Something Borrowed — Chapter 1
tags/warnings: med student!jack and med student!reader, academic rivals, enemies to lovers, fake dating, jack is kind of a dick (unfortunately he’s also hot), mentions of cheating (not by jack), eventual romance, eventual smut
summary: Finding out your ex-boyfriend is engaged is bad enough. Finding out days before you’re both in your brother’s wedding is worse. Luckily for you, Jack Abbot has a solution.
A/N: i'm so excited to finally start posting this! i love where this story eventually goes — fake dating, a wedding weekend, and lots and lots of med school jack abbot ♡♡
The rapid clicking of keyboards all around you should concern you. Like your classmates, you should be frantically smashing the keys, jotting down all the details your Pathophysiology professor is hurling at you. Unfortunately, you have more pressing matters. Your mother asked you to send her a copy of your speech for your brother’s wedding by tonight at the latest. A speech that, up until about twenty minutes ago, had only contained the closing phrase “To Nick and Molly!”
You glance at the laptops and tablets of those sitting near you, trying to gauge just how much of this lecture you’ll actually need to catch up on later. A few seats down, you spot hands gliding across the keyboard, leaving meticulously crafted annotations and embedded diagrams in their wake. You let your eyes drift up to see who exactly you might have to beg to share their notes with you. And of course. It’s Jack fucking Abbot.
There is not a single person on God’s green earth that irritates you more than Jack Abbot. He is a cocky little know-it-all and actually has the intelligence to back it all up. As if that weren’t infuriating enough, he is obscenely attractive. Steam practically pours out of your ears when you recall how, during your first year of medical school, he had the audacity to kick you out of a study group that you had put together for being eight minutes late. Even though a year has passed, you can still feel the locked door handle refusing to turn as Jack taunts you from inside the study room, tapping his watch twice before drawing the privacy blinds.
No, you would not be giving Jack the satisfaction of begging for his help. Tuning back into your professor, you try to focus so you can at least salvage something from this class. “In left-sided heart failure, increased hydrostatic pressure in the pulmonary capillaries pushes fluid into the interstitial and alveolar spaces. That’s where we start seeing pulmonary edema, dyspnea, and orthopnea.” Your professor drones on. You thought we were still covering renal disease…
Yeah, you were definitely going to be needing those notes. Hoping to at least do something productive while sitting in this room, you begin to tinker with your speech some more. After spending the rest of the class typing, second-guessing, and then retyping the same few clauses, the sounds of everyone packing up finally pull you away from your speech. As you close your laptop and slide it into your bag, you turn your head towards the end of the aisle just in time to see Jack slipping out the door. You jump out of your seat, yelling a flurry of apologies as you push past people, desperate to catch up to him.
“Jack!” you yell after him. He doesn’t stop or turn his head, but his steps falter just enough for you to catch up to him and fall into stride beside him. “Hey!” you cough out, embarrassingly gassed from the short sprint, the cool November air burning a bit as it fills your lungs.
“Were you even paying attention?”
“You were writing the same sentence for the last ten minutes.”
“Hey! You were reading my screen?” You glare at him.
“Hard not to. You deleted ‘When we were kids’ at least six times.”
“Well… speaking of taking a peek at each other’s screens… You have some very impressive note-taking skills.”
Your brows furrow together. “I haven’t even asked anything yet!”
He pauses. “You’re right. Go ahead.”
“Can I borrow your notes?”
“Jack!” you exclaim, desperation brewing in the pit of your stomach. “Please! I’m going to be gone on Friday. My brother’s getting married.”
“Congratulations to your brother.” His eyes bore into you, that familiar crooked smirk pulling at the corners of his lips. “My answer is still no.” He picks up his pace, leaving you behind with your cheeks burning in the chilly air.
By the time you settle into your usual spot in the library, your frustration with Jack has yet to subside. Before even opening your laptop, you send a text to a friend asking if she’d be willing to share her notes from today and Friday with you. Her response comes through almost immediately:
“hi girl of course!! i’ll send them after class on friday”
See Jack? Was that so fucking hard?
You shoot off a quick message to your mom, telling her you won’t have a readable draft of your speech for her tonight, but you promise you will have it ready in time for the reception. With your notes predicament solved and your speech successfully procrastinated, you pull out your laptop and get to work.
After almost two hours of gathering all the information you can on cardiovascular disease and regurgitating it into an Anki deck, you pull out your phone for a well-deserved study break. Instagram is denying you your usual dopamine rush, your Explore page determined to show you posts from vague mutuals instead of anything that could provide a semblance of entertainment.
You’re mindlessly scrolling when a familiar face flashes across your screen.
You haven’t seen his face on your phone in months. You made damn sure of that when you blocked him on everything after the breakup. And yet, there he is. Only, this isn’t his account. The username belongs to his girlfriend, Claire. Against your better judgment, you swipe. The photos are what you expect: the two of them looking nauseatingly happy, wrapped around each other. To your own surprise, seeing them together doesn’t sting like you had expected it to. You’ve been mentally preparing yourself to see him at the wedding. He’s a groomsman, after all. It’s not like you didn’t know he’d moved on.
Then you swipe to the fourth slide:
Your stomach drops and you suddenly feel like you may need to throw up. You take in the caption: the easiest yes of my life 🤍🤍 @camwalsh. The ring is practically burning a hole in your retinas. Cameron is getting married. You start doing the math in your head. Eight months. He’d been with her for eight fucking months. The tears start to well in your eyes. You were together for seven years.
Seven years of “I love you but I will never get married.”
Seven years of “Baby, you know what my parents splitting up did to me. I’m committed to you, isn’t that enough?”
Seven years of alleged promises all rendered meaningless the night he slept with someone else.
And now, after only eight months with Claire, Cameron has changed his mind. Your tears are freely flowing now, so you don’t notice the figure standing in front of you until a hand lands on your shoulder.
The sound of your name pulls you out of your own head. You gaze up to find Jack standing over you, dark auburn curls falling across his forehead and his usual smug expression replaced by concern in his hazel eyes.
“Hey, hey. It’s okay. You can borrow my notes.”
You look at him in disbelief. His earnestness almost draws a laugh out of you. “Jack, I’m not crying about your notes.”
“Oh.” He stares at you for a few moments, wary of making matters worse. “Then what’s going on?”
“It’s clearly not nothing if it’s got you sobbing in the library. Come on, tell me.” He takes the seat next to you, clearly not dropping this.
You should tell him to mind his own business. Instead, the words begin to fall out before you can stop them.
“I just found out my ex is engaged.” Jack’s eyes flick down to the phone still clutched in your hand.
He scans your face, trying to find the right words to say. “I’m…sorry?”
You let out a watery laugh. “We were together for seven years.”
“He cheated on me right before I left for med school.”
His face hardens. “What an asshole.”
“Yeah. And now I have to see him this weekend.”
“He’s going to be there?”
“Yeah. We’re both in the wedding party.”
“At your brother’s wedding?”
“Unfortunately.” You wipe furiously at your cheeks before going still. “...which means she’s obviously coming too.” You hadn’t even considered that until the words left your mouth. “God, this is going to be so humiliating.”
“Why would it be humiliating for you? He’s the one who cheated.”
“We grew up together. Everyone knows what happened, Jack. Everyone. I’m just not sure I can survive the pitying looks all weekend. I’m going to be all alone while he’s there with his new fiancée, and everyone will be looking at me like they’re waiting for me to fall apart.”
“To the wedding. Bring me.”
