brainrot 2: electric boogaloo

She’s had just herself for so long, after all. So maybe it was time to try something new.

She didn’t have to ask him for the letter, but she starts asking him for other things. Him, and other people. The day she aces her first interview with Presby, she calls Jack immediately afterward. Imagines his sleep-mussed hair and relishes in the deep tone of his half-awake voice when she asks if he wants to get lunch with her. To debrief. To express her appreciation for how he’s supported her. To let herself look at him across the table the way she’d avoided for so long.

The day after her second interview, she calls Heather Collins. Her finger hovers over the call button, the screen a long white stretch of their previous text conversations — clarifying questions about charts and shift swaps and a congratulations and a half-neglected promise to keep more in touch. Heather has her hands full — quite literally, her little girl crawling all over and around her as they giggle together on the couch, early afternoon sunlight starting to skim through the breezy curtains, the view of coniferous trees against cornflower-blue skies behind them.

She looks so happy, and unburdened, and she says Samira’s starting to look the same. That’s what happens when you make your escape, they both joke.

The moment she receives the offer letter, she starts driving before she can think of reasons not to. She shows up on the porch of the house in West View she’s only been to once before and knocks and waits.

When he answers the door, Jack Abbot is in a rumpled T-shirt rucked just above his hip bones and a pair of shorts and is leaning on a forearm crutch, and Samira assesses the foyer and the crutch and his heavy-eyed state and whispers, Sorry, before almost tackling him against the wall with a hug. He catches her — somehow — and backs them up and is soothing his free hand down her back like this has always been their normal.

I’m going to Presby, she whispers teary-eyed into his neck, and she feels him smile against her hair as he repeats, over and over again, Of course you are. Of course. 

Between the handing-in of her two weeks and her final day at PTMC, it’s like everything’s starting to swirl into place, the settling after the storm. Trinity asks her bluntly, “Since you’d been waiting for the end of your residency to have a life, and you’re not gonna be a resident here anymore, does that mean we can be friends now?” Samira just smiles and nods. Victoria makes her promise to provide her with frequent updates like a recruiter in reverse, because if Samira ends up liking it that much more, maybe Victoria should try and transfer, too, somehow.

Parker offers to take on some of Samira’s last shifts if Samira repays her by finally coming to the bar Parker’s been trying to convince her to for over a year. Even Shen surprises her by bringing in an incredibly delicious pistachio kulfi milk cake that he is endearingly protective of, not allowing anyone to go back for seconds until everyone who wants one has gotten a piece, even storing away a generous extra chunk for Samira to take home with her later. 

(When she begs John to tell her where he’d procured the cake, he just winks and says, “My sister-in-law has a hookup.”)

She feels like she’s going to miss working with all these wonderful people — and realizes, too, that just because she’s gonna start working at a hospital across the bridge, doesn’t mean she won’t see them again. She promises herself that she will.

On her first day at UPMC, Samira takes in deep lungfuls of the fresh morning air as she’s locking her front door. When she turns around, she isn’t even that surprised to see Jack Abbot leaning against the passenger door of his car.

“Need a ride?”

“Dr. Abbot,” she says, not even trying to hide her smile.

“Dr. Mohan.”

She knows how good it feels to ask for things now. To accept help — and support, and friendship, and reaching out, and maybe even love — when it’s offered. But some things, she’s seeing, she doesn’t have to ask for. They are so freely given.

“Please,” she lets him open the car for her and grins up at him as she ducks into the seat, “I think you better start calling me Samira.”

He waits until he’s in the driver’s seat before he says anything, and then:

He notices she declines Ellis’s invitations to their post-night shift breakfasts until she hooks her with the promise of discussing the latest issue of AJEM and that case they had started talking about earlier before a ped versus electric scooter rolled in and interrupted them. He’s tired as shit that day, but comes to breakfast anyway, ignores Ellis’s and Shen’s raised eyebrows at this decision of his, ignores them again when he puts down $120 to cover their four bagel sandwiches and coffee and juices and hashbrowns that definitely do not cost $120.

He learns Mohan does actually like talking about herself if you ask her the right questions. Will tell stories from her childhood and from med school with a nostalgic, faraway smile on her face, her dimples creasing adorably. He learns he gets this feeling, a flutter he thought he’d long since outgrown, when he’s listening to her talk. He does not know what to do about it, so he does nothing, keeps noticing.

He shoves over Shen’s knee when the younger doctor tries nudging him winkingly, instead choosing to store away the information that Mohan prefers grapefruit juice to orange, but nothing unless it’s freshly squeezed; that she likes her hashbrowns extra crispy and with lots of black pepper; that she doesn’t eat red meat usually but once a month indulges in a breakfast sandwich with extra bacon; that she likes her eggs scrambled with cheddar cheese and doesn’t mind if they’re scrambled a little soft, that she prefers that sometimes, in fact; that she takes her drip coffee brewed strong but spoons in a bit of cream and a frankly worrisome amount of sugar stirred into it, and, if it’s available, a dash of cinnamon; and that if a place has chai on the menu she’s going to order it, even if it’s bad, because she never makes it herself at home even though she should. This place doesn’t have chai, she observes quietly as she flips through the menu with a resigned sort of tilt to her mouth. He’s never tried chai, even though it’s a drink of choice of his sisters and nieces, too. Maybe he should. If Samira likes it.

He notices the places that come up the most when he googles “best chai in pittsburgh” are Dobrá, Big Dog, and People’s Indian, notices that when he brings one for her before she’s on nights with him, she always finishes the offerings from Dobrá and People’s, always leaves a couple sips at the bottom of the cup from Big Dog but loves their seasonal scones, scarfs them down with an endearing enthusiasm every time.

He notices, sometimes, when he runs a trauma — well, more like hovers at the edge of a trauma, instructing her, watching her handle it confidently, standing ready to step in as needed, and he’s usually not needed — she’ll look over at him with a proud gleam in her eye and he’ll have to try and temper his smile so he doesn’t give away everything he’s ever thought about her. He notices, above all, that he likes watching her succeed. His sisters have always told him he wears his heart on his sleeve, he’s sure she can see all that anyway.

And then, at some point, he starts noticing that things slide into a different sort of territory. Notices that when he gets close to her, she blinks and furrows her brows ever so slightly, squeezes the ear tubes of her stethoscope together. That she starts smiling at him a lot more. That her comments on the case studies he sends her grow less abbreviated, the questions more layered, the email responses longer. That she starts coming to retrieve him when he ends up on the roof instead of Robby, always with bright eyes and a kind, knowing smile and a patience that seems endless. That she seems, a lot of the time, excited to see him, or at the very least, at ease, her shoulders relaxing, her smile curving in that way he likes. That, more than ever, he wants to kiss her most days, hold her to him, thread his hands in her hair, feel the strength and grace of her hands on his own skin, anywhere.