el

Yesterday Mel smiled at him sixteen times. He's generous with the tally. If they're talking for a while and she doesn’t drop the smile the whole time, he'll call that two, maybe three. It’s not cheating because he makes the rules, and he’s the only one keeping track anyway. 

So sixteen is the number to beat. (Frank knows that everyone thinks he’s a loser, especially now that he’s living on his own and struggling to send enough money back to Abby for the kids daycare. But he’s objectively not a loser - he’s beat his own record eight shifts out of ten!)

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.”

Oh.

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.”

Hungry Eyes — Dirty Dancing AU

Frank can be full of himself, sometimes.

Not in a bad way. He just...knows what he's good at, and likes that he's good at it. Whether it be the proud look on his face when he makes a save in the ED, or how sometimes he'll grab her around the waist when she's taking one last look in the mirror before they leave the house and murmur, "Look at us, baby. We're the hottest couple in the tri-state area, bar none," and then nibble at the shell of her ear before kissing her temple.

He's most full of himself in bed.

She wasn't surprised to discover that he's a talker during sex – he's a talker in pretty much every situation. However, the kinds of things that spill out of his mouth while he's fucking her kind of shocked her, at first.

Maybe because he's the first person she'd ever slept with. But beforehand, she had the secret expectation that he would be overwhelmingly gentle with her if they ever crossed that line.

He was, at first. But as time passed, and they grew together, the things that he said switched from careful to downright filthy.

Mmm, baby. You love my cock inside you, don't you?

I make you feel so good, Mel. Only I can make you feel this good.

You're so perfect, baby, clenching around my fingers like that. I'm gonna make you come again, aren't I?

He could probably stand to have his ego knocked down a few pegs, for his health. Unfortunately, she finds it devastatingly hot, so she only finds it in herself to chant yes, yes, yes when he gets like that. Another accomplishment he takes in stride.

I fuck you so well that you can't even think, baby girl.

It comes to a head one night in early winter, after he eats her out so tortuously slowly that she almost dies, she thinks. She comes so hard she sees stars. He works her through it, passes his tongue through her folds once, twice more before crawling up her body and flopping down on the bed beside her

"I think I deserve a medal for that."

She makes herself roll her eyes, ignores the new coil of arousal that's already twisting in her belly.

"A medal for cunnilingus?" she asks skeptically.

"Yes," he confirms, tone serious. "A gold one, at that."

She scoffs as he leans up on his elbow so he can look down at her.

"Don't pretend that you're not my biggest supporter, honey," he scolds.

She opens her mouth and then closes it again, like a fish. She can't even deny it, and she should smack the shit-eating grin that turns up his lips off his face, but instead, she yanks him down and sinks her tongue into his mouth, reaches for his erection and lines him up with her opening.

They did this thing, sometimes. It was weird and shameful and like nothing Mel had ever heard of before, and they didn’t do it a lot, but it went like this: first, they’d share a look. This part always just kind of happened - it’s not like they ever planned it. Frank’s face would go all intense and serious, and he’d look down at her lips, and that’s how she would know.