aww, thank you! it's been a very nice and relaxing shabbat and i'm about to go to the pool with some friends (it's been over 90/33 degrees this week) but i intend to buckle down and work on my kingdon week tomorrow! <3
“I mean, if you don’t mind hearing about it.” She doesn’t seem like one who’d draw firm lines between her personal life and her colleagues, but he’s still her coworker and her superior, technically, and maybe she wouldn’t want to hear his sob story.
“Of course not! You can tell me anything!”
It’s a thing that people say, but he rarely believes them. “If you need anything…” has become a familiar phrase to him over the past year, and mostly it’s a social nicety, about as truthful as the automatic “fine” people give when asked how they are. People mean it kindly, but if he actually ever took them up on it, they’d be horrified. He’s gotten to the point where he only really believes that when it comes from another addict, like Cassie. From everyone else, he thinks of it as another way of saying, “I’m acknowledging that you’re in a rough place right now.”
But Mel means it. He knows she does, not just because of the characteristic sincerity of her tone and expression, but because she’s just that kind of person. And he knows she feels it too, the weird connection they’ve had since day one. He hadn’t been sure about that while he was gone, wondering if it was the drugs or the rollercoaster emotions of the day warping his memories, but as soon as she streaked across the room to him on his return, he’d known he hadn’t made it up.
It doesn’t really make much sense. It’s not like they have all that much in common, emergency medicine aside, and emergency medicine isn’t enough to build a friendship on, as his time at PTMC has more than proved. But it just feels like they’re on the same wavelength, like they operate on the same frequency, no annoying static to have to strain through.
“Kindred spirits,” Tress said when he mentioned Mel to her on their last call. “Sometimes people just click. Like when I met Mary Tom in middle school, remember?”
Frank absolutely remembers Tress’s childhood best friend; in fact, he’d seen her at the Food Lion last time he was home and they stood in the produce section next to the lemons and limes and caught up for twenty minutes. She’d practically been his other little sister until he left for college.
“She sat next to me on the bus her first day and by the time we got to school, we were best friends,” Tress added.
“You were kids,” Frank pointed out. “Kids are just like that sometimes.”
“Maybe. But maybe adults are like that too, and they just trust it less.”
“Wow, that’s pretty subtle coming from you,” he’d said.
“I mean it, though. If you think she could be a friend, be her friend. You could use more of them. Loser.”
Which was much more in line with the Tress who never hesitated to give him a hard time.
So yeah, there’s no particular reason that he should agree with Mel when she says that he can tell her anything, but…he does. He’s going to try to trust it.
