The Secret Loft

He’d taken you against the window the first time.

“You afraid of heights?” he’d asked, and the question moved through you like warm liquid rather than reached you. You’d shaken your head, or tried to. “No,” he’d murmured, your jaw in his hands. “Didn’t think so.” 

He’d taken his prosthetic off after, wryly claiming that the position felt good but the leg disagreed. That had somehow lead to another round, slower the second time with him on his back and you set over him.

A part of you wondered often the sort of impression you’d given Jack, what he’d seen, exactly, that made him sure he could have you like this and keep it weightless. Whatever it was, it had to have been right to some degree because you’d spent more nights in his penthouse than your own apartment for the past six months without ever calling it anymore than what it was. 

He was a better lay than you’d ever had. He was probably the best option around to get steam off while you worked your way through residency. It helped that he was your attending and you shared the same strange hours. 

You kept the books carefully and columns balanced. Sex, sleep, the occasional terrible four a.m. meal that didn’t count because eating was maintenance, not intimacy. You never stayed for coffee — you took it to go — and you didn’t learn his middle name on purpose. You’d never seen the inside of his closet. You left before you could risk having to go to work together. A woman in trouble would linger, and you did not linger. Therefore.

But the stupid books had started running a quiet deficit you hadn’t accounted for. You knew exactly how he took his coffee. The toothbrush in the second drawer that you reached for now without looking, muscle memory in a place you’d sworn was temporary. 

And even though you could admit that Jack knew his way around you and never made you ask twice for anything in that bed, that wasn’t the line item that worried you. Bodies learned bodies. It was that you’d stopped taking your coffee to go some mornings without ever noticing the change; you’d sit at his counter with a mug that was somehow yours now, and drank it there while he read something on his phone and never told you to leave. You’d started to become a woman that lingered, and even worse, one who liked to do so.

And that had to stop, because Jack had told you point-blank what this was on the first night while you were still putting on your shirt with his mouth print blooming under the fabric.

This doesn’t have to be a thing. I’m not looking to make it one. Is that alright?

He’d said the words while putting on his briefs, and you’d agreed too fast, because at that time, it had cost you nothing. You’d wanted a body and a break, and he was offering both. He’d been more honest than any man you’d let touch you. He’d told you the terms up front and never moved them.

So, you simply had to put yourself out of the arrangement.

Jack found you by your car in the parking garage. He’d put on his coat a heavy thing that should’ve swallowed him but instead he was able to fill out almost perfectly.

“Jack,” you said, trying to find an even voice as he closed the distance between you. Before he could even ask, you forced out, “I’m not going home with you.”

His brows furrowed and he looked confused. For good reason, you supposed. Friday mornings had become sort of a usual for you, the easiest compensation in your life for missing Friday nights. 

“You good?” He stepped close and tipped his head, and you watched him give you a complete once-over, eyes dropping to your hands and the set of your shoulders like you were a patient. “You looked a little out of it today. Come — I’ll make you soup.” 

You pinched your eyes shut at his words. “What’s that even supposed to mean — I was fine.” 

“Don’t take it personal,” he said. “Come on, soup.”

“Seriously, I was fine.” You were almost offended now, which was clearly his intent, the bastard. “I’ve been awake for nineteen hours, I’m not sick —” You caught yourself getting pulled into it, defending your honor, exactly the kind of dumb circular thing you’d let him rope you into a hundred times because arguing with Jack was sometimes fun. You shut it down. “I’m not going home with you,” you said again, this time with a sharper edge. 

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms over his chest, giving you another once-over as he recaliberated the situation in real time. “Did I upset you?” 

“No, it’s not a fight,” you said fast. You dragged a hand down your face. “I’m not mad at you, Jack. I’m done with this. The whole — all of it.”

He tipped his chin down when you gestured vaguely with your finger between the two of you, at the whole abstract nature of you. Then, he said, “You’re calling it?”

“Yeah, very much,” you said, voice dropping a register as you leaned against the driver’s side door of your car. Then, when you saw how his brows furrowed and how he looked just slightly caught off-guard, you added, dumbly, “Sorry. I guess.” 

He held your eyes a long beat, something working in his mouth, and then closed the last of the distance between you. His hand came up to your jaw, and you felt your face turn to liquid as you involuntarily leaned into it; his thumb dragged slow along your cheekbone and his gaze followed it, and you stood pinned to your own cold car door and let him, because telling him to stop would mean pretending you didn’t want it, and you’d never once been able to sell that lie for either of you. 

“You mean it?” he asked, voice rough, and his forehead dropped to yours. When you nodded, he mimicked your movement. “Alright. Then let’s at least end it properly.” 

When you showed no urgency to decline, his mouth found yours before you could decide whether you trusted yourself enough to end it properly. One of his hands stayed at your jaw while the other one fitted you back against the cold of the car. He smiled against your mouth, and you used your palm to push him by the chest.

He went back, just slightly, dropping his head to your forehead again. “I’m guessing that’s a yes?”

“One time,” you said quietly, almost in a whisper. “And then I mean it. It won’t change anything.”

“I believe you,” he said. “Last time, then. Make it count.”

Jack was making it obscenely difficult for you to make it count. The rhythm you’d settled into with him at around month two — the one where the two of you skipped the drink and went straight into his bed — had disappeared tonight. He just really needed a drink tonight, and then another, and then he really didn’t want to shut his mouth. 

He poured the second one without offering you a top-up and stood at the window instead of coming to you, two fingers of amber catching the lamplight. You watched him and watched him, answering his questions until the two of you finally ended up in the bedroom. 

He’d opened his mouth to argue something and you got his belt open instead slowly, and whatever he’d been about to say faded elsewhere. The city sat out past the glass, unblinking, that audience he never drew the blinds against. His hand found your hair, resting with his thumb at your ear, almost gentle and completely fucking distracting. 

“Slow,” he murmured when you took him into your mouth, and the word came out scraped down to nothing. His head went back against the headboard. “Fuck.”

You went the opposite of slow; you knew that taking your time with it, acknowledging the last time of it all, would crack something open in your chest you couldn’t afford to have open. You did everything you knew undid him — six months of evidence, a body of proof — fast and certain, and the breath punched out of him and his fingers curled into your hair and the smug, talkative version of him went quiet for about four seconds. 

“You — huh — last time. Really?” he managed to say, fingers tightening against your scalp, the blunt fingernails scraping against the skin. You slid your tongue down his length, and he let out a short groan, letting out a wrecked, “Good girl.” His hips lifted a fraction before he caught them, forcing himself still under your hands. “Good — yeah.” 

You’d have smiled if your mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied, so you settled on humming around him. You let yourself think you’d won the quiet, and then his thumb moved against your temple slowly, and he ruined it.

“You really mean it?” he asked quietly, words aimed somewhere at the ceiling. “You’re done?”

You ignored him and kept your rhythm. It wasn’t a question you were going to dignify with him in your mouth and your resolve already pooled somewhere on his bedroom floor. 

His hands flexed in your hair at the silence, then tugged, a frustrated little pull that went straight down your spine and that he absolutely felt you react to, because his thumb pressed flat behind your ear like he was talking to your pulse there.

“Don’t go quiet on me,” he said, rasp going uneven, breath catching somewhere between the words, his whole stomach drawn tight. You watched the muscle there jump when you took him deeper as his jaw worked. “You hear me. I know you — shit.”

You’d found the underside with the flat of your tongue you slowly dragged, and the sentence collapsed. His head dropped back and your eyes caught the tendon at his throat standing out. One of his heels dug into the mattress and you felt the tremor run up his thigh under your palm. 

You’d have been lying if you said this wouldn’t be missed. Not the talking, but this, the privilege of watching Jack Abbot lose a fight with his own body, a man who controlled every room he stood in coming apart by degrees because of what you were doing. You pressed your thumb into the crease of his hip and felt him shudder. You took him to the back of your throat and swallowed and he said your name that came out of his mouth breaking. 

“You’re really gonna — ” He inhaled sharply, hand fisting tighter on your head. “ — gonna do this and walk, you’re — ”

You pulled off of him with a slow, wet, and deeply unflattering sound and sat back on your heels and looked up at him, lips swollen, thoroughly out of patience, your hand still working him just enough that his hips chased it. His eyes were closed, and he let out a large exhale.

“Are you kidding me?” 

He cracked an eye open, then shifted his head to the side against the pillow. “What?” he muttered.

“Why won’t you shut up?” You squeezed deliberately and his jaw clenched against the noise that almost got out of him. “You’re acting like a child.” 

“Acting like a child,” he huffed, head tipping back. “I’m pretty aged out of the tantrum bracket.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” You dragged your thumb up the length of him slowly. “You’ve been throwing one since we got off.”

His hand left your hair and closed around your wrist instead — the one still working him — stilling it, and then he was pulling with his unarguable strength, drawing you up over him until you had to crawl up his body or be dragged. 

You ended up straddling his waist. He stayed flat on his back beneath you, one arm folding behind his head while the other spread warm and heavy over your thigh, and he looked up at you with his chest still heaving and the gray stark at his temples. 

“Better,” he muttered. “Neck was startin’ to go, watching you be stubborn down there.” The hand on your thigh slid up slowly, settling at your hip, thumb working a lazy circle into the bone. He tilted his chin up slightly. “What’s this really about?”

You went still because you had too much of an answer, and it was the sort of one that you didn’t believe could survive being said out loud over a man who’d made it clear exactly what this was on day one. 

“You know,” you said.

“Maybe. But humor me.” His eyes stayed on your face, looking patient as ever, as the circle of his thumb continued moving. “Thought we had something nice going and now — ” He tilted his head slightly against the pillow. “So, what’s going on up in that pretty little head of yours?”

“I want more than this,” you said plainly. “That’s what’s in my head. I want the whole thing — the relationship and dates and stuff. I think I’ve got enough time to — get into that.”

“Yeah?” he said, voice coming out in a breath His thumb stilled on your hip. He looked up at you and his other hand came up and pushed a piece of your hair back off your cheek. 

You had to press your lips together, because you obviously weren’t expecting him to offer, and yet you’d been holding your breath anyway. 

“Yeah,” you said. “I do.”

His hand stayed on your cheek a moment longer, the pad of his thumb resting just under your eye. Then his hand dropped back to your hip where it was safe.

“You should,” he said after a moment, swallowing. “Get into that. You’ve got the time.”

“That’s it?”

“What do you want me to say?” His hands flexed at your hip, his hips still beneath yours and the want still humming under all of it. “Not gonna talk you out of one thing you actually deserve. Even I’m not that selfish.” His brows furrowed, like he’d just processed his own words. “Most days.”

His hand left your hip and found your waist, and then he was turning you, guiding you off of him onto the side on the mattress beside him, leaving the two of you laying facing each other in the gold dark. His thigh slid between yours. 

This close, you could see everything you usually didn't get to study: the silver threaded through the stubble at his jaw, the small white seam of an old scar through one eyebrow, the way the lines around his eyes weren't from laughing. He had one arm folded under his head and the other draped heavy over your hip, fingers spread at the small of your back, and he just looked at you, the want and the conversation both still hanging in the air between you, neither resolved.

“S’it somebody at work?” he asked. “Has to be. You don’t have time yet to meet anyone who isn’t.” 

You shook your head slightly against the pillow, and your brows furrowed together at the idea. “No — no one. I haven’t met anyone yet.” 

He huffed. His eyes dropped from yours to somewhere near your collarbone, then came back up. 

He turned his face toward the pillow for a second, as if to hide his face from you, then met your eyes again. “You’d rather have no one than me, huh?” 

“Wow,” you breathed out in almost a gasp. You pulled back an inch against the pillow to look at him properly. “Now that’s mean, Jack. I can find someone, you know.” 

“Yeah?” His brow lifted, scar catching the light. “Course you can.” His hand slid off your hip and down, palming the back of your thigh, drawing your knee up over his. “Always hear someone in the hospital talking about you.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“M’not.” He hitched your leg higher, fitting himself into the space it opened, and you felt the blunt heat of him press where you were already aching for it, rubbing slowly against your folds. “I mean it. It’s about time you got out from this old man.” 

“Don’t call yourself that.”

He dragged the length of him through you again, catching you over and over where you wanted him and not giving it. “It’s what I am. Fifty, boring life, no good to you past this.” His mouth ghosted the corner of yours, breath warm and uneven. “You should be out with someone who can give you the whole thing. I’ve already done my time.”

You could do it again, you wanted to say. You could be the whole thing. But the words sat behind your teeth, because you already knew what he’d say and do if you’d said them, and you couldn’t take hearing it kindly. Especially not with him notched against you like this when it was supposed to be the last time.

You let your hand find his jaw instead, the rough of the stubble, the silver, and you watched his eyes flicker at the touch, at how your lips moved from one side to the other as you tried to keep the words down. It seemed like he’d understood whatever you didn’t say.

“Yeah, baby,” he muttered and pressed his thumb to the back of your thigh, eyes fluttering shut at the touch of you. “I know.” 

He pushed in then, slow, all the way, mid-breath like it was just the next thing between you. The shudder rolled clean through him as he sank into you, his exhale breaking ragged against your mouth. Your spine arched off the mattress. His arm hooked under the small of your back and dragged you flush, no space left, no air, the two of you pressed chest to chest in the gold hush.

“Fuck,” he breathed against your mouth, holding there, buried to the hilt and not moving as he felt you clench around him. “Spoiling me rotten and then telling me you’re leaving.”

“Shut up now — ”

He drew back slow and sank back in deep, and the sound you made came out somewhere against his shoulder. Each roll of his hips pressed you up the sheets. “Get me used to this and then — what? Go hand it to someone who hasn’t earned it.” He laughed brokenly against your throat. “Selfish girl.” 

You got a fistful of his hair and pulled, hard enough that his breath stuttered. “Go find — someone else yourself,” you said through your teeth, because opening your mouth seemed like something embarrassing would follow. “You’re not lacking options — ”

“But I like having my cake,” he breathed, and there was almost a laugh under it. “Eating it, too.”

“Gross,” you mumbled against him.

One month was meant to be enough time. Lying awake the first week, you’d assumed it’d take thirty days to unlearn a person. It had worked on the obvious things. You’d stopped reaching for your phone at the end-of-shift and stopped seeking him out by the lockers. You’d slept in your own bed and not found it lacking, mostly. But nobody warned you that being in a car for four hours would call it all into question. 

One month of calling him Dr. Abbot across the bay, crisp and so weightless, handing him a chart without your fingers brushing his. You’d gotten good at it. Then Robby floated the conference. Some emergency medicine thing four hours upstate;  a block of credits, a hotel with a conference rate, a chance to put PowerPoint slides between yourself and the actual work for two days. Dana volunteered the department van before anyone could think of a reason not to, already half out of her scrubs spiritually, determined to get a few days of being a person instead of a charge nurse.

Like these things usually did, the seating assembled itself, which was to say it was assembled badly. Robby drove while Dana drove shotgun. Trinity somehow won the entire back row. And the middle row was you, Dennis, and Jack. 

You in the middle, because the universe worked in fucked-up ways. In this case, the universe was named Dana.

“You’ll fit,” Dana had said, and pressed a duffel of granola bars into your arms like a consolation prize, steering you into the gap between the two men before you could mount a defense. 

You fit pressed thigh-to-thigh with Jack Abbot for four hours up interstate, his arm slung along the seatback behind you because there was genuinely nowhere else for a man his size’s arms to put it, the heat of him bleeding through your sleeve like a low fever. You knew that arm. You knew the weight of it, the places where his hand fell when it wasn’t thinking about where it fell. It was a quarter-inch from touching you, which was worse than actually touching you, and you suspected he knew that, too. 

The van pulled out of the lot at five in the morning. Dennis had his headphones in before the drive even started. Up front, Dana was already arguing with Robby about the music. Trinity was sprawled in the whole back row to herself, scrolling on her phone. 

Thirty minutes into the drive, Jack broke the seal. 

“Excited?” he asked, eyes still out the window, profile flat and bored as anything. His voice was pitched low enough that it lived in the space between his mouth and your ear and nowhere else. 

You kept your head tipped back against the seat. “More excited about sleeping in a comfortable bed than the conference.”

His brows narrowed as he turned to look at you. “Some Marriot-adjacent mattress? You’re aiming low.”

“It’s horizontal and not on-call. I’m easy to please.”

“Since when?” he drawled, bone-dry, eyes going back to the window. But his thigh had pressed a degree closer against yours, a shift you couldn’t call a thing without admitting you were keeping track. Up-front, Dana won whatever argument she’d been having and something with a heavy bassline filled the van. Jack let the noise ring and leaned half-an-inch closer that nobody would ever catch. “You used to say my sheets were scratchy.”

“For a man with that penthouse, they were scratchy — ”

“Finally,” he breathed out, satisfied, like he’d been fishing for exactly that and reeled it in. Something in his face eased and you hated, a little, how much you wanted to have done that. “I almost forgot you’d been in it.” 

God. You hadn’t forgotten anything. That was the whole problem. You knew the place, the cold floor on the way to the bathroom, the exact freckles on his chest up close. You knew he wore a ring you had never once asked about and he’d never once explained, and that you’d both kept your eyes politely off the subject the way you keep your eyes off a wound that wasn’t yours to dress. You knew all of it, and all you could do was keep promising yourself it didn’t count anymore. 

“Can we stop at the next exit?” Trinity said from the back. “I need coffee and the bathroom. In that order.”

Dana hummed. “There’s a Sheetz coming up in ten. That good?” She looked through the map on her phone. “Everybody go when we stop. We’re not pulling off twice.”

“Works for me,” Robby said. 

Dennis plugged out one of his earphones and glanced over everyone in the car. “We’re stopping?” 

“Yup,” Dana confirmed. “Bathroom, snacks, ten minutes, back in the van. Whitaker, you want anything, you decide now.” 

Dennis considered, then put his earphone back on, apparently deciding the whole thing was beneath the commitment. 

Jack leaned in from beside you, barely. “Single stall in the back of those places, you know?” he said, voice low, barely audible over the music. “There’s a lock on the door and everything.” 

You kept your eyes on the windshield in front of you. “Weird thing to know off the top of your head.”

His thigh pressed warm against yours through the curve of an off-ramp that didn’t strictly require it. “How much would it take?” His eyes flickered back out to the window, even as his shoulder now pressed up against yours. “You and me in there. Ten minutes. Name a number.”

“Can’t be bought.” You forced your eyes to the windshield. “Sorry. Not for sale.”

“No?” His voice dipped, amused. “Everybody’s got a price.”

“Not me.” You turned your head and found him already closer than he’d been a second ago. “You really think you could afford me?”

“Could take a run at it.”

“Wouldn’t get far.”

“Fifty,” he said, and you could see the slight grin crawling onto his lips. 

You let out a short laugh, then immediately pressed your mouth over your lips before it became any louder. “I don’t get out of bed for fifty dollars, Abbot, let alone on my knees.”

“Oof.” He winced, mock-wounded, dragging a hand over his chest. “Expensive date.” 

“It’s never a date with you.”

He bit his lip at that, eyes raking over you, the grin caught behind his teeth. “Right. Hundred, then.” 

“I’m gonna report you to HR. You’re my attending.” 

“Good luck with filling out the history we have for that.”

You turned to look at him, and let your mouth curl. “You really think I’m the sort of girl to do it in a gas station bathroom?”

You watched the grin go still on his face, watched his eyes drop to your mouth and drag back up, the warmth in them tipping into something darker. “Would you?” 

You scoffed, shaking your head. “In your dreams, Jack.”

“Frequently,” he said, not missing a second. “Vividly, too.” 

You leaned in enough to feel his breath catch. “Keep dreaming, then. It’s all you’re getting.” 

You sat back before he could answer, fingers playing with the seatbelt, sweet as anything.

“Christ.” He dragged a hand down over his jaw, his head tipping back against the seat and looked at you sideways through the gray morning light, and the bit fell off his face. “Missed you.”

Before you could even process the words with his attention on you, because he was who he was, his jaw worked once and looked back out the window, ending it himself before you could, handing the silence back to you to do with it what you pleased. 

Your chest squeezed just slightly at that, and you had to be the one to force yourself to look away, catching sight of Dennis’s head bumping against the window as he soundly slept, oblivious, lucky. 

At some point past the gas station you lost the fight with your own exhaustion. Nineteen hours of being awake before the drive, and the van was warm, and the bassline had mellowed into something Dana hummed underneath her breath, and the road had gone smooth — almost hypnotic — interstates often did when they’d gone out of the clutches of the city. You’d meant to stay awake. You’d made the small private rule about it, too; you went under anyway, somewhere between a stretch of dead farmland and the next, your head listing by degrees toward the warm solid thing on your left because your body, again, moving without giving a single shit about how you felt. 

When you surfaced, it happened slowly. The light had changed; it was full morning now, white and flat through the windshield. Your cheek was pressed against something that rose and fell in a long, even rhythm, and your brain took its time arriving to the fact of it. You’d fallen asleep on Jack's chest. One month clean and your face was tucked into the seam of his jacket like it had never stopped being there. 

You weren’t proud of how you didn’t want to move just yet, so you didn’t move. 

You could feel his breathing under your cheek, slow enough that he might have been asleep, too. There was a smell to him you’d made yourself forget and were now remembering, completely against your will. It was nothing fancy, just clean cotton and something warm. The Gatorade bottle you’d been clutching was in the cupholder against your knee now, and you had no memory putting it there. Which meant there was a slight chance Jack had worked it out of your sleeping hand at some point so it wouldn’t tip into your lap, and set it down. 

You cracked one eye to assess the damage to your dignity. Dennis had leaned in the same stretch of road, toward you, hood up and mouth open, gone to the world. And somewhere in all that, Jack’s arm, the long span of it along the seatback, had come down around you with his hand had ended up resting flat on the top of Dennis’s skull, holding it off your shoulder, fingers spread over the kid’s hair like a melon he was deciding whether to buy. 

You’d furrowed your brows at the arrangement, reeling, when the camera shutter went off. 

Jack came awake all at once. He always did; he was never groggy, never had a transition. It was like there was an off and on button to him, as though his nervous system had been trained somewhere that didn’t allow the luxury of waking up slowly. He clocked it in a half second: the phone, you against his chest, the unexplained weight under his own palm. He followed his arm down to where his hand was cradling a sleeping resident’s head and his face crumpled slightly. 

He smacked it off, open-palmed, off the top of Dennis’s skull. 

“Ow.” Dennis jolted awake, flailing upright, a crease pressed into his cheek from your sleeve. “What — Dr. Abbot — what —”

“Wrong shoulder, kid,” Jack said.

“I wasn’t —” Dennis took in the angle for himself and recoiled. “Sorry. God. Sorry.” 

You’d started to sit up to peel yourself off Jack’s chest and salvage some dignity to sit back into the cold neutral air of your own seat where you belonged. His palm came up to your forehead and pushed you back down against him.

“Not you,” he said. His hand stayed flat on your forehead. “You’re fine where you are.” 

You reached up and pulled his hand off your forehead, sitting up out of the warmth of him. 

“C’mon,” he said quietly, under the music, softer than a command.

You paused with your hand still around his wrist and turned to look at him full-on. He was already looking at you, none of the previous needling present in his face.

You shook your head once, a small gesture. You didn’t trust the words to come out the way they needed to, so you let your face carry it instead.

He held your eyes a second, then his jaw shifted slightly and the corner of his mouth went to a worn-down half of a smile. He gave you the smallest nod. His eyes fell shut and he tipped his head back with a small shake of his head as he eased his wrist out of your hand. 

You put your hands in your lap where they couldn’t get you in trouble, and stared out at the flat white morning coming up over the interstate, and made sure to not look at him again.

The conference threw a networking event the first evening, which meant a low-lit ball room, a cash bar charging eleven dollars for wine that came from a box, and a couple hundred physicians standing around in lanyards pretending they’d be here without the boxed wine. 

You’d lost the group almost immediately. Dana was drawn to a cluster of people she knew in a previous life; Robby to someone he’d done a residency with; Dennis to the food; Trinity to one of her college buddies. It left you working the edge of the room with a plastic cup of wine, doing a slow orbit as you read badges, when a man peeled off a nearby conversation and aimed at you.

He was older. Closer to Jack’s range, give or take. He had silver coming in at the temples and an unbothered ease that made you wonder if he’d ever had it hard. His badge put him outside Columbus. He had a good face and seemed aware of it without leaning on it, and no wear that graced his features; a man who slept fine, you assumed, and didn’t own a single thing he refused to speak about. 

“Pace yourself with that,” he said, tipping his own glass in the direction of yours. “It comes up to you pretty quickly.” 

“Bit late for that,” you said, lifting the cup up an inch. “This is already number three.”

“Then I’m too late to save you and might as well make it worse,” he said, offering a hand. “Mark. Philly. I run the shop out there.” 

You introduced yourself. He had a good handshake, dry and brief, none of the holding-on the men sometimes did at these things. 

He tipped his head to look at your badge. “Pittsburgh Trauma. You like it?”

“Most days.”

He shrugged. “Anybody who says every day is lying or hasn’t been doing it long enough.” He took a sip and let his eyes come back to your face. “Let me guess. Senior resident. Somebody made you come.” 

You were going to say something back—you had something, you’d half-built it—and then there was a hand at the small of your back. You knew the weight of it, the breadth, where the fingers fell. It settled low against your spine and stayed, warm through the dress. 

“Mark,” Jack said from beside you. He had a club soda in his free hand and an easy nothing on his face. “Jack Abbot. Pittsburgh.” 

“Jack.” Mark did a quick thing, the hand, the half-step Jack had folded into the space between you without seeming to take it, the way you hadn't stepped out from under his palm. Something recalibrated behind his face, pleasant and unhurried. He stuck the hand out anyway. “I think I’ve read you —” He referenced one of Jack’s studies you knew all too well, something he’d handed over to you once in his bed like it was a bedtime story.

“That’s me.” Jack took the handshake. His thumb moved once at your spine, where the angle hid it from the third person entirely. “Philly? You inherit the department or build it?”

“Little bit of both. Mostly inherited the problems,” he said lightly. “You enjoying the conference?” 

“It’s a conference,” Jack said, lifting his glass half-an-inch. Then, his head tilted in your direction. “You know this one’s my best trauma resident? I’d put her on anything. Watched her run a procedure last month half the seniors I came up with couldn’t have called that fast.” 

“That so?” Mark looked at you again, interest sharpened. “He doesn’t seem the type to hand those out.”

“He’s nice to everyone.” 

“She’s underselling it.” Jack’s hand spread a degree wider at your back, the heel of his palm settling into the dip of your spine, fingers easy along your hip. “You’ll be reading her name in a couple years and remembering you met her here, of all places.”

It got the laugh Jack wanted it to. Mark took a sip, easy, regrouping, and you watched him do the math the way smooth men do—fast, behind a pleasant face—and land on a play.

“Well.” He tilted the glass toward Jack. “I won’t monopolize you. I’m sure you’ve got the room to work — everybody wants a minute at these things.”

The thumb that had been moving at your back stilled, and Jack’s features crossed into something amused as he narrowed his brows at the man. 

“S’alright,” he said pleasantly. “Got everyone I need right here.” 

Mark recaliberated again, watching him take Jack’s measure one more time; the hand, the half-inch of space that hardly qualified as space. You watched him arrive to the easy conclusion that whatever was happening here had been decided before he ever walked over.

“Fair enough,” he said, setting his empty cup down at the nearest high-top. “Pleasure. Good luck with the residency.” He nodded at you, then to Jack. “Abbot.” And then he was gone, folding back into the room, off to find the next conversation that wasn’t already spoken for.

Jack’s hand was still on your back, and you stepped out from under it. You turned to face him, and felt the thing that had been climbing in you all night finally find a target.

“Why would you do that?” you asked, shaking your head and pressing your lips shut to keep yourself from saying anything more. 

“Do what?” he said mildly, the glass loose in his hand. 

“Don’t.” You kept your face arranged for the room, tamping down your voice so it wouldn’t carry over to strangers. “You know what you did. You’re not stupid.”

“I said you were good at your job.” He had the gall to look reasonable. “Becuase you are.”

“That’s not what it was and you know it — thank you.” Your jaw tightened. “You don’t get to walk over and put your hand on me when I’m talking to another man and act like — ” Your fingers moved between the two of you, a small and sharp movement. “ — like you’ve got any claim. We agreed to this a month ago.”

Jack’s lips pressed in a thin line at the words, and his eyes raked over your face. “He’d have you in his bed by ten,” he said, calmer now. “Guys like that — it’s their whole game at places like this. One night, gone by checkout. You didn’t lose anything worth keeping.” 

Your brows furrowed at that, and you felt something go hot in your neck. “Yeah?” you asked, voice going quieter. “Isn’t that what you were?” 

He looked away for a second, one hand coming up to rub over the bottom half of his face. “If you can’t tell the difference between me and a guy like that,” he said evenly, and there was something genuinely stung underneath as his eyes met yours, “then I really don’t know what to tell you.” 

“Maybe there isn’t one.”

His face twisted at that, and he let out a disbelieved laugh. “That’s how you think of me?”

“That’s not — ” You stopped, because his face had knocked something loose in you and you had no idea what you thought anymore. “That’s not what I said.” 

“It sounded a hell of a lot like it.” He shook his head. “Six months and you’re putting me next to a guy you met ten minutes ago. Alright.” 

“Jack — ”

“You wanted it, too. Okay?” When you let out a small ‘what?’ he continued, “You heard me. You’re acting like you just went along with it, and you never once asked for more either.” His voice had dropped low, and he’d walked closer to you before you even realized. “You never once asked for more until the night you walked. So don’t put it all on me.” 

“I asked,” you said, voice cracking just slightly, and you looked around the room to see if anyone was close to you. “You were the one who told me to go find someone else. You said you’re no good past what we were doing.” 

“I said it because it’s true,” he said quickly, dragging a hand down his face. “I’m not the guy you build the rest of your life around. I tried to do the decent thing.”

“Then stand on that,” you said. “You don’t get to tell me to find someone and stop it the second anyone shows up. Pick one. You don’t get to keep me in your life like this forever because you can’t stand to either let me in or go.” 

“I’m trying to do right by you,” he said roughly.

You pressed two fingers above your eyelid, shaking your head. “Why are you doing this?” You shoulders came up to your ears. “I don’t — it was never going to be us, Jack. You said so yourself. I don’t get why — I need to move on.” 

He closed his eyes at that for a moment. “I know you do,” he said quietly, the fight gone all out of him. His eyes flickered down to his hand for a second, then made a loose fist out of them. “I — can we go somewhere else?” He leaned in slightly, body stiffening up. Reading the hesitation on your face, he said, “Please.” 

You’d watched him avoid the word in a dozen rooms, so you nodded slowly and forced yourself to not look too hard at why. You couldn’t, because if you stopped to let yourself consider it, it’d make your body hurt even more, and you’d still do it. 

The stairwell was the only door on the floor that wasn’t a room or a lobby. It was fire-exit cold, raw concrete, a fluorescent light overhead. The reception came up through the floor as bass and nothing else, the words gone out of it. The door sucked shut behind you both and took the noise with it. You both walked four floors up, apparently neither of you being ready to do anything about it. And then there was simply the buzz of the bad light and Jack, six months and one month and four floors and a whole conference away from you, standing with his back to the cinderblock and his hands jammed in his pockets.

You crossed your arms and your eyes involuntarily flickered up to the ceiling because you weren’t sure you could talk. But when he let the silence drag on, too, you said, “Jack — ”

“Did you want it to be me?” he said immediately, like your voice had spurred him into action. 

“What?”

“The whole thing you said you want. Dates, the rest of it.” His body was stiff against the wall. “Was that — did you ever imagine me, or just, someone else. Someone who would.” 

You took in a shaky breath. “You.” It came out more plainly than you’d expected, like your body had been ready to be rid of it, to place it somewhere in the open. “I left because I wanted more — with you, and you made it pretty clear I could never have that.”

His hands jammed in his pockets. The light buzzed overhead, that sick fluorescent flutter, and somewhere four floors down the reception kept going, two hundred people who'd never know this was happening over their heads.

“I don’t think I can give you that,” he said.

“Okay.” You forced yourself to nod, and your eyes went hot. “Thanks for telling me that, then.”

He raised a palm just enough that it caught in your eyesight. “I didn’t — didn’t say I never wanted to. Don’t think that.” He tilted his neck up to meet your eyes properly. “Wanting you that way wasn’t hard. I’ve been doing that against my own advice the entire time.”

He'd come off the wall a step without seeming to know he'd done it, and his face had lost the arrangement it usually wore, the bored set of it, and underneath was something you'd caught glimpses of and never the whole of. His eyes shifted to the wall, the stenciled number, anywhere but you.

“I did years of this already. And it ended about as badly as it could end.” He laughed wryly, no humor in it. “I stopped letting myself want things — I thought it’s a lot easier to get through a night if there’s nothing you’d be hurt to lose.” His muscles tensed on his face, the lines deepening as he pinched his eyes shut and shook his head. “Feels like I’m losing you, and it hurts like hell.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know when it happened. It wasn’t meant to.”

You pressed a finger against the underside of your eye then, determined to catch anything that could possibly leak out. 

“But you don’t know if you can do it,” you said, words coming out shakily. 

He tugged his bottom lip between his teeth and shook his head slowly. “No,” he said honestly, and it was worse than any lie he could’ve told. “I don’t know.”

You nodded again, because there was nothing else for you to do. 

“But — but, I don’t wanna lose what I’ve got with you,” he admitted, voice dropping into something shameful. “I know that the nights you’re not on are longer. And if I can’t have you, I want you to know you do that for me. It started being pretty serious a long time ago — for me, too.” 

The light fluttered overhead and you let the finger drop from under your eye, gave up on holding it, let whatever wanted to come just come. Somehow, they were words you’d always wanted to hear and yet they arrived wrong, off-rhythm. You’d kept careful track of everything he wouldn’t give you, a whole running tally of it, and he'd just gone and paid the entire balance in one breath in the worst-lit room, and the awful part — the part that made your blood run even hotter — was that it counted. It counted, anyway. 

“So what do we do with that?” you said. “I don’t — I don’t know where that leaves us.”

He was quiet for a moment. You watched him sit in the question instead of dodging it, which was new, which was maybe the most he’d ever given you in one night.

“I’d want to try,” he said finally, words careful, like he was setting something down that might break. “Not the old way. I mean the other thing. What you wanted.” He let out a breath. “If you still want it. I wasn’t very great the first time, and I’m out of practice, too.” 

You wiped your cheek, and winced as you felt your hand scrub at your skin a little too roughly. “You were okay with it a month ago — ”

“It hurt,” he said immediately. “It hurt, you walking out. I didn’t have anything better than to let you, but don’t — don’t think it didn’t.” 

He moved when you didn’t respond, stepping closer than the conversation needed. His hands came up and settled at your arms, just below the shoulders, loose, holding you in place or holding himself there, you couldn't tell which, maybe both.

“Let me try,” he said roughly. His thumbs moved once against your arms. “I want to learn this with you.”

You looked up at him. He held it — your eyes, the closeness, all of it — instead of glancing off the way he had all night. You realized distantly that this was a sort of contract you’d be signing, and he was laying out the option for you to not do so. 

“You can’t disappear on me,” you said instead of considering the second option, “when it gets hard. I don’t ever want to feel like I made up something I didn’t.”

He nodded stiffly. “If I do, you can drag me back out.”

His forehead came down, to the top of your head, his chin resting in your hair, his arms folding the rest of the way around you like he'd finally run out of reasons not to. You felt him breathe out, the whole tense length of him going down an inch against you.

“Just let me try,” he said again, into your hair, voice a whisper. “Please. I’m asking. I don’t do that a lot.”

tags — @emmdreams @shoulderpress