can it be any clearer?

Tonight has been one of the hardest shifts you've encountered since transferring to the Pittsburg Trauma Medical Center, informally known as The Pitt to the staff, to be closer to your older brother.

The tire of your corolla was digging uncomfortably into your back through the thin scrubs that adorned your body. Though you made no move to alleviate yourself of the pain. It was your sick and twisted way of punishing yourself for the events that transpired during your shift.

No one in the pitt had blamed you for the patients that you had lost today and in the beginning, you hadn't blamed yourself. But the more the deaths had piled up on your roster the more you began to ask yourself, could I have done more?

Today, or more accurately in the last three hours of your shift, you had lost a record number of five patients.

Your first was an elderly woman from a group home, who had arrived after experiencing cerebrovascular accident, most commonly known as a stroke. She had been helping another resident of her group home with a crossword when she just slumped over in her chair.

It was hours before they had called emergency services and the blood clot in her brain damaged her brainstem before she entered the ER doors. She was dead for hours before you ever even got your hands on her. But still, you blamed yourself. It was a habit you knew better than to indulge.

The next three patients were from a car accident. It was three teenagers. A midsize sedan had run a red light at seventy miles per hour and was t-boned by a semi-truck.

You hadn't found out until later that all three of the teenager had been under the influence of alcohol and by the time you did, they had all already died, one in the ambulance, one on your trauma table, and one in the OR.

The last one, and the most recent reason for your drunken stupor in the parking lot of your place employment, was a child. A little boy not even a year old. It hadn't been until you'd seen the brain scans and seen the hemorrhaging. The baby had been shaken so hard and for so long that his brain had swelled inside his own head.

The mother had been sad enough but the boyfriend acted like he had a million other places to be. So after declaring the ten month little boy officially braindead, you had left it to the oncoming shift to inform the social work and the police.

You had never clocked out so fast, skipping the goodbyes and good nights from your favorite nurses and fellow residents in favor of sitting on the dirty pavement in the hospital staff parking garage, drowning your guilt into a now half empty tequila bottle.

The aforementioned tequila bottle clinked against the ground as you set it down, tiny splashes spilling out and on to your dark scrubs, scrubs you'd wished were dark enough to hide the blood stains on the cuff of your pants.

The tequila mixed with the blood as you tried to scrub it out. You stopped after the blood stain widened in size and opted for another large swig of the alcohol before placing it once again in between your stretched out legs.

The label had begun to peel at your habitual picking and turned sticky from the contents running down the side.

You lifted your right hands and drug it across your mouth catching the drops spilling out of the corners of your mouth with your jacket.

For a moment you had mistaken the drop for tears, but it had hit you that you hadn't shed a single tear through this whole ordeal and that only made you feel like more of a monster.

Were you so good at compartmentalizing that you had lost all the feelings that had made you a real person?

You didn't have an answer for yourself, so instead, for what felt like the hundredth time in the last half hour, the tequlia bottle was back on your lips, pouring so much into your mouth you almost gagged at the burning sensation.

But that is what you deserved right?

After telling upward of four different family members that their loved ones, the ones that had come to you for healing, wouldn't ever open their eyes again, that they would never eat their favorite food again, or listen to their favorite music, you had throughly convinced yourself that you deserved the pain of every burning drop that slid down your throat.

If your patients couldn't count on you to save their organs, why did you get to keep yours healthy and functioning?

It was backwards logic but you were far too wasted to argue with the darker parts of your subconscious.

You sputtered out a cough and the bottle clanked against the concrete ground for the umpteenth time tonight, but that wasn't the sound that had completely over taken your nervous system.

Footsteps echoed across the parking garage and you almost felt guilty for losing your composure here instead of the confines of your own apartment.

The key word being almost, as the cruel part of your brain reminded you of the morbid tally of deaths you had wracked up today had far outweighed the lives you had been able to save.

You wanted to scream. If you had been alone, you might have, and if you were a least a little bit more sober you might have commended drunk-you for having enough sense to hold it in.

You squeezed your eyes closed, tight enough you began to see stars dancing on your lids, although that could have been the copious amount of tequila talking.

"You planning to sleep it off on the pavement?"

You opened your eyes, albeit taking your time.

The rising sun shined bright behind him, making him look almost ethereal. Not that you need it to. In your eyes Jack Abbot was an angel sent from heaven. As much as he tried to portray himself as the gruff war veteran without a soft bone in his body, you had seen right through him.

Perhaps that is why he had been trying to hard to avoid you, despite technically being your superior. You hadn't had much opportunity to see him seeing as he was night shift and you were cursed to the days.

But when the occasion presented itself and he was working a day shift alongside you, you were glued to him. Only in the most professional sense, you would argue, though you couldn't help the flutter in your chest every time he praised you for your knowledge.

If it hadn't been for his familiar voice, a voice that you had spent the last three weeks practically memorizing, you might not have even realized it was him for the sun blinded your drunken eyes.

You tried not to be embarrassed that even drunken you held the same candle that sober you held for him. You hoped that he wrote off the grin rising to your lips to your inebriated state, rather than the sad puppy dog crush you held on him.

His voice was dry and flat, a voice he used with most everyone, but you especially.

As if he was always trying extra hard to hide the uptick in his voice anytime you started talking to him and he'd thought to himself, how foolish he felt. Like a damn teenager, feeling things he was far too old and far too emotionally complicated to indulge in.

You squint at him from your position on the ground. He stood a few feet away, leaned on his dark black truck with an indifference he would swear was natural. As if he didn't have to practice at least once a day when he knew he'd be seeing you.

He wore his regular attire, black scrub top and dark wash cargo pants. You wondered if he usually came to work ready or changed in the locker rooms. Not that you needed to know the inner workings of his routines. But a part of you felt yourself wanting to know.

You laugh bitterly. Even your school girl crush on your much older boss didn't lift your spirits. You stand, although you don't think what you did counts as standing as you nearly face plant into the concrete.

The fact that your car is still so close to you is the only reason you were still on your own two feet, slouched against it. You hold on to the backseat door handle and you stumble to lean down to snatch the tequila bottle into your hand once again.

Even those his arms are crossed over his chest, you clock the small twitch in his hands as you stumbled. If you weren't plastered beyond the point of no return you might have thought he wanted to steady you.

Once in your hand, you raise the bottle to your lips in attempt to curve the silence and maybe spare yourself any more embarrassing moments. Though you know that the alcohol would probably make things worse.

"Come on, let's not do that. I think you've had enough."

"Your not . . . my — my boss right now, Dr. Abbot," you slurred, stretching out the syllables of his last name, "I'm oooofff the clock."

Tequila bottle still in hand, you begin patting down your pockets for the keys to your corolla, huffing out triumphantly upon hearing the telltale jingle in your scrub pant pocket. You pull out the object and immediately he grunts in disapproval.

"You're not driving."

He steps forwards a millimeter, probably intent on taking the keys from your hands but never actually making the move to do so. You scoff as your giddy feeling from his mere presence turns sour.

"I don't need a babysitter . . . and you can—can't tell me what to do."

"You're right, but you're still not driving." He takes another step forward and holds out his hand. "Give me the keys."

You step back, defiantly, tugging both your car keys and the alcohol bottle close to your chest and he doesn't miss the way the action pushes your breasts up.

Even in the most unsexy piece of clothing you own the action was creating the illusion that they were bigger than they actually were.

He thanks the heavens that you're probably too drunk to notice the way he was ogling your chest.

He should have known that you noticed everything about him, drunk or not. You feel your lips tugging into a slight smirk but then remember that you're mad at him, however foolish the reason may be.

"Or what?"

Your statement surprised him, the shock written on his face was evidence of that. "You gonna take them from me, Dr. Abbot?"

"If I have to."

You laugh at that. This man, who makes it his priority to avoid you at all cost, he's gonna take them from you. Now that is something you'd pay to see.

He grunts at your defiance, because of course you were calling his bluff. "If you think I'm just gonna walk away and let you drive like this, you are a lot drunker than I thought."

His face is unreadable, but his stance isn't confrontational. There’s no righteousness. No judgment. Just observation, cold, clinical, and just maybe a little tired, not that he'd ever admit that to you or anyone else for that matter.

But what ticks you off the most is the way he's looking at you. Like you were a child, like you were a delinquent he's just caught stealing from their parents liquor. It pisses you off more than you'd like to admit because you weren't a child, no matter how much your older brother insists you still are.

And Jack Abbot is the one person you didn't want to see you like that.

"Don't pretend you care," you snarled, though it didn't sound as threatening as you had wished it did, as much as you had intended. He doesn't take your bait. He just tilts his head, the barest hints of annoyance in his eyes.

"Don't paint me an asshole for doing the bare minimum, sweetheart."

Your breath hitched at the pet name. You were never sweetheart to him. It was strictly always Dr. Robin and if you were lucky just Robin.

The pet name was a slip up on his part, but he didn't feel too worried about as he knew you probably wouldn't remember any of this tomorrow morning anyway.

But for you, no pet name in this moment could curve your anger, or your guilt. You glared at him as your breath hiccups. Too sharp to be a laugh and too shallow to be a sob.

"You think this is the worst thing I've done tonight?"

You hadn't actually meant to ask that and Jack seems to understand that because he doesn't respond, at least not in words. His shoulder sag just a little as he remember to grueling shift the both of you just endured. You more so than him.

You had even been excited for this shift as you stared at the schedule a week ago. Your eyes lingering excitedly as you saw Jack's name penciled in for the day.

There was another long silence, fulled with nothing but your guilt and his bare look of sympathy that you refused to acknowledge.

You abruptly lifted your hand and the keys left your palm before you had enough sense to think twice. Your actions were purely in attempt to get him to stop looking at you in the way you had looked at yourself in the mirror just ten minutes prior.

Despite your rash action of throwing your keys square at his chest, he still caught them. "Fine!" Your yell echoed through the parking garage, "you win! Are you happy?"

Though you refused to give up your tequila bottle even when he reached for it. You stumbled forward, probably in attempt to reach his truck, you weren't actually sure. Your own feet tangle with themselves and you flailed around helplessly as you fell forward. The bottle fell to the ground and shattered with a sickening crack.

"Woah there! Come on."

And if not for Jack, you'd probably of hit the concrete with the same sickening crack. His hands gripped your waist as he pulled you into his chest. The grip was anything but professional.

His fingers dug into your top as he tried to steady you. His touch made your head spin even more than the alcohol did.

You, in turn, gripped his scrub top as if he was the only thing holding you up and to be frank, it was probably true.

He was warmer than you thought he'd be. The cold and nonchalant attending that you had come to know what acting like he was anything but. Like nothing you'd ever experience from him.

You rested your cheek to his clothed shoulder and hummed as your eyes fell closed. If his face were half an inch closer to your head, it'd be resting against it. You could feel his steady breath on your ear, lightly swaying the fallen strands of your hair. For a second, you swore you heard his breath hitch much like yours had.

But your bliss was cruelly short lived. When you opened your eyes, your eye sight landed directly on the broken glass bottle to your right. You were upset for a number of reasons, rational and irrational. Bt the first one that came to your mind was that you would no longer be able to drown your sorrows from the inside out.

You mumbled out a quiet, almost to quiet to hear, "no," into his shirt. You pulled out of his grasp, despite his verbal and physical protests. You fall to your knees in front of the broken bottle. There was nothing to salvage but still you reached for the broken glass.

"Hey, no, you're gonna—"

"Fuck!"

You groan as the sharp glass slices through the skin of your palm. It's not deep enough to require stitches but it bled like it did, dripping on to the dirty concrete below.

'"—cut yourself," he mumbles after the fact, but it is for naught as the damage is done. "Christ, do you ever listen?" his jaw clenches. He's angry but not at you. It's almost seems like he is angry at the cut itself, at the glass for harming you, even if it was your fault, because how dare anything cause you harm and get away with it. Or you could just imagining things. You are wasted out of your mind, to be fair.

He pulls his backpack off his shoulder, not surprisingly fast or easy because it was only hanging off one shoulder to begin with.

The backpack was green with a camo pattern and if you weren't so focused on the blood dripping down your wrist, you'd have probably noticed the personalization he had done to the front of it. In medium sized black bold lettering was his name, Abbot.

And of course he carried a first aid kit in it. He didn't say a word as he leaned down, groaning as he settled on his knees in front of you. He wasted no time at all reaching forwards and grabbing your wrist.

The reservations he had about getting too close flew right out the window the moment blood was drawn. You mumbled a drunken ow as he applied the damp alcohol wipe to your already raw skin, wiping the blood away.

"Not gonna lecture me?"

"Said it yourself, not your boss right now," he tossed the now dark pink alcohol wipe in favor of grabbing a piece of gauze and medical tape. He wrapped the tape and you winced again. He glanced at you briefly.

"It's too tight," you mumbled, reaching to loosen some of the tape, but Jack grabbed your other hand in his, stopping you from doing anything. "Yeah, well, I'd rather you didn't bleed to death in my truck."

You snorted, it was involuntary but you flushed with embarrassment anyway. It wasn't like he had just confessed his undying love for you but he had admitted that he didn't want you to bleed to death. That had to be an improvement, at least in your book.

"Didn't know you cared, Dr. Abbot."

"You're my best resident, Dr. Robin. Need you in tip top shape."

And you were back to the professionalism. The irony was not above you. You weren't really his resident besides the occasional shared day shift.

But you weren't going to lie and say you didn't appreciate his sentiment.

He must have noticed your shift in demeanor because not longer after and his touch left yours all together. His thumb that had been rubbing small circles on the inside of your wrist in an attempt to soothe, now left the space cold.

The butterflies, no matter how cliche is sounded, that had taken up resident inside your stomach and under your ribcage had settled the moment his skin left yours.

You wanted to reach out and put his hand back in yours and to be honest, you almost did. You had the ultimate excuse and your drunken state gave you the perfect alibi.

Emergency rooms were not designed for quiet people.

You had figured that out sometime during your second week at PMTC, standing in the middle of the nurses’ station with three different voices calling your name and a trauma alert going off somewhere behind you.

The er existed in layers of noise, monitors chirping, stretchers rattling across tile, doctors shouting orders over the steady hum of fluorescent lights, and somehow you had learned to move through all of it without getting lost.

Your family liked to joke that you had been trained for it.

You grew up in Pittsburgh, in a house where six people talking at once was considered a normal dinner conversation. Someone was always shouting from another room, someone else arguing about the Steelers, your mother asking if anyone had seen her phone.

Compared to that, the ER was practically organized. It still made your nerves stand on end because of the chaotic loud but the organization gave you something to focus on.

You adjusted the pile in your arms, youe laptop, a PMTC iPad, and a notebook, and slipped past the trauma bay doors, nodding automatically when one of the nurses waved you down.

“Hey—social work!” someone called.

You stopped.

Technically you were the social work intern, which meant you still occasionally looked around behind you to see if a real social worker was following.

There wasn’t.

Your supervisor, Kiara, was somewhere upstairs handling another consult, which meant most of the er had quietly accepted that if they needed social work right now, they were getting you.

You tried to convince yourself that you didn't mind but you always came back around to the conclusion that you did mind. You minded a lot, in fact. As an intern you were still constantly doubting yourself and looking towards Kiara to double check.

“Room twelve, Mr. Melnick, is asking about discharge again,” the nurse said. “Thought you should know.”

“Okay,” you said immediately, already pulling your small notebook from your pocket.

You wrote it down.

You wrote everything down nowadays. Names, numbers, resources, reminders to drink water, question you needed to ask later and occasionally things people said that has stuck in your head longer than they should have.

The notebook had become something of a survival tool.

It was also currently full of notes about Mr. Melnick. He had been in the er four times in the last two months. He was a combat veteran, with severe PTSD, panic attacks that escalated quickly enough to land him back in a trauma room before anyone could convince him he was safe.

Technically, the case belonged to Kiara. In practice, the case had slowly become yours. Mostly because it overlapped almost perfectly with your master’s thesis.

Your thesis advisor had described it as “an underexamined but critically important area of emergency medicine.” You usually described it as repeat er trauma patients who fell through every other crack in the system.

Veterans especially.

Which was how Dr. Abbot had ended up involved. At first it had been purely practical.

Not only was he Mr. Melnick primary emergency medicine physician but you had also needed insight into how combat trauma presented in people like Mr. Melnick, what set it off, what helped, what didn’t, and Dr. Abbot was one of the only physicians in the department who had both the clinical experience and the personal background to understand it.

He was also, inconveniently, a veteran himself. So you had done what you usually did when you needed information. You looked him up in the hospital directory and texted him.

You hadn’t really thought about it.

Doctors texted each other all the time. Nurses texted consults. Residents texted attendings. You assumed social work interns could text attendings too.

Dr. Abbot had responded with a short, blunt answer to your question.

Then another.

Somewhere between the first shift and the second, the two of you had ended up orbiting the same patient chart for most of the night.

Which was also how he had become the unfortunate witness to what the er had since referred to, quietly, and with far too much interest, as the incident.

You still maintained it had been blown slightly out of proportion. Your blood sugar had dropped. It happened sometimes.

Being a type one diabetic meant there were days when your body decided it would prefer to function like an unsupervised toddler instead of a responsible adult. Most of the time you managed it fine.

Except when you didn’t eat.

And between a PMTC caseload, a full graduate program, and a thesis that refused to write itself, eating had quietly become one of those things that sometimes slipped your mind.

The episode itself had been quick, embarrassingly so.

You had been standing at the nurses’ station explaining a discharge barrier for Mr. Melnick with Dr. Abbot when the room tilted slightly to the left.

Then everything had gone dark. You didn’t remember falling. You only remembered waking up in a trauma room with a glucose tablet dissolving unpleasantly on your tongue and Dr. Abbot standing at the end of the gurney with a glucometer in his hand.

The er had learned two things about you that night.

One: you were a type one diabetic.

Two: Dr. Abbot did not take that lightly.

Which was why, apparently, you were now being periodically monitored like a mildly irresponsible houseplant.

You settled into one of the chairs at the far end of the nurses’ station, flipping open your laptop so you could update the notes on Mr. Melnick before the next consult came in.

Your desktop looked exactly like it always did—half research, half chaos.

A small music player hummed quietly in the corner of the screen. A reminder notification blinked lazily beside it. Several open documents sat scattered across the desktop like unfinished thoughts.

You had just opened the case notes when your phone buzzed against the table. A text notification appeared on your screen. For a second you just stared at the name.

Then you sighed quietly to yourself and riffled around your scrubs pocket for your cell phone.

Did you eat today?

For a moment you simply looked at the message.

The glow of your phone screen reflected faintly against the stainless steel edge of the nurses’ station while the er continued moving around you—stretchers rolling past, monitors chirping, someone laughing too loudly at the far desk.

You checked the time.

12:04 AM.

You had been on shift since six.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you tried to retrace the evening the way you would retrace a patient timeline.

Six o’clock: check in. Six-thirty: Mr. Melnick chart review. Seven: consult in trauma three. Eight: back to Melnick’s chart. Nine: phone call with a case manager. Ten: another consult. Eleven: more notes.

At no point in that timeline did food appear, bot because you weren’t hungry because you were.

You just forgot.

Which was a dangerous realization for someone with type one diabetes. Your thumb hovered over the keyboard. You should tell the truth.

But instead, you typed quickly before your brain had time to argue with you.

yes

You hit send. The message bubble appeared underneath his question. Almost immediately your stomach twisted. You stared at the screen for a second, feeling the lie settle somewhere uncomfortable under your ribs.

Then, because apparently you were incapable of leaving things alone, you typed again.

coffee counts, dr. abbot

You sent that one too. The familiar blue bubbles stacked beneath his message. For a second nothing happened, the three dots didn’t appear.

You lowered your phone slightly, leaning back in your chair as the thought crossed your mind, quiet and unwelcome.

Why did he even care?

Sure, he was a doctor.

But he wasn’t your doctor.

You didn’t even know him that well.

Two shifts working the same patient didn’t exactly count as a meaningful relationship. Most of your interactions so far had consisted of clinical questions, short answers, and the occasional blunt correction when you misunderstood something about combat trauma.

And yet.

He had been the one to catch you when you collapsed. He had been the one to check your blood sugar. He had been the one to make sure you stayed in the trauma bed long enough for the glucose tablets to actually work.

Since then, he had checked on you twice. Three times if you counted this. Which was strange. Strange enough that it made something in your chest twist a little.

Not entirely bad but not entirely good either.

Your phone buzzed again in your hand and you looked down.

No, it doesn't.

You could practically hear the flat disapproval in the sentence. Which was ridiculous. You couldn’t hear tone through text messages.

That wasn’t how communication worked and yet somehow you could still picture the exact expression he would be wearing if he were standing in front of you right now.

Brows drawn together slightly, mouth set in that quiet, unimpressed line he seemed to default to whenever you said something he didn’t like.

Your stomach twisted again, guilt this time. Before you could think of something else to say, another message appeared.

There wasn’t really a world where ignoring Dr. Abbot was a good professional decision. Especially when the message read less like a request and more like a direct order.

You closed your laptop.

The motion triggered the quiet cascade of your usual traveling office. Your iPad slid onto your pile first, followed by the small stack of notebooks that seemed to multiply every time you looked away from them. Your phone disappeared into the front pocket of your scrubs while you gathered the loose papers that had migrated across the nurses’ station during the last two hours.

When you finally stood, the chair rolled slightly backward behind you. Your pile felt heavier than it had a while ago. You adjusted your grip and then turned towards the desk where Lena, the night shift charge nurse, was reviewing the patient board.

“Lena?” you asked. She didn’t even look up at first. “Yeah?”

“Where’s South fifteen?” Her eyes lifted away from the board slowly. Then one eyebrow crept up. “South fifteen?” she repeated. She pointed down the hallway with the end of her pen. “Supply room past trauma two. Last door on the right.”

“Thank you,” you said quickly.

You had already turned before she could say anything else.

The hallway was quieter than the nurses’ station, but the er never really slept. The familiar rhythm of the department followed you as you walked, footsteps, distant voices, the soft beeping of monitors somewhere behind a curtain.

You passed trauma two. Then the supply closet. Then the last door on the right, South 15. You hesitated for exactly two second before pushing it open.

Dr. Abbot was already inside. He was leaning back against the wall near the foot of the empty hospital bed, arms folded loosely behind his back like he had absolutely nowhere else in the world he needed to be.

Which was, of course, a lie.

Attendings always had somewhere else to be.

He looked remarkably patient. Your eyes landed on him first. Tall, dark t-shirt, slightly disheveled hair like he had run a hand through it sometime in the last hour and never bothered fixing it.

There was something unmistakably smug about the way he was standing there, not obvious smugness but something subtly smug.

The kind that said he already knew exactly how this conversation was going to go. Then your attention shifted. Next to the empty hospital bed sat one of the adjustable rolling tables.

And on that table, a sandwich and a yellow Gatorade. You looked back at him immediately. “This is unnecessary, Dr. Abbot,” you said.

He didn't move. “Sit,” he said calmly. You didn’t sit.

Instead you adjusted your heavy pile in your arms and attempted a professional pivot. “Actually, I was hoping we could talk about Mr. Melnick’s discharge barriers—”

“Not right now.”

The interruption was immediate. Your mouth closed again. Dr. Abbot pushed himself off the wall and stepped toward you before grabbing the hulking pile in your arms and setting it on the table. Then, gesturing casually to the food like it was the only topic currently available for discussion.

“I didn’t know what kind of sandwich you like,” he said. “So I grabbed chicken salad.” He nudged the bottle slightly with one finger. “And a yellow Gatorade.”

You stared at the table. Then back at him. “Oh,” you said quickly. “I love chicken salad.” The words came out a little too fast, a little too bright.

You made absolutely no move to reach for the sandwich.

His eyes flicked from your face to the untouched food and back again. Then one eyebrow lifted slightly. A beat of silence passed. Then he said, very calmly, “Do I need to supervise?”

You blinked.

He tilted his head slightly. “Or are you just going to do what I say?”