Dreamer

“How about you don’t tell anyone, and you do the driving?” you propositioned, flashing the man a faux-innocent look from over the top of the rim as you brought the cup to your mouth. The fresh brew singed the tip of your tongue a bit, just enough to jerk your exhausted mind awake.

“Fine…” Jack caved with a slow huff; his first good breath all day. His following words came out slightly muffled as he leaned forward to press a fleeting kiss to your temple before walking on by you. “How much we got left on our sentence, huh? An hour? Two?”

“Sixty-four minutes, but… Who’s counting?”

“Well, that’s plenty of time for something fun to happen.” Jack turned in the doorway to flash you a knowing grin that you met with a tired scowl.

“Don’t jinx it,” you called to his retreating figure.

You’ve given enough of yourself for one night, you think; and after a rather urgent thoracotomy that nearly killed both the patient and you (though mostly in the metaphorical sense), you feel like you’re owed the small break. Now that the day shift is trickling slowly in, you’ve decided to stay hidden until somebody absolutely needs you.

You sink deeper and deeper into the plastic chair, willing yourself into invisibility, until a baby’s cry shatters the sacred quiet. 

The high-pitched whine cuts through everything — your heavy exhaustion, your simmering headache, and the steady hum of the emergency department you’ve learned to tune out over the years. You drag yourself from your seat with a distant groan in the pit of your throat, ‘cause you know you won’t be able to relax until you know someone else has got it handled. 

You trudge to the door and take a peek down the hallway, if only to say that you did, and find the long corridor bustling with an energy much livelier than you are. When the crowd parts, you spot Dana walking your way with something tiny swaddled in her arms — much too small to be as loud as it is now.

Her eyes light up at the sight of you.

“Dr. Abbot— Just the person I was looking for!” the older woman croons in her usual gritty monotone, with a knowing smile sitting crooked on her mouth. “We got a baby Jane Doe, ditched in the bathroom.”

Your features crumple under the weight of your exhaustion. Your head tips back to groan a long and theatrical, “No…” though your sneakers scuff the floor as you trudge her way despite yourself. “I only have one hour left on my shift— Please don’t make me do anything else.”

“Well, I also got a central line placement in Central 13,” Dana deadpans. “You know, if you’d rather not waste time takin’ care of this perfectly nice baby.”

The swaddled thing fusses when it’s shifted in her hold. Your eyes flit from its scrunched face, round and wet with tears, to the wise look in Dana’s eyes. She grins at your obvious hesitation.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

You sigh and step forward, like a martyr to the gallows. You trade the clipboard in your hand for the baby in Dana’s. She sets the thing gingerly in your hold — a warm and delicate weight between your arms, fitting just perfectly against your chest.

You had done a rotation in pediatrics before you settled on emergency medicine some years back. You know what it means to take care of a baby in the most technical sense, though none of it ever seemed to come totally naturally to you. 

You move like a robot accordingly, all tense and methodical. The whining baby settles into your hold with a gentle coo anyway, like a switch suddenly flipped.

“Well, look at that,” Dana hums with an arched brow of amusement. “You’re a natural.”

“You’re evil,” you deadpan.

“So they say,” the woman quips drily, patting you on the shoulder with a warm hand. “C’mon. Show my shadow how to do a proper pedes check-up— Dr. Abbot’s not as mean as she looks, Miss Emma, I promise.”

You flash the young, fresh-faced nurse a polite smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes before leading her towards the pediatric unit across the way. She’s made of bright smiles, braided chestnut curls, and sunshine incarnate as she scurries just behind you. She’s got a sparkling look in her dark eyes that you’re pretty sure you lost somewhere around your first week of residency.

You pass the workstation with a sort of tunnel vision zeroed in on the vibrantly painted pedes room. You nearly miss Jack standing there, leaning over the desk with his arms folded and his biceps straining against his scrub sleeves.

The silver-haired man briefs a newly arrived Robby on the morning cases and pauses at the sight of you — his whole entire life, cradling a much smaller one in her arms, with an exhausted frown on your face that you don’t bother trying to hide.

Robby traces the man’s suddenly distracted gaze over his shoulder. His brown eyes follow your form, lighting up at the sight of you the same way Jack’s do. 

“Well…” the older man croons. “Would you look at that—”

“Don’t,” you cut in sharply, and don’t bother slowing your stride as you pass them.

Jack’s quiet laughter follows you across the room. His eyes do, too, as he drinks up every ounce of you and the tiny thing swaddled in your arms. He finds himself getting drunk on a craving he didn’t know he had until that very moment.

Robby’s dark eyes squint. “Why do I have a feeling that you’re mentally siphoning through a bunch of baby names right now?”

“I always liked the name Milo for a boy. And Iris for a girl— but the missus is pretty allergic to pollen, so I’m not sure she’d go for that,” Jack answers without missing a beat, as though the thought had haunted his head at least once before. He only turns to face Robby again once you’re out of view. “What do you think?”

Robby just scoffs out a laugh.  “I think you’re screwed, brother.”

Baby Jane Doe is mostly stable, all things considered. 

Physically, she’s perfect. She had obviously spent the bulk of her little life being properly cared for. And, if you had to guess, she spent most of the time being held — if her immediate protest at being left in the warmer had anything to say about it. Her breathy whines fill the otherwise silent room as you perform a routine evaluation with practiced hands. You pay little attention to her annoyed cries and slip into teaching mode despite your palpable fatigue.

Emma hovers just behind you, with empathy glittering in her dark doe eyes. “Gosh,” she sighs. “How sad…”

“Eh,” you hum with a lazy shrug. Your gloved fingers lift the hem of her tiny white t-shirt to check for any bruising on her soft, pale skin, or for any other markers that might indicate signs of infection. You ramble on, half-distracted, “If you think about it, this baby got pretty lucky— If it really was abandoned, I mean. Better to be left here than with a family that can’t love it properly, right?”

Emma’s eyes widen at your cynicism. She can’t shake the feeling that you’re speaking from experience as she swallows hard and nods once in response. “Right…” 

The door swings open across the room. The noise of the E.D. swells for a brief moment, before muffling when it clicks shut again a second later. Robby steps in first, with Jack following close behind. The former stands on the opposite side of the warmer and keeps his suddenly softened gaze on the cooing baby before him.

Jack migrates to your side the same way he always does — never as close as he’d like to be while on the clock, but never more than a few inches away from you when he can be. 

“What are we thinkin’ here, Doc?” he asks.

“Normal pulse. Normal BP,” you rattle off with an air of indifference. “She’s well-hydrated, too. No visible sign of infection, either — though I guess we can’t rule out a benign virus just yet.”

“Do you think she qualifies for Safe Haven?” Emma wonders from Robby’s side.

You shake your head, lips softly jutted. “No. Either this baby is gigantic, or it’s well past the twenty-eight-day mark for Safe Haven. Worse-case scenario at this point is obviously abandonment. She’ll likely be put in foster care after a full evaluation.”

The young girl’s face falls slightly.

You soften despite yourself.

“But,” you add, if only to make her feel a bit better. “Past experience tells me that her parents might’ve just needed a break. Maybe they— I don’t know— stepped out for a cigarette or something. God knows, I’d need one if I had to take care of an alarm clock twenty-four-seven.”

Robby scoffs a weak laugh and shakes his head. “I’ll get Lupe to make an announcement in Chairs. See if anyone’s looking for her— If you’ll excuse me,” he nods with a polite smile down at the squirming baby below before sauntering out of the room.

The baby jerks when the noise of the crowded E.R fills the room again, startled by Dana’s yelling, who seems to be telling off a rowdy patient down the way. Her wet eyes squeeze shut as her gummy mouth opens to bellow a tiny wail. You reach out to comfort the baby, if only to hear less of the thing, with a methodical palm placed against its frail chest. 

It whines for a moment before softening with a contented sigh.

“Look at that… You’re good with her,” Jack mumbles, taking a step closer to peer over your shoulder — until you can smell the coffee on his breath and the musky cologne lingering on his skin. A small smile lifts the corner of his mouth as he watches you with glittering eyes. “Told ya you should’ve gone into pedes.”

You flash him an emotionless scowl. “Don’t patronize me,” you scold.

“Have you guys ever thought about having kids?” Emma wonders with a kind smile, having assumed your marital status from your matching last names and golden wedding bands. She cowers instinctively when your eyes turn to her in sync, fearful she might’ve said the wrong thing. “Or is that super rude to ask? I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s not rude at all,” Jack assures her, reaching to wrap his hands around either end of the stethoscope around his neck. It makes his freckled biceps strain against the black sleeves of his scrubs as his silver head swivels slowly to look at you. Something mischievous swims in his blue-green eyes as he lilts, “We’re just… going with the flow. Right, Dr. Abbot?”

You meet his tightlipped grin with a deadpanned look. The two of you agreed long ago that, while neither of you is totally opposed to having children, you’d also be perfectly happy living a completely childfree life. 

But instead of getting into all of that with less than an hour left on your grueling shift — in front of the newest addition to the nursing team, no less — you just nod with an artificial smile.

“Right. Yeah,” you say, already inching back towards the door. The baby starts to cry again a second later, in a series of revving whines that lead to a sharp shriek. You flash an apologetic grimace over your shoulder from your place in the doorway. “You guys have fun with… all that.”

You spend the next half hour finishing up your already-completed charting. You reword, backspace, and click occasionally at your mouse — pretending to work to keep from being bothered, though it isn’t quite as foolproof as you would’ve liked. Whitaker rushes your way with one of his interns in tow, sporting a worried sort of glint in his wide puppy dog eyes that he only gets when something’s going wrong.

“Hey… Dr. Abbot. Are you— Are you busy at the moment?”

“Nope,” you answer in a monotone, without looking up from the bright-white computer screen ahead of you. “And I’d very much like to keep it that way.”

“Well, uh…” Whitaker falters, shifting awkwardly on the other side of the desk. “We— We kinda need you. In pedes.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Baby Jane Doe hasn’t stopped crying since you left,” the woman behind him says, standing several inches shorter than the boy and sporting a heavy pair of glasses and a glittering silver septum in her nose.

Your eyes dart toward the stranger — Joy Kwon, MS3, the badge on her chest reads.

“That was, like, twenty minutes ago,” you say with an incredulous twist to your features.

“Exactly,” she deadpans.

You huff and lead the duo the short distance back to the pediatric unit. The crying hits you before you’ve even crossed the threshold — a sharp, unrelenting wail that adds to the headache you’ve been nursing all day. 

You find a lanky, blonde-haired man who eerily resembles Whitaker in the vibrantly painted room, though his badge reads James Ogilvie, MS4. The young med student flashes you a wide-eyed look of horror, holding the writhing baby in a visibly awkward hold.

“Please help me,” he pleads.

You don’t bother trying to hide your apathy as you trudge across the room to close the distance between you. You slip the tiny baby back into your hold, where it settles almost instantly, heavying against your chest with another breathy whine. You rock it gingerly in your arms the way you were taught to. Its wet eyes flutter slowly shut as fat tear drops trail down its reddened cheeks.

Whitaker gestures with a dazed smile. “See? Knew it. Total natural.”

You flash the boy a deadpanned look over your shoulder. “Because I’m a woman? That means I’m automatically a natural-born caretaker?”

His light eyes widen with an immediate panic. Joy tries and fails to hide her amused smile as she purses her lips to the side of her mouth. Whitaker, meanwhile, stumbles over himself to get the words out.

“W-What? No! No, not at all! I just—”

“She’s just messing with you, kid.” 

Jack’s voice drifts in as he steps through the door, saving the boy from his own stuttered-out apology. He’s perhaps the only one in Pittsburgh who can decipher your usual monotone from your humorous one, which he was only able to master after years of loving you. 

“Oh…” Whitaker says, deflating with a relieved sigh, though his pink cheeks are slow to lose their newfound color.

“Go check on Mr. Alvarez for me, will ya?” you tell him, jutting your chin back towards the door. “You know, since I have to take care of… this thing.”

Whitaker leaves and takes his interns with him, who trail after him in line like ducklings. They pass by Jack in the doorway, who peers at you over their heads with a pair of wide eyes. 

 “This thing?” he scoffs.

You bounce a shoulder in a lazy shrug. “I’m not getting attached to it.”

“It?!”

You huff and adjust the baby in your arms, with one hand resting on its diapered bottom and your other rubbing gently over its tiny back. You sway gently back and forth, far too sweetly for the following words out of your mouth.

“The entire reason I got into emergency medicine was so I could help people without having to deal with all the— baggage that comes with him.”

“Well, babies don’t have baggage, honey,” Jack laughs as he strolls slowly towards you. “They’re brand new— that’s literally their whole thing.”

“Yeah. That’s because the parents give it to ‘em through… years of psychological torment.”

Jack studies you for a long moment with a pair of squinted eyes. “I think you might be projecting a little bit here…”

“I know I am,” you scoff. “Which is why I’d be a horrible mother. ‘Cause I’d just be a mirror of my mom, and our kid would just be a mirror of me, and it’ll just be a whole cycle of… emotionless, unaffectionate women...”

You trail off with a heavy sigh, lifting your gaze from the calming baby to the man towering over you. You find him wearing a much softer gaze than you expect him to. He tilts his silver head to his shoulder, eyes narrowing and lips curling slowly.

“Our kid?”

Your eyes flick away and back again. “…What?”

“You said our kid,” Jack clarifies with a wider grin.

You roll your eyes at him despite the way your cheeks blaze beneath his unwavering stare. “Well, we are married, you know? Who the hell else would I be having kids with— Robby?”

“God, I hope not— Poor kid,” Jack quips drily before leaning in to press a soft, fleeting kiss to your temple. His silver scruff brushes our delicate skin when he pulls away, far sooner than you would’ve liked. “And, just for the record, I think you’d be an amazing mom.”

Something warm flickers in your chest at his words, like embers stoked suddenly to flame. You recoil physically from the foreign feeling, with a grimace twisting your features.

“Eugh…” 

“What?”

You shake your head in response, parting from him to set the now-slumbering baby into the warmer at your side. You lay it gingerly onto the blankets before stepping away with your hands splayed out, as if it had burnt you in some way.

“It got too real for a second there,” you mutter with a look of disgust on your face. “I started feeling all… warm and… and fuzzy— I didn’t like it…”

Jack laughs. 

“Yeah, that’s what they call happiness, Dr. Abbot,” he jokes in a gritty deadpan. “And I’m glad you’re finally getting to experience it after three whole years of marriage.”

Jack can’t get the sight of it out of his head. You, in the rocking chair in the corner, with the pedes room dimmed to a dull lamplight, cradling a sleeping baby to your chest and looking half-asleep yourself. 

“Thought you weren’t getting attached?” he whispered into the serene silence from his place in the doorway.

“’M not,” you mumbled back, head lolled to your shoulder, eyes half-closed. “‘M just using this as an excuse to shut my eyes for a second.”

Something about it all catches him off guard. Not the baby, exactly — he’s seen a thousand babies before — held them, handed them off, charted them like any other patient in a sea of a hundred different patients. They were always temporary things to him, always someone else’s. 

But then he sees you — his future, his eternity — with someone else’s baby tucked to your chest as if it had always been there. You had one hand instinctively supporting the weight of her head while your other smoothed up and down her back. And your voice, often edged with sarcasm dry enough to sand wood, had softened into something warm and low and honeyed. And the seemingly orphaned baby, who could cry loud enough to rattle glass, goes instantly still in your arms like it finds sanctuary in you alone. 

It does nothing more than pique his curiosity at first — the idea of having kids with you, of how great a mom you would be — which isn’t a completely rare thought, but one that is typically fleeting. But then the thought lingers. Festers. Settles somewhere in the pit of his chest until he can’t breathe without thinking about it. 

By the time you’ve settled in the empty cabin, six hours away from the PTMC, the desire has rooted itself somewhere far deeper than he’d like to admit.

Jack, freshly showered, reclines on the clean sheets of the familiar bed, smelling of detergent and time gone by. The bedroom settles slowly into a lamplit darkness in time with the late night. Fireworks crackle faintly in the distance, in mere echoes rolling across the midnight-colored lake outside. The quiet feels borderline suffocating compared to the never-ending chaos of the E.D. 

You move through the space as if you had always been there. Jack watches you from his spot on the bed, which gives him a perfect view of you in the adjacent bathroom. 

Your hair is still slightly damp from the shared shower, dripping onto the t-shirt swallowing your body whole. Your bare feet pad softly along the tile as you complete the last steps of your skincare routine; your attention flitting between your reflection in the mirror and the video playing on your phone.

It strikes him somewhere deep — swells from his stomach, to his chest, to his throat, until he gets the very sudden urge to cry.

“Should we have a kid, you think?” Jack blurts, as if the question were as simple as asking you if you wanted pizza for dinner.

You still in place in the golden-lit bathroom. Your fingers freeze on your cheeks, mid-swipe of moisturizer, as you flash him a deadpanned glare from the doorway.

“…Do you hear that?” you wonder in a monotone.

“The sound of my sperm dying?” Jack jokes

“The sound of quiet,” you correct before turning away to continue your work in the mirror. “Which doesn’t exist when you have kids. I mean, think about it— We wouldn’t have even been able to come here today if we had a kid. We wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

“Well, that’s just not true,” Jack scoffs, folding his arms behind his silver curls until his biceps strain beneath the sleeves of his black undershirt; the hem rises just enough to reveal the tuft of light brown-blonde hair trailing down into his sweatpants. 

His silver scruff brushes his freckled skin when he turns his head. “Parents take their kids places all the time— or alarm clocks, as you so lovingly called them.”

“Yeah, well, not mine,” you murmur distantly as you chuck your crumpled cotton pads into the bin beside the sink. “They always told me that I was the reason we couldn’t afford to do anything. ‘Cause apparently feed and clothing me was such a burden to them— as if I asked to be here.”

“Your parents were just assholes, babe.”

“The crazy thing is, they were actually pretty nice…” you sigh, bare feet padding softly across the floor as you trudge to bed, plugging your phone into its charger on the nightstand. “Just not to me. Like I ruined them or something.”

Jack’s chest flares with a white-hot warmth that makes his eyes sting. “You know that’s not your fault, right?”

You don’t answer him with words. You just bounce your brows and tilt your head, though he struggles to tell if it’s an agreement or not. He shifts on the mattress when you pull the fluffy comforter down to slide into bed beside him, brows lowered as he keeps his unwavering stare locked on your face.

“Is that why you don’t want kids?” he wonders gently. “Because you think you’ll end up like your parents?”

You scoff, kneeling on the mattress until you settle into place next to his reclined form. “Isn’t everyone terrified of ending up like their parents?”

“Sure, but… You’re nothing like them. I mean, I saw you with that Jane Doe today— You were perfect.”

“Well, you have to say that.”

“No, I don’t,” Jack scoffs. “If I thought any differently, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But I know you’d be a great mom because I saw that today— Saw the rest of my whole goddamn life in that place…”

He trails off with a faraway look in his eyes.

You watch him with a suspicious glint in yours. 

“…You really mean that?” you murmur, halfway shy, picking at pills of cotton on the blanket thrown over your legs. “The part about me… You know, being a good mom, I mean?”

“Of course I do,” Jack laughs like it’s obvious, eyes glittering as he peers up at you. “And it’s not like I expect you to change your mind right now— or ever, if that’s what you want. It’s just… Something to think about, you know?”

“Well…” you tilt your head and trail off with a mischievous sort of lilt in your voice. “They do say the best part of having kids is trying for one.”

Jack grins up at you, brows raised to his hairline. “Do they?” he hums lowly.

“Mhm,” you nod.

“Should we test that theory out, you think?” he teases, all giddy like a teenage boy.

You shrug lazily, t-shirt sleeping off your shoulder, pretending to remain uninterested despite the excitement flaring red-hot in your chest. “Well, what the hell else are we gonna do?”

Something about your indifference makes Jack ravenous. It always has. It makes him feel like he’s got something to prove. And there’s nothing he loves more than watching your mask slip, than watching all your attempts to tease him fade into moans you couldn’t hold back if you tried. 

You melt for him first, when his long fingers slide your pretty panties to the side, dragging an orgasm from you with an expert hand — and then further when he presses his mouth to the wet spot in the thin cotton, drinking the honey you leak from him until he licks another twitching orgasm from your buzzing body.

Jack’s wearing your slick down to the silver scruff on his chin when he crawls back up your trembling form, massaging his stiff cock through his boxers. “You’re not too sensitive, are you?” he wonders gently despite the proud smile sitting crooked on his face and the honey still coating his tongue.

Your hips buck on their own accord, chasing a pleasure you’re not entirely sure you can take.

“Fuck a baby into me,” you plead in a half-drunken slurs, etching scratch marks long his back in an attempt to ground yourself. “Wanna make you a daddy, Jack— Want feel you leakin’ outta me…”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack huffs, like you’ve just punched all the air out of his lungs. “You can’t talk like that, baby— I’ll cum before we’ve even started.”

He knows it’s just the previous two orgasms talking, ‘cause you’re still on the pill after all —  having a baby now is pretty much out of the equation even if you really wanted to. But Jack isn’t in the business of depriving you of what you want. So he gives you all he has for the time being.

He folds your knees to your chest with a pair of wide, calloused hands, keeping your drooling pussy spread for him as he pierces you slow. The head of his cock, glowing red with need, disappears inside your pulsing confines. His throaty groan entwines with your quiet whimpers as your cunt suckles him further in. Once he’s sheathed fully inside, he stills just against you, with the greying thatch of coarse hair above his cock nestled against your sensitive clit.

“Yeah, you feel that?” Jack croons with a breathy laugh, which turns into a moan when your nails rake down his muscular chest. “You’re so full of me, aren’t you, baby?”

Your heavy head nods lazily against the pillow, eyes bleary and wet with desire. They squeeze shut a second later, when Jack’s hips drag back, until only the head of his cock is left inside you. Then he slides back into you, slow enough that you feel every ridge and vein of his cock, and smiles when your back arches off the mattress.

“I’ll give you a baby one day, honey, I promise,” the man babbles, choppy between his measured thrusts. “Fill you up so much it’ll be leakin’ outta you for days—”

You whine, hips bucking into and away from his cock all at once.

“Yeah, that’s it… I’ll get you all round and full… ’Til you’re walking around the E.D… Showin’ everyone what I did to you— how good I make you feel…”

“Please,” you whine.

“Yeah?” Jack coos sympathetically, beneath the wet schlick, schlick, schlick sound of his thrusts inside you. “That what you want?”

You nod, head tilted back and eyes squeezed shut, though the pathetic “please, please, please”’s continue spilling from your kissed mouth.

“Take it then, baby— Take it.”

He buckles down over you, punching into you with shallow thrusts that slowly start to lose their rhythm. He talks you through every inch of your orgasm, which hits you so hard it makes tears swell in the corners of your eyes. 

“That’s it, honey. Let me have it,” he murmurs in your ear as your body starts to twitch beneath his muscular one. “Give me all of it, baby. That’s it.”

Your stomach pools with heat a second later when Jack tenses on top of you, burying his groans in his neck as his jerking cock spits thick ropes of warm cum inside of your pulsing confines. He deflates on top of you when he’s finally spent, sticky body melting with yours, until both of you are melting into the tousled sheets below.

“You okay?” Jack asks through panted breaths, muffled into your sweat-slick neck. 

You nod wordlessly, swallowing hard as the high fades, and shoving lazily at his bare shoulder. “Get off— I gotta go to the bathroom,” you huff. 

Jack slides off your body and falls heavily onto the other side of the mattress. He watches with lidded eyes as you hurry to the bathroom with your thighs clenched together. You clean yourself up inside and return some minutes later to Jack having wiped himself off and tucking his soft cock back into his grey boxers.

“Do you wanna… talk about all that?” he asks with a knowing squint in his eyes.

“Remind me tomorrow,” you sigh, feet heavy as you trudge back into bed. 

Jack scoffs a laugh, knowing you’ll likely tell him the same exact thing tomorrow, and flips off the lamp on the nightstand. The golden bedroom delves into a midnight-blue darkness.

His limbs entwine with yours on nothing short of muscle memory when he slides back into bed with you. His long legs slot with yours beneath the covers as he throws a heavy arm over your stomach, folding his free one beneath his head.

Quiet settles over the dark bedroom like a blanket. 

“Actually,” you blurt into the silence, catching Jack right before he falls asleep.

“Yeah?” he mumbles, warm breath fanning over your shoulder.

“It’ll probably take about— I don’t know, three or so days for all the results to come back. You know, for Baby Jane Doe’s workup,” you murmur, half-shy. “And we’ll be back to work by then, so… I was thinking maybe we could… Never mind, it’s stupid.”

Jack lifts his head before you can shrink back into yourself, eyes flitting across your shadowed profile. “No, what is it?”

You roll onto your back to meet his darkened gaze with a far more sheepish one. “Maybe we could take her, you know? Just foster her on an emergency basis until we can find her family. Or someone who can foster her long-term. Like a…”

“A trial run?” Jack finishes for you with an audible grin. “Yeah, that’s definitely one way to pitch it, honey.”

You grimace, hiding your burning face behind your hands. “I told you, it’s stupid,” you whine, muffled behind your palms.

“It’s not stupid,” Jack assures you with a quiet laugh. He pries your hands from your face with gentle fingers wrapped around your wrist. “I think it’s a great idea. We can, you know, taste the waters about the whole baby thing and help a kid in need at the same. Sounds like a win-win to me.”

“Yeah?” you hum with a soft wince.

“Yeah,” he nods. “We can look into it when we get back.”

Your chest swells with a sunshine sort of warmth when he settles back into bed beside you, tossing a muscular arm over you to tuck you back into his bare chest. It’s a pure, unadulterated feeling of overwhelming happiness that weirdly makes you feel like crying. ‘Cause only Jack would agree to foster an abandoned baby you found at work not even a day ago; only Jack would see all of you and still love you completely, for a reason you still can’t name.

“I hate when you’re supportive,” you grouse on instinct as you bury your head back into the pillow, even though you mean the exact opposite.

Jack knows this, too, so he just grins into your hair and jokes, “Yeah, I know. It’s definitely my worst quality.”

and now there was a puppy in your bathroom.

a very tiny puppy. a very dirty puppy. a very skinny puppy.

a puppy that had looked at you with huge brown eyes and immediately destroyed your ability to make rational decisions.

so now you’d spent the entire night cleaning him up, feeding him tiny portions of food left over in the fridge, googling what was safe for the pup to eat, and trying to convince yourself that jack wouldn’t be upset.

or at least not too upset.

the front door unlocked just after seven in the morning.

your stomach dropped. jack was home.

you were still sitting on the couch in yesterday’s clothes, running entirely on caffeine and poor decisions.

the second he walked inside, he frowned. “why are you awake?”

you immediately looked anywhere but at him. “couldn’t sleep.” you stuttered out quick.

jack narrowed his eyes. doctor eyes. the same eyes that caught every lie told in the emergency department. unfortunately for you, they worked at home too. “you look guilty.”

you scoffed. “i’m just tired.”

“you look guilty and tired.” he kicked off his shoes. “what happened?”

“nothing happened. what makes you think that?” you defenced back.

“something happened.”

you smiled weakly.

he sighed.

“how much trouble am i about to be in?”

“define trouble.”

jack groaned. “oh no.” he pointed at you. “what did you do?”

“i didn’t do anything.”

before he could respond—

woof!

both of you froze.

the tiny bark came from the bathroom. jack slowly turned his head. then looked back at you. then toward the bathroom again. then back at you.

“…what was that?”

you considered lying.

you lasted approximately one second. “…a dog.”

jack closed his eyes. “you found a dog.”

“well technically the dog found me.”

“that’s not how dogs work.”

another bark echoed through the apartment. followed by a tiny scratching sound against the bathroom door.

jack pinched the bridge of his nose.

you stood. “before you say anything—”

“that’s never a promising start.”

“—he was abandoned.”

jack immediately opened one eye.

you continued. “he was cold.”

the other eye opened. “and hungry.”

his expression softened despite himself.

you knew it would.

jack could pretend to be grumpy all he wanted, but he spent twelve hours a day saving people for a living. he had the softest heart of anyone you’d ever met.

you disappeared into the bathroom before he could argue further. a moment later, you emerged carrying the beagle puppy.

the puppy looked ridiculously small wrapped in a towel.

one floppy ear. oversized paws. sleepy brown eyes.

the second jack saw him, his face did something. not much. just enough.

that tiny shift that meant he was already losing the battle. “he’s cute,” he admitted.

victory. you grinned.

the puppy, however, had his own priorities. the second you crouched near the couch, the little beagle scrambled from your arms.

straight toward jack.

jack blinked. “oh.”

the puppy climbed directly into his lap. like he’d been doing it his entire life.

tiny tail wagging so hard his whole body wiggled. you watched in delight as jack looked down at the puppy.

the puppy looked up at jack. and that was it. gone. completely smitten. jack was finished.

the puppy pressed his nose against jack’s hand. jack immediately scratched behind one floppy ear. the puppy practically melted.

“oh my god,” you whispered.

jack didn’t even hear you. “hey, buddy.”

the puppy licked his thumb. jack smiled. an actual smile. the soft one. the one that made you fall in love with him. the one that meant you were absolutely bringing this animal home forever.

you pointed accusingly. “there it is.”

“what?”

“that face.”

jack glanced up. “i don’t know what you’re talking about.”

the puppy promptly curled up against his chest and fell asleep.

you laughed. jack looked back down at the tiny sleeping beagle. then sighed. a long, defeated sigh.

“…we should probably schedule a vet appointment.”

your grin widened. “jack.”

“don’t.”

“jack.”

he rolled his eyes. “fine.”

you practically launched yourself at him.

the puppy remained asleep through the entire thing.

It was a shit day in the Pitt.

When asked about your day, that was always your reply.

The patients were either monumentally stupid, disrespectful, verbally abusive assholes, intoxicated to the point they could not even hear the questions you asked, or the most precious, sweetest people ever - and the sweet, precious ones were always the sickest.

It was a cruel running gag of the universe, you were sure of it. The stupid assholes survived, and the sweet grandmas who called you hun and made you compliments, the polite single mums tearing themselves apart to keep their children’s worlds whole, died.

PTMC was chronically underfunded, the staff chronically overworked, running on shitty coffee, insomnia, saviour complexes and fumes, and the air conditioning unit perpetually shit.

What was there to love about this job?

You sat on the low wall by the ambulance bay, tucked away from the chaos of the ER against the corner by the wall with your knees drawn up to your chest and your head resting against the brick wall behind you.

It was your own personal little safe haven.

Everyone on staff had one.

Trinity and Dennis had the break room. Donnie and Jessy the hallways leading down into the subbasement where only the generators, central supply and the IT gremlins (as you affectionately called them) hid. Abbot and Robby had the roof.

You had this corner.

You took another sip from the can of soda you held in your lap. The late summer heat was oppressive, squeezing in around you until the air felt too heavy, too thick. The can was sweating as much as you, condensation seeping through the cheap fabric of your scrubs. Your feet were aching, your head too. Your hoodie lay discarded next to you on the wall. The ER itself was freezing cold, but the outside smoldering, and the waiting room was somehow even hotter.

ER waiting rooms often defied all laws of physics.

Yeah, when asked about your day, you always replied with shit. 

The pay wasn’t enough for the backbreaking labour expected of you to keep the crumbling healthcare system afloat on your compassion and spite alone. The patients were ungrateful or so gut-wrenchingly tragic you couldn’t breathe. You woke in cold sweats most nights, remembering the faces of patients you’d lost years ago. The air conditioning unit might as well have come straight from hell with how it savoured torturing you. You were still paying off student loans and would continue to do so for many years just to have parents argue with you that vaccines were a hoax, their children lying in the next room as they slowly died from preventable diseases.

And yet, despite it all, you kept coming back. You came back every day. You picked up shifts when colleagues called out. You volunteered for holidays so those who actually had a family could spend the day with them. You stayed longer when the Pitt was swamped.

Perhaps you had some masochistic tendencies (you definitely had those).

Perhaps you were simply insane.

For some inexplicable reason, staying away from the hospital longer than two days in a row drove you mad with boredom. You stood in the front row of every mass casualty, swirling through the ER, past bloodied gurneys and screaming patients, blood pounding in your ears and feeling alive like never before amidst the death and devastation.

There was another perk to being an absolute, hopeless workaholic, and it was currently arriving for his shift.

Robby started riding his new motorcycle to work a few weeks back, and with the shock of PittFest still deep in everyone’s bones, it took a few days for people to even realise. It started with Dana pursing her lips. It ended with you somehow finding time to sneak away for your ‘lunch’ break every day at seven a.m. when Robby arrived for his shift. 

He didn’t always notice you sitting on your wall with your packed lunch and ice-cold can of soda, no matter the weather. When he did, he shot you one of his strained, tight-lipped smiles or waved before heading inside to do handovers with Abbot.

You worked the midnight to noon shift, your time at the hospital overlapping with Abbot’s, Shen’s and Robby’s shift, a new system being tested by the hospital to provide greater continuity of care. The second-you worked from noon to midnight.

You didn’t mind. 

You got to watch Robby arrive for work and wave him goodbye when you left to go home.

You looked forward to it. To these slammed eight hours you got to see him, be near him, work at his side, sometimes close enough to smell the scent of soap he used still clinging to his skin.

Robby never wore a helmet. 

In front of Dana, he pretended he did. When you were around for one of their arguments on the matter, Robby always glanced over to you, sharing a private, conspiratorial smirk with you and winking.

Your knees went weak every single time.

It was pathetic really, how huge your crush on your much older attending had grown.

It started as fawning admiration for his skill and calm even amidst the shittiest, harshest shifts when you were nothing but a flustered med student who, no matter what she did, always stood in the way. When you were a resident, still overwhelmed that you actually got placed with your dream hospital, you worked tirelessly, making it your whole existence to prove to Dr Robby you could be trusted, that you were good, that you’d earned your spot here. That you soaked up everything he taught you. That you had not wasted the time he spent teaching you. You wanted to make him proud. You craved his approval and praise.

You were pathetic.

But when he’d been the first to congratulate you when you passed the boards, and he’d been the one to tell you your application for the attending position at PTMC’s ED had been accepted - those were your most cherished memories…

Robby parked in the same spot as always, close to the entrance of the ambulance bay. Sweat clung to his brow. The corners of his eyes were crinkled from a lifetime of smiling. You wondered when he stopped. What had sucked the joy and happiness out of him? Perhaps it was this job.

I’d make him happy again, that unhelpful, ridiculous little voice in your head whispered. You shoved it away roughly. What did you even have to offer a man at least twenty years your senior?

I’d suck him off so good he’d forget how to breathe.

“Oh my god.” You muttered to yourself, biting the inside of your cheek to fight off the heat creeping up your neck. When had you become such a fucking pervert? Lusting after some old man. Your former teacher. Your boss!

You were still watching Robby, like the unhinged little freak you’d become for him. He was checking his phone, still sitting on his bike. You watched him shove the phone back into the side pocket of his cargo pants and then, as if time had turned to molasses, you watched him shove his hand under the hem of his shirt and lift it up to wipe the sweat off his face and beard.

Your eyes glued themselves to the sight unfolding before you, to Robby’s soft, round stomach on full display, protruding over his belt like the most delicious fucking muffin you’d ever seen. You stared at his sweaty skin, the liberal dusting of coarse dark hair covering it, mouth quite literally watering at the sight.

Robby dropped his shirt again. It caught on his belly, leaving a delicious sliver uncovered, the same slivers you had stolen glances of every time he stretched his back in the ER, causing his scrubs to ride up.

Robby looked up and froze. Your eyes met across the ambulance bay. You couldn’t look away. What was wrong with you? Ogling his belly in public like some- some belly fetishist!

Heat suffused your face and neck, making even the scorching temperatures around you go green with envy. 

Robby stared back at you. A slight pink tinge spread across his cheeks. He tugged on his shirt, even when it sat normally again and averted his eyes, twisting his head away with more force than necessary.

You were still staring at him.

You couldn’t stop.

Seeing his naked belly had broken something, fried some essential wiring in your brain, you were sure of it.

Robby didn’t look at you when he stalked past to disappear into the Pitt.

You stayed. Trapped between mortification at being caught ogling him and depraved delight at the sight that had burnt itself into your retinas.

This was not good.

This was not at all helpful with regards to your concerning, lecherous crush - though crush was far too tame a word to describe the absolutely filthy thoughts that came to haunt you every time you lay down in bed to catch some sleep between shifts.

You finished your soda, ate the last of your ‘lunch’ while desperately trying to remember how to act normal before heading back inside.

The scent of Robby’s aftershave, still fresh in the morning, still hung in the air. You felt yourself blush again. Oh god. You were fucked. You were so royally, monumentally FUCKED.

I want to fuck him.

“Oh my god, shut the fuck up.” You hissed to yourself.

Dana shot you an incredulous look over the edge of her glasses, one brow raised, no doubt seeing the blush still darkening your skin when you went to check the board. You forced yourself not to look for Robby before grabbing a tablet to throw yourself back into the ER madness - a mistake, you realised as you turned around and collided with another person.

A solid, soft, very good-smelling person.

“Dr- Dr Robby.” You muttered, backing away quickly. Could this day get any worse?

You looked up on reflex - it was impossible not to look at Robby, not to look for Robby, but all you could think about as you were peering up at your old mentor and object of all your desires was how you would ride your pillow tonight while thinking about the mouth-watering show he’d inadvertently put on for you this morning.

Your blush only darkened further.

Had you been any more sane in the moment, you’d have noticed Robby’s own flushed skin, or the fidgedy, uneasy energy surrounding him.

Dana looked from you to him and promptly decided she was not paid enough to deal with whatever was going on between the two attendings.

You were called away to one of your cases and quickly ducked around Robby to scurry away, taking all your perverted thoughts and shame with you.

Good thing mind-readers don’t exist. And in case they do, please don’t tell on me.

Your shift dragged on, tugging you along at the most infuriating, pointless pace ever. You liked your shift time slot. You liked that you got to spend one half with the nightshift crew and the second half with the dayshift. Nights were slower and somewhat calmer but also batshit crazy. Days were turbulent and demanding. You never wanted to go back to twelve uninterrupted hours of this shit ever again. Eight were more than enough. 

You’d been avoiding Robby, and you’d almost made it to the end of your shift without interacting with him. You’d even voluntarily exiled yourself to chairs.

Just another hour to go before you could slink out, taking your shame with you and hopefully, hopefully Robby would have forgotten all about this by tomorrow. Or at least you could both pretend it had never happened.

You swirled around at the sound of your name being called - and cursed.

Robby made his way through the flow of staff and patients towards you.

“A word.” It was a question. He pushed the door to an empty exam room open and, hanging your head in defeat and embarrassment, you ducked under his arm and slipped into the room. Robby followed. The door fell shut. The chaos and noise of the ER faded away, leaving you alone with your stupid blush and stupid, feral thoughts and rapid heartbeat pounding in your ears.

Robby towered over you with his arms crossed, ridiculously tall and handsome and looking at you with that stern, sexy disappointed-teacher-look. You both shrunk under it and internally purred like a cat getting exactly what it wanted. He tilted his head and tipped it forward, looking down at you with those delicious dark puppy eyes-

“I expected more professionalism from you. If you have an issue, I thought you would have enough respect for me to bring it up with me personally, instead of doing this fucking charade of playing cat and mouse!”

Your eyes flicked down to his belly. Your severely unhelpful brain supplied pictures of you kneeling in front of him, feeling his belly against your forehead, choking on his cock while he berated you in exactly that tone.

Robby hissed your name. You flinched, head whipping up to meet his eyes again.

I’m no better than a man.

“I-” You mumbled unhelpfully, unsure of how to save yourself from the mess you were sinking into deeper and deeper the longer you were alone with him.

He was still going. Working himself up into a right frenzy while tearing into you in this new stress-fuelled way of his he never used to do before. You remember well how he knocked a former R4, who’d long since moved to another hospital after making attending, down a peg for shouting at you so hard after you made a harmless mistake you started crying and hyperventilating.

He was a very different man back then.

Not that you minded this new, rougher, meaner version of him.

“I know I am not the youngest man anymore-” An edge of insecurity slipped into his voice. “-but you are a doctor for Christ’s sake! I didn’t do anything inappropriate, so I don’t get what the fuck is going on with you that you can’t even do your fucking job today! Are you thinking about going to HR? Gloria? Is that it? Some snowflake shit about not being able to see some skin without getting offended?”

He was still going.

I want you to call me a filthy slut while I ride your sexy belly.

Silence.

No-

Oh god no-

“Did I say that-”

“Yep.”

You wanted to disappear. To stop existing. Better yet, for you to never have existed in the first place.

“I-” Your mouth went dry, so dry that every swallow felt like trying to force sand down your throat. “Fuck- I’m sorry-” You hid your face behind your hands and fought against the tears burning in your eyes.

Fuck.

Fucking stupid.

How could a decently smart person - and you had to at least be decently smart to have made it through med school and residency - be so fucking stupid?!

“Dr Robby, please- I-”

You bolted out of the room, leaving behind a stunned, slightly flushed Robby.

***

It was almost eight pm when a knock on your door tore you from your spiralling thoughts that shifted from berating yourself to considering resignation - because what else was there left to do at this point?

You’d stayed hidden in chairs until your shift was over and used the noon rush of people using their lunch break to see a doctor to slip out without bumping into Robby.

You barely slept, and you still had not decided whether you’d be showing up for your shift at midnight.

Peering through the peephole made your blood run cold.

Robby.

A dishevelled, sweaty, irritated-looking Robby. At your door.

You opened the door a crack, hiding behind it with only your head popping out. You felt Robby stare down at you, but you had no bravado left to face him. You didn’t have any bravado. You would have never said that to him, never confessed to your raunchy thoughts and fantasies. You still had no idea how the words slipped out.

“Can we talk?”

You nodded, still not looking up and stepped aside enough for him to slip into your apartment. You shut the door and slunk back down the hall and into the living room, where you sat down on your sofa, curling up into a tight ball with your knees to your chest and a pillow clutched in your arms.

Silence stretched between you, thick and loaded.

“Look…” Robby ran his hands through his hair and slumped down in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table with an audible sigh. “I don’t appreciate being ridiculed.”

Your head snapped up, brows dipping into a frown, lips parting as though to say something, but Robby lifted his hand, cutting you off.

“I made you uncomfortable, and instead of being a man about it and acknowledging it and apologising, I was a dick. That wasn’t right, but paying me back like that? That wasn’t cool either.”

“I- I didn’t-”

Robby snorted, a bitter, self-deprecating sound that sent a pang through your heart. “Right. Because I’m supposed to believe you meant that.”

“I did.” Your voice was a tiny, fragile little thing, bearing the evidence of the hours you’d spent panicking, thinking about what you were supposed to do to fix this, and no negligible amount of crying.

It was Robby’s turn to stare at you, opening and closing his mouth in a futile attempt to come up with something to say.

“I shouldn’t have- I never thought I’d say something like that to you, and that was so inappropriate, and I am sorry, but I won’t sit here and let you claim I was lying. Because I wasn’t.” Your cheeks burnt, but you forced yourself to hold eye contact even when your throat felt as though it was swelling shut.

“You- meant it?”

You nodded.

“You want to ride my belly?”

You looked away. Heat surrounded your face. “I think you look good. Really good.”

“Then you have very questionable taste, kid.”

You put the pillow down and got up, moving past your coffee table to stand in front of Robby. He watched you with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. You set your knee against the edge of the cushion, right between his spread legs.

“Do you have a problem with my taste?”

Robby whispered your name, a warning that was already hanging on by a thread, brittle, too weak to conceal his own yearning he’d been fighting to keep hidden from you.

You were too young, too pure for him to drag you down with his own messiness and inability to commit. He didn’t care about workplace relationships, he should as department chair and man who’d been frozen out by scorned nurses to the point Dana had to berate everyone involved into restoring some semblance of professionalism, but you- he didn’t want to mess you up, and everything he touched got messed up.

“Maybe it’s not my taste that’s the issue.” You placed your hand against his shoulders, curling the fingers of the other around his chin softly to force him to look at you. “Maybe it’s your perception.”

You bent down further. Robby bristled, taking a sudden, deep inhale. He looked like a man trapped between resisting and breaking, and a wicked, depraved part of you desperately wanted to see him snap.

You dropped to your knees. Robby groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying and failing to resist the temptation of looking at you, watching you huddled between his spread legs in your skimpy sleep shorts and loose shirt that did nothing to conceal the fact you weren’t wearing a bra.

You nuzzled the inside of his thigh with your head while dragging your hands down his chest, over his soft, warm belly-

You bit your lip to stifle a groan. You were too far gone to be embarrassed by how wet you already were for him, how needy and addled with pure, carnal lust that had been building for years, had grown to such devastating heights you apparently blurted it out in the middle of getting your ass handed to you - unfairly - by your attending.

You toyed with the hem of Robby’s scrub top.

“You’re crazy.”

“It would seem that way.” You murmured as you pushed his shirt up, eyes latching onto the delicious sight of soft, warm, hairy flesh. His body looked like the epitome of comfort. Lived-in, functional, not like those overly polished, eating disorder-driven fuck boys that clogged up your timeline on social media and flooded the dating apps, talking about discipline while eating unseasoned chicken with rice and making women feel shit about their very normal, very natural bodies. You could picture yourself curling up against Robby to leech off his warmth at night. Or resting your head on him while he ran his fingers through your hair.

“But since I already made a fucking spectacle of myself at work, I might as well do this.” You pressed your lips against his stomach and bit back a needy moan. Robby’s hand shot up to thread through your hair. He watched you mouth at his belly as if it was the hottest thing you’d ever seen, lavishing kisses and teasing kitten licks all over his squishy flesh.

He could not fathom how someone as pretty as you could ever be attracted to the worst part of him. Though perhaps these days the worst part of him was his steadily worsening temper… not that you seemed especially opposed to that too.

“Can I?” You looked up at him through your lashes.

“What?” Robby struggled to keep up with you, his mind preoccupied with trying to process how he’d ended up in your apartment with you kneeling between his legs and still somehow not to suck his cock.

“Ride your belly.” You painted languid patterns onto his exposed belly with your fingers, kempt nails scraping softly over his skin, making him shiver.

“Yeah.”

His reply came out breathless, without him really thinking about it. You emitted a squeaking noise of pure delight, and any inhibitions he might still have had melted away under it. You got to your feet, shimmying out of your shorts and panties before straddling him. You tugged and pulled impatiently on his shirt, but Robby needed a moment to get over the way your tits were in his face.

His shirt joined your shirts on the ground. Your fingers found their way into his hair and beard, toying with the coarse hair while rolling your hips against him. You stifled a moan against his temple, insides clenching violently around nothing as you dragged your soaked folds over his soft flesh. You applied more pressure, and his flesh gave way for you, allowing you more friction without it hurting or overstimulating your already swollen clit. You felt his hair against your inner thighs and heated flesh, a teasing tickle that sent prickling shivers of desire and need down your spine.

“Robby-” You moaned breathlessly. His face caught in your hands, you tipped his head back and slanted your lips over his. It was a messy kiss, uncoordinated and frankly, pathetically eager.

But was it your fault this sad old man underneath you was so fucking hot it burnt your neurons to just look at him?

After a stunned moment, Robby reciprocated. He cupped the back of your head with one hand while the other settled on the small of your back to pull you closer. He slipped down on the armchair a little, making it easier for you to grind against him.

“Fuck, sweetheart-” He muttered against your lips when you pulled back to gasp for air. “This what you wanted? You young people have some fucking issues…”

You shuddered above him.

Robby’s eyes lit up with mirth.

“Right… no, this is not all you wanted, is it? What was it you said? You want me to call you a filthy slut?”

You could only nod.

“Tell me, baby.” His hands fell to your hips, fingertips digging into your flesh as he pulled you down harder against him. “What is it your deranged mind pictured when you thought about this? Did you get yourself off to the thoughts of an old man’s floppy stomach?”

You nodded again.

“Words, sweetheart. Can’t help you if you don’t talk. Come on, be a big girl and use your words.”

You moaned.

Robby forcibly stilled the movement of your hips.

“I-” You couldn’t meet his eyes. Embarrassment burnt a path up your throat, and for some terrible, filthy reason it turned you on all the more. “You’re pulling my hair, holding my arms behind my back, and degrade me. Sometimes- sometimes you tell me to stroke your cock while I get myself off. To make myself useful.”

Robby inhaled a hissing breath through his teeth.

Slowly, he ran his hand up your spine, just to drag it back down and catch the hem of your shirt. You lift your arms to help him peel it off you. His eyes flicked down to your breasts immediately, mentally cataloguing the sight of you, saving it to his memory.

He threaded his fingers through your hair, palms flush against your scalp, just to curl his fingers, gripping your hair tightly at the root, and you thought you could have come right then, just from finding out Robby knew how to properly pull a girl’s hair.

He caught your wrist and twisted your arm behind your back, just enough to hurt but not so much he would dislocate your shoulder, dragging another stuttering moan from you.

“Go on then.” Robby purred, voice lower than before, eyes dark with hunger. “If you’re getting yourself off by rubbing your little cunt all over me like a fucking slut, you might as well make it worth my while.”

You could barely move. Between the silent threat of your arm twisted behind your back, forcing you to arch your back and lewdly present your breasts to Robby, and his hand in your hair, you were trapped.

It was so much better than you ever thought it would be.

Robby chuckled. “Fucking hell… and here I thought you were this innocent, well-behaved little thing.”

You finally managed to reach the waistband of his pants. It took you several attempts to manage to slip your hand under it, straining in Robby’s grasp and gasping when a movement had your shoulder aching. Robby, all the while, mocked you for struggling, for dripping all over him like a fucking whore, for getting so turned on by being man-handled.

“There you go… see, that wasn’t hard, was it? Pretending to be a useless, dumb bitch isn’t going to get you out of this, sweetheart. You put yourself in this situation, now be a big girl about it, hm-” Robby was cut off by a groan when you managed to close your fingers around his hard length. You tugged, forcing him out of the confines of his boxers. He felt big - long and heavy in your hand. Robby’s grip tightened around your wrist, dragging another stuttering moan from your lips.

You rolled your hips, rutting helplessly against his belly, immobilised by his strong arms around you, his cock throbbing against your palm-

“That’s all you can do? Hm? You get your hand around a cock, and suddenly that brain of yours doesn’t work anymore? Come on, sweetheart, put some effort in it. I thought you were going to make this worth my while? Why should I sit here and watch some whore get off?”

Pleasure pounded through your veins and rose to your head, wrapping your brain into a fuzzy blanket of bliss. Robby’s words made shame and embarrassment skyrocket in your chest. His hand around your wrist, twisting your arm behind your back, had sharp pain shooting through you, gasoline to the already raging storm of desire and need wreaking havoc over you.

“Robby- Robby, fuck- don’t stop-”

Tears clung to your lashes and rolled down your cheeks. Your chest rose and fell with each laboured breath you forced into your lungs. Your skin prickled as though you’d touched a live wire.

Robby’s dark eyes were glued to you, glinting with desire and wonder at the discovery of your own depravity. Never, never would he have expected the bubbly, sweet, innocent girl who’d been his med student all those years ago would get up to shit like this.

In all the years he’d spent pining after you, he never dared to think you would be this fucking perfect for him.

“Are you going to come? Are you seriously going to come from this? Fucking hell, sweetheart… such a disgusting, filthy fucking whore…”

“Y-yes-” You threw your head back, just for him to pull on your hair tighter, force your head back further until your toes were curling and your lips falling open around a suffocated moan. Your hand, already slick with pre-cum, tensed around his throbbing cock. “I’m a disgusting whore- your- your filthy whore- Robby- ah-”

“Oh, mine, are you? Am I to believe you won’t crawl to another man to have him throw you around the second I leave here?”

You tried to nod, but you could barely move your head.

“You can pretend to be a good girl all you want, baby, I don’t fucking believe you.”

“Daddy-”

A shudder tore through Robby, followed by a grin splitting across his face.

“Daddy? Oh ho ho, sweetheart.”

Your cheeks heated up under a fierce, bright red blush spreading across them.

“No no no, don’t you dare pretend you didn’t say that. Jesus, you’re such a fucking mess… no wonder you’re getting off to me tossing you around like you’re nothing but a used cum rag.”

“Robby-”

“No, baby.” Robby let go of your hair just to grab your chin. “No backpaddling now. Address me properly, pet.”

“D-daddy-”

“There you go. So there is some brain in that pretty head of yours after all.”

“Fuck me, daddy- please- ohmygod- I want to come on your dick-”

Robby was too far gone to question anything at this point. He was far too old to act like this, far too old to not waste a single thought of contraception or STIs or just the fact that he was your boss and you were far too young for him.

Robby let go of your arm. He had enough mental wherewithal about him still to ease it out of the uncomfortable position he held it in. He watched you for a second to make sure he’d not done any damage. You might be a little sore tomorrow, but from the way you moved it and rolled your shoulder to shake off the tension clinging to your muscles, he was sure you were fine.

You emitted a surprised squeal when Robby stood up with you in his arms, effortlessly, as though you weighed nothing. He turned you around and pushed you face-first onto the armchair. Your knees sank into the cushion. You clung to the backrest, just for Robby to grab your hair and push your face down. His fingers dug into your side, thumb pressing down on the small of your back viciously until you arched your back for him.

“Fuck- don’t even need any training, huh?”

You felt his blunt head rub through your soaked folds, heard the sharp intake of air he took in your ear as he bent over you, his front moulding to your back, belly pressed flush against your back-

“Keep that up and I might let you come.”

“Daddy-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Can’t trust a stupid slut to do as she’s told.” Robby forced your head to the side. You met his eyes through tear-soaked lashes. His lips brushed harshly against your cheek, his beard scratching your skin deliciously. “Tell me what you want, sweetheart. Come on. Beg me. I know you want to.”

“I want you-” You moaned, bucking against him, desperately seeking some friction to ease the painful pressure between your legs. “I want you to fuck me, daddy- I’ve wanted you- ah- wanted you for so long-”

“Yeah? How long, baby? How long have you been thinking about my cock stretching out that slutty little cunt?”

“Years-” Your nails dug into the fabric of your armchair, the material straining beneath your desperate grip, tears tumbling down your cheeks and falling off your jaw. A desperate sob tore through your chest. “Robby, please-”

You were cut off by the overwhelming stretch of his cock breaching you, pushing forward in a single, devastating thrust that had you trembling and whimpering under Robby. He felt so good- so fucking good- The stretch of him forcing your body to open up to him was just short of too much. He filled you up so good, thick and hot and heavy, a solid, throbbing weight inside your quivering, sopping cunt you could not forget.

“Shut up.” Robby hissed in your ear, knowing his sharp tone would only drag more delicious, high-pitched whines from you. “You got yourself into this mess, now be a good girl and take what daddy gives you. I don’t want to fucking hear you complain, sweetheart. You didn’t have to act like a fucking whore, you chose to, and now you see what daddy does to pathetic sluts throwing themselves at him.”

He fucked you in quick, jostling thrusts that had the feet of the armchair scraping across your flood. A distant, very distant part of you worried about Robby knocking the whole thing over from how hard he was pounding into you, but it quickly shut up when he let go of your hair to hold onto your waist, face nuzzling into the back of your neck.

He was panting, breathing loud and heavily, only interrupted by low, deep, rumbling grunts. His hips slammed into you, slamming you into the worn cushions. His star of david necklace tapped against your shoulder blade on every thrust while he mouthed at your ear and the side of your face, beard scraping deliciously over your sweaty skin.

The feeling of your cunt clamped down around him like a vice had apparently melted away every nasty word he could have thrown at you for your own sick, twisted pleasure, replacing the severe, struggling man you’d grown used to interacting with with a much softer version.

He muttered sweet nothings and tender praise into your skin while clinging to your waist as if you were a life raft. 

And fuck, you’d be his raft, life preserver and stress relief if only he kept fucking you like this.

A younger version of you made a vow what felt like lifetimes ago to not waste any more of your time on toxic, unstable men, but for Robby you might just throw every common sense out the window.

Robby’s big nose smushed into your cheek, he kissed the tears off your skin, telling you how good you were doing for him, how good you felt for him, while a ceaseless, barely comprehensible string of daddy and please tumbled off your lips and into the cushion he’d shoved your face into.

Within minutes - or had it been hours? You weren’t sure. You sure as hell couldn’t trust your mind in this situation - Robby had reduced you to a whimpering, drooling mess. Your own arousal mixed with his pre-cum ran down your thighs and slicked up every thrust, causing an obscene symphony of wet noises paired with the telltale slap slap slap of skin hitting skin to fill up your dim living room.

Robby pressed his face into the space between your shoulder blades. He reached around you, pressing two fingers to your swollen clit, rubbing the pads of his fingers over it at just the right rhythm to make you fall apart with a strangled scream, his name still on your lips.

He thrust into you once, twice more before following you, grunting against your skin and coming inside you. His hips kept moving, almost automatically, fucking his cum deeper inside you until it covered his whole length and dripped down his balls.

You’d turned to putty under him. Drooling, happy, satisfied putty. You let your body slide down the backrest, collapsing on the armchair that was no doubt traumatised now, covered in your own arousal, cum, tears and drool as it was now.

You rubbed a hand over your face, humming in contentment.

“Where’s your bedroom?”

Robby’s voice was soft, caring, the way it only got with injured, scared children and hearing him address you with it after he just wrecked you and called you a useless, disgusting slut had your insides turn all mushy and warm.

You gestured down the hall, unable to get enough of your bearing to talk. You didn’t expect him to stay. You certainly didn’t expect him to pick you up bridal style and carry you to your bedroom, or to fetch a warm washcloth from your bathroom and use it and his tongue to carefully but thoroughly clean you up.

He set you down on your unmade bed and dragged the warm cloth over your thighs before, almost as an afterthought, cleaning himself up. He settled himself between your legs, face smushed against your heated flesh and lapped at your cunt until every last drop of him was gone and you were clinging to his hair, whimpering his name sweetly.

And because Robby was apparently a depraved, wretched old man, he stayed there. He stayed there, kissing and licking and sucking at your skin until he’d dragged another orgasm from you and Jesus, you sounded so fucking sweet and tasted so fucking good- Robby couldn’t pull himself away. No matter how much he should. No matter how much guilt crashed down on him now that the lust and hunger had subsided. 

You wanted it, but how could he talk to you like that? Use you like that? You were such a sweet, young thing… how could you even know whether this was something you truly wanted? Not something you were made to believe you should enjoy? Robby had seen it before, and he had never wanted to be a part of it.

Even when you smiled at him, fingers playing with his hair and beard absentmindedly, he couldn’t help but feel like he’d done something terrible to you.

“Stay.” You croaked, and Robby felt himself nod before he could really think about the request, but yeah… what else was he going to do? Leave you? Fuck no.

He tossed the washcloth into your hamper and fetched you a glass of water. You gulped it down greedily before settling down, curling up against his side and nuzzling your face into his chest, your hand resting on his belly, drawing lazy circles onto his skin and playing with his hair. Robby buried his nose in your hair, the exhaustion of his shift finally crushing down on him, eyes falling shut…

Your alarm dragged you out of the easy, content, warm nap you’d slipped into. Your body felt pleasantly loosened, limbs still tingling faintly. Your arm felt sore, and a sharp, but not entirely unpleasant sting between your legs tore through you when you shifted.

Robby had wrapped his arms around you tightly, and it took some effort to extract yourself from him without waking him.

You tried to be as silent as you could as you took a shower and gathered your things for work. You left a note on the bedside table, telling Robby to stay as long as he wanted, and off you were.

You had an extra pep to your step as you strolled into the ER at midnight, just in time for your shift, and Lena commented on it right away - of course she did - gifting you one of her warm grins and peering at you over the edge of her glasses.

“Who’s the lucky guy?”

“A girl doesn’t kiss and tell.” You smirked and promptly slipped away to put your lunch in the fridge and your things into your locker before jumping into the nightly madness.

Your good mood stayed, and it did not go unnoticed by the rest of the Pitt either. Abbot shot you a questioning glance, a brow raised when your reply to his question came out a little more chirped than it should have. Ellis slapped you on the shoulder, grinning at you. Shen seemed a little intimidated, if not downright scared.

Seven a.m. rolled around, and you snuck away, grabbing your food and soda from the fridge, and made your way outside for your break you did not negotiate on. Seated on your wall by the entrance, you waited, perhaps with a little more anticipation than usual.

You watched Robby pull up on his motorcycle, the same motorcycle you saw parked outside your place when you left, a sight that put a grin onto your lips.

Whatever giddy, girlish delighted joy had carried you through the night, it withered the moment Robby got off his bike.

He didn’t look at you.

He didn’t acknowledge you.

He got off his bike, grabbed the helmet he never wore and marched right past you into the ER.

Tears stung in your eyes, and you didn’t know whether you hated yourself more for crying or for having had sex with him in the first place.

You knew he never committed to anyone. You knew his dating pool was basically limited to the hospital and the women who got into ill-advised affairs with him despite his reputation. You hadn’t even asked for anything. You had just had sex. Of course that didn’t have to mean anything you expected- you thought- that he’d at least look at you.

You chewed on your bottom lip, fingers trembling around your can of soda, trying not to let your thoughts spiral into self-loathing or self-deprecating versions of He is disgusted with you, of course he is. You are disgusting, playing on repeat in your head.

You finished your soda despite the nausea welling up inside your throat and dumped the rest of your lunch before heading back inside.

The change in your mood was felt viscerally by the whole ER, questioning looks following you on your way to your locker to deposit your lunch box. You didn’t notice Robby following you with his eyes, nor the concerned crease forming between his brows, but he was pulled away on an urgent case before he could make up his mind about whether to talk to you.

It was two hours into his shift when the silence between you became too much for him. The first chance he got, he slipped away, grabbed your wrist and tugged you with him into the family room.

You steeled yourself for another lecture.

It didn’t come.

“I-” Robby started, but stopped himself. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I was. Until you started ignoring me again.” You shrugged.

Robby winced. “Look- I shouldn’t have come to your place. We shouldn’t have- that-” He sighed. “It can’t happen again.”

“Why? Am I that disgusting to you?”

“Wh-what? No! How would you even come to that conclusion?!”

“Well, everything was fine last night, and now you’re back to being a dick. What else am I supposed to think? I’m sure most women don’t ask you to call them a slut while fucking them.”

“I don’t- Do you think most guys get off on calling the woman they’re with a slut?”

“Yeah, actually, they probably do.”

Robby hesitated. “Okay… point taken. Not that it was about calling you awful things for me. It was about you- about knowing I was making you feel good…”

You crossed your arms. “Then where’s the issue, Robby?”

He gestured vaguely at you. “You. All of you.”

“Wow. Thanks.” You deadpanned, glaring up at him.

“No! Not like that! Jesus. Look, you’re too young, yeah? And far too good to waste your time on someone like me. You deserve someone who’s kind and sweet and gentle. Not whatever the fuck I did to you last night.”

“You don’t get to tell me what’s good enough for me.” You sniffed. “You did what I asked you to do, you don’t think I deserve someone who does what I ask?”

“Come on, sweetheart, you don’t have to pretend with me. You didn’t actually enjoy that-”

“Why not? Oh, so you can be into BDSM but not me? Is that it? Leave me alone with that internalised sexism bullshit!”

“Woah, I’m not sexist.” Robby blinked at you.

You snorted.

“I’m not! I respect women.”

“Yeah, the thing with internalised things is you are not usually aware of them, but I’m not fucking getting into that with you now. Are you coming over tonight?”

Robby opened his mouth just to close it again. He had an odd resemblance to a fish in a moment, and you briefly wondered how it was fair for a man to be so handsome that even that didn’t turn you off.

“What?”

You rolled your eyes. “You need hearing aids or something? I asked if you’re coming over tonight.”

“Why?”

You shrugged and took a step forward, letting your hand trail over his protruding, soft belly. “I want to feel this against my forehead while I choke on you.”

Robby all but sputtered. He looked around frantically, as though to make extra sure the family room was empty, just to hiss your name under his breath.

You grinned.

Slowly, you lowered yourself to your knees. Robby didn’t stop you. You popped open the button of his cargo pants and dragged down the zipper, all the while looking up at Robby. He glanced from you to the door and back to you.

“I wanna suck you dick, daddy.” You purred. Robby cursed under his breath. He braced his hand against the door before slumping against it with his back when you curled your hand around his soft dick to pull it from his boxers.

“Jesus, kid-”

“Is that a yes?” You asked in a painfully fake, high-pitched, whiny tone.

“Yeah-”

You grinned to yourself as you parted your lips to take him into your mouth. He grew hard under your touch, under the insistent drag of your tongue over his velvety skin. You sucked on his tip until he was cursing, and giggled around him when he grabbed your hair to force you down, burying himself as deep in your throat as he could. He squished your nose into the coarse, dark curls at his base and your forehead into his soft belly.

You moaned around him, eyes fluttering shut.

It was so much better than you ever thought it would be.

A few minutes later, throat sore and hair more or less smoothed down, you emerged from the family room with a renewed pep in your step. Robby slunk out behind you a while later, once you’d cleared the hallway and hopefully nobody would put two and two together.

Dana shot him a withering, disapproving glare from central, Jack next to her merely raising his brow before shaking his head.

Robby blushed.

That night, after his shift, he found his way back to your apartment, and the night after that, and the night after… He was fucking addicted, and he didn’t even care when you sucked his cock like that or cried his name out so sweetly while coming around him - and especially not when you lay in bed next to him, playing with his stomach hair and smiling up at him so prettily…

Dr. Jack Abbot. Night shift attending in the ED. He had interrupted one of your evening meals, and seemed put out when he found his spot already taken. His annoyance seemed to fade when you offered him a home made cookie. After that, you found yourself cooking for two. 

***

“You know, you can just tell me what you want to eat and I’ll make it” you said, handing him the Tupperware container full of pasta salad. 

“You’re not my personal chef, green beans. Besides, I like the surprise” Jack said, taking the plastic tub, his fingers brushing yours. 

“Suit yourself” you murmured, but couldn’t help the tiny smile that bloomed when you heard your newest nickname. Every night you saw him, you got a new one to add to your list. 

“Thanks, peanut”

“What you got tonight, tiramisu?”

“Not bad, apple pie”

You munched on your food quietly, looking out at the darkening Pittsburgh skyline. You and Jack worked different shifts; you were ending your day while he was starting his, but you never minded staying an extra hour or two if it meant you got to watch the sunset with him. 

“You never thought of culinary school?” Jack asked after a moment.

“At one point, I guess. But it’s so stressful. Like, ‘The Bear’ or something” you said, shrugging slightly. 

Jack looked over at you, the red glow of the evening dusting his salt and pepper hair with copper. His silence told you everything; he had no clue what you were talking about. 

“The Bear. You’ve never seen it? It’s a show about a restaurant and the main guy is like- super stressed and… just watch it, Jack. First season is good” you said, trying to keep your amusement off your face. 

“You say it like this isn’t super stressful” Jack said, motioning down to the hospital below them. 

“Well, I mean… it is. But, I know what I’m doing” you said, shrugging again.

“You’re one confident doctor” he smirked, enjoying your nonchalance. 

“Oh, like you’re not? I know what they call you down there, cowboy” you laughed quietly. 

“So you’d be a confident chef too” he said, nodding quickly. 

“The second someone sent back a plate, I’d lock myself in the freezer. At least if you don’t like something, you’ve never said it” you snorted, glancing down at his mostly finished container. 

“You’ve never made anything I don’t like. Your cooking is the best” Jack said quietly, his voice low and gruff as usual. 

“You’re sweet” you murmured, and looked back at the skyline, hoping that the slowly growing orange dusk disguised the flush rising to your face.. 

A silence fell over you both as you both finished up your meals. Jack always tucked everything back into your little reusable grocery bag neatly, and that night was no exception. Again, your fingers brushed as he took your container from you. 

“You gonna watch that with me then?” Jack asked after a long moment. 

You look over, a bit surprised. But he’s looking right back at you, his gaze steady. 

“You want to watch The Bear with me?” You asked, eyebrows raised. 

“Yeah, green beans. And then we can go out for a dinner you don’t have to cook” he continued, still looking at you seriously. 

You paused, blinking quickly. Was Jack asking you out? For real? 

“Now, don’t think I’m being a creepy old man-” he began, huffing quietly, his eyebrows quirking up. 

“No, no I don’t think that at all- that sounds good. Sorry, I was just surprised-” you said quickly, feeling your heart rate spiking in your chest. 

Jack scoffed quietly and looked back at the skyline for a moment before looking back at you. 

“I’m not that old, I know what a Netflix and chill is, and this isn’t it-”

“What?” You laughed suddenly, taken aback.

“Yeah, I know. You put on a show and invite a girl over- but I’m a grown man, we can go out for dinner because I like you, green beans, and I’d like to do this properly-” he said. 

You couldn’t help but laugh, feeling a buoyancy fill you as you took in his words.

“I like you, green beans” 

Jack frowned at you, as if offended by your laughter. 

“I’d love to watch The Bear and go to dinner with you” you said, unable to keep the smile from your face. You turned back to the view, still feeling the warmth of your blush on your face. 

“Alright then, we’ll go. Figure out our schedules” Jack said, looking out at the view as well. 

“God, lookin’ at me like I spit out your food” he mumbles after a moment, shrugging slightly.

“I was just surprised, I told you” you said, a quiet chuckle leaving you.

“I don’t know how. I wasn’t climbing these stairs every night just for dinner, I like hanging out with you too, you know-” Jack continued, his eyebrows raising again.

“I know, I know, I like hanging out with you too” you said reassuringly. 

A brief silence fell over you again. Comfortable, like usual between the two of you. 

“You know, it’s not even on Netflix. It’s on Disney” you quipped. 

The Pitt never really slept; it only changed its shape. 

It swelled and recoiled upon itself, though the hours of the day like some great wounded organ under electric light. At midnight, it was all sharp, almost hectic movements and shouted orders; at three in the morning, it gave way to some kind of delirium, low and airless, soaked in the bitter smell of antiseptic and cold coffee.

Three ambulances had rolled in within the last twenty minutes. Somewhere beyond the partition curtains, a man was screaming in great bursts while a monitor answered in shrill protest. 

The waiting room had long since overflowed with bodies occupying every chair, every stretch of the wall. The air itself was stiff and stuffy, as if it had been handled too many times. 

Doctor Jack Abbot, the attending physician of the night shift, stood in the middle of it all with drying blood beneath his fingernails and the blunt iron ache of exhaustion driving steadily beneath his left eye. 

The overhead fluorescent lights caught the silver in his hair and turned the curls fallen across his forehead damp with sweat into something almost feverish-looking. His scrub top hung slightly crooked beneath the weight of the stethoscope. There was a hard line set to his mouth that had settled sometime around hour ten of the shift and probably wouldn’t leave until he got home. 

“Abbot.”

He looked up at once.

You were crossing the department towards him with a patient chart tucked beneath one arm, weaving through motion with the unconscious certainty of someone long accustomed to catastrophe. A strand of your hair clung to your temple.

You stopped close, closer than most people ever came to Jack willingly anymore. 

Without hesitation, you reached up and caught the folded edge of his scrub collar between your fingers, straightening it with a small, distracted frown as though the gesture belonged to habit. 

“There,” you murmured with a smile. “You looked insane.”

Your knuckles brushed the side of his neck as your hand fell away. 

It was hardly anything, almost only the barest contact. A passing warmth against skin still cold from over-air-conditioned hallways and way too many hours on feet. 

And yet Jack felt it with almost embarrassing certainty. 

The rough drag of your finger against the pulse in his neck. The faint pressure of your palm briefly brushing over his shoulder as you adjusted his collar. The clean, sharp smell of hospital soap clinging to your skin beneath the copper-rot scent of blood that saturated the entire department. 

His body reacted before his mind could catch up. Every muscle in him tightened at once. His breath caught somewhere low and hard beneath his rips.

For one terrible instant, he became aware of himself with unbearable precision: exhaustion humming under his skin, sweat cooling at the base of his spine, the sudden, violent thud of his pulse against the place you had touched.

You were already moving away before he remembered how speaking worked, disappearing towards Trauma Two while calling something over your shoulder to Lena.

Jack just remained where he was. Neither moving nor speaking.

Simply staring after you with the stunned disorientation of a man struck unexpectedly across the mouth. 

“You good?” Shen asked after a moment.

Jack blinked hard. Only then did he realise that the other physician had been watching him.  He dragged his gaze away from the doorway.

“Fine,” he said roughly, but the lie sat heavily in his throat.

Meanwhile, trauma two had swallowed you at once as you slid into the room, bright and hot and appallingly alive beneath the white glare of the overhead lamps.

There was a man on the table with rainwater still darkening the shoulders of his jacket, one paramedic talking too quickly at your left, another trying to untangle a blood pressure cuff from the mess of tubes and blankets. Somewhere behind you, a monitor had begun its beeping. 

Dr. Ellis was already there with one hip braced against the bed, listening and assessing.

“Motorcycle versus guardrail,” the paramedic was saying. “Helmeted at least. But brief loss of consciousness at the scene. Pressure’s soft, pulse one-thirty. Decreased breath sounds on the left.”

“Chest tube tray,” Ellis said, without looking away from the patient, blood darkening the torn front of his shirt in a widening, theatrical bloom. 

You were already reaching for it before she had finished her sentence.

There was comfort, in a strange and grim way, in the shape of instructions. In the crisp obedience of the body when the mind might otherwise have chosen panic. Clamp. Gauze. Betadine. Gloves snapped at the wrist.

The world narrowed itself to hands and numbers and the thin animal sounds of pain. 

You had been on nights for less than two weeks, not long enough for the altered rhythm of the place to feel natural, but long enough to understand that the Pitt after midnight was not the Pitt of daylight. It was another creature entirely. 

You moved because there was moving to be done. You smiled because sometimes people needed a human face more than they needed another instruction shouted over their bodies.

And if, sometimes, your hand found a shoulder or a wrist or the back of someone’s arm while you spoke, it was only because people were less likely to drift away from you when they could feel that someone had hold of them.

At least that’s what you told yourself. 

Outside Trauma Two, Jack remained where you had left him for half a second too long.

It irritated him, that half a second.

He was not a man prone to standing uselessly in corridors because a nurse had dared to straighten his collar. He had been shot at, cut open, widowed, rebuilt, and put back into rooms where people died noisily under his hands. He had survived the great, crude indifference of the world in more forms than he cared to name.

And yet the ghost of your fingers at his throat persisted. 

He stood long enough that Shen said his name again, more pointedly this time.

“Abbot!”

“What?” Jack blinked, a bit annoyed, having acknowledged his colleague already.

“Trauma One needs you.”

“Then why are you still talking to me?”

Shen lifted both hands and wisely retreated.

Jack moved then because Jack always moved when he was needed. Whatever strange paralysis had taken him released at once, vanishing beneath the old machinery of training and fatigue. His expression sealed itself, and his shoulder squared. 

The man who had forgotten language at the brush of your fingers disappeared completely as if he had never existed. 

There was a patient waiting, a pressure dropping, a room full of people who would obey him if he spoke clearly enough. 

That, at least, he understood. You, unfortunately, he did not. 

In Trauma One, there was an elderly woman with a fractured hip and a blood pressure that would not behave, and Jack gave himself to the work with almost punitive focus.

Orders came clearly from him. 

“Two large-bore IVs. Type and cross. I want repeat vitals in five.”

His hands were steady, his voice calm. Nothing in him betrayed the absurd fact that a few rooms over, the ghost of your hand was still lingering.

It was ridiculous.

It was, if he was honest, worse than just ridiculous. It was borderline humiliating. 

He was too old for this, too tired. 

You had likely already forgotten the moment. You had probably straightened three collars that night, squeezed five shoulders, leaned against half the department in passing. 

That was the cruelty of this, he thought. Not that you touched him. But that you touched him as though it cost you nothing. 

“Dr. Abbot?”

He looked up. The resident beside him had gone slightly pale, waiting with a syringe in hand. 

Jack blinked once, hard, trying to regain his composure that he seemed to lose at only the thought of you. 

“Now,” he said, and hated the roughness in his own voice. “Push it now.”

The old woman stabilised by slow degrees, and the room settled. The monitors, having exhausted their shrill objections, returned to a rhythm that suggested not peace exactly, but permission to breathe once again.

Jack stripped off his gloves and dropped them into the bin with more force than necessary.

Then he heard you laugh. Neither loudly nor carelessly.  

It came from Trauma Two, brief and breathless, tucked between Ellis’s clipped instructions and the patient’s groans. A small sound, almost absurdly human in the middle of all that blood. 

He turned before he consciously decided to.

Through the open doorway, he saw you at the patient’s side, one hand braced against the mattress while Ellis and the intern worked. 

There was a smear of red across the blue of your glove, another at the edge of your wrist. Your hair had loosened further, escaping in damp strands at your neck, and your mouth was set in that concentred line he had begun, against all sense, to recognise. 

You were good. And that was the part that made it more dangerous. 

Not merely warm. Not merely beautiful. Not merely younger than him in the way that made him feel the years in his own bones with particular cruelty. 

You were good at the work. You listened before you answered. You learned quickly. You touched frightened patients with the same unthinking steadiness with which you touched everyone else, as though your hands carried with them some private conviction that people were still people even when they were bleeding under fluorescent lights. 

Jack wandered to Trauma Two and told himself he was there because Ellis might need an attending. 

Instead of going in, he stopped at the doorway. His arms were folded tightly across his chest, one shoulder braced against the metal frame of the entrance. Fatigue had settled into him, roughening the edges of his expression. 

And yet there remained in him something unmistakably alert, almost controlled. The sort soldiers carried long after wars had finished with them.

You did not notice him at first. 

You were standing beside Ellis at the patient’s side when someone handed you a suction tube, and you took it without hesitation and without needing instruction, calm amidst the ruinous choreography of the room. 

Jack just watched you move. Not openly enough to be caught by it. His gaze moved here it ought to move - the monitor, Ellis’s hands, the ultrasound screen - but it always returned to you afterwards with the stubborn inevitability of a tongue seeking the gap left by a missing tooth. 

You tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear with the back of your wrist.

His jaw tightened.

He had seen prettier scenes than this. God knows he had. Women untouched by the fluorescent hospital lights and way too long shifts, and the strange erosion this work inflicted upon the soul. 

But none of them had ever looked at him the way you did, touched him the way you did.

And that was the problem.  

Ellis glanced up, relief in her eyes when she saw him, unaware of his inner struggle, “Abbot, perfect. Stop haunting the doorway and take a look at this ultrasound?”

You looked up at the sound of his name, too.

Your eyes wandered over him, taking note of how he stood half inside the opening. The overhead light flattened the colour from everything around him, bleaching the walls and turning the air itself a tired grey, but somehow it sharpened him instead.

The black of his scrub top stretched across the breadth of his shoulders; his forearms, bare and muscular, the tendons at his wrist standing out where his fingers tucked against his bicep.

He looked tired. Not just ordinarily tired or sleepless. It seemed like the tiredness had settled deep into his bones.

And still, absurdly, he was devastatingly handsome. 

Of course, you had noticed it before; it would have been difficult not to. Everyone noticed Jack Abbot. Some because he was brilliant. Some because he was intimidating. Some because grief clung to him in ways people sensed before they understood. But you had noticed him because of his stillness.

The Pitt was full of loud men. Jack never needed to raise his voice. 

Your gaze caught briefly on the rough shadow of his jaw, the silver threaded through his curls, the slight crease between his brows that deepened whenever he was concentrating. Or worrying. You had not yet learned which. 

Then his eye lifted fully to meet yours, and something in your stomach shifted. 

“There you are,” you said, your voice kind and soft as if you had been expecting him. 

Something unreadable moved briefly across his face, and then he crossed the room.

The space around the trauma bed was cramped with carts and tubing and bodies moving in practised collision. Ellis angled the probe again while you stepped automatically aside to make room for him, your hip brushing against the metal rail of the bed. 

That was what he would remember later. Not that you meant to touch him. Not that you intended anything by it.

Only that your body, without pause or question, made place for his.

Your shoulder brushed his arm as you stepped closer to the bed. The contact was brief, compressed by necessity, but your warmth passed through the thin cotton of your sleeve with indecent clarity. 

Jack looked at the ultrasound screen. 

He did not look at you, but you were suddenly aware of him beside you in a way that felt almost grave. You kept your eyes on the patient because that was what the patient deserved, but your attention was split in two. And only one half remained useful while the other noticed Jack Abbot breathing. 

“Free fluid?” you asked, because speech was safer when it belonged to work.

“Maybe,” Jack answered, his voice was steady while his pulse was not. 

Ellis angled the probe. The dim screen flickered with its lunar shades and swimming uncertainties “Here, see that?’

You leaned in for a better look, and the movement brought you closer still. Your arm crossed Jack’s for one second as you reached for a packet of gauze near his elbow. 

“Sorry,” you mumbled.

It should have ended there. 

And it would have ended there, if you hadn’t almost lost your balance, if the room had not been as crowded as it was, if his presence had not seemed to take up more space than his body alone could explain. 

Instinctively, your hand found the centre of his back as you steadied yourself around him.

It was nothing. It was everything. Under your palm, Jack went still.

Not enough for Ellis or anyone else to notice. Not enough for the room to falter. But you felt it: the minute arrest of muscle beneath fabric, the sudden held breath of a man who had learned too well how to conceal reaction and not quite well enough to conceal it from touch. 

So your fingers spread slightly before you thought better of it. 

Warm. Solid. Tense. 

“Sorry,” you said again, this time quietly as you withdrew your hand, “I’m in your way.”

No, thought Jack. The word rose in him with an immediacy that was almost violent. 

You were not in his way. You were, perhaps, too close. Too perceptive. Too capable of disturbing the delicate machinery by which he moved through the shift. But you were not in his way.

But the thought remained soundless, imprisoned somewhere behind his ribs.

He gave the ultrasound another hard look, as though the answer to the catastrophe of his own body might be hiding there amongst the grainy shapes.  

His jaw tightened as the patient groaned faintly.  

At least he said, “Call surgery. Now!”

The order cut clean through the air, and everyone moved. The other nurse moved first, then Ellis shifted the probe. Someone reached for the phone. The stretcher wheels gave a protesting click as another pair of hands appeared at the rail. The room, which had been suspended for half a breath around the uncertainty of the scan, abruptly became motion again. 

You moved too. You had been trained for this, knew how to fold yourself back into function, how to become hands and eyes and clear speech, how to take everything human and inconvenient and set it aside because the body on the bed could not wait for anyone’s private confusion. 

But before you turned fully away, your eyes flicked back to him once more.

It was barely a glance, quick and questioning beneath your lashes, there and gone so fast that anyone else might have missed it. Yet Jack saw it. And for a moment, he did not look away.

By the time the patient was wheeled out towards surgery, the room had been stripped of its emergency and left with the strange, intimate wreckage emergencies always seemed to leave behind.

There was torn packaging scattered across the counter, bloodied gauze abandoned in a shallow metal tray, a smear of red where the stretcher was and the flattened impression of a human already gone elsewhere. 

The air still held the sour metallic trace of blood beneath the sharper notes of antiseptic and plastic. 

You stripped off your gloves and threw them into the bin. 

Jack was still near the foot of the bed, speaking low to Ellis, his body angled half away from you. His voice had resumed its usual steadiness, that low, clinical economy that gave very little away. 

There was a smear of crimson near his collar. It sat just below the line of his jaw, stark against his skin. You took a clean wipe from the counter, not really thinking about what you were doing. 

“Hold still,” you said to him. 

Jack stopped speaking and looked at you with furrowed brows.

Ellis, mercifully, had already turned her attention to the chart, her pen moving with precision.

You stepped closer to him, almost on autopilot, driven only by the need to help and lifted the wipe to the side of his neck.

“There,” you murmured, “Blood. You’re collecting bodily fluids, Doctor Abbot.”

Something in him locked at once. It was immediate and humiliatingly complete, the hard, instinctive stillness of a body that had learned too much about pain and restraint; like the stillness of an animal that froze beneath unfamiliar hands. 

Your fingers were cool through the thin material of the wipe.

He felt them anyway. He felt the precise place where your hand hovered near his throat. The light pressure of the wipe. The nearness of your knuckles once again. 

A moment ago, the room had been all noise and utility: Ellis speaking in clipped phrases, equipment rolling, wrappers tearing, shoes moving briskly across the floor. 

Somewhere to his left, someone was still saying something. Beyond the door, someone pushed a cart down the corridor, one uneven wheel tickling faintly with each rotation. 

But Jack heard it all as though from underwater. 

You meant only to wipe the blood away and step back. He knew that. Of course, he knew that. 

You had seen the mark, taken a wipe, stepped close and done what any decent colleague might have done in the brief pause after a shared emergency. There was nothing in the gesture that required interpretation.

But that knowledge did nothing to save him. 

The antiseptic smell of the wipe rose faintly between you, clean and chemical and impersonal. And beneath it, maddenlingly, was something warmer - the scent of your skin after too many hours under hospital lights. 

It should not have registered. It should not have mattered.

His throat moved once beneath your fingers. A swallow, involuntary and unforgivable.

He saw the instance you noticed. 

Not because your expression changed much, you were too controlled for that, but because your hand hesitated. Only slightly, only long enough for the pad of your thumb to settle, absurdly, right against the side of his pulse. 

Jack had stood in rooms full of blood and screaming and stayed steady. He had walked into danger with a clear head. He had made calls that would have shaken younger doctors to the core. He had endured fear, grief, violence, exhaustion, and the long, grinding attrition of a life spent pretending that the body could simply be willed to continue. 

Shit, he had endured gunfire with steadier nerves than this. 

His jaw tightened, and he could not decide where to look.

Your eyes were dangerous because they were too close, and he didn’t want you to know how affected he was by this. Your mouth was worse. Soft with concentration, parted faintly around the quiet breath you had taken before speaking, close enough that some ungoverned part of him began measuring the distance without permission. 

There was a loose strand of hair near your cheek, dampened at the end by sweat or sink water or the long brutality of the shift. It clung there, out of place, human in a way that nearly undid him.

The urge to reach for it came so suddenly and violently that his hand almost moved.

Almost.

He imagined tucking it back. Not with purpose or with excuse. Only with the slow, careful intimacy of his fingers at your temple, the back of his knuckles near your cheek, your face turned slightly towards his hand. 

The thought was somehow even worse because it wasn’t desire, it was tenderness. 

He wondered, not for the first time, whether you understood what you were doing to him. 

Whether some part of you had begun to recognise the small betrayals his body committed in your presence. But Jack had never considered himself an easy man to read…life had taken care of that. And the hospital had taken care of the rest. 

Yet you just kept finding him. 

Not all of him. Not the whole ruin of him, not the darkened rooms he kept locked even from himself. 

But enough. 

You found the place where his breath caught. You found the pulse beneath his jaw. You found, with the terrible innocence of touch, the part of him still capable of wanting. 

So perhaps you did understand. And that possibility was somehow more terrifying than ignorance. 

Because if you understood, then Jack no longer knew which outcome frightened him more. That you wanted him back. Or that you did not. 

That you knew exactly what you were doing and had chosen him anyway. Or that this was nothing to you beyond the kind of careless warmth you carried without knowing what it could do to those who had learned to live without it.

That you might be playing not cruelly, maybe, but lightly. And that could wound too.

He was ashamed by the thought as soon as it came, since you had given him no reason to suspect cruelty. 

In fact, it was quite the opposite. 

Your kindness was not theatrical, which he had learned in the short time he knew you. It did not announce itself. It was almost instinctively, almost before thought, towards whatever looked hurt. A frightened patient gripping the rail too hard. A resident blinking too quickly after a reprimand. Ellis pretending not to be exhausted. A fellow nurse quietly swallowing tears in the medication room.

You noticed such things. You just noticed the small fractures people tried to hide beneath competence.

Perhaps that was all this was. Perhaps Jack Abbot was only one more damaged creature in a long line of damaged creatures. Perhaps the shape of your hands had simply learned to soothe. 

But God help him, he wanted to be more than that. 

He wanted to be more than another injury your kindness had found. More than a tired man at the end of a shift. More than a guarded colleague whose silence invited your gentleness. 

He wanted, shamefully and with a force that made him almost whole again, to be singular to you. Not merely cared for. But chosen. To be the person you touched, not because he needed gentleness, but because you could not quite keep yourself from giving it to him.

The desire was selfish. He knew that. Still, there it was. And it terrified him. 

“Got it?” he asked. The question came out lower than he intended, the words scraped by the roughness in his throat, and the sound of his own voice irritated him immediately. 

It gave too much away. Not to anyone else, perhaps. Ellis would only hear impatience. The room would hear only efficiency. But you would hear the fracture beneath it. 

You should have stepped back then. 

Jack wanted you to step back. 

He wanted the relief of distance, the restoration of ordinary air, the clean simplicity of no longer feeling the almost-touch of your thumb against his pulse. He wanted professionalism to return with its familiar walls and bright, sterile surfaces. He just wanted to be Dr. Abbot again, which was easier than being Jack under your hand. 

But you did not immediately step back.

You’d later blame it on the tiredness or the adrenaline. In the end, it was because he was looking at you with that terrible, restrained intensity, the kind that suggested a man holding a door shut from the inside. Because some reckless, increasingly curious part of you had begun to suspect that Dr. Jack Abbot was not nearly so unaffected as he pretended to be. 

Your fingers lingered another heartbeat at the edge of his collar. It was barely anything, just a breath of contact.

“Mh-hm,” you murmured softly, and Jack’s gaze dropped to your mouth. 

Only briefly, but not briefly enough. 

And he wondered what it would be like to kiss you, what it would be like to stop resisting.  

Then Ellis cleared her throat, and the sound cut through the moment with surgical precision. 

You withdrew your hand at once. Heat rising unhelpfully beneath your scrub top, spreading from your chest to your throat. You turned towards the counter and started to busy yourself with the discarded wrappers there, gathering torn plastic and empty gauze packets with a concentration far beyond what the task required. 

Jack stood there frozen for a second longer; he remained exactly how you left him: shoulder still, jaw set, head angled slightly aside. Cold rushed unpleasantly into the place your touch had occupied, and he felt the loss with humiliating clarity. 

Then he turned away. But not before you saw his hand flex once at his side. 

It was a small movement, almost nothing. His fingers opened and closed against empty air, controlled again almost as soon as it happened. You noticed because you had spent enough hours beside him now to understand the scale of his restraint. It looked like there had been something he almost reached for or something he had almost pushed away.

The thoughts arrived so suddenly that you almost dropped one of the wrappers. 

It couldn’t have been more than a minute, maybe less.

Thirty seconds, if anyone had been cruel enough to count them. Thirty seconds from the instant you stepped closer with the wipe to the instant Ellis’s throat-clearing returned you both to yourselves. 

That was all. Nothing, really.  If there were an official report of everything that happened during the shift, it would not have appeared at all. 

The patient went to surgery. 

He gave a few more orders.

Someone cursed at a jammed supply drawer.

The hallway swallowed the stretcher, and the room emptied by degrees and became once again just a trauma bay waiting for its next occupant. 

Nothing had happened. Nothing that mattered. Nothing that anyone else could have named. 

And yet, Jack carried those thirty seconds out of Trauma Two as though they had the weight of the world. As though they had been folded into his pocket. As though they had been ingrained in him now.

This irritated him greatly, because nothing had happened to him. 

You had seen blood. You had wiped it away. Your hand had been steady. Your voice had been low because the room had quieted, not because there was anything secret in it. Your thumb had rested at his pulse by accident, because bodies had edges and hands needed somewhere to go.

That was all.

Nothing except the sudden, catastrophic awareness of how long it had been since anyone had touched him with such unguarded care.  

Nothing except the disgraceful fact that for one wild instant, he had wanted to turn his face into your palm. 

Neither metaphorically nor sentimentally, but rather physically, shamefully. With the tired, aching hunger of a man who had spent too many years convincing himself that wanting comfort was a private weakness, best hidden under confidence clipped instructions and the occasional funny remark. 

He could only hope that you hadn’t noticed.

Jack moved towards the sink, washed his hands even though they were already clean and kept his eyes on the water until the rush of it was louder than the memory of your voice.  

But he suspected that your words and the simple act of kindness would trouble him for the rest of his shift. 

_____

After that, the nights began to arrange themselves around small catastrophes. 

Not the visible kind or the ones that seemed to announce themselves in alarms and rapid footsteps, that summoned surgery from upstairs or left blood drying in the seams of the floor. Those catastrophes belonged to the hospital, and Jack knew how to meet them. He had built a life out of meeting them.

They had protocols, names, and consequences. They demanded action and, therefore, gave mercy in some twisted kind of way. 

No, the kind that devastated him in ways he could never have imagined were the smaller things. The quieter things. 

The brush of your hand against his in an overcrowded room when you both reached for the same box of gloves. Your fingers closing briefly around his wrist as you passed him a pen without looking up from the chart. The absent, thoughless pressure of your palm between his shoulder blades as you slipped behind him at the nurse’s station, murmuring behind you under your breath, as though the warning could possibly prepare him for the touch. 

And those moments only existed in the narrow, treacherous space between bodies too tired to maintain perfect distance and too aware to call that failure meaningless. 

With each day you worked nights, the department made more room for you with the unconscious certainty of a place recognising one of its own. A mug appeared in the cabinet that no one else used. One of the residents began saving the last decent pudding cup because you had once mentioned liking it. The charge nurse started giving you the complicated patients because you understood quickly and did not rattle easily. 

But it was not an easy thing, belonging there. 

So you learned the nights’ own grim and tender rituals, when the coffee turned bitter enough to become a warning instead of a comfort. You learned where the extra blankets were hidden, when the warmer ran empty, which supply drawer jammed unless struck with the heel of the hand.

You learned the routines of every resident and fellow. Which ones panicked loudly and which ones panicked in silence. 

And despite every sensible boundary and every professional instinct screaming at you, you learned Jack’s rhythms too. Perhaps it was just impossible for you not to.

Dr. Jack Abbot did not make himself easy to know. He offered little freely and even less when pressed. His silences had edges. His patience, though real and kind, was often disguised as irritation so that sometimes new colleagues mistook the two. He had a talent for appearing immovable even when exhaustion had hollowed him from the inside. 

But you watched. Never obviously or enough to shame him. Only with the steady, quiet attention you gave to all you did. 

So you learned that he took his coffee black when the shift was bad and abandoned it half-finished when it was worse. How he rubbed the bridge of his nose before giving bad news, not afterwards, as if preparing his face to become something useful.

You noticed how he grew quieter when the pain threaded itself into his leg, his words becoming shorter, his movements more economical, the line of his mouth tightening in increments too small for most people to see. 

He never asked for help unless the asking could be disguised as an order:

Hold this. Come here. Tell Ellis to check her patients. Tell Shen I need another line. Walk with me.

And you noticed it all too well. 

Against all sense and every better judgement he had ever possessed, Jack learned yours as well. 

At first, he told himself it was just observation. Occupational habit. The natural consequences of working alongside someone in a department where the difference between competence and collapse could be measured in seconds. He noticed everyone, that was, after all, the job.

But there was noticing, and then there was knowing.

The way you hummed under your breath while restocking cards, always so softly that he suspected you may not even realise you were doing it. Sometimes it was a song he knew. More often, it was something shapeless, a thread of sound pulled through fatigue. 

He became aware of the way you touched people before you asked them to breathe - fingertips to a shoulder, a palm, to the back of a trembling hand, a physical reassurance offered before the instruction came. 

He even learned that you laughed differently after three in the morning.

Earlier in the shift, your laughter came quick and bright, a spark struck against the roughness of the place. But later, when the halls thinned and the lights seemed harsher, it softened. 

The tiredness changed you. Not in the way that you became less capable, if anything, the fatigue stripped you down to something more instinctive, more honest. Your voice grew gentler. Your movement slowed by fractions. 

You forgot, now and then, the careful distances other people kept as if your body, once exhausted, returned to some older language of warmth and nearness. 

When you were tired, you leaned closer to patients, to Ellis and Shen and the residents, when they looked ready to come apart.

And most dangerously towards him. Especially towards him. That was the intolerable part.

Because Jack could have survived your kindness if it had remained general, he could have endured being one more recipient of your impossible gentleness, one more tired colleague steadied by your hand in passing, one more creature briefly warmed by the careless mercy you gave everyone. 

But did it feel general? He wasn’t so sure anymore. 

Not when you glanced at him across the nurses’ station before smiling at whatever Ellis had said, as though some private part of the joke belonged to him. Not when you brought him coffee without asking and set it near his charting hand, black and no sugar, exactly as the night demanded. 

Not when, after a brutal case, you appeared beside him without a word and pressed two fingers lightly into the file he was holding, pushing it down so he would stop pretending to read it. 

“Jack,” you had said softly.  

Not Dr. Abbot. Jack.

And he looked at you because he had forgotten how not to. That was the true shape of the catastrophe. 

The slow, impossible accumulation of these things. The way each small contact refused to remain small. How every ordinary moment gathered weight because it belonged to you. 

The night shift, with all its fluorescent cruelty and exhausted mercy, had begun to feel less like a place he survived and escaped and more like a place where he might be seen. 

Jack did know what to do with being seen. 

He only knew that each night, when you came into the department, it seemed to alter around him. The coffee tasted worse. The lights seemed brighter. His pulse became less obedient. And all the catastrophes began anew. 

_____

There was the night you fell asleep for eight minutes at the nurses’ desk. 

Eight minutes, not more. Jack knew because he had looked at the clock when you head first began to dip, and then, for no reason, he refused to examine too closely, looked again when you finally started awake. 

You had not meant to sleep, that much was obvious. The night had been quiet, and you had been charting with a stubbornness that was becoming increasingly decorative, your cheek propped against your fist, pen still resting between your fingers, eyes lowering and opening and lowering again until your body gave you the pretence of being governed by will. 

For eight minutes, you were still.

Jack had passed you once and did not stop. Then he passed again with coffee. 

He set the cup beside your elbow, not loudly enough to startle you but close enough for the heat of it, or perhaps the smell, to reach whatever portion of you remained on duty.

Your eyes opened, startled and confused by the world’s reappearance, before you saw him.

“You looked dead,” he said dryly. 

Your mouth curved slightly, “Oh, you say the sweetest things.”

You reached for the coffee, and your fingers closed briefly over his before taking the cup. 

There was nothing deliberate in it, Jack told himself once again. After all, you were still half asleep.

Your hand had just gone where the coffee was, and his fingers happened to be there too. That was all, no mystery, no invitation, no evidence of anything except fatigue and proximity. Just the careless imprecision of a person dragged back from sleep too quickly. 

That’s what he told himself as he returned to his chart. What he told himself again when you took the first sip and made a face at the taste, then drank it anyway.

He told himself this a third time, hours later, when he realised he could still feel the warm, loose weight of your fingers closing over his.

Another of those catastrophes happened the night a combative patient caught you hard in the shoulder.

It happened quickly, as such things always did. One moment, the room was crowded with negotiation, restraint, the careful voices of people trying not to escalate fear into violence. And the next, the patient twisted with surprising force, and an elbow struck the upper part of your arm with a dull sound, Jack felt in his bones. 

You stepped back neither far nor dramatically. 

But Jack’s voice sharpened as it cut through the turmoil in the room. “Enough.”

Ellis and your fellow nurse looked, not because the word was unusual. Jack gave orders all the time. He corrected, interrupted, redirected, and cut through panic with the clean brutality of certainty. But this was different, too fast, too hard and too stripped of its usual professional distance. 

The patient stilled shortly after, beneath the hands restraining him. 

Afterwards, in the narrow stretch of hall where the light always seemed worse, you rolled your shoulder and tried to laugh it off. 

“I’m fine.”

Jack looked at you, unconvinced, “You always say that.”

You blinked, then tilted your head at him with an expression so dry it might have been amusement if he had not also recognised the tenderness under it. You just stepped closer as if the distance between you had been decided badly and required correction. Your hand came to his forearm, fingers wrapping lightly around the muscle there, gentle and sure. 

It was not gratitude or reassurance. Rather, it felt like forgiveness. As if you had understood the worry in him, the sharpness of his voice, the way concern had risen too quickly to be made polite and had decided not to punish him for it. 

He watched your hand leave his arm again, and the absence seemed unreasonable. Absurdly, he felt bereft.

And then there was the night rain battered the ambulance bay doors so hard the whole department seemed to breathe around it.

Water came down in sheets, turning the windows black and restless. Every arrival dragged the weather in with it: wet shoes, damp hair, the cold mineral smell of the street. 

The floors grew slicer near the entrance no matter how often someone mopped them. The wind pressed itself against the building, and each time the automatic doors opened, the night outside flashed with rain.

The ache in Jack’s leg had started before midnight. By two, it had become difficult to ignore. By three, ignoring it required enough concentration that he grew quieter than usual. 

You noticed, because of course you would.

He should have known that you would eventually pick up on it. Pain altered people in small, specific ways, and you had become uncomfortably fluent in reading his silences by then. 

So you saw the shorter stride, the careful stillness when he stopped walking. The hand braced against the counter for one second too long before he let it drop. 

But you said nothing in front of the others.

That was another thing about you that unravelled him. You had a talent for protecting dignity while tending to injury. 

You did not ask if he was all right in the hallway, where he would have had to lie. You did not fuss at him near the desk, where he would have had to make you stop.

You simply appeared beside him in the empty staff room some minutes later, carrying two paper cups of terrible coffee and a packet of ibuprofen tucked beneath one thumb.  And you placed both on the table in front of him.

Jack looked at the packet and then at you, “You always this bossy?”

“Only when people are being stupid,” you retorted, raising one eyebrow.

He should have resented it. He survived in stubbornness for too long not to recognise an attempt to manage him. And how he disliked being read, being handled. Above all, he disliked the sensation of needing something that someone else had seen before he could disguise it.

And yet? The coffee was warm. The pills necessary. Your face held no pity, only attention. So instead of getting up or ripping into you, he remained seated.

You took the chair beside him, close enough that your knee brushed his for the length of one quiet breath before you shifted away. And he wondered whether the contact was just accidental.

The staff room hummed around you with the old refrigerator’s incessant buzzing. Somewhere outside, someone called for transport. Neither of you spoke for a while as he took the ibuprofen and drank the coffee. 

Perhaps it would have been easier had you remained ignorant. 

Not ignorant of medicine, nor of pain, nor of the thousand small ways people revealed themselves under pressure. But ignorant of him. That would have been safer. 

If you had never learned where his restraint thinned. Never noticed how his body betrayed him when yours came too close. If you had continued to believe that Jack Abbot was simply difficult, competent, tired and impenetrable. 

He was controlled and disciplined. A man built out of restraint and old damage, every sharp edge held carefully beneath the practised calm of a physician who had seen too much and learned to continue anyway. 

But control was not indifference. And after enough nights beside him, you began to recognise the tiny failures.

The way he went still when your hand touched his arm, not with rejection but with the stunned obedience of someone touched where he had forgotten he was lonely. 

The way his eyes dropped, unwillingly and only for a moment, to your mouth when you stood too close. 

The way his voice changed when he said your name after a difficult patient.

The way he looked away first. Always first. And Jack Abbot did not look away from much.

You did not know what to do with that knowledge. It frightened you to no end, though not because you didn’t like it. Rather, because each small discovery felt less like proof of conquest than proof of responsibility. If he yielded, even by a fraction, it cost him something.

And, god, if you were honest, you had begun to want him to yield. 

You did not want to corner or embarrass him, did not want to make him feel hunted. There was too much damage in him for that. Too much restraint that seemed less like pride to you and more like survival. And yet you wanted to know whether the thing passing between you was only your foolish invention or whether he felt it too. 

So for a while, you did nothing at all - almost nothing. 

For Jack, it turned out, almost nothing was still enough to ruin him. 

You never crossed any line. No breach of professionalism that could be examined beneath the cold light of sense and condemned accordingly. But there was none of that. There was only almost nothing.

And that had become impossible for him. He endured it because he had not yet found a way to ask you to stop without revealing how badly he wanted you to continue.

_____

By the eighth week, Jack had begun to dread and anticipate you in equal measure, which disturbed him more than he cared to admit. 

Dread, at least, was familiar and something he could understand. It had shape and function. He had known it in operating rooms and field hospitals, in the seconds before bad news was spoken out loud, in the thin silence after a monitor changed its rhythm.

Anticipation, on the other hand, was another matter.

It was unreasonable. Undignified. It had no place in a man of his age and temperament, certainly not in a man who had taught himself, over the long and punishing course of his life, to expect little and need even less. 

He had endured months in the desert heat with torn skin and less physical awareness of his own body than he now possessed whenever you stood too close beside him.

And that irritated him to no end.

He despised how some part of him had quietly made a study of you and could no longer stop. It was as if the night had begun to arrange itself more sensibly when he knew you were within it. 

If you were busy with another resident, he found reasons to pass by. 

Good reasons, of course…defensible ones. He was the attending after all, and there was always a chart to check, a resident to correct. A patient whose labs he wanted to review personally again, even after Shen already did it. 

Jack was not stupid enough to wander aimlessly after you like a boy, so he wrapped every detour in purpose and carried it with sufficient authority that no one questioned him. 

Except you. You had begun to look up when he appeared. Not obviously, of course. But sometimes your eyes lifted before he spoke as though some part of you had started to anticipate him as well. 

That was dangerous enough to make him avoid you for almost an entire hour one night. But of course it did not help. 

If your name was not on the night roster, the ER seemed colder. 

That was absurd. He knew it was absurd. The temperature did not change because you were absent. The lights remained the same merciless white. The coffee tasted just as shitty. The stretchers rattled, the monitors beeped, and the residents panicked with ordinary regularity.

And yet the place seemed altered without you. Emptier in some quiet, structural way. 

As though someone had removed a source of warmth he had not meant to depend on. 

If you laughed with someone else, something old and unbecoming moved in him before he could will it into silence. 

Jealousy. 

It disgusted him that he was jealous over laughter of all things. Over the tilt of your head towards a young resident. Over the easy touch you gave Shen on the shoulder. Over the way, a paramedic leaned too close while telling you some story from the ambulance bay and was rewarded with a tired but nonetheless delighted smile. 

It was ridiculous and downright shameful. 

As if he had any right. Made any claim on you. Had offered anything that might justify the dark, brief tightening of his chest when your warmth turned elsewhere. As if standing still beneath your hand and then looking away first constituted a promise. 

He had no right. 

None.

And even if he had wanted one, what exactly did he imagine he could offer you?

A complicated body. A leg that punished rain and long shifts and the arrogance of pretending he was younger than he was. 

A dead wife whose absence still occupied rooms in him, he rarely opened. 

A history full of locked doors and old wars, of choices made under pressure and consequences that had outlived the circumstances that created them.

A temperament built more for endurance than joy. And exhausting that had settled so deeply into him, it might as well have been character.

You, meanwhile, moved through the department with your tired eyes and your quick hands and your reckless tenderness. Young enough still (or so he told himself) to expect that life might give something back if you loved it hard enough. You deserved someone unburdened. Someone uncomplicated. Someone who could take your warmth without flinching as though it were a wound. 

After all, he was sure that there was someone waiting for you at home. A boyfriend, perhaps or more. 

Jack imagined someone decent. Someone with clean hands and an unbroken history, someone who texted you before your shift and kept dinner warm badly but honestly. Someone who did not measure desire against grief and guilt and the arithmetic of age, Someone whose body didn’t ache. 

Someone who could accept your careless affection without making a religion of it.

Your imagined partner served a purpose. He transformed restraint into decency, into professionalism, into something cleaner than fear.

Wanting a woman who belonged to someone else was pathetic enough, but reaching for her? That would have made him cruel. And Jack, wherever else he had been, whatever he had failed at, refused to be cruel to you.

So he let the imagined man stand between you as a useful ghost. 

He disliked the idea of him with an intensity that embarrassed him every time it surfaced. 

But he needed him. Because the man made restraint noble, sensible, clean. 

And, god, Jack was desperate for cleanliness in a thing that had begun to feel anything but clean.

Because the truth, when stripped of all its careful justifications, was far simpler and far more humiliating:

When you touched him, he wanted. 

Not in a weird philosophical way, nor a tragic one and neither in the elegant, distinct manner of a man nobly suffering from some doomed attachment. But rather, he wanted with a terrible simplicity.

Wanted your hand close there when your fingers brushed against his. Wanted your knee touching his when your legs touched under the table. Wanted to hear you say his name - Jack, not Dr. Abbot, in a room where no one else could hear it.

Every time that wanting rose in him, all his noble restraint began to change shape into something that looked less like virtue or decency. Less like the necessary discipline of an older man protecting a colleague from the ruin of his own desire. 

Instead, it began to look very much like fear. Fear of being seen. Of being wanted. Of not being able to refuse you when you reached for him with any true intention. 

And worst of all, fear that you would not reach for him at all. 

You examined this thing between you way too much. 

You thought about him while washing your hands. While restocking carts. While walking home in the pale, exhausted morning after a shift, when the city looked too clean and unreal, and your body still felt tuned to the artificial brightness of the Pitt. You thought about the impossible carefulness of him, the way he let you come close and then seemed furious with himself for wanting it. 

You were afraid you’d misread him, that all his stillness was not wanting but discomfort. 

So you gave him chances, touched him, and then left space for him to move away. Smiled and let him look first. He never stepped away, never hardened against it, but also never reached for you either. 

And you were blissfully unaware that Jack had conjured up a man by your side in his head that, over time, had become strangely useful to Jack. Because as long as this ghost existed, the thing growing steadily and silently between the two of you remained impossible by default. 

He could stand beside you at the nurses’ station while your shoulder pressed warm against his arm and tell himself that the warmth belonged to someone else. He could endure the small, unbearable mercies of your touch because they were, in the end…. Harmless. 

They had to be just that because you were unavailable. That made restraint simple… simpler. But not easy. 

You continued touching him with the same careless familiarity that had first disturbed the machinery of his peace weeks earlier. Each contact lasted seconds and remained with him absurdly long afterwards. 

The worst of it all was that the touches did not remain the same.

Maybe they did, and Jack was only losing the ability to interpret them sensibly. That was a possibility.

After all, he was tired, older than he felt, and more affected than he wished. And desire had a way of falsifying evidence. He knew that. A starving man could make a feast out of crumbs. 

And yet, to him it seemed that your hand sometimes lingered. Not long enough to name or accuse. But only a fraction longer than they should remain. Your eyes sometimes held there for one dangerous heartbeat too long, as if you were waiting for him rt do something with the silence between you. 

He refused to examine this too closely, because he didn’t want to chase after hope. He had no patience to deal with the fact that hope would inevitably soften the walls that kept him functional.

So he returned to the boyfriend again and again to keep himself in check.

Until Thursday night.

The Pitt had settled into one of its uglier moods, and the waiting room had become its own nation of misery. Someone was vomiting loudly into a plastic basin near triage, Lena was threatening a resident with bodily harm over misplaced paperwork and from the tone of her voice, Jack suspected she had advanced beyond metaphor. Ellis had sworn at two separate monitors and the wall itself. Shen’s mood was just as bad, with Dunkin’ having closed due to a burst pipe and him not getting his sugary coffee in before the shift.  

Jack himself had perhaps slept three hours, and that would be the explanation he’d later use. 

He was due upstairs shortly before surgery, already running through labs and images and the sequence of calls he had to make today, when you appeared in front of him with that focused look you wore when your body had decided before your mind had finished justifying it. 

The night had scraped your nerves raw, and you were tired of pretending you did not want excuses to touch him. 

“Hold still,” you said. 

Jack should have stepped back. Should have taken the chart in his hand and used it as a shield. Should have turned towards anything else. Should have said something dry enough to restore the distance between you before your fingers reached him. 

But he did none of those things, and you stepped into his space before either of you could pretend it had happened by accident. One hand catching the edge of his collar when it had twisted and smoothing it back into place with absent concentration.

It was the same gesture as before, but then your palm flattened once briefly over the centre of his chest. 

Warmth, through cotton and t-shirt and skin and bone, Jack felt it everywhere, 

The exhaustion of the week, the months of hunger carefully buried beneath professionalism. The imagined boyfriend standing between Jack and the thing he wanted. All the structures he had built around restrained all the arguments he had polished until they looked like virtue, all the locked rooms in him that had remained obedient for years.

Something simply gave beneath the pressure of your hand. 

He looked down at your palm resting against his chest as though it had some right to be there.

“Does your boyfriend know you touch people like this?” The words were out before he could recall them.

Silence, not long but long enough for the full, catastrophic stupidity of the sentence to reveal itself. 

Jack felt the room stop around him, though of course it had not. The hospital carried on with its usual indifference, but between the two of you, everything became still.

You could not make sense of the words at first. It landed between you as an object dropped from a height, strange and heavy and weird. 

And so Jack experienced the full humiliation of what he had done. The jealousy. The nakedness, the pathetic hope dressed badly as accusation. He had asked a question he had no right to ask in a tone that he could not quite excuse as professional. 

He had dragged the imagined man into the space between you and, in doing so, revealed precisely how long he had been thinking about him. 

About you.

His jaw tightened, and he prepared himself for the worst: offence, withdrawal and the measured kindness with which you might decide to spare him. 

Part of you wanted to laugh at the misunderstanding; there had been no one for years. But another part of you, quieter and more vulnerable, hurt with the knowledge that he may not feel the same. And yet you realised that beneath the edge of his words, something frightened and exposed had taken root in him. Something that made your irritation soften before it could fully become irritation again. 

So when you looked up, you didn’t look offended, just startled with a flicker of understanding and something softer still that Jack was suddenly far too frightened to name. 

“Jack,” you said slowly and a little breathless with the sudden rearranging of everything you thought you knew about his silence, “I’ve been single for years…”

Years. Years.

That word struck him almost with physical force. Not now or recently or between things. 

For a moment, Jack felt suspended. The air between you became too close, too warm, too full of all the meaning he had spent weeks refusing to gather. 

You watched all that move through his face almost invisibly. The brief blankness, the tightening in his jaw, the way his eyes sharpened as if the room had tilted. 

Behind you, Ellis shouted for him from down the hall, but neither of you moved. 

Your palm remained on his chest, and you could feel his pulse under your hand, fast and thumping. And you looked at him as though the rhythm had answered a question you had not yet dared to ask aloud. 

You saw him realise that you were not beyond reach, and the sight frightened you because it did not make him look triumphant. It made him look undone.

Not dramatically, but enough. His jaw had gone slack slightly. Just enough to soften the hard line of his mouth to make him look less like the man who cut through emergencies and more like someone who had been struck by a truth he had not prepared himself to survive. His lips parted as if there had been a response in him once, but it had vanished before it could reach the air.

And his eyes - god, his eyes.

They had gone distant and exposed, fixed on you with a kind of stunned uncertainty as though he were looking not merely at your face but at the sudden collapse of every careful assumption he had built between you. 

You saw the muscle in his throat work one. Saw the small, almost helpless shift of his mouth as he thought he might speak and could not decide whether spelling would save him or ruin him faster. 

The fluorescent light caught in the tired lines at the corner of his eyes, the rough shadow along his jaw, the silver threaded through his hair and all at once, he seemed unbearably real to you. 

Not distant, not untouchable, not safely contained between the authority of Dr. Abbot. 

Just…Jack. 

A man standing very still under your hand, with his pulse beating hard and fast, realising that the person he had been denying himself was not safely beyond reach.

And that realisation did not make him look victorious. It made him look afraid.

As though the one thing that had protected him from hope had been removed without warning. 

So at least you stepped back, your hand falling from his chest, and cold air replaced it. 

The surroundings returned to Jack in a rush, and he could only muster a soft sound to comment on what you had just revealed, “Oh…”

Under the circumstances, it was an exceptionally inadequate response, but it was all he could say right now, and you wouldn’t push for more. 

Your mouth twitched slightly at one corner as Ellis called his name again and shattered the moment around both of you. 

You walked away first because you had to. If you stayed, you were afraid you might say something neither of you could take back. Something too honest for the hallway and too soft for the Pitt. Something like I thought you knew, or There really is no one, or even I don’t touch everyone like that. 

So you turned towards the noise of the department and made yourself useful. 

Jack remained where he was for several seconds longer, staring at the space you had occupied as though your absence had left a visible outline in the air. The place where your hand had reset still burned through his scrub top. His pulse had still not recovered. 

The man he resented for weeks did not exist. There was no boyfriend, no decent man waiting at home. 

The realisation continued to move through him, but he didn't feel relief or joy or anything so simple. It was too complicated for that, too threaded with fear and hunger and the brutal awareness of consequence. 

But beneath it all, low and sickenly warm under his ribs, something dangerously close to hope had begun to unfurl from its coil. And Jack hated it instantly.

And you, walking away with your hand still tingling from the shape of his chest, felt hope, too, but you did not hate it. 

But it did scare you enough that you did not look back. 

_____

After that question, Jack became careful, and you noticed almost immediately.

He didn’t withdraw with the intention of punishing you, and somehow that made it even worse. Because it meant he believed he was doing something decent. Something responsible. Something that hurt both of you and therefore must, by some grim equation of his, be right.

He changed so subtly that no one else in the department would have paused over it, and yet sharp enough that you felt it almost at once. 

He stopped lingering beside you after hard cases.

Before, there had always been those few quiet seconds when the patient had gone, when the room looked wrecked, and the two of you stood in the aftershock together. He would remain near, not speaking much, pretending to study a chart, wiping his hands, or listening for someone calling his name. 

You learned the language of that lingering. It meant I am still here, that was bad, or maybe even stay near me while I remember how to be ordinary again. 

Now? He left first and always with some reason in his hand. 

He no longer reached for the coffee you handed him. He glanced at it, then at you, and seething shuttered behind his eyes. 

“Thanks,” he said. Polite. Careful. Awful. 

When your arms brushed in crowded hallways, he moved aside first now. And that was maybe what bothered you the most because the hospital was cramped and bodies collided. It was perfectly ordinary.

But Jack began avoiding even the ordinary. He gave you space with the grave courtesy of a man offering an apology you had not asked for. 

You hated it. And Jack? He hated it too. That was maybe the worst part. 

You could see it in him, the cruelty of knowing someone too well. He was not unaffected by what he was doing. If anything, the carefulness had made him more visibly strained with his jaw tighter and his silences harsher.

He didn't watch you as often anymore, and yet when he did, it was with such hunger quickly disguised as restraint that it felt almost unbearable to catch him at it. 

Distance was supposed to restore proportion, which had been his intention at least. To step back before the thing growing between you acquired enough shape to be named. Before it became visible to Ellis, to Shen, to anyone with eyes and the misfortune of being awake at three in the morning.

Before it ruined you.  

Not himself. Jack had very little patience for his own preservation, had dragged his body and soul through worse things than longing and expected no sympathy for it. But you were different. Younger, warmer, and still capable of giving tenderness without flinching from it first. 

And he would not be the thing that taught you to.  

To Jack, the department felt wrong without your nearness in it. He noticed the missing warmth of your shoulder, the way you laughed without catching his gaze afterwards, and how you stopped reaching for him as easily.

The last one should have relieved him, but it did not. Instead, it irritated him with the sheer unfairness of a self-inflicted wound. He had created the distance and now restored the shape it made around him. 

It was pathetic, really. At his age, desire ought to arrive with dignity or not at all. But it had just reduced him to someone measuring entire shifts by the accidental proximity of a nurse.

You deserved someone lighter than him. That thought followed him everywhere. Through the endless hours of his shift. Through the ambulance bay. Through the staff room. Through the brief moments when he washed his hands and found himself staring too long at his own reflection in the dark window above the sink. 

Someone younger, whose body did not ache with old injuries. Someone who could still stand at the end of a brutal shift and imagine dancing or breakfast, or sunlight without first calculating how much pain the next hour might cost.

Someone who did not carry war quietly in the set of his shoulders. 

Someone who did not carry widowhood in the exhausted caution of his hands. 

Someone who could offer you uncomplicated things. Mornings untouched by nightmares, intimacy untouched by grief… a future not assembled awkwardly from surviving pieces. 

He feared all of that because wanting you made him feel breakable.

So he thought he could endure wanting you. Because wanting was private and could be locked away. He had survived worse than wanting, so he could survive this, too.

What he could not endure was the possibility that you might actually want him back, because then restraint would no longer be noble, but rather a refusal. He wouldn’t protect you; he would actively hurt you.

You missed the moments between the two of you immensely, and you suspected he felt the same.

Twice during this week, you caught him looking at you with an expression that made your pulse stumble. 

One time, you had been laughing at something someone said near the medication station, tired enough that the laughter came out softer than usual. When you looked up, Jack was watching you from across the department. 

Not with the ordinary irritated attention he gave noise in a place already too full of it. He was looking at you as though he had forgotten that looking could be seen. 

The second time was sometime after four in the morning. You were standing together at the nurses’ station, close but not touching, both exhausted. His shoulders were rounded with fatigue, one hand braced beside the keyboard, the other resting near a chart he had stopped pretending to read.

You needed a pen. Probably pens were everywhere, from drawers to pockets. But the nearest one was tucked behind Jack’s ear.

And before you could think, ask, or remember that things had changed, you reached for it. 

When your finger brushed his temple, he froze, went still under your hand. It was as if he had ceased to be the steady centre of anything and became a statue under the smallest possible kindness. 

Your hand closed around the pen, but you did not pull it free yet, and Jack just looked at you. No, not at you. More into you. 

As though your touch had interrupted something inside the machinery he had built to keep himself distant, as if it suffered a catastrophic failure at the contact of your fingers. 

Slowly, carefully, his eyes dropped to your mouth. Heat moved through you instantly. It struck low and sharp, almost carnal in a sudden awareness of your own mouth and the small distance between you. 

His gaze stayed there for longer than it should have. When he lifted his eyes again, he looked almost angry. Not with you. With himself, with the want that had become visible despite all his effort. 

You could have made it easy for him then. You could have laughed, taken the pen, turned away, restored the moment to something ordinary again. You could have pretended not to notice the way his pulse had changed, or how the tips of his ears turned red, or even how his eyes had betrayed him. 

Instead, you just stayed close, too. Just long enough to let him understand that you had seen him. 

Then he moved back gently. 

After that, you stopped pretending you didn’t know. 

Not loudly. There were still patients to be seen, families to call, rooms to turn over before the next emergency arrived. 

But still, you knew now. 

You knew in the way he went still, when you came too close with the sudden arrested quiet of a man holding himself back by force. Or how he stared at your mouth too often in a way that couldn’t be denied. And, of course, in the way he had asked about a partner and retreated the moment your answer removed the last clean excuse between you. 

He wanted you. But it felt like a man standing very still in a burning room because he was more afraid of harming you than of being consumed himself. And so you gave him the choice to leave. 

You wouldn’t - couldn’t - demand a confession from him when he seemed so torn between his inner demons and what he wanted so clearly.

So you started to behave normally again. Standing beside him instead of across, touching his shoulder or arm in passing once more. Nonetheless, you always made sure he could step away if he wanted to. 

Sometimes he would, and those times always hurt. Not because you thought he didn't want you, but because you know he did and chose distance. 

But sometimes, he did not. 

Sometimes, when you touched his wrist and said his first name, he looked down at your fingers, not like a man rejecting a boundary crossed, but like a thirsty man refusing to drink the water in front of him. 

These moments were almost nothing: a pause, a breath, a hand not withdrawn, a man allowing himself to be touched. 

And somewhere in those small permissions, the thing between you stopped being imaginary. 

It became waiting. 

_____

It happened after a child with appendicitis turned septic faster than anyone would have liked.

That was how Jack would have described it later, if anyone had asked. Nothing catastrophic, in the end: Surgery took him, and the vitals steadied. The boy was alive. His mother had only stopped crying after Ellis had told her that her son had arrived in time and that he was in the best hands. The machinery worked as it was meant to work.

And still, by the time you slipped into the medication room, your hands were shaking. Not enough for anyone else to notice in the hall. You had kept them useful when it mattered, held pressure, passed instruments on, spoken gently. 

But in the narrow privacy between shelves and drawers with the door half-closed behind you and the worst over, your body had demanded compensation. 

Jack found you there, your fingers trembling around nothing. 

“Hey,” his voice was low and careful. 

You looked down at your hands, “I’m fine.”

“I didn’t ask.”

His dry retort almost made you laugh, almost broke you too. 

The laugh rose first, small and helpless, because of how he had said it. But under it, something hot and sudden began to manifest itself behind your eyes; you had to press your lips together to keep it from becoming a sound you would not be able to take back.

 Jack stepped closer to you, not much. Just in the way it had been now for quite some time, only allowing proximity in measured doses as though closeness was some volatile drug to be administered with caution. 

For a moment, he only stood there, the war in him obvious. Something between you had been stretching for weeks now. Thin as wire. Hot as a live current. Every almost, every retreat, every glance too long had pulled it tighter. 

And as his hand rose and settled at the back of your neck, you knew something in him had snapped. 

Your breath caught, and for one second, the world seemed to stop turning. His palm curved around the nape of your neck with a restraint so delicate it was almost worse than hunger. His fingers rested beneath the fall of your hair, not gripping, not claiming, only there - steady and human and closer than he had allowed himself to be in days. 

The touch should have calmed you, but instead it felt like oil thrown onto the flame.

Your skin seemed to know him before the rest of you could decide what to do. The warmth of his hand spread down your spine, across your shoulders, beneath your ribs, until the shaking in your fingers became something else entirely.

Jack felt it too. Or maybe he only felt his own ruin answering yours.

“You did well,” he said, his voice was rougher than usual, and his thumb moved once, barely. 

In any other world, the words should have just steadied you. Returned the moment to something safe, something professional; just one colleague comforting another one. You should have just nodded, thanked him and stepped back.

Instead, you looked up. And his gaze dropped to your mouth again.

This time, he did not look away immediately.

That was the difference. That was the match. 

For weeks, he had glanced and retreated, wanted and punished himself, let his gaze fall to your mouth only long enough for both of you to know before turning away with the grim discipline of someone believing he was doing something right. 

But now he just looked. Really looked. 

“Jack,” you whispered, and whatever he saw in your face, your eyes, ruined him. 

You could watch it happen, the small collapse inside of him. The flare of want before restraint closed around it, and how his eyes darkened. 

His hand tightened by a fraction at the back of your neck. Not enough to hurt, but enough to tell the truth. 

You just stood inside the tiny room, close enough that the air seemed shared and everything beyond the door became distant and irrelevant. His hand was on your neck, your eyes on your mouth. And that was all that mattered. The fire had caught now, and all his carefullness, all his distance, all his noble, miserable retrauint had only fed it. 

Then someone shouted from the hall and tore through the moment. 

Jack stepped back so quickly that the absence of him felt like a slap. His face closed again, and then he left. 

And for the next hour, he was furious with himself. Not because he had touched you. No, it was because for one second he had believed he was allowed to.

That was the dangerous thing. Desire could be mistrused and eventually starved. Permission was worse. 

The look on your face had not been pity. And he couldn't make it pity no matter how hard he tried. It had been wanting. Unmistakable enough that even Jack’s considerable talent for self-denial could not fully disfigure it. 

You wanted him. Possibly. Probably. 

That thought moved through him like a second ignition, heat catching where he had already been burning. 

And still, he couldn’t let go of his thoughts. He was too old, too damaged. He was sure you only wanted the idea of him. The controlled version you saw.

You didn’t know the rest; the bad nights, the stiffness, the pain. 

You deserved better than a man who would have to explain himself before letting you undress him. 

Better than a body that came with history written into muscle and bone.

Better than a man who had learned to survive so thoroughly that he no longer knew whether he could be loved without first apologising for what survival had made of him. 

Better than Jack Abbot. 

That was what he told himself like a mantra through the rest of his shift. As he scrubbed his hands too hard. As he corrected a resident too sharply. As he avoided looking towards you because he knew if he saw you again, the thing in him might snap a second time.

And next time, he was not so sure he would step back. 

_____

The night that continued the unravelling began badly and then worsened with an almost theatrical dedication. 

Rain came down hard enough to turn the outside almost silver. It sheeted over the asphalt in violent, glittering bursts beneath emergency lights, gathered in gutters, and struck the roof with a steady metallic insistence. The city seemed to empty itself into the Pitt one siren at a time.

By midnight, every bed was full.

By two, the hallways had become waiting rooms. 

By three, even Shen had stopped making jokes.

Jack had not eaten since noon, and had only had half a cup of black coffee that now stood forgotten on the counter next to a protein bar he had taken one bite from. You had not sat down in six hours, and your body ached with it. 

Around dawn, the department seemed to quiet down a bit. At least it gave the illusion of rest, ten stolen minutes in the staff room beneath humming lights. When you entered, you found Jack already there.

He was sitting on the worn couch with his head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed, one hand resting loosely over his abdomen and the other along the cushion at his side. Exhaustion had stripped something from his face. Without the sharpness of command and the motion of work, he looked older.

Not weaker. Just… unbearably human. 

His hair was damp at the edges, curling even more than normally. The shadow of the stubble along his jaw was more pronounced than at the start of the shift. He looked like a man assembled out of duty, pain, caffeine, and refusal. And for one aching moment, you wanted nothing more than to touch the place where the world had rested hardest on him. 

“You should go home,” he said without opening his eyes.

“So should you.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” you mumbled as you sat down beside him, the couch dipping beneath your weight. 

Once again, you were too close. Your knee nearly touched his, and the heat of his body met yours in the narrow space between you. 

For a while, neither of you spoke. But silence did what speech could not: It softened the edges and let the hospital drift away inch by inch. Somewhere outside the ER continued breathing, but inside the room, the world narrowed down to you and him. 

Exhausted, you leaned against him in a small surrender. Jack went still beneath the contact, his body reacting with that familiar restraint as every muscle seemed to hold its breath. His arm was warm and solid against yours had become the nearest real thing in a room that had been moving all night.

Your temple came to rest against him next. 

“This okay?” you asked, barely above a whisper. 

It was not. It was the least okay thing that had happened to him all week. Because it was so gentle and the question gave him a chance to refuse you, but some starving part inside him knew that he did not want the distance.

“Yes,” he said. The word came out low and rough, nearly unrecognisable. 

You relaxed against him by degrees. First, your shoulder settled more fully against his upper arm, the tension easing from you in small increments. Then your head came to rest more heavily against him, your temple warm through the fabric near his shoulder, your hair brushing the side of his jaw whenever you shifted. Your hand, loose and tired and utterly thoughtless, drifted towards his forearm.

He had the kind of arms that made restraint look physical: broad through the forearm, corded not in any decorative way but with the practical strength of a man who had spent his life using his body because there had never been another option. There were small marks there too, old nicks and pale scars, the sort of evidence a life left behind without ever asking whether it would be welcome. 

Your fingers touched him lightly, and Jack stared down. 

You traced the inside of his forearm slowly, not with the deliberate confidence of someone trying to seduce him, but with the absent tenderness of a person too tired to keep desire and comfort in separate rooms. 

Your fingertips followed the raised path of a vein beneath his skin, then drifted over the firm muscle beside it, then back again, slow enough that every inch of contact seemed to enter him with impossible precision. You felt the warmth of him, the roughness of fine hair under your fingers, the faint tension that moved through his arm each time your touch passed near the bend of his elbow. 

He smelled closer like this. Less than the department and more like Jack. 

Beneath the traces of coffee, rain and disinfectant was the living warmth of his skin, the scent held at his collar and in the fabric of his scrubs after a night of work and fear and too little rest. It made you dizzy in a way that exhaustion could not fully explain. 

Jack watched your hand as though it contained instructions for his destruction. 

He knew he should move, should sit forward or should clear his throat. Should do any number of sensible things before the thread between you, stretched for weeks by almost-touches and almost-confessions and the cruel oil of hope poured again and again onto desire, finally snapped. 

But you were so warm against him with your fingers on his arm and your head beneath his chin. And Jack, who had spent weeks starving himself of the exact tenderness, found that self-denial had a limit after all. 

He didn’t decide to kiss the top of your head. Because a decision would have implied a process, a moment in which consequences had been weighed and accepted or rejected. But consequences belonged to a version of Jack Abbot who had slept, eaten, kept a better distance and had not spent the last several months becoming quietly and completely undone by the way you touched him when you thought you were being gentle.

So his mouth found your hair before he understood that he had moved. 

It was barely a kiss, barely anything, 

Just the lightest press of his lips to the crown of your head. It should have been innocent, but Jack felt it go through him like a match to oil.

Your hand stilled on his forearm, and you lifted your head, slowly but not startled or pulling away. And that, more than anything, destroyed the last fragile thing holding him back. 

Jack’s hand was still on your arm, though he had no memory of putting it there. His fingers curved around you with careful pressure, thumb resting against the soft skin just below your sleeve, not gripping, not yet, but holding enough that both of you knew he could not pretend this was merely fatigue. 

Your hand remained on his forearm, your fingers spread over the vein you had been tracing, and beneath your palm, his muscles were tense with the effort of not reaching for more.

For one suspended second, you looked at him with the same softness that had been ruining him for weeks.

“Jack,” you whispered.

His name in your voice was the final pull on the thread.

His hand rose from your arm to the side of your face as he leaned in, broad palm warm against your cheek, fingers sliding carefully into the hair near your temple as though even in surrender, he could not stop himself from being gentle with you. His mouth found yours slowly enough to give you one last chance to turn away and urgently enough to confess that he had been wanting this for longer than he could bear to admit. 

You did not turn away but moved into him. 

So he kissed you like a man arriving starving at his own destruction. 

Your hands caught his shoulders, fingers gripping the fabric of his scrubs as though some part of you needed more proof that he was solid and that this was real. 

He responded by deepening the kiss, his tongue sliding against yours in a slow stroke that made your stomach clench. 

His own fingers could not seem to decide where they were allowed to belong. 

They found your waist first, large and careful and so unsteady, drawing you closer and closer. Then one slid to your back, pressing between your shoulder blades as if he could keep you there. And then it rose to your face, his thumb brushing over your cheek with an overwhelming tenderness.

Your hand slid from his shoulders to the back of his neck. Your fingers found the short hair at his nape, and Jack made a sound, low and involuntary, that vibrated through the narrow space between your bodies. 

He pulled back just enough to look at you, to make sure that this was real. That you were real. His thumb brushed over your cheek again, and when you tilted your face up, he kissed you again. 

You shifted on the couch, turning towards him. His hand slid from your jaw to the back of your head, fingers threading through your hair, and you felt the gentle pressure of his palm. His tongue brushed against yours and responded in kind, tasting him and deepening the kiss even further.

Driven by hunger, his hands found your waist, and he lifted you up until you were straddling him on the narrow couch. You settled against him, your knees bracketing his hips, and the first thing you felt was the solid wall of his thighs beneath you. 

“Jack-” you started, voice breathless even to your own ears.

“I’ve thought about this,” he murmured against your throat, interrupting you. His lips moved over your pulse point, his stubble scraping over it. “Thought about you … for months.”

His thumbs started to trace slow circles against the jut of your hipbones through the fabric, and you arched into him instinctively. 

You felt him hardening beneath you. The thick length of his cock pressed against your cunt through too many layers of fabric, and you rolled your hips without thinking, chasing the friction. The sensation sent sparks up your spine, and you gasped against his neck.  

His head fell back against the wall with a soft thud, eyes closed and throat exposed. You took the opportunity to lean in and press your lips against the hollow of his neck. 

When he let out a low groan, you rolled your hips again, slower this time. His fingers dug into your hips, guiding you, pulling you harder against him. You could feel the tension coiling in his body, the way his thighs tensed, and the ragged catch in his breathing.

“Fuck,” he gasped. “Fuck, wait..I-”

But you were already moving again, lost in the heat of him and the taste of his mouth when he pulled you back in for another kiss. His hips bucked up against you, and you felt him throb against you.

Then he went rigid beneath you. 

A low, broken sound escaped his throat. Half groan, half something like aguish. Jack’s hands clamped down on your hips hard, fingers curled in the fabrics of your scrubs hard enough to wrinkle them, as his whole body shuddered. 

You felt the warmth spreading against you even through the fabric.

A flush of shame rose to his face. Colour high along his cheekbones now, through the stubble and the exhaustion of the shift.

“Fuck,” The word came out strangled. “I’m so sorry.”

His jaw tightened, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at you. He could feel the cooling wetness against his skin, the uncomfortable cling of fabric. It had been years since anyone touched him with intention. Years since he had let himself want something enough to lose himself in it.

“I need to change my scrubs…” He said quietly, words rough and scraped raw by embarrassment. 

“It’s been a while,” he said finally, the admission dragged out of him like a confession. “A long while. This doesn’t usually…”

He could not finish the sentence, couldn’t articulate the way his body had betrayed him, had responded to you with an intensity he had forgotten he was capable of feeling. 

You watched the shame move through him like a wave. Watching how his eyes could not quite meet yours, the way his jaw worked around words he could not say. Nonetheless, your body still hummed with want; you could feel the ache between your thighs that hadn't been satisfied yet. But you also felt a fierce tenderness for this man who looked at you like you were something precious and terrifying. 

“Jack.” You kept your voice soft and steady. “It’s okay.”

“It's not,” he exhaled sharply. “That wasn’t…I wanted to...”

“I know.”

You leaned in and pressed your forehead to his. The gesture was intimate in a way that made his chest tighten. He could smell your shampoo, feel the warmth of your breath against his lips.

You stayed where you were for another long moment. The fluorescent lights hummed. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere in the ER, the night shift continued without you, but here in this small room, time had become something elastic and strange.

Finally, reluctantly, you began to move.

His hands slid from your hips as you rose, but not before he squeezed them once - hard, deliberate, a silent promise. The fabric of your panties stuck to your cunt, and you were acutely aware of how muhch you wanted him. 

Jack watched you stand. He remained on the couch, making no move to rise, and you understood why. The evidence of his orgasm was visible if you looked, a slight darkening of the fabric at his groin. He kept his thighs pressed together, one hand resting casually over the affected area, but his ears had gone red again.

Then, very gently, you cupped his cheek.

Jack stopped breathing.

Your palm fit against the side of his face with a tenderness that made his expression change before he could prevent it. Your thumb brushed once beneath his eye, over the tired skin there, near the place exhaustion had settled into him so deeply that it seemed part of his bone structure. His stubble rasped faintly against your palm. He smelled of coffee and rain and hospital soap and the warm, human aftermath of being kissed past his own defences.

“It’s okay, really,” you murmured.

Finally, Jack looked at you properly again.

Something steadier had begun to settle behind the embarrassment now. Not calm exactly. Calm would have been too clean a word for it. This was darker, quieter, more deliberate. Determination, perhaps. Or surrender wearing the clothes of decision.

“Come with me after shift,” he said.

Not a question.

The command seemed to surprise him the instant it left his mouth.

His expression shifted, the old caution returning so quickly it almost hurt to watch, and his voice softened immediately afterwards, roughened by the effort of giving you room.

“If you want,” he paused and swallowed. “I’ll do better. I’ll make it good for you…I-”

“Yes.”

You answered before he could finish or spiral into self-doubt or find reasons why this was a mistake. 

“Yes,” you repeated softly. “I want that. I want you.”

Something low and helpless moved through Jack’s expression before he looked away from you entirely.

It was not quite a smile, not quite a grimace, not quite surrender, but some private combination of all three - desire and disbelief and the terrible relief of being answered. His hand flexed once against the couch cushion, as though he had to remind himself not to reach for you again when the door was unlocked, and the department still needed him.

“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath.

You laughed softly.

The Pitt never really slept; it only changed its shape. 

It swelled and recoiled upon itself, though the hours of the day like some great wounded organ under electric light. At midnight, it was all sharp, almost hectic movements and shouted orders; at three in the morning, it gave way to some kind of delirium, low and airless, soaked in the bitter smell of antiseptic and cold coffee.

Three ambulances had rolled in within the last twenty minutes. Somewhere beyond the partition curtains, a man was screaming in great bursts while a monitor answered in shrill protest. 

The waiting room had long since overflowed with bodies occupying every chair, every stretch of the wall. The air itself was stiff and stuffy, as if it had been handled too many times. 

Doctor Jack Abbot, the attending physician of the night shift, stood in the middle of it all with drying blood beneath his fingernails and the blunt iron ache of exhaustion driving steadily beneath his left eye. 

The overhead fluorescent lights caught the silver in his hair and turned the curls fallen across his forehead damp with sweat into something almost feverish-looking. His scrub top hung slightly crooked beneath the weight of the stethoscope. There was a hard line set to his mouth that had settled sometime around hour ten of the shift and probably wouldn’t leave until he got home. 

“Abbot.”

He looked up at once.

You were crossing the department towards him with a patient chart tucked beneath one arm, weaving through motion with the unconscious certainty of someone long accustomed to catastrophe. A strand of your hair clung to your temple.

You stopped close, closer than most people ever came to Jack willingly anymore. 

Without hesitation, you reached up and caught the folded edge of his scrub collar between your fingers, straightening it with a small, distracted frown as though the gesture belonged to habit. 

“There,” you murmured with a smile. “You looked insane.”

Your knuckles brushed the side of his neck as your hand fell away. 

It was hardly anything, almost only the barest contact. A passing warmth against skin still cold from over-air-conditioned hallways and way too many hours on feet. 

And yet Jack felt it with almost embarrassing certainty. 

The rough drag of your finger against the pulse in his neck. The faint pressure of your palm briefly brushing over his shoulder as you adjusted his collar. The clean, sharp smell of hospital soap clinging to your skin beneath the copper-rot scent of blood that saturated the entire department. 

His body reacted before his mind could catch up. Every muscle in him tightened at once. His breath caught somewhere low and hard beneath his rips.

For one terrible instant, he became aware of himself with unbearable precision: exhaustion humming under his skin, sweat cooling at the base of his spine, the sudden, violent thud of his pulse against the place you had touched.

You were already moving away before he remembered how speaking worked, disappearing towards Trauma Two while calling something over your shoulder to Lena.

Jack just remained where he was. Neither moving nor speaking.

Simply staring after you with the stunned disorientation of a man struck unexpectedly across the mouth. 

“You good?” Shen asked after a moment.

Jack blinked hard. Only then did he realise that the other physician had been watching him.  He dragged his gaze away from the doorway.

“Fine,” he said roughly, but the lie sat heavily in his throat.

Meanwhile, trauma two had swallowed you at once as you slid into the room, bright and hot and appallingly alive beneath the white glare of the overhead lamps.

There was a man on the table with rainwater still darkening the shoulders of his jacket, one paramedic talking too quickly at your left, another trying to untangle a blood pressure cuff from the mess of tubes and blankets. Somewhere behind you, a monitor had begun its beeping. 

Dr. Ellis was already there with one hip braced against the bed, listening and assessing.

“Motorcycle versus guardrail,” the paramedic was saying. “Helmeted at least. But brief loss of consciousness at the scene. Pressure’s soft, pulse one-thirty. Decreased breath sounds on the left.”

“Chest tube tray,” Ellis said, without looking away from the patient, blood darkening the torn front of his shirt in a widening, theatrical bloom. 

You were already reaching for it before she had finished her sentence.

There was comfort, in a strange and grim way, in the shape of instructions. In the crisp obedience of the body when the mind might otherwise have chosen panic. Clamp. Gauze. Betadine. Gloves snapped at the wrist.

The world narrowed itself to hands and numbers and the thin animal sounds of pain. 

You had been on nights for less than two weeks, not long enough for the altered rhythm of the place to feel natural, but long enough to understand that the Pitt after midnight was not the Pitt of daylight. It was another creature entirely. 

You moved because there was moving to be done. You smiled because sometimes people needed a human face more than they needed another instruction shouted over their bodies.

And if, sometimes, your hand found a shoulder or a wrist or the back of someone’s arm while you spoke, it was only because people were less likely to drift away from you when they could feel that someone had hold of them.

At least that’s what you told yourself. 

Outside Trauma Two, Jack remained where you had left him for half a second too long.

It irritated him, that half a second.

He was not a man prone to standing uselessly in corridors because a nurse had dared to straighten his collar. He had been shot at, cut open, widowed, rebuilt, and put back into rooms where people died noisily under his hands. He had survived the great, crude indifference of the world in more forms than he cared to name.

And yet the ghost of your fingers at his throat persisted. 

He stood long enough that Shen said his name again, more pointedly this time.

“Abbot!”

“What?” Jack blinked, a bit annoyed, having acknowledged his colleague already.

“Trauma One needs you.”

“Then why are you still talking to me?”

Shen lifted both hands and wisely retreated.

Jack moved then because Jack always moved when he was needed. Whatever strange paralysis had taken him released at once, vanishing beneath the old machinery of training and fatigue. His expression sealed itself, and his shoulder squared. 

The man who had forgotten language at the brush of your fingers disappeared completely as if he had never existed. 

There was a patient waiting, a pressure dropping, a room full of people who would obey him if he spoke clearly enough. 

That, at least, he understood. You, unfortunately, he did not. 

In Trauma One, there was an elderly woman with a fractured hip and a blood pressure that would not behave, and Jack gave himself to the work with almost punitive focus.

Orders came clearly from him. 

“Two large-bore IVs. Type and cross. I want repeat vitals in five.”

His hands were steady, his voice calm. Nothing in him betrayed the absurd fact that a few rooms over, the ghost of your hand was still lingering.

It was ridiculous.

It was, if he was honest, worse than just ridiculous. It was borderline humiliating. 

He was too old for this, too tired. 

You had likely already forgotten the moment. You had probably straightened three collars that night, squeezed five shoulders, leaned against half the department in passing. 

That was the cruelty of this, he thought. Not that you touched him. But that you touched him as though it cost you nothing. 

“Dr. Abbot?”

He looked up. The resident beside him had gone slightly pale, waiting with a syringe in hand. 

Jack blinked once, hard, trying to regain his composure that he seemed to lose at only the thought of you. 

“Now,” he said, and hated the roughness in his own voice. “Push it now.”

The old woman stabilised by slow degrees, and the room settled. The monitors, having exhausted their shrill objections, returned to a rhythm that suggested not peace exactly, but permission to breathe once again.

Jack stripped off his gloves and dropped them into the bin with more force than necessary.

Then he heard you laugh. Neither loudly nor carelessly.  

It came from Trauma Two, brief and breathless, tucked between Ellis’s clipped instructions and the patient’s groans. A small sound, almost absurdly human in the middle of all that blood. 

He turned before he consciously decided to.

Through the open doorway, he saw you at the patient’s side, one hand braced against the mattress while Ellis and the intern worked. 

There was a smear of red across the blue of your glove, another at the edge of your wrist. Your hair had loosened further, escaping in damp strands at your neck, and your mouth was set in that concentred line he had begun, against all sense, to recognise. 

You were good. And that was the part that made it more dangerous. 

Not merely warm. Not merely beautiful. Not merely younger than him in the way that made him feel the years in his own bones with particular cruelty. 

You were good at the work. You listened before you answered. You learned quickly. You touched frightened patients with the same unthinking steadiness with which you touched everyone else, as though your hands carried with them some private conviction that people were still people even when they were bleeding under fluorescent lights. 

Jack wandered to Trauma Two and told himself he was there because Ellis might need an attending. 

Instead of going in, he stopped at the doorway. His arms were folded tightly across his chest, one shoulder braced against the metal frame of the entrance. Fatigue had settled into him, roughening the edges of his expression. 

And yet there remained in him something unmistakably alert, almost controlled. The sort soldiers carried long after wars had finished with them.

You did not notice him at first. 

You were standing beside Ellis at the patient’s side when someone handed you a suction tube, and you took it without hesitation and without needing instruction, calm amidst the ruinous choreography of the room. 

Jack just watched you move. Not openly enough to be caught by it. His gaze moved here it ought to move - the monitor, Ellis’s hands, the ultrasound screen - but it always returned to you afterwards with the stubborn inevitability of a tongue seeking the gap left by a missing tooth. 

You tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear with the back of your wrist.

His jaw tightened.

He had seen prettier scenes than this. God knows he had. Women untouched by the fluorescent hospital lights and way too long shifts, and the strange erosion this work inflicted upon the soul. 

But none of them had ever looked at him the way you did, touched him the way you did.

And that was the problem.  

Ellis glanced up, relief in her eyes when she saw him, unaware of his inner struggle, “Abbot, perfect. Stop haunting the doorway and take a look at this ultrasound?”

You looked up at the sound of his name, too.

Your eyes wandered over him, taking note of how he stood half inside the opening. The overhead light flattened the colour from everything around him, bleaching the walls and turning the air itself a tired grey, but somehow it sharpened him instead.

The black of his scrub top stretched across the breadth of his shoulders; his forearms, bare and muscular, the tendons at his wrist standing out where his fingers tucked against his bicep.

He looked tired. Not just ordinarily tired or sleepless. It seemed like the tiredness had settled deep into his bones.

And still, absurdly, he was devastatingly handsome. 

Of course, you had noticed it before; it would have been difficult not to. Everyone noticed Jack Abbot. Some because he was brilliant. Some because he was intimidating. Some because grief clung to him in ways people sensed before they understood. But you had noticed him because of his stillness.

The Pitt was full of loud men. Jack never needed to raise his voice. 

Your gaze caught briefly on the rough shadow of his jaw, the silver threaded through his curls, the slight crease between his brows that deepened whenever he was concentrating. Or worrying. You had not yet learned which. 

Then his eye lifted fully to meet yours, and something in your stomach shifted. 

“There you are,” you said, your voice kind and soft as if you had been expecting him. 

Something unreadable moved briefly across his face, and then he crossed the room.

The space around the trauma bed was cramped with carts and tubing and bodies moving in practised collision. Ellis angled the probe again while you stepped automatically aside to make room for him, your hip brushing against the metal rail of the bed. 

That was what he would remember later. Not that you meant to touch him. Not that you intended anything by it.

Only that your body, without pause or question, made place for his.

Your shoulder brushed his arm as you stepped closer to the bed. The contact was brief, compressed by necessity, but your warmth passed through the thin cotton of your sleeve with indecent clarity. 

Jack looked at the ultrasound screen. 

He did not look at you, but you were suddenly aware of him beside you in a way that felt almost grave. You kept your eyes on the patient because that was what the patient deserved, but your attention was split in two. And only one half remained useful while the other noticed Jack Abbot breathing. 

“Free fluid?” you asked, because speech was safer when it belonged to work.

“Maybe,” Jack answered, his voice was steady while his pulse was not. 

Ellis angled the probe. The dim screen flickered with its lunar shades and swimming uncertainties “Here, see that?’

You leaned in for a better look, and the movement brought you closer still. Your arm crossed Jack’s for one second as you reached for a packet of gauze near his elbow. 

“Sorry,” you mumbled.

It should have ended there. 

And it would have ended there, if you hadn’t almost lost your balance, if the room had not been as crowded as it was, if his presence had not seemed to take up more space than his body alone could explain. 

Instinctively, your hand found the centre of his back as you steadied yourself around him.

It was nothing. It was everything. Under your palm, Jack went still.

Not enough for Ellis or anyone else to notice. Not enough for the room to falter. But you felt it: the minute arrest of muscle beneath fabric, the sudden held breath of a man who had learned too well how to conceal reaction and not quite well enough to conceal it from touch. 

So your fingers spread slightly before you thought better of it. 

Warm. Solid. Tense. 

“Sorry,” you said again, this time quietly as you withdrew your hand, “I’m in your way.”

No, thought Jack. The word rose in him with an immediacy that was almost violent. 

You were not in his way. You were, perhaps, too close. Too perceptive. Too capable of disturbing the delicate machinery by which he moved through the shift. But you were not in his way.

But the thought remained soundless, imprisoned somewhere behind his ribs.

He gave the ultrasound another hard look, as though the answer to the catastrophe of his own body might be hiding there amongst the grainy shapes.  

His jaw tightened as the patient groaned faintly.  

At least he said, “Call surgery. Now!”

The order cut clean through the air, and everyone moved. The other nurse moved first, then Ellis shifted the probe. Someone reached for the phone. The stretcher wheels gave a protesting click as another pair of hands appeared at the rail. The room, which had been suspended for half a breath around the uncertainty of the scan, abruptly became motion again. 

You moved too. You had been trained for this, knew how to fold yourself back into function, how to become hands and eyes and clear speech, how to take everything human and inconvenient and set it aside because the body on the bed could not wait for anyone’s private confusion. 

But before you turned fully away, your eyes flicked back to him once more.

It was barely a glance, quick and questioning beneath your lashes, there and gone so fast that anyone else might have missed it. Yet Jack saw it. And for a moment, he did not look away.

By the time the patient was wheeled out towards surgery, the room had been stripped of its emergency and left with the strange, intimate wreckage emergencies always seemed to leave behind.

There was torn packaging scattered across the counter, bloodied gauze abandoned in a shallow metal tray, a smear of red where the stretcher was and the flattened impression of a human already gone elsewhere. 

The air still held the sour metallic trace of blood beneath the sharper notes of antiseptic and plastic. 

You stripped off your gloves and threw them into the bin. 

Jack was still near the foot of the bed, speaking low to Ellis, his body angled half away from you. His voice had resumed its usual steadiness, that low, clinical economy that gave very little away. 

There was a smear of crimson near his collar. It sat just below the line of his jaw, stark against his skin. You took a clean wipe from the counter, not really thinking about what you were doing. 

“Hold still,” you said to him. 

Jack stopped speaking and looked at you with furrowed brows.

Ellis, mercifully, had already turned her attention to the chart, her pen moving with precision.

You stepped closer to him, almost on autopilot, driven only by the need to help and lifted the wipe to the side of his neck.

“There,” you murmured, “Blood. You’re collecting bodily fluids, Doctor Abbot.”

Something in him locked at once. It was immediate and humiliatingly complete, the hard, instinctive stillness of a body that had learned too much about pain and restraint; like the stillness of an animal that froze beneath unfamiliar hands. 

Your fingers were cool through the thin material of the wipe.

He felt them anyway. He felt the precise place where your hand hovered near his throat. The light pressure of the wipe. The nearness of your knuckles once again. 

A moment ago, the room had been all noise and utility: Ellis speaking in clipped phrases, equipment rolling, wrappers tearing, shoes moving briskly across the floor. 

Somewhere to his left, someone was still saying something. Beyond the door, someone pushed a cart down the corridor, one uneven wheel tickling faintly with each rotation. 

But Jack heard it all as though from underwater. 

You meant only to wipe the blood away and step back. He knew that. Of course, he knew that. 

You had seen the mark, taken a wipe, stepped close and done what any decent colleague might have done in the brief pause after a shared emergency. There was nothing in the gesture that required interpretation.

But that knowledge did nothing to save him. 

The antiseptic smell of the wipe rose faintly between you, clean and chemical and impersonal. And beneath it, maddenlingly, was something warmer - the scent of your skin after too many hours under hospital lights. 

It should not have registered. It should not have mattered.

His throat moved once beneath your fingers. A swallow, involuntary and unforgivable.

He saw the instance you noticed. 

Not because your expression changed much, you were too controlled for that, but because your hand hesitated. Only slightly, only long enough for the pad of your thumb to settle, absurdly, right against the side of his pulse. 

Jack had stood in rooms full of blood and screaming and stayed steady. He had walked into danger with a clear head. He had made calls that would have shaken younger doctors to the core. He had endured fear, grief, violence, exhaustion, and the long, grinding attrition of a life spent pretending that the body could simply be willed to continue. 

Shit, he had endured gunfire with steadier nerves than this. 

His jaw tightened, and he could not decide where to look.

Your eyes were dangerous because they were too close, and he didn’t want you to know how affected he was by this. Your mouth was worse. Soft with concentration, parted faintly around the quiet breath you had taken before speaking, close enough that some ungoverned part of him began measuring the distance without permission. 

There was a loose strand of hair near your cheek, dampened at the end by sweat or sink water or the long brutality of the shift. It clung there, out of place, human in a way that nearly undid him.

The urge to reach for it came so suddenly and violently that his hand almost moved.

Almost.

He imagined tucking it back. Not with purpose or with excuse. Only with the slow, careful intimacy of his fingers at your temple, the back of his knuckles near your cheek, your face turned slightly towards his hand. 

The thought was somehow even worse because it wasn’t desire, it was tenderness. 

He wondered, not for the first time, whether you understood what you were doing to him. 

Whether some part of you had begun to recognise the small betrayals his body committed in your presence. But Jack had never considered himself an easy man to read…life had taken care of that. And the hospital had taken care of the rest. 

Yet you just kept finding him. 

Not all of him. Not the whole ruin of him, not the darkened rooms he kept locked even from himself. 

But enough. 

You found the place where his breath caught. You found the pulse beneath his jaw. You found, with the terrible innocence of touch, the part of him still capable of wanting. 

So perhaps you did understand. And that possibility was somehow more terrifying than ignorance. 

Because if you understood, then Jack no longer knew which outcome frightened him more. That you wanted him back. Or that you did not. 

That you knew exactly what you were doing and had chosen him anyway. Or that this was nothing to you beyond the kind of careless warmth you carried without knowing what it could do to those who had learned to live without it.

That you might be playing not cruelly, maybe, but lightly. And that could wound too.

He was ashamed by the thought as soon as it came, since you had given him no reason to suspect cruelty. 

In fact, it was quite the opposite. 

Your kindness was not theatrical, which he had learned in the short time he knew you. It did not announce itself. It was almost instinctively, almost before thought, towards whatever looked hurt. A frightened patient gripping the rail too hard. A resident blinking too quickly after a reprimand. Ellis pretending not to be exhausted. A fellow nurse quietly swallowing tears in the medication room.

You noticed such things. You just noticed the small fractures people tried to hide beneath competence.

Perhaps that was all this was. Perhaps Jack Abbot was only one more damaged creature in a long line of damaged creatures. Perhaps the shape of your hands had simply learned to soothe. 

But God help him, he wanted to be more than that. 

He wanted to be more than another injury your kindness had found. More than a tired man at the end of a shift. More than a guarded colleague whose silence invited your gentleness. 

He wanted, shamefully and with a force that made him almost whole again, to be singular to you. Not merely cared for. But chosen. To be the person you touched, not because he needed gentleness, but because you could not quite keep yourself from giving it to him.

The desire was selfish. He knew that. Still, there it was. And it terrified him. 

“Got it?” he asked. The question came out lower than he intended, the words scraped by the roughness in his throat, and the sound of his own voice irritated him immediately. 

It gave too much away. Not to anyone else, perhaps. Ellis would only hear impatience. The room would hear only efficiency. But you would hear the fracture beneath it. 

You should have stepped back then. 

Jack wanted you to step back. 

He wanted the relief of distance, the restoration of ordinary air, the clean simplicity of no longer feeling the almost-touch of your thumb against his pulse. He wanted professionalism to return with its familiar walls and bright, sterile surfaces. He just wanted to be Dr. Abbot again, which was easier than being Jack under your hand. 

But you did not immediately step back.

You’d later blame it on the tiredness or the adrenaline. In the end, it was because he was looking at you with that terrible, restrained intensity, the kind that suggested a man holding a door shut from the inside. Because some reckless, increasingly curious part of you had begun to suspect that Dr. Jack Abbot was not nearly so unaffected as he pretended to be. 

Your fingers lingered another heartbeat at the edge of his collar. It was barely anything, just a breath of contact.

“Mh-hm,” you murmured softly, and Jack’s gaze dropped to your mouth. 

Only briefly, but not briefly enough. 

And he wondered what it would be like to kiss you, what it would be like to stop resisting.  

Then Ellis cleared her throat, and the sound cut through the moment with surgical precision. 

You withdrew your hand at once. Heat rising unhelpfully beneath your scrub top, spreading from your chest to your throat. You turned towards the counter and started to busy yourself with the discarded wrappers there, gathering torn plastic and empty gauze packets with a concentration far beyond what the task required. 

Jack stood there frozen for a second longer; he remained exactly how you left him: shoulder still, jaw set, head angled slightly aside. Cold rushed unpleasantly into the place your touch had occupied, and he felt the loss with humiliating clarity. 

Then he turned away. But not before you saw his hand flex once at his side. 

It was a small movement, almost nothing. His fingers opened and closed against empty air, controlled again almost as soon as it happened. You noticed because you had spent enough hours beside him now to understand the scale of his restraint. It looked like there had been something he almost reached for or something he had almost pushed away.

The thoughts arrived so suddenly that you almost dropped one of the wrappers. 

It couldn’t have been more than a minute, maybe less.

Thirty seconds, if anyone had been cruel enough to count them. Thirty seconds from the instant you stepped closer with the wipe to the instant Ellis’s throat-clearing returned you both to yourselves. 

That was all. Nothing, really.  If there were an official report of everything that happened during the shift, it would not have appeared at all. 

The patient went to surgery. 

He gave a few more orders.

Someone cursed at a jammed supply drawer.

The hallway swallowed the stretcher, and the room emptied by degrees and became once again just a trauma bay waiting for its next occupant. 

Nothing had happened. Nothing that mattered. Nothing that anyone else could have named. 

And yet, Jack carried those thirty seconds out of Trauma Two as though they had the weight of the world. As though they had been folded into his pocket. As though they had been ingrained in him now.

This irritated him greatly, because nothing had happened to him. 

You had seen blood. You had wiped it away. Your hand had been steady. Your voice had been low because the room had quieted, not because there was anything secret in it. Your thumb had rested at his pulse by accident, because bodies had edges and hands needed somewhere to go.

That was all.

Nothing except the sudden, catastrophic awareness of how long it had been since anyone had touched him with such unguarded care.  

Nothing except the disgraceful fact that for one wild instant, he had wanted to turn his face into your palm. 

Neither metaphorically nor sentimentally, but rather physically, shamefully. With the tired, aching hunger of a man who had spent too many years convincing himself that wanting comfort was a private weakness, best hidden under confidence clipped instructions and the occasional funny remark. 

He could only hope that you hadn’t noticed.

Jack moved towards the sink, washed his hands even though they were already clean and kept his eyes on the water until the rush of it was louder than the memory of your voice.  

But he suspected that your words and the simple act of kindness would trouble him for the rest of his shift. 

_____

After that, the nights began to arrange themselves around small catastrophes. 

Not the visible kind or the ones that seemed to announce themselves in alarms and rapid footsteps, that summoned surgery from upstairs or left blood drying in the seams of the floor. Those catastrophes belonged to the hospital, and Jack knew how to meet them. He had built a life out of meeting them.

They had protocols, names, and consequences. They demanded action and, therefore, gave mercy in some twisted kind of way. 

No, the kind that devastated him in ways he could never have imagined were the smaller things. The quieter things. 

The brush of your hand against his in an overcrowded room when you both reached for the same box of gloves. Your fingers closing briefly around his wrist as you passed him a pen without looking up from the chart. The absent, thoughless pressure of your palm between his shoulder blades as you slipped behind him at the nurse’s station, murmuring behind you under your breath, as though the warning could possibly prepare him for the touch. 

And those moments only existed in the narrow, treacherous space between bodies too tired to maintain perfect distance and too aware to call that failure meaningless. 

With each day you worked nights, the department made more room for you with the unconscious certainty of a place recognising one of its own. A mug appeared in the cabinet that no one else used. One of the residents began saving the last decent pudding cup because you had once mentioned liking it. The charge nurse started giving you the complicated patients because you understood quickly and did not rattle easily. 

But it was not an easy thing, belonging there. 

So you learned the nights’ own grim and tender rituals, when the coffee turned bitter enough to become a warning instead of a comfort. You learned where the extra blankets were hidden, when the warmer ran empty, which supply drawer jammed unless struck with the heel of the hand.

You learned the routines of every resident and fellow. Which ones panicked loudly and which ones panicked in silence. 

And despite every sensible boundary and every professional instinct screaming at you, you learned Jack’s rhythms too. Perhaps it was just impossible for you not to.

Dr. Jack Abbot did not make himself easy to know. He offered little freely and even less when pressed. His silences had edges. His patience, though real and kind, was often disguised as irritation so that sometimes new colleagues mistook the two. He had a talent for appearing immovable even when exhaustion had hollowed him from the inside. 

But you watched. Never obviously or enough to shame him. Only with the steady, quiet attention you gave to all you did. 

So you learned that he took his coffee black when the shift was bad and abandoned it half-finished when it was worse. How he rubbed the bridge of his nose before giving bad news, not afterwards, as if preparing his face to become something useful.

You noticed how he grew quieter when the pain threaded itself into his leg, his words becoming shorter, his movements more economical, the line of his mouth tightening in increments too small for most people to see. 

He never asked for help unless the asking could be disguised as an order:

Hold this. Come here. Tell Ellis to check her patients. Tell Shen I need another line. Walk with me.

And you noticed it all too well. 

Against all sense and every better judgement he had ever possessed, Jack learned yours as well. 

At first, he told himself it was just observation. Occupational habit. The natural consequences of working alongside someone in a department where the difference between competence and collapse could be measured in seconds. He noticed everyone, that was, after all, the job.

But there was noticing, and then there was knowing.

The way you hummed under your breath while restocking cards, always so softly that he suspected you may not even realise you were doing it. Sometimes it was a song he knew. More often, it was something shapeless, a thread of sound pulled through fatigue. 

He became aware of the way you touched people before you asked them to breathe - fingertips to a shoulder, a palm, to the back of a trembling hand, a physical reassurance offered before the instruction came. 

He even learned that you laughed differently after three in the morning.

Earlier in the shift, your laughter came quick and bright, a spark struck against the roughness of the place. But later, when the halls thinned and the lights seemed harsher, it softened. 

The tiredness changed you. Not in the way that you became less capable, if anything, the fatigue stripped you down to something more instinctive, more honest. Your voice grew gentler. Your movement slowed by fractions. 

You forgot, now and then, the careful distances other people kept as if your body, once exhausted, returned to some older language of warmth and nearness. 

When you were tired, you leaned closer to patients, to Ellis and Shen and the residents, when they looked ready to come apart.

And most dangerously towards him. Especially towards him. That was the intolerable part.

Because Jack could have survived your kindness if it had remained general, he could have endured being one more recipient of your impossible gentleness, one more tired colleague steadied by your hand in passing, one more creature briefly warmed by the careless mercy you gave everyone. 

But did it feel general? He wasn’t so sure anymore. 

Not when you glanced at him across the nurses’ station before smiling at whatever Ellis had said, as though some private part of the joke belonged to him. Not when you brought him coffee without asking and set it near his charting hand, black and no sugar, exactly as the night demanded. 

Not when, after a brutal case, you appeared beside him without a word and pressed two fingers lightly into the file he was holding, pushing it down so he would stop pretending to read it. 

“Jack,” you had said softly.  

Not Dr. Abbot. Jack.

And he looked at you because he had forgotten how not to. That was the true shape of the catastrophe. 

The slow, impossible accumulation of these things. The way each small contact refused to remain small. How every ordinary moment gathered weight because it belonged to you. 

The night shift, with all its fluorescent cruelty and exhausted mercy, had begun to feel less like a place he survived and escaped and more like a place where he might be seen. 

Jack did know what to do with being seen. 

He only knew that each night, when you came into the department, it seemed to alter around him. The coffee tasted worse. The lights seemed brighter. His pulse became less obedient. And all the catastrophes began anew. 

_____

There was the night you fell asleep for eight minutes at the nurses’ desk. 

Eight minutes, not more. Jack knew because he had looked at the clock when you head first began to dip, and then, for no reason, he refused to examine too closely, looked again when you finally started awake. 

You had not meant to sleep, that much was obvious. The night had been quiet, and you had been charting with a stubbornness that was becoming increasingly decorative, your cheek propped against your fist, pen still resting between your fingers, eyes lowering and opening and lowering again until your body gave you the pretence of being governed by will. 

For eight minutes, you were still.

Jack had passed you once and did not stop. Then he passed again with coffee. 

He set the cup beside your elbow, not loudly enough to startle you but close enough for the heat of it, or perhaps the smell, to reach whatever portion of you remained on duty.

Your eyes opened, startled and confused by the world’s reappearance, before you saw him.

“You looked dead,” he said dryly. 

Your mouth curved slightly, “Oh, you say the sweetest things.”

You reached for the coffee, and your fingers closed briefly over his before taking the cup. 

There was nothing deliberate in it, Jack told himself once again. After all, you were still half asleep.

Your hand had just gone where the coffee was, and his fingers happened to be there too. That was all, no mystery, no invitation, no evidence of anything except fatigue and proximity. Just the careless imprecision of a person dragged back from sleep too quickly. 

That’s what he told himself as he returned to his chart. What he told himself again when you took the first sip and made a face at the taste, then drank it anyway.

He told himself this a third time, hours later, when he realised he could still feel the warm, loose weight of your fingers closing over his.

Another of those catastrophes happened the night a combative patient caught you hard in the shoulder.

It happened quickly, as such things always did. One moment, the room was crowded with negotiation, restraint, the careful voices of people trying not to escalate fear into violence. And the next, the patient twisted with surprising force, and an elbow struck the upper part of your arm with a dull sound, Jack felt in his bones. 

You stepped back neither far nor dramatically. 

But Jack’s voice sharpened as it cut through the turmoil in the room. “Enough.”

Ellis and your fellow nurse looked, not because the word was unusual. Jack gave orders all the time. He corrected, interrupted, redirected, and cut through panic with the clean brutality of certainty. But this was different, too fast, too hard and too stripped of its usual professional distance. 

The patient stilled shortly after, beneath the hands restraining him. 

Afterwards, in the narrow stretch of hall where the light always seemed worse, you rolled your shoulder and tried to laugh it off. 

“I’m fine.”

Jack looked at you, unconvinced, “You always say that.”

You blinked, then tilted your head at him with an expression so dry it might have been amusement if he had not also recognised the tenderness under it. You just stepped closer as if the distance between you had been decided badly and required correction. Your hand came to his forearm, fingers wrapping lightly around the muscle there, gentle and sure. 

It was not gratitude or reassurance. Rather, it felt like forgiveness. As if you had understood the worry in him, the sharpness of his voice, the way concern had risen too quickly to be made polite and had decided not to punish him for it. 

He watched your hand leave his arm again, and the absence seemed unreasonable. Absurdly, he felt bereft.

And then there was the night rain battered the ambulance bay doors so hard the whole department seemed to breathe around it.

Water came down in sheets, turning the windows black and restless. Every arrival dragged the weather in with it: wet shoes, damp hair, the cold mineral smell of the street. 

The floors grew slicer near the entrance no matter how often someone mopped them. The wind pressed itself against the building, and each time the automatic doors opened, the night outside flashed with rain.

The ache in Jack’s leg had started before midnight. By two, it had become difficult to ignore. By three, ignoring it required enough concentration that he grew quieter than usual. 

You noticed, because of course you would.

He should have known that you would eventually pick up on it. Pain altered people in small, specific ways, and you had become uncomfortably fluent in reading his silences by then. 

So you saw the shorter stride, the careful stillness when he stopped walking. The hand braced against the counter for one second too long before he let it drop. 

But you said nothing in front of the others.

That was another thing about you that unravelled him. You had a talent for protecting dignity while tending to injury. 

You did not ask if he was all right in the hallway, where he would have had to lie. You did not fuss at him near the desk, where he would have had to make you stop.

You simply appeared beside him in the empty staff room some minutes later, carrying two paper cups of terrible coffee and a packet of ibuprofen tucked beneath one thumb.  And you placed both on the table in front of him.

Jack looked at the packet and then at you, “You always this bossy?”

“Only when people are being stupid,” you retorted, raising one eyebrow.

He should have resented it. He survived in stubbornness for too long not to recognise an attempt to manage him. And how he disliked being read, being handled. Above all, he disliked the sensation of needing something that someone else had seen before he could disguise it.

And yet? The coffee was warm. The pills necessary. Your face held no pity, only attention. So instead of getting up or ripping into you, he remained seated.

You took the chair beside him, close enough that your knee brushed his for the length of one quiet breath before you shifted away. And he wondered whether the contact was just accidental.

The staff room hummed around you with the old refrigerator’s incessant buzzing. Somewhere outside, someone called for transport. Neither of you spoke for a while as he took the ibuprofen and drank the coffee. 

Perhaps it would have been easier had you remained ignorant. 

Not ignorant of medicine, nor of pain, nor of the thousand small ways people revealed themselves under pressure. But ignorant of him. That would have been safer. 

If you had never learned where his restraint thinned. Never noticed how his body betrayed him when yours came too close. If you had continued to believe that Jack Abbot was simply difficult, competent, tired and impenetrable. 

He was controlled and disciplined. A man built out of restraint and old damage, every sharp edge held carefully beneath the practised calm of a physician who had seen too much and learned to continue anyway. 

But control was not indifference. And after enough nights beside him, you began to recognise the tiny failures.

The way he went still when your hand touched his arm, not with rejection but with the stunned obedience of someone touched where he had forgotten he was lonely. 

The way his eyes dropped, unwillingly and only for a moment, to your mouth when you stood too close. 

The way his voice changed when he said your name after a difficult patient.

The way he looked away first. Always first. And Jack Abbot did not look away from much.

You did not know what to do with that knowledge. It frightened you to no end, though not because you didn’t like it. Rather, because each small discovery felt less like proof of conquest than proof of responsibility. If he yielded, even by a fraction, it cost him something.

And, god, if you were honest, you had begun to want him to yield. 

You did not want to corner or embarrass him, did not want to make him feel hunted. There was too much damage in him for that. Too much restraint that seemed less like pride to you and more like survival. And yet you wanted to know whether the thing passing between you was only your foolish invention or whether he felt it too. 

So for a while, you did nothing at all - almost nothing. 

For Jack, it turned out, almost nothing was still enough to ruin him. 

You never crossed any line. No breach of professionalism that could be examined beneath the cold light of sense and condemned accordingly. But there was none of that. There was only almost nothing.

And that had become impossible for him. He endured it because he had not yet found a way to ask you to stop without revealing how badly he wanted you to continue.

_____

By the eighth week, Jack had begun to dread and anticipate you in equal measure, which disturbed him more than he cared to admit. 

Dread, at least, was familiar and something he could understand. It had shape and function. He had known it in operating rooms and field hospitals, in the seconds before bad news was spoken out loud, in the thin silence after a monitor changed its rhythm.

Anticipation, on the other hand, was another matter.

It was unreasonable. Undignified. It had no place in a man of his age and temperament, certainly not in a man who had taught himself, over the long and punishing course of his life, to expect little and need even less. 

He had endured months in the desert heat with torn skin and less physical awareness of his own body than he now possessed whenever you stood too close beside him.

And that irritated him to no end.

He despised how some part of him had quietly made a study of you and could no longer stop. It was as if the night had begun to arrange itself more sensibly when he knew you were within it. 

If you were busy with another resident, he found reasons to pass by. 

Good reasons, of course…defensible ones. He was the attending after all, and there was always a chart to check, a resident to correct. A patient whose labs he wanted to review personally again, even after Shen already did it. 

Jack was not stupid enough to wander aimlessly after you like a boy, so he wrapped every detour in purpose and carried it with sufficient authority that no one questioned him. 

Except you. You had begun to look up when he appeared. Not obviously, of course. But sometimes your eyes lifted before he spoke as though some part of you had started to anticipate him as well. 

That was dangerous enough to make him avoid you for almost an entire hour one night. But of course it did not help. 

If your name was not on the night roster, the ER seemed colder. 

That was absurd. He knew it was absurd. The temperature did not change because you were absent. The lights remained the same merciless white. The coffee tasted just as shitty. The stretchers rattled, the monitors beeped, and the residents panicked with ordinary regularity.

And yet the place seemed altered without you. Emptier in some quiet, structural way. 

As though someone had removed a source of warmth he had not meant to depend on. 

If you laughed with someone else, something old and unbecoming moved in him before he could will it into silence. 

Jealousy. 

It disgusted him that he was jealous over laughter of all things. Over the tilt of your head towards a young resident. Over the easy touch you gave Shen on the shoulder. Over the way, a paramedic leaned too close while telling you some story from the ambulance bay and was rewarded with a tired but nonetheless delighted smile. 

It was ridiculous and downright shameful. 

As if he had any right. Made any claim on you. Had offered anything that might justify the dark, brief tightening of his chest when your warmth turned elsewhere. As if standing still beneath your hand and then looking away first constituted a promise. 

He had no right. 

None.

And even if he had wanted one, what exactly did he imagine he could offer you?

A complicated body. A leg that punished rain and long shifts and the arrogance of pretending he was younger than he was. 

A dead wife whose absence still occupied rooms in him, he rarely opened. 

A history full of locked doors and old wars, of choices made under pressure and consequences that had outlived the circumstances that created them.

A temperament built more for endurance than joy. And exhausting that had settled so deeply into him, it might as well have been character.

You, meanwhile, moved through the department with your tired eyes and your quick hands and your reckless tenderness. Young enough still (or so he told himself) to expect that life might give something back if you loved it hard enough. You deserved someone unburdened. Someone uncomplicated. Someone who could take your warmth without flinching as though it were a wound. 

After all, he was sure that there was someone waiting for you at home. A boyfriend, perhaps or more. 

Jack imagined someone decent. Someone with clean hands and an unbroken history, someone who texted you before your shift and kept dinner warm badly but honestly. Someone who did not measure desire against grief and guilt and the arithmetic of age, Someone whose body didn’t ache. 

Someone who could accept your careless affection without making a religion of it.

Your imagined partner served a purpose. He transformed restraint into decency, into professionalism, into something cleaner than fear.

Wanting a woman who belonged to someone else was pathetic enough, but reaching for her? That would have made him cruel. And Jack, wherever else he had been, whatever he had failed at, refused to be cruel to you.

So he let the imagined man stand between you as a useful ghost. 

He disliked the idea of him with an intensity that embarrassed him every time it surfaced. 

But he needed him. Because the man made restraint noble, sensible, clean. 

And, god, Jack was desperate for cleanliness in a thing that had begun to feel anything but clean.

Because the truth, when stripped of all its careful justifications, was far simpler and far more humiliating:

When you touched him, he wanted. 

Not in a weird philosophical way, nor a tragic one and neither in the elegant, distinct manner of a man nobly suffering from some doomed attachment. But rather, he wanted with a terrible simplicity.

Wanted your hand close there when your fingers brushed against his. Wanted your knee touching his when your legs touched under the table. Wanted to hear you say his name - Jack, not Dr. Abbot, in a room where no one else could hear it.

Every time that wanting rose in him, all his noble restraint began to change shape into something that looked less like virtue or decency. Less like the necessary discipline of an older man protecting a colleague from the ruin of his own desire. 

Instead, it began to look very much like fear. Fear of being seen. Of being wanted. Of not being able to refuse you when you reached for him with any true intention. 

And worst of all, fear that you would not reach for him at all. 

You examined this thing between you way too much. 

You thought about him while washing your hands. While restocking carts. While walking home in the pale, exhausted morning after a shift, when the city looked too clean and unreal, and your body still felt tuned to the artificial brightness of the Pitt. You thought about the impossible carefulness of him, the way he let you come close and then seemed furious with himself for wanting it. 

You were afraid you’d misread him, that all his stillness was not wanting but discomfort. 

So you gave him chances, touched him, and then left space for him to move away. Smiled and let him look first. He never stepped away, never hardened against it, but also never reached for you either. 

And you were blissfully unaware that Jack had conjured up a man by your side in his head that, over time, had become strangely useful to Jack. Because as long as this ghost existed, the thing growing steadily and silently between the two of you remained impossible by default. 

He could stand beside you at the nurses’ station while your shoulder pressed warm against his arm and tell himself that the warmth belonged to someone else. He could endure the small, unbearable mercies of your touch because they were, in the end…. Harmless. 

They had to be just that because you were unavailable. That made restraint simple… simpler. But not easy. 

You continued touching him with the same careless familiarity that had first disturbed the machinery of his peace weeks earlier. Each contact lasted seconds and remained with him absurdly long afterwards. 

The worst of it all was that the touches did not remain the same.

Maybe they did, and Jack was only losing the ability to interpret them sensibly. That was a possibility.

After all, he was tired, older than he felt, and more affected than he wished. And desire had a way of falsifying evidence. He knew that. A starving man could make a feast out of crumbs. 

And yet, to him it seemed that your hand sometimes lingered. Not long enough to name or accuse. But only a fraction longer than they should remain. Your eyes sometimes held there for one dangerous heartbeat too long, as if you were waiting for him rt do something with the silence between you. 

He refused to examine this too closely, because he didn’t want to chase after hope. He had no patience to deal with the fact that hope would inevitably soften the walls that kept him functional.

So he returned to the boyfriend again and again to keep himself in check.

Until Thursday night.

The Pitt had settled into one of its uglier moods, and the waiting room had become its own nation of misery. Someone was vomiting loudly into a plastic basin near triage, Lena was threatening a resident with bodily harm over misplaced paperwork and from the tone of her voice, Jack suspected she had advanced beyond metaphor. Ellis had sworn at two separate monitors and the wall itself. Shen’s mood was just as bad, with Dunkin’ having closed due to a burst pipe and him not getting his sugary coffee in before the shift.  

Jack himself had perhaps slept three hours, and that would be the explanation he’d later use. 

He was due upstairs shortly before surgery, already running through labs and images and the sequence of calls he had to make today, when you appeared in front of him with that focused look you wore when your body had decided before your mind had finished justifying it. 

The night had scraped your nerves raw, and you were tired of pretending you did not want excuses to touch him. 

“Hold still,” you said. 

Jack should have stepped back. Should have taken the chart in his hand and used it as a shield. Should have turned towards anything else. Should have said something dry enough to restore the distance between you before your fingers reached him. 

But he did none of those things, and you stepped into his space before either of you could pretend it had happened by accident. One hand catching the edge of his collar when it had twisted and smoothing it back into place with absent concentration.

It was the same gesture as before, but then your palm flattened once briefly over the centre of his chest. 

Warmth, through cotton and t-shirt and skin and bone, Jack felt it everywhere, 

The exhaustion of the week, the months of hunger carefully buried beneath professionalism. The imagined boyfriend standing between Jack and the thing he wanted. All the structures he had built around restrained all the arguments he had polished until they looked like virtue, all the locked rooms in him that had remained obedient for years.

Something simply gave beneath the pressure of your hand. 

He looked down at your palm resting against his chest as though it had some right to be there.

“Does your boyfriend know you touch people like this?” The words were out before he could recall them.

Silence, not long but long enough for the full, catastrophic stupidity of the sentence to reveal itself. 

Jack felt the room stop around him, though of course it had not. The hospital carried on with its usual indifference, but between the two of you, everything became still.

You could not make sense of the words at first. It landed between you as an object dropped from a height, strange and heavy and weird. 

And so Jack experienced the full humiliation of what he had done. The jealousy. The nakedness, the pathetic hope dressed badly as accusation. He had asked a question he had no right to ask in a tone that he could not quite excuse as professional. 

He had dragged the imagined man into the space between you and, in doing so, revealed precisely how long he had been thinking about him. 

About you.

His jaw tightened, and he prepared himself for the worst: offence, withdrawal and the measured kindness with which you might decide to spare him. 

Part of you wanted to laugh at the misunderstanding; there had been no one for years. But another part of you, quieter and more vulnerable, hurt with the knowledge that he may not feel the same. And yet you realised that beneath the edge of his words, something frightened and exposed had taken root in him. Something that made your irritation soften before it could fully become irritation again. 

So when you looked up, you didn’t look offended, just startled with a flicker of understanding and something softer still that Jack was suddenly far too frightened to name. 

“Jack,” you said slowly and a little breathless with the sudden rearranging of everything you thought you knew about his silence, “I’ve been single for years…”

Years. Years.

That word struck him almost with physical force. Not now or recently or between things. 

For a moment, Jack felt suspended. The air between you became too close, too warm, too full of all the meaning he had spent weeks refusing to gather. 

You watched all that move through his face almost invisibly. The brief blankness, the tightening in his jaw, the way his eyes sharpened as if the room had tilted. 

Behind you, Ellis shouted for him from down the hall, but neither of you moved. 

Your palm remained on his chest, and you could feel his pulse under your hand, fast and thumping. And you looked at him as though the rhythm had answered a question you had not yet dared to ask aloud. 

You saw him realise that you were not beyond reach, and the sight frightened you because it did not make him look triumphant. It made him look undone.

Not dramatically, but enough. His jaw had gone slack slightly. Just enough to soften the hard line of his mouth to make him look less like the man who cut through emergencies and more like someone who had been struck by a truth he had not prepared himself to survive. His lips parted as if there had been a response in him once, but it had vanished before it could reach the air.

And his eyes - god, his eyes.

They had gone distant and exposed, fixed on you with a kind of stunned uncertainty as though he were looking not merely at your face but at the sudden collapse of every careful assumption he had built between you. 

You saw the muscle in his throat work one. Saw the small, almost helpless shift of his mouth as he thought he might speak and could not decide whether spelling would save him or ruin him faster. 

The fluorescent light caught in the tired lines at the corner of his eyes, the rough shadow along his jaw, the silver threaded through his hair and all at once, he seemed unbearably real to you. 

Not distant, not untouchable, not safely contained between the authority of Dr. Abbot. 

Just…Jack. 

A man standing very still under your hand, with his pulse beating hard and fast, realising that the person he had been denying himself was not safely beyond reach.

And that realisation did not make him look victorious. It made him look afraid.

As though the one thing that had protected him from hope had been removed without warning. 

So at least you stepped back, your hand falling from his chest, and cold air replaced it. 

The surroundings returned to Jack in a rush, and he could only muster a soft sound to comment on what you had just revealed, “Oh…”

Under the circumstances, it was an exceptionally inadequate response, but it was all he could say right now, and you wouldn’t push for more. 

Your mouth twitched slightly at one corner as Ellis called his name again and shattered the moment around both of you. 

You walked away first because you had to. If you stayed, you were afraid you might say something neither of you could take back. Something too honest for the hallway and too soft for the Pitt. Something like I thought you knew, or There really is no one, or even I don’t touch everyone like that. 

So you turned towards the noise of the department and made yourself useful. 

Jack remained where he was for several seconds longer, staring at the space you had occupied as though your absence had left a visible outline in the air. The place where your hand had reset still burned through his scrub top. His pulse had still not recovered. 

The man he resented for weeks did not exist. There was no boyfriend, no decent man waiting at home. 

The realisation continued to move through him, but he didn't feel relief or joy or anything so simple. It was too complicated for that, too threaded with fear and hunger and the brutal awareness of consequence. 

But beneath it all, low and sickenly warm under his ribs, something dangerously close to hope had begun to unfurl from its coil. And Jack hated it instantly.

And you, walking away with your hand still tingling from the shape of his chest, felt hope, too, but you did not hate it. 

But it did scare you enough that you did not look back. 

_____

After that question, Jack became careful, and you noticed almost immediately.

He didn’t withdraw with the intention of punishing you, and somehow that made it even worse. Because it meant he believed he was doing something decent. Something responsible. Something that hurt both of you and therefore must, by some grim equation of his, be right.

He changed so subtly that no one else in the department would have paused over it, and yet sharp enough that you felt it almost at once. 

He stopped lingering beside you after hard cases.

Before, there had always been those few quiet seconds when the patient had gone, when the room looked wrecked, and the two of you stood in the aftershock together. He would remain near, not speaking much, pretending to study a chart, wiping his hands, or listening for someone calling his name. 

You learned the language of that lingering. It meant I am still here, that was bad, or maybe even stay near me while I remember how to be ordinary again. 

Now? He left first and always with some reason in his hand. 

He no longer reached for the coffee you handed him. He glanced at it, then at you, and seething shuttered behind his eyes. 

“Thanks,” he said. Polite. Careful. Awful. 

When your arms brushed in crowded hallways, he moved aside first now. And that was maybe what bothered you the most because the hospital was cramped and bodies collided. It was perfectly ordinary.

But Jack began avoiding even the ordinary. He gave you space with the grave courtesy of a man offering an apology you had not asked for. 

You hated it. And Jack? He hated it too. That was maybe the worst part. 

You could see it in him, the cruelty of knowing someone too well. He was not unaffected by what he was doing. If anything, the carefulness had made him more visibly strained with his jaw tighter and his silences harsher.

He didn't watch you as often anymore, and yet when he did, it was with such hunger quickly disguised as restraint that it felt almost unbearable to catch him at it. 

Distance was supposed to restore proportion, which had been his intention at least. To step back before the thing growing between you acquired enough shape to be named. Before it became visible to Ellis, to Shen, to anyone with eyes and the misfortune of being awake at three in the morning.

Before it ruined you.  

Not himself. Jack had very little patience for his own preservation, had dragged his body and soul through worse things than longing and expected no sympathy for it. But you were different. Younger, warmer, and still capable of giving tenderness without flinching from it first. 

And he would not be the thing that taught you to.  

To Jack, the department felt wrong without your nearness in it. He noticed the missing warmth of your shoulder, the way you laughed without catching his gaze afterwards, and how you stopped reaching for him as easily.

The last one should have relieved him, but it did not. Instead, it irritated him with the sheer unfairness of a self-inflicted wound. He had created the distance and now restored the shape it made around him. 

It was pathetic, really. At his age, desire ought to arrive with dignity or not at all. But it had just reduced him to someone measuring entire shifts by the accidental proximity of a nurse.

You deserved someone lighter than him. That thought followed him everywhere. Through the endless hours of his shift. Through the ambulance bay. Through the staff room. Through the brief moments when he washed his hands and found himself staring too long at his own reflection in the dark window above the sink. 

Someone younger, whose body did not ache with old injuries. Someone who could still stand at the end of a brutal shift and imagine dancing or breakfast, or sunlight without first calculating how much pain the next hour might cost.

Someone who did not carry war quietly in the set of his shoulders. 

Someone who did not carry widowhood in the exhausted caution of his hands. 

Someone who could offer you uncomplicated things. Mornings untouched by nightmares, intimacy untouched by grief… a future not assembled awkwardly from surviving pieces. 

He feared all of that because wanting you made him feel breakable.

So he thought he could endure wanting you. Because wanting was private and could be locked away. He had survived worse than wanting, so he could survive this, too.

What he could not endure was the possibility that you might actually want him back, because then restraint would no longer be noble, but rather a refusal. He wouldn’t protect you; he would actively hurt you.

You missed the moments between the two of you immensely, and you suspected he felt the same.

Twice during this week, you caught him looking at you with an expression that made your pulse stumble. 

One time, you had been laughing at something someone said near the medication station, tired enough that the laughter came out softer than usual. When you looked up, Jack was watching you from across the department. 

Not with the ordinary irritated attention he gave noise in a place already too full of it. He was looking at you as though he had forgotten that looking could be seen. 

The second time was sometime after four in the morning. You were standing together at the nurses’ station, close but not touching, both exhausted. His shoulders were rounded with fatigue, one hand braced beside the keyboard, the other resting near a chart he had stopped pretending to read.

You needed a pen. Probably pens were everywhere, from drawers to pockets. But the nearest one was tucked behind Jack’s ear.

And before you could think, ask, or remember that things had changed, you reached for it. 

When your finger brushed his temple, he froze, went still under your hand. It was as if he had ceased to be the steady centre of anything and became a statue under the smallest possible kindness. 

Your hand closed around the pen, but you did not pull it free yet, and Jack just looked at you. No, not at you. More into you. 

As though your touch had interrupted something inside the machinery he had built to keep himself distant, as if it suffered a catastrophic failure at the contact of your fingers. 

Slowly, carefully, his eyes dropped to your mouth. Heat moved through you instantly. It struck low and sharp, almost carnal in a sudden awareness of your own mouth and the small distance between you. 

His gaze stayed there for longer than it should have. When he lifted his eyes again, he looked almost angry. Not with you. With himself, with the want that had become visible despite all his effort. 

You could have made it easy for him then. You could have laughed, taken the pen, turned away, restored the moment to something ordinary again. You could have pretended not to notice the way his pulse had changed, or how the tips of his ears turned red, or even how his eyes had betrayed him. 

Instead, you just stayed close, too. Just long enough to let him understand that you had seen him. 

Then he moved back gently. 

After that, you stopped pretending you didn’t know. 

Not loudly. There were still patients to be seen, families to call, rooms to turn over before the next emergency arrived. 

But still, you knew now. 

You knew in the way he went still, when you came too close with the sudden arrested quiet of a man holding himself back by force. Or how he stared at your mouth too often in a way that couldn’t be denied. And, of course, in the way he had asked about a partner and retreated the moment your answer removed the last clean excuse between you. 

He wanted you. But it felt like a man standing very still in a burning room because he was more afraid of harming you than of being consumed himself. And so you gave him the choice to leave. 

You wouldn’t - couldn’t - demand a confession from him when he seemed so torn between his inner demons and what he wanted so clearly.

So you started to behave normally again. Standing beside him instead of across, touching his shoulder or arm in passing once more. Nonetheless, you always made sure he could step away if he wanted to. 

Sometimes he would, and those times always hurt. Not because you thought he didn't want you, but because you know he did and chose distance. 

But sometimes, he did not. 

Sometimes, when you touched his wrist and said his first name, he looked down at your fingers, not like a man rejecting a boundary crossed, but like a thirsty man refusing to drink the water in front of him. 

These moments were almost nothing: a pause, a breath, a hand not withdrawn, a man allowing himself to be touched. 

And somewhere in those small permissions, the thing between you stopped being imaginary. 

It became waiting. 

_____

It happened after a child with appendicitis turned septic faster than anyone would have liked.

That was how Jack would have described it later, if anyone had asked. Nothing catastrophic, in the end: Surgery took him, and the vitals steadied. The boy was alive. His mother had only stopped crying after Ellis had told her that her son had arrived in time and that he was in the best hands. The machinery worked as it was meant to work.

And still, by the time you slipped into the medication room, your hands were shaking. Not enough for anyone else to notice in the hall. You had kept them useful when it mattered, held pressure, passed instruments on, spoken gently. 

But in the narrow privacy between shelves and drawers with the door half-closed behind you and the worst over, your body had demanded compensation. 

Jack found you there, your fingers trembling around nothing. 

“Hey,” his voice was low and careful. 

You looked down at your hands, “I’m fine.”

“I didn’t ask.”

His dry retort almost made you laugh, almost broke you too. 

The laugh rose first, small and helpless, because of how he had said it. But under it, something hot and sudden began to manifest itself behind your eyes; you had to press your lips together to keep it from becoming a sound you would not be able to take back.

 Jack stepped closer to you, not much. Just in the way it had been now for quite some time, only allowing proximity in measured doses as though closeness was some volatile drug to be administered with caution. 

For a moment, he only stood there, the war in him obvious. Something between you had been stretching for weeks now. Thin as wire. Hot as a live current. Every almost, every retreat, every glance too long had pulled it tighter. 

And as his hand rose and settled at the back of your neck, you knew something in him had snapped. 

Your breath caught, and for one second, the world seemed to stop turning. His palm curved around the nape of your neck with a restraint so delicate it was almost worse than hunger. His fingers rested beneath the fall of your hair, not gripping, not claiming, only there - steady and human and closer than he had allowed himself to be in days. 

The touch should have calmed you, but instead it felt like oil thrown onto the flame.

Your skin seemed to know him before the rest of you could decide what to do. The warmth of his hand spread down your spine, across your shoulders, beneath your ribs, until the shaking in your fingers became something else entirely.

Jack felt it too. Or maybe he only felt his own ruin answering yours.

“You did well,” he said, his voice was rougher than usual, and his thumb moved once, barely. 

In any other world, the words should have just steadied you. Returned the moment to something safe, something professional; just one colleague comforting another one. You should have just nodded, thanked him and stepped back.

Instead, you looked up. And his gaze dropped to your mouth again.

This time, he did not look away immediately.

That was the difference. That was the match. 

For weeks, he had glanced and retreated, wanted and punished himself, let his gaze fall to your mouth only long enough for both of you to know before turning away with the grim discipline of someone believing he was doing something right. 

But now he just looked. Really looked. 

“Jack,” you whispered, and whatever he saw in your face, your eyes, ruined him. 

You could watch it happen, the small collapse inside of him. The flare of want before restraint closed around it, and how his eyes darkened. 

His hand tightened by a fraction at the back of your neck. Not enough to hurt, but enough to tell the truth. 

You just stood inside the tiny room, close enough that the air seemed shared and everything beyond the door became distant and irrelevant. His hand was on your neck, your eyes on your mouth. And that was all that mattered. The fire had caught now, and all his carefullness, all his distance, all his noble, miserable retrauint had only fed it. 

Then someone shouted from the hall and tore through the moment. 

Jack stepped back so quickly that the absence of him felt like a slap. His face closed again, and then he left. 

And for the next hour, he was furious with himself. Not because he had touched you. No, it was because for one second he had believed he was allowed to.

That was the dangerous thing. Desire could be mistrused and eventually starved. Permission was worse. 

The look on your face had not been pity. And he couldn't make it pity no matter how hard he tried. It had been wanting. Unmistakable enough that even Jack’s considerable talent for self-denial could not fully disfigure it. 

You wanted him. Possibly. Probably. 

That thought moved through him like a second ignition, heat catching where he had already been burning. 

And still, he couldn’t let go of his thoughts. He was too old, too damaged. He was sure you only wanted the idea of him. The controlled version you saw.

You didn’t know the rest; the bad nights, the stiffness, the pain. 

You deserved better than a man who would have to explain himself before letting you undress him. 

Better than a body that came with history written into muscle and bone.

Better than a man who had learned to survive so thoroughly that he no longer knew whether he could be loved without first apologising for what survival had made of him. 

Better than Jack Abbot. 

That was what he told himself like a mantra through the rest of his shift. As he scrubbed his hands too hard. As he corrected a resident too sharply. As he avoided looking towards you because he knew if he saw you again, the thing in him might snap a second time.

And next time, he was not so sure he would step back. 

_____

The night that continued the unravelling began badly and then worsened with an almost theatrical dedication. 

Rain came down hard enough to turn the outside almost silver. It sheeted over the asphalt in violent, glittering bursts beneath emergency lights, gathered in gutters, and struck the roof with a steady metallic insistence. The city seemed to empty itself into the Pitt one siren at a time.

By midnight, every bed was full.

By two, the hallways had become waiting rooms. 

By three, even Shen had stopped making jokes.

Jack had not eaten since noon, and had only had half a cup of black coffee that now stood forgotten on the counter next to a protein bar he had taken one bite from. You had not sat down in six hours, and your body ached with it. 

Around dawn, the department seemed to quiet down a bit. At least it gave the illusion of rest, ten stolen minutes in the staff room beneath humming lights. When you entered, you found Jack already there.

He was sitting on the worn couch with his head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed, one hand resting loosely over his abdomen and the other along the cushion at his side. Exhaustion had stripped something from his face. Without the sharpness of command and the motion of work, he looked older.

Not weaker. Just… unbearably human. 

His hair was damp at the edges, curling even more than normally. The shadow of the stubble along his jaw was more pronounced than at the start of the shift. He looked like a man assembled out of duty, pain, caffeine, and refusal. And for one aching moment, you wanted nothing more than to touch the place where the world had rested hardest on him. 

“You should go home,” he said without opening his eyes.

“So should you.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” you mumbled as you sat down beside him, the couch dipping beneath your weight. 

Once again, you were too close. Your knee nearly touched his, and the heat of his body met yours in the narrow space between you. 

For a while, neither of you spoke. But silence did what speech could not: It softened the edges and let the hospital drift away inch by inch. Somewhere outside the ER continued breathing, but inside the room, the world narrowed down to you and him. 

Exhausted, you leaned against him in a small surrender. Jack went still beneath the contact, his body reacting with that familiar restraint as every muscle seemed to hold its breath. His arm was warm and solid against yours had become the nearest real thing in a room that had been moving all night.

Your temple came to rest against him next. 

“This okay?” you asked, barely above a whisper. 

It was not. It was the least okay thing that had happened to him all week. Because it was so gentle and the question gave him a chance to refuse you, but some starving part inside him knew that he did not want the distance.

“Yes,” he said. The word came out low and rough, nearly unrecognisable. 

You relaxed against him by degrees. First, your shoulder settled more fully against his upper arm, the tension easing from you in small increments. Then your head came to rest more heavily against him, your temple warm through the fabric near his shoulder, your hair brushing the side of his jaw whenever you shifted. Your hand, loose and tired and utterly thoughtless, drifted towards his forearm.

He had the kind of arms that made restraint look physical: broad through the forearm, corded not in any decorative way but with the practical strength of a man who had spent his life using his body because there had never been another option. There were small marks there too, old nicks and pale scars, the sort of evidence a life left behind without ever asking whether it would be welcome. 

Your fingers touched him lightly, and Jack stared down. 

You traced the inside of his forearm slowly, not with the deliberate confidence of someone trying to seduce him, but with the absent tenderness of a person too tired to keep desire and comfort in separate rooms. 

Your fingertips followed the raised path of a vein beneath his skin, then drifted over the firm muscle beside it, then back again, slow enough that every inch of contact seemed to enter him with impossible precision. You felt the warmth of him, the roughness of fine hair under your fingers, the faint tension that moved through his arm each time your touch passed near the bend of his elbow. 

He smelled closer like this. Less than the department and more like Jack. 

Beneath the traces of coffee, rain and disinfectant was the living warmth of his skin, the scent held at his collar and in the fabric of his scrubs after a night of work and fear and too little rest. It made you dizzy in a way that exhaustion could not fully explain. 

Jack watched your hand as though it contained instructions for his destruction. 

He knew he should move, should sit forward or should clear his throat. Should do any number of sensible things before the thread between you, stretched for weeks by almost-touches and almost-confessions and the cruel oil of hope poured again and again onto desire, finally snapped. 

But you were so warm against him with your fingers on his arm and your head beneath his chin. And Jack, who had spent weeks starving himself of the exact tenderness, found that self-denial had a limit after all. 

He didn’t decide to kiss the top of your head. Because a decision would have implied a process, a moment in which consequences had been weighed and accepted or rejected. But consequences belonged to a version of Jack Abbot who had slept, eaten, kept a better distance and had not spent the last several months becoming quietly and completely undone by the way you touched him when you thought you were being gentle.

So his mouth found your hair before he understood that he had moved. 

It was barely a kiss, barely anything, 

Just the lightest press of his lips to the crown of your head. It should have been innocent, but Jack felt it go through him like a match to oil.

Your hand stilled on his forearm, and you lifted your head, slowly but not startled or pulling away. And that, more than anything, destroyed the last fragile thing holding him back. 

Jack’s hand was still on your arm, though he had no memory of putting it there. His fingers curved around you with careful pressure, thumb resting against the soft skin just below your sleeve, not gripping, not yet, but holding enough that both of you knew he could not pretend this was merely fatigue. 

Your hand remained on his forearm, your fingers spread over the vein you had been tracing, and beneath your palm, his muscles were tense with the effort of not reaching for more.

For one suspended second, you looked at him with the same softness that had been ruining him for weeks.

“Jack,” you whispered.

His name in your voice was the final pull on the thread.

His hand rose from your arm to the side of your face as he leaned in, broad palm warm against your cheek, fingers sliding carefully into the hair near your temple as though even in surrender, he could not stop himself from being gentle with you. His mouth found yours slowly enough to give you one last chance to turn away and urgently enough to confess that he had been wanting this for longer than he could bear to admit. 

You did not turn away but moved into him. 

So he kissed you like a man arriving starving at his own destruction. 

Your hands caught his shoulders, fingers gripping the fabric of his scrubs as though some part of you needed more proof that he was solid and that this was real. 

He responded by deepening the kiss, his tongue sliding against yours in a slow stroke that made your stomach clench. 

His own fingers could not seem to decide where they were allowed to belong. 

They found your waist first, large and careful and so unsteady, drawing you closer and closer. Then one slid to your back, pressing between your shoulder blades as if he could keep you there. And then it rose to your face, his thumb brushing over your cheek with an overwhelming tenderness.

Your hand slid from his shoulders to the back of his neck. Your fingers found the short hair at his nape, and Jack made a sound, low and involuntary, that vibrated through the narrow space between your bodies. 

He pulled back just enough to look at you, to make sure that this was real. That you were real. His thumb brushed over your cheek again, and when you tilted your face up, he kissed you again. 

You shifted on the couch, turning towards him. His hand slid from your jaw to the back of your head, fingers threading through your hair, and you felt the gentle pressure of his palm. His tongue brushed against yours and responded in kind, tasting him and deepening the kiss even further.

Driven by hunger, his hands found your waist, and he lifted you up until you were straddling him on the narrow couch. You settled against him, your knees bracketing his hips, and the first thing you felt was the solid wall of his thighs beneath you. 

“Jack-” you started, voice breathless even to your own ears.

“I’ve thought about this,” he murmured against your throat, interrupting you. His lips moved over your pulse point, his stubble scraping over it. “Thought about you … for months.”

His thumbs started to trace slow circles against the jut of your hipbones through the fabric, and you arched into him instinctively. 

You felt him hardening beneath you. The thick length of his cock pressed against your cunt through too many layers of fabric, and you rolled your hips without thinking, chasing the friction. The sensation sent sparks up your spine, and you gasped against his neck.  

His head fell back against the wall with a soft thud, eyes closed and throat exposed. You took the opportunity to lean in and press your lips against the hollow of his neck. 

When he let out a low groan, you rolled your hips again, slower this time. His fingers dug into your hips, guiding you, pulling you harder against him. You could feel the tension coiling in his body, the way his thighs tensed, and the ragged catch in his breathing.

“Fuck,” he gasped. “Fuck, wait..I-”

But you were already moving again, lost in the heat of him and the taste of his mouth when he pulled you back in for another kiss. His hips bucked up against you, and you felt him throb against you.

Then he went rigid beneath you. 

A low, broken sound escaped his throat. Half groan, half something like aguish. Jack’s hands clamped down on your hips hard, fingers curled in the fabrics of your scrubs hard enough to wrinkle them, as his whole body shuddered. 

You felt the warmth spreading against you even through the fabric.

A flush of shame rose to his face. Colour high along his cheekbones now, through the stubble and the exhaustion of the shift.

“Fuck,” The word came out strangled. “I’m so sorry.”

His jaw tightened, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at you. He could feel the cooling wetness against his skin, the uncomfortable cling of fabric. It had been years since anyone touched him with intention. Years since he had let himself want something enough to lose himself in it.

“I need to change my scrubs…” He said quietly, words rough and scraped raw by embarrassment. 

“It’s been a while,” he said finally, the admission dragged out of him like a confession. “A long while. This doesn’t usually…”

He could not finish the sentence, couldn’t articulate the way his body had betrayed him, had responded to you with an intensity he had forgotten he was capable of feeling. 

You watched the shame move through him like a wave. Watching how his eyes could not quite meet yours, the way his jaw worked around words he could not say. Nonetheless, your body still hummed with want; you could feel the ache between your thighs that hadn't been satisfied yet. But you also felt a fierce tenderness for this man who looked at you like you were something precious and terrifying. 

“Jack.” You kept your voice soft and steady. “It’s okay.”

“It's not,” he exhaled sharply. “That wasn’t…I wanted to...”

“I know.”

You leaned in and pressed your forehead to his. The gesture was intimate in a way that made his chest tighten. He could smell your shampoo, feel the warmth of your breath against his lips.

You stayed where you were for another long moment. The fluorescent lights hummed. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere in the ER, the night shift continued without you, but here in this small room, time had become something elastic and strange.

Finally, reluctantly, you began to move.

His hands slid from your hips as you rose, but not before he squeezed them once - hard, deliberate, a silent promise. The fabric of your panties stuck to your cunt, and you were acutely aware of how muhch you wanted him. 

Jack watched you stand. He remained on the couch, making no move to rise, and you understood why. The evidence of his orgasm was visible if you looked, a slight darkening of the fabric at his groin. He kept his thighs pressed together, one hand resting casually over the affected area, but his ears had gone red again.

Then, very gently, you cupped his cheek.

Jack stopped breathing.

Your palm fit against the side of his face with a tenderness that made his expression change before he could prevent it. Your thumb brushed once beneath his eye, over the tired skin there, near the place exhaustion had settled into him so deeply that it seemed part of his bone structure. His stubble rasped faintly against your palm. He smelled of coffee and rain and hospital soap and the warm, human aftermath of being kissed past his own defences.

“It’s okay, really,” you murmured.

Finally, Jack looked at you properly again.

Something steadier had begun to settle behind the embarrassment now. Not calm exactly. Calm would have been too clean a word for it. This was darker, quieter, more deliberate. Determination, perhaps. Or surrender wearing the clothes of decision.

“Come with me after shift,” he said.

Not a question.

The command seemed to surprise him the instant it left his mouth.

His expression shifted, the old caution returning so quickly it almost hurt to watch, and his voice softened immediately afterwards, roughened by the effort of giving you room.

“If you want,” he paused and swallowed. “I’ll do better. I’ll make it good for you…I-”

“Yes.”

You answered before he could finish or spiral into self-doubt or find reasons why this was a mistake. 

“Yes,” you repeated softly. “I want that. I want you.”

Something low and helpless moved through Jack’s expression before he looked away from you entirely.

It was not quite a smile, not quite a grimace, not quite surrender, but some private combination of all three - desire and disbelief and the terrible relief of being answered. His hand flexed once against the couch cushion, as though he had to remind himself not to reach for you again when the door was unlocked, and the department still needed him.

“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath.

You laughed softly.

Jack Abbott looked like he would rather be intubating someone in a supply closet during a power outage than standing in the ballroom of the Philadelphia Grand Hotel wearing a name badge.

That was your first thought. Your second thought was that he looked unfairly good for a man who had spent the last twenty minutes silently judging an entire conference hall.

He stood beside one of the tall cocktail tables near the back of the room, one hand wrapped around a paper cup of coffee he had not actually drunk from, his conference lanyard hanging crooked against the front of his dark sweater. He had taken off his blazer sometime between the trauma systems panel and the keynote address on "Innovative Compassion in High-Pressure Emergency Environments," which was a title Jack had heard once and immediately decided was a personal attack.

The ballroom was too warm. Too bright. Too full of physicians pretending they had never once eaten a vending machine granola bar over a trash can at three in the morning.

There were banners everywhere. There were sponsored pens. There was a man from Boston wearing a bow tie and explaining airway management like he had personally invented oxygen.

Jack had been quiet for most of it. Not polite quiet. Jack quiet. The kind of quiet that made residents straighten their backs and consultants reconsider their tone. The kind of quiet that looked harmless from across the room right up until someone said something stupid near it.

You had watched three people attempt to make small talk with him already. The first had asked what hospital he was representing. Jack had said, "UPMC Mercy." The second had asked if Pittsburgh had "much trauma volume."

Jack had stared at him for one full second too long before saying, "Enough." The third had smiled too brightly and said, "I always think emergency medicine is really about resilience."

Jack had said, "It's mostly about staffing." You had nearly choked on your coffee. Now he was standing beside you at the back of the room, radiating the particular kind of irritation that came from being professionally trapped.

"You know," you said, keeping your voice low as the speaker at the front of the ballroom advanced to another slide full of stock photos and bullet points, "some people enjoy conferences."

Jack did not look at you. "Those people need hobbies." "You're a doctor. You're at an emergency medicine conference. This is technically one of your hobbies." "No," he said. "This is Robby losing a bet and somehow making it my problem."

You turned your head, smiling into your coffee. "He made you come?" "He strongly suggested." "That sounds like Robby." "He used the phrase 'good for department visibility.'"

"Oh, no." Jack finally glanced at you. There was nothing overtly warm in his expression, exactly. Jack did not really do overt. His face was all sharp restraint and tired intelligence, mouth set like he was holding back three separate complaints and a legal disclaimer.

But his eyes shifted when they landed on you. Only slightly. Enough that you felt it. Enough that you hated that you felt it. "You laughing at my suffering?" he asked. "Yes."

"Good to know." "I'm enjoying your commitment to misery." "I commit to things." "You do," you said, before you could stop yourself. It came out softer than you meant it to.

Not flirtatious, not exactly. But too honest for a ballroom full of laminated schedules and sponsored tote bags. Jack looked at you for half a second longer than necessary.

There it was again. That pause. That tiny, dangerous bit of space that kept opening between you lately. At work, you could usually avoid it. The ED was useful that way. There was always something screaming, bleeding, crashing, coding, ringing, paging, demanding. There was always a monitor alarm or a consult call or someone yelling for a blanket warmer key.

There was no room for pauses in the ED. There was no time to notice that Jack brought you coffee when he made some for himself. No time to wonder why he always seemed to appear when a patient's family member started getting aggressive near your workstation.

No time to think about the way his voice changed when he said your name instead of your title. No time to think about his hand at your back when he moved behind you in a crowded trauma bay, not touching exactly, but close enough that you felt the heat of it through your scrubs.

No time for any of that. Here, unfortunately, there was nothing but time. Time and bad coffee. Time and Jack standing too close beside you because the back of the ballroom was crowded and neither of you had moved away.

On stage, the speaker clicked to the next slide. COMPASSION FATIGUE: RECOGNIZING THE WARNING SIGNS. Jack made a sound low in his throat. You looked over. "Don't." "I didn't say anything."

"You made a noise." "A clinical noise." "A judgmental noise." "Same system." You pressed your lips together to keep from smiling too obviously. The woman seated in front of you turned halfway in her chair and gave you both a tight look.

Jack stared back with no change in expression whatsoever. The woman turned around again. "You're going to get us kicked out," you whispered. "From this?" "That would be a shame."

"Would it?" You tried to look stern. "We are representing the hospital." "We're standing in the back drinking burnt coffee while a man named Brent tells a room full of emergency physicians to try mindfulness."

"His name is Brett." "I don't care." You lost the fight with your smile then. Jack saw it. Of course he saw it. Jack noticed everything he had no business noticing. His gaze flicked to your mouth, barely there and gone so quickly you could have convinced yourself you imagined it.

Except you had stopped giving yourself that much credit. You had been imagining things with Jack Abbott for months. Or maybe you had not been imagining them at all. That was the problem.

The speaker's microphone crackled. Somewhere near the middle of the room, someone coughed. Outside the tall ballroom windows, snow pressed thickly against the glass, turning the city beyond it into a blur of white and grey.

It had started that morning as a pretty dusting. The kind of snow people from conference registration desks called seasonal atmosphere. By lunch, it had become an inconvenience.

By three, it was an advisory. Now, at almost five in the evening, it was beginning to look like a problem. You checked your phone under the edge of the cocktail table. Three weather alerts. Two emails from the airline. One text from Dana.

DANA: Heard Philly's getting buried. Tell Abbott not to pick a fight with cardiology. You snorted. Jack's eyes shifted down. "What?" "Nothing." "You laughed." "Dana says hi."

"She does not." "She said to tell you not to pick a fight with cardiology." Jack's expression did not change. "Cardiology started it." "You haven't even seen cardiology today."

"That you know of." You sent Dana a quick reply. YOU: Too late. He's fighting the concept of conferences as a whole. Dana responded almost immediately. DANA: Sounds right. Bring him back alive. Or don't. I'm flexible.

You tucked your phone away, still smiling. Jack watched you do it. "What did she say?" "Nothing." "You're a bad liar." "You're nosy." "I'm observant." "You're nosy with a medical degree."

"That's the profession." That pulled another laugh out of you, quiet but real. Jack's mouth moved like he was trying very hard not to let his own expression change. He failed, just slightly.

It was not a smile, not by normal standards. But for Jack Abbott, it was practically fireworks. You looked away first. You had to. The thing about Jack was that he made stillness feel loud. You could handle him in motion. In the ED, with his hands gloved and his voice clipped and his body angled toward disaster, he made sense. He was built for crisis. He was decisive, sharp, controlled. He moved through chaos like he had made some private agreement with it years ago.

But stillness made him harder to manage. Stillness let you notice the tired lines at the corners of his eyes. The scarred steadiness of him. The careful way he shifted his weight after standing too long. The fact that his left hand had settled near his hip, thumb brushing absently over the edge of his pocket.

Stillness let you remember that under all that competence was a person who got tired. A person who hurt. A person who, for reasons you were trying very hard not to interrogate, had started keeping track of whether you ate during twelve-hour shifts.

You looked down into your coffee. It had gone cold. "You okay?" Jack asked. It was so quiet you almost missed it under the speaker's voice. You glanced up. "What?" He was not looking at the stage anymore.

"You went quiet." "I'm listening." "No, you're not." "You don't know that." "What was the last slide?" You opened your mouth. Closed it. Jack raised his eyebrows. You sighed. "Fine. I wasn't listening."

"Good choice." "I'm okay," you said, because you understood then that the question had not really been about the presentation. Jack held your gaze. There were days when that look irritated you. The steady, unblinking attention of it. Like he could read your pulse without touching your wrist. Like he saw whatever you were trying to tuck out of view and simply decided whether or not he was going to let you get away with it.

Today, it did not irritate you. Today, it made something behind your ribs go a little unsteady. "Long day," you added. His expression softened by a degree. For anyone else, it would have been nothing.

For Jack, it was practically a hand offered. "Yeah," he said. You both looked back toward the stage. The speaker had moved on to a case study about physician burnout that somehow included a clip-art image of a candle.

Jack stared at it. "You've got to be kidding me," he muttered. You coughed into your cup to cover the laugh. The woman in front of you turned around again. This time, she looked only at Jack.

Jack looked back. You gently touched his sleeve. It was instinctive. Barely a touch. Your fingers against the dark fabric at his forearm for one second, maybe less. "Behave," you murmured.

Jack's eyes dropped to where your hand had been. You pulled it back too quickly. Too obviously. Heat climbed up your neck, which was ridiculous. You worked in emergency medicine. You had held pressure on arterial bleeds. You had told surgeons where to stand. You had been vomited on by strangers and once had to explain to a grown man that shampoo bottles did not belong there, no matter what the internet said.

You should have been able to touch Jack Abbott's sleeve without forgetting how breathing worked. Jack said nothing. That was almost worse. The room clapped suddenly, polite and scattered. The session was ending.

Chairs scraped. People stood. Voices swelled all at once, filling the ballroom with that post-lecture noise of professional relief. Lanyards swung. Tote bags rustled. Someone near the doors started talking loudly about dinner reservations.

You stepped back from the cocktail table, grateful for the movement. "Well," you said, "that was very informative." Jack looked at you. You managed to keep a straight face for two seconds.

"Okay, no. It was terrible." "Thank you." "But we survived." He glanced toward the windows. The snow was falling harder now, fast and thick under the streetlights outside. It moved sideways in violent gusts, smearing white across the glass. People were beginning to cluster near the lobby entrance, phones out, faces lit with the blue glow of cancellation alerts.

Jack's jaw tightened. "What?" you asked. "Storm's worse." You followed his gaze. "It was supposed to slow down." "It didn't." "You secretly a meteorologist too?" "No. I have eyes."

You rolled yours, but you checked your phone again. Another airline email. Your stomach dropped. FLIGHT CANCELLED: PHILADELPHIA TO PITTSBURGH. "Oh," you said. Jack looked over immediately. "Cancelled?"

"Yeah." He did not ask to see your phone. He just read your face. His mouth flattened. You refreshed the app pointlessly, because apparently denial had a user interface. "All flights tonight?" he asked.

"Looks like mine, at least." You tapped through the airline page. "The app says earliest rebook is tomorrow afternoon, but that's assuming the airport opens properly." Jack pulled his own phone out.

He did not look surprised by whatever he found. "Mine's cancelled too." "Great." "Roads?" You opened the weather alert. The words hazardous travel, whiteout conditions, and avoid unnecessary trips were not especially comforting.

"Also great," you said. Jack slid his phone back into his pocket. "We stay another night." You looked toward the lobby, where a line was already forming at the front desk.

"Everyone is going to try to stay another night." "Then we get there before the orthopedic surgeons." You laughed despite yourself. Jack started walking.

You followed him out of the ballroom and into the broad hotel corridor. The conference had spilled everywhere now — doctors and nurses and vendors in branded fleeces, everyone talking too loudly over everyone else. The lights overhead were warm and expensive. The carpet was patterned in a way that made you suspect someone had been paid too much money to make beige feel important.

At the far end of the hall, the lobby opened wide and bright, all marble floors and high ceilings and enormous windows looking out onto a city disappearing under snow. The front desk line was already fifteen people deep.

Jack stopped. You nearly bumped into him. He glanced over his shoulder. "You checked out this morning?" "Yeah. My room was only booked through today because my flight was supposed to be tonight."

"Conference block?" "Full. I tried earlier when the delays started." His face shifted. Not much. But you saw the calculation begin. "No," you said immediately. "I haven't said anything."

"You're about to." "You don't know that." "I know your face." That made him pause. Something flickered in his eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or something warmer pretending to be amusement.

"You know my face?" "I know your about-to-be-stubborn face." "That's just my face." "No, your regular face is more quietly judgmental." He gave you a dry look. You smiled sweetly.

The line at the front desk moved one person forward and somehow became more chaotic. A woman in a navy pantsuit was telling the receptionist that she was a keynote speaker and therefore needed a room. A man behind her was arguing with someone on speakerphone. Near the windows, two residents were sitting on their suitcases, looking exhausted.

Jack's attention moved over the lobby once, quick and assessing. Then he looked back at you. "You can take my room." You crossed your arms. "There it is." "It's a room." "It's your room."

"You need one." "So do you." "I can figure it out." You gave him a look. He gave you one back. The trouble with Jack was that he did not posture. He did not make generous offers with softness around the edges. He did not say things to be gallant. He simply looked at a problem, decided on the cleanest solution, and expected everyone else to fall into line.

Which was irritating. Because sometimes the cleanest solution involved him being quietly self-sacrificial in a way that made you want to shake him. "You are not sleeping in the lobby," you said.

"Neither are you." "Jack." His name came out sharper than you intended. He noticed. Of course he noticed. His expression eased by a fraction, but his voice stayed even. "I'm not arguing about this in a hotel lobby."

"Then stop being wrong in one." His eyes narrowed. Not angry. Almost amused. Almost. "You always this difficult?" he asked. "With you? Yes." "Lucky me." "You bring it out in me."

Jack held your gaze for one beat too long. The noise of the lobby seemed to pull back for a second. Around you, people were still moving. Suitcases rolled over marble. Phones rang. The automatic doors slid open and let in a blast of cold air sharp enough to make someone curse.

But Jack was looking at you, and you were looking back, and there was that pause again. That impossible little pause. The one neither of you ever knew what to do with. Then the front desk clerk called, "Next guest, please," and the spell cracked.

Jack stepped toward the desk. You caught his sleeve again. This time, you did not pull away immediately. "Don't give up your room," you said, quieter now. His gaze dropped to your hand.

Then back to your face. "Don't sleep in a lobby," he said. "That's not an answer." "It is if you listen." You let go of his sleeve. He moved to the desk before you could argue again.

You stood beside him, close enough that your shoulders nearly touched, and watched as he gave his name to the exhausted-looking receptionist. "Abbott," he said. "I have a room for tonight. Need to extend it."

The receptionist typed quickly, her face already apologetic in the way customer service workers got when the computer was about to ruin someone's day. "I'm so sorry, Doctor Abbott. We're completely sold out for tomorrow night at this point. The storm has stranded most of the conference guests."

Jack's expression did not change. "Existing reservation," he said. "Room 1117." "I understand, sir. But all rooms are currently booked. If housekeeping confirms no-shows or cancellations, we can add you to the waitlist."

You leaned in slightly. "What about my reservation? I checked out this morning, but with the flight cancellations—" The receptionist looked at you with genuine sympathy. "I'm sorry. We don't have anything available."

Jack looked at her. "Anything." "I'm afraid not." "A cot?" "No cots left." "Conference room?" "Sir—" "Not for me," he said, impatient now. "For her." Your stomach did something stupid.

The receptionist glanced between the two of you. A tiny, knowing sort of understanding moved across her face. You hated her a little. "I'm sorry," she said again. "We really don't have a safe accommodation option outside of existing rooms. The city has issued travel warnings, so we're advising all guests not to leave the property unless absolutely necessary."

Jack went still. You could almost see him biting back a response. You touched his arm again, this time with warning. "Jack." His jaw worked once. Then he looked at the receptionist. "Keep the room under my name."

"Of course." "And if anything else opens, call up." "Yes, Doctor Abbott." He gave a short nod and stepped away from the desk. You followed him toward the edge of the lobby, away from the worst of the noise.

"No," you said. Jack turned. "You don't know what I'm going to say." "You're going to say I should take your room and you'll do something ridiculous like sleep sitting upright by the vending machines."

"I wasn't going to specify vending machines." "Jack." "What?" "No." He exhaled through his nose. Outside, the wind threw snow hard against the windows. Somewhere overhead, the lights flickered once, just enough for half the lobby to pause and look up.

When they steadied again, Jack's face had changed. Not softened. Settled. Like something in him had made a decision and locked the door behind it. "You're not going anywhere tonight," he said.

"Neither are you." "No." "No?" "No," he repeated. "We're not doing the noble idiot routine." You blinked. "That was directed at you, right?" His mouth twitched. Barely. "Both of us."

"Oh, progress." "We share the room." The words landed between you with the subtlety of a dropped instrument tray. You stared at him. Jack, infuriatingly, looked completely calm.

"We what?" "We share the room," he said again, like saying it plainly made it less insane. Your voice lowered. "Jack." "It has a lock. Heat. Bathroom. Presumably fewer orthopedic surgeons."

"That is not the issue." "It's a room." "It's your room." "You already said that." "With one bed?" He paused. And there. There it was. Not much. Not enough that anyone else would have caught it.

But you did. The tiny hitch in his expression. The one beat where practical Jack Abbott, the man who could handle blood and death and impossible decisions without blinking, appeared to remember that you were not simply a stranded colleague but a woman he had been standing too close to for months.

His eyes shifted away first. That almost never happened. "I'll take the chair," he said. "You will not." "I've slept in worse places." "I know," you said, softer before you could stop it. "That doesn't mean you should."

He looked back at you. The argument died a little in his face. Not completely. Jack was not built for surrender. But enough. The lobby carried on around you. People complained. Phones buzzed. The storm kept pressing itself against the glass like it wanted in.

You could feel the heat in your cheeks now. Not embarrassment exactly. Something worse. Awareness. Sharp and immediate. One room. One bed. Jack Abbott standing in front of you, close enough that you could see the dark flecks in his eyes, telling you in that maddeningly practical voice that he was not going to let you be unsafe tonight.

He cleared his throat. "It's not ideal." You let out a small laugh, mostly because if you did not laugh, you might say something dangerous. "No. I'd say it's a little past ideal."

"We're adults." "Are we?" His eyes narrowed. You lifted both hands. "Sorry. Tension response." "Clearly." "We work together." "I noticed." "People will talk." "People always talk."

"You hate when people talk." "I hate when people are stupid. Overlap, not causation." Despite everything, you smiled. He looked at your mouth again. This time, you were sure of it.

The smile faded. Jack looked away, jaw tightening like he had caught himself doing something he had not given himself permission to do. "Room's there," he said, his voice lower now. Rougher around the edges. "You can have the bed. I'll figure out the rest."

You should have said no again. You should have insisted on the lobby or found another stranded doctor to double up with or called Dana and let her laugh you through a nervous breakdown.

Instead, you looked outside. At the snow. At the city disappearing. At the people sitting on suitcases under expensive chandeliers, trying to pretend they were not scared of being stuck.

Then you looked back at Jack. He was tired. You could see it now, in the way he held himself. The conference chairs had been bad for him; standing through the reception had been worse. The cold would not help. Neither would an argument that lasted another twenty minutes because both of you were too stubborn to admit the obvious.

You sighed. "Only if you don't sleep in the chair." His brows drew together. "That's not—" "No," you said. "We are not doing the noble idiot routine. You said it. It applies."

Jack stared at you. You stared back. "I'm serious," you said. "So am I." "You always are." "Someone has to be." "You're impossible." "You keep saying that like it changes anything."

You looked at him for a long second. Then, because apparently the storm had knocked all common sense out of the sky along with the snow, you said, "Fine." Jack blinked once.

"Fine?" "Fine. We share the room." His face was very still. Very controlled. Too controlled. "But," you added quickly, "we are establishing rules." "Rules." "Yes." "For sleeping."

"For survival." His mouth twitched again. That almost-smile. The one that should not have had the power to make your chest feel too small. "Fine," he said. "Rule one: no chair."

He looked annoyed. You pointed at him. "No." "I didn't say anything." "You were thinking loudly." "Occupational hazard." "Rule two," you said, trying very hard not to think about the fact that you had apparently agreed to share a hotel room with Jack Abbott. "No being weird."

Jack looked at you. "You think I'm going to be weird?" "I think we're both going to be weird." "That's probably accurate." "And rule three…" You stopped. Because you had no idea what rule three was.

Do not look at me like that. Do not stand too close. Do not make this feel safer than it should. Do not be kind in that quiet, gruff way that makes me want things I have no business wanting.

Jack waited. You swallowed. "Rule three," you said, "we pretend this is normal." His gaze held yours. For a moment, neither of you moved. Then Jack gave one short nod. "Professional courtesy," he said.

You laughed. You could not help it. It came out softer than before, edged with nerves. "Is that what this is?" His expression was unreadable. The storm threw another gust of snow against the windows.

"Sure," he said. But he did not sound convinced. And God help you, neither were you. The elevator ride to the eleventh floor was silent. Not peaceful silent. Not comfortable silent.

The kind of silence that had bones in it. You stood on one side of the elevator with your overnight bag tucked against your hip and your coat still buttoned to your throat. Jack stood on the other side, his conference tote hanging off one shoulder, his gaze fixed on the glowing numbers above the doors like they had personally offended him.

Four. Five. Six. The elevator hummed upward. You watched his reflection in the polished metal doors because looking at the actual man felt like a risky decision. He looked tired now.

More tired than he had in the ballroom. There was a set to his jaw you had learned to read over months of working beside him. Pain, probably. Or irritation. With Jack, the two had a habit of presenting similarly unless you knew where to look.

His weight was shifted slightly more onto one side. Not dramatically. Jack did not do dramatically when it came to his own body. He was careful in a way that pretended not to be care. Precise. Controlled. Almost invisible about it.

But you knew. You had no right to know, maybe. But you did. "You're doing it again," Jack said. You looked away so quickly you nearly gave yourself whiplash. "Doing what?"

"Watching me in reflective surfaces." Heat crept up your neck. "I was not." "You were." "It's an elevator. Everything is reflective." "Convenient." "You're very suspicious for a man who just invited me to share his hotel room."

He turned his head then. Slowly. "That was not an invitation." You raised your eyebrows. His mouth flattened. "It was a logistical decision." "Ah." His eyes narrowed. "Don't."

"I didn't say anything." "You made a noise." "A clinical noise." "That's my line." "I'm borrowing it." "You need better material." "You need better coffee." "I know." That, somehow, eased the air between you.

Not by much. But enough that you could breathe again. The elevator climbed past eight. A family got on at nine, two exhausted parents and a little boy in dinosaur pyjamas clutching a stuffed bear by one ear. The mother gave you both a brief, tired smile. The father looked like he had spent the last hour on hold with an airline. The little boy looked at Jack's conference lanyard, then at his face, and immediately decided Jack was the most interesting person in the elevator.

Jack stared forward. The little boy stared harder. You bit the inside of your cheek. Jack's eyes flicked sideways. "What?" "Nothing." "You're laughing again." "I'm not." "You are internally laughing."

"Can you diagnose that?" "Yes." The little boy tugged on his mother's coat and whispered, much too loudly, "Is he a spy?" His mother's eyes went wide. "Elliot." Jack did not move.

You looked at the ceiling. The father closed his eyes like he wanted to disappear. The little boy kept staring. Jack turned his head just slightly and looked down at him.

"No," he said. Elliot blinked. "Are you sure?" "Yes." "Because you look like one." Jack considered that. Then said, "I get that a lot." You made a small, strangled sound.

The little boy nodded seriously, apparently satisfied. The elevator stopped at eleven. Jack stepped forward as the doors opened. You followed him out, barely keeping your laugh contained until the doors slid shut behind you.

Then you lost it. Not loud. Not enough to carry far down the hotel corridor. But enough that you had to press a hand to your mouth. Jack glanced at you. "Don't start." "He thought you were a spy."

"I heard." "You told him you get that a lot." "He was under stress." "He was six." "Children are often under stress." You laughed again, softer this time. Jack's expression shifted.

You almost missed it because it was small and gone quickly, but there was something there. Something like satisfaction. Not smugness. Not exactly amusement. More like he liked making you laugh and did not know what to do with that information.

That made you stop laughing. The corridor was quieter than the lobby, muffled by thick carpet and expensive wallpaper. The air smelled faintly of linen, citrus cleaner, and overheated radiators. Somewhere far down the hall, an ice machine rattled. Beyond the windows at the end of the corridor, snow blew hard against the glass.

Jack started walking. You followed half a step behind. For some reason, that felt worse than walking beside him. Maybe because it made you look at things you usually avoided looking at. The slope of his shoulders under the dark fabric of his sweater. The careful steadiness of his gait. The conference tote knocking against his side. The back of his neck where his hair sat slightly mussed from the collar of his coat.

This was ridiculous. You were an adult. A medical professional. A person who could calmly handle a dislocated shoulder, a combative drunk, and a cardiologist with an ego the size of Allegheny County.

You could walk down a hotel corridor behind Jack Abbott without constructing an entire emotional crisis out of it. Probably. Room 1117 was near the end of the hall. Of course it was.

Because apparently the universe had decided to commit to the bit. Jack stopped outside the door and pulled his key card from his pocket. Then he paused. You stopped beside him.

"What?" you asked. He did not look at you. "Last chance." "Last chance for what?" "To decide the lobby's better." You stared at him. Jack kept his gaze on the door like it was suddenly fascinating.

The awkwardness of the situation had finally caught up with him, you realised. Not because he regretted offering. Jack was too stubborn and too protective for that. But because he was aware of you.

Painfully aware. The same way you were aware of him. You were both standing in a hotel hallway with snow trapping you inside and a single room waiting beyond the door, and the months of not saying things had followed you upstairs like another piece of luggage.

You shifted your bag on your shoulder. "Do you want me to say the lobby's better?" His jaw tightened. "No." The answer came too fast. Too honest. You looked at him. He still did not look back.

"No," you said quietly. "I don't either." That made him turn. Only a little. Enough. His eyes met yours, and for one breath, the corridor felt narrower. You had said nothing shocking. Nothing romantic. Nothing that should have made his expression change.

But it did. It softened in the smallest possible way. Then the ice machine rattled again, brutally loud, and both of you looked away like teenagers caught holding hands behind the gym.

Jack cleared his throat and tapped the key card to the lock. The light flashed green. He pushed the door open. "After you," he said. You looked at him. "Professional courtesy?"

His mouth twitched. "Don't push your luck." You stepped into the room. And stopped. Because the hotel room was not bad. That was the problem. If it had been cramped or ugly or strange, you could have laughed. If the carpet had been stained or the heating had sounded like aircraft failure, you could have turned the whole thing into a joke.

But the room was warm. Quiet. Low-lit. The curtains were partly open, showing a wall of storm-dark sky and snow-lashed glass. A small desk sat near the window with a conference programme folded beside the lamp. Jack's suitcase was open on the luggage rack, clothes folded with a level of military precision that should not have surprised you and still somehow did. His coat hung over the back of the desk chair. A pair of boots sat neatly near the wall.

And the bed. The bed was large, white, neatly made, and extremely singular. One bed. One. Not two small beds pushed together. Not a fold-out couch. Not even an ottoman that could plausibly become a desperate sleeping surface.

Just one king-sized bed sitting in the middle of the room like an accusation. You heard Jack come in behind you. The door clicked shut. Neither of you said anything. The silence immediately became unhinged.

You stared at the bed. Jack stared at the bed. The bed, smugly, remained a bed. Finally, you said, "Well." Jack dropped his key card on the desk with unnecessary precision. "Don't."

"I didn't say anything." "You were about to." "I was only going to say it's… roomy." He looked at you. You looked back. "It is," you said. "It's a bed." "Yes, Jack. That's the issue."

"It's a large bed." "Again. Not helping." He exhaled through his nose and turned away, moving toward the thermostat near the door. "Heat's on." "Good." "You can take the bathroom first."

"Fine." "And the bed." You turned. "We already discussed this." "We discussed the room." "We discussed the noble idiot routine." "I'm not being noble." "You are physically incapable of not being noble in the most aggravating way possible."

Jack shot you a look over his shoulder. "That is not a sentence that makes sense." "It does to me." "That's concerning." "You are not sleeping in the chair." He glanced at the chair.

You did too. It was a perfectly nice hotel desk chair, upholstered in grey fabric, with curved wooden arms and absolutely no business being considered a sleeping arrangement by any person over the age of twelve.

Jack looked back at you. "I've slept sitting up before." "Yes," you said, "and now you are older and more breakable." His eyebrows lifted. You froze. "Not breakable," you corrected quickly. "That came out wrong."

"Did it?" "Yes." His face was unreadable, but there was a dry edge to his voice. "Older, then?" You closed your eyes briefly. "I am making this worse." "You are." "I meant your leg."

"I gathered." You opened your eyes. Jack's expression had changed again, but not in the way you feared. He did not look angry. Not offended. Maybe a little guarded, but that was Jack's baseline around any mention of his body that did not come from a medical chart.

You softened your voice. "I meant you've been on your feet all day. Conference chairs are awful. It's freezing outside. You're not sleeping upright because of me." The guard shifted.

Just slightly. His eyes flicked over your face like he was trying to find the trick in what you had said. There wasn't one. That seemed to be what unsettled him. "I'm fine," he said.

You sighed. "Of course you are." "I am." "You know, when you say that, it has started to sound less like a status update and more like a legal defence." Jack turned fully toward you.

"You keep notes?" "Mentally." "On me?" The question was dry. The look was not. You should have had an answer ready. Something sharp. Something easy. Something that would put the conversation safely back where it belonged.

Instead, you said, "Sometimes." Jack went still. The room held its breath around you. The heater clicked on with a low rush of air, warm and dry, but you felt cold suddenly in the centre of your chest.

Sometimes. What a stupid thing to admit. Except it was true. You kept notes on him.

The way he preferred bitter coffee but drank bad hospital coffee without complaint if it was hot enough. The way he always stood between you and agitated family members without making a show of it. The way he hated fussing but tolerated directness. The way his patience with interns was better when no one was watching. The way grief seemed to live near him but not always in him, like a room he knew how to pass without opening the door every time.

The way he noticed when everyone else missed something. The way he noticed you. Jack looked away first. "I'll take the floor," he said. "Oh my God." "What?" "You are impossible."

"It's carpeted." "That is not an argument." "It's a fact." "You are not sleeping on hotel carpet." "I've slept on worse floors." "Stop saying that like it helps." "It's true."

"It's depressing." His mouth twitched faintly. "You wanted honesty." "I wanted common sense." "You're asking a lot." "Apparently." You set your bag down by the dresser and slipped your coat off, mostly to have something to do with your hands. The room was too warm now after the cold of the lobby. Your skin felt prickly. Your mind was moving too fast.

One bed. Jack. Snowstorm. Professional courtesy. Very funny, universe. Tremendous work. No notes. Jack moved to the window and pulled the curtain back a few inches. Snow slammed across the glass in thick gusts. The city beyond was nearly gone, reduced to blurred lights and white movement. The roads below were barely visible. Cars crawled through slush with hazard lights flashing. At the corner, a traffic signal swung hard in the wind.

"That's bad," you said. "Yeah." His voice had changed. Less irritated. More serious. You stepped closer, stopping beside him with enough space between you to pretend you were being normal.

Outside, Philadelphia looked suspended. The usual movement of the city had slowed to something strange and fragile. Sirens flashed somewhere far off, red and blue diffused through snow. You thought of everyone stuck out in it — EMS crews, police, hospital staff trying to make shift change, patients trying to get home.

Your stomach tightened. Jack glanced at you. "Don't." You looked at him. "What?" "You're thinking about the ED." "You don't know that." "You get that look." "What look?" "The one where you start trying to personally take responsibility for weather patterns and systemic infrastructure failures."

You stared at him. "That is very specific." "You're very specific." The words landed quietly. No joke wrapped around them. You looked back out at the snow before your face could betray you.

"I just hate knowing people are stuck out there." "I know." That was the thing with Jack. Sometimes he could be blunt enough to bruise. And sometimes he said two words like they carried a hand under your elbow.

You folded your arms loosely, not because you were cold but because you needed to hold yourself together. "The Pitt will be slammed," you said. "Probably." "Dana's going to be running on spite and vending machine pretzels."

"Dana can run a hospital on spite and vending machine pretzels." That made you smile. "True." "Robby'll keep it moving." "Also true." "They don't need us tonight." You looked at him then.

Jack kept his eyes on the window. It occurred to you that maybe he had said it for both of you. "They don't," you agreed. A gust of wind hit the glass hard enough to rattle it.

The lights flickered. Once. Twice. Then steadied. You both looked up. "Comforting," you said. Jack let the curtain fall back into place. "Hotel'll have a generator." "Probably."

He gave you a look. You smiled faintly. "Sorry. I'll stop being reassuring." "That was you trying?" "Barely." He crossed to the desk and picked up the room service menu. "You eaten?"

The shift was so abrupt it took you a second to catch up. "What?" "Food," he said. "Have you had any since lunch?" "Yes." Jack looked at you. You looked back. "Define food," he said.

"That feels hostile." "It was a simple question." "I had half a muffin during the afternoon break." His eyes closed briefly. "Don't make that face." "I'm not making a face."

"You're making the doctor face." "I am a doctor." "You're making the disappointed attending face." "With cause." "It had blueberries." "It was conference food. It had the concept of blueberries."

You laughed, despite yourself. Jack picked up the phone. "Room service." "You don't have to—" "I'm ordering food." "I can order my own food." "Good. Then you can tell me what you want."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. He waited. You crossed your arms. "You are very bossy." "Yes." "No denial?" "I'm tired." That caught you off guard. It was small, the admission. Almost nothing.

But Jack did not give away small things without meaning to. Your expression softened before you could stop it. "Yeah," you said. "Me too." His eyes met yours. For a second, the argument fell away.

The bed was still there. The storm still existed. The whole strange shape of the night still waited around you. But so did the exhaustion. So did the fact that you had both been awake since before dawn, sitting through panels and making careful conversation and pretending, always pretending, that the invisible line between you was not getting thinner every day.

Jack looked away first, but gently this time. "What do you want?" he asked, lifting the phone. You glanced at the menu. "Grilled cheese." He paused. "What?" "Grilled cheese."

"They have salmon." "I don't trust conference hotel salmon during a weather emergency." "Sensible." "And fries." "Of course." "And whatever dessert looks least disappointing."

Jack's mouth tilted slightly. "There's chocolate cake." "Done." He nodded once and lifted the receiver. You watched him order with the same brusque efficiency he used when calling consults, except instead of demanding neurosurgery he was asking a very overwhelmed kitchen employee for grilled cheese, fries, black coffee, tea, and chocolate cake.

It should not have been attractive. It absolutely was. You turned away and busied yourself with your bag. You had packed badly. Not disastrously, but with the optimism of someone who thought she would be back in Pittsburgh by midnight. You had a spare blouse, a phone charger, toiletries, and a soft sleep shirt you had only thrown in because your last flight delay had taught you humility. No actual pyjama bottoms. No extra jumper. No thick socks.

Wonderful. Jack hung up the phone. "Forty-five minutes," he said. "Not bad." "Kitchen sounds like a war zone." "Poor them." He glanced toward your bag. "You need anything?"

You looked up too quickly. "What?" "Toiletries. Shirt. Charger." "Oh." You swallowed. "No. I'm okay." He watched you for half a beat. "You packed for one night." "So did you."

"I have clothes." "Congratulations." "You're doing the defensive thing." "You're doing the observant thing." "Occupational hazard," he said again. You looked down at your open bag.

It was not a big deal. That was what you told yourself. It was just clothes. Just a hotel room. Just a storm. Just Jack. You were so tired of the word just. "I have a shirt," you said. "No bottoms. I'll survive."

Jack did not react obviously. Which somehow made it more obvious that he was reacting. His gaze moved to the dresser. "I have sweats." "No." "They're clean." "That was not my concern."

"They have a drawstring." "Also not my concern." "You'd rather sleep in conference pants?" You looked down at your trousers. They were perfectly professional and deeply uncomfortable after a twelve-hour day.

"I hate that you're making sense." "Happens." "Rarely." Jack opened his suitcase and pulled out a neatly folded pair of dark sweatpants. He held them out without looking directly at you.

The gesture was so practical. So simple. So completely dangerous. You took them. Your fingers brushed his. Barely. Nothing. A nothing touch. Except Jack's hand stilled for a fraction of a second, and your pulse jumped like an idiot.

"Thank you," you said. His voice was rougher when he answered. "Professional courtesy." You glanced up. He was looking at you now. There was humour there, buried under exhaustion and restraint. But there was something else too. Something careful. Something that knew exactly how thin this joke was becoming.

You held the sweatpants against your chest. "Right," you said. "Professional courtesy." The bathroom was small and aggressively hotel-like, all marble counter, bright mirror, and towels folded into shapes no one needed. You changed quickly, keeping your sleep shirt on and tying the borrowed sweatpants as tightly as they would go.

They were too big. Of course they were. They sat low on your hips and pooled slightly at your ankles. They smelled faintly of laundry detergent and something cleaner underneath. Jack's suitcase, maybe. His soap. The same faint scent you sometimes caught when he leaned over a chart beside you.

You stared at yourself in the mirror. "Oh, this is bad," you whispered. Not bad because you looked bad. Bad because you looked comfortable. Bad because the pants were his.

Bad because you could already imagine walking out and seeing him notice. You pressed both hands to your face. "Get a grip." A knock came at the bathroom door. You jumped.

"You alive?" Jack asked from the other side. You opened the door too quickly. "Do not say it like that." He was standing a few feet back, one hand braced on the desk chair, his shoes off now, his sweater sleeves pushed to his forearms.

He looked at you. Then very pointedly looked away. It was possibly the least subtle thing he had ever done. Your stomach flipped. "They're too big," you said, because apparently you had chosen death.

"They have a drawstring," he said. "I used it." "Then they're functional." "Is everything functional to you?" "No." The answer came too quietly. You looked at him. He was still not looking at you.

The air changed. That was the only way you knew how to think of it. Changed like weather. You stood barefoot on hotel carpet in Jack Abbott's borrowed sweatpants, and he stood across from you in his shirtsleeves, and the room felt suddenly too small for the amount of not saying happening inside it.

Then someone knocked on the door. Both of you startled. Actually startled. Jack recovered first, because of course he did. "Room service," he said, like that was not obvious.

"Right." He crossed to the door. You sat on the edge of the bed without thinking, then immediately stood again because sitting on the bed felt insane. Jack opened the door and accepted the tray from a harried-looking employee who looked one room away from quitting the hospitality industry entirely. Jack thanked him, tipped him too much, and shut the door with his hip.

The smell of hot fries filled the room. You nearly groaned. Jack set the tray on the desk. "You look like you're about to propose to the food." "Don't judge me." "I'm not. It's the most enthusiasm you've shown all day."

"That's not true." "No?" You stepped closer to the tray and lifted the metal cover from the plate. Golden fries. Grilled cheese cut diagonally. A small bowl of tomato soup you had not ordered but immediately respected.

You looked at Jack. His expression was neutral. Too neutral. "You ordered soup." "It came with it." "Did it?" "Yes." "Jack." "What?" "You ordered soup." "It's cold out." You smiled.

He looked annoyed, but not enough. "Professional courtesy?" you asked. He pulled out the desk chair and sat down a little carefully. "Eat your sandwich." You did. You sat on the edge of the bed because there was nowhere else to sit, balancing the plate on your knees while Jack took the chair at the desk. It should have been awkward, but food helped. Food made it normal, or something adjacent to normal.

The storm raged outside. The room smelled like fries and coffee and radiator heat. Jack ate like a man who had forgotten hunger existed until food was placed in front of him. You pretended not to notice. He pretended not to notice you noticing.

The silence between you grew less sharp. You dipped a corner of grilled cheese into the soup and looked over at him. "So," you said, "besides Robby and department visibility, why did you really come?"

Jack did not answer immediately. He leaned back in the chair, coffee in hand, eyes on the window. "For the conference?" "No, Jack. For the ambience." His mouth twitched. "I was asked."

"You always do what you're asked?" "No." "Exactly." He took a sip of coffee and grimaced. "Bad?" "Hotel bad." "You ordered it." "I was desperate." "You could have had tea."

"I'm not eighty." "That is hurtful to tea." "Tea will recover." You smiled, but you did not let him off. "Why did you come?" Jack looked down into his coffee. For a moment, you thought he was going to dodge again.

Then he said, "Robby thought I should get out of Pittsburgh for two days." That was not what you expected. Your face softened. "Why?" Jack's thumb moved along the side of the paper cup.

"Because he's annoying." "Jack." He exhaled. Not quite a sigh. "He thinks I've been working too much." "You have." His eyes lifted. You held his gaze. "What?" you said. "You have."

"You're one to talk." "I didn't say I was innocent." "No. You just keep mental notes on me and forget to eat." You looked down, smiling despite yourself. "That sounded almost affectionate."

"Don't get excited." "Too late." Jack's eyes stayed on you. The smile thinned a little on your face, not because you stopped feeling it, but because suddenly feeling anything seemed dangerous again.

He looked away. "Robby wanted someone senior here," he said. "I had the time. You were already going." There. Quiet. Almost buried. But there. Your fingers tightened around your fork.

"You came because I was going?" Jack did not move. "I didn't say that." "You kind of did." "I said it was a factor." "A factor." "Yes." "In the logistical decision." He glanced at you, and there was that dry look again. The one that made your chest ache because it was almost easier than softness.

"You're enjoying this." "A little." "Dangerous habit." "Noted." You ate another fry to give yourself something to do. But your mind had snagged on it. You were already going.

Not a confession. Not even close. But with Jack, half the time the truth came wrapped in enough caution to survive impact. You wondered how many other almost-truths he had offered you over the months that you had been too careful to pick up.

Outside, thunder cracked. Not thunder, maybe. Something heavy and distant. A transformer. Ice shifting. A city noise made strange by snow. The lights flickered again. This time, they went out.

The room dropped into darkness. For one second, everything disappeared. You heard yourself inhale sharply. Then the emergency lighting kicked in, faint and amber from the hallway through the crack under the door. The city glow outside the window blurred through the curtains. The heater went silent.

"Jack?" "I'm here." His voice came immediately. Close enough that your panic had no time to grow teeth. Then your phone screen lit up where it sat on the bed beside you, buzzing with an alert.

WINTER STORM WARNING. SHELTER IN PLACE. You stared at it. "Well," you said, trying for lightness and not quite getting there. "That feels dramatic." Jack stood. You heard the chair shift, then the careful sound of his movement in the dark.

"Stay there." "I wasn't planning on sprinting." "Good." He moved across the room with a confidence that made something inside you ache. Even in near-dark, even in a strange hotel room, Jack was calm. Measured. One hand found the desk. Then the lamp. Then the wall.

A second later, his phone flashlight clicked on, casting sharp white light across the room. You blinked. He aimed it toward the floor, not your face. "Power's out," he said.

"Really? I thought they were setting the mood." His eyes flicked up. Even in the thin flashlight glow, you saw the look. "Joke response," you said. "Ignore me." "I usually try."

"No, you don't." "No," he said after a beat. "I don't." You looked at him. The darkness softened everything except the places it sharpened. His face was half-lit, half-shadowed, the lines of him drawn in silver and black. His sweater was gone now, you realised belatedly, leaving him in a dark T-shirt that made him look less like the attending who could silence a trauma bay and more like a man trapped in a room with you and all the things neither of you said.

He crossed to the dresser and opened a drawer. "What are you doing?" "Looking for extra blankets." "In the dark?" "I have a light." "You also have a habit of ignoring your own limits."

He stopped. Not for long. Just enough that you knew he had heard the thing beneath the words. Then he pulled open the lower drawer and found a folded blanket sealed in a plastic bag.

"Found one," he said. "Of course you did." He brought it over and handed it to you. You accepted it, fingers brushing his again. This time, neither of you moved away as quickly.

The room was colder without the heater already. Or maybe that was your imagination. Maybe you were just suddenly aware of every inch of space between you. Jack's hand was warm.

Steady. Scarred along the knuckles. You let go first. Barely. "We should call the front desk," you said. "They're aware." "Because of the power outage?" "Because half the hotel just started calling them."

"You're probably right." "I usually am." "Incredible how you say things like that and expect people to like you." His mouth moved. "Some people manage." Your breath caught.

Jack seemed to realise what he had said at the exact moment you did. His expression locked down. But not fast enough. You saw it. The flash of something unguarded. The room felt very quiet.

Too quiet. Then his phone buzzed in his hand, cutting through the moment with brutal efficiency. He looked down. "Generator's delayed," he read. "Hotel says emergency lights remain active, heat may be intermittent, guests advised to stay in rooms."

"Great." "Could be worse." "How?" "We could be in the lobby with orthopedic surgeons." You laughed. You really could not help it. The laugh came out tired and a little shaky, but it was real.

Jack looked at you for a second with that almost-soft expression again. Then he glanced at the bed. You followed his gaze. One bed. One extra blanket. No heat. Professional courtesy, your traitorous brain supplied.

You pulled the blanket against your chest. "So," you said carefully, "this got more complicated." Jack's jaw shifted. "Yeah." "We can still be adults." "Probably." "Probably?"

"I'm accounting for variables." "Such as?" He looked at you. In the phone light, his eyes were darker than usual. "You," he said. Your pulse jumped. Jack looked away almost immediately, like he had not meant it to come out like that.

But it had. And now it was in the room with you. You. Not the storm. Not the bed. Not the lack of heat. You. You swallowed. "I'm a variable?" "A persistent one." You should have laughed.

You almost did. But his voice had gone too quiet. Too honest. So you only said, "That sounds inconvenient." Jack's gaze returned to yours. "It is." The snow hit the window hard.

Neither of you moved. Then, somewhere down the hall, someone shouted, "Power's out on ten too!" and another voice yelled back something about flashlights, and the moment snapped before either of you could decide what to do with it.

Jack exhaled, low and controlled. "You should finish eating before the food gets cold." You blinked. Then laughed softly, because of course. Of course that was where he went.

Food. Practicality. A safe surface after stepping too close to the edge. "Right," you said. "Professional courtesy." He looked at you for one long second. Then he said, very dryly, "Don't make me regret naming it."

You sat back down on the edge of the bed with your plate and the extra blanket over your lap. Jack returned to the chair, phone flashlight propped against the lamp base so it lit the room in a strange upward glow.

You ate in semi-darkness while the storm pressed against the windows and the hotel groaned softly around you. And for a while, neither of you talked about the bed. Neither of you talked about variables.

Neither of you talked about the fact that the room was getting colder. But Jack took the blanket from the foot of the bed and draped it around your shoulders without asking.

And you let him. When his hand brushed the back of your neck, neither of you said anything at all. By the time you finished eating, the fries had gone soft, the grilled cheese had gone lukewarm, and the room had become noticeably colder.

Not freezing. Not dramatic. Just cold enough that the tips of your toes had started to curl against the hotel carpet. Cold enough that you had pulled the borrowed sweatpants lower over your ankles and tucked the extra blanket tighter around your shoulders. Cold enough that Jack had noticed, because Jack noticed everything, and was pretending he had not noticed in a way that meant he absolutely had.

The emergency light from the hallway bled under the door in a thin amber line. Jack's phone was still propped against the lamp base, flashlight angled at the ceiling so the whole room sat in a pale, strange glow. Shadows gathered in the corners. The window was a black mirror now, occasionally flashing white when the wind threw snow hard against the glass.

The hotel was quieter than it had been. Or maybe it only felt that way because the power outage had changed the sound of everything. No humming heater. No elevator chime. No faint television from the room next door. Just wind, the distant murmur of stranded guests in the hallway, and the occasional muffled thunk of something outside giving in to the storm.

Jack stacked the empty plates back on the room service tray with the kind of precision that suggested he could not quite tolerate mess when there were too many other things he could not control.

You watched him from the edge of the bed. "You know they have people for that." He did not look up. "For what?" "Stacking plates like you're preparing them for sterile processing."

"That would be a terrible use of sterile processing." "You understood my point." "Unfortunately." He set the cutlery on the plate, folded the napkin once, then stopped when he caught you watching.

"What?" "Nothing." "You keep saying that." "You keep asking." "You keep looking at me like you have commentary." "I always have commentary." "That's true." You smiled faintly.

The silence that followed was softer than the ones before. Less sharp, anyway. The food had helped. The ridiculousness had helped. The fact that you were both too tired to maintain full emotional defences had helped in a deeply inconvenient way.

Jack took the tray to the narrow table near the door, then checked his phone. "No update?" you asked. "Generator crew's working on it." "That sounds fake." "It does." "Do you think they're lying?"

"I think they're busy." "That was generous." "I have moments." "You hide them well." He glanced at you, dry. You tucked your feet under the blanket and tried not to shiver.

Failed. Jack saw it. Of course he did. His gaze dropped to the blanket around you, then to your bare feet, then back to your face. "You cold?" "No." "You're a bad liar." "I'm fine."

"That one's mine." "I'm borrowing it." "You use it worse." "You use it constantly." "With more conviction." "With more denial." His expression shifted. Not a flinch exactly. Jack was too practised for that. But something in him went still around the edges, like your words had touched a place you had not meant to press.

You regretted it immediately. "Sorry," you said, softer. "That wasn't—" "It's fine." "Jack." He turned toward the suitcase instead of looking at you. "You need socks." "I don't."

"You do." "I'm not taking your socks." "Why?" "Because there are lines." "There's a line at socks?" "Yes." "But not at sweatpants." You looked down at yourself. The borrowed sweatpants were still much too big, bunched slightly at your waist where you had tied the drawstring tight enough to survive a storm. You hated that they were comfortable. You hated more that you had stopped noticing they were not yours.

"That was an emergency." "So is hypothermia." "I am not hypothermic." "You're shivering." "I'm dramatically chilly." "Clinical distinction?" "Emotional distinction." Jack opened his suitcase.

You sighed. "Jack." He pulled out a pair of thick dark socks and held them out. You stared at them. He stared back. The socks hung between you like the dumbest possible symbol of intimacy.

"You're very bossy," you said again. "You're very cold." "I could put my shoes back on." "You're not wearing shoes in bed." The sentence landed. Both of you heard it. Both of you froze.

In bed. Not the bed. Not that bed. In bed. The words sat in the dim room, far too casual and far too specific. Jack's jaw tightened. You took the socks mostly so neither of you had to keep looking at each other across the space between you.

"Thank you," you said. His fingers brushed yours as you took them. A small touch. Accidental. Still, your hand warmed like his skin had left a mark. Jack stepped back too quickly and turned toward the window.

You pulled the socks on under the blanket, trying to do it with dignity. It was impossible. The blanket slipped off one shoulder. The sweatpants rode up. You nearly kicked the nightstand with your heel.

Jack did not turn around. Which meant he was very deliberately not turning around. Somehow that made it worse. "There," you said when you were done. "Feet saved. Crisis averted."

"Good." His voice was rougher than before. You looked at the back of him. He stood near the window with one hand braced against the frame, shoulders slightly bowed. The phone light made a dark outline of him against the curtains. Without the hotel noise, without the conference, without the ED, he seemed more human in a way that made your chest ache.

Still Jack. But less armoured. You wondered if anyone else at The Pitt had ever seen him like this — barefoot in a hotel room, tired around the edges, quietly trying to make sure another person was warm without making it a scene.

Probably not. The thought did something strange to you. "Are you cold?" you asked. "No." "Bad liar." He did not look over. "I'm fine." "Worse liar." His mouth moved, barely visible in profile.

"Probably." That answer felt too honest. You watched him for another moment, then looked away before he could catch you looking again. The hotel groaned softly around you.

Somewhere down the hall, a child laughed. A woman shushed him. A door opened, then closed. The storm kept pressing at the windows, steady and relentless. You reached for your phone on the bed and checked the time.

8:47 p.m. It felt much later. You had been awake since four-thirty that morning, because the first flight out of Pittsburgh had seemed like a good idea when you booked it. It had not seemed like a good idea when your alarm went off in the dark. It had seemed actively hostile by the time Jack appeared at the airport gate with black coffee, a conference folder, and the expression of a man who had already decided the day was guilty until proven otherwise.

You had laughed at him then too. He had handed you the coffee without comment. You had not asked how he knew your order. That was the thing with Jack. He gave things in ways that made asking feel impossible.

He would notice. Adjust. Provide. Protect. Then act like anyone would have done the same. Anyone would not have. That was the problem. You scrolled through your notifications. Dana had texted again.

DANA: You alive? You smiled. Jack, still near the window, said, "Dana?" You looked up. "How did you know?" "She asks that when she wants reassurance but refuses to phrase it emotionally."

"That is… uncomfortably accurate." "What'd she say?" "You alive?" Jack huffed softly. It was almost a laugh. "See?" You typed back. YOU: Alive. Snowed in. Power out. Abbott still hasn't killed anyone.

Dana's reply came fast. DANA: Yet. DANA: Where are you staying? Your thumb hovered over the keyboard. Ah. There it was. The simple question with the deeply complicated answer.

You glanced at Jack. He had turned from the window and was watching you now. Not suspicious. Aware. Always aware. "Dana asked where I'm staying," you said. Jack's expression went carefully blank.

"What are you going to tell her?" You looked down at the phone. That was an excellent question. The truth was simple. You were in his room because the hotel was full and the city was shut down and neither of you had any better options.

The truth was also impossible. Because Dana would understand the logistics. Dana understood emergencies. Dana understood bad weather and full hotels and professional adults making practical decisions.

Dana would also absolutely hear the silence between the words. Dana had eyes. Worse, she had instincts. Even worse, she liked you. You typed. YOU: Hotel. It's chaos here. Everyone stranded.

Not a lie. A strategic omission. Jack watched you send it. "She'll know," he said. "Probably." "You omitted relevant details." "I learned from doctors." "That's charting, not lying."

"Overlap, not causation." His eyes narrowed slightly, but there was something warm under it. "You're getting too much use out of my lines." "You should write better ones."

"I'll workshop it." Dana's next text buzzed through. DANA: You dodged that question so hard I felt the wind from Pittsburgh. You pressed your lips together. Jack saw your face.

"What?" "She knows." "I said that." You set the phone face down on the bed. "I'm ignoring her." "Sensible." "I can practically hear her eyebrows." "Dana has loud eyebrows."

"She really does." You both smiled. The room went quiet again. This silence was different. It was domestic in the strangest, most dangerous way. You were sitting on his bed in his sweatpants and socks, ignoring a text from Dana while Jack stood by the window in his T-shirt, and for one awful second you could imagine this without the storm. Without the conference. Without the emergency explanation.

A room. Food containers. Shared warmth. Jack looking at you like you were something he had learned the shape of without meaning to. The thought was so clear it startled you.

You stood abruptly. "I should brush my teeth." Jack blinked. Then gave one short nod. "Okay." "Then we should probably…" You gestured vaguely toward the bed, immediately regretted it, and turned the gesture into pointing at your bag. "Sleep. Eventually. Because we're exhausted. And adults. Professional adults."

His mouth twitched. "Professional adults brush their teeth?" "They do." "Good to know." You grabbed your toiletries and escaped into the bathroom. The mirror was bright only because of your phone flashlight propped against the soap dish. Without the overhead lights, your reflection looked softer and stranger. Tired eyes. Messy hair. Jack's sweatpants. Jack's socks.

You brushed your teeth with too much focus. Then you stood there for a moment with your hands braced on the sink. This was fine. Fine was a word doing heroic work tonight.

You had shared tighter spaces with coworkers before. Ambulance bays. Trauma rooms. Supply closets during disaster drills. Once, a hospital break room with six people, one working microwave, and a smell you all silently agreed not to identify.

This was not different because of square footage. It was different because of Jack. Because every quiet thing he did felt louder in the dark. Because he had remembered food. Socks. Blankets. The fact that you got anxious when you thought too long about the ED functioning without you.

Because he had said, You were already going. Because he had called you a variable. Because when the power went out, your first instinct had been to say his name, and his first instinct had been to answer before you could be scared.

You rinsed your mouth, dried your face, and stared at your reflection. "Normal," you whispered. "We are being normal." When you opened the bathroom door, Jack was sitting on the edge of the bed.

Not in it. On it. His prosthetic was off. You stopped before you could stop yourself. It was not the first time you had seen him without it. Not exactly. The ED had a way of stealing privacy from everyone eventually, and Jack was not secretive in the way people assumed. He was matter-of-fact about the reality of his body when he had to be.

But this was different. This was not clinical. This was not a glance through a curtain gap or a practical adjustment after a brutal shift. This was Jack in the low light of a hotel room, one leg extended slightly, his liner set aside with careful precision, his hand resting near his thigh. His posture was composed, but there was something in the stillness of him that made you understand, immediately and painfully, that he had not expected you to come out just then.

His head lifted. His expression closed. Fast. Too fast. "Sorry," you said softly. You did not know what you were apologising for. Walking out. Seeing. Making him feel seen. All of it.

Jack looked away first. "It's fine." There it was again. The legal defence. You stayed where you were by the bathroom door, toiletries in hand. For once, you did not tease him.

You did not say he was a bad liar. You did not try to make the room easier by making a joke. Instead, you said, "I can give you a minute." His jaw shifted. He looked at you then, and there was something in his eyes you could not read.

Not embarrassment, exactly. Not shame, though something close enough to make your chest hurt. Wariness, maybe. A man used to people either looking too long or looking away too fast.

You did neither. At least, you tried not to. "You don't have to," he said. His voice was low. Rough. You nodded once and crossed to your bag, setting your toiletries inside with deliberate calm. Not ignoring him. Not staring. Just letting the moment exist without making it bigger.

Jack watched you for a second. You could feel it. Then he reached for the compression sleeve beside him and adjusted it with efficient, practised movements. You turned toward the window and gave him privacy without leaving.

The snow was still falling hard. The glass had frosted slightly at the corners, feathered white around the dark. The city lights outside looked blurred and far away. Behind you, fabric shifted. Jack moved carefully. The bed creaked once.

"You can turn around," he said. You did. He had pulled the blanket over his lap, sitting upright now, back against the headboard. The bedside lamp was useless without power, but his phone flashlight on the nightstand lit the lower half of the room. His face was half in shadow.

"You okay?" you asked. Then immediately wanted to kick yourself. Jack's eyebrows lifted. "I mean—" You stopped, exhaled. "Sorry. Stupid question." "Not stupid." "You hate that question."

"I hate most questions." "True." His mouth twitched faintly. The tension eased by a millimetre. You sat carefully on the opposite side of the bed, leaving as much space as possible between you. The mattress dipped under your weight, and both of you noticed.

How could you not? One bed. One room. No power. The space between you suddenly felt measured in inches and bad decisions. Jack reached for his own toiletries. "Bathroom's yours?"

"I'm done." He nodded and shifted to stand. You looked away before he could need you to. It was instinct. Respect. Maybe both. But before he moved, he paused. "You don't have to do that."

You looked back. "What?" "Look away like I'll break." The words were quiet. Flat, almost. But something under them hurt. You swallowed. "I'm not looking away because I think you'll break."

Jack held your gaze. "Then why?" You thought about lying. You were both good at it, in your own ways. Little lies. Necessary ones. The kind that kept rooms functioning. I'm fine.

It doesn't hurt. I don't care. This is professional courtesy. But the storm had narrowed the world to this room, and the lights were out, and Jack had given you socks like it meant nothing when it meant everything, and you were so tired of talking around the truth.

"Because I don't want to make something private feel less private," you said. He went still. You could hear the wind dragging snow across the window. Then Jack looked down.

For a long moment, he said nothing. When he spoke, his voice was quieter. "That's considerate." You tried to smile. "Don't sound so surprised." "I'm not." "You are a little."

"I'm used to people being curious." That landed hard. You kept your voice gentle. "I'm curious about you, Jack. Not about that." His eyes lifted. Oh. The room seemed to stop.

You realised what you had said a second too late. Not about that. About you. There was no good way to pull it back. No joke quick enough. No professional framing strong enough to cover it.

Jack looked at you like you had put a hand directly over a bruise. You opened your mouth. Nothing came out. Then he looked away, and the moment passed. Or he let it pass. You were not sure which.

"I'll be quick," he said. He stood, carefully, and you kept your gaze on your hands this time. Not because he had asked, not because you thought he needed saving from being seen, but because the room already had too much honesty in it and you were not sure either of you could survive another piece.

The bathroom door closed. You exhaled slowly. Your phone buzzed against the blanket. Dana again. You turned it over. DANA: You are absolutely not telling me something. DANA: Fine. Don't die. DANA: Also Abbott better not be pretending he doesn't need sleep. He does.

You smiled despite yourself. Dana was the human equivalent of a locked medication cabinet and a warning label. She saw more than people wanted her to see, kept what mattered safe, and made sure you knew when you were being stupid.

You typed back. YOU: He is being managed. You stared at it. Then deleted it. Absolutely not. You tried again. YOU: We're both going to sleep soon. Power's still out. Dana replied.

DANA: Both? You closed your eyes. Of course. Of course she caught that. Before you could decide how to answer, the bathroom door opened. You dropped your phone face down like a teenager hiding contraband.

Jack paused in the doorway. "That subtle?" "Shut up." "Dana?" "No." "Liar." "Fine. Yes." "What did she say?" "Nothing." He gave you a look. You sighed. "She noticed I said both."

Jack's expression did something complicated. "Ah." "Exactly." He moved back to his side of the bed with his toothbrush and toothpaste in hand, then set them on the nightstand. The room was colder now, enough that goosebumps had lifted along your arms where the blanket had slipped.

Jack noticed. He pulled the top blanket down on his side. The bed suddenly became a real object again. Not a prop. Not a joke. A place where both of you were expected to sleep.

You stood. Too quickly. "I can sleep on top of the covers." "No." "Jack." "It's cold." "I know." "So don't be stupid." You looked at him. "Did you just call me stupid?" "I told you not to be."

"Fine distinction." "Important one." You crossed your arms. He leaned back against the headboard and looked up at you with tired, unamused patience. "We are not doing this for another hour," he said.

"Doing what?" "Pretending either of us is sleeping anywhere but the bed." The bluntness of it sent heat straight up your neck. Jack noticed that too. His gaze flicked away, but his mouth tightened like he regretted nothing.

"You could phrase things less aggressively," you muttered. "I could." "You won't." "No." You stared at him. He stared back. Then, because exhaustion was apparently making you brave, or reckless, or possibly both, you said, "Fine. But the pillow stays in the middle."

Jack looked at the row of pillows stacked against the headboard. "One pillow?" "One pillow." "As a border?" "As a diplomatic boundary." "That's not what pillows are for."

"It is tonight." He considered this. Then reached for one of the pillows and placed it lengthwise down the centre of the bed with dead-serious precision. You watched him.

The absurdity hit first. Then the tenderness. Jack Abbott, attending physician, military veteran, professional misery enthusiast, was sitting in a powerless hotel room during a snowstorm creating a pillow wall because you had asked him to.

Your chest did that stupid, aching thing again. "There," he said. "You made it very official." "It's a terrible wall." "It's symbolic." "It's structurally unsound." "Most emotional boundaries are."

He looked at you. You looked back. For a moment, neither of you smiled. Then Jack's mouth twitched. You laughed quietly and climbed under the covers before you could think about it too much.

The sheets were cold at first, crisp against your legs. You slid carefully onto your side, keeping the pillow between you. Jack stayed sitting up for another moment, phone in hand, probably checking alerts. Or pretending to. You suspected he was giving you time to settle before he moved.

The thought made you ache in a way you did not know how to name. Finally, he set his phone on the nightstand with the flashlight still aimed upward and lowered himself under the blankets.

The mattress shifted. The world narrowed. You were lying in bed with Jack Abbott. There was a pillow between you. There were several inches of careful space. There were covers pulled up to your shoulders, socks on your feet, snow at the window, and a storm blocking every exit the two of you had spent months pretending you needed.

"This is normal," you said into the darkness. Jack turned his head slightly. "Is it?" "No." "Then why say it?" "Manifestation." "That doesn't work." "Evidence?" "This." A laugh escaped you before you could stop it.

Jack's eyes were on the ceiling, but his expression had softened. The flashlight glow caught the line of his jaw, the tired slope of his mouth, the lashes casting faint shadows beneath his eyes. He looked exhausted now. Not just annoyed. Not just inconvenienced. Truly worn down.

Something in you quieted. "You should sleep," you said. "So should you." "I will." "Good." "You too." "That was implied." "Was it?" "Yes." You smiled into the dim. For a while, neither of you spoke.

The hotel settled around you. The storm battered the window. Somewhere distant, a door opened and closed. Your phone buzzed once more, but you ignored it. The cold made the bed feel smaller than it was. Or maybe awareness did that. You could feel the heat of him on the other side of the pillow. Not touching. Not even close enough, really.

Still, you knew exactly where he was. Every breath. Every subtle shift. Every careful movement made by a man trying not to make this harder for either of you. "You asleep?" Jack asked eventually.

"No." "Why?" "Because you asked me if I was asleep." He huffed softly. You smiled. A long pause. Then he said, "Your flight tomorrow. What time?" "Rebooked for two-thirty. Assuming the airport doesn't stay closed."

"Mine's three." "Good." "Good?" You stared at the pillow boundary between you, barely visible in the dark. "Means I'm not leaving you stranded here alone with all the orthopedic surgeons."

"You'd make that sacrifice?" "I'm heroic." "You forgot to eat today." "I contain multitudes." "Mostly bad decisions." "That's rich coming from you." He was quiet for a beat.

Then said, "Fair." The honesty of that made your smile fade. You turned onto your back carefully. "Can I ask you something?" Jack did not answer right away. His gaze stayed on the ceiling.

"That depends." "On what?" "Whether you're about to ask something I don't want to answer." "I don't know if you'll want to answer it." "Then probably no." "Jack." He sighed.

"Ask." You hesitated. The question had been sitting in you since dinner, since you were already going, maybe even before that. Since the airport coffee. Since the way he always turned up near you without making a thing of it.

"Why do you do that?" His head turned slightly. "Do what?" "Take care of people and pretend you're not." His face went unreadable. You rushed on before you could lose courage.

"The coffee. The food. The socks. The room. At work too. You act like it's all logistics, but it isn't always." Jack looked back at the ceiling. The silence stretched. You almost apologised.

Then he said, "It's easier if people don't make it a thing." Your chest softened. "Why?" His jaw moved once. "Because then they expect you to talk about it." The answer was so Jack that it almost hurt.

You turned your face toward him. In the low glow, he looked carved out of restraint. "You don't always have to talk about it." His eyes shifted to yours. "No?" "No." "What do I have to do?"

The question was quiet. Too quiet. You were not sure he meant it the way it sounded. You answered anyway. "Let someone notice." Jack did not move. Something passed over his face — guarded, tired, almost unbearably vulnerable before he buried it.

"I let people notice plenty." "Charting irregularities don't count." His mouth twitched, but it faded quickly. "People notice what they want," he said. "That's not true."

"It's often true." You studied him across the ridiculous pillow. "Then let me notice." The words came out before you could stop them. Soft. Plain. Terrifying. Jack looked at you.

Fully now. The room seemed to contract around his silence. You felt your heartbeat in your throat. Outside, the storm kept going. Snow against glass. Wind at the windows. The city hidden. The hotel powerless. Everything ordinary stripped away until there was only this: you and Jack, inches apart, pretending a pillow could hold back months of almosts.

Jack's voice, when it came, was rough. "You already do." You could not breathe for a second. He looked away first. But the damage was done. The truth was there between you, small and live and glowing.

You did not know what to do with it. So you did nothing. Maybe that was the only thing either of you could manage. You lay there in the dark, his words moving through you like warmth.

You already do. For a while, neither of you spoke again. Eventually, exhaustion began to pull at you. The edges of the room blurred. The storm became a dull, steady rush. Your body, traitorous and tired, stopped caring about awkwardness and started caring only about heat.

The bed was cold where you were not touching anything. Your feet were warm in Jack's socks, but your shoulders were not. You curled slightly on your side, facing the pillow wall, tugging the blanket higher.

Jack shifted on the other side. "You cold?" "No." He made a low sound. You did not even open your eyes. "I know. Bad liar." "Terrible." "I'm fine." "Mine." "I know." The mattress dipped as he adjusted, and the blanket shifted over you, tucked more securely near your shoulder. Not intrusive. Not too much.

Just enough. His hand brushed your upper arm through the fabric. You opened your eyes. Jack's hand withdrew immediately. "Sorry." "It's okay." "I was just—" "I know." His face was close now.

Closer than before because you had both shifted toward the middle without noticing. The pillow was still between you, crushed slightly under the weight of your shoulders.

The flashlight had dimmed as his phone battery dropped, turning the room softer. Jack's eyes were dark in the low light. You should have moved back. You did not. Neither did he.

"You should sleep," he said again. His voice had changed. Low. Careful. Like he was speaking near a wound. "So should you." "I'm trying." "Are you?" "No." The honesty made something in your chest go still.

Jack closed his eyes briefly, like he regretted it. You watched him. Then, because you were too tired to be wise, you whispered, "Me neither." He opened his eyes. There it was again.

The pause. The dangerous pause. His gaze moved over your face, not quickly this time. Not hidden. He looked at you like he was memorising the cost of wanting something. Your fingers rested near the pillow between you.

His hand lay on the blanket on the other side. Not touching. Almost. Almost had become a language between you. Jack swallowed. "We shouldn't," he said. You had not asked what.

You both knew. "No," you whispered. But you did not move. The room held very still. Then the hallway erupted with noise. A door slammed somewhere. Someone laughed too loudly. A man cursed about the emergency lights. The spell shattered so abruptly you almost flinched.

Jack looked away. You let out a breath you had not realised you were holding. The pillow wall suddenly looked absurd again. Useful, maybe. Merciful. You turned onto your back, staring at the dark ceiling.

"Orthopedic surgeons," you murmured. Jack was quiet for half a second. Then he huffed a laugh. A real one. Small. Exhausted. But real. It loosened something in the room. You smiled.

The two of you lay there in the dark while the hotel settled again and the storm carried on, pretending nothing had almost happened. Eventually, your eyes grew heavy. Your body warmed under the blankets. The borrowed socks were soft against your feet. The bed no longer felt quite as cold. Jack's breathing evened out beside you, slow and controlled, though not quite sleep.

You drifted in and out. At some point, the pillow between you shifted. You were too tired to know who moved first. Maybe you curled toward the warmth. Maybe Jack turned in his sleep.

Maybe the bed dipped and the pillow slid down between your knees and neither of you woke enough to correct it. The room had grown colder. The blankets had tangled. The storm was loud.

You came halfway awake to the feeling of warmth against your forehead. A steady body near yours. An arm, heavy but careful, resting around your waist. For one hazy second, your mind did not understand.

Then you felt Jack's breath against your hair. You should have startled. You should have pulled away. Instead, half-asleep and freezing, you made a small sound and shifted closer.

The arm around you tightened. Not much. Just enough. Jack murmured something you could not make out. His hand settled flat against your back, warm through the borrowed shirt. His body curved around yours with a kind of unconscious care that made no room for embarrassment because neither of you was awake enough to choose it.

The pillow boundary was gone. The diplomatic border had failed. You tucked your face against his chest. He was warm. So warm. The storm battered the window, but under the blankets, in the dark, the world narrowed to the steady rise and fall of him.

Jack's chin brushed your hair. His hand rested between your shoulder blades. You fell asleep like that. Not deciding. Not confessing. Not crossing any line either of you could name while conscious.

Just cold and exhausted and drawn, somehow, to the safest heat in the room. Outside, snow buried the city. Inside, Jack held you like he had been doing it for years. Jack woke before the power came back on.

For a few seconds, he did not move. That was habit. Old habit. Useful habit. The kind of stillness that came before assessment. Before pain caught up. Before memory sorted itself into place. Before the body told the truth the mind had not agreed to yet.

Dark room. Hotel. Storm. Philadelphia. Conference. You. That last one arrived slower. Not because he had forgotten. Because his mind seemed determined to give him one merciful second before handing over the evidence.

Warmth against his chest. Soft breath through the fabric of his T-shirt. A hand curled loosely near his ribs. Your knee tucked between his. His arm around you. Jack stared at the ceiling.

The phone flashlight had died sometime during the night. The only light came from the window now, weak and blue-grey through the curtains, the city beyond still blurred by snow. The power was still out, or the room would have been humming. Instead, the silence was deep and cold around the edges, broken only by wind and the steady sound of your breathing.

You were asleep. Against him. Not beside him. Not near him. Against him. Your cheek rested over his heart like you had chosen the exact place designed to ruin him. Jack did not move.

He should have. That was the first reasonable thought. The second reasonable thought was that if he moved, you would wake up embarrassed, and then he would have to watch you apologise for something that had been as much his fault as yours.

The third reasonable thought was that he had no idea how the hell the pillow had ended up near the bottom of the bed. He looked down slowly. The diplomatic boundary, as you had called it, had collapsed sometime in the night. One end of the pillow was wedged between the blankets near his shin, completely useless. The other had vanished under the duvet.

Structurally unsound, he thought. And then, despite himself, almost smiled. Almost. His hand was spread against your back. He became aware of that next. Not gripping. Not possessive. Just there. Warm through the cotton of your sleep shirt. His thumb had found the small space beneath your shoulder blade and rested there like it belonged.

It did not belong there. That was the problem. Or one of them. Jack should have moved his hand. Instead, he let himself feel the weight of it for one more second. One more second, he told himself, was not a crime.

You shifted in your sleep. Jack went completely still. Your fingers tightened faintly against his shirt, and your face turned a little closer into his chest. A small sound left you, half breath and half protest against the cold room.

His arm responded before he could stop it. It tightened by a fraction. Your body settled. Jack closed his eyes. Idiot. The word had no force behind it. He had been called worse by better men and disagreed less.

Because this was stupid. Not the storm. Not the hotel room. Not even the bed, in itself. Those had been logistics. Bad logistics, but logistics. This was something else. This was waking up with you tucked against him and feeling, for one unguarded awful moment, not alarmed but relieved.

Relieved. Like some part of him had been waiting for the world to arrange itself like this. Like he had slept better with your breath against his shirt than he had any right to.

That was the dangerous thing. Not desire. Desire was simple enough to recognise and avoid. Jack had been avoiding wanting you for months with the grim discipline of a man disarming a device he refused to admit was live.

But this— This quiet. This ease. This body-deep reluctance to leave. That was what frightened him. Your breathing changed. He heard it before you moved. A slight catch. A deeper inhale. The soft, muddled shift of someone beginning to surface.

Jack opened his eyes. He still did not move. There was no good version of this. If he pulled away now, you would wake to rejection. If he stayed, you would wake to everything.

You stirred again. Your hand slid a little against his shirt. Then stopped. Your body went still. Jack held his breath. He felt the exact moment you woke properly. Your fingers curled.

Your cheek lifted a fraction. For a second, neither of you did anything. Then your eyes opened against the dim grey of his chest. You blinked. Once. Twice. Jack watched your face change.

Sleep-soft confusion. Recognition. Horror. Not horror of him, he thought. Not that. Horror of the situation. Of your hand on him. Of your leg tangled with his. Of his arm around you like he had made some claim in his sleep that he had not had the courage to make awake.

You lifted your head very slowly. Your eyes met his. Your hair was mussed on one side. Your face was warm from sleep. There was a faint line from his shirt pressed into your cheek.

Jack's chest tightened with such abrupt force that it bordered on pain. "Morning," he said. It came out low. Too rough. Your mouth parted. Nothing came out for a second. Then, because apparently you were both determined to survive by saying the least helpful things possible, you whispered, "Hi."

Neither of you moved. His arm was still around you. Your hand was still on his chest. The room was still cold. The snow kept hitting the window in softer gusts now, less violent than the night before but steady. The world outside had gone pale and quiet, buried under white.

Your eyes dropped to where his arm lay across your back. Jack became very aware of his hand again. He loosened it at once. "Sorry." The word left him before he could stop it.

Your gaze snapped back to his face. "No," you said quickly. "No, I'm— I'm sorry. I must have—" "We both moved." You stopped. Jack watched that land. You looked down between you, where the blankets were tangled around your legs, where the pillow boundary had failed catastrophically, where all the evidence suggested neither of you had been an innocent bystander.

"Oh," you said. Jack's mouth twitched faintly. It was not exactly funny. Except it was a little funny. You saw the almost-smile and exhaled a small, embarrassed laugh. "The wall failed," you murmured.

"Poor construction." "I blame the contractor." "You approved the design." "I was under duress." "You were under a blanket." "That too." The tiny rhythm of banter returned like a match struck in the cold.

It did not fix the intimacy. It made it worse, actually. Because neither of you had moved away. Not properly. Jack's arm had loosened, but his hand had not left your back. Your hand had shifted lower against his ribs, but it had not disappeared. Your knee was still pressed against his thigh beneath the covers.

You both knew. You both pretended not to know for one more second. Then you said, softer, "Are you okay?" Jack looked at you. He could have answered the usual way. He almost did.

The word sat ready. Fine. A shield. A reflex. An old door that knew how to close itself. But your face was close to his, and your voice had none of the clinical edge people usually carried when they asked him that. You were not asking about pain only. You were not asking whether he needed help. You were not asking because you had seen something and wanted reassurance that it had not disturbed you.

You were asking because you had woken in his arms and still wanted to know if he was alright. Jack looked away. "Yeah." A beat. Then, because the room had apparently stripped him of common sense, he added, "Better than expected."

Your expression changed. Slowly. Carefully. Like you did not want to frighten the admission by looking at it too quickly. "Yeah?" you asked. Jack should have corrected course.

He did not. "Yeah." Your fingers relaxed against his shirt. The movement was tiny. He felt it everywhere. "I'm okay too," you said, though he had not asked aloud yet. He looked back at you.

"You sure?" You nodded. Your cheek was still marked from his shirt. It made you look younger somehow, more vulnerable, and he hated that the sight of it did something warm and unreasonable to him.

"I'm sure." The words settled. No one moved. The morning had made the room visible in pieces. The room service tray near the door. His suitcase open on the rack. Your bag on the floor with a sleeve hanging out. The dead phone on the nightstand. The useless lamp. The curtains breathing faintly whenever the wind found a seam at the window.

And the bed. The two of you in it. Too close to pretend it meant nothing. Not close enough, a terrible part of him thought. Jack shifted his gaze to the ceiling. "You're probably cold."

You blinked. Then laughed, the sound soft against him. "That's where we're going?" "It's relevant." "Is it?" "The power's still out." "Ah. Logistics." "Yes." "Professional courtesy?"

He looked down at you. The joke had been easier last night. Now it sounded like a challenge. His hand, still traitorous, rested against your back. Your body was warm where it touched his.

He could feel your heart beating. "No," he said. The word left quietly. Barely more than breath. But it changed everything. Your smile faded. Not in a bad way. In the way a person goes still when a door opens somewhere they thought was locked.

"No?" you asked. Jack swallowed. The smart thing would be to move. Sit up. Reach for his phone. Check the flight status. Talk about snowplows and airport delays and work schedules and the thousands of ordinary facts that could bury this one extraordinary one.

He was good at ordinary facts. He was good at burying things. But you were looking at him, and for once, the cost of silence seemed heavier than the cost of speech. "No," he said again.

You looked at him for a long moment. Then your hand flattened gently against his chest. Not pulling him closer. Not pushing away. Just there. "Okay," you whispered. Jack had no idea what that meant.

He had no idea if you meant okay, I understand or okay, stop or okay, me too. He had no idea how a single word could make him want to lean in and run at the same time. His voice came out rougher than he wanted.

"You should know better." Your eyebrows drew together. "Than what?" He looked at you. "Than to get involved with me." The words were blunt because bluntness was easier than fear.

There. Said. Ugly thing on the table. Except there was no table. Just a cold hotel room, a failed pillow wall, and your hand over the centre of his chest. Your expression shifted.

Not hurt. Not quite. Angry, maybe. Softly. The way you got angry with patients who apologised for needing help. "Jack." He looked away. "I'm serious." "I know you are." "You work with me."

"I noticed." His mouth tightened despite himself. "You know what I mean." "I do." Your voice stayed quiet. "But I also know I'm not a child, and I don't need you to make decisions for me because you've decided you're complicated."

His eyes came back to yours. That hit somewhere precise. You knew it too. He saw it in the way your face softened after the words landed, like you had not meant them to bruise but were not taking them back either.

"You are," you said. "Complicated. So am I. So is everyone who works where we work and keeps showing up anyway." "That's not the same." "No," you agreed. "It isn't." The honesty of that did more damage than reassurance would have.

You did not pretend he was easy. You did not pretend there was no grief in him, no damage, no history that stood in rooms before he did. You did not smooth him down into someone more convenient. You did not make him harmless.

You just stayed. "You deserve someone who—" he began. "No." Jack stopped. Your voice had sharpened. Not loud. Not harsh. Just firm enough to cut through the sentence before he could use it against both of you.

"No?" "No," you said. "You don't get to do that." His brows drew together. You pushed yourself up a little, enough that your faces were no longer so close, though your hand still rested lightly on him.

"You don't get to decide what I deserve if the only reason you're doing it is because you're scared I might choose you anyway." Jack went utterly still. Outside, the wind dragged snow across the glass in a long hiss.

Your own face changed then, as if you had surprised yourself. But you did not look away. Brave, Jack thought suddenly. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just there, under the borrowed sleep shirt and the oversized sweatpants and the line from his shirt on your cheek.

Braver than him, maybe. Often. His throat worked. "That's not—" he started. You waited. He stopped. Because it was. Of course it was. The room was quiet. You sighed softly, not with impatience. With tiredness. With tenderness. With something that made him feel more exposed than anger would have.

"I'm not asking you for everything right now," you said. "I'm not asking you to have some perfect answer in a hotel room with no power after six hours of sleep and terrible conference food."

"Good," he said, because he was still himself. "That would be unreasonable." A smile broke over your face before you could stop it. Small. Affectionate. Devastating. "There he is."

His chest tightened again. You said it like you had been waiting for him under all the fear. Like the deflection was not all of him, but it was a familiar enough piece to love.

Love. No. Not going there. Not yet. Jack looked at your hand on his chest. Your fingers shifted as if you had only just realised you were still touching him. You began to pull away.

He caught your wrist. Gently. Not enough to hold you if you wanted to go. Just enough to make you pause. You looked at him. Jack stared at the place where his fingers circled your wrist.

Your pulse tapped against his thumb. Fast. Not fear, he thought. Or not only fear. His voice was low when he spoke. "I'm not good at this." Your face softened again. "I know."

That might have offended someone else. For Jack, it felt like relief. "I mean it," he said. "I know." "I'll make it harder than it needs to be." "Probably." His eyes flicked up.

You shrugged a little. "What? You will." A faint laugh moved through him before he could stop it. You smiled, and the whole room changed around it. "But I'm not exactly known for choosing the easy thing," you said.

"No?" "No." "That seems like a character flaw." "You would know." His thumb moved once, unconsciously, over the inside of your wrist. You looked down at the movement. So did he.

The banter faded. The air shifted again. Jack let go of your wrist. But slowly. Very slowly. Your hand did not retreat this time. It lowered to the blanket between you, close to his.

The space from last night returned. Almost. A language, you had made it into. A habit. Jack was tired of almost. That was the problem. He had been tired of it for a while.

He had just called it professionalism. Timing. Caution. Decency. Self-preservation. He had dressed fear up in enough adult words that it could pass through most rooms unchallenged.

But here, in the low morning light, with your hair mussed and your body still warm from his and your eyes not letting him disappear inside his own excuses, it looked exactly like what it was.

Fear. And wanting. Both. Your phone buzzed. Neither of you moved. It buzzed again. You closed your eyes. "Dana," Jack said. "Probably." "Persistent." "You respect that." "I do."

The phone buzzed a third time. You groaned softly and reached toward the nightstand, nearly overbalancing because the blankets were tangled around your legs. Jack's hand moved to your waist automatically, steadying you.

You froze. So did he. His palm was warm through the shirt. Your eyes met. The phone stopped buzzing. Neither of you said anything. His hand stayed where it was. You were close again.

Not accidentally this time. Not entirely. Jack could see the hesitation in your face. Not doubt. Not regret. Just awareness. The same line both of you had been walking for months, suddenly under your bare feet.

He should have let go. He did not. Your gaze dropped to his mouth. It was so quick he might have missed it if he had not been looking for some reason not to be the only one losing the fight.

His breath changed. You noticed. Of course you did. "Jack," you whispered. He had heard his name in every possible context. Shouted across trauma bays. Snapped in frustration. Called over noise. Written on charts. Spoken by patients, colleagues, strangers, people dying, people grieving, people angry enough to spit.

He had never heard it like that. Soft. Terrified. Wanting. It reached somewhere he had not fortified well enough. He lifted his hand from your waist slowly, giving you time to stop him. Giving himself time to stop.

Neither of you did. His fingers brushed your jaw. Barely. A question more than a touch. Your eyes fluttered, then held his. He leaned in. Not all the way. Just enough. Enough that your breath warmed his mouth. Enough that the whole room seemed to vanish except for the inch between you. Enough that if either of you moved, there would be no pretending this was about weather or beds or professional courtesy.

Your phone rang. Loudly. You both jerked back. The sound tore through the room with the violence of an overhead page. Your phone skittered slightly on the nightstand as it vibrated.

Dana's name lit the screen. For one second, you and Jack stared at it. Then Jack closed his eyes. You made a sound that was half laugh, half despair. "I'm going to kill her," you whispered.

"No, you're not." "I might." "You like her." "That's the only thing saving her." The phone kept ringing. You grabbed it, cheeks flushed, and answered with the tone of someone clinging to the last scraps of dignity.

"Dana." Jack lay back against the pillows and looked at the ceiling like it had personally wronged him. You avoided looking at him. Mostly. "What? Yes, I'm alive. No, the power's still out." You paused. "No, I'm not in the lobby."

Jack's eyes closed harder. You sat up a little straighter, dragging the blanket with you. "No, I found somewhere safe." Another pause. "Dana." Jack turned his head slightly.

Even in the dim light, you could see the amusement beginning to break through his exasperation. Your face warmed further. "Because I'm an adult and I don't have to give you my full lodging itinerary." You listened, then looked briefly skyward. "Yes, I ate. Yes, actual food. No, not just coffee."

Jack mouthed, barely. You glared at him. He looked almost pleased with himself. "I am ignoring that," you said into the phone, though you were not entirely sure whether you meant Dana or Jack. "How's the ED?"

The shift was instant. Jack saw it. Felt it, almost. The way your face changed. The softness tucked away. The clinical focus returning. Concern sharpening your posture even though you were sitting in his bed in his clothes with your hair a mess.

You listened for nearly a minute. The room changed with you. Jack watched quietly. "They got extra staff in?" you asked. "Good. Is Robby there? Of course he is." You smiled faintly. "Tell him Abbott hasn't caused an interstate incident yet."

Jack gave you a look. You ignored it. "No, don't tell him the rest." A beat. "There is no rest." Jack's eyebrows rose. You covered your eyes with one hand. "Dana." Your voice dropped. "I'm hanging up now."

Whatever Dana said made your mouth fall open. Jack could not hear it, but he could guess the flavour. You pointed at the phone like she could see you. "That is harassment."

A pause. "Love you too." You hung up. The room went quiet. You set the phone down very carefully. Jack waited. You did not look at him. "She knows," he said. You nodded once. "She knows something."

"What did she say?" "No." "That bad?" "She said…" You stopped, pressing your lips together. Jack watched your restraint with growing interest. "She said?" You turned to him, face hot. "She said if I'm with you, she hopes you're being less emotionally constipated than usual."

Jack blinked. Once. Then looked away. You waited. His shoulders moved. Just slightly. Then again. "Oh my God," you said. "Are you laughing?" "No." "You are." "I'm not." "You absolutely are."

He pressed his fingers to his brow. It was contained. Barely audible. But it was there — a low, reluctant laugh that seemed dragged out of him against his will. The sight of it did something catastrophic to you.

Jack Abbott laughing in a dark hotel room under a snowstorm because Dana had called him emotionally constipated. Your heart did not stand a chance. "It's not funny," he said.

"It's very funny." "She's insubordinate." "She's charge." "That explains the confidence." You laughed then too, and the room warmed a little around the sound. It helped. It saved you, maybe.

Or delayed the inevitable. Jack's laughter faded first, but not completely. There was still something loose around his mouth when he looked back at you. For a second, it was easy to imagine waking up like this again. Not in a hotel. Not because of a storm. Just morning. His voice. Your phone. Someone from work interrupting with unnecessary accuracy. Jack pretending to be annoyed while secretly pleased you had people who checked on you.

The thought must have shown on your face because his expression softened. Not much. Enough. "ED's okay?" he asked. You nodded. "Busy. Not catastrophic. Roads are bad, but night shift got stuck, day shift came in early, everyone's annoyed but functioning."

"Normal disaster mode." "Pretty much." "Good." "Robby told Dana to tell you that if you're bored, you can review the conference notes and send him bullet points." Jack's expression went dead flat.

You grinned. "He did not." "No." "Good." "He did say, apparently, that you should not pick fights with anyone from cardiology while stranded." "Cardiology keeps coming up."

"You have a reputation." "I have standards." "Same system?" "Same system." The quiet settled again, gentler this time. You were sitting up now, blanket around your shoulders, and Jack was still half-reclined beside you. The accidental closeness had been disrupted, but not erased. If anything, the interruption had made the unfinished thing between you brighter.

You both knew what had almost happened before the phone rang. Neither of you could unknow it. Jack looked at your phone, then at the dead lamp. "We should check flights."

"Probably." Neither of you moved. A beat passed. Then another. You turned your head toward him. "Jack." He looked at you. There was caution in his face again, but not the closed kind. More like a man standing at the edge of a room he had avoided for years, listening for whether it was safe to step inside.

You swallowed. "We don't have to pretend nothing almost happened." His jaw flexed. "No." "No, we don't?" "No," he said. "We don't." The answer was steady. Your pulse was not.

"Okay." "Okay." It would have been easier if one of you had looked away. Neither of you did. Jack's hand rested on the blanket near your knee. Yours rested beside it, fingers curled in the fabric.

Close. Almost. Again. This time, you moved. Only a little. Your fingers brushed his. Jack looked down. You waited. His hand turned beneath yours. Slowly. Palm up. An offering.

Not dramatic. Not polished. Not the kind of gesture that belonged in speeches or films. Just Jack, quiet and tired and scared enough to be careful, letting you decide if you wanted to take what he could give right now.

You slid your hand into his. His fingers closed around yours. Warm. Firm. Real. Something in your chest unknotted so abruptly it almost hurt. Jack kept looking at your joined hands like he was studying an X-ray for a fracture line.

Then he said, "This is a bad idea." You squeezed his hand once. "Probably." His eyes lifted. You smiled faintly. "You're not the only one allowed to make bad decisions." "That's not reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be." "You could try." "I could." "You won't." "No." A faint almost-smile tugged at his mouth. The shape of it was so familiar now it made you ache. "What happens when we get home?" you asked.

There. The real question. Not the storm. Not the bed. Not the almost-kiss. Home. The Pitt. The ED. Dana's loud eyebrows. Robby's knowing looks. Long shifts. Short breaks. Professional distance. Charts and traumas and grief and the kind of fatigue that made honest things hard to hold.

Jack's fingers tightened around yours. Not much. Enough. "I don't know," he said. The answer should have disappointed you. It did not. Because he did not pull away. Because he did not say nothing.

Because Jack Abbott admitting uncertainty while holding your hand felt more intimate than any clean promise would have. You nodded. "Okay." "That enough?" "For this minute?"

His eyes stayed on yours. "Yes." You looked down at your joined hands. "For this minute, yeah." Jack let out a slow breath. Then, after a long moment, he said, "When we get home, I'd like to take you to dinner."

You looked up so fast you nearly hurt your neck. "What?" His face shifted, some of the vulnerability closing under dry irritation. "You heard me." "I did. I'm just checking for carbon monoxide."

"The power's out, not the ventilation." "Could be subtle." "It's not carbon monoxide." "It might be concussion. Did you hit your head?" "You're making this difficult." "I'm panicking."

"That's obvious." You laughed, breathless and ridiculous and on the edge of something much softer. Jack's eyes warmed. There. No hiding it this time. Not entirely. "Dinner," he repeated.

Your smile settled. "Like a date?" His thumb moved once against yours. "Yes." One word. No flourish. No professional courtesy. Just yes. Your heart went very quiet. Then very loud.

"When we get home," you said. "When we get home." "And not at the hospital cafeteria." His eyebrows lifted. "You have standards." "I do." "Good." "Somewhere with actual food."

"Fine." "And no orthopedic surgeons." "That may be harder to guarantee." You smiled. He did too. Barely. Perfectly. The room hummed suddenly. You both looked up. The heater clicked.

The lamp beside the bed flickered once, then turned on, flooding the room with warm yellow light. The power was back. For some reason, neither of you moved for several seconds.

The return of normal things felt rude. The lamp. The heater. The faint buzz from the mini fridge. The hotel room snapping back into itself as if it had not spent the night holding you both outside of ordinary life.

Then your phone began charging again and immediately buzzed with a flood of notifications. Jack looked at it. "You're popular." "I'm monitored." "Accurate." The heat began to push through the room slowly. The window stayed pale and snow-blurred, but the worst of the storm seemed to have softened. Somewhere beyond the walls, the hotel came alive again — pipes shifting, voices rising, the distant chime of an elevator finding power.

The spell should have broken. Maybe it did. Maybe that was why you noticed, suddenly, that you were still holding Jack's hand. Maybe that was why Jack noticed too. Neither of you let go.

Not immediately. Then, carefully, like he did not want you to mistake the movement for regret, Jack released your hand and reached for his phone. "Flights," he said. "Right."

"Need to know if we're stuck another day." "Imagine." His eyes flicked to yours. You held his gaze. The joke did not quite land as a joke. A flush climbed your neck. Jack looked back at his phone.

His mouth twitched. "Airport's delayed," he said after a moment. "Cancelled?" "Not yet." You checked your own phone. It took a second to load, then the airline app opened with the kind of cheerful incompetence only travel software could manage.

"My flight's still showing delayed." "Mine too." "So we might get home." "Might." You sat there with him, both of you looking down at your screens and pretending the ordinary task was enough to steady the room.

It helped. A little. Then a notification from Dana appeared at the top of your phone. DANA: If he asks you to dinner, say yes. If he doesn't, tell him I'm disappointed but not surprised.

You stared at it. Jack glanced sideways. "What?" "Nothing." "Dana again?" "No." "Liar." You turned the phone screen down against the blanket. "She's invasive." "She's usually right."

You looked at him. Jack's eyes were on his phone, but his expression had gone deliberately neutral. A smile crept across your face. "She is, actually." He looked up then.

The warmth between you changed shape. Not less. Just steadier. A little less accidental. A little more chosen. You tucked the blanket around yourself and leaned back against the headboard, suddenly aware of how tired you still were. The night had not been restful, exactly, even if it had been something close. Your body felt warm now in the returning heat, heavy with interrupted sleep and emotional whiplash.

Jack noticed. Of course. "Sleep another hour," he said. You blinked. "What?" "Flights aren't going anywhere yet. Checkout's delayed because of the outage. Sleep." "You too?"

"I'm awake." "That is not an answer." "It was adjacent to one." You gave him a look. He sighed. "Fine." "Fine?" "I'll sleep." "Good." "But if you steal the blanket—" "I will."

His mouth twitched. "You admit it?" "I contain multitudes." "Mostly theft." "Mostly survival." He set his phone down and reached to turn off the lamp. Then he paused. The room was warm-lit now, no longer hidden in emergency glow. Morning had made everything more visible. More real.

He looked at the bed. Then at you. The pillow wall was still at the bottom of the mattress, defeated and crumpled beyond repair. You followed his gaze. A laugh threatened, but your throat felt too tight for it.

"Do we rebuild the border?" you asked. Jack looked at the pillow. Then at you. "No," he said. Soft. Certain. Your breath caught. He did not touch you. He did not make it bigger than that.

He just turned off the lamp, easing the room back into dim morning, and settled under the covers beside you. Not as far away as before. Not pressed close either. Just there.

Close enough that if either of you shifted in sleep, you might find each other again. Close enough that pretending would require more effort than honesty. You lay on your side facing him.

Jack lay on his back, eyes on the ceiling. For a minute, neither of you spoke. Then you said, very softly, "Dinner when we get home." His eyes closed. "Yes." "Not professional courtesy."

His mouth moved. "No." You smiled into the quiet. Outside, the snow kept falling. Inside, under the returning heat and the tired morning hush, Jack reached beneath the blanket and found your hand again.

The world entered through a wormhole of tissue paper, emerging through the darkness in blotches and fuzzy shapes. Yet you were able to feel the intensity of your hand being held.

Your head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool, your doctor’s voice occasionally pushing through the forest of fluff to remind you that you had to keep sipping water. Accepting the straw that materialised in front of your face was easy enough. It led you back to the man sat at your side who was holding it – and your hand still in his other one – for you. You tried to squint at him whilst you drank to abate the overwhelm that came with looking at someone you were half sure was handsome, but catching and keeping the straw between your pursed lips took all your concentration.

“Woah there,” he dabbed a napkin – where did he get a napkin from? – around your mouth.

Ah, you were dribbling, not swallowing.

At some point, he’d placed the cup back on the table. You only realised when he squeezed your hand in both of his, his smile making you weak at the knees. Probably. Your legs felt like you hadn’t moved them in years. His face was in full focus now, and goddamn if it wasn’t the most beautiful one you’d seen.

“Hey.” The “y” was really drawn out by whoever was saying that. They sounded close by.

The stranger’s smile grew bigger, creating lines at his eyes that sweetened the deal, “Hi again.”

You took in the black sweater he was wearing, how cosy it looked around his arms and how you wanted to snuggle into them.

“’M I dreamin’?” said the voice. You looked to your right to catch who it was, but no one else was there, not even the doctor. Where’d she go? Where’d the chatterer go?

“You’re awake,” the stranger answered. He cocked his head to the left; you copied him.

“Cool.” Oh, it was your voice talking. “’Ve we met?”

He chuckled and you would be offended if he didn’t look so damn attractive doing it. The joy echoed clearly out of his throat; your eyes latched onto the dimples that framed his mirth like a painting.

“Yeah, we’ve met,” he confirmed. A corner of his mouth stayed upright in a smirk.

Eh, fuck it.

“Can I buy you a drink?” you slurred.

Your own tongue poked out of your mouth as you watched him wet his lips, his head and shoulders shaking before he replied, “How about I buy you one and you get the next round?”

He ended his proposal with a wink which sent you reeling like he’d spun the world and you on a plate.

“’Kay, charmer,” you smiled goofily at him. If you looked dumb, who cares? No you, you were getting propositioned by a hottie with a body – seriously how’d it taken you so long to notice his arms?

“Be right back.” He kissed your brow, still smiling down at you. Woah, this guy was forward!

In your anaesthetic haze, you went to playfully slap his chest, but he was already out his chair and the room. You would’ve scrunched your body up in on itself to keep the view of his behind in sight, except you were achy still and could barely lift your head off the pillow.

You were left staring at the popcorn tiled ceiling, brightly lit. Stupid interior choice for a flirting hot spot, you’d have to take this guy somewhere else.

“Just checking your-”

“Swee’ Jesus,” you winced in slow motion at the sudden voice.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” apologised the voice, now appearing at your side in the form of a nurse by an IV bag. Your gaze trailed down the tubing and frowned when it found a needle plastered to your hand, but you didn’t fight against it.

“What’s’is name?” you pointed vaguely in the direction he’d gone and pouted. How long did it take to get you a damn drink?

“Jack?”

“Ohhh, nooo,” your head lolled back and forth on the pillow, “Not supposed to date a ‘J’ name. ‘S cursed.”

Your nurse tapped the tautly full IV bag (that you were sure was nearly empty a second ago), “Bit late for that. He’s your husband.”

“M’husband?” You gawked, eyelids slipping halfway in shock as all other energy was directed on trying to remember what this man looked like on your wedding day. “I married that?”

The nurse smiled down at you, “Aren’t you lucky?”

“Y’see those biceps?” slipped out your mouth before the idea of being embarrassed could even be conjured from the recesses of your subconscious. “Could bounce a dime off that ass… ‘R a nickel.”

What would be harder to aim? You couldn’t remember their sizes or shapes, so calculating the prime aerodynamics would be tricky. Getting past the number seven of counting the ceiling tiles without getting bored was already threatening you with another round of sleep.

Thank God, the hot guy came back with two drinks in hand. Instantly, this room was better.

“Hey, handsome,” you cooed.

“Well,” he balanced the drinks on a moveable table, “Hello, gorgeous.”

Beaming at him, your head rolled back towards him and you demanded, “Gimme some sugar!”

Hopefully you were pouting. You were telling your lips to pout. If they were listening, that was another thing.

His arms – Christ, his arms were bulging out of that black t-shirt – bracketed you into the bed as he drew closer to you. Each freckle, speck of stubble, line across his skin brightened with clarity. You could happily stare at him for days. Why was he this close again?

Oh yeah, you’d requested a kiss from his pretty mouth.  

No sooner were his lips brushing yours, you collapsed into giggles as if he was tickling you five drinks deep, batting him with all the strength you had. He barely moved.

“Glad to see the meds are working their magic,” What’s-his-face barely moved to leave a prickly kiss on your cheek before he withdrew back to his seat.

A gasp escaped you as you covered where he’d left his affection. The laughter kept spilling out like water from your mouth though. Then your fingertip caught on something on your left hand. Before What’s-his-name could take your hand again, you lifted it in front of your eyes which widened five long seconds later.

“Oh shit! I’m married?” You gawked at the ring. How long had that been there?

“Yeah,” He showed his hand where a ring glinted teasingly at you, “We’re married.”

Jaw slack, you reached a shaky hand out and prodded his ring then yours.

“We’re married?” you said softly, eyes big and beaming.

“Yeah. Two years in a month.”

Before you could feel any embarrassment at forgetting your husband’s name again, you spotted your nurse passing the corridor.

You flinched at the volume you couldn’t control as you bellowed, “Will I be outta here in time to have anniversary sex?”

A low cackling echoed beside you and you frowned at your husband who was hiding his crimson blush in cupped hands. Evidently, your expression conveyed your concern at his lack thereof; he took your hand back in his and kissed your knuckles.

“I’ll take you home tonight if you behave,” he squeezed your fingers gently, “Get some rest?”

You had been dodgy about your daughter at first, sharing the information as if it were a combination of landmines and wincing as if he were already edging up from the table to run. It made sense that he didn’t know about her. He had met you in a coffee shop after a fourteen-hour shift and still thanked whatever higher power was responsible for the delirium-infused confidence that led him to you, but he didn’t know much. He just knew you were beautiful and you were in front of him and you stared up at him with eyes that made him blink faster, so he asked you out. 

You told him about her on the third date, and Jack couldn’t stand the way you flinched, so he held your hand across the table, rubbed his thumb along your knuckles, and said, “Whenever you’d let me, I’d love to meet her.” 

“Are you serious?” had tumbled out of your mouth directly after, and Jack couldn’t take that either, knowing that so many people had missed out on you and told you that that reaction was warranted. So he pressed your fingers to his lips and quirked his mouth into a smile despite his uncovered frustration. 

“Of course I’m serious. I’m always serious.” 

Jack Abbot fell in love with Penny almost as fast as he fell in love with you. Middle-of-the-night illnesses frequently tainted his exposure to children, so Jack had almost forgotten how energetic and full of life a four-year-old could be. Penny was shy, bashful in ways like her mother, but she was also intelligent and loved squids (you said it was a phase) and asked Jack questions about bones because you told her he was a doctor and she had just learned about bones in preschool. 

“Have you ever seen a bone?” 

“I’ve seen lots of bones,” Jack had whispered back to her, eyes flashing wide for emphasis. 

“That’s literally crazy,” Penny had gasped, looking over her shoulder at you as you paid for a snack at the farmer’s market stall. “My mommy says that if I ever see one of my bones, I need to tell her right away.” 

Jack knelt beside Penny on the grass. “Your mommy’s right. You want to see something cool? I don’t have a bone in my leg.” 

“What!” 

It hadn’t taken long for Penny to become accustomed to Jack’s presence. She asked about him when he wasn’t around. She joined calls when you checked in early during his shifts. She saved a book full of stickers to show him when he came over for dinner, which he did often. Said stickers also somehow appeared on his prosthetic, something your daughter still had a hard time believing to be real. 

And Jack hadn’t been expecting it, but he had begun to think of children again—thinking of his life in squid stickers and irrational questions and a weight on his lap as he sat on your couch and watched an animated dog teach him a life lesson. 

He had begun to enjoy getting out of work. He got to bring bagels to your place early in the morning and kiss you against your kitchen counters and fix Penny’s wild hair as she tumbled into the living room. His hobbies had changed; adrenaline was replaced with soccer games and sticky fingers and lying in bed with you right up until he had to throw his scrubs on. 

Everything had become simple in Jack’s life. There was work, there was you, and there was Penny. And in a few weeks, he would ask you to make his life even simpler. 

~~

A gratefully unfamiliar dread pulsed through Jack’s chest as he turned the corner of the Pitt and saw you. He took inventory instantly, cataloging the tone of your skin, each of your limbs, the small smile on your face as you spoke casually to Mateo. You were fine, you looked to be fine, but Jack still picked up the pace because you were in the emergency department, and you never came to visit without Penny. 

Jack’s eyes shot to your legs, and more panic filled him at the empty space.

“Hey,” Jack breathed, his mouth twitching into a smile that did not reach his searching eyes. He placed a hand on your cheek and tried not to furrow his brows. “You okay? Where’s Penny?” 

Your smile was much warmer. You gripped his wrist, and Jack felt the almost imperceptible way you leaned your face into his touch. “I’m fine, and Penny’s fine. I did late pickup so I could see you before we take the train upstate.”

Upstate. Upstate—right. Jack had primed his brain to work a double, so that often meant blocking the shifts with tasks. He was just about finished with the day shift, and your trip to see your family was a night shift event. Your train was leaving at 7:30 pm—an in-between-shift event, then.

“You coulda brought her by, too,” Jack quietly replied, brushing his thumb along your cheek as Mateo swiveled his stool to the other side of the nurse’s hub. Relief was slowly trickling through the shock of seeing you unannounced.

“Oh, I see. If I don’t bring Penny, I shouldn’t come at all?” you teased. 

Jack moved his hand down to fix your scarf, tucking it closer to your neck. “Didn’t say that,” he argued. “I just wanted to say goodbye to both my girls.” 

Your face heated furiously, an outcome Jack had been hoping for. He loved to get you flustered, and that was the quickest way to do it. Never failed. 

“We would’ve missed our train if I brought her.” You poked Jack’s chest. “You two always get into it, and then I have to drag her away because she gets too upset to leave you.” 

“Can’t help it. I’m just so much fun to be around.” 

“Yeah, well, you’ll have to be fun over FaceTime for the next few days, Dr. Abbot.”

Jack tsked, looking off to the side to tamp down his disappointment. You’d had this visit planned for a few months now, but it didn’t make watching you go any easier. He had wanted to go with you, eager to meet your family, but the Pitt needed an attending on doubles, and Jack was the only one available. You’d assured him several times that it was fine, and there would be more opportunities to come. He knew it was fine. What wasn’t fine was watching his family leave and feeling incomplete. 

He needed to ask you that question. 

“You sure you can’t wait until tomorrow so I can drive you up?” Jack tried. He moved his fixing touch to the zipper on your jacket, tugging it up to keep in the warmth. “No train that way.” 

You brushed his hand off and stepped closer, raising your brows. “Right. Have you drive that far after working a double? Just for you to drive back home, sleep for 45 minutes, and then work again? Not happening, Jack. The train is fine. We’re fine.” 

“You keep saying that,” he murmured under his breath. He placed his hands along your jaw, holding you again, even though he knew several eyes watched on. “Call me when you get on the train. And have Penny bring that spray hand sanitizer she made me spend ten dollars on. It’s flu season. And—” 

“Jack,” you gently interrupted. “I love you. So much. But when I say we’re fine, I mean it. And stop buying her everything she sees in Sephora. She doesn’t even need to be in Sephora. She’s five.” 

“I love you more,” was how Jack decided to respond. He tilted his head back and looked at you fully, his hands moving your face to one side and then the other. 

“Memorizing me?” you teased. 

“Something like that.” 

Continuing his shift was difficult. Jack had already felt the weight of the double being exacerbated by your departure, but then you FaceTimed him on the train, and the night got heavier. Penny held up her hand sanitizer with a mouthful of marshmallow muffling her words, and Jack just wished he could be sitting beside you on that stupid train. He’d paid more for the two of you to have a private compartment, and it was nice knowing you were cared for, but he had become the one taking care of you. 

He felt his back stiffen as the night went on. 

“You gotta loosen up, Dr. Abbot,” Mateo called out after five minutes of Jack scrolling through his camera roll. He’d stopped on a picture of you and Penny on the hood of his truck. “You knew they were leaving all day. We still got nine hours before you can go home and make scrapbooks.” 

Jack hooked his chin over his shoulder, placing his phone face down on the charting station. “Mind your business.” 

Mateo put his hands up in surrender. “They’re coming back in three days. You work all three of those days. It’ll be quick.” The younger man patted Jack’s shoulder. “Then maybe you can finally fish that ring out of your locker.” 

“What do you know about that, huh?” Jack accused, crossing his arms in a show of intimidation that didn’t match his almost-smile. 

“Nothing you didn’t just confirm,” Mateo quipped back. “I’ve babysat at her place enough times to catch a vibe.” 

“Catch a vibe?” 

“Yeah. It’s emanating from you.” 

Dr. Shen passed by the pair, settling into a stool and logging into the computer. “What’s emanating from him?” 

“My vibe, apparently,” Jack spoke to the ceiling. 

Mateo cut in, resting his arms on the counter. “That he’s gonna propose.” 

“I did not say that,” Jack shot back. 

“You don’t have to say anything if it’s a vibe,” Shen informed him, gaze focused on his notes. He took a casual sip of watered-down coffee. “Can you do it within the next three months, though? I want to win the pool to pay off my car.” 

Mateo let out a hiss, resting his head on his elbows. “Dude. He wasn’t supposed to know about the betting pool. Now he’s gonna be weird about it.” 

“He’s not going to—” 

“Okay, what?” Jack almost sighed, head jolting back. “There’s a betting pool? Since when?” 

“Since you started wearing that little bracelet with the sea creatures on it. It got bigger after y/n came by that one time with lunch and you practically ran down the hallway.” 

Jack stared at Shen as he recounted the betrayal happening under his nose. “Alright. Who’s in it?” 

“Who isn’t—”

 “Got incoming traumas. The T Line crashed. Unidentified number of casualties, but we’re getting at least a dozen wounded.” 

It took a moment for the humor to dissipate from Jack’s body. He heard the charge nurse’s calls to clear the trauma bays and could recognize the movement in the room. Mateo was staring at the side of Jack’s face and Shen had shot up from the charting computer to do… something, but Jack was swimming in a state of thick confusion.

He did some math in his head. 

It might not have been your train. You FaceTimed him thirty minutes ago, and the train hadn’t left yet. You were just sitting with Penny. You had said there was a small delay, but you both were settled into the “stupidly-priced private seats,” and Penny was eager to watch Bluey during the wait. You were wearing an old college sweater he’d left at your apartment. 

But that was thirty minutes ago. 

It could have been your train. 

“Dr. Abbot?” Mateo’s call was a jumbled haze. “Dr. Abbot, what can I—” 

“My girls are on the train,” Jack muttered to himself. 

“What?”

“My girls are on the train,” he said again, clearer this time. His gaze shot to the board as if he’d see your name, a pinpoint focus washing over him. If he were calm enough, nothing could happen.

Mateo said something else, maybe a reassurance or a passing encouragement, but Jack couldn’t register it. He took his shaking hands and donned the PPE needed for a disaster of this magnitude, drowning out the orders ringing through the ED. Shen had taken over as head, and Jack couldn’t remember if he’d told him to do that. He probably hadn’t. 

The first patient wasn’t you. Neither was the second. Or the third. At some point near the beginning, Jack had texted you—a quick text, asking if you were okay, even though that was a ridiculous question. But if you weren’t a patient, and if you didn’t answer him, then the unidentified number of casualties Lena announced was a harrowing reality. 

But it couldn’t be you. 

Jack was doing everything right. He was calm and working doubles and he had paid for you to have better seats. Penny wouldn’t get the flu and he was going to have the lattice on your balcony fixed before you got home. 

You couldn’t be an unidentified casualty. 

“Hey, you good?” Dr. Ellis barked at Jack as he blinked hard in a trauma bay. The man lying in the bed had his arm in the wrong direction, bruises already covering the left side of his body. 

Every moment he wasn’t checking the incoming patients was a moment he couldn’t be sure of you. A moment Penny could be wheeled by. 

Jack cleared his throat harshly. “I’m good. Roll him on three.” 

You weren’t the fourth patient he saw, either. 

But you were the fifth. 

He had prepared himself for it, but nothing would have been enough, he soon realized. No amount of grounding or breathing exercises or visualization would have made it easier. Your eyes were open, but they couldn’t focus on him, not even as he stuttered out a breath and shot to the side of the gurney, his feet quick beside you. 

He said your name, repeated it, but your eyes kept flashing past the overhead lights. An EMT was shouting out your vitals and Jack heard them, but his waterline was burning and the collar of your sweatshirt was rimmed red with blood. His sweatshirt. He’d left it at your place a few days ago. 

Crush injury. Fully conscious but lacks verbal response. Jane Doe—you weren’t Jane Doe. You were his. 

As they landed you in trauma one, Jack began to assess. He ignored that his hands had begun to shake again. “I need you to hear me, baby,” Jack called as he moved meticulously through his assessment. “I just need to know that you can. Can you do that for me? Let me know if you can hear me?” 

A nurse was untangling an ultrasound machine as Jack moved to palpate your abdomen. You flinched. He felt himself unravel. 

“I needed that yesterday!” he shouted, ripping the machine from the older woman’s hands. It wasn’t her fault. Jack would apologize later if he could ever form words again. “Why isn’t anyone giving me info?” 

Dr. Ellis entered the trauma bay, confusion laced with apprehension at the sound of Jack’s anger. All the confusion was wiped clear when she saw who was on the bed. When she saw the blood sticking to the cracks in Jack’s hands and the sheen of sweat on his forehead. 

“You need me to take this?” Dr. Ellis asked, but it was hardly a question. She was direct when she needed to be, even towards an attending, but Jack was not in the mind to be overpowered by reason and level-headedness. 

“No,” he simply replied, eyes glued to the grainy screen of the ultrasound. 

“Are you sure you should—” 

“Free fluid in the abdomen. I need—” 

Jack stopped cold when a sound escaped you. It was breathy, barely even there to make out, but he felt his gaze drop to your face before his mind could even register it. Someone took the Doppler from his hands and the room erupted in movement and calls and beeps from machines, but Jack had his hands on your face as he had just a few hours ago, begging your eyes to focus on him. 

“What was that?” he breathed back, eyes racing over every inch of your face. He cataloged four bruises before you finally found his eyes. “There you are. There’s my girl. You’re doing so good, and we got you, okay?” 

“P-Penny,” you uttered. Your hand twitched up to grasp Jack’s arm, and he silently thanked god that you could move it. “Penny.” 

Jack had been thinking about Penny since you entered the Pitt. He had hoped, in some unreasonable way, that she would be with you. That you both would be fine, maybe with minor injuries, and he would sweep you away into the break room while he managed the crisis. But you were the crisis, and Penny wasn’t here. He had no idea where she was. 

“I know, baby. I know. I’m gonna find Penny. She’ll be just fine. Both my girls will, okay? Promise. Promise on everything.” 

He was speaking so low, his hand on the top of your head and his face close. He felt the dread pool in his gut at the lies he was telling. Jack had no way of finding Penny. He couldn’t leave you and search the wreck for a little girl. They probably wouldn’t let him past the police tape. 

“F-find. Her. Jack, please,” you pleaded. Your nails dug into his arm and Jack had to move his jaw to stop from crying. Your face was becoming pallid and someone was calling surgery. 

“I’ll find her,” he smiled. A sad smile. A waning one. “You don’t worry about a thing. I’ll find her and bring her right to you.” 

“Jack.” 

It was Robby’s voice that tore Jack’s face from yours. He had to have ridden fast to get there. His hair was swept back and he still had his jacket on and Robby was supposed to be out on vacation for another few days, but he was there. He was there, and he shook his head when Jack turned to find him. 

“Let them take her. You gotta back up.” 

They must have been asking for a while. Jack hadn’t registered a single request for him to move; he had been too caught up in tracking each minuscule twitch of your face—in remembering you before life changed, because it still felt the same, just more urgent, more scary. If he stopped looking at you, if you were taken away, there was the chance that you wouldn’t come back. That he would look up and find that Penny was gone. 

He hadn’t been ready for the after. 

Robby forced it, anyway. 

Jack felt like he was going to throw up as they wheeled you away, Dr. Walsh sending worried looks to each person in the trauma bay who wouldn’t meet her eye. Your blood was on the floor in free-flowing streaks that Jack couldn’t look away from, and he felt like he was going to throw up. The bay felt stagnant. The walls moved when he did not. His back hit a hard surface, and Jack let it hold him as he sank to the floor. 

He went to press his face in his hands, but stopped when he saw your blood filling the lines in his palms. 

He hadn’t told you he loved you. He let them take you, and he hadn’t reminded you. 

Robby crouched in front of Jack, hands flexing between his knees. “She’s gonna be okay.” 

Jack felt his head roll against the wall as his jaw trembled. “What’re you doing here?” he croaked out. 

“Mateo called me. Said your girl was in the crash. I was already home, so I came as fast as I could.” Robby paused, scratching his jaw. “Is Penny—” 

“I don’t know where Penny is.” 

“Okay. Okay, we wait then. We wait and see, and we fix what we can—” 

“I can’t just fucking wait, Robby,” Jack finally sobbed, the adrenaline from keeping you awake and talking wearing off in a hard crash. “I can’t wait to hear that she didn’t make it. Or that y/n doesn’t get out of that surgery. I can’t—I have to do something, and there’s nothing—there’s nothing I can do.” 

Jack's hands were raised in a helpless motion, his eyes fixed on the back wall of the trauma bay. He couldn’t see much through the tears, couldn’t feel much past the all-consuming fear, but he would try for you. For Penny. If the two of you were gone, he wasn’t sure if he could. 

“They’re all I got,” Jack nodded to himself, hands hanging over his tented knees. “And if I have to walk out there into a world where I’m alone again?” Jack pointed towards the door, finally meeting Robby’s pinched expression. “Not sure what I’d be doing it for.” 

“Don’t say that,” Robby cut through. “You don’t know that they won’t make it. You don’t. Stop giving up before you have to.”

“I don’t even know where my little girl is.” 

“So we find out. But we can’t do that from in here. We can’t do that when you’ve given up already.” 

So, Robby hauled Jack up from the floor of trauma one, and Jack followed him to the nurse’s hub. He washed his hands, he cracked his neck, and he let the central heating dry the stickiness of his tears as he stared up at the news reports of the crash. He wouldn’t be able to work; that was why Robby came in, but he could make calls. Jack knew people who knew people, and those people were in law enforcement. Those people would know more than he did. 

Jack was glued to the red phone in the Pitt for fifteen minutes, asking about a little girl that no one could find. Lena had sent him a concerned look one too many times and had yet to scold him for using the emergency line, but Jack hardly noticed. Robby was popping in and out of rooms in the role he was supposed to fill, but Jack hardly noticed. 

“Sorry, Abbot. Haven’t gotten the list yet. I’ll send you the info as soon as I get it.” 

Jack squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the growing ache above his nose. He shot out a quick thank you that didn’t sound genuine, and jumped out of his skin when a hand met his shoulder. 

“Anything I can do?” Lena asked. 

Jack only shook his head and went through his contact list in his head once more. It was all looking bleak. Jack’s world was looking bleak. And then the ambulance bay doors burst open, a bed being shoved down the hall, and Jack dropped the phone onto the counter. And then he was sprinting.

“Straggler from the crash. Says she’s five and asking for her mom, but mom couldn’t be found on scene. No obvious signs of trauma other than some cuts and bruises, but—” 

“Oh, fuck. Penny,” Jack gasped out, reaching for her on the bed that was far too big.

To her credit, it was only then that Penny started crying. She had been strong-faced when she got in, fear a shadow on her innocent face, but the moment she saw Jack, that was gone. Penny threw her arms around Jack’s neck and let out a wail he hoped never to hear again. She was trembling against him, retelling events no one could make out, and Jack pressed his nose to her temple as he rocked her where he stood. 

“I know, baby,” he shushed, words so similar to the ones he had spoken to you. “But you were so brave, you hear me? So brave. Your mom’s gonna be so proud of you.” 

Through hiccuping breaths, Penny asked, “Where is mommy?” 

Jack’s chest caved. “She’s getting fixed up upstairs. Mommy got hurt, but they’re fixing it.” 

“I didn’t get hurt because mommy was holding me.” 

“What was that, baby?” Jack asked, tucking Penny’s hair back from her face as he continued to sway. 

Penny looked up at him with big, watery eyes. “When the train started making noises, mommy grabbed me and held me really tight. I didn’t get hurt, but she did.” 

And of course you did. Of course that was why Penny was safe in his arms, and you were fighting for your life upstairs. Jack couldn’t imagine a world where that wasn’t the outcome. You would do anything for her. You were always going to do anything for her. 

Jack looked for you in Penny’s face as he offered the best smile he could muster. “She’s gonna be alright. She was protecting you, Penny. Mommy always protects you.” 

“Like how she used to check for monsters?” 

“Just like that. But I check for the monsters now. Safer that way.” 

“I wish you were with us on the train,” Penny choked out, clutching Jack’s scrubs in her tiny fists. “To make mommy safe, too.” 

Jack’s chest hurt. He pressed his forehead back to Penny’s temple, collected himself with a tight scrunch of his eyes, and grounded. “C’mon, sweetheart. I gotta check you over, okay? Make sure nothing’s wrong.” 

Jack cared for Penny in the same meticulous way he did you. He cleaned her scrapes and assessed her bruises, relishing the small giggle she let out when he prodded around to make sure nothing was happening internally. He felt the weight of the day in a lopsided, confusing uneasiness, one part of his life complete, the other in the balance. He would start to think of you, start to feel the dread, but then Penny would lay her head on his chest as he held her in the break room, and he had to snap back. 

You would want your daughter to feel safe. 

He needed to be a safe place. 

So Jack held Penny, bumping his knee to help her sleep, and he considered what he would have done a year ago. If he had been inundated with a tragedy, he would have thrown himself into work as a distraction. He would have thrown caution to the wind and taken case after case until his leg ached too much to continue. They would have had to tell him to stop, forced him to go home, and Jack would have done so only when he knew he would fall dead asleep the second he hit the mattress. 

Because that was what his life used to be. 

Today, no one had had to beg Jack to slow down. No one pulled him from patient rooms and gave him a stern talking to. They had called Robby as soon as they knew you were involved. They had expected him to slow down for you—for his family. 

Jack pressed a kiss to Penny’s head and enjoyed the difference. 

It was another hour before any news of you came. Penny had finally dozed off, and Jack’s left arm was dead from the weight of her head, but he was alert when Dr. Shen poked into the dim room and smiled softly. 

“She’s out. Asleep, but in recovery. They said she can have visitors, but I don’t know if—” 

Jack gazed down at Penny, still knocked out on top of him. “Can you get Mateo?” 

The pass-off was seamless, Jack running a hand over Penny’s head as Mateo nodded to the older man and promised to take care of things. It would be better for her to wake up with someone she knew, and Jack wasn’t going to leave her with anyone he didn’t trust. He trusted the entire staff, but Mateo was different. Mateo loved Penny. 

Jack cleared his mind on the elevator ride up, and then cleared it again as he walked through the maze of the ICU to find your room. He would bring Penny up when you were more stable, when he had a better idea of the state you were in. You hadn’t looked scary, but you were her mom. You were her mom, and Jack was—

“Jack?” 

He hadn’t been expecting your voice; Jack felt the breath knock from his lungs at the sound of it. His tears were fresh as he rounded your bed, checking vitals in a quick sweep before putting his hands anywhere they could reach. Your eyes were hazy as he leaned over you, but you had said his name, and something in him righted. 

“Hey,” he practically cooed, brushing your hair back as his eyes traced the shape of your face. “Didn’t think you’d be awake.” 

“Penny—” 

“Penny’s okay. She’s not hurt, sweetheart. Mateo’s got her.” 

Jack wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken so low before, so soft amidst beeping machines and the footsteps of nurses in the hall. You let out a breath, and your lashes fluttered shut, and it was clear to Jack that you shouldn’t be awake. That you had fought through exhaustion just to make sure your daughter was okay. 

Pride swelled in his chest, the first emotion to override the fear. “I’m so damn proud of you,” he softly stated. He fixed the blanket around your shoulders and felt his mouth twitch. “Protecting our girl like that. Making it through.” 

In response, Jack saw your own lips form a tired smile, hoarse voice asking, “Our girl?” 

“Yeah, our girl.” Jack kissed your forehead, then your cheek, and then checked the vitals again. “I’ll make it official soon,” he said, almost under his breath. 

“What—does that mean?” 

You were losing the fight to sleep, relief palpable in the room and lulling you off. Jack swung a chair by your bed, clicked his phone ringer on low for any texts about Penny, and waited for you to sleep. Waited to be there when you woke up. 

“You’ll see,” he affirmed, ignoring the wetness still on his cheeks. “I love you. Sleep. I got you.”

When he found room four, his assumptions were confirmed. Penny was in line with the rest of her kindergarten class, speaking animatedly with a boy beside her while firmly rooted on the numbers painted on the floor. She was excited, but Jack could tell she was putting considerable effort into staying right where she was supposed to be. He had to fight the smile that crept up on his face. 

“Your daddy’s a manager?” Penny asked, tugging on the straps of her backpack. “Wow! What does that mean?” 

The boy next to her raised a brow. “I don’t know. I think he tells people what to do. He has a computer.” 

“What does he tell them to do?” 

“Work more! He always says everyone is a lazy piece of—” 

The teacher in the hall clapped her hands, drawing the class's attention. “Let’s make sure we are using kind words while we wait to go home.” 

A long drone of “Yes, Miss Cindy” reset each conversation in the line, but Penny clearly wasn’t done. Jack took a few steps closer and nodded at Miss Cindy in greeting, content to wait until Penny turned and noticed the surprise. You hadn’t told her Jack was picking her up, and Jack loved how Penny got when she was surprised. 

“Well, want to know what my daddy does?” Penny posed, bouncing up on her toes. 

Jack paused. 

You never talked about Penny’s birth father. You’d offered a simple explanation the first time Jack skirted around the topic: he was there for the birth, and then he never was again. You never tried to fight for child support, not wanting to drag Penny through messy custody battles or inconsistent relationships. Penny knew she had a dad, just like everyone had a dad, but you tried hard to make that hole feel small. Jack thought you did a damn good job. 

And he hoped he played a role in that, as well. 

Jack held his breath as the boy nodded excitedly, and then he felt like he was free-falling as she answered. “He’s a doctor for emergencies! He works when everyone is asleep so he can help people during the nighttime.” 

“But how are there emergencies if everyone is asleep?”

Penny puckered her lips as she thought. “I don’t know. I guess if they wake up, maybe.” 

Jack tried and failed to settle the grin that had taken over his face. Penny had never called him anything but Jack. He hadn’t wanted to ask you for more when it came to your daughter, and he wanted Penny to be comfortable, but Jack felt like Penny’s dad. Penny was his girl. You’d been engaged for a few months, and he couldn’t ask for more than he had, even if he only had the feeling, not the title. He couldn’t be greedy. 

Hearing Penny call him dad made Jack feel greedy. 

He leaned over behind Penny and tugged on her sleeve, raising his brows as she spun and let out a gasp. It was only a tick of a second before she launched herself at him, exclaiming a loud “Jack!” that now held a different meaning for him. He wondered how many times she’d talked about him and called him something different. 

Jack grunted as he lifted her to his hip, trying to find her eyes with her arms clutched tight around his neck. “Hey, Penny girl. Is it alright if I take you home today?” 

Penny squealed and nodded against him, but then became serious as she leaned up. “Does mommy know? She told me to never go home with strangers.” 

Jack raised a brow, both of his girls overcautious and full of rules, as always. “Am I a stranger now?” 

Penny threw her head back in a giggle. “No! But no one else has ever picked me up from school before.” 

“First time for everything. It’s exciting. We can get something up for mommy on the way home.” 

“Like flowers?” 

“How’d you know?” 

“You always get mommy flowers.” 

“You want some too?

Penny blew a raspberry as they finally made it to his truck. “What am I gonna do with flowers? They just sit there. That’s so silly, Jack.” 

“How about a toy, then?” Jack offered, tapping Penny’s nose after buckling her in. He rested a hand on the door and shifted the car seat around to make sure it was locked in place. You were rubbing off on him, clearly. “What do you think?” 

Penny tapped her chin. “I’ll consider it.” 

~~

When you finally got home that night, looking frazzled and far too apologetic for Jack’s liking, Jack had a towel on his shoulder and a pot simmering on the stove. He’d stayed at your place despite you insisting that the neighbor could watch her for an hour, so he figured starting dinner was the next course of action. 

You hadn’t moved in together just yet. For Penny’s sake. 

You sighed when you spotted him, putting your bags down with a defeated sound. “You really didn’t have to stay,” you almost whined. Jack was already on you, hands on your hips and gaze locked on the furrow of your brow. “The lady next door loves Penny. She could have watched her.” 

“Yeah? Well, what if I love Penny?” Jack countered, pressing his lips to yours. He saw another argument brewing, so he squeezed your cheeks and kissed you again. “Seriously. I’m gonna be the one picking her up on my days off soon. Let me practice.” 

You shook your head. “You do not have to do that. You work all the time, Jack. I wouldn’t make you take care of Penny when you finally have time to rest.” 

“Make me take care of her?” 

“Yeah. You have enough on your plate and—”

“Hey,” Jack softly called, tugging you in closer. “When I asked you to marry me, I meant that I wanted both of you. You aren’t making me take care of her. I want to.” 

You looked up at him, hands resting on his chest, and Jack saw the conflict raging in you, the fear that this would be too much. You didn’t talk about Penny’s birth father, but Jack could pick apart the damage that was done by him. He could see it in every anxiety-fueled phone call about Penny and in all the things you tried to take on alone. You wouldn’t accept help, not fully, but Jack was ready to fight you on that. For the rest of his life, if he needed to. 

“Was she okay for you?” you asked, because Jack was pretty sure you knew he would fight you on that. 

“She was perfect,” he answered, his hands holding your head steady as he leaned down to look at you. “Like her mom.” 

You scoffed out a laugh. “Don’t try too hard, Dr. Abbot. The ladies like mystery.” 

“Yeah? Well ignore the flowers in the kitchen then. I want to be mysterious about them.” 

Your smile was soft and vulnerable as you leaned up to kiss him, and Jack backed away only because the noodles in the pot were going to stick together if he didn’t stir them, and Penny was entering a picky eating phase. He could handle a picky eating phase, along with everything that came after. 

And later in the night, when Penny fell asleep over Jack’s legs and Mulan played softly in the background, he thought to bring it up. Casually. More as a curious pondering than a request, because he didn’t want to ask for too much. You played with Penny’s hair as the Huns fought to invade China, and Jack threw his thoughts into the air. 

“Does Penny—” he paused. You lifted your head from his shoulder, and Jack caught your engagement ring glinting under the dim living room light. “Does she ever… call me anything when I’m not around? To other people?” 

You became still, gaze falling to Jack’s chest. “I’ve talked to her about that. I didn’t want you to feel like you had to… be anything you didn’t want to be. Like if you wanted things to be more separated. But sometimes—you know, she’s just a kid—so sometimes—” 

Jack gently shushed you, taking your hand in his because that was the closest thing he could read. “What’d I say earlier, huh? I was asking because I don’t want things to be separated. And she always just calls me Jack, so I was wondering—” 

“She calls you dad all the time,” you revealed, looking down at Penny’s face smushed against Jack’s thigh. “To her friends, her teachers, a random guy in the grocery store.” 

Jack huffed out a breathy laugh. “Seriously?” 

“Yeah. She loves talking about you.” You looked back up at him. “Are you okay with her calling you that?” 

And for some reason—Jack would blame it on the sentimental music in the movie—tears welled in his eyes at the question. At the gentle way you looked at him. Jack cleared his throat of the sticky emotion and nodded, his brow twitching. 

“Yeah,” he almost whispered, voice sounding hoarse. “Yeah, if she wants to.” 

“I think she was waiting for permission. To make sure it was okay.” 

“You two and your rule following,” Jack gruffed, tugging you closer and kissing your temple to hide his misty eyes. 

Jack had a talk with Penny a few days later, after she slipped up and the echo of the word dad bounced around in Jack’s truck. He’d had to pull over to ease the tension that wound up Penny’s expression, sitting her on the tailgate in some gas station parking lot as you stayed in the passenger seat. 

Jack watched as Penny wound her small fingers into a knot on her lap, and he covered them with one of his hands, tipping her chin up with the other. 

“I’m not mad at you,” Jack assured, paying attention to each grimace she tried to hide.

“But I’m really sorry,” Penny edged out. “Because I know my daddy isn’t here anymore, and my mommy says that’s okay, and that you are kind of like a daddy but that sometimes people—” 

“Penny girl,” Jack softly interrupted. “It’s okay, alright? You know how your mom and I are getting married?” 

Penny nodded. 

“Well that means that we’re family. You, me, and your mom. All of us. And I know your daddy isn’t around, and I know you’re too smart for your own good, but sometimes mommys and daddys can be new people.” 

“I was gonna say that next,” Penny mumbled.

“I know you were.” Jack smiled in the empty parking lot and brought Penny’s gaze back up to him. “I love you, kid. You can call me anything you want. And before you ask, yes, your mom is okay with it. I asked her myself.” 

“You asked mommy if it was okay to be my daddy?” 

“Of course I did. Gotta make sure I check all the boxes with you two.” 

Jack walked into the room, two mugs of tea in hand. He set one near you and sank onto the couch, his eyes immediately drawing to Maya.

He watched her for a long moment, a crease forming between his brows. He had a... feeling, when he saw how her daughter was playing with the blocks.

"Hey, sweetheart," Jack murmured gently, leaning forward. "Do you want some of Daddy's tea?"

Maya didn't look up. Her fingers just adjusted a green block so its edges perfectly aligned with the red one before it.

"New game with the blocks?" he asked you.

You looked up at Jack, offering a tired smile that didn't quite reach your eyes. "She’s been doing that for an hour. That green one seems to make her nervous. I tried to join her earlier, but if I move one, she gets... inconsolable."

"Maya?" Jack gently called her name again. "Do you need help with the green block, babygirl?"

Nothing.

It was as if a wall separated her from the rest of the room.

"Maybe she’s just focused," you said, though the words felt like you were trying to convince yourself. "Kids get hyper focused sometimes, right? She’s just independent."

"Yeah," Jack said softly, but the medical part of him was quietly cataloging everything. "Maybe."

You swallowed hard when a moment of yesterdays afternoon flashed your mind. "She screamed yesterday. When we greeted our neighbor at the front door, his dog started barking at a bird. She covered her ears screaming and ran inside. I thought she was just startled. But I found her on the kitchen floor covering her ears, even though I couldn't hear the dog from here anymore."

A heavy silence settled between you. As a doctor, Jack was used to having answers, to diagnosing and fixing. But when it came to his own daughter, that instinct felt distant, and he only witnessed paternal anxiety.

Suddenly, the microwave in the kitchen began to beep, signaling that whatever was being heated was ready. It wasn't loud, but the deep chime echoed in the silence of the night.

Maya froze. Her posture went rigid, and her hands flew to her ears, pressing down hard. A whine pitched from her throat, her eyes fixed on the floor, completely overwhelmed by a sound she heard every single day.

"Oh, baby, it's okay, it's just the microwave," you whispered, moving instantly to her side. You went to scoop her into a hug, but the moment your arms wrapped around her, she stiffened even more, crying out and pushing against your chest, desperately trying to wriggle free.

Your heart sank.

It hurted that your comfort was seemingly making it worse.

"Hold on," Jack said and moved to the kitchen to turn the sound off.

When the sound faded, Maya let her hands drop from her ears, her breathing catching in little hiccups. She reached back out for her blocks, her fingers trembling slightly as she re-aligned a red one, one that Jack had accidentally kicked when he went into the kitchen.

Then, she reached out for you, instantly croudling to your lap while hiccupping.

"I've got you, sweet girl." You stood up with your little girl in your arms and sank on the couch. Jack came back and sit beside you. He wrapped an arm around you and pulled you and Maya against his side.

"I don't know how to help her when she gets like that," you confessed in a whisper. "I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. Why does she push us away?"

Jack kissed the top of your head, his grip tightening protectively around the two of you. He kept his eyes on Maya, his mind spinning with questions he didn't know how to answer yet. He knew medicine, he knew emergencies, but this was unchartered territory.

"You're not doing anything wrong," Jack promised. "We're going to figure this out. I don't know exactly what's going on in her little head right now. But we're going to find out. I'll call her pediatrician first thing in the morning, and we'll get some guidance."

He looked at you. "Whatever it is, we're a team. You, me, and Maya."

You nodded, taking comfort in his certainty, looking down at Maya, who was now entirely calm sleeping against your chest.

--------

The pediatrician’s office was quiet. You and Jack sat side by side, while Maya sat on the linoleum floor between your feet. She had found a plastic toy car in the waiting room and, instead of rolling it across the floor, she had turned it upside down and was using her thumb to spin the front left wheel over and over, completely mesmerized by the rotation.

Dr. Evans sighed gently, closing the thick folder in her hands. She looked up, her expression a mix of profound empathy and clinical clarity.

"Based on the developmental milestones we’ve reviewed, the sensory sensitivities you've described, and the observational assessments we just ran," Dr. Evans said calmly. "Maya is showing clear signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder."

The word hung in the air. Autism.

It was a word you'd both been thinking about for the past few weeks; somehow, deep down, you suspected the signs. Although the uncertainty had kept them up at night. Hearing it from a professional was like the world was suddenly collapsing around you.

You instinctively reached out, your fingers wrapping tightly around Jack’s hand. His grip was already there, waiting, holding onto you.

Jack sat entirely still. The clinical definitions in his head felt entirely useless against the wave of fear rising in his chest.

"Autism," Jack repeated. His brain was trying to force the word to make sense in the context of his three year old daughter. "So... the way she plays, the sensitivity to sounds... that's all part of it?"

"Yes, Jack," Dr. Evans replied gently with a nod. "Her brain simply processes sensory information and communication differently than a neurotypical child. She has her ways of comfort in a world that probably feels incredibly overwhelming and loud to her."

You looked down at Maya. She was still spinning the tiny plastic wheel, her face completely peaceful. Tears pricked the corners of your eyes, blurring her small form. "Did... did I do something during the pregnancy? Or did we miss something early on? I should have noticed sooner..."

Dr. Evans smiled warmly, trying to comfort you. "No, darling. This is genetic, neurological. It is nobody’s fault. And you didn't miss it, she’s only three. Catching this now means we are right on time for early intervention, which makes a world of difference."

You swallowed the lump in your throat, nodding weakly, letting Jack wipe a stray tear from your cheek with his thumb. Looking at the doctor, you asked, "What does this mean for her? Is she going to be okay? Will she have trouble... talk to us, or tell us what she need? How she's feeling? What about school? Socializing?"

"Every autistic child is entirely unique," Dr. Evans explained, leaning forward. "We can't predict her exact trajectory, but Maya is incredibly bright. She just communicates on a different frequency. Our goal now isn't to fix her or change who she is, but to give her the tools to navigate our world, and to give you the tools to understand theirs."

She handed Jack a packet of information: brochures for speech therapy, occupational therapy for sensory processing, and local support networks.

Jack took the papers. This was going to be a lifelong journey of learning, adapting, and patience. It was terrifying, but as he looked down at the paperwork, a strange sense of grounding replaced the initial shock.

They finally had a name for it. They had a map.

"Maybe we could start with the occupational therapy," Jack suggested. "We’ll figure out how to make our home a space where she feels safe, not overwhelmed."

"Exactly," Dr. Evans said. "You're already doing a wonderful job. The fact that you noticed and sought answers is everything."

The appointment wrapped up, and Jack stood, lifting Maya into his arms. Normally, she might have squirmed away, but she allowed it this time, burying her face into the crook of his neck while still clutching the plastic toy car. Jack held her tightly, one arm supporting her weight, the other wrapping firmly around your waist as you walked out to the car.

After the appointment, you all went to have dinner together at your favorite place, trying to clear your minds of the new life that awaited you. But then, the drive back home was suffocating.

Maya sat in her car seat in the back, staring blankly out the window as the streetlights flickered across her face.

You didn't look at Jack. You couldn't.

You just stared straight ahead, your knuckles white as you gripped your purse in your lap. Every time Jack reached across the center console to touch your knee or find your hand, you subtly shifted away, wrapping your arms tightly around yourself.

You felt like if someone touched you right now, you would shatter into a million jagged pieces, and you were desperately trying to hold it together until you were behind closed doors.

Jack kept glancing at you, the muscle in his jaw twitching.

He knew that silence. Seeing it on your face, the absolute numbness, and the hollow look in your eyes, made his chest ache.

When you finally got home, it was late, so the routine was mechanical. You didn't speak. You carried Maya upstairs, guided her through her bath, and helped her into her pajamas.

Putting her to bed took twice as long as usual. Tonight, the texture of her favorite blanket seemed to upset her. She whined, a high pitched sound that sliced right through your nerves, pulling at her collar and refusing to lie down.

Panic, cold and sharp, flooded your veins. Is it too tight? Is the fabric too rough? Am I making it worse? Your hands shook as you tried to soothe her, your voice trembling as you whispered, "Shh, baby, it's okay, Mommy's here," but the more you tried to adjust her, the more she stiffened, burying her face into your neck.

Eventually, exhaustion won. Maya’s breathing leveled out, her tiny fingers loosely curled around your shirt.

You put her on her scrib and stood over for a long time, watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest. The diagnosis echoed in your mind like a death knell to the future you had envisioned. Every milestone you had taken for granted felt like it had been violently ripped away, replaced by a terrifying labyrinth of therapies, specialized plans, and a world that wouldn't understand her.

Will she have a good first day of school? Will she make good friends? Will she be able to whisper secrets to you? Will she say I love you, Mommy and actually know the meaning of that?

And the worst part: you were terrified of yourself.

You closed her bedroom door and went to your room. Jack was standing at the end of the hallway, leaning against the wall, waiting for you.

"Is she down?" he asked, his voice low and raspy.

"Yeah," You walked past him into your bedroom.

The moment the door closed behind you, you totally broke.

A choked sob tore from your throat. You pressed your hands over your mouth to muffle the sound, your knees buckling beneath you. Before you could hit the floor, Jack was there. His strong arms caught you, pulling you violently against his chest as you collapsed into him.

"Hey, hey, I'm here," Jack murmured, his voice cracking as he hugged you. He plopped down on the bed with you, rocking you against him. "What's wrong, love? I need you to talk to me."

You gripped the fabric of his shirt, burying your face into his neck, your body shaking violently with tears. "E-Everything feels wrong, Jack." you sobbed, the raw terror finally bleeding out of you. "I don't know what to do, were do we start? Are we making the right decisions for her? I'm so scared, I just want to keep her safe from anything that hurts her."

"It's okay," he whispered calmly, though his eyes were glossy and a tear slid down his cheek into your hair. "We'll do what feels right. We have places to go, a doctor who will answer all our questions. And we'll take our time, step by step, we'll find what's best for her, okay?"

"No, you don't understand!" You pushed back slightly, your hands trembling against his chest, forcing him to look at the sheer panic in your tear-streaked face. "You're a doctor. You know what to do. You fix people, daily. I'm just... I'm her mother, Jack, and I feel I've been doing everything wrong. Every time I try to hold her, she screams. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I trigger a meltdown and I can't stop it? What if I ruin her?"

The raw vulnerability in your voice made Jack reach up, his hands framing your face, forcing you to meet his eyes.

"Look at me," Jack commanded softly. "You think I'm not terrified? You think because I'm a doctor I have the answers to this? I don't. When Dr. Evans said those words, I felt like I couldn't breathe for a second. I'm scared too. But we are not going to ruin her. You love her. I love her. That's the only prerequisite that matters. If we make a mistake, we learn from it. If a therapy doesn't work, we try another one. But do not ever think you are alone in this fear. I am right here with you."

You let out a broken breath as you looked into his eyes.

He was terrified too.

"What if she never understand we love her? What If she never says she loves us? I want her to be okay, to feel we are here for her." you whispered, the darkest, most agonizing thought in your mind finally escaping into the open.

Jack swallowed hard, tightening his grip on your waist, pulling you back into the safety of his chest.

"We will learn to read her." Jack whispered into your hair. "Because she does love us, sweetheart. She went straight into your arms after crying the other day. We'll learn from those little gestures. We are never, ever going to give up on her. Or on each other."

Jack kept his arms wrapped tightly around you. He didn't try to dismiss your fears. He knew the road ahead was going to be steep, and he knew there would be days where the frustration felt insurmountable. But as he looked toward the door, thinking of the little girl sleeping soundly just down the hall, a protective warmth settled over his chest.

Gently, he nudged your chin up with his fingers.

"Doll," he murmured, catching your attention.

You blinked through your blurred vision, leaning into his hand.

"She is our amazing girl," Jack said, his thumb wiping away the last trace of a tear from your cheek. "She is exactly who she was meant to be. Our girl. And if she can't say the words, then we will learn to read her. We are going to learn her language, sweetheart. I promise you."

You nodded, pressing your face back into the crook of his neck, finally letting your body go heavy against his.

There were still a thousand unanswered questions, and tomorrow would bring a whole new reality to navigate. But your amazing girl was safe, sleeping calmly on her bed. And, while listening to the calm beat of Jack’s heart beneath your cheek, you finally allowed yourself to breathe.

------------- Bonus scene

Jack slipped into his six years old daughter's room quietly. He watched her form tangled in her sheets. She was already half awake, staring intently at the dust motes dancing in the morning light, her fingers trying to catch the sun rays.

"Good morning, sleepy girl," Jack murmured, keeping his voice low. He waited, giving her a moment to register his presence.

Maya blinked, her gaze shifting to Jack’s face.

"Daddy," she said, her voice raspy with sleep.

"Ready for breakfast?" Jack smiled, offering his hand. Maya took it, letting him lift her out of bed.

Jack knew that morning rutines were their best friend now. He always placed her favorite plate and fork on the table in the exact positions she preferred. Today, he brought over a stepstool so she could stand next to him at the counter.

"We’re making pancakes today," Jack announced, measuring out the flour. "Do you want to pour the milk?"

"Yes, please." Maya nodded solemnly. She took the measuring cup of milk with both hands, her tongue poking out slightly in intense concentration.

Jack kept a steadying hand near, but he let her do it herself. She poured it into the bowl, watching the white liquid splash into the flour with rapt fascination.

"Good job, baby," Jack praised softly.

But when he was goint to take the cup, Maya tapped it against the side of the bowl three times, making sure there wasn't a single drop on it. Tap, tap, tap. Then she paused and did it again. Tap, tap, tap.

"There, done, daddy."

Jack just smiled, recognizing it as her rhythm. "Nice beat, kiddo," he said, taking the cup; then the spoon to finish the batter.

Minutes later, the kitchen was filled with the sweet aroma of pancakes. Jack cut her pancake into squares and sat down next to her at the table.

Maya ate with her usual pace, entirely focused on each bite. As she chewed, she suddenly stopped, her shoulders relaxing. She looked up at Jack.

"I like breakfast with dad," she said clearly. The cadence of her voice was a little flat, a little rehearsed, like it was an inside thought, but the words were entirely her own.

Jack froze, his fork halfway to his mouth. A wave of overwhelming emotion hit him so hard it brought a sudden sting to his eyes. He reached over, gently squeezing her small hand. "I like breakfast with you too, Maya. More than anything."

From the doorway, a soft sound caught Jack's attention.

You were standing there, leaning against the frame, wrapped in a oversized cardigan. Your hair was a bit messy from sleep and the expression on your face was pure awe. You had caught every single word.

Jack met your gaze with a smile across his face. You heard her? his eyes seemed to say.

You nodded and walked up behind him, resting your hands on his shoulders, leaning down to press a kiss to his cheek before looking at your daughter.

"Room for one more at the table, sweet girl?" you asked softly.

Maya looked up at the sound of your voice. She didn't say yes or good morning. Instead, she picked up a piece of pancake with her fork and held it out toward you in a straight line, offering it to you.

You smiled, leaning down to take the bite before sitting next to her.

Maya looked at you, her big eyes blinking as she processed your presence. For a moment, she just stared, her hands resting on the edge of the table.

Then, completely unprompted, she slid off her own chair.

Maya approached you, turned around, and leaned her back against you, waiting for you to lift her onto your lap. When you did, she snuggled against your chest, her back pressing against you as she got comfortable.

You waited a second before you gently wrapped your arms around her waist, holding her close but leaving her enough room so she wouldn't feel trapped.

She didn't stiffen. She didn't push you away. She just sat with you, anchoring herself in your warmth.

Across the table, Jack watched the two of you in silence.

Maya reached down, carefully picking up her fork. With concentration, she stabbed a piece of pancake, with no syrup, exactly how she liked it, and lifted it up, holding it out toward your mouth.

"Eat, Mama," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the fork.

You leaned down and gently took the bite from her fork, chewing it as you rested your chin on the top of her soft hair, inhaling her sweet, sleepy scent.

"Thank you, baby," you whispered. "It’s delicious."

Maya nodded once, satisfied with your reaction, and immediately went back to looking at the rest of her plate, entirely content in the safety of your lap.

You looked up, meeting Jack’s gaze across the table. He reached you, his hand finding yours and squeezing it tightly.

Lately, there were no words needed between the two of you. The fear of the unknown hadn't entirely vanished after years, but sitting there in the quiet morning, with your daughter tucked safely against you, you knew Jack was right.

You were learning her language, step by step, and the journey was beautiful.

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