@kingdonmicrofic day twenty-eight: pulse | 494/494 | rating: g | warnings: infidelity? choose your own adventure!
She’s kind of obsessed with his heartbeat.
It started the first time he ever hugged her, after a particularly miserable and taxing shift. She’d been standing outside the employee bathroom with tears in her eyes, and he had pulled her into his body without hesitation.
She’d closed her eyes as she settled into his chest. She could feel his heart thumping, quick and uneven.
“Your heart is beating a little fast,” she’d told him, frowning.
He’d tensed around her just the tiniest bit, and then laughed lightly.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Yeah, it is.”
She’d chalked it up to the absolutely awful day they’d had, and allowed the rhythm to lull her into a sense of calm.
She immediately becomes addicted not to the sound of his heart, but to the sensation of it. The feeling of the planes of his chest rising and falling against her cheek, the muscle pumping his lifeblood through veins and capillaries.
As they grow around each other, she becomes bolder with it. They sit in the stairwell and share a protein bar, and she reaches over and grabs his hand, presses her palm against the pulse in his wrist. During lunches in the break room, she takes her index and middle fingers and trails them down from the corner of his eye and over his jaw, and puts pressure on his carotid artery, feels the thump, thump, thump from under his skin.
His pulse rate always seems slightly high, no matter when she feels it. It just must be how his body works, and she’s fascinated to know something about him that everyone else at the hospital doesn’t. It’s a sort of secret only she’s privy to.
One night, as they sit in the park across from the hospital after another grueling shift, she puts her palm flat against his chest, feels his heart beating even faster than it usually does.
She lifts her head from where it rests on his shoulder.
“Your heart is beating a little fast,” she tells him, thinking back to their first hug.
He hums, but doesn’t answer otherwise.
“It always seems a little fast,” she says, suddenly going into doctor mode. Maybe she should’ve brought this up before. What is there’s something wrong with him? “Have you ever talked to anyone about that?”
He laughs, almost nervously.
“It doesn’t always beat that fast.”
“Well, whenever I feel it, it’s beating that fast.”
He swallows slowly, and then reaches for the hand on his chest, lacing their fingers together.
“That’s kind of the point, Mel,” he whispers. “It’s you.”
She lets go of his hand slowly, once again takes her index and middle fingers down from the corner of his eye, over his jaw, and to his carotid pulse. It’s pounding even faster now.
“We should go home,” she breathes.
“I don’t want to go home.”
When he leans in and kisses her moments later, her fingers are still pressed into his neck.
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