knees and rolling the condom on. You let out an annoyed whine. You’ve never hated the more rational side of your brain more than you do right now. You craved to feel him bare inside you–to feel him cum deep inside you, the hot white ropes painting your walls. And while you trusted him implicitly, you knew safety was of the utmost importance, so condom it was. 

“Don’t worry, baby, soon as we get tested, you won’t be able to stop me from fuckin’ this pussy raw,” he groaned, settling between your spread thighs. His body was a soothing weight above you, the warmth he emanated relieving any anxiety you had. 

He gripped the base of his cock and ran it through your sopping folds a few times, the tip catching slightly on your entrance on each pass. “Please, Jack, need to feel you,” you moaned, wrapping your legs around his waist and pulling him close. 

He cursed before giving in, notching the head of his cock against your entrance and entering you slowly, letting you feel and adjust to every inch on its own. Your head fell back into his plush pillows as he sank fully into you, your mouth open in a silent scream. Your walls were tight around him, clenching viciously at the intrusion–you’d never been stretched so wide, or filled so thoroughly. It felt like the air had been punched out of your lungs and replaced by his cock. Your hands clutched at his shoulders, your short nails biting at his skin. 

You were still for a moment, both your chests heaving as you adjusted to the feeling of one another. Then, once Jack composed himself, he started to move–slow, shallow thrusts at first, your pussy still clenching tight around him, sucking him in greedily with each thrust. 

“Relax for me, honey, that’s it, doin’ so good for me,” he grunted, eyes closed, “pussy feels so good.” 

You willed your body to relax, for your muscles to go lax around him. You shifted your legs up higher, the heels of your feet digging into the soft flesh of his ass. 

“There you go, so good for me,” he moaned, “knew you’d be so good for me.” 

He pulled out again, easier this time, until only the tip remained inside you, then snapped his hips forward. His thrusts were slow but hard, his hips slamming against you each time he bottomed out. The drag of his cock against your walls felt so good, his thick, throbbing length rubbing up against every sensitive spot. You felt every thick vein and ridge, as if they were imprinting into your walls, making a home there. You moaned at the thought of eternity, of Jack making your pussy his again and again and again. 

He was watching you with a wondrous look on his face, his eyes flitting between your blissed out face and bouncing tits. “So fuckin’ sexy, baby, you don’t even understand how fuckin’ gorgeous you are,” he groaned, hips picking up speed, fucking you faster and harder. 

The adrenaline and emotions from the night came crashing down around you. The feeling of his cock dragging through your walls mixed with the sweet words he was whispering into your ear had you feeling exposed and vulnerable, made you feel seen. Your hands were frantic, running over every bit of skin you could get your hands on, needing to feel his skin against yours. You pulled him impossibly closer, his chest now flush against yours, the friction it provided to your nipples dizzying.  

You didn’t notice the tears until Jack was kissing away the salty tracks, his tongue sneaking out to lick up the length of your cheek. “You’re my little crybaby, aren’t you?” he asked, a sweet hint of condescension in his tone, “just can’t help babbling over my cock, huh, baby?” 

You could only whimper at that. The words should feel shameful, degrading, even, but the fondness on his face, the constant reassurance he’d been giving you all night only made you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Because you weren’t a crybaby, you were his crybaby. 

The coil in your stomach tightened, your orgasm fast approaching. He was fucking you hard and fast now, his balls slapping against your ass with a wet smack. “Jaack, I’m gonna–fffuck–I need–” you gasped at a particularly hard thrust, your eyes rolling into the back of your head. 

But Jack knew what you needed before you did, his thumb finding your clit and rubbing tight circles against it, and you were done for. Your toes curled, heels pressing harder into his ass as you came, white-hot sparks shooting through your body. Your walls spasmed wildly, your orgasm crashing through you in waves. You were absolutely drenched, your pussy gushing around his cock, leaking down your ass and onto the bed. 

Jack wasn’t far behind, his hips stuttering as your walls seized his cock in a vise grip. “F-fuck, baby, you’re squeezin’ me so tight, so fuckin’ good,” he grunted, his hips going into overdrive now, chasing his climax and fucking you hard and deep.

"Cum for me, Jack, wanna make you feel good," you cried.

He ground his hips into one last time, cumming with a loud moan, cock buried deep inside you and hips pressed flush against yours. 

He collapsed on top of you, head resting on your chest. He pressed lazy kisses to your sternum, collarbone, the soft flesh of your breasts–whatever he could get his lips on from this angle. Your fingers carded through his curls, the motion soothing as you tried to catch your breath. 

Eventually, though, you had to part. 

You whined as he pulled out, your cunt empty and cold now that he’d taken his warmth away. He grabbed his arm crutches, disposing of the condom and retreating to the bathroom. He returned with a warm washcloth and began cleaning you up, gently wiping at your swollen pussy and sticky thighs, making sure you were comfortable before tossing the rag in the hamper.  

He slid back into bed when he was finished, laying on his side and pulling you close against his chest. Your head was cushioned by this arm as you curled into him, your sweat slick bodies cool to the touch now that the heat had dissipated. 

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to kiss you,” he said, fingers brushing up and down your ribs, the touch featherlight.  

“Mmm probably as long as I have,” you said, snuggling closer to him.

“Really? When did you realize you wanted to kiss me?”

You didn’t have to think about it at all. “My birthday, on the roof. I gave you a cupcake and you got frosting all over you,” you giggled at the memory, “and all I could think about was how bad I wanted to kiss it all off of your stupidly handsome face.” 

He laughed with you, the creases around his eyes deepening as he did. He was so pretty, you thought for the thousandth time that night. 

 “I remember that,” he smiled, “I remember being so proud that I made you laugh that night.” 

“What about you?” you asked. 

He thought about it for a minute. “I think the need to kiss you has been simmering in me since I met you, but the first time I had the conscious thought was when you patched me up after that patient clocked me in the head,” he said, his hand now on your cheek, stroking the bone there, “you were standin’ between my legs, stitchin’ up my forehead, and all I could think about was pulling you close and kissing you until I couldn’t breathe.” 

“Why didn’t you?”

He sighed, “I’m your superior and I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable if you didn't feel the same way.” You knew he didn’t want to delve into the ‘superior’ thing right now, didn’t want to have the long, complicated conversation that was sure to come in the following days. 

“And I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop myself once I started,” he said, lightening the mood a bit. 

You giggled at that, rolling your eyes affectionately. But something nagged in your head about what he said. 

“Wait…” you said, piecing together a timeline, “that was nearly a year ago! You’re telling me we could have been doing this for a year!?” you exclaimed, slapping him on the chest lightly. 

He shook his head at you, a sheepish look on his face. You were both idiots. 

“Well, I guess we have a lot of lost time to make up for, then, don’t we?” he said cheekily, capturing your lips again and pushing you onto your back, determined to make you a very happy woman.

a/n: thank you for reading!! I hope you enjoyed it <33

He’s hard. Jack’s hard, and his dick is pressed right between Robby’s ass cheeks. When he realizes, he freezes. His brain finally catches up with reality, but before he can apologize and move away, Robby rolls his hips backwards.

A low moan rumbles through Jack. Cautiously, he pushes forward. It feels so good. The scrape of his boxers and Robby’s pajama pants provides a soft friction, but the materials are thin enough that he can still feel the heat of Robby through their clothes.

Robby pushes back again; Jack pushes forward.

This slow back and forth goes on for a few minutes before Jack snaps. He places a firm hand on the floor next to Robby’s head, and the other tight on his hip, keeping Robby’s hips tilted up just right for Jack to hump against like a wild animal.

Robby lies there and takes it. Biting his lip to muffle his needy whines and looking back at Jack with glazed-over eyes and beautiful pink cheeks smashed into the floor.

It doesn’t take long for Jack to cum, leaving what should be a humiliatingly large stain in his underwear, but he doesn’t care. He leans back on his knees, trying to catch his breath and bring his consciousness back inside his body.

In that time, Robby rolls over onto his back, exposing the large tent that’s formed in his pants. He moves to wiggle out from under Jack, presumably to take care of his own obvious problem, but Jack pins him down again with a heavy hand on his shoulder.

Robby looks up at him with those gorgeous brown eyes. Jack’s own trace the desperate bob of Robby’s Adam’s Apple before darting back down to his covered hard-on.

Jack places a flat palm on Robby’s clothed dick. A small, pitiful sound breaks through Robby.

“Do it,” Jack demands.

Robby’s breath stutters, a little confused, but he catches on quickly. He plants his feet for leverage and bucks his hips, rubbing his hard dick against Jack’s unmoving, flat hand.

With each thrust, Robby loses more and more of his composure. Soon his face blooms into a radiant red, and the hold on his lip slips, releasing wanton moans into the air.

Jack is too recently spent to go again, but that doesn’t stop his dick from twitching in interest.

Robby orgasms so prettily. His moans echo through the room, and his blush has descended past the collar of his shirt. Jack resists the temptation to lift the hem and check how far down it goes.

“We good?” Jack asks. His palm is still hot from all Robby’s rubbing.

“Yeah.” Robby swallows. “We’re good.”

After that, they enter a silent agreement to get each other off. It starts slow, with little brushes here and there that turn into more humping and the occasional hand.

But they also have unspoken rules. No purposeful skin-to-skin, no getting naked, and no kissing.

They get close sometimes. Fingers brushing under lifted shift hems and heavy panting into each other’s mouths, but they never cross the line.

That is, until Jack gets home from class, pent up beyond belief.

It’s been a long week, and all Jack could think about during that dull-ass lecture was Robby’s pretty blissed-out face. And then when he walks into their dorm, there he is in nothing but his underwear, waiting for his leftovers to finish in the microwave.

Jack snaps. Before he can think, he’s shoving his jeans down to his knees, and Robby is bent over the counter, letting himself be humped in the middle of their kitchen with Jack’s hands enveloping his thin waist. Jack figures it’s not really breaking the rules, more bending, since he wouldn’t be touching Robby’s bare torso if he was properly dressed.

“I didn’t know you wore panties,” Jack huffs.

“I— I don’t.” Robby's arguing is undercut by his soft whimpers and the fact that Jack can see the tiny briefs cupping his ass. His cheeks bounce under the material with each of Jack’s thrusts.

Jack’s grip on Robby’s waist tightens, and is pace increases. It’s not long before a familiar wet puddle forms in his boxers.

The microwave is beeping somewhere far away, but Jack doesn’t give a shit. He’s too focused on placing Robby against the fridge. Jack cups his hands under Robby’s thighs and helps him grind against his stomach.

The briefs give Jack a nice outline of Robby’s dick. It’s nothing special. Jack could probably cover the whole thing with one fist; he imagines it leaving a trail over Robby’s thin stomach while Jack fucks him until he cries.

Robby’s little whines turn to moans, and for the first time, Jack is able to see that pretty pink blush crawl all the way down to his nipples. Fuck. Jack’s mouth waters; he wants to bite them so bad, but he can’t. That would definitely be against the rules.

Although… the way Robby is looking at him is already pushing it. Jack knows Robby wants to kiss him. If he did, Jack would shove his tongue so far down his throat that he’d be able to feel all of Robby’s pretty noises. But he doesn’t, and Jack isn’t about to be the one to knock down that barrier.

Robby cums in his little panties with his head tilted back, and goddamn it takes every bit of strength in Jack not to latch onto his neck.

Delicately, he places Robby’s shaking feet back on the ground.

“Thanks,” Jack says.

It takes Robby a moment to comprehend what Jack said. “Oh, yeah,” he says eventually. “Thank you too…”

Robby looks so dizzy. Jack wants to wrap him in his arms and hold him until his balance returns; he wants to bury them both beneath a blanket and pretend nothing else exists.

He pats Robby’s shoulder; good game, and walks away.

His grips your chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting your head to the left and the right, flecks of concern marring his hazel eyes.

You smack his hand away.

“Are you blaming a female healthcare worker for violence from a male patient twice her size?” you challenge, quirking your brow in mock offense.

You know that’s not what he means, and you almost feel bad when his face falls in guilt. But you’re still fired up from the encounter and you can’t ever resist a chance to spar head-to-head with your attending — unlucky for him, this one’s been served to you on a silver platter.

“Should we call Gloria?” you press. “I can get Javadi to make a TikTok.”

He retracts his hand back to his side where it belongs — not anywhere near you, as far as you’re concerned. It’d be frozen, hovering at the side of your face.

“Good point,” he says, hands now on his hips. “Sorry. You okay?”

You blink your rapidly swelling eye, dabbing at your split lip gently with the pad of your ring finger. “Yeah. Never better.”

He shakes his head, any concern replaced again by disappointment. “You gotta call hula hoop, kid.”

“Why? I knew you were watching.”

He opens his mouth, then closes it, rolling over the tray Lena had prepared for your room. “Well I’m not always going to be.”

You doubt that — sometimes Jack felt like a fly you could never swat away, right over your shoulder when you least needed him to be. You guess tonight is an exception.

“Those procedures are in place to keep you safe. If you’re gonna run your mouth—”

“Again, with the blaming,” you accuse.

“I’m not blaming you. It’s not your fault,” he says. “But sometimes…”

He trails off, ripping open a swab, bringing it to your lip. His other hand holds your face again as he dabs at your lip.

The bleeding had stopped after a while once Lena supplied you with gauze to hold against it, rattling off assessment questions while you could still hear Jack and Crus working with security to restrain the patient in the background.

She looked at your eye and begged you to let Shen order a CT, but you’d sat there frozen, reeling until Jack had appeared where you were situated in the empty room next door, his chest heaving and hair mussed, clearing everyone else from the room and telling them to get back to work.

The swab stings a little, even with his feather-light touch, and you can’t help but rear back, even if you don’t slap his hand away this time.

“Sometimes what?”

“Hold still,” he says, hand tightening on your chin. He keeps dabbing, swearing when you feel a new line of blood start to trickle down your chin. You grab a pad of gauze off the tray and hold it up to your chin yourself, before he grabs it from you and wipes it himself. “Sometimes I just wish you’d mouth off a little less.”

You scoff, and he pulls back with frustrated resignation, like he’s ready for the monologue you’re about to burst into. He’s heard them enough times.

“Sorry I don’t just let these daddy’s money fucks walk all over me for our patient satisfaction scores,” you spit, your lip aching, head throbbing, heart pounding. Traitorous tears push at the back of your eyes. “They don’t scare me, and neither do the suits upstairs. They’re all cut from the same cloth. I came from a hospital way worse than this.”

“I’m sure,” he nods, still paused with the swab in his hand, holding the gauze pad with the other. “But you’re at my hospital now. So cool it. If not for your own sake, then for your attending’s, who has to sign off on all of these reports, yeah?”

“What happened to being the weirdest and wildest?” you say. “Hooah?”

“You can do that without having to enter concussion protocol,” he argues, dropping the gauze to the tray. “Night crawlers gotta be careful, too. Probably even more so.”

“Um, that’s wild. Was it not you I heard earlier telling someone to shut their fucking mouth?” you retort. He still holds your jaw, his grip firm but not harsh — nothing like the man who’d done this to you — continuing to dab at your lip until he’s satisfied before discarding the swab onto the tray next to the gauze.

He grins at your remark then, some tension evaporating from the room, even if he still scans your face with intensity. He looks kind of silly, trying to smile with a crease in his brow.

“Touche. I for one can’t wait to read the review he leaves,” he says. “I’m sure I’ll get a CC on that one.”

“‘Stupid bitch doctor didn’t let me obstruct an active investigation,’” you say. “‘Cut my ugly Brooks Brothers golf shirt off. Papa’s lawyer will be in touch.’”

Abbot’s still smiling and you find yourself doing it too, wincing when your lip stretches over the broken skin. “Motherfucker.”

“C’mon, res,” he sighs, reaching for another swab, ripping it open. You let him fix up your lip unbothered this time, not speaking. He doesn’t feel the need to hold your face still this time, but you almost wish he would.

When he speaks again, it’s no longer chastising.

“How about,” he starts, throwing the second swab on the cart, shucking his gloves into the trash and opening the monitor across the room with his badge. “‘Put my stupid, privileged hands on a pretty resident and got tossed into police custody. Zero stars.’”

He makes another off-handed comment not to laugh at that and fuck up your lip again before he mumbles his way through your chart. But you’re not laughing at all, your stomach actually flipping at his words.

“Patient presents agitated.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” you say, standing, nudging into his space to see he has a chart open for you. “Can’t we keep this off the books?”

He laughs, still typing, his arm moving against yours. “Not a chance in hell. Go home.”

——

You’d noticed something off about Jack as soon as he’d entered the ED during the day shift half of your double, yelling and sweaty in his SWAT gear, bringing a wave of testosterone onto the floor along with his colleagues.

But he’d struggled throughout the entire procedure, leaning on you and Robby for every step.

“Bag him,” he practically winces, shuffling out of the way, hands held up while you take over Hiro’s intubation.

With Hiro’s vitals closer to stable, Garcia nods for him to be taken upstairs into a waiting OR, and Jack barely cracks a pained smile to an insult about being an adrenaline junkie — nothing smart to say for once.

He exits the room promptly at Robby’s question about contacting Hiro’s family, saying someone else on the team can help him, passing directly behind you.

“You’re with me,” Jack says, his breath fanning against the nape of your neck. “Now.”

His eyes find yours for one brief, weighted moment as he shoulders open the Trauma 2 door with a poorly concealed wince.

If not for your worry, you’d have immediately made a snide remark.

You look to Robby, slightly shell-shocked, wondering if he’d heard. Perlah definitely had, if the eyes she’s giving Princess say anything.

Robby just shakes his head. “I don’t think he was asking.”

You sigh, ripping your gloves and gown off into the bin and stalking off in the direction he’d gone, seeing a flash of camo duck into one of the South rooms across the way, wondering what you could’ve possibly even done to tick him off in the measly 10 minutes he’d been here.

You open the door after taking a deep breath outside the room.

“You know you can’t boss me around when you’re not even on shift,” you start.

“Shut the door,” is his instant reply. Message not fucking received.

Jack’s sitting on the bed already, the curtains drawn closed around the entire room, only a small gap left for you.

The room quiets as the door clicks shut behind you, and you draw back the curtain just enough to join him bedside before closing it again.

“What’s—”

One of his elbow pads already discarded on the bed, Jack is undoing the velcro straps on the right side of his Kevlar, but there’s that wince again once he moves to his other side. He tries to reach around his torso, but he can’t get the angle right, and he looks at you.

“Please help me get this thing off.”

You still have yet to learn why he’s clearly in pain, but you can tell the sweat running down his temple isn’t just from the July heat anymore as you step into his space.

“You’re hurt,” you realize, undoing both velcro straps on his left side. You dig your hand into the slight gap between his camo quarter-zip and the vest, pulling the straps out of the plastic loops attached to the back panel of the vest.

“Not badly,” he says, stilling as you push his hand away where he’d been trying to free the straps on the other side, doing it for him.

Both sides undone, you stand back slightly, moving your hands toward his shoulders. You detach the radio he has clipped onto the vest’s collar, placing it on the bed.

“Ready?”

He nods.

The vest comes off easy, but it’s heavy — he still winces as it drags over where he must be injured.

“Sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he breathes. “Just throw it wherever.”

You set it aside on one of the chairs, taking his radio, too, and setting it on top. When you turn back around, he’s already swearing under his breath and struggling with his long sleeve, caught under the remaining elbow pad.

“Alright,” you say, slightly annoyed, but mostly worried. “Do you want my help or not?”

He manages to undo his elbow pad, but grimaces as he shakes it off his good arm. He stops struggling with the shirt after a bit, his right arm stuck halfway through his sleeve. You can’t help the smile that sneaks onto your lips.

“Wow,” he says, but he’s smiling a little, too, incredulous. “This is funny to you?”

“Only a little,” you say. You assess how his arm is awkwardly caught in his sleeve, deciding on your next move. The thing is, you know exactly what you’d do if this was a patient, and not your attending. But you suppose he’s more one than the other right now.

“Do you mind?” you ask, gesturing to the bottom of his shirt.

“No. Not at all,” he says.

“Okay,” you say. “Let me just…”

You pull his right sleeve taut, your other hand going up under his shirt — thankfully, you feel an undershirt on the backside of your hand. He snakes his arm through the rest of the sleeve, and you stretch the shirt up over his head, his sweaty curls flattening further on his head. You really ought to offer him some electrolytes, and maybe a towel.

“I can’t believe they make you guys run around in all this gear when it’s this warm out.”

“Supposed to—” he winces as you drag the rest of the shirt down the arm on his injured side “—keep us safe.”

“Results may vary,” you say under your breath, setting his long-sleeve on the bed.

“Bullet could’ve gone right through without it. I’ll take my chances.”

Your mind catches on the first word, frozen as Jack seems to barely pay it any mind. Why would he, you wonder to yourself, given his history and his reputation — a troubling affliction for adrenaline.

“You got shot?”

“Shot at,” he says, shrugging. Another grimace. “Fuck. It should be a superficial wound, but it’s on my back, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to treat it.”

Your gaze assesses the last layer between you and his skin, his black undershirt, fitted across his chest and arms. No way you’re getting that off of him without it hurting like hell if he can barely undo his elbow pads.

He narrows his eyes. “What are you—”

“It’s the only way.”

“This is my nice shirt,” he warns slowly, eyes tracking you across the room to one of the drawers he knows as well as you do stocks the fabric shears.

“You’re sweating and bleeding all over it,” you say flippantly. “Or do you really want me to try and pull it off?”

He huffs a sigh.

“It’s a fucking t-shirt, Jack,” you say, already hacking at his sleeve. “We can get you a new one. Size small?”

“You little—“

“Extra small. Got it.”

His left arm free after you cut a line from the sleeve to the collar, his pale, freckled shoulder now exposed to the room, you finally get a chance to look at what he’d been complaining about.

“Holy shit,” you breathe, leaning over the side of the bed, getting the best look you can.

“S’not that bad, is it?” he asks, turning to look over his shoulder, grimacing once again.

“Stop moving,” you say, your hand on his face, pushing it away from you. “Have you taken any pain reliever?”

“Got kinda busy,” he says. “You rocked that shit in there, by the way. With Hiro. I’m sure you knew that though.”

Your hand falls away from his jaw. “Doesn’t hurt to hear.”

You come around to cut the rest of the material away, suddenly painfully aware you hadn’t gloved up again in the rush of it all. You pull the fabric from his body as far as you can, but your knuckles still brush against his stomach, his chest, his sternum as you make your way up. The butchered material falls away as you push it off of his body, guiding it down his good arm. You turn away pointedly as soon as he’s properly shirtless, bunching up the ball of fabric and placing it with his vest just to have something to do.

“Just trash it,” he says softly. “I might have you get another from my locker, though.”

“All that fuss,” you say, finally putting a pair of gloves on. “And you had a spare.”

He’s smirking when you do turn back around, and you roll your eyes.

“Let me see, will you?”

It’s quiet after that as you assess the wound. He’s right that it’s superficial, but it still could probably use a few stitches.

You tell him as much, and he nods.

“Whatever you suggest, doc.”

You pull your mouth to one side, still assessing, your hands light. “Maybe we get Robby or someone else in here, just to check. Or I can grab you a mirror?”

You see him shake his head. “I didn’t ask Robby to come in here. I asked you. I’m your patient. Make the call.”

You stop crouching over him just as he turns around again, his gaze fixated on you, his eyebrows raised in anticipation.

“I’ll grab a suture kit.”

He nods. “Good. A shirt too, yeah?”

You snap your gloves off and throw them in the trash, flipping him off when they miss and you have to pick them up off the floor.

“I’ll have Dana get it when I put in the order for the anesthetic,” you say, logging into the monitor by the sink after sanitizing your hands. “I think some imaging, too. You’re in a lot of pain.”

“Don’t involve anyone else. I’ll sign off on the order,” he says, then pauses, and you can see him squinting at you in your peripheral. “What are you doing?”

“Starting a chart for you,” you murmur mindlessly, entering his details into the demography section. “Patient presents agitated.”

“Off the books,” he says firmly.

You scoff, tapping the rest of the current line of your assessment out before saving it, locking the display, like he’s in any shape to lunge over and delete it. “Not a chance in hell. Be glad I saved you a little speech about being careful. They’re quite dull.”

“No hula hoop on a SWAT raid,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest, wincing when he remembers he can’t do that right now.

It’s too late though — the image of your attending shirtless, wearing camo pants and sweating all over the exam bed, arms taught over his chest, will be burned into your retinas for the foreseeable future.

“Maybe there should be,” you mumble, crossing the room to him again. You look at his wound one more time, mentally noting you’ll need irrigation, too, and maybe a Plastics consult that you know he’ll refuse.

“Yeah?” he asks, looking up at you when you stand full height again. “You worried about me?”

You shrug. “If you die and leave me stuck under Robby…”

He chuckles. “‘Cause they’d never stick you with Shen, right? You’d get fuck all done together.”

You can no longer help the smile that has irritatingly been threatening to break through for a while — ever since you’d discovered he actually was okay, really.

“It wouldn’t be good for the hospital.”

“So maybe we both agree to be a little more careful then,” he suggests, wincing as he stands again, pushing himself off of the bed. “Deal?”

“Deal,” you say.

“Your eye looks good, by the way,” he says. Your eyes narrow at the way his voice has dripped into that deeper register. The same one it takes on when he tells you atta girl and you’re with me, now. “Healed nicely.”

Open bullet graze, sweaty curls and all, Jack makes his way to where you’re standing, his hand grabbing your face like he had just last week, titling your head side to side. This time, his thumb brushes softly over where your lip had split, the skin new and soft under his calloused fingertip.

“This, too,” he murmurs, pressing down just slightly.

You let him linger for just long enough, chancing a look up at him through your lashes, reveling in the way he looks down at you now — something that had annoyed you only last week when you were up on that bed instead.

But then you smack his hand away.

He had just checked into a cheap motel off the highway, exhausted after a long day on the road. He opened the door to his room - and stopped mid-step.

There was an orange tabby cat on the bed.

When it heard him, it lifted it’s head, gave a quiet meow, then settled back down like it owned the place.

Robby blinked.

He didn’t remember booking a room with a cat.

He set his bag down and closed the door carefully behind him. Then he stepped closer and sat on the edge of the bed.

The cat stirred again. Looked at him with wide green eyes - wary for half a second - then yawned. 

It stood.

That’s when Robby saw it was missing a leg, which didn’t seem to bother it. Also it was male.

It stretched lazily then walked straight over to him with no hesitation. It climbed into his lap, shoved its head under his leather jacket and settled like it had always belonged there.

It was asleep again in seconds.

Robby stared down at it.

“Um” he muttered. “Yeah. That’s not… ideal.”

But he didn’t move.

At some point the cat decided it had had enough of him.

It slipped out of his lap without ceremony, stretched, then padded off toward the bathroom like it knew the place. Robby watched it go, still not entirely convinced this was actually happening.

A second later he heard the faint scrape of claws against tile. He frowned, pushed himself up and followed.

The bathroom window was open. And the cat was gone.

Robby stood there for a moment, staring at the empty sill. Then he let out a quiet huff of a laugh, rubbing a hand over his face.

“Right” he muttered. “Of course.”

That made more sense. Random cat shows up, random cat leaves. No strings attached. No complications.

He closed the window and went back into the room. By the time he headed out for dinner, the whole thing already felt a little unreal. Like something he’d made up to entertain himself.

— — —

It was dark by the time he got back. The parking lot was quieter now. Robby unlocked the door, stepped inside, dropped the keys on the small table without bothering to turn on the light right away.

The room was exactly how he’d left it.

No cat.

He snorted softly to himself and toed off his boots.

“Yeah” he said under his breath. “Didn’t think so.”

He grabbed his phone and opened the chat with Jack. The last message still sat there, unanswered:

You good? Text me.

Robby exhaled slowly.

All good. Stop worrying.

He grabbed a towel and headed for the shower.

— — —

The water had just warmed up when he heard it. A faint, persistent scratching.

Robby froze, one hand braced against the tile, head tilted slightly.

There it was again.

Scritch, scritch.

But not inside. Outside.

He frowned and shut the water off, grabbing the towel and wrapping it around his waist as he stepped out of the shower.

He looked at the window.

The cat was perched on the outside sill, front paws hooked over the edge of the window, scratching at the glass like it had been personally offended by the concept of being locked out.

Robby just stared at it.

The cat held his gaze, then let out a short annoyed meow.

Robby blinked once, then reached over and pushed the window open.

“Unbelievable” he muttered.

The cat didn’t even hesitate. It slipped past him like it belonged there, tail flicking once as it landed neatly on the floor. Then it walked straight back into the room, hopped onto the bed, turned once, twice - and curled up exactly where it had been before.

Robby stood in the doorway, water dripping onto the floor, watching it settle.

“Right” he said after a moment. “Why not?”

— — —

Later, when he finally got into bed, it didn’t move.

He lay down carefully beside it, leaving more space than necessary - just in case. The cat shifted once, just enough to press closer against his side, warm and solid and very much there.

Robby went still.

For a second he considered moving away - but he didn’t. Instead he let out a slow breath and stared up at the ceiling, one hand resting loosely on the blanket between them.

“Yeah. Fine. Stay, thent.”

— —- —

The cat was still there in the morning.

Robby noticed it the second he opened his eyes - curled up near his ribs, exactly where it had settled the night before. Warm. Breathing slow. Like it had nowhere else to be.

For a moment he just lay there and watched it.

Then he pushed himself up, careful not to disturb it and started dressing. Then packing.

Underwear, socks, helmet, jacket, bag, keys.

By the time he turned back to the bed - it was gone.

Robby paused.

The dent in the mattress was still there. The faint warmth too. But the cat itself had vanished.

He exhaled through his nose, something between a huff and a laugh. “You could have said bye, at least” he muttered.

— — —

Checkout was quick.

The man behind the counter barely looked at him at first, too busy scrolling through something on his phone. Mid-forties, unshaven, the kind of expression that suggested he’d already decided he didn’t like you before you opened your mouth.

Robby set the key down.

“Morning” he said.

The guy grunted.

Robby hesitated a second, then nodded back toward the rooms. “You’ve got cats around here, right?”

That did it.

The mans head snapped up, irritation flaring instantly. “Don’t remind me.”

Robby stilled slightly.

“There’s this stupid orange one” the guy went on, voice rising. “Keeps sneaking into rooms, scratching at doors, scaring off guests. Damn thing thinks it owns the place.”

Robby said nothing.

“I tried to shoot it once” the man added, like he was talking about a faulty appliance. “Missed. Little bastard’s fast.”

Something cold settled in Robby's chest.

The guy leaned back in his chair, snorting. “But I swear if I ever get my hands on it-” He made a vague motion with his hands. “I’ll drown it myself. Wouldn’t even mind.”

Silence stretched for a beat.

Robby picked up his receipt. “Um, right” he said quietly.

He turned and walked out without another word.

— — —

Two miles down the road, he pulled into a gas station. He filled up the bike, then headed inside.

He told himself he needed snacks and drinks for the ride.

The shop was small, cluttered. Rows of snacks, cheap souvenirs. He grabbed a bottle of water, then stopped.

There was some kind of a pet section there. It barely covered more than a shelf. He stared at it for a second longer than necessary. Then he reached out, grabbed a bag of cat treats and carried it to the counter.

— — —

Twenty minutes later he was back at the motel.

He leaned against the low railing outside his old room, the bag of treats in his hand. He felt ridiculous. Completely, objectively ridiculous.

“This is crazy” he muttered to himself, then tore the bag open anyway.

“Hey” he called quietly, glancing around. No one was around. Good. “Hey. Come on. Don’t make this weird.”

Nothing.

He crouched slightly, shaking the bag once. The soft rattle sounded way too loud in the still morning air.

“Come on kitty” he tried again. “I’m not doing this all day.”

He waited for quite a while.

Then - movement.

A flash of orange at the edge of the building.

Low. Cautious.

Robby straightened a little, not wanting to spook it. “There you are” he murmured.

The cat paused a few feet away, watching him. Green eyes sharp. Assessing him.

He seemed smart.

Robby crouched properly this time, lowering himself to its level. He reached into the bag, pulled out a treat and held it out - not too close, not too far.

“Here, I brought a bribe.”

The cats ears flicked and then it took a step closer. Then another. It was still watching him.

Robby didn’t move.

Finally the cat closed the distance, sniffed his hand and took the treat. Quick, efficient.

Robby let out a quiet breath. “Yeah, thought so.”

He gave it another. And this time the cat stayed closer.

By the third it didn’t bother pretending it might leave.

Robby shifted slightly, testing. The cat didn’t back away.

“Alright” he murmured. 

Slowly - very slowly - he reached over and slid his hands under it. The cat tensed for half a second. Then - nothing. No fight. No protest.

Robby lifted it carefully, automatically adjusting for the missing leg without thinking about it.

“Hey kitty” he said under his breath.

The cat pressed into him - and then it started purring. Loud. Immediate. Like a switch had been flipped.

Robby blinked, a little thrown by it. “Okay, hey, easy.”

He shifted his jacket open and tucked the cat inside, holding it close against his chest. It settled instantly, like it had been waiting for that exact spot. And it was still purring.

Robby glanced down at it. “Yeah, great.”

He stood carefully, adjusted his grip slightly and walked back toward his motorcycle.

At the bike he paused, one hand resting on the handlebar. “Okay” he said after a moment. “But now we find you a new family, alright?”

The cat kept purring.

Robby nodded once. “Yeah. That’s what we’re doing.”

He swung his leg over the bike.

“And please stay inside.”

— — —

By the time he stopped for lunch the sun was high and the road had started to blur into one long stretch of asphalt. He pulled into a fast-food parking lot, killed the engine and sat there for a second. The cat shifted inside his jacket, a small warm weight.

“Yeah, kitty. We’re stopping.”

— — —

A few minutes later he was leaning against his bike, a paper bag open on the seat. Burger. Fries. Soda.

The cat sat half-tucked inside his jacket, front paws hooked over the edge like it had decided this was its new default position. It had been just a little awkward when he had used the restroom at the burger place like that. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the cat was judging him.

Robby unwrapped the burger, took a bite, chewed - and felt eyes on him.

He glanced down.

The cat was staring at the food. 

Robby exhaled through his nose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The cat didn’t even blink. He sighed, tore off a small piece of meat and held it out.

“Don’t make this a habit.”

The cat took it immediately.

A couple walking past slowed down. The woman nudged the guy, whispering something with a grin. The guy laughed under his breath.

Robby ignored them.

Another bite. Another piece for the cat. Then some fries.

“Don’t think this is a cat-appropriate diet” he muttered.

Eventually Robby unzipped his jacket, sat down on the curb beside his bike, the paper bag crumbled next to him. He slurped some soda. The cat immediately settled on his lap.

Robby pulled out his phone. “Alright” he said quietly. “Lets do this properly.”

He typed: animal shelter nearby

The results loaded.

He stared at the screen - looking, reading, scrolling. Then scrolled back. Words jumping out at him:

intake full

euthanasia policy

limited capacity

Robby's jaw tightened slightly. “Euthanasia? No way” he said under his breath.

The cat nudged his arm, impatient. 

He locked the screen and shoved it back into his pocket.

“Not happening.”

A family passed by a few minutes later. Two kids - maybe eight or nine - trailing behind their parents, arguing about something loudly enough that everyone in the lot could hear. Robby watched them for a second. So did the cat.

Then, before he could overthink it - “Hey” he called out.

The parents turned, surprised.

Robby gestured vaguely toward his lap. “You guys want a cat?”

The kids lit up instantly.

“Mom-!”

“Can we-?”

The parents didn’t even hesitate. “No.”

The kids groaned. The mom gave him a weird look and kept walking.

Robby watched them go, then looked down at the cat.

“Well” he said. “That was your shot.”

The cat didn’t seem particularly bothered. He nudged his arm again, purring, with closed eyes. Robby leaned back slightly.

“This is getting stupid, you know?” he muttered.

He pulled his phone out again, typing:

how to transport a cat on a motorcycle

The search results loaded.

Harnesses. Carriers. Backpacks. A lot of advice forums. People arguing about safety on reddit.

Robby stared at the screen for a long second, then let out a quiet breath.

“Yeah. Okay.”

He typed again:

pet shops nearby

A couple of minutes later he was back on the bike. The cat was tucked inside his jacket again, steady and warm. Robby adjusted it slightly, then started the engine.

“Alright” he said over the low rumble. “Let’s do this stupid thing right.”

— — —

The bell above the door chimed as Robby stepped into the pet shop. Cool air. Shelves packed too close together. The faint, unmistakable smell of animal food and sawdust.

The cat shifted inside his jacket, then pushed its head out, ears flicking as it took everything in.

“Yeah” Robby murmured. “Welcome to your kingdom.”

He didn’t linger but walked straight to the essentials. He looked around the carriers first.

Plastic crates - too bulky, too rigid.

Soft carriers - zippers, mesh - not rigid enough.

Then he stopped at the backpacks.

One of them had clear, rounded front and ventilation holes. Enough space for a cat to turn, to lie down and to see out. He picked it up and tested the weight.

“That might work. What do you think?” he asked toward the cat.

It meowed quietly.

“Great.”

“Are you traveling with a cat?” a voice asked behind him.

Robby turned.

A clerk - early twenties, mildly amused - was watching him with open curiosity.

“Looks that way” Robby said.

The clerk glanced at the cat peeking out of his jacket. “He seems… judging.”

Robby looked down. “Yeah. He’s got opinions.”

The rest added up quickly. Foldable bowls for water and for food. A week’s worth of premium cat food - Robby paused at the price, then grabbed it anyway.

A brush. Flea and tick treatment.

“Not dealing with that” he added quietly. “You’re probably infested, hm?”

Then he grabbed a collar. A green one with a small bell attached. He turned it over in his hand. Robby stared at it for a second.

“Yeah, great - no more killing wildlife on my watch.”

At the counter the clerk scanned the items one by one. “Going on a long trip?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

The clerk nodded toward the backpack. “That’s a good choice. Safer than letting him ride loose.”

Robby hesitated. “Does he need a helmet?”

The clerk blinked. “A… helmet?”

“For the ride” Robby clarified, completely serious. “Wind, debris, that kind of thing.”

The clerk huffed a laugh, trying - and failing - to hide it. “I mean… I’ve never seen anyone put a helmet on a cat” he said. “Backpack’s more than enough. He’ll be secure in there.”

Robby studied him for a second, like was evaluating whether this was negligence. “Okay.”

— — —

Outside, Robby set the bag down beside his bike and crouched, pulling out one of the cans of food. The second it opened the cat was alert. He filled one of the foldable bowls and the cat dove in, eating like it hadn’t seen proper food in days.

Robby watched, one brow lifting slightly. “Easy tiger.”

The first bowl was gone in seconds.

Robby filled it again and poured some water in the other bowl. Then he started packing the cans of foods in the side pockets of his bike.

The second can didn’t last much longer.

“You’re going to regret that” Robby said.

The cat ignored him completely. Which wasn’t surprising. It sat back, licked its paws and looked at him again for a moment. Then it turned and climbed straight into the open backpack. It curled up, adjusted once and settled.

Robby stared at it. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

The cat was already closing his eyes.

Robby exhaled and looked around. He wasn’t imaging it, right? Other people could see that cat too. The clerk had commented on it, so… yeah. He wasn’t hallucinating.

He zipped the backpack carefully, then slung the backpack over his shoulders, testing the weight.

“Yeah, not bad.”

He adjusted the straps, then glanced back at the cat.

“You good, pal?”

Robby huffed a quiet breath, then grabbed his helmet, swung onto the bike and settled in. For a second he just sat there.

“For the record - that wasn’t the plan” he muttered.

— — —

Sometime in the afternoon, the road stretching long and empty ahead of him, Robby felt it. There was a faint scratching right behind his shoulder.

He frowned slightly, shifting his grip on the handlebars.

There it was again.

“Seriously?” he muttered.

He slowed, scanning the roadside, then pulled over onto a narrow strip of gravel beside a patch of grass.

He switched the engine off and sat for a second. Silence settled in, broken only by the ticking of the cooling bike. Then he swung off the bike, reaching back to pull the backpack around to his front.

“Alright” he said. “What’s wrong?”

The cat was already moving inside, restless now. Robby crouched and set the backpack down carefully, unzipping it - the cat didn’t even wait. It slipped out immediately, landing lightly on the ground, then trotted off with purpose toward the grassy patch.

Robby blinked.

The cat stopped a few feet away, circling once - and did its business.

Robby let out a short disbelieving huff. “No way.”

The cat finished, kicked some dirt over it with practiced efficiency, then turned around walking straight back. It stopped in front of him, looked up and meowed.

Robby stared down at it. “You’re house-trained” he said flatly. “Or I don’t know… backpack-trained.”

The cat stepped closer and nudged against his leg. Robby shook his head, but crouched anyway, reaching down automatically. The cat leaned into his hand immediately, pressing its hand against his palm, purring low and steady. Robby ran his hand over its back once, then again, slower this time.

The cat enjoyed his touch for a while, then pulled away on its own, turned and hopped right back into the open backpack.

Robby chuckled. “Alright.”

He zipped the backpack up again, then stood and slung it back over his shoulders. Then he swung onto the motorcycle again and started the engine.

“This is insane.”

— — —

By the time the sun dipped low Robby pulled into another motel. It was smaller than the last one, but cleaner. At least from the outside.

He cut the engine, rolled his shoulders once, then reached back to steady the backpack.

“You survived your first day on the road” he muttered.

The cat inside shifted gently.

— — —

Check In was quick.

The clerk - a woman this time, late thirties, sharp eyes and a hint of a smile - noticed the backpack immediately.

“Pet?” she asked, leaning slightly to get a better look.

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “That’s fine. Just so you know - pets cost extra.”

“No problem.”

She smiled, clearly amused. “What kind of dog is it?”

Robby paused. “Um, it’s a cat.”

That earned him a raised eyebrow. He shrugged, signed, paid, took the key and left.

— — —

Later he sat outside a fast-food place a few blocks down. The backpack sat on the seat next to him, unzipped. The cat was awake, watching everything with calm, steady interest.

Robby unwrapped his food, took a bite and then - without thinking too much about it - tore off a piece of meat and passed it over.

The cat took it immediately.

“Never seen a grown man travel with a cat before.”

Robby glanced up. A guy at the next table - mid-forties, easy grin, more curious than judgemental - was watching him.

Robby shrugged. “Yeah.”

The guy chuckled. “What’s his name?”

Robby paused, mid-motion and looked at the cat. The cat looked back, blinking slowly.

“I don’t know” Robby admitted. “He just showed up.”

“So” the guy said, slightly confused now. “You picked up a random cat and took it with you?”

“Yeah, looks that way.”

The guy laughed. “Alright. Still - he’s gotta have a name.”

Robby huffed quietly. “Cat?” he offered.

The guy shook his head immediately. “That’s not a name. That’s a species.”

Robby leaned back slightly, considering that. “I guess he calls me ‘human’” he said eventually.

That got a real laugh. “Yeah” the guy said. “Probably does.”

Robby’s phone buzzed. A message:

Didn’t hear from you earlier. You alive? Don’t do anything stupid, okay?

Robby leaned back in his chair, picking up another piece of meat and tossed it absent-mindedly toward the backpack.

— — —

The motel room was quiet. Dim light from the bedside lamp, the low hum of traffic somewhere in the distance.

Robby lay flat on his back, one arm tucked behind his head, the other resting loosely next to him. The cat was stretched out on top of him. It was completely relaxed. One paw draped over his chest like it had claimed territory. It was heavy for its size.

Robby stared up at the ceiling for a while, not moving. The rise and fall of the cat’s breathing matched his own without him noticing when it started.

Eventually Robby shifted a little and reached for his phone on the nightstand. He unlocked it and chose the camera. He angled it slightly, catching both of them in frame - the cat sprawled across him, his own tired face half-lit by the lamp. Then he snapped the picture and opened the chat with Jack. He attached the photo:

Adopted a new friend.

He sent it.

A minute later his phone buzzed.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Another buzz 

That’s a good reason to keep going.

Robby stilled for a second.

Yeah. He likes riding. 

Another buzz.

Of course he does. What’s his name?

Robby glanced down at the cat, still sprawled across his chest like it owned him.

Three legs.

Didn’t take no for an answer.

Showed up uninvited. Stayed anyway.

Robby’s mouth twitched, while he was typing:

He’s annoying, won’t leave me alone, loves burgers and only has three legs. There was only one option.

The typing bubble appeared.

Disappeared.

Came back.

I don’t like where this is going.

Robby laughed out loud.

Jack, meet Mr. Abbot

The reply was instant.

Fuck you.

Robby's smile widened. Another message followed right after:

You’re unbelievable.

Robby shifted a little under the cat’s weight, one hand coming up to rest lightly against its side. Another message.

He’s not getting neutered by the way.

Another message:

An Abbot doesn’t get neutered.

Robby laughed again.

Another buzz.