call me emmy.

Inspired by Problematic Summer Romance

Her hand works him slowly. Cruelly, really, the callous on the side of her thumb dragging under the head with every stroke, and he hisses into it. His hips cant upward, so she pins them flat with her free hand, and that — the ease with which he goes pliant and soft under her grip — makes her mouth water. 

It makes her feel a little insane, and very, very greedy: oh, the things she wants to do to this man.

She is tempted, very, to take him into her mouth, so she does, leans down and licks one slow stripe up the underside, tracing the vein there, just to watch the way his stomach hollows out.

But she's just as tempted to watch the way he falls apart, so then she sits back onto her heels, tugs his cock again, and his back arches and he whimpers.

"Mira. Mira, please—"

"Please what?" She lets her gaze fall, watches her own hand on him, wetting her lower lip with her tongue.

"Please. Please just—" His head drops back against the headboard. "Don't stop, please don't stop, I'll be good, I swear I'll—"

"I know. You're so good." She twists her hand on the upstroke and his whole body twitches. 

The way he's looking at her, half-lidded and bleary but still focused, gaze locked on hers, stirs something in her gut. He's trying to remember.

"What do you think about?" Samira hears herself say. "When it's just you. Tell me what you think about, Jack."

He whimpers and shakes his head.

"S'mira— Baby, please—"

"Thought you wanted to be good? Tell me, Jack, come on. Tell me how you get yourself off."

The flush spreads across his throat, his ears. "You won't like it."

"Jack." Her grip loosens and she slows her pace to a crawl, almost stopping entirely, and he jerks up, seeking the friction she's denying him. She tsks. "I always want to hear every thought in your head."

"It's not—" He swallows. "It's you. Being in— When I get home. On the couch, you're— You're there, and—"

Her hand moves again, rewarding him, and he keens, head falling back, and she giggles.

"What, naked and waiting for you? I can do that."

He shakes his head again, brow furrowed and eyes squeezed shut now.

"No, no, you're— When I get home," he babbles. "Just— Existing, you're happy, and I get to walk in and you're mine, you look up and smile like I'm the best part of your whole day— Oh, oh fuck—"

He yanks her hand off of him and she drops it at her side; he's gripping himself, fist around the base of his cock hard, holding hard and panting.

"Fuck. Fuck, wait, I'm gonna—" His chest heaves, thighs trembling. "I can't, if I keep— Give me a second, please, I want to be good, I want to tell you—"

She leans in. Her mouth brushes the shell of his ear, and her hand closes over his straining one, and she squeezes with him.

"So good."

He comes on the second word with a whine, hips fucking up into his own hand as she watches, while she keeps murmuring it against his ear, so good, so good for me Jack, so fucking good.

Afterward, he's limp, hand and thigh wet with his come and eyes hazy as he looks up at her. He manages a breathless chuckle.

"W—What about you, baby?" he asks. "What do you think about?"

She tilts her head consideringly. "Pegging."

Jack isn't looking when he rounds the corner. He's thinking instead: Central Six's potassium should be back. There are two patients awaiting discharge and one that's going to discharge himself AMA and that's both his problem and not.

Lena laughs, and someone laughs back, so he looks and—

It's Mohan?

She's not supposed to be here. She left a half hour ago. She worked for twelve hours and, from what he heard from Dana when he arrived, saved multiple lives. He doesn't doubt it; she's a year and a half into residency and already maybe the smartest person he knows.

She's got jean shorts on that fall a little bit below her knee, fraying at the edges like they were cut haphazardly. Jorts, his mind fills in. That's what Parker would say. Greying shoes, too, with a near-hole in the toe of the one he can see, and a cardigan that's beige and big on her shoulders. She must've forgotten something.

Lena says something else, and Mohan snorts.

He wants to cross the room. He wants to say something stupid so she snorts again. His mind comes up with possibilities, but none of them seem good enough. Maybe if he trips dramatically. He'd do it. Screw his good leg, it's worth it.

He wants to know where she got those awful shoes and how long she's had them and if she'd let him buy her new ones so they wouldn't be so ragged. He wants to buy her a coffee, ten maybe, that she'll forget about in the name of medicine. He'll buy her another when it goes cold. He wants to carry her groceries up however many flights of stairs there are to her front door, and he wants to open that door and never leave the space, and he wants to find out if she snores.

He wants that cardigan on the empty hook on his coat rack, and he has only ever wanted that hook filled once before. He can see it, too, is the thing, hanging there, rubbing wool fibers onto his coat so he'll have her with him later. If it's there, she's there, her feet in his lap and a journal open in her hands.

He'd say something silly and she'd snort again: there. That's the moment for it; that's how he'd get her to make that delighted, honest sound to him and only him.

Mohan doesn't notice him. She just grabs something off the table, waves a hand at Lena, and turns to go.

He has felt this way before. He doesn't want to feel it again. Didn't think he would, so he pushed the idea aside, and now it's here, and he doesn't want it. All ten fingers and five toes tingle. 

In modern-day Argentina there is a cave, and inside that cave are silhouettes of hands. We have studied the handprints, so we know the peoples in the cave used bone pipes to spray paint and stencil their fingers onto stone. Most are left hands; we assume they held the pipes in their right.

We do not know what they were thinking at the time. We simply know they were there.

Samira's final shift is a Tuesday night. When it ends, she hands in her badge and walks out into a blaze of summer sun. The day ends as it begins. She stands in the fresh air, and she inhales.

A man is going to live because of her. Because of the pump of her hands on his chest, palm on his sternum, fingers spread, weight bearing down. She gave him days, maybe years, and she can feel the ache in her pectorals still.

There are patients who know her by name, and they may notice she is gone. Perhaps they will miss her. Perhaps they will wonder, once, where she went. Then they will forget.

She did not carve anything here. She leaves tomorrow; she is out of time.

We know the painters in the cave stood, palm on stone, fingers spread, still. We know they pulled their hand away then and went back to their lives, and the handprint stayed. Maybe that's why they traced their hands to begin with.

It's hard to know what you'll leave behind. If you'll leave anything. If you'll be remembered.

The boxes arrive flat, so she spends her next day off assembling them, folding the flaps under and running tape along the seam.

Samira packs her kitchen first, which is something every guide online says not to do — don't pack the stuff you'll need, like your kitchenware — but need is a relative term, and plates stack nicely, and it feels like an easy win to start there and make real progress, so that's what she does. She scribbles FRAGILE on two sides in black marker and moves onto her mugs next.

Each mug gets tightly wrapped in paper. First: navy and white stripes, the one she had picked out from Target because it felt more interesting, and therefore a better choice, than the solid blue one. Then one that said "lots of patients, little patience," that her aunt had given her with a wink on her last day of medical school. Samira had glowered a bit because she was patient. She was! She could be.

Those memories don't fit in a box like the mugs themselves do.

She knows the biology, how the hippocampus consolidates memories, how the patterns form. A recollection is a physical thing, and she has seen it fail in stark-white hospital rooms. Seen a man not know his own daughter's gaze. Known she'd carry that moment long after he lost it.

So maybe they go there, folded down like the stack of spare cardboard, taking up space in her brain. Maybe it's fine they don't fit inside boxes.

Then, halfway through packing her bedroom, she runs out of boxes and has to buy more and wonders if there's room for it all.

She has lived thousands of mornings she cannot recall already, after all. She didn't get to triage any of those — urgent, trauma one, patient about to forget something that matters — and she won't get a say in these either. She'll just wake up one day short a memory, and she'll never know it.

She wants to pack them up. Wrap the good ones in paper. Set the most fragile ones, the ones with thinner edges, down more carefully than the rest, write FRAGILE on the sides. She'd hand the box to someone she trusts, watch as they carry it down the stairs with their hands under the bottom to hold the weight well, know they'll drive slower on the bad roads so the memories stay safe. Stay whole.

Her phone buzzes.

Almost there. Leave the heavy ones for me.

Samira looks at the wall of boxes she's built and filled and taped. There is no way to run the roll of tape across her brain and seal everything in.

You have to turn.

That is the message of the myth: you must. There is no version where Eurydice steps back out into the flowers and the sunlight.

You, however, will. You turn in your badge after your last shift, and they tell you to take everything out of your locker. There is nothing to take other than the overshirt you shrug onto your shoulders. No photos to untape; who would you deign to hang here?

The sky is still bright when you leave at this time of year, so you cannot hide. Once you are out from under the awning of the ambulance bay, you are free. 

Behind you there are footsteps, uneven, following you to the surface. You would know them anywhere.

Don't look back. Don't do it. Don't—

You turn.

You see him, yes. Of course you do. Eyes squinted, unused to the light, green. No, brown. Both? Too far away to tell, so you suppose you'll never know. Leaning on his good leg already, minutes into his shift.

You see the rest of it too. Sliding doors, white walls within, those depths that held you that you are only now escaping. Someone steps out, looking left, looking right. Do they seek him? Do you?

He has tried to follow you, after all, hand up, reaching for fresh air. 

If you hadn't turned, maybe you wouldn't have known that he belongs there. The darkness is his space: you see it so clearly now. 

He looks different in the sun.

He would come if you asked him to, but you turned, so you know. You know you can't. You shake your head.

Going to start posting my pieces here! Here's my latest: a Emmy nom-inspired breakdown of scenes, lines, and whose story gets told.