history, huh?

It’s a slow day, so she thinks he'll duck out at seven sharp, home to the wife and the two little kids she’s heard about and never seen. But he stays three hours past sign-out with the overdose teen whose parents never showed, speaking in a low voice with the lights out until the boy sleeps.

She tries not to stand too close to him because she knows everyone thinks she has a crush. But some asshole in triage lunges for her and Frank steps right in the middle, takes a fist to the jaw, and apologizes to her after for the way he had knocked into her shoulder.

She won't ask about his marriage because it's none of her business and she doesn’t think she wants to know the truth anyway. But some days he wears the ring and some days he doesn’t.

Privately, Robby likes to keep a pretty close score. It’s for the best. If his sabbatical taught him anything, it’s that he can’t handle the loneliness and the disappointment anymore, so he has to do this, for his own sake, he has to keep count, a mental tally on who he can trust and who he can’t. 

Frank Langdon, he’s learned, he can’t trust. Not by quite a large margin. 

Which is maybe why he gets so annoyed when Langdon turns up at the Friendsgiving thing. He wasn’t even in the groupchat, the one Shen had started and called feastie boys🍗- it was just supposed to be the fuck-ups with nowhere better to be. Robby certainly qualifies, single and childless. But Langdon has a wife. Two kids, a dog, medical debt, a long recovery road ahead of him. It’s the holiday weekend and Langdon is supposed to be at home. He shouldn’t be here, and he really shouldn’t be all pressed up against Dr. King as if there’s not plenty of room around the table at this shitty all-you-can-eat homestyle buffet place. 

Click. Click. Click.

“Can you go two seconds without making noise,” Mel huffs, hand already on her temple.

Across the note-littered table, Langdon clicks his pen again, defiance twinkling in his eyes. 

God, the nerve of him. 

She’s never met someone so stubborn and cocky and competitive before, which of course means she's never met someone who understands her better. He knows every button to push, how to crawl right under her skin, so much so you’d think he lived there. Always so good at keeping up with her, always catching her eye after a heated debate, watching. Smirking.

(If she thought about it for more than a second, their rivalry is less of a battle and more of a feast — each of them arriving hungry and wide-eyed for the challenge the other provides. He pushes her, she pushes him, cloaked in annoyance and insult. Satisfaction after supping themselves on their wit.)

(But why would she think, when she could blindly hate?)

“You’re insufferable.”

“Am I?” His eyes narrow. “Or do I just steal your chances to be right?”

Mel scowls, an indignant noise rumbling in her chest as she rearranges something on the whiteboard.

There’s another noise behind her, louder than before.

“Can you please be quiet?” She asks, turning quickly.

He’s much closer than she expected, towering over her. She swallows, and the corner of his mouth twitches upwards, and if she hadn’t been staring into his eyes — have they always been so blue? — she might’ve missed the way his gaze flickered downward for just a split second.

“I don’t know, can—”

Before he can finish, as if continuing the same argument they’ve been having all night, Mel grabs the front of his shirt and kisses him hard.