Saturn Sent

Your father had never stopped going. Even in his last years, when his knees complained and the walk to the church had become a small daily negotiation with his own body, he still went every Sunday and some weekdays besides, because — he told you, more than once, in the tone he reserved for things he considered simple fact — a person owed God the courtesy of showing up.

Whatever capacity you had once had for faith, you had inherited from him, before you let it go the way you let most things go that required upkeep you didn't feel you had hours to spare for. He'd mentioned the new priest to you once, years back, over dinner: a Father Baelor, transferred in from another diocese, young yet by his account, and by all reports a fine homilist. You made a noise of polite interest and never once, in all the years your father had left, went to see for yourself.

Then your father died — quickly, in the way that manages to feel both sudden and, in hindsight, inevitable for months beforehand — and it was only you and your mother left in a house that had never before had to hold just two people's worth of grief and now had far too much room for it.

Your mother wept in the kitchen at strange hours over recipes she had made a thousand times before and now, apparently, understood she was making for one person fewer. You held her. You made the calls. You signed what needed signing and discovered you could go entire days without anyone asking how you, specifically, were managing — because it had not occurred to anyone, least of all to you, that you might need managing too. You had not known, until that year, that loneliness could exist inside a house that still held another person in it.

On a Wednesday in the flat middle of an otherwise unremarkable week, for reasons you could not have fully explained under interrogation, you put on real clothes instead of the ones you had been sleeping and grieving in, and walked to the parish you had not entered in the better part of a decade.

The building had not changed, which felt like its own small insult. The same water stain crossing the ceiling beam over the side aisle. The same brass rack of votive candles, most of them lit by hands you would never know, guttering low in their red glass cups. You dipped two fingers into the stone font at the door out of a muscle memory old enough to embarrass you — you hadn't decided to do it, your hand had simply done it — and the water was cold enough to register up to your wrist. You took a pew near the back, out of an instinct you didn't examine too closely, and sat with your hands loose in your lap, turning your father's old verdict over in your mind. A fine homilist. You supposed you would judge that for yourself, if you managed to stay through the whole of it.

You laced and unlaced your fingers, conscious of how conspicuous your own restlessness must have looked beside the handful of elderly women scattered through the front pews, each of them still in the settled way of people who had done this ten thousand times before and expected to do it ten thousand times again. A small bell sounded once from somewhere near the sacristy — a clean, single note, felt more in the sternum than heard — and the women rose as one, the movement automatic, requiring no more thought from them than breathing did. You stood a half-beat behind them and turned toward the side door as he came through it.

He was not what you had pictured, though you couldn't have said what you had pictured instead. He was tall enough to duck fractionally beneath the door frame, an old habit worn smooth by however many years of practice, and built with a breadth through the shoulders and chest that the green vestments of Ordinary Time did nothing to disguise, and seemed, if anything, cut to accommodate. He crossed to the centre of the sanctuary, made his reverence to the altar, and for a moment before the Mass properly began you simply looked at him the way you might look at any large, unfamiliar object set without warning into a room you thought you knew by heart.

This, you supposed, had to be the Father Baelor your father had mentioned all those years ago, at a dinner you otherwise barely remembered. He looked, on the strength of nothing more than how he carried himself at the altar, like precisely the sort of man your father would have approved of.

The opening rites passed you in fragments — the cross traced automatically over your own chest, the responses arriving on your tongue half a second before you'd consciously recalled them, evidence that some part of you had never actually released any of this, whatever you had spent the last decade telling yourself. It was the Gospel that undid whatever fragile composure you had managed to assemble since walking in.

Father Baelor stepped to the ambo, made the small triple sign of the cross — forehead, lips, heart — that you copied without deciding to, and read from the Gospel of John: Christ's promise to his disciples, the night before he died, that he would not abandon them. I will not leave you orphaned; I will come to you.

It was a passage your father had read aloud to you more than once, in years you would rather not audit too closely, on nights neither of you could sleep for reasons you never named to each other directly. You had not thought of those nights in years. You thought of nothing else for the length of the Gospel, sitting with your spine very straight and your face arranged into the specific blankness you had perfected these last months for use at funerals, hospital corridors, and now, it seemed, church pews.

The homily was not what the voice had led you to expect. You weren't sure what you had exactly expected, to be honest, but it certainly fell somewhere more instructive, maybe, closer to a lecture. Instead, he spoke low and unforced, pitched to carry to the back pews without ever seeming to labour at it, and what he spoke of was loneliness: not as a sin requiring confession or a weakness requiring correction, but as a country nearly everyone in the room had crossed at some point, a good number of them more than once.

He told the story of the prophet Elijah, fled into the wilderness and certain he was the last faithful man left alive, so worn through by his own isolation that he begged God to let him die under a solitary broom tree — and how God had answered him finally not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the great wind tearing the mountain apart, but in what the old translations called a still, small voice, so quiet the prophet had to go silent himself and strain to catch it.

Presence, Father Baelor said, was rarely loud. It came, more often than not, in the smallest and least dramatic of forms — a hand set on a shoulder, a voice through a doorway, someone choosing, again and again, simply to remain. You are not abandoned, he said, near the close, his voice dropping lower still, and for one unreasonable, indefensible moment it felt aimed directly at the back pew where you sat with your hands gone white-knuckled in your lap. You are not orphaned. Even when it feels that way. Even now.

You heard little of what followed. You were aware, distantly, of standing and sitting in their correct places, of the practiced choreography of the Eucharist proceeding at the front of the church, but your attention had narrowed to the low cadence of his voice and stayed there, snagged, useless for much else, for the remainder of the hour. You did not go up for Communion. It did not feel earned yet — whatever grace required of a person who had spent ten years deciding this building had nothing left to offer her, you weren't ready to test in front of witnesses whether you'd been wrong.

When Mass ended and the small congregation filtered out into the ordinary Wednesday afternoon waiting for them, you stayed behind. You told yourself it was to pray, though when you tried to assemble the actual shape of a prayer in your head, you found you had lost the grammar of it somewhere in the years between. You could recall the posture without the words, kneeling with your forehead nearly against your folded hands, the old formulas half-remembered and abandoned partway through.

You were still sitting there, in the hush a church holds once everyone else has gone, when you became aware of a presence behind you, waiting with the patience of someone who had nowhere else in particular to be.

You turned. He had shed the outer vestments somewhere between the sanctuary and here, down now to the plain black cassock, and without the ceremonial weight of the chasuble he looked, if anything, larger rather than smaller — less an office now and more simply a man, broad through the shoulders and faintly stooped in the way tall men sometimes learn to stand, in rooms built at a scale for other people. He was smiling at you, and it was not the composed, public smile he had worn at the altar. This one sat a little crooked, tucked at one corner, like something he had not entirely decided to let you see. In the low light through the side windows his eyes read as two different shades entirely, and you couldn't have said with any confidence which one was closer to true.

You got to your feet too fast, some old reflex about remaining seated in front of a priest reasserting itself before you thought to question it.

"I'm afraid I haven't seen you before today." He offered his hand, and you registered, absurdly, how much larger it looked before you'd even taken it. "Are you new to the parish?"

"Not new." His palm was warm and dry, the handshake brief but not perfunctory. "Estranged is probably closer to it. I used to come here with my father, when Father Arlan had the parish."

Something shifted across his face — recognition, maybe, or just the private realization of years passing. "That was quite a while ago, then. I've had this parish almost ten years now."

"I stopped coming altogether, somewhere in there." You gave him a lopsided smile you didn't entirely feel behind.

He tilted his head slightly, looking at you from his considerable height in a way that felt like being properly seen rather than assessed, and when he spoke again there was no trace of the judgment you had braced yourself for out of old habit.

"It's a wonderful thing, coming back to Him."

"I'm not sure I'd say I've come back. Not yet." The admission left you before you'd quite decided to make it. You hadn't planned on honesty with a stranger, least of all one in a collar.

If the words troubled him at all, he didn't show it. "That's no trouble whatsoever." The corner of his mouth deepened. "Would you like me to hear your confession? I promise I won't make you feel judged. Friendly priest's oath."

You laughed, a small, surprised sound you hadn't produced in longer than you could easily place. "Maybe another time. I don't think I'm up for it today."

He nodded, unbothered, and the quiet that followed felt like permission rather than dismissal, so you turned and started toward the door, your footsteps loud against the stone in the emptied church.

You were nearly at the threshold when you heard him behind you again, his stride longer than yours, closing the distance without seeming to hurry at all.

"I'm Father Baelor, by the way." He held out his hand a second time, as though the first exchange hadn't quite counted, or this one meant something slightly different. "Though most everyone here just calls me Baelor."

You took his hand again and gave him your name. His closed fully around yours — warm, a little rough at the knuckles, engulfing rather than simply holding.

"It's been a pleasure, having you back."

You managed something close to a smile before you turned and let yourself out into the ordinary daylight, the door falling shut behind you with a weight that, for the first time in longer than you could say, did not feel entirely like an ending.

You had told yourself you wouldn't come back so soon — one visit had been forgivable, permitted on the strength of grief alone, and you had meant to leave it there. And yet here you were again, five days later, on your knees at the same back pew, arguing with a God you'd spent the better part of a decade insisting you didn't especially believe in.

"I really don't know why I'm back here," you said, low, to the wooden cross above the altar, the words barely clearing a whisper.

You'd meant it as prayer when you'd knelt. What came out instead was closer to an indictment: anger at your father for dying, resentment at your mother for being so thoroughly undone by it that there'd been no room left over for you to be undone too, something smaller and uglier aimed at yourself, for how little of what you were meant to feel you actually managed to feel most days. And underneath all of it, aimed at the cross itself like it might actually answer back — fury at God, plain and entirely unmanaged, for allowing any of it to happen in the first place. You knew exactly how this looked from the outside: a grown woman muttering to an empty chancel. You wouldn't have blamed anyone for thinking you mad. Fuck, you thought yourself mad half the time.

"I don't even know why I'm trying to talk to you," you went on anyway, some perverse momentum carrying you now that you'd started. "You've only proved yourself real by fucking up my entire family." You let out something between a laugh and a scoff, some small vicious part of you almost proud of the defiance. Your father would have killed you for saying it aloud. Father Arlan would have lectured you into an early grave, out of sheer patient disappointment.

You were still smiling faintly at your own blasphemy when a low chuckle sounded from somewhere behind you, and it startled a small, undignified sound out of you — something between a gasp and a curse.

"You really shouldn’t say things like that." Father Baelor's voice reached you before he did, warm and unbothered, that same lulling register from the pulpit put to entirely domestic use. "I hear there's a priest about."

You twisted around on the kneeler to find him a few pews back, tall even sitting, dressed only in the black of the cassock rather than anything more ceremonial. You recovered enough to manage a lopsided smile of your own. "I think the old ladies who come every single day are the ones I should actually be afraid of."

"There's one in particular who's appointed herself unofficial sacristan." He came forward and lowered himself into the pew beside you, his knees drawn up higher than the pew in front of him had been built to accommodate. "I'd be careful there, if I were you."

"Are you mocking your own flock, Father Baelor?" You'd turned fully around by now, still on your knees, to look at him properly.

He laced his hands over the back of the pew ahead and looked toward the altar rather than at you. "Merely observing." A trace of mirth touched the words. "Purely so I know what to brace for, come Sunday confessions."

You studied his profile while his attention stayed elsewhere, something you allowed yourself only because he wasn't looking. He was, you decided with a clinical honesty you rarely extended to strangers, a good-looking man. The beard did something generous for his jaw, and the collar, stark white against the black, framed the whole arrangement in a way that felt almost unfair — engineered for maximum effect on a face that presumably hadn't needed the help to begin with. You found yourself wondering, in a thought you filed away immediately as unhelpful, whether he'd have been just as striking without either — beard gone, collar gone, nothing left to signal what he was and wasn't allowed to be to you.

"I believe I heard you telling Him off, a few minutes ago." He turned his head and caught you looking, though he didn't seem to register it as anything worth remarking on. "Would you like to talk about it?"

"What is it with priests and confession?" You shook your head, grateful for the change of subject. "You're all just gossips with better outfits."

He laughed low in his chest. "This needn't be a confession. Mondays run quiet, around here. We could simply talk, if you'd rather."

"Free information, and you won't even absolve me for it?" You aimed a teasing frown his way. "Now I really know you're a gossip."

His smile deepened enough to finally reach his eyes, and you were certain, seeing it properly this close, that they weren't quite the same colour, though you couldn't have said in what way exactly they differed. Maybe one bluer than the other. "It would do you good. I promise."

You considered that for a few seconds, weighing something you couldn't entirely name. "If I'm doing this," you said finally, "I think I'd rather do it properly. In the confessional, I mean."

He only nodded and rose, offering a hand down that you took before you'd quite decided to, and led you toward the confessional set into the side wall — dark wood, a heavy curtain standing in for a door.

The interior smelled of old varnish and years of incense worked into the grain, close and dim enough that the mesh screen resolved him into little more than a suggestion: a dark shape, the pale smudge of his collar, one hand loose at rest against his knee. You settled onto the narrow kneeler, your knees complaining faintly at the thinness of the cushion.

"I don't actually remember how this starts," you admitted into the dark, feeling foolish for it. "It's been a while."

"Then we'll do it simply." His voice came low through the screen, closer somehow than it had been out in the pew, stripped of whatever distance the space was meant to enforce. "You needn't recite anything. Just tell me what's sitting on you. That's the whole of it."

You gathered what you could of your thoughts, which had scattered the moment you knelt, and started with the easiest one, because you didn't trust yourself yet to start with anything harder.

You told him about the anger — at God first, for allowing any of it, and then at your father, for the particular unfairness of an ordinary Tuesday becoming the day everything else stopped making sense. You told him about your mother, and the resentment you were ashamed even to name, at how completely her grief had swallowed the whole house, leaving you to manage the funeral home and the paperwork and her, on top of whatever you were supposedly still allowed to feel yourself. You told him, last and quietest, about the funeral itself — how you had stood dry-eyed at the graveside while cousins who'd seen your father twice a year wept without restraint, how at the reception after you'd caught yourself counting the sandwiches left on a tray instead of thinking about him at all, and had hated yourself for it in almost the same breath you'd been grateful for the distraction.

He was quiet for a moment once you'd finished, long enough that you nearly asked if he was still there. When he spoke, something in his voice had changed — pulled tighter, quieter, though no less warm.

"None of that needs absolving." A pause, brief, before he went on. "Grief isn't a sin. Neither is anger, however much it frightens you to feel it. God can bear a great deal more fury than you're capable of giving Him, I promise you that." Another pause, and when he continued, the words seemed to be reaching somewhere past the space between you, as though he were, in some way you had no means yet of naming, telling himself the same thing. "Loneliness convinces you that you're the only one who's ever stood where you're standing. You're not. You won't be, either, if you let anyone stand there with you."

You closed your eyes without deciding to, letting the voice move through you unbroken by the sight of him, and found you could feel each word land somewhere just beneath your sternum, distinct as a hand pressed flat there.

When you had said what there was to say, he walked you through a short Act of Contrition, feeding you the words a line at a time since you had lost the shape of them years ago, and then his voice dropped into the older cadence of formula — mercy and reconciliation folded into a rhythm that didn't belong to him alone, ending the way it always ended, your sins spoken loose from you and a cross traced in the air with steady hands somewhere on the other side of the screen. You said Amen because you remembered, at least, that much.

You heard him rise and draw back the curtain on his side before you trusted your own legs enough to do the same. It took you a few extra seconds — you told yourself it was your knees, stiff from the kneeler, and mostly believed it — to gather up whatever had come loose in you, listening to that voice low and unbroken by any obstruction, aimed entirely and only at you in the dark. You were fairly sure that wasn't the reaction the sacrament was designed to produce. You filed it away regardless, somewhere you didn't intend to examine too closely, and finally pushed back your own curtain.

He was waiting near the confessional, hands loose at his sides, and the smile he gave you this time didn't climb all the way to his eyes the way it had out in the pew. You couldn't have said what the difference was, exactly — something in the set of it, something you didn't yet have the information to name.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I feel different." You wrapped your arms around yourself, an old habit you hadn't consciously chosen.

"Different bad, or different good?" Something in the way he held himself shifted, almost imperceptibly, closer — as though some string you couldn't see had drawn taut between you.

"Just different." You breathed the word more than said it. "Which is better than nothing. It's a start."

You started toward the main doors, and he fell into step half a pace behind you, quiet in a way that didn't feel like absence so much as consideration. Near the threshold, you turned back to him.

"Thank you. For listening."

He shook his head, easy, deflecting the weight of it. "It's nothing. It's the job."

He hesitated, though — long enough that you noticed, long enough that whatever came next had clearly needed the extra half-second to arrive at. "You know these doors are open to you. Whenever you need them. Not only on Sundays or odd Mondays."

You looked up at him, at the mismatched eyes, and something in how he'd phrased it — whenever you need them, not whenever you need Him — struck you as slightly too warm for something owed to any parishioner off the street. Or maybe that was only your own starved and unreliable judgment, filling gaps that weren't there with whatever it currently wanted to find.

"I know," you said simply.

"Good." He nodded, more to himself than to you, it seemed, some private thought being settled. "Good. Sunday, then? I'll see you at Mass?"

You let a smile pull at one corner of your mouth as you turned on your heel toward the door, already walking backward into the beginning of an answer he wasn't going to get easily. "Don't push it, Father."

Hypocrite.

The word arrived most mornings before his feet had properly found the floor, uninvited and precise, phrased the same way it had been phrased for longer than he cared to count. 

Bloody hypocrite. How dare you counsel anyone toward righteousness when you cannot walk two steps down that road yourself? How dare you comfort a soul in despair when despair is the country you've been living in for years?

It was not so much a thought as a visitor who had long since stopped waiting to be let in. It simply arrived, sat on his chest, and stayed there until he had wrestled himself upright and into the black. He had come to think of it, with the only kind of humour he still had reliable access to, as his cross. Not poverty. Not chastity, not obedience, though God knew those extracted their own toll daily. Hypocrisy. A priest who no longer entirely believed the thing he had given his whole life to proclaiming.

He told himself, most days, that this was temporary, a crisis of faith, the kind nearly every priest he'd trained alongside admitted to somewhere in the confidence of a rectory kitchen, late, after the wine had loosened something. Faith was a theological virtue, after all. A gift, not an achievement. He'd had it once, freely given, and a gift once given could presumably be asked for again.

The problem, as Baelor saw it, was that he had been asking for four years.

His faith had gone dry as a wadi in August, and no amount of kneeling had managed to run water through it since. He kept the form of the thing scrupulously — the Office, the daily Mass, the rosary some nights when sleep wouldn't come and there was nothing else worth doing with his hands — because he had learned, early in seminary, that discipline outlasted feeling, that a man didn't stop rowing simply because he could no longer see the shore.

He had read enough John of the Cross in seminary to recognize the shape of what he was in — a dark night, technically, textbook enough that he could have lectured on it — which didn't make the nights any shorter, or any less dark. Recognizing the disease in a book had never once, in his experience, cured a man of it. He knew, with the specific and humiliating clarity of a man who had studied theology long enough to diagnose his own condition and still be unable to treat it, that there was a difference between fidelity and faith, and that he had been running almost entirely on the former.

Loneliness was the part he told no one, not even in his own confession, which he supposed was its own failure of the sacrament if nothing else.

It wasn't for lack of company. There were the parishioners — the same handful of devoted, elderly women who left casseroles at the rectory door like offerings and asked after his health with more attention than his own mother sometimes managed. There were the other priests, the ones he saw at diocesan meetings and ordination anniversaries, men who clapped his shoulder and asked how the parish was doing and never once, in fifteen years, asked how he was doing, because none of them had been trained to ask that question of each other and neither had he. There was his family — brothers, more nephews than he could always keep straight at a glance, a standing invitation to Sunday dinner he took up perhaps twice a month, sitting at the end of a table crowded with other men's children, uncle to all of them and father to none, which had once felt like a clean and holy kind of sacrifice and now, some nights, simply felt like a room he was allowed to visit but never quite live in.

None of it touched the actual thing. He was lonely. So fucking lonely, if he let himself reach for the one word he'd never once used from the pulpit, in the one register no parishioner would ever hear, in the privacy of his own skull, where apparently no vow of composure held any jurisdiction at all.

He knew, in the part of his mind that still functioned as a theologian even when the rest of him had stopped functioning as a believer, exactly what was supposed to go in that hollow he felt in his chest. It had gone there before. He could remember — not abstractly, but with the kind of sense-memory that ambushed him at inconvenient moments — what it had felt like in his first years ordained, kneeling before the tabernacle at two in the morning because he simply wanted to, not because the breviary demanded it, and feeling something answer him that was not merely his own voice bouncing back. He hadn't imagined that. He was nearly certain he hadn't imagined that. But it had been a long time since anything had answered, and he had run out of new ways to ask.

Which was, he suspected, why he had not been able to stop thinking about her.

She had come to him unannounced, not quite a fortnight ago now, and confessed in the dark, through the screen, in a voice trying very hard to sound steadier than it was, to a loneliness so exact in its shape that he had sat on his side of that screen and felt, for one disorienting moment, as though he were somehow listening to himself. Grief for a father. Resentment she was ashamed of. The exact exhaustion of being the person everyone assumed was managing, because she had gotten so good at performing it that no one thought to check. He knew that exhaustion. He had built a fifteen-year vocation on top of it.

He'd told her, because it was true and because it was his job to say true things in that room: loneliness convinces you that you're the only one who's ever stood where you're standing. You're not. You won't be, either, if you let anyone stand there with you.

He had believed it, saying it. He still believed it, as doctrine. And walking back to the rectory afterward, hands cold in his pockets, he had been visited by the obvious, unavoidable question, arriving with all the cruelty of a thought that shows up exactly when a man is feeling pleased with himself: had he ever once let anyone stand there with him?

He hadn't. He knew that the moment the question landed. Not his brothers, who would have tried, who had tried — one of them, Maekar, had cornered him once after a dinner, quiet, asking if he was alright, really alright, and Baelor had said yes, of course, only tired, and watched the offer close itself back up like a door he had chosen, deliberately, not to walk through. Not the other priests. Not even, if he was honest, God — not really, not with the thing that was actually wrong, because admitting the actual thing out loud, even to Him, even in the dark, even where it was supposedly safe to admit anything, felt like the one betrayal he wasn't sure he'd survive committing.

He recognized something else in her, too, underneath the grief. That same instinct to manage her own drowning quietly rather than let anyone watch her go under, the same reflex against being a burden. He knew that instinct from the inside. He'd built a career on it.

It frightened him a little, watching it in someone twenty years his junior, because he knew exactly where that road went if nothing interrupted it early enough. He wanted, with an urgency that surprised him in its intensity, to reach her before she arrived wherever he currently was. Before the loneliness calcified in her the way his had done.

He simply didn't know how to do it without frightening her off entirely, without becoming one more authority figure informing her what she needed, which was, he suspected, exactly the kind of attention she'd spent her whole adult life quietly avoiding.

He was still turning the problem over, unsolved, on the Sunday morning he stood in the sacristy working his arms into the alb, the young deacon's voice carrying faintly from the sanctuary as the boy tested the bell.

The vestments went on in their fixed order, the way they had for fifteen years — the alb first, white and formless, the cincture cinched at the waist, the stole crossed over his chest the way it was worn by priests rather than draped straight the way a deacon wore it, and finally the chasuble, green for the long ordinary stretch of the year.

He murmured the old vesting prayers as he went, mostly from habit rather than intention, half in the Latin an elderly priest had taught him as a seminarian, before he'd properly learned to shave. He caught his own reflection, briefly, in the sacristy's dark window as he settled the chasuble across his shoulders — a tall man, greying now at the temples, dressed for a role he had once wanted with his whole undivided self and now simply performed, competently, the way a man performs any task he has done long enough to stop feeling much of anything while doing it.

Get it together, he told himself, in the tone he might have used on a nephew who'd skinned a knee and was making more of it than the injury strictly warranted. It's an hour. You've done this ten thousand times before.

The bell sounded, thin and clear, and Baelor walked out into the nave doing the practical arithmetic he always did on the way to the altar; a rough count of heads translated automatically into a rough count of hosts, a habit worn so smooth by repetition it required almost no conscious thought at all.

Except that his eyes, running the width of the church, caught on the back pew and simply stopped there, sum completely abandoned.

She was there. Sitting exactly where she'd sat the last two times, in the pew closest to the door, as though she wanted a clean line of retreat available at all moments, as though some part of her still hadn't decided whether she was staying. She looked, from across the church, like she'd apologize for existing in the space if anyone asked her to.

Baelor thought, with a conviction that arrived whole and immediate and slightly too fierce for a passing observation, that she could not have been more wrong about that if she'd tried.

The midday light was coming through the east windows at the low, slanting angle it only managed for a few hours that time of the year, falling directly across the back pews in long panels of colour, and it happened to be resting on her the moment he looked — gold and red and a deep, churchy blue laid over her like something intentional, though he knew perfectly well it was only the accident of architecture and the hour.

He thought, with the part of his brain that had apparently decided today was the day to stop cooperating with the rest of him, that he had never, in all his years at this altar, seen anything as purely, uselessly beautiful as her sitting alone in stained-glass light when she had no idea anyone was looking at her, and no idea, either, how much sorrow she carried visibly enough that a stranger could read it from forty feet away.

He lost, he would later admit to no one, a genuine portion of his own homily to the fact of her. He knew the passage well enough to preach it on autopilot — he'd written the thing himself three days earlier, in a version of himself that had apparently not accounted for this — but somewhere in the second point he caught himself having skipped an entire line of his own argument, recovered only by long practice and the mercy of a congregation too polite to notice a priest losing his thread. He watched her instead, in the gaps his voice could apparently manage without him. Watched her bite the inside of her cheek when something he said caught on some private snag of hers. Watched her brow pull together, briefly, at a line about mercy, as though mercy were a concept she was still deciding whether to trust.

Time did the thing it did during Mass, folding oddly, and he surfaced properly only at the Communion, distributing the host down the line with the automatic grace of long practice, until he registered, with a small, precise jolt, that she had risen from the back pew and joined the queue.

She had not, he remembered clearly, gone up the first time she'd come. He had noticed that too, at the time, and filed it away as simply information: she wasn't ready, and a priest who pushed a person toward the altar before they were ready did more harm than the waiting ever could. That she was standing now, moving forward a few careful people at a time, felt disproportionately significant for something so small — a woman joining a line — and he was aware, distantly, of being moved by it in a way that had very little to do with sacramental theology and a great deal to do with simply being glad, in some entirely personal register, that whatever had been keeping her back had loosened its grip a little.

She reached him a few communicants later, and knelt.

He hadn't expected the kneeling. Most of the parish took the host standing these days, the old rail rarely used except by the handful who'd never adjusted to the newer practice, but she went down onto the worn kneeler like it was a thing she'd done a thousand times before she'd ever stopped, muscle memory outrunning whatever else she might have decided about the morning, and he found himself praying, hard and specific and entirely impious in its motivation, that his hands would hold steady.

They did not, quite. Not enough that he thought anyone else would have caught it — fifteen years gave a man excellent control over the visible parts of himself — but he felt the small tremor in his own fingers as he lifted the host, and knew precisely why it was there, and hated himself for it with an efficiency that would have been almost funny had it not been happening to him specifically, in front of her, at the altar, during the single most sacred moment the day contained.

"The body of Christ," he said, and his voice, at least, held.

She opened for it the way most of the older parishioners still did, tongue offered rather than hands, and he registered the fact of it with a clarity he immediately, furiously, wished he hadn't. The pink, slight wetness of it, the plain vulnerability of the gesture, a woman kneeling in front of him with her mouth open and her eyes lifted to his through her lashes, trusting him with something that had nothing at all to do with what his body had apparently decided to make of the moment.

"Amen," she said, quiet, and he set the host down against her tongue, and for perhaps a quarter of a second, no more, the pad of his thumb grazed the wet warmth of it.

He felt the reaction low and immediate and entirely outside his own permission — his cock twitching hard against the front of the alb, an animal response to a moment he had spent his entire adult life training himself out of having at all, arriving anyway, uninvited, in the one setting on earth where it had absolutely no right to.

She rose. Crossed herself. Returned to her pew without a backward glance, entirely unaware, he was fairly sure, of anything beyond having received Communion for the first time in over a decade, which should have been the thing occupying the whole of his attention, and which he found he could not currently locate among the noise of his own reaction.

He had, God help him, an entire line of communicants still waiting.

He served the next in line, an elderly man who had been kneeling at that rail longer than Baelor had been standing behind it, with the effortful concentration of someone performing a familiar task while a separate part of his mind stood off to one side, arms crossed, informing him in no uncertain terms exactly what he was.

Hypocrite, the voice supplied, obligingly, and for once he couldn't argue with it.

He had spent the walk back to the rectory that first week convinced the problem in front of him was pastoral: a lonely, grieving young woman who needed someone steady to reach for, and a priest well-placed, by training if nothing else, to be that steady thing. He understood now, standing at his own altar with his body still humming with something it had no business feeling anywhere, let alone here, that he had gotten the shape of the danger badly, embarrassingly wrong.

The problem was never going to be knowing how to help her.

The problem was going to be whether he could stand this close to her at all without eventually wanting something from her that had nothing to do with helping, and everything to do with the plain, damning sin he had promised, fifteen years ago, in front of a bishop and his own weeping mother, that he would never again allow himself to want.

Something close to a week had passed since the confessional, and you had, despite every intention to the contrary, kept coming back. You told yourself it was for different reasons each time — the quiet, mostly, a kind of nothing that a weekday Mass demanded of you, ten minutes where nobody needed managing and your mother's grief could exist without an audience for once. In all four of those weeks, you had not planned to receive Communion. The plan, such as it existed, was to sit in the pew and let the ritual move around you, spectator rather than participant, the way you'd done as a child through the parts of Mass you were still too young to properly understand.

This Sunday was different, though you couldn't have said exactly when the decision got made. Somewhere between the Gospel and the final blessing, some quiet negotiation appeared to have concluded itself without consulting you, and by the time Father Baelor descended from the presbytery, distributing the host himself, your body had already decided the matter on your behalf.

You didn't remember deciding to stand. One moment you were sitting with your hands folded loosely in your lap, and the next your feet had committed you to the aisle, already three steps into the queue before the rest of you had caught up to ask what, precisely, it thought it was doing.

You told yourself the nerves climbing your spine were simply the ordinary nerves of the thing itself — ten years since you'd last done this, and your body apparently hadn't forgotten how much weight the act was meant to carry, even if the rest of you had spent a decade pretending otherwise. That explanation held for approximately four pews. By the fifth you were close enough to watch him working down the line, steady, unbothered, that same soft cadence repeating itself to each person in turn, and the nerves sharpened into something with a considerably more specific target.

You watched the woman two ahead of you receive the host into her open palm, easy, practiced, already turning away before she'd finished her Amen. That was how you'd meant to do it too — you'd decided as much, sitting in the pew, some sensible, unbothered part of you resolving to take the host in hand like a normal person having a normal religious experience.

The line moved with the same unbroken rhythm every queue like it seemed to share, and ahead of you his words repeated themselves at even intervals — the body of Christ, the body of Christ — until they nearly lost their shape entirely and became simply sound, a current pulling you forward rather than a sentence you were choosing to walk toward. And then it was your turn, and you were on your knees on the worn kneeler before you'd consciously authorized the movement, spine bent, chin lifted, and your tongue, God, your tongue was already out, waiting, and you were looking up at him through your lashes in a way that had nothing to do with piety and everything to do with something you didn't have a clean word for yet.

You had spent a great deal of your adolescence being taught, carefully and thoroughly, the difference between reverence and its imitations. You could probably still recite, if pressed, the specific ways a person's posture and intention were meant to align during the sacraments, the whole careful presence of a well-formed conscience. Nobody had prepared you for how completely that presence could collapse the moment desire decided to borrow its vocabulary. Kneeling had always meant one thing. It appeared to now mean several things simultaneously, and you had no reliable way of establishing which one currently governed your body.

You wondered, distantly, mortified, whether any of it read on your face the way it felt from the inside. Whether a man could look down at a woman kneeling in front of him with her mouth open and simply know.

"The body of Christ." His voice reached you barely above its usual register, quieter than you'd heard him use even in the confessional, and you had exactly long enough to wonder whether that meant anything before you ran out of time to wonder it.

You could have sworn — though you dismissed it in the same half-second you thought it, because surely you were simply looking for things now, seeing significance in whatever your own hunger handed you — that something moved behind his eyes as he looked down at you. Some fraction of dilation, dark spreading further than the low church light could account for. You told yourself you'd imagined it. A composed man, too many years a priest, did not come undone over a woman kneeling at an altar rail. You were, you reminded yourself, spectacularly good at inventing evidence for whatever you already wanted to be true.

"Amen," you managed, in a register you didn't entirely recognize as your own, and took the host onto your tongue. It tasted the way it always had — of nothing, faintly of paper, a blankness you'd forgotten could hold so much weight — and you drew the wet weight of it back into your mouth, uncomfortably aware, for the first time in your entire pious childhood, of every part of a gesture you had never once thought to be self-conscious about.

You crossed yourself, rose, and turned back toward your pew on legs you were no longer entirely confident belonged to you. By the time you reached it you had abandoned any pretence of composure and simply knelt again, forehead dropping toward your folded hands in a posture any observer would have read as devotion, and which was, if you were honest with yourself, mostly a structural decision. You did not trust your knees with your weight. Kneeling, at least, put the failure somewhere expected.

For however long remained of the Mass — ten minutes, perhaps, though it passed with the strange, syrupy slowness of time that refuses to behave when you most need it to — you were aware of a pair of mismatched eyes finding you, again and again, across the width of the nave.

You did not look back. You told yourself it was decorum. The truer answer was that you did not trust yourself either to survive whatever expression you found waiting for you there, and some cowardly, self-protective part of you had already decided, without evidence, what that expression would be. Disappointment, probably. A priest, watching a woman make a spectacle of an ancient, most-sacred rite because some starved, undisciplined part of her had wanted an excuse to kneel in front of him. You could not have named a single thing Baelor had actually done to earn that verdict. You handed it to him anyway, because it was easier to believe yourself pathetic than to consider the alternative: that he had looked, and kept looking, for reasons that had nothing to do with judgment at all.

It was, you supposed, a very on-brand mistake for you specifically to make: assuming the worst interpretation of yourself before anyone else had the chance to offer one, a habit you'd perfected over exactly the kind of year you'd just had.

When Mass finally released you, you gathered your things and made for the doors, only to find your escape blocked by the usual congregation of elderly women, several of whom had apparently decided the threshold was an ideal location for a leisurely post-Mass conference. Blasted old mules, you thought, uncharitably, easing your way through the knot of cardigans and hairspray with what you hoped read as patience rather than the quiet panic actually driving you.

The churchyard held its usual after-Mass scattering, knots of parishioners trading the same three pleasantries they traded every week, a couple of children weaving between legs, the sharp, cold smell of stone and cut grass that November insisted on despite the season otherwise doing its best to die.

You had almost recovered something like your normal footing when you spotted him, already outside, a few yards off, saying his farewells to a cluster of departing parishioners. You watched him for a moment before he saw you. Safe, for once, in the anonymity of simply being one more parishioner in a scattering crowd. He had a hand braced warm on some old man's shoulder, head inclined to catch whatever the man was telling him, nodding along at exactly the right intervals with the practiced attentiveness of someone who had spent years convincing an entire parish that each of them, individually, had his whole and undivided attention.

It was, you thought, uncomfortably close to the same trick you performed for your mother most days: competent kindness worn like a coat, covering whatever was actually happening underneath it. You wondered, watching him, whether he ever got tired of wearing his.

He must have slipped out through the sacristy door while you were fighting your way past the old guard. You prayed, with a fervency that would have embarrassed you an hour ago, that he hadn't clocked you yet, that you might simply slide past unseen and process the entire morning in the privacy of your own head, where it belonged.

God, apparently, was not in a forgiving mood.

"Wait—" His voice found you before you'd made it three steps past him.

This must be penance, you thought, aiming the complaint at God directly, for telling You off the other week. You turned anyway, because ignoring a priest calling your name across a churchyard felt like a significantly worse option than facing him.

He was still in the green chasuble, and you decided, with the kind of petty, deflecting focus you reached for whenever you needed somewhere safer to put your attention, that green wasn't his colour. Black suited him better — sharper, somehow, unfairly so, as though the absence of colour did something the vestments simply couldn't.

The two of you had drifted, without either of you seeming to choose it, a little apart from the general flow of departing parishioners, into a pocket of relative quiet near the low stone wall bordering the churchyard.

"You received Communion." He was smiling as he said it, easy, a little pleased, as though the fact of it were a small gift someone had handed him unexpectedly.

You nodded once, feeling suddenly, absurdly, like a student called on for an answer she wasn't sure was correct. "I thought it seemed appropriate. Sorry if I — I don't know, did something wrong."

His smile only deepened at that, wide enough to show teeth that weren't quite perfect. One canine set very slightly forward of the other, both slightly longer than the average, a small imperfection that somehow sharpened the effect rather than softening it. You found yourself thinking, with a specificity that alarmed you, exactly what those particular teeth would feel like against skin, and then you thought about the fact that you'd thought that, and wanted, briefly and sincerely, to walk directly into oncoming traffic.

This was, you reflected grimly, an extraordinarily inconvenient time to discover a specific interest in a man's teeth. You filed the discovery away next to the growing pile of other discoveries you'd made about yourself these last four weeks; a pile you were doing an increasingly poor job of pretending not to notice.

"You did nothing wrong." His voice gentled further, if that was even possible. "In fact, I'm rather proud of you."

Proud of you.

You blinked at him and felt the words land somewhere considerably lower than your chest, spreading out into a warmth that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Spirit. You were, in that moment, sincerely and profoundly grateful for whatever biological quirk kept the more obvious evidence of arousal confined to men, because you would otherwise have been standing in a churchyard in a state no amount of decorum could have disguised.

You noted, somewhere beneath the more immediate crisis, that it wasn't only your body responding to the words. Nobody had told you they were proud of you in longer than you wanted to calculate. Your father had said it constantly, casually, about report cards and parallel parking and nothing in particular, and you hadn't realized, until a priest said it in a mostly unrelated context outside a church, exactly how much you'd been missing hearing it from anyone at all.

You must have taken too long to respond, because something crossed his face, a flicker of doubt, quickly papered over. "Sorry. That came out a bit strange, didn't it." He laughed, short, and for a moment looked almost boyish about it, which did nothing at all to help your current situation.

You laughed too, mostly to have somewhere to put the air currently trapped in your chest, and mostly to keep from examining the warm, insistent ache that had settled low in you and did not seem inclined to leave anytime soon. "Don't worry about it," you said, and then, because the silence that followed felt like it needed something in it, "it was nice seeing you."

"Nice indeed." He said it slowly, turning the phrase over like he was testing its weight, and you had the distinct, mortifying sense that you'd just stumbled into the kind of conversation you'd have mocked mercilessly in anyone else: two people standing a foot apart in a churchyard, trading pleasantries like teenagers who'd forgotten how words worked.

You were already half-turned to go when he spoke again. "We'll be getting the church ready for Christmas soon — decorations, the nativity, that sort of thing. We could always use another set of hands, if you were interested."

You hadn't expected that. Some vague, formless plan on your part had involved politely declining further entanglement with this parish beyond whatever your body had apparently already committed you to this morning, and here he was, casually assuming a future in which you'd be back, repeatedly, with a staple gun and a box of ornaments.

"Sure." You turned fully back to him, caught slightly off guard. "I mean — yes. I'll see what I can do."

He looked, for just a moment, more hopeful about that than the offer strictly warranted, though he recovered fast enough that you might have imagined it too, the way you'd apparently decided to imagine everything else about him today.

He looked as though he meant to say something further, but an elderly woman intercepted him first — the sacristan-adjacent one, you suspected, from the sheer righteousness of her posture — and launched into what appeared to be less a conversation than a fully prepared monologue on the subject of the Advent wreath.

Baelor towered over her, patient, nodding along to whatever she was saying while his eyes found yours over the top of her head, faintly, helplessly amused.

You mouthed good luck at him and turned to leave, and caught, in the last half-second before you did, the flash of one more toothy, uneven, entirely unpriestly grin aimed directly at you.

You walked home with absolutely no memory of the walk itself.

It was only much later, sitting at your own kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of you, that you let yourself think properly about any of it. The kneeling, the eyes, every feeling that came onto you without your permission.

You thought about the fact that you'd gone looking, four weeks ago, for the specific comfort of being comprehended without judgment, the thing you remembered feeling as a child and had wanted back badly enough to sit through your own grief to get it.

You had not, at any point in that search, accounted for the possibility that the comprehension might arrive wearing a Roman collar, or that wanting it might eventually stop feeling like faith and start feeling like something considerably harder to confess.

You thought, too, about the Christmas decorations, about staple guns and small nativity figures and days of proximity you had apparently just volunteered yourself into, without any of the caution the last hour should reasonably have taught you. You told yourself you'd think more carefully about that later. But you did not, in fact, do it.

You simply marked the date in the calendar on your phone, and found, when you looked at it sitting there among your mother's doctor's appointments and your own overdue dentist visit, that some small, traitorous part of you was already looking forward to it.

Christmas had a way of crawling under your skin, the way old songs do. You could go months without thinking of it at all, and then a single carol drifting out of a shop doorway would drop you straight back into a kitchen you hadn't properly stood in for over a decade. You remembered good Christmases, the kind that still arrived intact in memory without needing much reconstruction: the house loud with cousins, someone's dog underfoot, your grandmother's insistence on a specific brand of nougat nobody but her actually liked, the whole extended chaos of a family that hadn't yet learned how to lose people. Those years had been good in the uncomplicated way only childhood afforded. You hadn't yet understood that a table could shrink, that the chairs pulled out each year could simply, one by one, stop being needed.

You thought, unbidden, of the last Christmas Eve you'd spent with your father whole and healthy and utterly unaware of what the coming year held for him — the two of you assembling a jigsaw puzzle at the kitchen table past midnight because neither of you could sleep and neither of you wanted to admit it, some ridiculous thousand-piece rendering of a lighthouse he'd bought on a whim and insisted on finishing before morning, as though the deadline mattered to anyone but him. You'd found the last piece around two, and he'd made you both cocoa to celebrate, badly, too much sugar and not nearly enough milk, and you had not known, sitting there in your pyjamas laughing at his terrible cocoa, that you were spending the last ordinary, uncomplicated Christmas you'd ever get with him.

You would have paid considerably more attention, you liked to tell yourself, if you'd known. You weren't entirely sure that was true. You suspected you'd have taken it for granted regardless, the way you seemed to have been built to take most good things for granted right up until they were gone.

They had started thinning sometime in your teens, the guest list first, then the feeling itself, until Christmas became something you observed rather than inhabited — a season that happened around you while some quieter, more adult part of you took inventory of who was missing. You supposed that was simply what growing up did to a holiday built entirely on presence. This year the table would seat two, and one chair would stay pushed in on principle rather than practicality, because neither you nor your mother had yet found the courage to actually put it away.

Which was perhaps part of why you found yourself, on a Tuesday evening in the beginning of December, standing on a folding chair in the nave of a church that wasn't strictly yours, marvelling at the old women who'd spent the better part of the afternoon transforming the place into something out of a Christmas card. They'd draped garland along every available surface with a fervent, uncomplicated joy you found yourself envying more than you were entirely comfortable admitting.

You glanced toward the altar, toward the plain wooden cross presiding over all of it. You could spare me a little of whatever they've got, you thought, directing the request at Him with the blend of irony and genuine hope you'd become fluent in these past almost-two months. He didn't answer, which by now you'd come to expect. Silence, you'd decided, was simply His preferred register of correspondence with you.

You supposed you owed whatever had brought you back to this parish in October a debt you hadn't properly paid yet. Somewhere in the weeks since, without your quite noticing the transition, the building had become something closer to a bunker than a place of worship; somewhere you could exist without the performance the rest of your life currently demanded of you. You didn't have to be the strong one here. Not because you necessarily were the strong one everywhere else, but because here, specifically, nobody was paying close enough attention to require it of you.

The old women, you were fairly certain, didn't particularly care for you. You'd become something of a fixture over the autumn — reliably present, reliably unwilling to stay for the rosary, reliably uninterested in the small, warm currency of parish gossip they traded so easily among themselves — and you supposed that reticence read, correctly, as a kind of standoffishness.

You couldn't entirely blame them for the verdict. In the interest of honesty, which spoke poorly of whatever devout young woman a stranger might have glimpsed in you at first glance, you found you didn't much care for them either. It wasn't unkindness, exactly. You simply had nothing left over, most days, for the effort community required, and the women had sensed that absence the way people always seemed to sense exactly the thing you were trying hardest not to show.

You'd lost track of the hour somewhere in the effort of getting the wreath symmetrical — a task that had absorbed you far more completely than its actual importance warranted, the satisfying tyranny of a problem with a correct answer, unlike most of what currently occupied your days.

By the time you next surfaced enough to notice your surroundings, full dark had settled outside the tall windows, and the women who'd spent the afternoon polishing candlesticks and dusting the reredos had long since collected their coats and gone home to their own, presumably fuller houses. There was one stubborn corner of the wreath that refused to sit flush against the beam, and you stapled it into submission with more force than the task strictly required.

"You know, every single one of those will need to come out again come January." The familiar, lulling voice found you from somewhere near the floor.

You looked down from your perch — you'd had to stand on the chair to reach the beam over the door — and found him below you, his face arriving at roughly the level of your waist even accounting for the height the chair gave you. Why was he so fucking tall, you thought, not for the first time since October.

"I'm sure you'll find some other charitable soul to deal with it," you said, aiming for breezy and mostly landing there.

He laughed, low, and the sound did something to the base of your spine you'd rather not have examined closely.

You fixed the last staple and pivoted on the chair to face him properly. "Besides," you added, smirking, "I think some of these staples are older than I am."

His own smirk answered yours, quick and easy. Over the weeks you'd known him, you had arrived at the settled, private conclusion that Baelor was, against every expectation you'd walked in with that first Wednesday, a genuinely good priest to know.

Nothing like Father Arlan's gentle, uncomplicated warmth. Baelor's register was drier, more grounded, quick, despite it, to turn a homily's more solemn point into something almost funny, or at least as funny as a man in his position could reasonably manage without causing a diocesan incident. He'd once, memorably, described a visiting bishop's homily as spiritually correct but tragically overlong, pitched just quietly enough for only you to catch during the coffee hour afterward, and you'd had to disguise your laugh as a coughing fit for the better part of a minute.

But there was something else, too, something you'd started cataloguing without quite meaning to.

You'd caught it first during a November homily on the Prodigal Son, of all things. A pause where his voice simply stopped, a beat too long even for effect, his gaze gone somewhere past the back pews entirely before he recovered himself and finished the line. You remembered, too, a Tuesday afternoon that same month when you'd found him alone in the sacristy long after any practical reason for him to still be there, hands loosely folded, eyes fixed on nothing in particular, so thoroughly somewhere else that he hadn't heard you knock. It had taken him a full three seconds to resurface enough to greet you; three seconds in which his face had held an expression so nakedly exhausted you'd nearly turned around and left rather than intrude on it. By the time he'd properly noticed you, the mask was back in place, warm and unbothered, and you'd both pretended, with the same silent, mutual courtesy, that you hadn't seen anything at all.

There was a darkness sitting behind those mismatched eyes that had nothing to do with the warm, careful light he'd clearly spent years learning to project for public consumption. Something you recognized, with an unsettling flash of kinship, because you'd been living behind a similar performance yourself for the better part of a year. Even now, watching him smile at your staple joke, you could see it there underneath, patient and entirely unmoved by whatever surface amusement was currently crossing his face.

You had, on more than one uncharitable evening alone in your room, caught yourself wanting to reach up and kiss that darkness straight off him; an urge that arrived, inconveniently, with startling specificity, and that you suppressed each time by picturing, with deliberate cruelty toward yourself, the exact white of his collar glowing that much brighter in your mind's eye. A small and effective penance you'd invented all on your own.

"Here." You held the staple gun out to him, resigned. "Take this and help me down."

He reached for it with a half-smile still playing at his mouth, but instead of taking your hand, he simply set the staple gun down on the nearest pew and stayed exactly where he was, making no move whatsoever toward a helping distance.

"You got yourself up there," he said. "I'm reasonably confident you can manage the trip back down unassisted."

"And you can manage the very interesting phone call to the coroner," you shot back, "when I crack my skull open on these charming marble floors."

He shook his head, something between exasperation and fond disbelief crossing his face, but he came to help you regardless.

You'd expected a hand; his palm extended for you to brace against as you stepped down, the same practical courtesy any decent person would offer someone perched too high on unstable furniture. What he did instead rewired something in your chest before you'd fully registered it was happening. His hands came to your waist, both of them, spanning nearly the whole width of you with room to spare, and closed there with an easy, certain strength that lifted rather than merely assisted.

You came down off the chair already caught. His hands didn't release you once your feet found the floor, they stayed exactly where they'd landed, warm even through the fabric of your sweater, and the momentum of the drop left you standing closer to him than either of you had ever managed before, the backs of your knees still grazing the chair's edge, your front nearly flush against the solid wall of him. You had to tip your head back to find his face at all, the angle sudden and unfamiliar even after two months of knowing exactly how tall he was in the abstract.

And when you found it, his expression wasn't one you had a name filed away for. Not the easy mirth from a minute ago. Not the quiet darkness you'd just spent an entire private paragraph of your own thoughts cataloguing. Not even the careful, generic kindness he handed out to every stranger who walked through the doors. This was something else, something focused entirely on you with an intensity that made you feel, absurdly, like the only thing left standing in the building.

The church itself had gone very quiet around you both — no children running, no old women's chatter, nothing but the two of you and the faint, resinous smell of fresh pine garland strung along every surface that afternoon, incongruously festive against whatever was actually unfolding here.

"We wouldn't want to have to explain to our self-appointed sacristan why she'd need to clean blood off her floors, would we?"

His voice, when it finally arrived, had dropped somewhere you hadn't heard it go before. Low, rough at the edges, scraped clean of the careful, cultivated softness he used from the pulpit and in the confessional alike. Fuck, you thought, with the kind of clarity reserved for genuine emergencies, and had to physically bite the inside of your cheek to keep something considerably less dignified than a word from escaping you.

Your brain, which had apparently decided this was the correct moment to abandon you entirely, produced a single unhelpful thought at top volume: that whatever you were currently feeling qualified, by any reasonable Catholic accounting, as a sin already fully committed, whether or not your body ever got around to acting on it. His hands were still at your waist. He had not moved them, and you found you had absolutely no intention of pointing that out to him.

"I can only imagine the headlines," you managed, aiming for something like your usual register and landing somewhere considerably shakier. "Beloved cool local priest murders parishioner over minor stapling dispute."

He laughed at that — a low, private sound you felt as much as heard, given how little distance currently separated the two of you — and in the same motion your own hands found his wrists, not to push him away, you noted with some private alarm, but simply to have somewhere to put your hands that wasn't the fabric of the cassock that covered his chest.

"Finally," he said, something almost boyish slipping into his voice despite its lower register, "you admit I'm a cool priest."

"Never said the opposite," you managed, and were fairly certain your heartbeat had become audible at this point, some frantic percussion filling your own ears loudly enough that you half expected him to hear it too, if he simply stopped talking long enough to listen for it.

He didn't stop talking. He also didn't step back.

What you noticed, in the strange, suspended quiet that followed, wasn't the words at all: it was the small, controlled way the distance between your faces kept shrinking, inch by inch, so gradual you might have missed it entirely if every nerve in your body hadn't been standing at full and humiliating attention.

His eyes had dropped, briefly, to somewhere south of your own eyes, and you felt the weight of that gaze land on your mouth like a physical touch you hadn't known a look alone could carry. You didn't move away. You were fairly sure, standing there with his hands still warm at your waist and the whole of him leaning steadily closer, that moving away had stopped being something your body currently had access to as an option.

Then thunder cracked somewhere close enough to rattle the stained glass in its leading, and the spell broke apart all at once.

Baelor recoiled like he'd been struck, stumbling half a step backward and nearly catching his heel against the kneeler of the pew at his back. His hands left your waist so abruptly the absence of them registered as its own small shock, cold rushing in where his palms had been. He put several feet of distance between you with the swift, overcorrected urgency of a man putting out a fire he'd only just noticed was burning him, and you stood exactly where he'd left you, rooted to the same patch of marble floor, arms hanging uselessly at your sides because you couldn't immediately think what else to do with them.

He turned toward the nearest window, ostensibly checking the weather, though you suspected the actual view held considerably less of his attention than whatever was currently happening behind his own eyes. You watched his shoulders rise and fall once, twice, some private negotiation being conducted entirely without your input.

"I should be going," you said, into the silence neither of you seemed inclined to fill, wrapping your arms around yourself in a gesture you recognized, distantly, as purely defensive, though you couldn't have said exactly what you thought you were defending against at this point.

He looked back at you then, and you caught the specific effort it took him to swallow whatever he'd been about to say instead of the thing he actually said, which was, "Right." A short, laboured breath followed the word, like it had cost him something to produce. "Have you got an umbrella?"

You nodded, not trusting your voice with anything more elaborate, and busied yourself gathering your coat and bag from the pew where you'd left them, grateful for the excuse to look at literally anything besides him.

"I'll come back tomorrow," you said, to the buttons of your coat rather than to his face, "to finish whatever's left."

He said nothing to that. When you finally made yourself look up, he was watching you with an expression you didn't have the emotional bandwidth left to interpret, and you decided, with the last reserves of self-preservation currently available to you, that you didn't especially want to try.

"Good night, Baelor."

You hadn't called him that before — not to his face, not without the Father in front of it — and you felt the shape of his name leave your mouth like something you'd been keeping in a drawer you'd forgotten you owned. You didn't wait to see what it did to his expression. You turned and walked to the doors, footsteps too loud against the marble in the church's electric hush, and did not look back once — not through the doors, not into the wet dark of the churchyard, not all the way to your bicycle.

You weren't sure, if you had, that you would have found the will left in you to actually leave.

What exactly are you doing?

Baelor asked himself the question kneeling at the side of his bed, in the small, plain bedroom of the parish quarters that had been the whole of his home for ten years now. Narrow bed, a crucifix above the headboard he'd hung there himself his first week, a desk crowded with breviaries he increasingly opened out of habit rather than hunger.

Are you out of your mind entirely?

For the first time in longer than he wanted to calculate, he knelt not performing the posture but actually reaching for what it was meant to produce — comfort, or something adjacent to it, anything at all that might quiet the chaos currently occupying his skull.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven—"

His voice wavered on the fourth word and gave out entirely somewhere in the fifth.

"Our Father—"

Her laugh arrived instead. Not summoned, simply there, whole and uninvited. The exact pitch of it from an hour ago when she'd made the joke about the coroner, and behind the laugh, inevitably, her face: chin tipped back to find his, mouth still curved with the last of the humour, eyes doing something he hadn't yet found a word brave enough to use.

He lowered his head further, forehead nearly meeting his own clasped hands. He had heard that laugh perhaps a hundred times over these past two months. He could not account for why it should return to him now, tonight, with such insistence, refusing to be filed away with the evening's other ordinary noise.

He knew the shape of temptation well enough by now to recognize its usual visitors. Fifteen years he'd been fighting it in one form or another, and for most of that decade and a half it had arrived the way temptation was supposed to — faceless, fleeting, a passing current easily broken by discipline and the plain stubbornness of prayer. This was different. This had roots. And prayer, tonight, was not coming to him with anything like its old ease.

When, he wondered, had those roots first taken hold? He turned the question over the way a man probes a bruise to test how deep it goes, expecting each interaction between them to yield the same comfortable diagnosis he'd been offering himself for weeks: compassion, simply. A priest's ordinary, sanctioned care for a grieving soul.

How readily the heart baptized its own sins, dressing them in vestments respectable enough to walk past its own conscience unchallenged.

He knew, kneeling there with the evidence assembling itself against him one memory at a time, that this had never been only compassion. Compassion had not made him remember, with the specific clarity of a man cataloguing evidence, the warmth of her palm the very first time they'd shaken hands beneath the vestibule light, both of them strangers still. Compassion had not made him look at her, weeks later, sitting alone in stained-glass light, and think she resembled something closer to a miracle than to a parishioner. Compassion, God knew, had nothing whatsoever to do with the way his own cock had throbbed, mortifyingly, at the memory of her kneeling before him at the altar rail, tongue offered, so entirely disposed toward receiving him — not the capital-H Him she'd knelt for, but him.

No. This was not compassion. This was desire.

Baelor wanted her.

The realization did not arrive first as language. It existed, before he dared give it words, as a certainty his soul appeared to have recognized considerably ahead of his conscious mind's permission. When he finally did put language to it — silently, without moving his lips, though it felt no less spoken for the silence — the shape of the thought landed like blasphemy against his own teeth.

I want her.

Not merely the light she brought into a parish that had grown grey and administrative around him. Not merely the sharp, unpredictable wit she threw at him like a dare. Every part of her. Even, and especially that, the darkness she carried behind her own carefully practiced eyes, the same darkness he had recognized, the very first time he'd glimpsed it, as an exact echo of his own.

He wanted her wholly. Wanted, with a specificity that frightened him, to imagine some entirely different future, one in which she crossed a room not toward the confessional but toward him. Wanted to wonder, with a tenderness that felt more dangerous than any simple hunger could have, what it might be to hear her say his name in some context that had nothing whatsoever to do with prayer. And, God help him, wanted to hear her moan it.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

"No." The word left him barely above a whisper.

But no to what, exactly? To himself? To God, wherever He currently was? To the relentless, unwelcome honesty currently dismantling him from the inside out? To the hardening evidence, even now, of exactly how little his own body cared for the word he'd just spoken?

His vows had once felt like architecture: stone, load-bearing, built up patiently over years until they no longer required conscious thought to remain standing, because conviction itself had become the mortar holding every course of them in place. Tonight they felt like glass instead. Transparent enough that he could see straight through to an entire unlived life on the other side of them. Fragile enough that he feared one careless touch of longing might be all it took to shatter the whole structure at once.

He searched, kneeling there, for disgust. Certain, if only he could locate it, that it would be enough to save him. He tried to name what he was feeling as corruption. As weakness. As the plain, ordinary failure of a man who had simply stopped being strong enough to want what he'd promised to want instead.

What he found, reaching for disgust, was grief.

Because beneath the desire there was love. He could see it now that he'd stopped looking away from it: the faint, unbearable outline of an entirely different life. One with someone actually beside him rather than merely near him. Unwavering loyalty, offered and received both. Being loved, and — this was the part that undid him most completely — being able to see it happening, to actually feel it landing, rather than simply trusting it existed somewhere beyond his ability to perceive it, the way he'd spent fifteen years trusting God's love existed without ever quite managing to feel its weight.

It had accumulated so quietly he'd missed the accumulation entirely. In conversations that ran twenty minutes longer than either of them had any real reason to justify. In the uncomplicated comfort of simply being near her, which asked nothing of him and somehow still gave him more than most of his days currently offered. In the way his own schedule had begun rearranging itself, without his conscious permission, around the mere possibility of crossing paths with her — a Tuesday errand that could easily have waited until Thursday, suddenly urgent, suddenly today. In the strange emptiness that settled over the whole parish on the days she didn't come.

He understood, kneeling there, that he was thoroughly and completely finished.

Because lust, at least, could be confessed. Named, absolved, resisted with enough discipline and enough distance. But what was a man supposed to do with affection that had stopped being distinguishable, at some point he couldn't pinpoint, from prayer itself?

His lips trembled around the next attempt.

"Lord—"

The word broke apart before it finished forming.

He had spent years — his whole vocation, really — teaching other people that grace was never withheld from anyone who sought it honestly, that God did not turn away an honest accounting of a struggling heart. And yet honesty, tonight, felt like the single most impossible thing currently available to him. Because if God were to search his heart in this exact moment, He would find no noble struggle waiting there to reward. Baelor already knew that much. He was already lost, and some new, terrible clarity in him suspected God knew it too, and had simply chosen, as He had for four long years now, to say nothing about it either way.

Perhaps that was what finally pushed him across whatever threshold remained between kneeling there in honest, wretched prayer and what he did next. Perhaps it was simply exhaustion, years of dryness and denial collapsing all at once under the sheer weight of wanting one particular, unrepeatable woman rather than some abstract, manageable temptation. Whatever the mechanism, his hands moved before the rest of him had finished deciding to let them. He undid the drawstring of his pyjama trousers with clumsy, hurried fingers, wrapped his hand around his own cock — already full, already aching — and began, without further ceremony, to work himself with long, rough strokes.

He turned his face into the mattress at the last second, some final scrap of habit or shame driving him to muffle the sound rather than let it fill the small room the way everything else about tonight already had.

In the dark behind his own closed eyes, only one image held. Her face. Not exactly as she'd looked tonight, though the memory of tonight fed everything that followed. Her eyes, specifically, the way they'd caught his after she'd teased him, some light living in them that he had spent two months telling himself he was imagining, a light that might, if he let himself believe it even for the length of this single traitorous hour, have meant she wanted this too. He held to that possibility the way a drowning man holds to whatever debris happens to be floating nearest.

He held, too, to the image his own imagination built for him next, unbidden and merciless in its detail: her, entirely undone beneath him, her spine arched at some impossible, desperate angle, her mouth open around sounds that had nothing left of teasing in them. He imagined the give of her, imagined thrusting into her again and again, deep and unhurried and then not unhurried at all, imagined that every stroke of it might somehow reach past her grief and turn it, briefly, into something closer to pleasure — as if he alone might be capable of giving her that, as if wanting it badly enough might make it true. He imagined her nails finding his back, dragging half-moons into skin that had not been touched with anything like hunger in longer than he could accurately remember. He imagined her voice breaking around his name, over and over, in a register that had nothing whatsoever to do with confession.

What finally undid him — what tore the last of his composure loose entirely — was not any of it. It was the imagined shape of her mouth releasing three specific words in his direction, words he had no right whatsoever to imagine anyone giving him, let alone her, and yet there they were anyway, vivid and unbearable and entirely his own invention: I love you.

He came hard around his own fist, a broken, guttural sound tearing loose from somewhere low in his chest before he could catch it against the mattress, his whole body drawing tight and then breaking apart at once, the mess of it spilling hot over his knuckles.

He stayed exactly where he'd fallen, face pressed into the bedding, and breathed. Once. Twice. A third time before anything like steadiness returned to him.

He raised his face eventually, feeling the cool, unmistakable patch where his own breath had dampened the sheet beneath him, and stared up at the ceiling instead, at the water stain shaped vaguely like a rowboat he'd been meaning to have looked at for the better part of a year.

A thought arrived, quiet enough that he nearly missed the size of the blasphemy folded inside it: if loving her brings me closer to creation than years of praying ever brought me to the Creator, what exactly am I meant to do with that.

He covered his face with his free, cleaner hand.

Perhaps that, he thought, was the actual sin waiting underneath all the others he'd been so carefully cataloguing tonight. Not the desire, or not only the desire. The realization — arriving now, with nowhere left to hide from it — that somewhere along the long road toward this particular altar, he had gone looking for God, over and over, for years, and found only silence waiting at the end of every attempt.

And that tonight, for the first time in longer than he dared admit even to himself, some other voice — hers, or the idea of her, or whatever she had quietly become to him in the space where God's silence used to sit — had finally, unmistakably, answered.

You hadn't slept well. You'd known it the moment you opened your eyes, before your body had even finished the transition out of whatever half-formed dreams had kept you turning most of the night. You had the unmistakable heaviness behind the eyes that came from too little rest rather than too much of it. You'd drifted in and out of something that wasn't quite sleep for hours, catching yourself somewhere between waking and dreaming with your own pulse doing something inconvenient, replaying, on an unwelcome loop, the weight of his hands at your waist and the taut, terrifying stillness of the half-second before the thunder broke whatever had been about to happen between you.

What had kept you awake, if you were being honest with the version of yourself still too groggy to construct a better lie, was a pair of eyes. Blue, though not quite matching, one shade lighter than the other even in memory. And a proximity you still hadn't fully accounted for.

Or that's what you told yourself, dressing for the day, that it was simply eyes and proximity keeping you up, nothing more specific than that, nothing requiring further examination before coffee.

Your mother had been lighter that morning than you'd seen her in longer than you wanted to count — humming something tuneless over the stove, actually eating the toast she made rather than simply making it and leaving it to go cold on the counter. She'd even mentioned, unprompted, something about clearing out your father's side of the closet before spring — not today, not this week, but someday, spoken aloud for the first time since the funeral, which felt like its own small, cautious miracle. You knew better than to expect it to last.

Grief, in your admittedly limited experience of managing hers alongside your own, didn't improve in a straight line; it simply had good days scattered unpredictably among the difficult ones, and you'd learned not to read too much promise into any single morning. Still, you let yourself enjoy it while it lasted.

December seemed to have settled properly over the town by now — breath visible in the cold, the last of the leaves finally surrendered from the trees lining the route you'd walked perhaps thirty times since October, familiar enough now that your feet found the way without requiring much input from the rest of you.

You held the memory of your mother's laugh at something on the radio the whole walk to the parish, turning it over like a stone in your pocket, and told yourself, with the kind of deliberate optimism you rarely trusted yourself with anymore, that today was going to be a good day.

You repeated the thought enough times that it started to feel less like a hope and more like a small, private incantation — as if enough repetition alone might be sufficient to summon the thing into being.

That confidence lasted exactly as long as it took you to push through the church's side door and see two teenage boys — the Dustin brothers, you'd learn shortly, though you didn't yet have names to put to their faces — already up on a stepladder, stapling ornaments to the exact beam you'd left unfinished the night before, their staples crooked and their banter loud and entirely unbothered by the fact that this had been, as far as you understood things, your job.

Something twisted low in your stomach, sharp and disproportionate to the actual size of the slight. You told yourself it didn't matter who finished the ornaments. You did not, in fact, manage to believe yourself.

You shrugged out of your coat in silence, watching the boys' cheerful, careless work a moment longer than necessary, and made your way toward the sacristy, brow already furrowed before you'd even reached the door. The room smelled, as it always did, of candle wax and old wood polish, vestments hanging in their orderly rows along one wall like a wardrobe built for a much stranger kind of theatre.

Baelor was there, alone, occupied with something at the shoulder seam of a violet alb, the colour of Advent, penance and waiting both folded into a single shade of cloth.

"Good morning." You kept your voice light. "What needs doing?"

He turned to look at you, and what met you in his eyes was so entirely unlike what had been there mere hours ago that you nearly took a physical step back from it.

Where warmth had stood the night before — warmth you'd felt with your whole body, warmth that still had your pulse doing something complicated whenever you let yourself think about it — there was now only a careful, deliberate distance, the kind a man constructs on purpose rather than simply falls into.

"Garrick and Harlan are already tending to it. Don't trouble yourself." The smile that came with it didn't make it anywhere near his eyes.

You tried to swallow around whatever his voice had just done to your chest and forced something like a smile of your own. "I brought climbing equipment today. In case it was needed."

"They're handy boys. I'm sure they'll manage." He turned his attention back to the alb, the conversation apparently concluded from his end.

You stood there a moment, fidgeting with your own fingers, looking down at them rather than at him. "Right," you said, mostly to fill the silence. "Well — there must be something else I could do."

"There always is." He offered nothing further, and you waited, foolishly, for an elaboration that simply never arrived.

You tried once more for something like the warmth that had, or so you'd let yourself believe, been growing steadily between the two of you these last weeks. "You look tired," you said, arms coming up to wrap around yourself, the gesture more defensive than you'd intended it to read.

His hands paused over the fabric for the barest fraction of a second. "Do I?"

"A little," you admitted, the faintest smile tugging at your mouth despite everything.

"Occupational hazard." He laughed, politely, and it landed less like genuine amusement and more like something he believed himself obligated to produce. A pause followed, longer than the joke warranted. "Would you mind helping Mrs. Reed in the parish hall? They're sorting donations for the Christmas drive."

You agreed, because there was nothing else on offer, and turned to leave.

The afternoon passed in an accumulation of small, catalogable evidence. The way he found reasons to be in whichever room you currently weren't. The exact, careful politeness he extended to you precisely as he extended it to every other volunteer that afternoon, nothing more, nothing that marked you as separate from Mrs. Reed or the Dustin brothers or anyone else currently sorting canned goods into cardboard boxes. At one point you both reached for the same box of ornaments at the same moment, and he withdrew his hand so quickly, so completely, that you nearly dropped the box entirely, fumbling to catch weight he would ordinarily have simply helped you carry.

You thought, sorting through a crate of secondhand ornaments while Mrs. Reed chattered pleasantly beside you about the parish's fundraising goals, of the specific way his voice had dropped the night before — rough-edged, stripped of its careful public register — and wondered whether you'd imagined the whole of it after all. Wondered whether desire had simply invented a version of events flattering enough to suit itself, the way desire apparently could, given half a chance and a dimly lit church.

By mid-afternoon you had started, despite your own best efforts not to, hunting for a cause. You ran through the obvious candidates and discarded most of them quickly enough — nothing you could point to, no specific offense, no moment you could identify as the hinge everything had swung on. And then, unbidden, unwelcome, one possibility surfaced and refused to submerge again: maybe I made him uncomfortable yesterday.

The thought should have landed like something manageable. Instead, it landed like a stone dropped into still water, and once it had broken the surface, every ripple that followed reshaped how you read the entire day. His hands at your waist, longer than strictly necessary. The way he'd looked at you before the thunder cracked. The whole suspended, tortuous length of that almost-moment you'd spent half the night convincing yourself you hadn't misread. Perhaps you had misread it after all. Perhaps you'd made a decent, well-intentioned man deeply, understandably uncomfortable, and this — the distance, the exact politeness, the careful redirection to donation boxes — was simply the kind, considerate way he'd chosen to handle your mistake without ever having to name it aloud.

By the time the afternoon's volunteers had gathered their coats and gone, dusk pressing early and blue against the windows the way it did this time of the year, you found him sitting alone in one of the front pews of the small side chapel, facing the tabernacle. Not praying, as far as you could tell. Simply sitting, spine slightly bowed, hands loose in his lap.

It occurred to you, watching him from several pews back, that you had never once actually seen him pray. Not properly, not in all the days you'd come here, though you'd certainly seen him perform every other visible function of his office with total competence. The votive candles nearest the tabernacle had mostly burned down to stubs by now, small orange points holding on against the gathering dark, and you found yourself wondering whether any of them had been lit by him.

You stood there a few moments longer than was probably polite, looking at the width of his back, the black cassock making him seem larger somehow in stillness than he ever did in motion. From this angle the collar was entirely invisible, hidden beneath the fall of black fabric at his throat, and for one strange, guilty moment you were glad of it; glad, however briefly, of the illusion that the man sitting in front of you belonged to no one and nothing beyond himself.

"Everything's finished," you said, quiet, from where you stood. "I think everyone's gone."

He didn't turn. You noticed, though, the small, almost imperceptible way his head dropped a fraction further. "So it seems," was all he offered.

You took a few steps closer and sat yourself in the pew directly behind his, close enough now that you could have reached out and touched his shoulder if you'd had any idea what you would have done with that kind of contact.

You fought, for several long seconds, the pressure building behind your teeth and the humiliating need to simply ask, to stop guessing and hunting through the day's evidence and just ask. You eventually lost.

"Did I do something wrong?"

Your own voice arrived in the same register a child might use bracing for a parent's disappointment, and you hated yourself for it even as the words left your mouth, already too late to call them back.

He turned then — properly turned, for the first time all day giving you the whole of his attention rather than some careful, rationed fraction of it — and his expression shifted through several things in quick succession: confusion first, and then something that looked, unmistakably, like guilt. Real guilt. Immediate and undisguised.

"What?" The word came out on an unsteady breath.

"Yesterday—" You laughed, quiet and humourless, more embarrassment than amusement, and didn't finish the sentence. You tried again, choosing your words more carefully this time, leaving him room to answer honestly rather than simply defensively. "I don't know. You've hardly looked at me all day."

It worked better than a direct accusation would have. You watched him understand that too; watched him recognize the door you'd left open for him to walk through without having to admit to anything more than he was ready to admit.

"I'm sorry." Not defensive. Not brushing past it. Simply, plainly sorry, and something about the sincerity of it hurt considerably worse than deflection would have.

You searched his face for something you didn't have a name for yet. "You don't have to apologize, Baelor."

Something moved across his face at the sound of his own name in your mouth, something you couldn't have fully described if pressed, though you filed the reaction away regardless, another entry in a ledger that was growing longer than you knew what to do with.

He opened his mouth. Closed it again without producing anything. His eyes dropped to his own clasped hands, and you watched, with a strange, suspended clarity, his thumb begin moving absently over the opposite knuckle, back and forth, some private and wordless working-through of a thing he couldn't say aloud. A breath came and caught somewhere in the middle of itself before he managed to release the rest of it. His shoulders sagged, incrementally, as though something he'd been carrying alone for years had finally, briefly, allowed itself to be felt as weight rather than simply as habit.

For one long, suspended moment, it genuinely felt as though he was about to tell you something enormous.

"I'm just tired," he said instead, very quietly.

You studied him for a long moment before you answered. "That isn't the whole truth, is it?"

Another silence, longer than the first. When he finally exhaled, it sounded less like an ordinary breath than something closer to surrender.

"No."

Your heart skipped, actually skipped, one single missed beat, because for the length of that one heartbeat you were entirely certain he was about to tell you. That whatever enormous thing had been sitting behind his eyes all day was finally going to be given words, right here, in the blue dark of a side chapel neither of you had bothered to light.

Instead, he smiled. Weary. Apologetic, in a way that felt like its own small, insufficient penance.

"But it's the only answer I can allow myself right now."

You let the silence sit between you after that, unwilling to push further into a door he'd just as good as told you he wasn't ready to open. You weren’t satisfied with that answer, not at all, but you understood, watching the tension still sitting in his shoulders, that pressing further tonight would cost more than either of you currently had to spend.

You said good night instead, quieter than you'd meant to, and left him there in the blue dark with whatever he wasn't yet willing to hand you, telling yourself, without much confidence, that there would be another evening for it.

There always is, he'd said, hours ago, about something else entirely.

You hoped, walking home through the cold, that it was still true and applicable to the space that seemed to separate you all of a sudden.

The Vigil Mass had let out a little after eight, though the building did not empty of people so much as slowly leak them, handshake by handshake, through the side door into a churchyard gone silver with frost.

Baelor had stood at the threshold the better part of an hour receiving the currency of Christmas Eve and had absorbed all of it with the same trained warmth he produced every December, until the last car pulled out of the gravel lot and left him alone with a stack of foil-covered dishes he had no real intention of eating and several hours yet before Midnight Mass would require anything further of him.

He did not go to the rectory. He told himself, locking the front door rather than the side, that the walk back through the nave would do him good — some vague and unexamined instinct toward penance, though he was long past pretending he still knew the difference between penance and simple avoidance.

He crossed the dark church lit only by the sanctuary lamp and the ranks of votives still guttering red beside the Nativity scene the altar guild had finished dressing that afternoon: the manger no longer empty, the way it had sat through the whole of Advent, waiting. Mrs. Reed had processed the Infant in sometime during the Vigil — she claimed the honour every year, and no one had yet found the courage to contest her for it — and laid Him at last in the straw, small and plaster-pink, catching what little light remained in the building.

Baelor did not know why the sight of it undid something in his chest tonight of all nights, when it had failed to manage the same in ten Christmases prior at this altar. He suspected he knew precisely why, and declined, as he had declined nearly everything else worth confessing this month, to look at it directly.

He took the back pew. Her pew, though he would not have said so aloud to anyone, and had in fact spent three weeks pretending the association had never lodged itself in him at all. Baelor has tried to convince himself of the fact that any pew, chosen at random, might have served just as well for a man wanting a few hours alone with a God who had gone conspicuously silent on him for longer than he currently had the patience to calculate. He, almost always, failed spectacularly.

It had been three weeks, now, since he had watched her walk out that same side door and told himself, with the conviction of a man constructing an alibi, that he had done the decent thing. A priest who could offer a woman nothing but scandal owed her, at minimum, the mercy of not letting her get any closer to a life that would cost her considerably more than it ever gave back.

He had told himself, that last afternoon in the sacristy, that the coldness had been a kindness; a controlled withdrawal engineered for her benefit rather than his own. The responsible action of a man who understood, better than she currently could, exactly how much damage he was capable of doing to a young woman who had already lost enough. He had held onto that story for the better part of a week, turning it over each night like a stone worn smooth from handling, comforted by how reasonable it sounded, how selfless.

He had built that justification brick upon carefully mortared brick, reinforced with enough real theology that it had held, more or less, clean through the third week of Advent. It took him nearly ten days to notice the story had a hole in it large enough to walk through and that the architecture he had thought as precise was clearly not holding tonight.

He braced his forearms against his knees, the cassock pulling taut across his shoulders, and made himself do what he had been circling for three weeks without ever quite landing on: the full accounting. Not the version he preached — love that costs nothing was never love, only convenience wearing love's vestments — but the version underneath it, the one he had apparently reserved for no one at all, not even himself, until an empty church at this particular hour finally cornered him into it.

He had not gone cold to protect her.

He had gone cold because for one suspended half-second three weeks ago, with her spine curved back against his own hands and thunder cracking the stained glass loose in its leading, he had wanted. Wholly, specifically, with an intensity that bore no resemblance to the manageable, textbook temptation he'd spent fifteen years training himself to weather. And the wanting had frightened him more than any sin he had ever been taught to guard against from that pulpit.

Lust, Baelor had been telling himself at the moments he felt more vulnerable, he could have managed easy enough. Lust had its own liturgy: name it, confess it, do the penance, watch it pass the way weather passes. He knew the path.

What had actually moved through him in that sacristy would not pass, though, because it was not lust. He had known that even as he fled it, his own hands leaving her waist so fast the absence carried its own small violence, and the knowing had done considerably more to terrify him than any fear of scandal ever had.

He had told himself he was protecting her. What he had actually done was protect himself and dressed the cowardice in a cassock respectable enough that even he had been fooled by it for most of a month.

A man protecting her would have found some way to remain honest with her. Distant, yes, but certainly careful and honest. He had rather manufactured a performance of indifference precise enough to convince a perceptive young woman that she had imagined two months of something. He had watched her work it out in real time, that terrible afternoon in the parish hall — watched her hunt for the offense she must have given him, watched her land, wrongly and with visible pain, on herself as the cause — and he had let her sit inside that wrong conclusion for three weeks rather than correct it, because correcting it would have required naming what was actually true, and naming it was the one thing he had not yet found the courage to survive.

How readily the heart baptizes its own sins, he thought now, recognizing the shape of it — recognizing, too, that he had thought nearly the identical sentence three weeks prior, kneeling at the side of his own bed, and had apparently learned nothing from the thought except how to think it a second time with a fresh coat of shame applied.

None of this recognition had made the following days any easier to survive. If anything, the clarity made it worse: he no longer had the comfort of believing himself noble about it, only lonely, and specifically, deliberately lonely this time, having manufactured the loneliness himself with his own two hands and then had nowhere honest left to put the blame for it.

He had not known misery like the misery of the past twenty days. Not in fifteen years of vocation, not in four years of dry, wordless prayer. He had simply not accounted for the weight of an absence that was entirely his own doing, a door he had closed with his own hand and then had to walk past, every day, in his own church, knowing exactly whose fault it was that it stayed shut.

Now it was the twenty-fourth of December, and he had not seen her since the day he'd given her nothing but a cold shoulder dressed up as tiredness.

The church clock ticked over its quarter-hour somewhere above the belfry. Soon, he thought. Midnight, the bells, the whole parish arriving half-frozen and candlelit for the one Mass of the year that still filled every pew he owned. He had perhaps two hours left of whatever this currently was — solitude, penance, cowardice examining itself in the dark — before duty required him upright and vested, singing the old proclamations over a congregation with no notion that their priest had spent three weeks failing every single thing he had ever told them love was supposed to look like.

He sat in the back pew — her pew, he admitted again to himself — facing the tabernacle, alone in every sense of the word he currently had access to. He was not praying, not exactly. He had stopped pretending, these past weeks, that sitting in front of the tabernacle and praying were reliably the same activity.

He heard the side door before he heard anything else. It had a particular three-note complaint at the old hinge before it settled that Baelor registered and did not turn. Parishioners came and went from the church at every hour on Christmas Eve; some private, unshakeable devotion drew the lonelier half of his flock back through those doors long after the Vigil crowd had gone home to their families, chasing whatever the empty nave offered that the full one hadn't. He assumed, hearing the door, that this was simply one more of them, and kept his eyes on the tabernacle, and did not turn.

Footsteps crossed the stone toward his end of the church, measured and quiet against the marble, and stopped at the pew he currently occupied. He felt, before he processed it as thought, the small shift of weight as someone settled onto the bench beside him.

He smelled her before he saw her.

Jasmine. Not perfume exactly, or not only. Something warmer than that, something that seemed to rise off her skin rather than sit on top of it the way scent from a bottle usually did, faint and green and just short of sweet, the note he had spent three weeks failing to name in memory whenever he tried and failed to recall precisely what it was about being near her that had always, since the very first handshake in the vestibule, made something in his chest go quiet in a way incense never once managed.

Baelor had never told her he loved that smell. He had never told her anything close to the truth of what moved through him when it reached him, and it reached him now, sudden and total, a full second before she rounded the end of the pew, and by the time she sat down beside him — close, in the way of someone who had chosen him rather than simply taken the nearest available seat — whatever composure an hour of brutal honesty had cost him to assemble had already abandoned him entirely.

He turned.

She was watching him already, had been, he suspected, for the length of those footsteps, and the smile she offered did not come anywhere near her eyes. It sat crooked at one corner instead, apologetic and uncertain in a way that made his chest contract sharply enough that he nearly reached for her before he'd decided to do anything of the kind.

He knew that smile. It was an expression he recognized immediately because he'd been wearing some close cousin of it himself for nearly three weeks.

He said nothing. He had spent twenty days rehearsing, in odd, unguarded moments, some version of what he might say if he ever got to see her again, and found now, faced with the actual reality of her sitting an arm's length away, that every rehearsed line had evaporated completely, leaving him with nothing but the plain, humiliating fact of having hurt her and no adequate words assembled anywhere in him to address it.

They simply existed there together for a while, in a silence that should have been unbearable and somehow wasn't. He could feel the warmth of her radiating against the side of his cassock where her shoulder nearly, not quite, met his. A sweet, ordinary heat that stood in stark and almost startling contrast to the last time they'd been this close, weeks ago, with thunder cracking overhead and his own hands still burning at her waist. There was nothing carnal in it now, or nothing only carnal. It read instead as something closer to relief given a temperature, comfort with a pulse behind it.

Three weeks ago, in this same building, a comparable warmth and a comparable proximity had ended with his own hand around his own cock and a confession he could not bring himself to make even in the dark, even to God directly. What moved through him now bore almost no resemblance to that night's hunger. It was not smaller. If anything it occupied more room in him, sat heavier. It simply was not, tonight, primarily a thing his body wanted. It was something considerably more dangerous.

He looked at the plain wooden cross above the altar and let himself think, for the first time without immediately flinching from the thought, that he still wanted her. He thought, with a clarity that would have frightened him a month ago and now simply arrived, quiet and total, that he could have gone to his knees right there on the cold marble and prayed at the altar of her. He could ask, again and again, for an absolution only she was positioned to grant him; plead, in whatever language a man used for a thing this far past reasonable, that she never left again the way these twenty days had made him believe she might.

He did none of it. He sat, frozen by the sheer size of what he'd just allowed himself to think and let the silence continue instead.

"I hope there weren't too many entitled women today," she said finally, her voice landing somewhere between uncertain and hopeful, testing the ground before committing her full weight to it.

He huffed something close to a laugh and turned to look at her properly. "Let's just say I won't need to cook for myself for at least a week." The joke came easier than he'd expected, some old, grateful muscle memory taking over where his more careful faculties had failed him entirely. "I could see myself through to Epiphany on goodwill alone."

She smiled at that — a real smile, however small, climbing further up her face than the one she'd walked in with — and he could have sworn, absurdly, that his own heart actually moved in his chest at the sight of it, some physical lurch he had no theological vocabulary adequate to explain.

They held each other's eyes a moment longer than the joke strictly required, and the silence that followed felt entirely unlike the one that had come before it — warmer, though not yet safe.

"I actually wasn't sure about coming." Her eyes stayed on her own hands, folded in her lap. "After the other day, I thought — I don't know. I didn't want to be the sort of person who doesn't take a hint. I thought that maybe I needed to give you some space. In case I was becoming a bit too much."

"Don't be silly." The answer left him faster than he'd intended, almost tripping over itself in its hurry to correct her. "It's me who owes you an apology. My behaviour that day was—" he searched for a word that wouldn't require explaining the whole of what actually lay beneath it and settled for an inadequate one. "Poor. It was poor, and it was unfair to you, and I am sorry for it."

She nodded, faint, more to herself than to him, and something in the set of her shoulders told him she wasn't finished. "You had me believing I was unwanted here." Her voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, and he felt the crack land somewhere in his own chest like a physical blow. "Which is stupid, I know — you don't owe me anything, you never did — but I'd started thinking of this place as somewhere that was actually mine. Somewhere I got to just exist, without anyone needing managing from me, for once. And then you—"

She didn't finish it. She didn't have to. He watched the first tear break loose and travel the length of her cheek before either of them had acknowledged what was happening, and something in his own chest gave way at the sight of it more completely than three weeks of solitary, brutal honesty had managed on its own.

He turned fully toward her then, his whole body pivoting on the pew, and his hands found hers where they sat clenched in her lap, covering them before he'd consciously decided to. Her warmth beneath his palms did something complicated and inconvenient to the rest of him, some low, insistent pull he chose, deliberately, to ignore in favour of the considerably more urgent thing happening in front of him.

"You will always have a place here." He got the words out before she could continue, though it turned out not to matter, because she spoke straight over him anyway, the sentence already building too much momentum to be stopped by anything as small as his interruption. "That was never in question. It will never be in question."

"I thought that I understood you." Her breath was coming faster now, catching unevenly between words. "Your loneliness — that sadness you keep locked up behind everything else, that feeling like you have to carry the whole weight of everyone alone — I thought I understood that, in you, because I recognized it. And I thought you understood me too, and I — I—"

Her breathing had gone properly ragged now, words fracturing apart faster than she could assemble them, and he stopped her the only way he could think to in the moment: lifting both hands from hers to her face instead, thumbs coming to rest against the wet tracks already cutting down her cheeks.

Her name left his lips — the only solid thing he had left to offer her, thrown out as deliberately as a lifeline to a drowning woman — and it worked exactly as he'd hoped. Her eyes found his again, properly, holding there instead of skittering away.

"I understand you," he said, quiet and entirely certain, the first fully honest sentence he'd managed to give anyone in longer than he wanted to calculate. "And you understand me. And I am so ashamed — so genuinely ashamed — of having caused you even a fraction of this pain. I—"

He didn't finish. She closed the remaining distance between them in a single motion, the whole of her colliding into his chest, her face burying itself in the black fabric over his heart, and whatever he'd been about to say dissolved, unimportant now, into the more urgent business of simply holding her.

He wondered, distantly, whether she could feel how hard his heart was currently working against her ear, pressed as she was directly over it. He was fairly certain she could, because Baelor didn’t bother trying to still it.

His arms came around her without any further input required from the rest of him, holding her shaking frame together while her sobs worked themselves out against the fabric already growing damp beneath her face, and he stayed exactly like that — steady, present, entirely hers for as long as she needed him to be — for considerably longer than he bothered counting.

Her sobs thinned eventually, then stopped, and she drew back from him at her own pace, wiping at her face with the back of one hand in a gesture that struck him as almost childlike in its simplicity. "Sorry," she managed, on a breath still not quite steady.

"Don't be. Please." He shook his head, meaning it entirely.

She nodded, more to herself than to him, some private decision apparently being finalized. "How about we just — forget this happened. All of it." Her eyes found his again, searching. "Stop apologizing to each other and go back to where we left off. I promise I'll still believe you're a cool priest."

The laugh that pulled out of him was real, surprised out of him despite everything the evening had already asked of him. "I'm holding you to that." His hand found the back of her neck, gentle, tilting her face back up to his when it had started to drop. "I’ll remove you from wreath-duty until next year."

"What?"

"The wreath. You're off the hook until next Advent."

She laughed at that too — a real laugh this time, breaking through whatever was left of the tears — and the sound of it did something to the whole of him that fifteen years of careful discipline had absolutely no defence prepared against.

He turned back toward the altar eventually, leaning into the worn wood of the pew behind him, and she shifted beside him a moment later, settling her weight against his side with an ease that suggested she'd stopped questioning whether she was allowed to. His arm found its way around her shoulders without any real deliberation on his part, and her head came to rest in the crook of it, cheek against the side of his chest, close enough that every breath she took registered against him.

He breathed her in. Jasmine, warm and close and entirely real this time, no phantom trace left to chase down a stranger's collar or a shop aisle.

He fucking loved jasmine.

A.N.: sooooo, what do we think? i warned it would be a slow burn, but they're getting there... i will work on the next parts along the weeks, they will be shorter (or at least i'll try) because proofreading this behemoth was a workout in itself lol. as always, comments and feedback is very much appreciated. i love you all <3

TAGLIST: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @sacha1slytherin @alternarabuda @jjubilee-fluff @a-sunflower-in-bloom @heieufh @karakatitsa-sonya @eleventhboi @celestialsonglines @xglittergoddess @warpedlilium @themoonseroticoracle @hrh007 @fraaiefreule91 @hannisreading @samthegreenapologist @dont-try-pesticide @thorins-queen-of-erebor @outpostsworld @sotragedynut @nicoall12 @escapic-mezzanine @m0th-g0th @noble-17 @bbjkfnmc @sol-in-wonderland @sem-ra @mitth-eli-vanto @justmasblack @coff33mug

Jack looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head as his hands went to rest on his hips. When he looked back down, he found you walking toward the nurse and it suddenly made complete sense. 

He let out a sigh. “This has to be a joke.”

His eyes, as they did more often than was appropriate, caught on you, hair coming down loose from where you’d pinned it, the scrubs lopsided at one hip, riding lower than where they’d started at the beginning of the night. You turned to say something to the guy quickly, and the movement caught the slip, your scrub top moving up half an inch, and Jack’s eyes went there before his brain could tell him that was wrong, some groove in him that noticed you before it noticed anything useful. He had a second of pure, unhelpful distraction before his brain reminded him that he was an attending and had things to do. 

“I actually think it’s funny,” Lena said, shrugging.

Of course it had something to do with you. He should’ve figured it out the second he saw the guy standing there with his hands in the pouch of his scrubs, rocking heel to toe like the floor was just too exciting to be standing on. Nobody loitered around the ambulance bay at midnight for good reason. People came through those doors bleeding or they didn’t come through them at all, and this guy had shown up with nothing wrong with him, except maybe a case for some lovesickness. 

“I’m gonna make this stop,” Jack said, already pushing himself away from the nurse’s station.

Lena’s eyes widened slightly. “Don’t say anything that gets you sat down with HR.”

“She can goddamn try me,” he said, and went. Also because Jack was fairly sure you would never report him to HR. 

He crossed the floor and caught the tail-end of your conversation as he closed in.

“ — just tell me when you’re free, that’s all I’m asking,” the guy was saying.

You were already half-turned, already gone as you waved a hand loosely beside you. “I don’t know, I just don’t think we should try again.” 

Jack blew out a breath, standing a few feet short of you, your back facing him. Why was he not surprised? He’d been keeping tally without meaning to, and he knew that was embarrassing. There was the radiology fellow who’d started hand-delivering films that very well could’ve gone through the system; the travel nurse who’d washed through in six weeks and left the floor faintly weird in his wake; the anaesthesia resident who now took the long way around the department if he saw you at the end of it, as though he were a dog who’d learned the fence was electric. And now this one, apparently, Peds with his whole hopeful heart hanging out in Jack’s department. 

“You’re so sweet for coming down here,” you practically crooned at him, shifting on your heels, eyes flicking down to the form in your hand. “But I really do have a whole long night ahead of me, and I know my answer’s not gonna change, so I won’t make you wait around for it, okay?” 

Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes when you said the words with the upward lilt of a woman sending a toddler back to his mother. He wanted to laugh a little when he saw that the guy had taken it standing up like it was a gift. 

The hell of it was that Jack understood the man. He understood every last one of them because he stood next to you fifty hours a week, had been doing so for three years, and whatever the department thought of him after his consistent therapy, he was not carved out of stone. 

Jack was afraid that if he hadn’t been your attending these last four years and a little younger, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he’d have been eating out of the palm of your hand. 

You gave the guy a there-there pat, and it was only then did his eyes land on Jack, who he probably knew was your fucking attending. You turned then, and immediately said, “Oh, Dr. Abbot, I’ve got the guy in six’s labs back, the potassium —”

“Mhm.” Jack’s hands came up and landed on your shoulders before you’d finished the sentence, squaring you off the spot where you stood and turning you bodily back toward the floor like you were a gurney. 

“It is four-point-nine, but the EKG’s good, so I was gonna recheck in —” 

“Let’s recheck it now,” he said. He kept you moving, his palms broad through the cotton of your scrubs, steering you a few feet till your own feet caught onto the idea. 

You grumbled something under your breath, and once he’d stopped you right in front of six, you turned to face him with your brows raised.

“Say something?” he asked, tipping his chin down.

“You seem like you’re mad at me,” you said. 

“Huh. I do?” He let go of your shoulders — noticing, distantly, the exact second his hands came off and suddenly felt too empty — and reached past you to pluck six’s chart off the tray, more to have something to do with them than needing it. “You’re right. You should recheck in ten minutes.”

“You’re mad at me,” you said again, crossing your arms over your chest. 

He blew out a breath, and suddenly felt just a little silly at getting worked up over a nurse by the doors when there was a large, glowing board behind him full of names that needed his complete, undivided attention. 

You were a senior resident, after all, four years deep, one of his sharpest — you’d treated the guy in six, hadn’t you, you’d flagged it and called for the EKG and made the right call on the recheck before he’d even asked, all while dismantling some man’s hopes. Somehow, your mess and competence ran on the same current. You never let the first touch the second. He’d have loved, some nights, to have an excuse to be mad — a missed lab, a blown line, anything he could write up and point at — and you kept declining to hand him one. All of this meant he was left with this vague swampy irritation, and Jack wasn’t the sort of mentor who liked to hound upon that. 

“No, sweetheart, I just love it when you get random men hanging around the department,” he settled on saying, feeling his shoulders visibly loosen a fraction.

You winced, eyes darting over to the emptiness in front of the doors now. “Sorry.” 

“You’d say it won’t happen again, but we both know better.” He shrugged. Then, he reached out his hand — he wasn’t sure why, except that it just happened naturally — and patted you once on the shoulder, then on the second turned you to face the curtains leading to your patient. “Doctor up.”

And you did, the loose, embarrassed shape of you being replaced in the space of a single breath, being replaced by something Jack had watched grow into you over the years and still hadn’t quite gotten used to. 

Trauma called it in nine minutes later, an MVC, unrestrained driver, GCS dropping in the field. Jack was working on a laceration in four when he heard the crackled warning, and by the time he’d looked up out the curtains, you were already moving, gowned and at the head of the bay calling out assignments like you’d been doing this for a decade.

“I need two units O-neg before he rolls in,” you said, voice pitched high enough to carry without yelling, cutting clean through the perpetual noise of the department. “Somebody get me a second eighteen-gauge ready, and I want an ultrasound in here.”

Donnie and Mateo were already moving, and so were the people around you, falling into your orbit like the room had easily reorganized itself around your voice the second it went up. Jack stood by the curtain, gloves from the lac still on, and found he couldn’t make himself move just yet.

The doors banged open. EMS wheeled the stretcher through fast, calling out vitals over each other, and you were already on the patient’s side before the gurney had fully stopped moving, hands moving on his neck, chest, eyes scanning his pupils in a matter of ten seconds. He began walking over, catching your voice as you called out your reads as someone hung the blood and someone else prepped the ultrasound wand. “Page neuro now.”

“On it,” Mateo said, already moving.

You had both hands on the patient, running the primary survey quickly, confirming, checking, discarding possibilities out in short, clipped sentences Jack recognized as the sound of your brain running six steps ahead of your mouth. Sweat had started on your hairline. You called out for OR to be on standby, eyes flickering around the room and landing on Jack. “OR, please,” you said, aimed at him, brows going up. 

“On it,” Jack said, because there was no way he was going to let you be wrong about needing something and didn’t make sure you got it.

The next six minutes went by fast and loud, in bursts and then suddenly quiet, the room narrowing down on functionality. You stood at the center of it; you called it and ran it. You got the man upstairs stable enough that Walsh didn’t sound worried for one second, and that was a compliment from her. 

Jack watched the whole thing from four feet back, arms crossed, and chipping in when your brain had snagged. He was feeling a heat in his chest helplessly and entirely unprofessional, it was always present when he was able to see, in real-time, how far you’d come from your first day of residency when your hands were a second too slow on the central line and how your voice would pitch up at the end of every read, asking for permission every time instead of stating it like a fact, eyes finding him across the room each time, checking.

There was none of that left in you now, he realized, had done so a long time ago. He thought, watching you now, that this was the closest thing he’d let himself do to falling in years, standing uselessly riveted as he watched a woman he’d taught outgrow the need for him in real time, and finding that instead of the loss he’d expected to feel when the day finally came, all he felt was warm and terrifying and too much like pride. 

When the room had started clearing out, he watched your mouth drop open as you let out a heavy breath, eyes going over to him. The second he watched you realize he was still there, your face shifted, the relief turning into something sharper. 

“Why didn’t you jump in?” You crossed the floor toward him in four hard strides, gloves already peeled off and balled tight in one fist, snapping the second one free with a motion that looked terrifyingly like it wanted to be aimed at him. “His pressure tanked for thirty seconds and you just watched.”

“You had it.”

“You didn’t know that,” you said, voice going up an octave, adrenaline still thrumming through you, hands coming up the gesture at the blood-streaked floor. “I could’ve missed something. You’re the attending, Jack, you’re supposed to catch if I missed something —”

“I would’ve,” he interrupted, stepping in close enough that you had to tilt your head back to keep glaring at him properly. “The second you needed me, I would’ve stepped in. I wasn’t gonna take it from you before you did.” 

“You can’t gamble like that with a patient —” Your chest was rising and falling fast, gloves now crushed in your fist, and he could see the fear catching up now that everything around you had gone quiet enough to let it, something that looked more like fear of yourself than for the patient. “What if I’d frozen —?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” He reached his hand out, thumb catching a smear of the blood at your jaw you’d accidentally smeared on yourself, wiping it off carefully with the pad of his thumb, and felt you go still under it. “You don’t trust my judgement?”

“You know I do. You just could’ve said something.”

“I could’ve. He dropped his hand from your jaw only to catch your wrist instead. “Didn’t wanna interrupt you being brilliant. Kinda liked watching it happen.”

Your mouth opened, surely to let out some unnecessary retort, and died there when he pressed one slow stroke of his thumb against your wrist, raising a brow. 

“Relax,” he said, voice going rough as he leaned in a little, forcing you to meet his eyes properly. “Just take the win. That’s an order.”

“Now you wanna give orders,” you mumbled.

He barked out a short laugh, letting go of your wrist. “Only when you’re being stubborn for no reason.”   

It was sometime during the second year of your residency when he’d started catching your drift. It had started with a random Friday shift. He’d seen you at the station, elbows on the counter, telling Lena something conspiratorially. Jack was meant to be reading a chart but couldn’t help how his ears had perked up. Anything to get through the shift, he supposed.

“ — no, but he was perfect on paper,” you were saying, “kept his house clean and everything. He told me he kept his plant alive for six years —”

“So, what happened?” Lena said flatly, like she already knew what you were going to say but wanted to hear anyway. 

“He wanted to take me bowling on the second date,” you said through a sigh. “I know how it sounds, but you’ve gotta hear me out —”

“I’m genuinely not going anywhere.”

“ — for the first date, bowling’s fun. But he took me to a nice dinner the first time, he set a standard, and then the second date he goes bowling, which means the effort’s already —” You created a little downward slope with your hand. “And if it’s already sliding on date two, where’s it at on date two hundred? I can already see my marriage with him and it’s bad.”

It seemed you had a criteria, Jack learned then. It was proven even more when he’d heard you talk about your other failed dates, seen them, and learned — without ever wanting to — what they were, to an extent. 

He knew you couldn’t stand a man who ordered for you without asking. He knew you’d written off a fellow for the way he talked about his mother, and another one — an accountant, a rare specimen who had no clue what an EKG was — over a text message you’d read aloud to Ellis in a voice of complete horror, though Jack had never caught what it actually said, only your face while you read it. He knew you gave people precisely three dates, that this was a rule you held if the first and second date went well, three apparently being the magic number at which a person could no longer hide the demon they were going to turn out to be (your words).

He knew, too, that you only allowed one kiss after the first date, if even that. It was never up for negotiation, no matter how beautifully the night had gone, for you never wanted to end up “emotionally overdrawn on an account you hadn’t even opened yet.”

He knew you a man lost real points if, over the three dates, if it involved drinks, he ordered the same one. He knew a man gained them, silently and instantly, for being able to sit in a lull without narrating his way out of it, and that you considered this the single rarest trait in modern dating.

He knew you were looking for something you had no name for and would recognize on sight, which struck him as a hell of a way to run a search.

He’d have told you, if you asked, that he tuned most of the station chatter out as a matter of survival, for while he enjoyed the occasional gossip, he couldn’t very well absorb everyone’s business. And that was true about everyone’s business but yours, apparently, because yours came in clear.

Your business he retained against his own better judgement, and he realized — once, during a slow shift — that he could’ve drawn you a better map of your taste than you seemed to carry yourself. He could’ve told you, if you asked, exactly the kind of man who’d finally clear your bar, and exactly why he had yet to show up. 

It was almost nice, some nights, watching you try anyway. The ER was a place where everyone was kept tethered to the world by a thread, and everyone who worked in it long enough to develop some version of the same calluses. Jack had grown his years ago, and he wore them invisible, occasionally aching, and had come to terms with it being permanent.

Love, for Jack, had stopped being a real noun before you’d shown up, somewhere between things he used to want and things he’d decided weren’t for him anymore.

You still believed in it. You’d watched this place take everything soft out of grown men twice your seniority and somehow walked through the same fire hopeful, still convinced, against every scrap of evidence, that somewhere there was a person worth all that hoping.

For that reason, he had decided to not interrupt your endeavors, not until now, when he noticed you during hand-off before your night shift with him started, in front of Robby, of all people. 

While Jack loved Robby like a brother, he had a documented, department-wide, actuarially reliable seven-week expiration date on every woman he charmed out of this building. He’d heard intra-departmental gossip about him. There was, Jack was fairly sure, a running joke about it that predated your residency by years. 

He knew you definitely were not finding love in his best friend. But Jack felt the buzzing in his mind go quiet and mean watching how you with him.

You laughed at something and Jack lost, for one humiliating second, the thread of what he’d walked over to say. It happened sometimes, more than he’d admit to anyone. Ordinary noises out of you hit him somewhere in his chest before the better part of him flagged it as a problem, and he had to physically clear his throat before finding his footing again. 

“ — Italian’s always good after pulling a double,” Robby was saying. “But I do love some microwave ramen, too, when I’m missing my med student days.” 

“Oh, so your standards have been raised being chief?” you said, and Jack could hear the smile and wariness in it. 

“For sure —”

Jack let out a huff, something resembling a laugh, as his feet planted him between the two of you. He was close enough that his shoulder nudged yours and you had to step back to keep your balance. He felt your weight land for a second against him with a satisfaction he had no, absolutely no business feeling for something so small. So childish.

He turned to Robby, spreading his hands wide, mock outrage. “My resident.”

Robby looked mildly amused, unbothered, so Jack added, before he could respond, “Go home before I report you to HR.”

“You’d do that to me?” 

“In a heartbeat. Have some shame.” Jack kept his shoulder where it was still angled half in front of you, an old, unexamined instinct keeping the line drawn even though Robby had already backed off.

He tipped his head toward the doors, toward the gold light coming up in them, the day shift draining out around you both. “There’s a whole rich life waitin’ for you out there.”

Robby just smiled and pushed off the counter, giving you a small wave before he left.

Jack turned to you then, brows furrowed. “Seriously?”

You let out a short laugh. “Work hard, play hard?” 

“Soundin’ a lot like a frat brother right now. Never have those words been said in an ER,” Jack said. 

“I wasn’t actually going to do it,” you said, rushing the words out with something more honest in them. “For the record. I know what — he’s got a reputation.” You picked at the counter. “I was just talking to him. He’s funny.”

Jack had to recalibrate for a second. “You were talkin’ sweet to him.” 

“I talk sweet to everyone.” You lifted a shoulder, completely unbothered. “You should try it sometime.”

He rolled his eyes at that. He reached over for your cup of coffee sitting between you — closer to his elbow than yours — and drank a sip, eyes going up to the ceiling at the sheer volume of syrup you’d decided you needed in your bloodstream today. “The hell?” he muttered, turning the cup slightly as if that would help. “Are you trying to embalm yourself?”

“Give it back.”

“In a minute.” He took a second sip, slower this time, and watched you over the rim of the cup. Then, he set it back a few degrees off how you’d had it, just to see your jaw tick.

You pulled the cup back in, thumbed it around until the lid faced you again, and drank from it without breaking your explanation. “I’m offended you think I’ll get wine and dined by the chief attending.” You tilted your head. “Give me some credit here. I won’t be his seven weeks.”

“Huh.” He rubbed the back of his neck, which was warm. “Well, good. Don’t think he’ll clear your bar anyway.”

“See, you get it,” you said, pointing a finger at him. “At least someone around here does.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tipping his head slightly forward that even he hadn’t realized that he had shifted the distance just slightly. “Better than most.”

Your eyes widened slightly at that, and Jack took that as his cue to step back, clear his throat, as he jerked his chin toward the board.

“Alright, time to work. Stop the play,” he said, trying to get his voice the right level. “Go look at chest pain on three.”

“So bossy,” you said, but you were already turning around to go to three.

Well, that’s what he was, wasn’t he? For some reason, he had to remind himself that. 

It was what he had to remind himself as his hands hovered your trembling ones as you tried to pump air into Mrs. Foley’s lungs, knowing she was already gone — had been for a while now, if he was honest — longer than it took you to admit. He knew it, he’d grown the grim ability to recognize when a body stopped being a patient and being someone you were performing compressions on for the family’s sake, for your own need to have done everything. 

He’d let it run anyway, because you hadn’t accepted it yet, and he’d wanted to give you that extra minute to arrive at it on your own. 

Mateo had come up to Jack’s side, snapping his gloves off, the sound of it overshadowed by your own heaving. 

“She has to call it,” he murmured. “You want me to —”

“No.” Jack’s eyes, he felt, could not move away from your distress. “I’ve got her.” 

Mateo looked at him for a moment longer than the moment warranted, and then he stepped back and let Jack be. You were still going, your compressions had gone harder, faster, less like genuine medicine and more like you were pleading with Mrs. Foley herself now. Sweat had gone to the hair at your temple. Your jaw was set in a clench Jack recognized all too well, and for a moment, Jack wished that he didn’t have to be so acutely tuned into watching what the job did to others, the same way it did to him. 

He stepped in behind your shoulder, close, and brought his hand down over yours where they were locked on the old woman’s chest.

“Look at the clock,” he said quietly into your ear.

“One more round —” 

“You’ve done plenty.” He pressed, gently, until your hands stilled under his, and felt your entire body resist it. “You know she was gone before we could’ve even done anything —”

“She’s been my patient for years —” 

Jack knew then that while you may have been an excellent doctor, his senior resident that had bloomed under his mentorship but still could’ve gone without him and done just the same, it wasn’t a good feeling to wonder if the job would dim you the way it had him. 

“I know.” He kept his hands over yours with enough pressure so as to not let you drive them down again. “That’s why it’s yours to call. But you’ve gotta call it, Doctor.”

Your breath hitched as you turned your neck to face him, and there was a pool brimming on your lashline that you kept at bay, nodding. Your hands under his stopped straining upward, and he felt the exact second you accepted it, for it moved through your shoulders and down your spine and left you a little smaller standing there, the fight trickling into the moment after, which Jack always thought was worse. 

“Time of death,” you said, forcing your voice back into the procedural tone, “oh-three-forty-one.” You peeled your gloves off finger-by-finger.

His hand found the small of your back after taking the minute, leading you to the little family consult room with the boxed tissues and fake ficus with a couch that had absorbed more bad news since longer than you or he had worked there. He shut the door with the flat of his hand and let the floor’s noise cut to a hum through the drywall. 

You stood in the middle of the room with your arms crossed, holding yourself, and stayed silent. 

Jack propped himself against the table, arms folded, as he breathed out a small sigh through his nose. He knew you weren’t a talker after the bad ones. Some residents came out of a loss with their mouths running, narrating it into something survivable, and some went quiet and small and had to be waited out, and you were the second kind. So he waited.

You broke it eventually, like he always knew you would have. “I’ve got a butterscotch she gave me seven months ago in my locker still,” you murmured, craning your neck so you were looking at the ceiling. You wiped under your eyes with the heel of your hand roughly. 

“Think I’ve got one, too,” he murmured, wincing as he tried to shift his weight. 

It had been building up for the past few hours, a hot ring of wrong down below the knee where the socket had gone slick and furnace-warm because it was past hour fourteen, when he’d sweated the fit and never changed the liner because there’d been no window that wasn’t already accounted for. He shifted his weight off it, trying again, and reached down to thumb the release, breaking the seal. 

He let out a short, punched out sigh as he pulled himself down onto the chair behind him, one hand balancing himself on the table. “Sorry,” he gruffed out, jaw clenching. 

Your eyes flickered down to the prosthetic limb he was balancing against the pole of the table and you were already moving before he could finish apologizing. You never asked if he needed a hand. You’d learned sometime during your second year that asking him gave him a chance to say no, and you’d quit handing him that chance sometime during your second year, so now you just came. You went down on one knee at the pole of the table.

“Don’t say sorry,” you mumbled, eyes not meeting him.

His jaw stayed tight and he didn’t fight it, fight you. That was a formality and you both knew it, a thing he did with his shoulders and not his hands, but he watched the top of your head and thought — like he always did, each time, and never said out loud — there was no one else on god’s green earth he’d let do this in the way you did. Not the prosthetist, who did it clinically. Not the VA, who did it tired. You did it each time like it was nothing and everything at once, as though this something not worth remarking on. 

He very badly wanted to thank you, despite how small he always felt when you did this. He wanted to tell you that you were, without question, better at this than anyone who was paid to do it.

Your fingers found the socket and went for the liner because you knew the fit went bad and the sweat before it went bad anywhere a person could see, knew he’d have to run it slick and furnace-hot than spend the fourteen minutes off the floor. You rolled it back with the flat of your thumb, easing the trapped heat out of it, and he felt the pressure of the ring of raw below his knee and had to clench his jaw to not let the relief show on his face. You spared him anyway by keeping your eyes down where they’d been.

“You’ll strip your skin doing this,” you said conversationally, the roughness still present in your voice from the code. “You know that. You keep running it past twelve and one of these nights it’s cellulitis and I’m admitting you.” 

“If only I could be so lucky.”

He ducked his head slightly, a part of him wanting to catch the reaction, and he saw how one corner of your lip was barely turned up. 

You thumbed a line of red where the socket’s edge had bitten in, checking it, and your touch went careful around there. “This is new. The edge is catching higher than it was.”

“Went to a new liner last month,” he said, voice low. “Not broke in yet.” 

“Then you break it on your days off. Not on a fourteen hour.” You finally looked up at him, shaking your head with this flat, fond expression he’d come to realize was your favorite way to look at him. “You’d write me up for less.” 

“I’d write you up for a lot less,” he agreed, thinking back on the time you’d fought him tooth-and-nail over staying through a migraine, refusing, point-blank, to hand off a soft rule-out chest pain at eleven when the migraine had started very visibly began creeping up on you. 

He’d caught you before you’d said a word about it because you’d begun squinting at the numbers and pressed the heel of your hand against one eye for a moment too long between patients, thinking nobody was watching. He was, he realized, always watching you in some way.

“Go home,” he’d said quietly, catching you by the elbow outside the curtain. “That’s not a request.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got a migraine.”

“I’ve got a job.” Your jaw had clenched, stubbornly, and Jack had thought that even if he’d put all his strength into it, he wouldn’t have been able to unclench it for you. “I’m not handing off a chest pain because my head hurts. This guy has waited long enough for a bed. I’m not the priority here.”

He’d wanted to tell you that you were, actually, that you were exactly the priority, and watching you white-knuckle forms with your pupils blown different sizes from pain scared him more than any board full of critical pains ever had. But he’d just pulled down the light two notches, told the nurses to shadow eleven’s discharge, and put a bottle of water and two Tylenol on your desk without a word. And thank god, you’d taken the Tylenol and finished the shift standing up because sitting made the room tilt worse, and only taken on non-critical cases. You’d refused until the end that you should’ve gone home three hours earlier.  

Now, you huffed something that was nearly a laugh, your first real once since the code, and went back to setting. And Jack sat there with his arms crossed in the dark with your hands on the worst-guarded part of him and the door shut against the whole floor, and thought about how he believed nobody deserved you. People were vile and sucked and cut in line and let doors swing shut behind them, and you handed out three dates to men who wrote sonnets in your voicemail and couldn’t clear a bar you’d never once lowered for anyone. He’d thought, more nights than he liked to admit, that these people had no idea what they were auditioning for. 

His eyes snagged on you because there was nothing else in this small room worth looking at. There was still salt dried in your lashline from the code. You were a wreck and you were fixing his leg anyway, still half-shaking from a woman you couldn’t save, and it hadn’t occurred to you to stop and put yourself back together first. It never did. Jack had seen the care run out of you before you ever decided to spend it. 

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Foley,” he said.

You shook your head, face still angled down, thumb pausing mid-motion. “I’ll be okay,” you murmured, lifting up one shoulder. “I just hate that she couldn’t get here sooner.”

“You did nothing wrong,” he said plainly. “Family said she’s been feeling off for two days now.”

“I know.” Your voice cracked, betraying the flatness you were trying to present. “Doesn’t make it easier.”

You lifted your head for a moment, then, looking at him with a sad smile he knew you were painting on to get him to stop talking.

He nodded stiffly, tipping his chin down. “Alright. Finish my leg and we’ll run this floor together.”

Up in radiology a few nights later, Jack had gone himself to sort out a reading that had been sitting long and he’d cornered a tech and got what he needed and was already halfway out the door, jacket sleeves still rolled from the last set of compressions, when he saw the guy standing off by the light boxes. 

Younger. A resident, he supposed, in scrubs a size too crisp for someone who’d actually been on the shift long enough to earn wrinkles in them. He’d been watching Jack the whole time — Jack could feel it, the itch of being observed — shifting his weight heel to toe against the linoleum floor. 

“Somethin’ on my face?” Jack said flatly because he really did have to get back to the floor.

“You’re — sorry, you’re Dr. Abbot, right?”

“Last I checked.” 

The guy’s hand came out of his jacket’s pocket, and there was a piece of folded paper in it. Jack looked at it like it was a spider, hoping — no, praying — it had something to do with work.

“Could you give this to her?” the guy asked, and Jack’s hope died, as he stepped closer. “The senior resident on your shift. She’ll — she’ll know who it’s from.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack murmured, brows pulling in together. “You ever heard of texting, kid?” 

“I did,” he said, and Jack could practically feel the heat radiating off of him. “She stopped answering, so I figured, maybe on paper, she’d actually —”

“Take the hint,” Jack grumbled, snatching the paper out of his hand. Then, as he turned to the door, he said, “You know I work in the ER?” When the guy only nodded quickly, he added, “You know she works in the ER?” 

“I — yeah. Obviously.”

“Then you know she doesn’t need this.” He held up the paper between him and the guy. “She’s got enough on her plate without some guy too chicken to call her handing me a note like I’m her mailman.”

The guy opened his mouth, nose scrunching at Jack’s words, but nothing came out. 

“Yeah.” Jack was already walking, note tucked in his pocket, done with the conversation. “Try calling next time. Or don’t.” 

The guy looked at least a little sheepish, a little ashamed, and Jack thought good, he should feel ashamed. He wasn’t sure what the protocol in dating was now — he’d been just a little rusty and out of the stretch for a stretch of years he preferred not to count in single digits — but he was fairly certain that whatever the rules had curdled up to, this could not possibly be inside them.

He rode the elevator down with the note in his pockets, and he could feel the small stiff square of another man’s hope pressing over the outside of his thigh. 

He found you at your desk, hands running restlessly through your hair as you spoke into the microphone, charting. The words were coming out of you bluntly, mechanic and after saying the same variation a thousand times over. There was a pen behind your ear you’d forgotten about and the residue of a lab value gone blue across the back of your hand where you’d scrawled it hours ago and never washed off.

He stood there for a second before you noticed him, and thought — not for the first time and with the same low irritation he always felt about it — that he had no earthly business being the man this got routed to.

Jack leaned down so his head hovered beside yours, scanning your work on the screen, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed yours, head tilted to read your screen at an angle that had nothing to do with actually needing to see it. 

“The man wants an espresso martini?” he asked, furrowing his brows as he read over your notes, right by your ear. 

You jumped just slightly and swivelled on your stool to face him, then back at the screen. “Shit — Jack. Announce yourself.” You scanned the words on your notes, shaking your head and already backspacing. “No, that was me talking to myself. Stupid mic picked it up.”

“Long as it’s just the one,” he drawled, staying there in your space a little longer, watching the side of your face instead of the screen now. “Those things sneak up on you.”

“Speaking from experience?” You turned on your stool to face him fully, chin tilting up to meet his eyes, something playful and a little challenging in it. 

“I’ve got a couple decades on you. Everything’s snuck up on me.” 

You held his gaze a little longer, then looked away first, tongue coming out over your lips for a second. He took a small satisfaction in not being the one who blinked first. 

He blew out a breath through his nose, remembering, with reluctance now, what he’d actually come here to do. “Speaking of sneaking up.” He pulled out the note from his pocket. “I got something to deliver to you —”

You furrowed your brows when he handed it to you. “Secret admirer?” you asked jokingly. 

He barked out a short laugh. “Nothin’ secret about it. You ignoring some radiology fellow?”

You grimaced, opening the note and scanning over the words quickly. He could’ve left, but stayed instead and watched you read it. The frown only pulled deeper, and he saw your eye twitch once as you scanned the words.

Against his better judgement, he murmured, “That bad?” 

“Uh — no, it’s okay.” You shrugged stiffly. 

“Huh,” he breathed out, studying you outright now. “Wonder what you’re doin’ to these guys to get them so wound up.”

You chuckled, mostly to yourself. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”  

His chest tightened at that. It was unfair how you could make anything to him sound like something he’d been waiting to hear. He swallowed. “Suppose I would.”

“That an offer, Dr. Abbot?” 

“Might be,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. 

You laughed — surprised, the tension in your shoulders breaking slightly — and shook your head, folding the note back up. “You’re ridiculous. Well, thank you for getting it to me. I’m sorry he bothered you with this —” You swivelled, placing the note on your desk before picking up your phone. “That’s really weird.” 

“That’s one word for it,” Jack said, and left it there, because you’d already turned and had your phone in one hand and the microphone in the other. The small furrow was back between your brows, and he’d learned there was a point past which pushing you got him a brighter, smaller version of whatever you were covering. 

He drifted toward the far end of the station where Mateo was crouched at the crash cart running his palm along the drawers, checking seals, restocking and checking the fact of it on slower nights like this. 

“She okay?” Mateo asked, snapping the drawer, seemingly having caught the interaction. 

“Oh, you know.” Jack leaned a shoulder into the wall, arms crossing. “The belle of our ball. Can’t clock in without collecting a proposal.”

Mateo huffed. “She loves love.”

“That she does.” Jack watched you across the station, the phone lit against your ear now. “Don’t know why she keeps doing that to herself, though.”

“She’s an optimist.” Mateo clicked a seal into place, then moved down the cart. “Thinks someone’s gonna turn out different.”

Jack hummed, then, because the question had been sitting low and unlovely for a couple hours, he asked, “You two give it a run ever?” 

Mateo turned his neck to look up at Jack. “Me and —” He jutted his thumb behind him to vaguely gesture at you. “Her?”

“Mhm.” Jack kept his eyes on you. “You’re close.”

“Nah.” Mateo went back to the cart, shaking his head as he chuckled softly. “I don’t think I’d pass a single one of her tests. Besides, I got my eye on someone.”

“Apparently I don’t make the list either, I guess,” Jack murmured.

Mateo laughed through his nose, eyeing Jack with something new now. “You want to?” 

Jack caught it, reaching his palm and smacking it against Mateo’s curls with no force. “No. Now, do your job.”

“I am —” He laughed through the words, eyes scanning over Jack’s stiffened posture now. “It’s good you don’t, then. Couldn’t handle her anyway.” 

“Sure, I could,” Jack said immediately. 

Mateo’s head turned again, lips curving upwards at Jack’s words, and he felt momentarily blindsided by his own mouth, entirely too honest for something that had started as a joke. 

“Sure, you could,” Mateo teased, drawing out the words.

“Shut it.” Jack grabbed a box of gloves off the cart and set it down two shelves lower than it needed to go, purely to do something with his hands that didn’t involve reaching for Mateo’s collar. “Wasn’t a real question.”

Couldn’t handle you? As if he didn’t know, without having to think about it, that you took the stairs two at a time instead of the elevator when you were annoyed and needed somewhere to put your extra energy, or that you’d started drinking your coffee black on nights a patient reminded you of someone, syrup and cream abandoned, like sweetness felt wrong to have that shift. As if he hadn’t noticed, months ago, that you hummed the same four off-key notes from a jingle neither you nor Jack could place when a chart was boring you to death, or that you double-checked every single IV line now, ever since one bad mistake in your first year. He could very well handle you, he simply hadn’t been given the chance to do so.

Most of the time, Jack was fine with watching your love life play out in 3D. More often than not, he knew they’d never work out. You were just too good for anyone who came sniffing, and there was a grim comfort in that, in knowing the fellows and the nurses would wash through and out and leave you exactly where he found you, three feet down the counter from him, close enough to keep.

Tonight the comfort wasn’t coming. Mateo’s accidental interrogation had rubbed Jack wrongly, somewhere he had yet to fully locate yet, and was sitting in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting was there until he turned the corner over the night, saw you, and noticed it was there. He should’ve let it stay as nothing, but his brain had apparently decided three hours later was the correct time to relitigate the whole exchange, turning it over at odd intervals between patients like a tongue worrying a chipped tooth.

It was the bad sort of slow in the ER, the sort that let his brain fill up with things he’d have no time for on a real night. Ellis had wandered over to your desk with two energy drinks and placed her arms loosely beside your computer.

Jack was distantly aware he had misplaced labs to hand back to you because they’d gotten lost in the system, and he told himself that was the whole reason his body had started moving in your direction. 

“I got a rundown from Marge,” Ellis said, dropping into an empty stool beside you. “Apparently he wrote it out of the OR.”

“You’re joking,” you muttered. “I don’t understand it.” 

Jack stood there with the labs in his hand, close enough to hear it. 

“I’m still wondering if I should respond,” you were saying, half into your hands. “Is this romantic? This one’s never happened before.”

Ellis laughed slightly with you, and the two of you had built one of those small pockets that slow nights sometimes allowed, thirty seconds of being people instead of clinicians.

Jack set the labs down at the edge of your keyboard harder than he meant to, the papers slapping flat against the desk, and both of you looked up at him like he’d grown two heads. Fuck — had he? It sure felt like he was operating off of whatever chemical cocktail his brain had whipped up for nights like this, some ugly little compound of jealousy and exhaustion. He was fairly sure if you pulled his labs right now they’d look like a man in the middle of a bad reaction to something not yet figured out in the scientific world. 

“Labs on eight got lost.” His palm stayed on the sheet for a few seconds too long, some instinct telling him to keep his hand on something solid before the rest of him did something stupid. “You’ll want to recheck the trop.” 

His eyes cut, against every ounce of better judgement he had left, to the note still folded in your hand, the same one he’d carried down like it was radioactive, the same note that had clearly done something for you that four years of Jack standing next to you clearly hadn’t. An unreasonable, low feeling creeped up behind his ribs at the sight of it, hot and out of proportion to a piece of folded-fucking-paper. 

Ellis’s smile went uncertain as he felt her gaze snag on him. 

You blinked up at him, and whatever had been sitting easy in your face a second ago curdled itself away, the corners of your mouth retreating. He knew this same retreat, had watched you recalibrate your muscles, swiftly, built to be unreadable against anyone who hadn’t spent four years learning your face. 

His stomach dropped and heat climbed up the back of his neck, jaw tightening on its own. He hated that his body had learned to answer you the way it answered a motor alarm. He hated more that some raw, cornered part in him — still smarting about Mateo’s offhand comment and sore from that folded note — felt it wasn’t soothed.

You blinked up at him, and the laugh faded off your face, and you said, easily, warm, “Yeah — course. I’ll get right on that.”

He shrugged up one shoulder, lips pressing into a thin line. He turned, already walking away. “Whenever there’s a gap on your social calendar, I guess.”

He heard the small silence that opened behind him, and he could practically imagine you and Ellis looking at each other. Then, he heard you push back from the desk, the stool wheels catching, and your footsteps coming after him like he’d known they would, because you were the last person to let something like that go. 

“Hey.” You fell into step beside him, voice pitched low, still giving him more benefit than the doubt had earned in the last ten seconds. “What was that about?”

“Nothing.” He tilted his neck up slightly to do a quick scan of the board, some stubborn muscle in his neck refusing to let him meet your eyes. “Got a department to run.”

“And you’ve been running it great. You just became weird right now.” He could feel you working it over beside him, shifting on your feet as you toed the line between resident and the hard-won territory neither of you had ever named. “Jack.” 

“You want to laugh about your shitty dates, that’s your business,” he said instead of letting it go, sounding too far from the man who’d had his hands hovering over yours an hour ago, watching you put in a chest tube, telling you that you’d done well. “Do it a little quieter. This is an ER, not a lunch table.”

His words stopped you for half a step. Jack kept walking, an ugly, cowardly momentum carrying him three more steps before you caught back up.

He heard you recalibrate your voice in real time when you said, “I was charting on a slow shift,” carefully. “You’ve made worse jokes when it’s even more busy. What’s this about?”

“It’s about you treating this place like it’s your dating pool and not your place of work.” The words came out much uglier than he meant, and he didn’t have it in him to call them back. “It’s not professional. It reflects on the department. Reflects on me. Somebody’s gotta say it, and apparently that’s me, since you clearly enjoy it too much to stop.” 

You stopped walking altogether this time. He turned to face your stillness whole, then, and found your eyes narrowed at him, looking like you’d been hit from a direction you hadn’t been completely guarding against. 

He let out a breath, fingers going up to his forehead to wipe at sweat that wasn’t there. “I’m just saying what —”

“I’m sorry,” you said, voice going level and courteous, as you nodded quickly. “You’re right. You’re my attending, it reflects on you. I’ll keep my personal life out of work.” 

“That’s not —” he tried, but you were already turning away, shoulders squared and chin level, professional armor snapping into place just like he’d told you to. It should have made him feel better to watch you take it so cleanly, to not make a big deal out of it. All it made him feel was like something had been surgically removed from him. 

“Stop —” he tried again, to your back now, and the sentence died somewhere between his teeth and the air. That was okay. There was no end to the sentence that didn’t sound worse than the beginning anyway. 

He blew out a sharp breath through his nose, standing in the middle of the floor with his hand still half-raised toward you, fingers curling back into his palm when he realized you weren’t there to reach. Jack felt, distantly, uselessly, like the only thing standing still in the entire building. 

“Great going,” he heard Lena say, trailing past him, a tray tucked against her hip, not even breaking stride. “You got rid of the one entertainment we’ve got around here.”

His shoulders stiffened, and he caught up with her in three steps, jaw working around words that wanted to spill out defensively and came out simply tired. “It’s not entertainment if she keeps getting hurt,” he grumbled. “She’s not a show. Stop treating her like one.” 

“Didn’t look like she was the one getting hurt tonight,” she said, rounding a corner and leaving him standing there.

Jack let out a low groan, running a palm down the lower half of his face, and dropped his hand only when he’d scrubbed enough friction into his jaw to feel it sting a little, which was at least a sensation he’d chosen, at least tonight. He stood there a second longer, staring at nothing in particular. His hands found his hips on reflex. 

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, and dragged both hands back through his hair, gripping once at the roots before letting go. 

He rolled his neck, felt it pop unsatisfyingly, and pushed off the wall he hadn’t even realized he was leaning against. His leg fucking ached, the burn starting behind his knee. He ignored it like he always did and started walking anyway, jaw still held tight, hands shoved deep into his pockets like he could physically hold himself together with the seams of his own black scrubs.

It was by the lockers after hand-off that Jack saw you next. Both of you had conveniently managed to work over-time; he because there was nothing to get home to, and you — he’d heard through the grapevine — because one of your patient’s little sister was coming in toward close, and you simply wanted to talk with her instead of handing the situation off to one of the day residents.

Usually, nobody had asked you to stay when you did. Most times, there was no version of staying that showed up in your favor; he and Shen were gone, so there was no attending grading you on it; no hours that counted. It was just for a kid who was going to get bad news from a face she’d seen before, so you cost yourself hours of sleep you most definitely needed to be the soft spot for a stranger’s little sister, and hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, and he knew you would’ve been embarrassed if he brought it up. 

He found you using the little mirror inside your locker to apply some kind of pink-tubed gloss with one hand while the other ran its fingers through your hair. Jack pursed his lips, eyeing you from the doorway, because he was pretty sure you’d done something different to it in the last ten minutes. 

“Look nice,” he tried, biting the bullet and walking toward his own locker. “Goin’ somewhere?” 

You caught his eyes in the mirror instead of turning around. “Just breakfast,” you said, and there was none of the earlier lilt in it, the warmth that you’d always aimed at him gone functional. You capped the gloss with more force than it needed and dropped it into your bag. 

Jack stood there a second too long with his hand over his own locker without opening it. He’d expected — and he knew he was more optimistic than usual for doing so — your easy back-and-forth, his slip-up from earlier forgotten. He wasn’t sure what to do with the quiet or you not looking at him properly, hairbrush working through your hair in short strokes. 

He’d saved around thirty lives tonight, and that was what he was good at. He was not good, and had never claimed to be good, at the aftermath of hurting a person he’d have put his own body between a stretcher and wall for, without meaning to, over something that had never been about the radiology fellow at all. 

He opted out of opening his locker and chose instead to lean his bicep against the locker, eyeing you in front of him. “Mad at me?” he murmured. 

You let out a short breath, shaking your head, and he tracked all your micro-expressions through the mirror. “On the clock?” 

“Well, we’ve both been off it for a while now,” he said, watching the shape of your mouth in the mirror, waiting for it to give something away. It didn’t. “But no. Asking as your —” He stopped himself, because ‘friend’ seemed not to be the honest word though it was the first one that popped up. “Off the clock. Whatever I am to you right now.”

You set the hairbrush down on the little shelf with more care than the moment needed. “It’s okay, Jack,” you said, shaking your head.

“Don’t think it is. Try again.”

You watched him for a second in the mirror, then you turned. 

“It’s just embarrassing,” you said, and the words came out smaller than anything he’d heard out of you in years. You crossed your arms over your chest. “I respect you and I hate that you’d think for one second I don’t take this place seriously.” Your voice cracked on the last word, just barely, and you pressed your lips together. “So, yeah. It’s embarrassing to have my attending confirming I’m exactly what people think I am.”

He was shaking his head before you could even finish the sentence. “Nobody thinks —”

“You do,” you said, voice rising slightly. “So, off the clock, I’m embarrassed, and tonight, I’m going to be your resident. Because I agree with you. It’s been unprofessional of me to keep dating within the hospital —” You threw your arms up halfway by your side, and you let out a short laugh that came out dry and wrong. “And I hate that you’ve probably been thinking it for four years.”

“I haven’t,” he said too fast. God, he’d come here to make tonight better for you, not to make you re-evaluate all your years working with him. “Sure, I thought it was none of my business how you spend your good nights off. Didn’t stop me from thinking they didn’t deserve ‘em.” 

You rolled your eyes. “You’re just saying that now ‘cause you feel bad.”

“Wish it were that simple,” he said, and chose to leave it unelaborated because it wasn’t that simple and he had no intention of explaining exactly why. “Half the time, you know it’s not gonna work out. You’re breaking my heart by making me watch you break yours.” 

You blinked, and he watched the fight loosen out of you by inches. “It’s just a free breakfast, Jack. Nothing to get your heart broken over.” 

Jack let out a huff through his nose, mouth opening to say what, he didn’t know. “Is that all? ‘Cause I can get you free breakfast for the rest of your life.” 

You laughed, disbelieving, through your nose, some of the night’s weight finally cracking off of you. “You’ve got a weird way of apologizing.” 

“Just to my favorite resident.” He pointed his index finger at you, lazy, and pushed himself off the lockers. His shoulder blades left a faint dust-print on the metal where he’d been leaning. He thumbed in the combination without looking at the dial — muscle memory, years of the same locker — and the door swung open with a rusted squeak. He pulled out his bag. “So?” 

“So what?” 

“You ditch the fellow.” He slung the bag up over his shoulder, close enough now that he caught the tail-end of the perfume you’d lightly spritzed over yourself. “I buy.”

You looked at him for a second too long, lips pushing to one side, as though you were gauging whether this was a bit or not, another line he’d tossed and wanted to let die on its own. He stood there, jaw set and features relaxing to show you he did mean it, more than he wanted to admit, if he was being honest with himself. 

“You’re serious.” 

“Do I look like I’m not?” He nodded once at your locker, your bag sitting on the shelf. “Grab your stuff. We’re going.” 

“Fine,” you said finally, reaching over and zipping your backpack all the way before throwing it over one shoulder. “Can you drive? I’ve been taking the subway.”

“Why?” he asked drily. “You’ve got a car.”

Jack realized, as he watched you slide in across from him and folding both hands around the coffee before it was all the way poured, that he’d never once been on a date where the woman had no idea it was one. 

It wasn’t lost on him what that made him, a man old enough to know better, letting a thing be one thing on his side of the table and another thing entirely on yours, saying nothing to square the difference. But he’d meant what he’d said, and he was going to feed you. 

You ordered a short stack, eggs, hash brown, decaf on loop. She wrote it down, definitely having heard worse from better.

“Thanks for the treat, Jack,” you said when Dina left, bringing the rim of your cup to your lips. “Don’t think I could’ve done another breakfast to let him down gently.”

“We have to make some changes to your lifestyle,” Jack replied, voice rough, as he eyed you. 

“Oh, yeah?” you murmured. “We?” 

“Well, I did have to deliver a note to you today. In all my life working here, that’s never happened.” 

You laughed around the rim of your cup. “In my defense, I don’t think anyone’s wrote me a note out of an OR either. That’s a first for both of us.”

“Glad we share the experience.”

Dina came by with a pot and topped you off without being asked, and placed the food in front of you. Jack watched you reach for the salt before your fork had even touched the eggs, shaking it twice over the plate.

“You’re gonna give yourself a stroke by forty.”

“You’re gonna give me a stroke right now if you comment on my food.” But you set the shaker down after the third shake, which he noticed and had to bite back a smile.

Dina dropped his plate in front of him — bacon, eggs, no pancakes — and you were reaching for it with a piece of your fork before she’d even finished setting his fork down. He gave you a faux-frown, picking up his fork and, without looking, spreading a piece of your hashbrown off the opposite plate in trade. He wasn’t sure when the two of you had started stealing bites and sips off of each other’s stuff, only that it’d started somewhere and calcified into something neither of you mentioned. 

“Rude,” you said, mouth already full.

“Learned it from you,” he muttered, nudging his plate an inch closer to your side of the table, which you took full advantage of. 

Dina’s radio crackled through something twangy and close-to-familiar behind the counter, competing with the clatter of a skillet somewhere in the back, the whole place smelling like batter and grease soaked into decades of countertop, syrup that had dried a hundred small amber rings nobody had ever fully scrubbed off. 

“I’ve never been here before.” You absentmindedly cut the hashbrown in half as your eyes raked over the place. “This a regular spot for you?”

“Since before you joined,” he said easily, but his brows furrowed as he realized he’d been coming here alone for years. He was in the same booth when he could get it, ordered the same order, and it struck to him only now, watching you eat your hashbrowns, how much smaller and less lonely a booth felt with you taking up the other half of it. “Used to be the only quiet I got on some weeks.” 

You hummed. “And now?”

“Guess the quiet’s pretty negotiable.” He shrugged. “I can go without it.”

You smiled down at your plate, something easy working at the corner of your mouth. A thread of syrup had gathered at the seam of your lips — you hadn’t noticed, too busy considering his answer — and before he’d cleared the impulse with the rest of himself, his thumb was already moving, catching it at the corner quickly, no different than when he swiped under your lashline for salt after a bad night.

You stayed still, having gotten used to his hands somewhere during your residency.

“You’re a mess,” he said, wiping his thumb off on the paper napkin folded under his elbow. 

“You’ve got coffee on your scrub top,” you said, eyes flicking down to his chest. His brows furrowed and he looked down, and you were right. “Pot, kettle.”

He’d been about to say something else, he could’ve sworn it, but had lost every word of it watching you smile so unguarded, free enough to let him look at you. He had to reach for his coffee just to have something to do with his hands. 

When the check came, folded in its little plastic tray, you both reached for it at once. Your hand landed flat over his knuckles. Neither of you moved it for a second, for his hand stayed exactly where it was, broad and unmoving under yours, and something unspoken passed through the two inches of fornica between your faces as he raised a brow at you. He slid the tray out from under you slowly.

“Said I’m buying,” he said, shaking his head slightly.

The drive back had been quieter than the one there had been. It was nearing ten in the morning, and he knew both of you had stayed up longer than intended, especially for two people who had to clock back in in a shorter amount of time than he deemed plausible to reset completely.

He’d cracked the window down an inch, and the air coming through carried the smell of wet pavement and the sound of a garbage truck grinding its gears three streets over. Your neighborhood, he was learning, woke up slow; there was a paperboy on a bike, a guy in scrubs different from yours locking up his own car after a shift that wasn’t at the PTMC, and Jack drove through it with two fingers loose over the wheel. Neither of you had bothered with the radio.

You’d gone somewhere billowy around your third cup of decaf, all the sharp edges of the night replaced with something looser and sleepier, and you gave him directions in a voice gone thick from exhaustion as you were likely starting to feel it behind your eyes. 

He pulled his car along the curb and let it idle, one shoe braced against the floorboard, watching the numbers of your building.

“Gonna sleep?” he asked.

“Gonna try.” You were already working the bag strap over your shoulder, hair falling loose out of the knot you’d put it up in at some point at the diner, strands of it catching the early light. “I’ve got no idea how you do this then take SWAT calls.”

“You’d be able to do it, too, if I put you on the field.” 

You mumbled something, letting your head drop against the window for a second, before picking itself back up. “Stop threatening me, Jack.” 

He watched you fight your eyelids, his mouth pulling up at the corners at the sight. “C’mon. Get inside before I gotta carry you up.”

You snorted, half-hearted. “You can’t. You’d throw your hip out.”

“Try me.” He was already rounding the hood before you’d gathered your bearings, boots loud on the quiet street, and you let out another laugh and let him get there first, too tired to argue about who gets to open what.

He walked you up the cracked path, palm settling at the small of your back, and you leaned back into it, half your weight given over without you noticing it. 

At the door, you fumbled with your keys out from under a granola wrapper and a capless pen, missed the lock twice, and gave up trying on the third. You turned to face him instead with your back against the frame and your bag slowly sliding off one shoulder.

“Thank you,” you said, words coming out loose and filtered by the exhaustion even as you tried to meet his eyes head-on. “For the — everything. The explanation. And the breakfast.” 

Jack felt his lips curve up, fingers flexing at his sides. “Anytime.” 

“And for driving me there — thank you. And for the drive back.” 

“Uh-huh. You gonna go inside?” he said, voice going quieter as he looked down at the ground, at how the toes of your shoes were almost touching. “Or keep thanking me until you fall asleep standing up?” 

You cocked your head to the side, your lips moving upwards into a fuller smile. His own mouth curved as he shifted on his feet slightly, closing the barely-there inch between his shoes and yours. 

“Jack?” 

He hummed, and you went up slightly onto your toes before he’d finished deciding what to do with you. Or maybe he’d moved in first, or maybe there was no real order to it at all. His mouth found yours somewhere in that uncertainty, slowly despite it, because he’d already worked out every version of this moment and this one had simply appeared in front of him.

His hand came up to cradle the side of your jaw, thumb settling into the soft hollow just beneath your ears. Your skin was warm despite the cold snap in the air, much softer than he’d let himself imagine, and he felt the exact second your breath caught against his mouth, a small stutter that made his fingers curve around your jaw, index resting against your cheekbone. 

He kept it slow, it was the only thing he had any real control over right now, the pace of it instead of the fact of it. He used what little he had left, dragging his mouth against yours, like he could somehow make up for four years of nothing by refusing to rush the first thirty seconds of something. His other hand found your waist, and his palm felt how your back curved into him, the hitch of your ribs on an inhale, and he pressed you back the last inch against the doorframe more to ground himself. 

Your fist found the front of his canvas jacket, dragging him in the last stubborn space he’d been too careful to close himself, and a sound came out of his chest that embarrassed him a little. He felt you smile against his mouth, and his entire body felt warm at having been caught enjoying this entirely as much as he was. 

He tilted his head so his forehead pressed against yours and pulled his mouth away. His lips jutted out slightly, feeling suddenly empty and unwilling to put the full distance back between the two of you.

Your eyes were still shut, and you were breathing unevenly. “Thank you,” you murmured. 

He huffed a short laugh, and in it, realized how breathless he, too, was. 

You tipped your chin back up, already chasing him.

Jack felt the want knot up inside him, greedy and unreasonably leaning back in to meet you halfway before the rest of him had caught up and made him stop. He made a small sound in his throat and pinched his eyes shut, letting you get right up to the edge of it, breath already tangling with his, wanting so badly to just let it happen, before his finger came up between you, pressed light against your bottom lip to stop you a hair short. It was more for his own sake than the words he remembered you telling someone years ago ringing in his head.

“Ah-ah.” His voice came out rough with want, entirely at odds with his actions. “Your rule. Only one kiss after the first date. I’m trying —” he exhaled hard, almost dramatically, “— trying real hard here to make it to the second.”

“Huh?” Your eyes peeled open. “This was a date?” 

“Best one you’ve had I’m guessing, with the way you’re breaking your rules.” His finger stayed right where it was, and he watched your eyes struggle to focus, still glassy from the kiss. He could feel the warm huff of breath breaking unsteady against his fingertip, could feel your mouth soft and parted underneath it, waiting on him. 

You pressed a peck against his finger instead, your mouth barely dragging against his skin as a shy smile formed behind it that he felt more than saw. “Maybe.”

“Well, good.” He smiled, despite himself, and pushed himself off your forehead, opting instead to press his lips there. “Get some sleep,” he murmured against your hairline, lips lingering a little longer there. “Might be able to get a full seven hours.” 

“Will you?” 

“Doubt it.” He pulled back enough to look at you properly, thumb tracing a line along your cheekbone — his touch feather-light, tracking the exact curve of it, memorizing the route — before he made himself drop his hand entirely, fingers curling loosely at his sides because suddenly he had no idea what to do with them without you under them. “Kinda got a lot on my mind now.”

“Yeah?” You bit back a smile, still not quite steady on your feet. “Anything you wanna share with the class?”

“Not a chance.” He bent a fraction and hooked two fingers under the strap of your bag where it’d slid down to your elbow, dragging it slowly back up to your shoulders, knuckles grazing your arms the whole way. “You’ll find out. Eventually.”

He forced himself to step off the mat — one step back, then the second, putting real distance between you now — forcing ease into his expression that he definitely wasn’t feeling. He stopped a few feet away from you anyway, unable to fully commit to walking away, watching you stunned and still in your doorway, mouth a little kiss-soft. He felt so completely helpless and pleased at the sight. “Text me when you’re up and I’ll get to planning date two.” 

You raised a hand into a wave, fingers curling in the air.

“Bye, Jack,” you said, and his name came out of your mouth softer than you probably meant it to, smooth and cushy the way it never sounded on shift.

The text from Valarr arrived twelve minutes before you were supposed to meet.

so terrible news. kiera situation. cannot make it. SO sorry. dad said he'd go instead if you still want to?? he's literally already in the area for work. no pressure obvs

You stared at your phone for a moment.

is your dad going to be weird about it

Valarr's response was immediate.

dad is constitutionally incapable of being weird about anything. also he literally works at the museum three streets away so he's probably already mentally in the bookshop. please go he'll be sad if you cancel he's been in meetings all morning

You looked at that for a second. The image of Baelor Targaryen being sad about missing a bookshop trip was doing something to your composure that you chose not to examine.

fine tell him I'm at the corner table

THANK YOU you're literally saving his day and probably mine too bc kiera is

He did not finish the sentence. You sent a sympathetic emoji and put your phone down and ordered a coffee and tried very hard not to think about the fact that you were now waiting for your best friend's father in a cafe on a Saturday afternoon, which was a sentence you were choosing not to examine too closely.

He arrived seven minutes later.

You knew it was him before you looked up properly — there was a quality to the way he moved through the cafe that you had catalogued during the various times you had been at Valarr's house and found yourself in the same room as his father. Unhurried. Certain of his own pace. The kind of person who did not navigate around other people so much as other people instinctively made space.

He was wearing a jacket that suggested he had in fact come directly from the museum — slightly more formal than a Saturday probably required, dark, the kind of jacket that had probably lived on the back of an office chair all morning — and he was carrying, you noticed immediately, a book. Not in a bag. Just — in his hand. Like he had picked it up to read on his walk over and had not put it down yet because he was still thinking about whatever was on the last page.

He found you, and something in his expression arranged itself into warmth.

"I'm sorry about Valarr," he said, settling into the chair across from you with the ease of someone who had decided this was simply the situation and there was no point in making it awkward. "Kiera rang him about twenty minutes ago — I'm not entirely sure what happened but it sounded significant."

"He sent approximately four apology texts," you said.

"That sounds right." He set the book on the table and flagged down the server with the unhurried confidence of a man who had been in many cafes and knew how they worked. "He felt terrible about it. He was very insistent that I — I believe the phrase was do not be boring."

"Are you boring?" you asked.

He looked at you over the menu with those eyes — attentive, with the quality of someone who was already slightly amused by the question. "I work in a museum," he said. "Specialising in medieval and Byzantine history. The jury, I think, is still out."

"Byzantine is genuinely fascinating," you said. "The iconoclasm period specifically."

The menu lowered approximately two inches.

"The iconoclasm period," he repeated.

"The politics of it," you said. "Everyone talks about it as a theological dispute but it was fundamentally a power struggle between the emperor and the church dressed in theological language, which is—"

"Which is significantly more interesting than the religious framing suggests," he finished, and there was something in his voice that had not been there thirty seconds ago — a quality of attention that had sharpened from polite and warm to entirely focused in the space of one sentence about Byzantine iconoclasm.

You had said something right.

You were not going to examine how much you wanted to keep saying right things.

The coffee arrived.

Baelor ordered his with the automatic ease of someone who did not need to think about it — flat white, no sugar — and settled back in his chair and looked at you with the expression of a man who had come here expecting a pleasant if slightly obligatory Saturday afternoon and was recalibrating.

"How do you know about the iconoclasm period?" he asked. Not testing. Genuinely curious, in the way of someone who has encountered something unexpected and wants to understand it.

"My grandmother," you said. "She was obsessed with Byzantine history. Had about forty books on it. I grew up reading them because they were the most interesting things in her house."

"What else did she have?"

"The complete collection on the fall of the Western Roman Empire by Gibbon. Three books specifically on Theodora — she had strong opinions about Theodora."

"Everyone should have strong opinions about Theodora," he said, with a conviction that suggested this was not a casual statement.

"She also had this absolutely unhinged book about the administrative structure of the Carolingian empire that I read when I was fourteen and found genuinely compelling."

Baelor set his coffee cup down.

He looked at you for a moment with an expression you had not seen from him before — not the warm composed attention of Valarr's father being polite to Valarr's friend, but something more unguarded than that. Something that looked, if you were reading it correctly, almost like delight.

"The Carolingian administrative structure," he said.

"It was a very good book," you said.

"I think I own that book," he said. "I have recommended that book to colleagues who hold doctorates in medieval history and been looked at like I was suggesting light reading."

"The section on the missi dominici alone—"

"Is extraordinary," he said, and then caught himself, and the tips of his ears went very slightly pink in a way that you were fairly certain he was unaware of. "Sorry. I'm — Valarr did say not to be boring and I've just launched into—"

"I brought up the missi dominici," you pointed out.

"You did," he said.

"I knew what I was getting into."

He looked at you for a moment. Something shifted in his expression — a recalibration, subtle and complete, like a man who has been holding a map of a situation and has just realised the map and the territory do not entirely match.

He picked up his coffee. "Right," he said. "The missi dominici."

They closed the café.

Not intentionally. It simply became apparent at some point — you were not sure exactly when — that the afternoon had developed a quality of its own that neither of you had planned and both of you had stopped managing. You had gone from Byzantine iconoclasm to the Carolingians to a twenty minute debate about whether the popular historical narrative around the fall of Rome was more politically motivated than academically honest, during which Baelor had leaned forward with his elbows on the table and the expression of a man who had stopped remembering to be measured about things he found genuinely exciting, which was — a lot. It was a lot. His hands moved when he talked about history, which you had not known about him, and he had a specific smile that arrived when you said something that surprised him, which was different from his usual composed warmth and considerably more dangerous to your ability to function normally.

He was not being smug about knowing things.

That was the thing that had been doing something to your composure since approximately the iconoclasm conversation. He could have been smug — he worked in a museum, he had the credentials, he had probably forgotten more about medieval history than most people ever learned. But every time you said something he did not expect he looked at you like you had shown him something he genuinely wanted to see, with the uncomplicated delight of someone who loved a subject and was simply glad to find another person who loved it too.

It was, you had concluded somewhere around the second coffee, the most attractive quality you had ever encountered in another person and you needed it to stop immediately, but it was not stopping.

"We should probably—" he said, at the point when the server had refilled your water glasses for the third time with the pointed patience of someone whose shift was ending.

"The bookshop," you said.

"Right." He reached for his jacket. "Although at this point I feel I should warn you that I have — opinions. About the history section."

"What kind of opinions?"

"The kind that Valarr refers to as dad, please and that my colleagues find professionally embarrassing."

"Tell me the opinions," you said.

He looked at you. The smile that crossed his face was not the composed public one. It was something underneath that one — warmer and more unguarded and slightly helpless, the smile of a man who had been trying to be measured and had run out of reasons to bother.

"Right," he said. "The opinions."

The bookshop was three streets from the café and was exactly the kind of place that seemed to exist specifically for people like Baelor — floor to ceiling shelves, the particular quality of light that only occurred in rooms full of old paper, a complete absence of any organisational logic that was somehow navigated instinctively by everyone who belonged there.

Baelor belonged there immediately and completely. You watched him walk through the door and visibly relax in the specific way of someone arriving somewhere they understood.

"History is in the back," he said, already moving. "Past the travel section, which is organised by continent rather than alphabetically, which I have thoughts about, and through the archway. Don't let the archway fool you — it looks like it goes to philosophy but it doesn't."

"Sounds like you've been here before," you teased.

"I may have a tab," he said, without turning around.

You followed him through the travel section — organised by continent, as advertised — through the archway that did not lead to philosophy, and into a room that was essentially floor to ceiling history, organised by period, with handwritten shelf labels that had clearly been redone at some point in the last decade and not entirely consistently.

Baelor stopped in front of the medieval section and looked at it with the expression of a man surveying a landscape he had complicated feelings about.

"The Byzantine section," he said, "is filed under Eastern Europe, which is—"

"Reductive," you said. He turned to look at you. "Historically, geographically, and culturally reductive," you continued. "It's like filing Rome under Italy."

He stared at you for a moment.

"I have said those exact words," he said slowly, "to the owner of this shop. Twice. In those exact words."

"What did he say?"

"He said that's where people look for it." A pause. "Which is pragmatic and also completely misses the point."

"It completely misses the point," you agreed.

Baelor looked at you with that expression again — the unguarded one, the one that had been appearing with increasing frequency since the missi dominici and that he appeared to be losing the ability to fully manage. There was something in it that was different from the version you had been cataloguing during visits to Valarr's house. Warmer than that. More specific.

"Right," he said, and turned to the shelf, and you watched the back of his neck go very slightly pink.

You were extremely pleased with yourself.

An hour later you had accumulated a small pile of books each — his significantly larger than yours, though he had shown you each one with the genuine enthusiasm of someone sharing things they loved rather than performing expertise, which was the thing that kept doing the thing to your composure — and had ended up side by side in the narrow aisle between medieval and early modern, which was not a wide aisle, consulting the shelves with the proximity of people who had stopped noticing the proximity because the conversation had taken over.

You reached for a book on the top shelf at the same moment he did.

Your hands did not quite collide but they came close enough that you both stopped.

He was — close. The aisle was narrow and he was taller than you and the combined effect of both of these facts was that when you looked up you were looking at him from a distance that was significantly less than the distance that had existed between you at the café table, and the expression on his face in the half second before he registered that he needed to have an expression was—

Not composed. Not the curator. Not Valarr's father being politely warm to Valarr's friend. Just a man, in a bookshop, standing very close to someone, with an expression that had not been filtered through any of the usual management.

He registered it approximately one second after you did.

You watched the composure return — not completely, not at its usual speed, the edges of it slightly uneven in a way they were not normally — and he took the book from the shelf and held it out and said, very evenly: "This one is worth reading. The author's thesis about manuscript transmission is contested but the primary research is solid."

"Thank you," you said, taking it.

"The footnotes specifically," he said, to the shelf.

"I'll read the footnotes specifically," you said.

A pause during which the narrow aisle continued to be narrow.

"We should probably find the till," he said.

"Probably," you agreed.

Neither of you moved immediately.

Then he did — stepped back, with the slight over-correction of a man giving a situation more physical space than it strictly required — and you followed him toward the front of the shop with your small pile of books and the specific warmth of an afternoon that had not been what either of you planned and had been, despite or because of that, one of the better ones you could remember.

At the till he paid for his books with the focused attention of a man concentrating on a transaction and not on anything else, which was so transparently what it was that you looked at the display of bookmarks near the counter rather than at his face because you were kind like that.

Outside on the pavement the afternoon had gone golden, the particular late Saturday light that made the city look briefly like somewhere worth staying.

"Thank you for not cancelling," he said. He was looking at the street rather than at you, with the quality of someone choosing their words carefully. "I'm aware it wasn't — you came to spend the afternoon with Valarr, not with his—" he stopped.

"I had a very good afternoon," you said simply.

He looked at you then.

"So did I," he said. The composure was there but the edges were still slightly uneven and you could see, if you knew where to look, which you did, the thing underneath it that he was managing with less success than usual.

You smiled at him.

He looked at you for a moment longer than was strictly accounted for by polite conclusion of a Saturday afternoon, and then he said goodbye and that he would tell Valarr you had survived his abandonment, and walked back in the direction of wherever his car was.

You watched him go for approximately four seconds before you got your phone out and opened Valarr's chat.

your dad knows about the missi dominici

Valarr's response took thirty seconds and consisted entirely of a series of increasingly alarmed emojis followed by

oh no oh no are you okay

You looked down the street in the direction Baelor had gone. You thought about the narrow aisle and the unguarded expression and the pink at the back of his neck and the smile that had been arriving with increasing frequency and decreasing composure since the iconoclasm conversation.

I am so normal about your dad

that's a lie

It was, in fact, a lie. You decided to brush it off instead.

how's Kiera

He sent back a very long string of text that you read while walking to the tube and that successfully occupied your attention for approximately three minutes before your brain returned, with the reliability of something that had found a preferred direction, to the bookshop and the narrow aisle and Baelor Targaryen saying the footnotes specifically to a shelf because he needed somewhere to look that was not your face.

You were, you concluded, in considerable trouble.

You heard him before you saw him.

You and Daeron had been on the sofa for the better part of two hours, working through a series of increasingly bad decisions in the film he had put on, when the sound came from upstairs. Not loud exactly. More — sustained. A specific quality of noise that suggested a man encountering a situation and responding to it with his full vocabulary.

Daeron paused the film. You both listened.

Another burst of it, muffled by the ceiling but comprehensively audible, featuring several words in combination that you were fairly certain constituted a new grammatical construction.

"That's the bathroom," Daeron said, with the calm of someone who had been hearing his father swear at inanimate objects for his entire life and had developed a classification system. He stood up. "That's the bad bathroom."

"How many bathrooms are there."

"Four." He was already heading for the stairs. "Only one of them is currently antagonising my dad, which statistically is pretty good for this house."

You followed him up.

The bathroom was at the end of the upstairs hall and the door was open and the sound of water was immediately, obviously wrong — not running water, not shower water, but the specific urgent sound of water going somewhere it was not supposed to go with considerable commitment to the project.

Daeron stopped in the doorway. You stopped behind him and looked over his shoulder and took in the situation.

The cabinet under the sink had been fully removed — it was propped against the wall behind the door — and the pipes beneath were exposed and one of them was, there was no other word for it, enthusiastically wrong.

Water was going in several directions with the democratic generosity of something that had decided if it could not go one place it would go all places. A wrench and several other tools were arranged on the sodden bathmat with the organisation of someone who had started this project with a plan and had encountered escalating complications.

Maekar was on the floor.

Specifically he was wedged half under the sink with his legs out, in jeans and a dark t-shirt that had not survived the situation in any meaningful way — soaked through, hair wet, jaw set with the expression of a man conducting an intense personal negotiation with a section of copper piping. His forearms were braced against the cabinet frame and there was water dripping from his elbow onto the already comprehensively wet bathmat and he had not yet registered that he had an audience.

He said something to the pipe. It was not a nice thing.

"Dad," said Daeron.

Maekar turned his head. Took in Daeron. Took in you behind Daeron, with the brief additional quality of a man who had forgotten a guest was in his house and was now processing this in the context of being soaking wet on a bathroom floor.

"The compression joint went," he said, which you recognised as an explanation directed at Daeron and as a form of dignity preservation directed at you. "Hand me the adjustable wrench. The large one."

Daeron looked at the arrangement of tools on the bathmat with the expression of a man confronting a foreign language.

"Which one is—"

You reached past him, picked up the adjustable wrench, and held it out. Maekar's hand came out from under the sink and closed around it and then stopped. He turned his head and looked at you. Not at Daeron. At you.

You held his gaze with the equanimity of someone who had grown up watching their father fix things and knew what an adjustable wrench looked like.

He took it.

You watched him go back to work, the specific focused efficiency of someone who knew what they were doing, and you watched him encounter the problem — the angle was wrong, the joint was seated badly, there was a secondary issue with the isolation valve that he had not got to yet — and you watched him get to the point where what he was doing was not going to work.

"The valve," you said. "The isolation valve on the left — it's not fully closed. That's why the pressure's still—"

Maekar stopped.

He came out from under the sink enough to look at you properly. Water dripped from his hair. His expression had the quality of a man who had received unexpected information and had not yet decided what to do with it. "How do you know about isolation valves," he said. Not rudely. Just — directly. The way he said everything.

"My dad," you said. "He does all of this for a living. I grew up handing him tools."

Maekar looked at you for a moment. Then he looked at Daeron.

Daeron, who was still holding nothing and had the slightly glazed expression of a man who had identified this situation as one he was not going to be useful in, gave a small shrug that communicated don't look at me with minimal effort.

"The valve's behind the— you'd have to get down here," Maekar said, which was not quite an invitation but was the closest thing to one that his current position and dignity allowed.

You pushed past Daeron.

You dropped to your knees on the wet bathmat without hesitating, which you felt Maekar register even though he said nothing, and looked at the pipes with the assessment of someone who had spent enough Saturday mornings under kitchen sinks and in airing cupboards to know what she was looking at.

The isolation valve was most of the way closed but not fully — a quarter turn away from where it needed to be, which was enough to maintain the pressure that was making the repair impossible.

"Got a flathead?" you said.

A brief pause. Then the flathead screwdriver appeared in your peripheral vision. You took it, reached in, gave the valve the quarter turn it needed, and felt the pressure in the pipes ease almost immediately — the aggressive water going several directions becoming a manageable drip and then, mostly, stopping.

"There," you said. "Now the joint should seat properly."

Silence.

You turned your head.

Maekar was looking at you from approximately eighteen inches away with an expression you had not seen from him before. Not the gruff default. Not the frown at something failing to cooperate. Something that had not fully decided what it was yet, moving through several registers in the space of a second — surprise, reassessment, and something underneath both of those that arrived and was immediately and firmly pushed somewhere else.

"Right," he said.

He went back to the joint.

You stayed where you were and passed him things when he needed them — not waiting to be asked, just reading the work and anticipating it the way you had learned to do at your father's elbow, handing things over with the quiet efficiency of someone who knew the rhythm of this kind of job — and you felt him register each time, the slight adjustment in his attention, the way he started to reach for something and found it already there.

At some point Daeron, in the doorway, ceased to exist as a presence in the room. You were not sure when this happened. You were not sure when you stopped tracking anything except the pipes and the work and the specific focused quality of being next to someone who knew what they were doing.

"Jointing compound," Maekar said.

You found it. Handed it over.

He worked in silence for a few minutes — good silence, the silence of someone who was inside a problem and making progress. You watched his hands. He had good hands for this kind of work, large and certain and knowing where to be, and there was water still dripping from his forearm onto the bathmat and you were, you noted with some resignation, very wet from the knees down and did not care even slightly.

He tightened the joint.

Reached past you to the isolation valve and opened it by degrees, carefully, watching the joint.

No drip.

He opened it further.

Still nothing.

He opened it fully and you both watched the pipes for a long moment with the specific quality of attention that plumbing demanded — not quite trusting, not yet — and the joint held and the water went where it was supposed to go and Maekar sat back on his heels and exhaled.

You sat back on yours.

The bathmat was thoroughly destroyed. Your jeans were wet from the knee down and there was something that appeared to be jointing compound on your left hand and probably on your face as well given that you had pushed your hair back at some point without thinking about it. Maekar was still comprehensively soaked, water drying in his hair, jaw slightly less set than it had been when you came in.

He looked at you.

"Your dad's a plumber," he said.

"Plumber, electrician, general person of all trades," you said. "He used to take me with him on weekend jobs when I was small. I was useful for getting into small spaces."

Something moved through Maekar's expression. Not the almost-smile exactly — something that happened before the almost-smile, the thing that decided whether the almost-smile was going to be permitted. "You handed me the adjustable wrench before I asked for it," he said.

"You were about to ask for it."

"I hadn't said anything."

"You didn't need to." You looked at the now-functional pipes with the mild satisfaction of a finished job. "The body language was pretty clear."

He looked at you for a moment.

Then he looked at the pipes.

Then he looked at you again, and this time the thing moving through his expression stayed a beat longer before he put it somewhere — the reassessment fully completed now, the previous category clearly revised, something in the revised version that he was choosing not to examine in a wet bathroom on a Saturday afternoon with jointing compound on the bathmat.

He chose correctly for approximately four seconds.

Then his gaze went, briefly and entirely without his permission, to your hands — to the water still tracking down from your wrists along your forearms in the specific way that wet things did — and something happened in his expression that was there and gone so fast you might have missed it if you had not been paying the exact quality of attention that you were paying.

You had been paying exactly that quality of attention.

He looked at the pipes again with the focus of a man who had found something to look at that was not your forearms and intended to look at it until the situation resolved itself.

"The valve needs a new washer eventually," you said, kindly, because you were a kind person. "It's seating a bit soft. Not urgent but worth doing before winter."

"Right," he said.

"I can tell you what to get if you want. My dad has a supplier — trade prices."

Maekar looked at you with the expression of a man receiving information that was practical and useful and entirely beside the point of what was currently happening in his head and who was grateful for the practical and useful information for exactly that reason.

"That would be useful," he said.

"Great." You stood, brushed the wet from your knees with the philosophical acceptance of someone who had made peace with the bathmat situation, and became aware for the first time in some minutes of the doorway.

Which was empty.

You and Maekar both looked at the empty doorway simultaneously.

Daeron had, at some point during the isolation valve situation, simply — ceased to be there. No announcement. No explanation. Just the specific absence of a young man who had assessed a situation and made a strategic withdrawal with his coffee and his survival instincts intact.

You looked at the empty doorway. Maekar looked at the empty doorway.

"He does that," Maekar said.

"Does he."

"When he decides he's not needed." A pause. "Or when he decides something is none of his business."

You looked at Maekar.

He was looking at the doorway still, with the expression of a man who had just heard himself say something and was assessing whether it had meant what it might have sounded like it meant and what, if anything, to do about that.

He appeared to conclude: nothing. For now.

"I'll get you a towel," he said, standing with the efficiency of a man who had identified a practical action and was grateful for its existence. "You're soaked."

"So are you," you pointed out.

"I live here," he said. "It's different."

He went to the airing cupboard in the hall and came back with a towel and handed it to you with the directness he brought to everything — no ceremony, no hovering, just the towel, held out, yours if you wanted it. You took it and he went to get one for himself and came back and you both stood in the bathroom doorway drying off with the comfortable ease of two people who had just fixed something together and had not yet decided what to do with the afternoon that remained.

"Thank you," he said. Not elaborately. Just the two words, said with the weight of someone who meant them and did not see the point of dressing them up.

"It was a straightforward fix," you said.

"It wasn't," he said. "The angle was bad and I'd missed the valve." A beat, during which he appeared to consider whether to say the next thing and decided to. "You didn't make a production of it."

You looked at him.

"Neither did you," you said. "About me knowing."

Something in his expression acknowledged this — a small precise movement, almost but not quite the almost-smile. "Daella would have filmed it," he said. "For — what do they call it."

"Content," you said.

"Content," he repeated, with the tone of a man for whom this word had never fully made sense and had stopped trying to make it. "She would have made it content."

You laughed.

It was a real one — the unguarded kind, arrived without warning — and you watched it land on Maekar with the specific quality of something he had not anticipated and was not immediately sure what to do with. The almost-smile made a full appearance this time. Brief. Real. Directed entirely at you.

He looked away first.

Downstairs, at a volume suggesting he was in the kitchen and had decided the kitchen was where he lived now, Daeron turned the television on.

Maekar looked at the ceiling briefly with the expression of a man who knew his son and had drawn accurate conclusions.

"There's tea," he said. "If you want. Before you go."

It was not please stay. It was not I would like you to stay. It was Maekar, offering tea, in the specific way of someone for whom there is tea if you want was as close as he was currently able to get to either of those things.

You had grown up watching your father fix things. You knew how to read what was underneath what was said.

"Yeah," you said. "I want."

He nodded once and headed for the stairs and you followed him and downstairs Daeron turned the television up slightly, for absolutely no reason, in the way of someone who was providing cover for a situation he had chosen not to witness and had absolutely engineered anyway.

You sat at the kitchen table with wet jeans and jointing compound on your hand and watched Maekar make tea with the same focused efficiency he brought to pipework and thought that you were, objectively, in considerable trouble, and that it was entirely worth it.

A.N.: i promise there will be a third because we have to jump on these sexy old men, we cannot leave it like in the middle of it. For those who have read Dalgliesh's how you call to me, yeah, Baelor's part here was heavily inspired in it (i just love him so much as a nerd)

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @mongrelcryptid @sacha1slytherin

The first time you came in, he’d handed you over to Shen. You were a sprained wrist and a BAC that explained the wrist, sixteen other things were louder, and Shen was free then. 

He’d clocked you for half a second on his way to a GI bleed in bay nine: girl on the gurney, one heel too high on, and one somewhere in the greater metropolitan area, some little pink lace-trimmed thing sliding off one shoulder, telling Shen with enormous seriousness that she was so sorry, she didn’t usually do this, she’d had a singular margarita. Only.

Singular. He’d categorized it under the thousand other single margaritas he’d sworn to in this department and forgotten you before he’d reached the bleed. 

The second time, he didn’t take you either, but he noticed the wrist. 

Same wrist. Different night — a Saturday, three weeks in, the sort of shift where the waiting room sounded like a kennel — and he caught it sideways while he reviewed another chart. It was the same left wrist, taped this time, the nails on that one hand done in some soft pinky color gone chipped at the tips as though the week itself outlasted the manicure, somebody walking you through the discharge paperwork you clearly were ignoring. Something thought for him instead of him thinking much for it, some pattern-recognition thing buried under twenty-some years of reading bodies fast, the same instinct that made him glance twice at something almost normal. A wrist that kept coming back, he supposed. A thread snagging on a nail, there and gone. 

The third time, it was Shen, breezing past the station with his Dunkin, saying over his shoulder, “Frequent flyer’s back.” 

He shrugged, not yet placing that you were the frequent flyer, and went to bed four.

And that — somewhere between the third time and a number he stopped keeping an honest count of — was where it stopped being a chart and became some sort of thing. A bit, he’d say. The nights the bars let out and the board lit up, he’d find himself reading the incoming names a half-second longer than triage required, and feeling something wrong in his chest when yours wasn’t in them. 

Pittsburgh was notoriously interesting, Jack learned through you, in that it apparently contained an infinite supply of ways a girl could get herself in trouble. He was convinced he could’ve drawn a map of the city by your injuries. There was the ankle, of course, a recurring grievance, always the shoes, never your fault. There was one time you’d burned your hand on a curling iron getting ready tipsy and come in more upset about the makeup you’d had to redo (because of crying it off) than the blister. The night you’d gone over in a parking lot because you refused to look at the ground while walking — looking at the ground, while drunk, you informed him, was how you trip — and the time you sliced your finger open trying to shotgun a White Claw with a key because someone had bet you couldn’t. You were really proud of the last one, you’d won the bet. 

You were never the same disaster twice, he had to give you that. A little too keen on busting yourself up here and there, sure, but at least it was the wrist once, then a knee that met a curb, then a memorable evening involving a fence you’d been certain you could clear. You came in apologizing — always apologizing, to him, to the nurses, once, memorably, to the wall — and you came in sweet, which was the part that got under him, because drunk people in this ER were a lot of things and sweet was rarely one of them. 

“Mmm,” you hummed the fourth or fifth time, the second your eyes found him through the gap in the curtain, going boneless with relief like Jack was the cavalry and not the man who was meant to flash light into your eyes for thirty seconds. “The pretty one.” 

Jack let out a huff. “Thanks, doll.” 

“Doll,” you repeated, the word going gummy in your mouth. “He calls me doll.”

“Eyes open. Follow the light.” 

“You call everyone that, Dr. Abbot?” you said, his name coming out in a cluster like you were losing thread of it, the Abbot dissolving into something closer to a hum. 

“Sure do,” he lied. “Track the light.”

You looked at his mouth, then his hands, then back up, a slow uncoordinated sweep because your eyes had stopped reporting to anything in particular, much less what they had to. Pupils blown wide and lazy. He thumbed your eyelid up a fraction to get the light where he needed it; your lashes were clumped and starry with whatever mascara had survived the night. 

He held the penlight steady and waited you out. He had nowhere to be. That was the thing about the dead hours after bars closed; the bleed had been signed up to the floor, the chest pain turned out to be a panic attack and a large energy drink, and there was just you, and the saline ticking into your arm one slow drop at a time. 

“What’d you get up to tonight?” he murmured, thumb finding the pulse at your wrist, counting without meaning to.

“S’fast ‘cause you’re here,” you said, sounding very pleased with yourself.

“Sure it is. Where’d you hurt yourself tonight?”

“... stairs,” you said after a moment, like your brain had to run a few laps to get to the word. 

“Oh, yeah?” He hummed. You lifted your free hand a little off the mattress, lost track of it, and dropped it back down. “How many?” 

“Mm. Four?” You squinted at the ceiling. “Maybe three. I dunno. Not the Great Wall or somethin’. Promise.” 

“I believe you.” He nodded, then turned your forearm to the light, finding the scrape you’d come in with. It was gravel-burn, raw, the heel of your hand and a stripe up your wrist. Nothing that needed more than cleaning. You watched him do it with your head tipped against the pillow, gone quiet so the talking had run out for a second, which never lasted.

“Should I get a better first aid kit?” you asked, then clenched your jaw for a second like you felt something was wrong with it. “S’I don’t have to bother you all the time?” 

“Might be a good idea to invest,” he said. He pulled the swab through the gravel-burn slowly, and you hissed and tried to pull back the hand on reflex. “Easy.” He kept it, his grip light yet unmoving around your fingers. “Almost done. Don’t fight me.”

You hummed, like you wanted a different answer.

Jack wet his lips, shaking his head slightly. He worked the grit out of the scrape, a fleck of it catching raw skin, and he tilted your arm to the light, getting it on the second pass, and wiped it on the gauze. Your hands twitched in his, and he pressed your fingers flat to the mattress with his thumb, and they stayed.

“You’d have to do it yourself, though,” he said. “Bathroom sink at three in the morning with one hand.” He reached for fresh gauze. “You’d make a mess of it.”

You frowned at the ceiling, nodding. “Sounds a little bad.”

“It’s a lot bad.” He laid the gauze over the scrape, thumbed the tape down at the edge of your wrist slowly, smoothing it flat where it wanted to lift. His knuckle dragged once over the thin skin there, and he felt your pulse jump under it. “You’d scar, probably.” His thumb passed the chipped polish, the chunky gold ring you’d kept on, even for this. “You’ve got nice hands. Shame to wreck ‘em over the sink.”

It took you a second. “You think so?”

“Don’t wreck ‘em.” 

“You like when I come in,” you said, delighted. 

“What I’d like,” he said, flat, lifting his eyes to yours, “is you off the stairs and down to the one drink.” His thumb settled over the back of your hand again. “But if you’re set on flinging yourself down, then you come here. Deal?”

Your fingers had curled around two of his somewhere in there loosely, without you noticing. He felt them settle, and he held very still so as to not spook you. He chose to not acknowledge it or look at it.

“Deal,” you mumbled, somewhere far off, probably forgetting the front half of the terms. 

He let it go at that, taping down the last edge and turning over your wrist once more to be sure of it. Then he set your hand back on the mattress, yours still loosely hooked through his, going nowhere.

“Anyone out there to get you home?” he asked. 

“Dunno.” Your nose scrunched. “Was gonna Uber.”

He sighed through his nose. “Where’s that girl — the one you came in with last time? Why don’t you call her?” 

“That’s annoying, Dr. Abbot,” you said, almost in a whine. 

“Yeah?” He kept looking at the wall behind you. “What’s annoying about a ride home?” 

“Calling people. Making it a thing.” Your free hand flopped vaguely. “Then they gotta come get you, and they’re all — have to be nice about it, but you can tell.” Your nose scrunched. “It’s a whole production.”

He pressed his thumb flat back over your hand where your fingers were still caught in his. 

“Oh? Nothing annoying about it, sweetheart. You call, she comes. Simple as that.” He turned to face you. “But if you insist on it, I’m not signing you off until you’re good enough to go home alone. So you call your girl, or you sit right here and keep my department company till you’ve cleared enough that I’ll sign off on it.” 

Your eyes narrowed as you looked at him as though he’d spoken a different language. “Second one?”

“Obviously you pick that one,” he said. 

He pulled the stool over and sat. For a few minutes, he had nowhere to be, and now, apparently, neither did you.

It wasn’t that you simply didn’t let people help you, either. Jack had never seen anyone so committed to being simply fine. Jack had met the stoic kind before; construction guys who walked in with rebar through a forearm acting like it was a small inconvenience; old ladies who’d been having a heart attack since last Tuesday and didn’t want to be a bother. But Jack had always believed those people to be suppressing, and you were just convinced, somewhere down in the foundation, that needing anything was an imposition. 

That was also why the shoes confused him so much. 

“This is the same damn ankle,” Jack said, turning your foot in his hands, watching the swelling outside of it. 

“You don’t have to remind me. Most men buy me a drink before they get this familiar with my ankles,” you said, then groaned as you looked at his eyes going over the swelling. 

“No drink.” He pressed along the bone. “Not my fault you keep handing your ankle to me.” 

You tipped your head back against the pillow, groaning again. “Dr. Abbot, they look so bad. I feel like I’m pregnant.” 

“I can do a quick blood draw and we can rule it out.” His palm flattened on the mattress beside your feet, leaning over to meet your eyes again. “But I think it’s those heels of yours, doll.” 

Your eyes snapped to him. “Don’t be a dick, Dr. Abbot.”

He tilted his head, then pointed at the laminated paper stuck to the wall. “Aggressive behavior of any kind toward healthcare workers is a felony.” 

“Then arrest me, doctor. I’ll die on this hill — and they’re not heels.” Your lips pursed, and the corner of your mouth kicked up. “Cuffs may be a little forward for a date, but I won’t stop you.” 

“Aren’t you just so sweet,” he muttered. “What are they, then?”

“Bottega Lido Mules.”

The words meant absolutely nothing to him — could’ve been a pasta dish, a town in Italy, a wine — but they clearly did to you, so he remembered them. 

“That’s nice, doll. They’ll be the reason I see you again.” 

“Maybe, ‘cause I’ll never stop wearing them.” 

You said the words your whole face, hands coming off the mattress to make the point with a drunk theatrical conviction as you argued something that genuinely mattered to you. Jack thought, not for the first time since he’d met you, that you’d have been magnetic stone-sober at a dinner party, the kind of girl that made a table lean in. It was just that he only ever got the 3am version.

At least you had a hill you’d die on and didn’t apologize for, Jack supposed. 

“You married, Doctor?” you asked as he started icing your ankle. 

“No,” he said, holding your eyes for a second. “Why — you got a boyfriend I should know about, then?” 

He almost wished you did have one. He wished that there were somebody whose name you’d have said just now who’d be in the waiting room with his jaw tight because you’d gone and hurt yourself again. Somebody who’d take care of the ankle when you walked out of here in crutches, who took the keys when you had too many. He wished there was a person in the world whose job you were. 

And you weren’t his first patient who he’d understood to not have someone taking care of them. He knew that if he carried them all, he’d drown inside a month if he tried to be the person nobody else had been. He’d never once had it turn into a wish, standing here with an ice pack in his hand going slack in his hand because he was too busy resenting someone who didn’t exist for not being in the waiting room. 

He wondered when down the line you’d stopped letting the people in your life around you be the ones you could call, became a girl who said sorry for bleeding and had nobody, nobody, and looked at him like he was the warmest place she’d been in all week.

You laughed. “If I had a boyfriend, would I be laying it on so thick?” 

He let out a breath through his nose, despite himself. “Stop wearing the heels, doll. Not nice to not have a foot.”

The next time you came in, it was a Thursday. With some pileup of bad luck, you came in somewhere past one with a split lip and a story about a dance floor he only half got the shape of. Jack hadn’t even been assigned to you yet, he’d just seen your name on the board, and reassigned himself quietly enough that dared anyone on shift to comment. Nobody did. 

“Lip’s not bad,” he said, tilting your chin up under the light, thumb at your jaw. The split was already going fat and shining at the center of your lower lip, and he found his eyes stayed on your mouth a second past the part that was his job, on the soft unhurt swell of it under the hurt. He moved his thumb. “Doesn’t need anything. You bit it when you fell down. That’s all.”

“S’throbbing, Doctor,” you mumbled, the word coming around muffled around the split. 

“It’ll throb. You’ve got a swollen lip.” He let go of your jaw and reached for the penlight. “Eyes on me.” 

“I was so cute before this,” you said through a groan. 

The huff that came out of him was almost a laugh, dragged out against his own will, and he shared a fleeting look with Bennet — a fairly new nurse — who had tilted his head briefly and was too afraid to meet your eyes.

“Alright. Still the prettiest girl I’ve treated tonight,” Jack said when your brows had furrowed together.

“You treat other girls?” 

“It’s a hospital,” he said. “Few hundred a week.”

Your face looked wounded. “Few hundred.”

He leaned in slightly, faking a whisper. “You’re my top three.”

You were further gone than usual tonight. He’d noticed it the second he came around the curtain, the way your head was having a hard time holding itself up, the loose unmoored swim of your eyes that took longer than it should to find his finger. A piece of hair had come loose and stuck to the gloss at the corner of your mouth and you hadn’t the coordination to deal with it, and he had the unprofessional impulse to, and didn’t. 

Bennet kept working the blood pressure cuff up your arm, half an eye on you, half on his own work. 

“Track the light,” Jack murmured. “Slowly.”

“Too bright.”

“Tough.” The corner of his mouth moved up slightly. “You can bat your lashes at me when we’re done. Right now, I need ‘em open.” 

You batted them anyway, slowly and theatrically, just to be a problem about it. They were long, and the theater of it was so ridiculous, and Jack had to bite down the inside of his cheek to keep his face flat to wait you out, until you gave up and tracked the finger. Your pupils were reactive, equal, and lagging half-a-beat behind. He clicked the light off. 

“Too bright,” you said again. 

“It’s off,” he drawled, chuckling. 

Bennett thread a line into the back of your free hand, and you watched him sink it with a drowsy focus. 

“Why’s it go in the back of the hand?” you mumbled. “More nerves there. Hurts more. Why not the — inside. By the elbow.” You tilted your head slightly to let your eyes wander to the crook of your arm. “Bigger vein. The antec—antecubital,” you said carefully, sounding out each syllable, afraid of messing it up. You wet your lips and turned to face him, then Bennet. “Why’s nobody use the good one?” 

Jack pursed his lips and looked at you for a moment. 

“Saves the good one,” he said, catching up, eyes going back to your chart. “AC vein blows easily when somebody’s moving around, and you —” He tipped his head at you, raising a brow, the squirming drunk of you. “ — Are gonna move around. Back of the hand’ll hold. I’d rather you be sore than re-stuck twice ‘cause you couldn’t sit pretty for thirty seconds.” He paused as he saw your eyes glaze over. He sighed. “Ask me how I know that about you.” 

You’d gone busy, lips moving slightly like you were repeating it back to yourself so it’d stick, and Jack felt something in his chest shift a degree as he watched you do it. 

He sighed, dragging a palm over the lower half of his face. “Where’d you learn that, then?” 

“School,” you said to the ceiling, a small hint of pride taking over your voice. “M’gonna become a nurse. Gonna be good at it.”

Bennet snorted, finishing the tape. “Gonna be patching up drunk girls just like you then, huh,” he said. “Full circle.”

Jack watched the pride go out of your face slowly, like a house losing its power. Your chin dropped and your eyes slid from Bennet to the curtain as your hand fisted in your lap. 

“Yeah,” you said, almost curiously. “Guess so.” 

Jack’s jaw clenched involuntarily. It wasn’t the guy’s fault, not really. It was a nothing joke, the sort the whole department tossed off a hundred times a shift, the gallows shorthand that kept you sane at two in the morning. Jack had made worse about patients who’d never know, about drunks who wouldn’t remember, about exactly this, exactly girls like you. He’d just never had one of them go quiet before, watched the bright thing fold itself up and get tucked away. 

“Bennet, you done?” 

“Yeah, line’s good — ”

“Then go take vitals on six. I’ve got her.”

Bennet went, and it was just the two of you again. 

Jack pulled the stool over with his foot and sat — lower than he had to, level with you, taking himself out of the column of people standing over you tonight and telling you what you were — and waited until your eyes came up off the curtain and found him.

“There she is,” he said when your eyes found him. He turned your taped hand over under the light like there was still something to do with it. There wasn’t, he just wanted his hands on something of yours while he undid what the room had done. “Look at me. Nothing good on the curtain.” 

“How’s school treating you then, doll?” he asked, aiming for offhand and not steering you off whatever Bennet had knocked loose.

“Hard,” you said, but a small smile had crawled up your lips. “But I like it.” Your shoulders came up loosely.

“Yeah?” He kept his thumb moving over the back of your hand slowly, like he could press the bright thing back up to the surface where it belonged. “I think you’ll be good at it.” 

It was such a strange feeling, Jack distantly noticed, to feel this utter conviction. He was rarely sure of anything good anymore. Sure of plenty else; sure within ten seconds of a bad rhythm which way the night was going to break, sure of which of the kids wheeled in at 2 am he’d see again and which he wouldn’t, a grim accumulated certainty that had nothing in it he’d ever wanted to be right about.

The job had made him an expert on the downslope of things. He could read the exact moment a body wanted to quit better than he could read most of what people said to his face. And here you were, and he was so sure of the other direction, and he felt the same weight of it behind his sternum, except it had swung and pointed at something good for once. You were going to be excellent at this. 

It bothered him a little, how much he wanted to be there to see it, whoever you were going to be once you stopped washing up on his floor on the worst nights of your week. He’d known you, what, a handful of shifts as a frequent flyer, a bit, a name his eyes unconsciously caught on. He had no business feeling certain of anything about you, and he was, and he’d let himself feel it. 

Your eyes found him properly again. “Liar.”

He huffed out a short laugh. “Tell you what. You finish that program, you get through all that mess where they try to drown you.” His thumb smoothed over the tape. “Then you come find me here and we’ll see if we can get you here with me on nights. Clearly you’re at your finest then.” 

It was maybe something silly to say, and Gloria may have his head for it. He had no actual standing to say anything like it, even though you’d never remember it. He knew better; hope was a controlled substance in his field and he was stingy with it on purpose, because he’d seen the withdrawal.

But God, he’d love to see the part of you he could only catch glimpses of through the wreck like a light under the door. He’d love to be the one who taught you which arrogance to keep and which to let the job take away. He’d love, plainly and without anywhere to put it, to watch you become who you’d just told him you were going to be. 

It was a lot of loving for a girl who’d been in his department and wouldn’t recall his face or a word of this by tomorrow morning. He was getting sentimental, or old, or both; the years stacked up behind his eyes until he started mistaking everything for a second chance at something. 

Your lips moved. “So I can patch girls up like myself?” 

“Nah.” He kept looking at your hand. “You can patch up old bastards like me, too.” Then, he pointed his index finger of his free hand at you, mock-stern. “Gotta make sure you’re not at point three BAC, though. Will have to do that work to get you working with me.”

“Mm.” Your eyes flickered up to the ceiling, weighing it with the enormous gravity of the very drunk as though he’d posed a very real proposition to you. “Okay. For you, I’d stop.”

“For me?” he repeated, mostly to buy himself a second.

“Mm-hm.” You turned your face to him and said it with such ease, no glance away to leave yourself an exit. “You’re worth not drinkin’ over.”

Your words went in clean, the way the best and worst things do, under the ribs where he kept nothing armored because nobody ever aimed there. Jack felt the back of his neck go warm and was abruptly, intensely grateful for the light that wouldn’t display it. 

Jack huffed, having to look away at the floor then. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all year, and you’re not gonna remember it. Hell of a thing.” 

When he made himself look back up, you’d tipped your face into the pillow, watching him from the side with your eyes gone soft and heavy, the smile arriving unguarded across your mouth. The split tugged one corner of it, that small wince folded right into the sweetness, and you seemed to not feel it. 

He had the sudden, idiotic wish to have met you on a night you’d remember. To have perhaps caught you when you fell at the bar, to have been the stranger whose arm happened to be there, not the doctor it eventually routed you to. Perhaps he could’ve been a man in your night instead of a stop in it.

He shook his head. “You’re trouble, you know that, right? Saying all these nice things. What’s a man supposed to do with that?” 

He’d have liked to have been remembered, was the bottom of it. By you specifically. He’d spent decades being the man people were grateful to and glad to forget.

“What’s your name, Doctor Abbot?” you asked, drowsy.

He looked down at his badge, then back up at you. “Take a wild guess?” Then, he added, “You never looked at my badge?” 

“Sorry. Didn’t read.” 

“Don’t apologize to me. It’s Jack.”

Jack was doing his usual rounds this Friday, on a rush from a chest pain in two that turned out to be a panic attack and a kid in five who’d put a kitchen knife through the meat of his own palm trying to halve a frozen bagel when Ellis caught him by the elbow at the board.

“Heads up, Abbot,” she said, grinning. She nodded toward triage, toward the doors. “Bed three. Your, uh—” The grin tipped over, delighted with itself. “Girlfriend’s got a boyfriend.” 

It was a running thing now. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time you’d washed up on his shift the staff had started on it — your frequent flyer, your stray, your girl’s back — and Jack had stopped bothering to deny it because that’d only feed it, and he’d learned not denying it had a way of starving the joke faster. 

He looked, and was immediately able to notice what you weren’t doing more than what you were; you weren’t grinning at the ceiling, weren’t doing that boneless sweet-relief thing. You were sitting up too straight on the bed, hands folded in your lap, and there was a guy fitted to the chair beside you with one arm slung along the back of yours and a hand resting on your knee like he’d put it there to mark the spot. He was saying something low to the side of your face, and you were nodding at it, and not looking at anybody.

Jack felt a muscle tick in his jaw, immediately not feeling anything nice about the situation. “I got it — you mind taking six for me? I’ll come in a couple minutes.” 

By the time he’d made it to you, he’d settled his face into something unbothered. You could read it, he’d realized at some point during your frequent visits, and that only meant he had to be on his better behavior around you. 

“Evening.” He pulled the curtain half-round behind him, glanced at the chart clipped to the foot of the bed, then at you. “What’d we do tonight?”

“She caught an elbow,” the guy answered. “Some asshole on the dance floor. It’s nothing — she’s fine. She’s just a lightweight, aren’t you — ” A little squeeze on your knee. “ — didn’t even really need to come in, but y’know. Better safe.” 

You weren’t a lightweight, he immediately wanted to correct. He’d seen you put away enough over the months to know your tolerance better than this guy apparently did; he knew the difference between the nights you were genuinely wrecked and the nights you came in clearer than you let on, and looking at you, tonight, you weren’t anywhere near the state implied. 

“You,” he said, tipping his chin in your direction. “Not him. Where’d it get you?” 

You lifted your hand up from your lap and touched your cheekbone, movement slow, and Jack stepped in and tipped your head up toward the light with two fingers under your chin, thumb resting just shy of the scrape. The skin had gone dark along the bone, tender, an elbow’s worth of it. Nothing that needed more than an ice and a night, but you were still holding still under his hand and not meeting his eyes, and that he didn’t like at all. 

“It’s okay,” you said. “Really. S’not even — ”

“Let me be the judge of that, sweetheart. Gettin’ paid for this.” His eyes flicked down to yours and caught, holding it there a second with a small question in the rise of a brow, before he went back to the bone, thumb tracing the edge of the bruise so light you barely felt it. A small frown pulled at the corners of his mouth at the sight. “Follow my finger. Eyes only.” 

You followed, pupils fine and equal. No concussion in it. 

“She’s fine, I told you,” the guy said from the chair, a little laugh under it like he was inviting Jack in on something. “Hardly. She bounces back.”

Jack clicked the penlight off and turned to the side. “Gonna need the room.”

“I’ll stay.” The hand went back to your knee. “I’m all good here.”

“Can’t clear a head strike with people in the room. You get it.” Jack tilted his head to the side, raising a shoulder. “Liability. Coffee machine’s down the hall. Give me two minutes with my patient.”

The easy smile on the guy’s lips went thin around the edges, looking for a thing to push against and not finding it. He stood up slow, making a show of it, squeezing your knee and letting you know he’ll be back in a minute, babe, a hand trailing your shoulder on the way past, all of it aimed less at you and more at Jack holding the curtain. Jack pressed his lips in a thin line as he met the guy’s eyes. 

The second the curtain closed behind him, a breath left you, tiny and involuntary, and your shoulders came down in the empty room. 

“Sorry, Dr. Abbot,” you murmured. “I keep being a mess at this place.” You took in a short, almost shaky breath. “Sorry.” 

“None of that,” he almost grumbled, penning your chart. “Your folks down here, sweetheart?” 

“No,” you said to your lap, picking the edge of the blanket. “Back home. A few states over.” You let out a laugh. “Just me out here. S’nice.” 

Jack forced a small smile, having to look at the ceiling while you looked down at your lap, shaking his head, more of an action for himself than for you. He pulled the stool over with his foot and sat, getting level with you. 

“What’s goin’ on with you, huh?” he asked quietly, making sure there was nothing sharp in his tone at all. “Honest. I like seeing you but not like this bruised up with a guy who talks for you.” His thumb found your wrist. “So talk to me. What’s going on?” 

“He’s fine,” you said. “Just likes being around.”

Jack tilted his head, dipping his head to meet your eyes that were still facing down. “Not the important part of the question, and you know it.” 

You sighed. “Sorry, Jack.”

“Quit it. The only thing I want from you tonight is some honesty, alright?” 

A corner of your lip kicked up, even though the dimness in your eyes held. “Your eyes look really pretty tonight.” 

“Heard that one before,” he drawled. “Had ‘em fifty years. Try a new one.” 

“Your neck’s going red,” you mumbled, fingers reaching up to press flat to the warm of his skin, right there below the jaw, like you just had to feel whether it was true.

Jack stilled. Your fingers were cold on his neck. He distantly registered his pulse was probably going under your fingertips, and you’d feel it if you held there a second longer. And then you caught yourself, hand snapping back to the blanket.

“Sorry. Sorry — I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that — ” you said, the words coming out in a taut string. 

“Easy,” he said, voice coming out rough. He swallowed. “Got me all flustered and now you’re gettin’ all shy?” 

You huffed a small laugh, your hand still fisted in the blanket where you’d snatched it back. “I’m not allowed to do that. I don’t think.” 

“Had no idea you knew how to behave,” he leaned a little back from the stool, crossing his arms. “Should I be worried about that guy out there?”

“Jealous, Doctor?” 

He rolled his eyes slightly, not responding. 

You sighed when you realized he wasn’t taking the bait. “He’s fine. He just likes being around.” 

He stood off the stool and reached for the discharge clipboard at the foot of the bed.

“Whatcha doing there?”

“My job.” He clicked the pen. “Clearing you. You’ve got no concussion. You’re not dying tonight.” He scrawled on the paper. “And I’m writing you a script for the bruise and a code for an Uber — ”

“No, no,” you said immediately. “Please don’t do that.” 

He raised his hand with the pen, palm open. “You never let me Uber you back when you’re alone. At least have this.” Your face scrunched up, and he could practically feel the guilt building in you. “Don’t need to use it now. Or ever. You can keep it for whenever.” He set the slip on your lap before you could push it back at him, the matter completely closed on his end. “Goes in your phone case. You can forget it exists until you need it.”

“You can’t keep handing me stuff — ”

“Department’s got a whole stack. You’re not special.” He capped the pen, though the corner of his mouth made it slightly visible that his words were false. “Don’t flatter yourself, doll.”

You looked down at the slip, your thumb worrying the edges of it. “I don’t like taking things.” 

“I noticed. A few hundred times now.” He tucked the pen back in his scrub pocket, and his voice came down a notch. “If it really makes you feel so bad, though, then maybe we can start taking care of ourselves so you don’t have to keep ending up here?”

Jack was in the middle of hand-off, Robby doing his thing before Robby left and did whatever the hell he did. They were at the board, Robby running down the floor. It was six-fifteen in the ugly hour, the in-between where the day shift was dragging itself toward the door and the night hadn’t started biting yet, the light through the ambulance doors gone gold and slanted and almost decent for once.

And then the doors slid, and you came through them. Jack’s attention peeled to you the second your shape entered the room, except this was wrong, he distantly registered. It was daylight and six in the evening and you were on your own two feet, upright and, assumedly, sober and walking in through the front like a person as opposed to a patient. You were wearing a jacket that swallowed you, and he assumed underneath it was shorts of some sort. He could see a stripe of navy cotton peeking from under the collar of your jacket as you adjusted a tote bag on your shoulder. 

You looked, frankly, like a completely different species from the one he scraped off bed four on weekends. The jacket was too big — his first thought was that it was a man’s, and his second thought, which he didn’t care for, was about whose — sleeves shoved up to your forearms, a stripe of soft navy cotton on the collar, and below it bare legs and shorts and sneakers that had likely never seen the inside of a club. Your hair was up and a little damp at the temple and your face was scrubbed clean.

You looked like somebody’s whole good day, he thought. You looked around around the waiting room with slightly widened eyes, a lost expression coating your features like you’d built up a lot of nerve to walk in here and had no idea what to do with it. 

“ — and the tox screen is still pending, so don’t let them,” Robby was saying. 

“Mhm,” Jack said, attention already halved. 

And Bennet, breezing past the triage desk with cheerful obliviousness, caught your figure and said, out loud, “Don’t tell me you’ve started day drinking. It’s barely past six, you gotta pace yourself — ” He let out a small laugh at his own joke, and kept walking, and didn’t see the way it landed. 

Your body stiffened, and you looked like a deer in headlights. Your mouth opened, some sort of flustered apology forming, he was sure. 

Jack let out a short groan, shaking his head. He set the tablet on the counter, already moving to cross the floor toward you. “Finish the hand-off with Shen. I gotta go deal with something.” 

Robby said something at his back — deal with what? — but Jack was already gone, crossing the floor slowly but somehow still eating the distance fast, and he watched you spot him coming and watched the relief crash over your face. Except you were sober now, in the daylight, and your whole face was going soft and grateful and just slightly wrecked at the sight of him.

He stopped a couple feet short of you, closer than a doctor, further than he stood to you at night. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands — there was no chart to hold (he should’ve brought the tablet) or wrist to take or a penlight to shine — so he clasped them behind his back, and tilted his head to get a better look at you. 

“Hi,” you breathed.

“Hey,” he said, eyes doing a quick once-over to make sure you really didn’t have any new injuries.

You shifted the tote under his gaze and clutched whatever was in the bag a little tighter.

“Jack —” you started, stopped, like the name had come out wrong. “ — Dr. Abbot.” You winced, pinching your eyes shut for a second. “Jack?” you tried to say again, smaller, your eyes flicking up to check his face to check if you’d overstepped. “Sorry, I don’t know which — ”

“Jack’s great.” His mouth tugged up, despite himself. “You’ve called me a lot worse. Jack’s a step-up.” 

You let out a startled little laugh, your mouth coming over your mouth like you could catch it, as your body eased a degree. 

“I’m sorry — I don’t — God, this is so embarrassing. I’m sorry.” 

“You know how many times you’ve apologized to me? Quit it.” He rubbed a finger over his lips. “What’s got you here today, then?”

“Um, I came to see you.” He raised a brow, and you let out a short breath, then continued, “I might not remember a lot of it, but I remember you took really good care of me. And my friends who came in with me sometimes said you took really good care of me.” The words came out softer now, flowing, more earnest. “Even though I was a mess. Especially when. So I just wanted to —” You shrugged, smiling slightly. “ — come say thanks.”

Jack felt the complete warmth of you land somewhere he kept no armor. “It’s the job,” he said quickly, before he could stop himself. “You didn’t have to come down here for that. That’s — it’s what we do. Anybody on shift would’ve done the same.” 

Your expression faltered for a moment, and your eyes dropped to the tote at your side as your shoulders came in. You shook your head, a small motion, then smiled again. 

“Right. No — yeah, of course.” You chuckled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it a — I know it’s your job.” You shifted the bag, then shifted your weight from one foot to another. “Still, though. You did, so I wanted to.” 

Jack already wanted to take his words back, but he couldn’t, so he just shook his head. “Hey, you’re my problem, though. So thank you. For the thanks. We’re even.” 

Your shoulders eased and you nodded. “Well, I also have something for you.” You hauled a container out of your tote and held it out to him with both hands before you could chicken out. “It definitely doesn’t make up for all of the times you helped me.” You looked down at the container. “And I don’t know if you’re lactose intolerant, or have a peanut allergy or anything. I’m sorry if you do — I can — ”

“I’ve got a cast-iron everything. The cookies won’t kill me.” When you pushed the container further to him, he took it off your hands, eyes quickly scanning the round chocolate chip cookies, forcing a smile down. He swallowed whatever had lodged in his throat. 

“These are homemade?” He weighed the container in both hands, absurdly. You nodded. He swallowed whatever on earth had lodged in his throat at that.“Didn’t have to do all that for me.” 

“I wanted to,” you said quickly. “I wasn’t sure how the food here is, so thought it might be a nice change.” 

“Worse than you’re imagining,” he said, then tipped his head to the side as the memory crawled into his brain, uncalled for. “You’ve actually thrown a sandwich across the room.” 

Your palm came up to your mouth, and you let out a muffled, “I’m so sorry.” 

Jack snorted, shaking his head. Then, after a moment, he cleared his throat before it could get away from him. He looked back toward the board, then at you, knowing time was slipping and he’d have to go back to work and you’d have to go somewhere else, most likely. 

“You got finals or anything coming up soon?” he asked. 

Your lips curved down, and you nodded. “Yeah, in a couple weeks.” 

“Am I gonna be seeing you getting wheeled in wasted?” 

“I want to say no,” you said, smiling a little crooked. “I’m working on it. But I’ve said that before and ended up here. So.” You shrugged, lips jutting out like you were also unimpressed with yourself. “Ask me again in a couple weeks, I guess. I’d like it if you didn’t, though.” 

“Then quit doing the hard nights alone,” he said, leaning in just slightly. “You keep yourself off the stairs, and you can come bother us instead here with a textbook.” He raised a brow as he held your eyes. “We’ve got a family room that’s almost always empty at night.” 

“I couldn’t — ”

“Won’t be a bother. Trust me. You’d be silly not to use people’s help when they’ve clawed through the same exams to get the badge. You get stuck, somebody’ll know it cold.” He shrugged. “Half of ‘em are bored out of their minds some nights. You’d be doing us a favor.” 

You let out a breath, brows pinching together. “That’s — yeah.” You let out a short laugh, looking away for a second. “I’d like that. A lot. Thank you, really. As long as you don’t mind.”

“This is a teaching hospital, doll. I don’t mind, so long as you don’t mind the company. Might be nice for me, too.”

You smiled and for a moment, neither of you moved to end it. Then you shifted the tote back up your shoulder, and Jack felt the pull to keep you here one more second before he could stop himself. 

“Go home,” he said gruffly. “And I’ll be looking for you. So actually turn up, don’t make me look for nothing.” 

The whole sun of you came up at that, stunned, like you hadn’t expected to be looked for by anyone. Jack felt the ground go quietly out from under him, the vertigo of having reached for a person’s happiness on purpose and connected, of being, for once, the cause of a face doing that. He’d gotten so used to delivering news that took the light out that he’d forgotten it ran the other way, too.

“I’ll turn up. I promise.” 

He nodded, clearing his throat and turning for the board, bidding you a throaty goodbye. 

“She’s the girl that everyone on night talks about?” Robby asked immediately, falling into step beside him. 

Jack looked at him sideways, shaking his head. “You got something to say, too?”

“No,” Robby said, rubbing his palm at his chin like he was holding something in. “You like her or something?”

Jack halted for a second, pointing his index at Robby as he lowered his chin. “You shut up. She’s gonna be a nurse.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Robby laughed. “Looks like she’s gonna be your nurse, old man. You’ll need it soon enough.”

Thank god you did turn up. Jack had the sense that maybe he’d scared you off altogether by his offer, and the line he’d toed had two very alternate spectrums: you’d find a new hospital altogether to go to in the metropolitan area after your falls or poisonings, or you’d be here a lot more often, which he still wasn’t sure would’ve been often enough. 

The first time you came in, it was well past midnight and Jack had unfortunately not been able to catch you off the bat because he was in an emergency surgery. He’d walked out of it with his blood-stained surgical gown still on to be met with the sight of you by the nurse’s station, writing something down on the back of a discharge form for Lena, with another Tupperware laying on the table. He made the guess that you’d brought the whole floor something and were three minutes from having Lena eating out of your hand. 

You’d found a corner of his department and made yourself a small soft home in it inside of ten minutes, and you were leaning in, and Jack stood there for a moment with the bad night still ringing in his ears and felt something unclench in his chest by a fraction.

“ — no, but you gotta,” you were saying to Lena in earnest as Jack approached closer. “If you put the brown sugar in while the butter’s still hot, it’s just — it’s a different cookie.”

“You taking the recipe, Lena?” Jack asked then, fully submerging into the knot you’d made with his charge nurse. 

You turned to face him, a smile forming on your lips almost immediately, and then your eyes dropped over him, to the gown, the rust-brown stain dried dark across the front of it, the set of his shoulders. 

“I am,” Lena replied. “Gonna make these for the kids.” She punctuated her sentence by holding up one of the cookies. 

“Gonna make some for us, too, then?” Jack asked, raising a brow, and settled his elbows over the table. He turned his neck to face you properly, putting on his best smile.

Lena laughed shortly. “I don’t like you enough.” She pushed off the counter with some forms in hand. “Her, maybe. You can have whatever she leaves behind.” She shot you a look that was almost warm before she went and disappeared down the hall. 

“Could be you someday,” Jack said, tilting his head in the direction of Lena’s chair. 

You shook your head, then pushed the container in his hands. “I’ve got to graduate first. And pass pharm, which is currently — ” You patted your tote bag, textbooks heavy. “ — trying to kill me.”

Jack nodded toward the family room, placing the container on the table for a second beside him. “C’mon, then, doll. Let’s see what the pharm’s doing to you.”

“You don’t have to — ” Your eyes flicked down the gown again. “You just came out of surgery. You don’t have to help me study.”

“Actin’ like I’m the one who got the surgery,” Jack muttered, chuckling slightly. He was already peeling off the gown one-handed, balling it up to toss. He started walking, and you followed behind him. “C’mon. It’s pretty empty right now.” 

It’d been pleasant that night and the few after to have five to ten minute increments of sitting with you helping you study in between doing his actual job. He’d duck in between things — a lull after discharge, the dread stretch while he waited for a CT scan, the ten minutes a trauma took to roll in once the call came — and you’d be there in the family room with your stack of cards on the couch. He’d drop on the chair across you or the couch beside you and pick up wherever you’d left off like he hadn’t left at all. Then his pager would buzz and he’d be gone, and you’d still be there an hour later when he came back, and he’d sit back down, and both of you’d pretend this was a completely normal way to study.

It’d annoyed him the first night how badly the flashcards were failing you; he’d seen you stare at the words and your eyes would glaze and slide right off it like they were greased. You’d memorized or retained nothing. And then he’d said, half to himself, a story for the why to click, and he’d watched it lock in you. 

So he’d stopped quizzing you primarily off the cards and started telling you stories instead and you’d talk it back to him, reasoning out loud, getting there in the saying of it the way you never got there on the page. 

The nights stacked up. The first week, you’d sat at a table across from him. By the second, you’d migrated to the chair beside him. Your coffee, the one by the far end of the table, was right by his elbow. Lena started leaving a second cup at the station when she saw you come in, his and yours, and never commented.

You’d stopped apologizing for taking up his time somewhere in there. He noticed when you’d started saving him the worst looking cookie on purpose because he’d once told you he liked the ugly ones. He’d noticed when you learned the rhythm of his pages; you’d go quiet and just hand him the next card when his eyes drifted to the board through the window of the door, would have it ready when he came back, like you’d kept his place for him while he was off keeping someone alive. 

He noticed that he more than looked forward to it. Somewhere in the dead middle of a bad shift, his feet would take him toward the family room before his brain could catch up on the why of it all. An empty table on a night you didn’t come in sat wrong with him, a tiny disappointment he didn’t have anything in him to figure out why.

Sometimes, like now, you’d get distracted. Jack had learned. He’d walked into the family room to see you and Ellis folded into opposite ends of the couch, the flashcards abandoned in a fanned mess on the cushion between you, both of you mid-argument and enjoying yourselves too much.

“Poaching my study hall, Ellis?” he said, finally moving in. 

Ellis pointed one stern finger in your direction as she pulled herself off the couch. “Do the crossword, not the sudoku.” 

“She’s gonna make you a worse student,” Jack said to Ellis’s back.

“She’s making me a worse doctor,” Ellis said cheerfully, already at the door. “I’ve been here twenty minutes. I have patients.” She turned to you one final time. “Crossword. You’ll thank me later.” 

She gave Jack a knowing look on her way out, one he didn’t want to read too much into, and she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her in one slow plunge. 

You watched the door settle, and the entire wattage of your attention turned to him. He hadn’t gotten used to that, and he didn’t think he ever would. “Looks like I’ll never be a nurse.” 

“Don’t say things like that.” He came around and lowered himself onto the couch beside you. “What’re you stuck on? Hit me.”

Your palm met his upper arm, a small smack. 

He narrowed his eyes at you. “Hit me all you want. You’re not getting out of this.” 

“But Jaaaack,” you drawled, tipping your head back on the couch. “Not here to study today.”

His eyes flickered over to your form briefly as he gathered the cards and squared them. “Oh, no? What’re you here for then?”

“Dunno.” You pulled your knees up to the couch. “Didn’t wanna be at mine. And work was a lot and boring.” You turned to face him then, a small smile growing on your lips. “Thought I’d bother yours instead.” 

He set the squared deck on his knee. “Lucky me.”

He’d caught it, though, how you’d folded the sad thing in the middle of the sentence where it’d draw the least attention and moved on before it could sit. He let it move on, but he kept it. The image of you on a Tuesday, work behind you, and the choice you’d made was to drive to a hospital rather than go home to your own quiet. He was getting a picture of what that quiet looked like and learned that he didn’t like it very much.

“Work was boring, huh,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine what a fun day looked like as a waitress. “You working more?”

“Mm. Saturday girl quit, so now I’m on Saturdays, too.” You picked at your sock. “S’okay. Tips are good. I learned that old guys tip better when you call them ‘sir.’” 

He huffed. “Do they?”

“Huge. It’s a cheat code.” You tilted your head at him, smiling shyly. “You’d tip well, I think. You’d overcompensate.” 

“I’m not gonna sit here and get profiled by you in the only few minutes where I can catch my breath.” He held the card up, front to himself. “And I tip twenty-five percent like every functioning adult, thank you.”

You groaned. “Where can I get tipped more than that?” 

“You don’t want me to answer that.”

“I do. I do. I’m a broke student. Point me to the money — where should I apply?” You shifted on the couch, fully facing him now, the cards apparently abandoned for the moment. “C’mon. You’ve lived a hundred years. You’ve gotta know where I can make some quick cash.” 

“You’re sweet to me, doll,” he muttered, rolling his eyes. He set the cards down and looked at you, genuinely considering it now. He tried to ignore the fact that you likely had money troubles and tried to think about how he could actually help. “Define quick.” 

“Like — by next Thursday.” 

“Legally?”

“No.” 

“Legally, you can sell plasma. Twice a week, they pay you, you sit there with a juice box.” 

Your nose scrunched. “I don’t love needles in me sober.”

“You’re gonna be a nurse.”

“In other people. That’s totally different.” You waved it off. “Next. What else?”

“Sleep studies pay you to sleep. Egg donation pays a whole lot but it’s a whole process, not a Thursday deal.” He was ticking them off on his fingers, now fully committed. “Medical research’ll pay you to test things. Phase-one trials. You take an experimental drug and they watch you for side effects.”

“That’s the one.” You sat up. “How much?”

“No,” he said immediately, shaking his head. “Absolutely not. I bring you in here to keep you from blacking out. I’m not gonna have you volunteering to get poisoned for a quick four hundred bucks.” He pointed at you. “Maybe start laying on the ‘sir’ a little too thick from now on.” 

“Sir.” You tested on him directly, dropping your voice, leaning in an inch, lashes going slow. “Could you help me out, sir? Tips have been so slow, sir.” 

He turned his face away from you, now making himself look out the window. “I’m not entertaining this.” 

“Oh, but sir.” You’d fully abandoned the cards now, scooting closer, a hand under your chin, the picture of innocence. “I’m just a girl. A poor, hardworking girl trying to be a nurse. Don’t you want to help me out, sir?”

“I am trying.” He pulled up the flashcards. “If it’ll help, I’ll bring my SWAT buddies into your place and they can run up a tab.” He waved a card in front of your face, trying to get your attention back to it. “You do this, I’ll have eight cops eating mozzarella sticks in your section by Friday, overtipping ‘cause I saved their lives. Won’t even have to call ‘em sir.” 

“Right. No, that’s — ” You let out a little laugh too quickly, eyes widening at his words, and you took the card out of his hand mostly to have something to do with yours. “You don’t have to do that. Obviously. I was kidding — ” You batted the whole thing away with a shake of your head. “God. No. I’m okay, I promise. I was kidding.”

“I’m half-kidding,” he said, raising a brow. “I do know those guys. It’s no skin off me. But it’s okay.” 

He let the offer sit like that, and he saw you pinch your eyes shut. He watched the whole thing happen on your face, the small involuntary recoil you always had when anyone offered you real kindness. You were bad at it. For a girl who lied so charmingly about how much she drank and how her night went, you had absolutely no poker face for being cared about. You had not the first idea how to hide it.

He found it unbearably endearing.

You opened your eyes and looked a little caught, a little sheepish as your thumb worried the corner of the card.

“You’re a strange girl,” he mumbled, fond, before he could stop it. “You know that?”

“Shit — Jack,” you said through a small laugh, shaking your head. “I don’t — I’m — ” You pressed your lips together and your shoulders came up almost to your ears in a stiff shrug. “Is there anything I can do for you? I can’t just accept — all your help.” 

He snorted. “What help? I give you a study room and review flash cards.”

“Let me do something. I’m a good cleaner — ”

His head went back slightly, shaking his head. “You’re really not.”

“Okay,” you continued, rallying. “A dog? Guys like you always have dogs they don’t walk ‘cause of their hours. I can walk dogs.” 

“No dog.” He raised his hand when he saw your mouth move again, stopping you. “You pay me back by passing your boards. You can pay me back plenty if you end up working here, doing good at the job.”

You went quiet for a second. “That’s just me doing my own thing. That’s not real.”

“That’s real to me.” He shrugged, like he hadn’t just made your whole future the price of his kindness. “I get a good nurse out of it someday.” He pulled himself off the couch. “And now I gotta go. Floor’s not gonna run itself.”

“Boo,” you said, pulling the entire deck on your lap now. “You’re the worst study partner. You leave constantly.”

Tonight, Jack had come into the family room after leaving you for a longer stretch of time than usual — a multi-vehicle situation that had eaten two hours and most of his patience — and found the studying had long since lost.

You’d migrated to the couch at some point. The textbook was open face-down on the cushion beside you like a small tented roof, your flashcards fanned across the middle seat, and you were folded in the corner with your knees pulled up and cheek mashed into the worn armrest, fighting your eyes and losing completely. You’d dimmed the overhead lights, lighting the lamp in the corner, the one nobody used, throwing everything low and gold.

He paused in the doorway. “You awake?” 

“Mhm. Need a cat nap, though,” you murmured.

Jack snorted, shutting the door behind him as he walked closer to you. “How far’d you get?”

“Far enough.” Then, you added, “Cat nap.”

“Sayin’ it like I’m gonna not let you have one.” 

Your eye cracked open a sliver, tracked him, then fell shut again. “Feel like you’re gonna make me do more cards.”

He toed the leg of the coffee table aside, reached down, and started clearing your mess off the cushions. He lifted the textbook and shut it around the receipt you’d jammed as a bookmark; gathered the flashcards and squared them in his palm; capped the highlighter and pocketed it. You watched the cleanup through one half-open eye, not lifting a single finger, your cheek staying flat to the armrest. 

“There. No more cards. You’re done for tonight, doll.” 

“Hooray,” you mumbled. 

He nudged your socked foot where it had crept up across the cushion. “C’mon. Budge up a second. Don’t want you wrecking your neck sleeping like that.”

You made a small sound of protest but you went, peeling your cheek off the armrest with reluctance. There was a crease pressed into your skin where the fabric seam had been and your hair was flat on one side and mushed on the other. You blinked up at him, swaying where you sat, eyes glassy and unfocused in the gold lamplight.

He sank into the space he’d cleared, the cushion dipping, tipping the two of you a fraction into each other. That was all the invitation your body apparently needed, because you folded into him without a beat of thought — too tired to second-guess it, he supposed — your temple finding the warm of his shoulder, your whole side melting against his. You drew your knees up and tucked them against his thigh. Your hand came to rest on his chest, palm flat, fingers spreading once before they went still. You exhaled after a moment, long and slowly, and burrowed your nose into his neck. 

Jack stilled. 

“Ten minutes,” you murmured, the words barely coming out as words.

He took his arm off the back of the couch and settled it around your back, broad hand spanning between your shoulder blades and drawing you that last fraction deeper into him. You went boneless with it, a small contended hum slipping out of you. 

Because he couldn’t help himself, he tipped his head down a fraction to say into your hair, “Been doin’ really well, y’know that, sweetheart?” 

You hummed, the sound of it vibrating against his throat, your fingers curling the faintest bit in his scrubs. “Thanks, Jack.”

“Gonna be a good nurse,” he murmured, thumb moving once along your shoulder. 

“Gonna work with you,” you mumbled, three-quarters gone. “You said.”

“Mhm.”

“Holdin’ you to it.” 

“Yeah, I know you are.” The corner of his mouth flicked up where you couldn’t see it. “Go to sleep. You can hold me to it in ten minutes.” 

When you didn’t answer for a second, Jack realized you were already gone. You were warm and trusting at his side, your hand slack over his heart, your breath sinking deep and even into his neck. 

Jack let his head tip back against the couch, pinching his eyes shut at the feeling of you, at the feeling you caused. His hand spread slowly across your back, feeling the breath go through you — the proof of you — and he let his thumb find the curve of your shoulder and rest there, keeping his eyes shut. He sat with the enormous fact of you, the girl he’d not seen anyone circle back for, gone soft and so pliant in his arms like she’d always belonged there, and he stopped pretending he wasn’t already lost. 

The ten minutes came and went. He let them. He’d have given you the whole night, the whole shift, the whole of whatever this was turning into. There wasn’t one place on the earth worth standing up for, and he’d known it for weeks, and only now, with your breath slow against his throat, did he let himself sit all the way inside of the knowing.

Jack came out of the OR and signed — albeit distantly, mind running a meter a minute about nothing good — what needed signing and said the things he was meant to, feeling the familiar piece of his own damn soul rotting away in the place those things went to rot. He knew the spot by now. It’d been decades of depositing them into the same place, and the place didn’t fill, exactly, but it never emptied, either. It just sat there, getting heavier, like things usually do when you keep adding to it and never take anything out.

This one would sit a while. Jack had started to sense it around the first year in this job; the ones that stayed had a weight, and you knew on the table whether you were getting one of those or whether it’d wash off by morning. This one wouldn’t.

He stripped his gloves, and somebody said something he answered without hearing, and then his feet simply walked past the board, carrying him down the hall toward the one door on the whole floor that wouldn’t have somebody else’s catastrophe behind it. 

His hand was flat on the door. He was still wearing the gown, and he looked down and registered it too late. He should’ve changed it, left the thing in the dirty bin with the rest of what the shift had taken, the way he always did before he came to you, kept the two halves of the floor separate on purpose. 

He opened the door. You were on the couch, one leg tucked under you and the other foot on the floor and a half-empty cup of coffee on the table going cold. You’d been doing something on your phone, or nothing, when the door opened, and you looked up with the easy expectant expression on your face you always had before it dropped. He watched it melt.

“Hey,” you said, making your voice soft.

“Hey.” His voice came out rough, and he almost winced as he heard it himself. 

You set your phone face-down on the cushion and unfolded yourself from the couch and stood, crossing the room to close the gap between you. You stopped in front of him and looked up, your brow doing a small worried thing, and he let himself be looked at.

“Sit down,” you said. “You look like you’re gonna fall through the floor.”

He distantly registered you walking him to the chair — your hand finding his forearm, a light touch — and he let you. He folded into the chair like the strings of his own body had been cut, his elbows finding his knees and head dropping.

He heard you move, small domestic sounds of you filling a cup, the tap somewhere down the hall turning on then shutting off. Then your socks were back in his eyeline, toes pointed to him.

“Here.” You crouched, came into his lowered field of vision, and pressed a cup into his hands — water, cold — and folded his fingers around it when they were slow to close. “Drink it all.”

He drank because that was the path of least resistance. The water caught something he hadn’t registered was bone-dry. You took the empty cup out of his hands when he was done, setting it on the table behind you, and then he felt your hands find his shoulders.

He flinched just slightly, the smallest involuntary thing, for nobody touched him like that. Nobody put their hands on him that weren’t shaking one of his or needing something from him. You settled your thumbs into the iron base of his neck and pressed slowly, working the knots the night, the days, the weeks, and probably the year had wound there.

Your thumbs were unsure of themselves — you weren’t good at it, you weren’t trying to be, you were simply trying — and that was somehow worse because it got further to him than skill would have; there was the unpracticed earnestness to it, like you’d simply decided his shoulders had been holding too much and you wanted to put your hands there to take some of it down. 

He felt his head drop lower, coming forward on its own, the tension bleeding out of his neck by degrees under your hands. Your thumbs found a place at the top of his spine that had been clenched so long that it had stopped registering as pain, and you pressed there, and a fraction let go. He felt his shoulders drop the inch they’d been holding up all night, and an uneven breath went out of him.

You kept your hands moving, your thumbs working the meat of his shoulders through the cotton, occasionally finding a knot and leaning your weight into it until it gave. 

His head tipped a little forward after a stretch of time — chasing, or simply falling — and it found the soft of your stomach. His forehead rested against the front of you, where you stood close in the gap between his knees. He hadn’t intended for it, or maybe he had, somewhere under where the intention happened, his body had chosen to stop holding its own weight and give it to the nearest thing that felt like it’d take it. His eyes were already shut, and he stayed there, hands coming up on their own to rest at the sides of your waist. His fingers anchored into the fabric of your shirt.

“Shitty job sometimes,” he mumbled after a moment.

“Yeah,” you said softly above him. “I bet it is.” 

Your fingers had found his hair, threading through the curls. Then, you added quietly, “But you’re really good at it.” 

His fingers tightened a fraction at the fabric on your waist as he let out a short huff. 

“Didn’t help him,” he said finally, the words coming out muffled behind his own mouth. “Whatever I’m good at didn’t help him.” 

“Maybe not.” Your fingers scraped carefully at his scalp. “I think you were the best shot he had.”

He breathed you in, choosing to let the words rest in his skull for a while instead of fighting them. 

“I’m — ” He heard you take in a breath and felt it go through your whole body. “I’m really grateful I met you, Jack.”

For some reason, he waited for you to take it back. There was a primally fast thing in him that told him that you’d take the words back, and he’d have understood.

“You don’t have to say anything,” you added. “I just wanted you to know. While you’re here being all — ” Your thumb moved at the back of his neck, tender and so gentle. “ — Figured it was a decent time to tell you I’m glad you exist.” 

He took in a shaky breath against you, fingers tightening again. 

“Thank you, sweet girl,” he said, and it sounded like it’d been punched out of him. “Likewise. More than you know,” he finished, his arms wrapping around the rest of your waist now, pulling you in like he could just fold himself smaller if he held hard enough.

Your fingers kept moving slowly in his hair, your other hand coming around the back of his head to hold him there. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d let anybody do this; as far as he could remember, he’d decided in some wordless permanent way that he’d carry his own weight from then on, that it was cheaper, that needing somebody was a bill that came due eventually and he’d rather not run the tab. 

“You should sit,” he said after god knows how long without letting go. “Selfish, keepin’ you standing here.”

“It’s okay.”

He hummed, thumb moving once at your waist. “Two more minutes then.”

“Whatever you need, Jack,” you said, voice quiet. “I’m not going.”

Jack’s phone lit up on the arm of the couch at 10:52, face-down, buzzing itself a quarter-inch off the leather before he caught it. 

He’d been working his way, with grim completionist patience, through an iceberg video you’d sent him three days ago with the message ‘THIS rabbit hole i need you to fall down.’ You’d followed it up by telling him, ‘do Not skip tiers!!’ He hadn’t skipped tiers. He was, in fact, ninety minutes deep and only about two-thirds down the pyramid, somewhere in the tier where a young man with a serious voice was explaining internet folklore he couldn’t believe was real. 

He was fairly sure it’d been invented by some teenager, but Jack only shrugged, distantly wondering why on earth anyone would spend the labor — the diagrams, alone — hoaxing a thing this elaborate for an audience of complete strangers. He also wondered why on earth you were so interested in this. As quickly as the thought arrived, he realized that he was working down the iceberg himself.

Working down a thing you’d handed him felt adjacent to sitting next to you, and his apartment had become the sort of quiet that made adjacent worth ninety minutes of contemporary folklore. He’d sooner have chewed glass than admitted it out loud.

It was a good apartment and an unwitnessed one. He’d realized somewhere in the past year it was untouched by any hand but his. Every object was exactly where he’d last set it down, for there was no second person to nudge the remote three inches or leave a hair tie on the counter or ask why there was a mug in the sink and no bowl. His leg was off for the night, propped against the arm of the couch, the whole standing weight from his night shift to SWAT calls finally set down somewhere it was allowed to stay.

So, the phone going off, went off loud in the silence that had become almost-permanent. Your name lit across the screen, and the picture with it (one you’d set yourself, commandeering his phone to do it). It was already strange that it was a call. You never called; you texted in floods, six messages deep before he’d gotten to the first, but the ringing meant the thing had gotten past the point where typing it out would hold. 

He looked at your laughing face buzzing on his phone for a second too long, the cold little instinct, and thumbed it green.

“Hey,” he said. “You know it’s almost eleven on my night-off. This better be good.”

You stayed silent for a second, and he could hear your breath and the hollow of a call connected in a car, the cooling engine’s tick and automotive acoustics. 

“Hey,” you said finally, and Jack felt it wrongly. The back half of the word had gone soft and unsteady at the end.

Jack was already sitting up. “Hey, yourself,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” He heard you swallow quickly. “Sorry. God, this is so dumb. You — were you asleep?” 

“I was almost through with your iceberg, if you want the truth.” 

You made a sound that tried to be a laugh but didn’t clear the runway, breaking apart halfway. “You watched it?”

“Almost.” His fingers were drumming against his prosthetic leaning by the couch now. “Are you out?”

“I’m —” You paused, then hummed like you were debating. “I’m kind of near your place, actually?” Your voice rose toward the end, like you were embarrassed or questioning it all yourself. “I know. It’s creepy. But I think I need to — talk to you.” 

“Yeah?” He tried to keep his voice light, though he could already feel something in his body start racing, panicking. “You break something?”

“No. No. Promise. It’s nothing like that.”

For some reason, that put a deeper hook in him. If it wasn’t a wrist, an ankle, or your body doing something it shouldn’t, then it was the other kind, and he had no idea how to hold something like that. He wasn’t sure what he could do with a sprain he couldn’t ice.

“Okay — ”

“Wait,” you interrupted, voice pitching higher, and he could see you were psyching yourself out. “I could just say it now, honestly. It’d probably be easier over the phone.”

Jack’s eyes widened a fraction at that. His stomach suddenly felt cold. 

“No,” he said, voice rougher than he’d intended. “I won’t make it hard. Whatever you want to say, I promise. Just — not like this, okay? Come here.” 

He listened to you breathe as you weighed it and knew, with bone-deep certainty, that he wouldn’t like what you were going to say. “Okay,” you breathed. “I’ll be there in fifteen.” 

Jack opened the door after the first knock, unembarrassed of waiting. You’d come as you were, a coat thrown open over sleep clothes, good wool hanging loose over a thin cami with lace at the collar and soft shorts and bare legs down to the sneakers you hadn’t laced properly. The second fact that registered to Jack was that you’d been crying; there was a soft ruin around your eyes, the mascara long gone, wiped with a sleeve somewhere back in the evening. Your hair was up and losing, a claw clip hanging looser than he believed it was meant to.

“Hi,” you said, eyes raising to meet his. “Thanks for letting me come by.”

Jack felt his shoulders rise to his ears just slightly at the formality. He felt like a bucket of ice had been dropped upon him because somewhere in the past few weeks, you’d stopped apologizing to him as much, which had felt like a small victory he never told you he was counting. And here it was again, your stiff little courtesy, the door swung back shut on a thing that had been open. Jack didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. 

“You don’t thank me for coming by,” he said gruffly, opening the door wider.

You came in, but only just. Before he could steer you to the warmth of his apartment, you were already reaching into the bag on your shoulder — hands shaking, he realized, with a fine tremor — and pulling out a folded piece of paper, creased hard down the middle and then again like you’d tried to bundle it up into a fist.

He unfolded it and smoothed out the edges, eyes looking for yours briefly, but you’d already looked away. Your bottom lip was between your teeth and you were looking at the ground. He forced himself to look down.

It was your pharmacology exam. Your cramped looping handwriting scattered the margins, a star drawn to one question because you starred everything. There was red pen all down the side and a number circled on the top. The number, Jack saw immediately, was not catastrophic, not a failure even. It was a low pass, the sort of grade that would’ve stung for Jack in his school days and evaporated by the next exam. He’d expected worse from the way you’d been shaking holding it. 

He looked back at you, confused more than anything. “Congratulations, you passed.” 

Your jaw tightened, and he could see your eyes go bright and wounded. “It’s a seventy-one.”

“That’s a pass.”

“Barely. Barely.” You took the paper out of his hands, folding it away like you couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. “And you helped me with this so much and I still couldn’t. I’m so tired of — ” You stopped, looking up at the ceiling as you pressed your lips flat. “It’s not about the test.”

“Okay.” He leaned back against the counter, giving you the whole floor of the room. “Talk, then.” 

You looked at him, and he watched you gather it all up, deciding, as it settled into your face, your mouth, whatever you’d come here to say.

“I don’t wanna waste your time anymore,” you said, tugging your bottom lip between your teeth as your eyes landed on the wall behind him. “I can’t — it’s not fair.” 

Jack felt the whole floor shift under him and felt his brows go up an inch as he tried to keep his face seem collected. 

“You’re you,” you continued. “You’ve got a whole life, a hard one, and I’ve been just — dumping mine on you. Making you sit there and hold my hand through studying and I’m — ” You shook your head, face going grim as you said the words. “It’s not fair to you. You’ve been carrying me for so long, and it’s not fair. None of this is yours to carry. I’m not yours to carry.” 

His nose scrunched just slightly, something like burning blooming at the center of his face. Something in his chest had cracked along the seam he had no idea was there, because he’d never had to look at it once straight on. It was easy to carry your own weight when there was no one asking to take some. It was easy to call solitude a principle when nobody had ever made the alternative real. And you had. You’d made it real for months, and here you were proposing — no, telling — to take it back, to hand him his loneliness again because of some measurement of fairness. 

The horror of how much Jack didn’t want it — how badly, how completely he didn’t want to go back to how it was before you — was the first honest look he’d taken at himself in longer than he could stand to count. 

“That so?” was all he could say, voice roughening as his brows narrowed at you. 

“Yes.” You mistook the roughness for agreement, or maybe you just needed to do so, because you kept going. “You don’t have to help me. The only thing I can think is you’re — you are a good person and I was there. And you help people, it’s what you do.” Your hand waved in the general direction of him as your voice cracked. “So help someone who’d actually make it worth it. Who won’t barely pass and keep getting too drunk and — ” You laughed slightly, and it was all wet and terrible, the sound. “I’m a bad use of you. You’re this — you are so much, Jack, and I’m a bad place to put it. So put it somewhere better.” 

Jack had to force a swallow when you ended your words with a sharp intake of breath, the pool behind your eyes slipping free slowly down your cheeks. You’d run out of anything that’d make you wipe it away now, and that undid him worse than the crying itself, that you were standing there and letting it fall, done hiding, wrung all the way out. 

“I’m sorry — ” he started.

“It’s okay,” you said immediately, shaking your head.

“For making you think that’s what it was,” he said, lowering his voice. “That’s on me, that you talked yourself into thinking this has been some sort of charity.” He cocked his head to the side then, wishing you’d look up at him. “But you’re gonna quit shaking your head for one minute, and hear the rest, ‘cause you got it wrong. All of it, backwards and upside down.”

He came off the counter and closed the space himself, until you had to lift your chin to keep his eyes. 

“I’m not a man who spends his nights on a stray out of the goodness of his heart. Ask anyone I work with what I’m like. I don’t have that lying around spare.” His jaw tightened. “So take the halo off. That’s not what this was.”

“Then why — ”

“You,” he said plainly, for he learned it cost him nothing to do so, and a lot if he didn’t. “I wouldn’t do this for just anyone. There’s nowhere else I want to put it.”

He watched everything in your face tighten at his words, the disbelief and reflex to argue all curdling underneath. 

“If you don’t want this.” Me. Me, he wanted to say. “Say it. I’ll leave you alone. You don’t owe me anything.”

“That’s not — ”

“But don’t act like it’s some favor for me.” He was closer now than he’d been. “Don’t tell me you’re leaving for my sake. That’s a lie.”

“It’s not — ”

“It’s a lie,” he said, voice going flat and so final, as he slowly nodded his head. He looked at you a second, lips coming between his teeth, then looked away as he felt something physical seize over his entire body.

Jack himself had to process the words as he said them, because he was only just realizing how much truth they held.

“You make it good.”

He forced himself to look back at you, and you had tilted your head now to look up at him, caught and still as stone, the arguing gone completely off your face now and replaced with something more frightened.

“Don’t — ” One of Jack’s shoulders came up in a half-hearted shrug. “You’re the one part of my day that doesn’t take anything out of me. Just — get that straight, sweetheart.” 

You were just looking up at him with your whole face undone, the tears gone still on it, as though his words had knocked your own clean out of you.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” you said quietly. “People don’t — that’s not a thing that happens to me, Jack. Being — ” Your sentence broke apart and your hand had come up and fisted loosely in front of his shirt without either of you deciding it should, holding on, holding him there. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Nothing.” His hand came up slowly and covered yours where it fisted in his shirt, holding it flat there against his chest. “It’s just true.”

You made a small, pained sound and dropped your forehead against his sternum, right where his hand held yours, and he felt the whole strung-tight weight of you gave at once and settled into him. He felt you breathe against his shirt at the same time he felt his own pulse going too fast on your knuckles; he wasn’t bothered enough to try and slow it, because there was no point now. You’d already found out. 

“Very grateful for you,” he murmured, his other hand pulled up to rest over the back of your skull. “Told you so earlier. Meant it more than you let yourself hear.”

You huffed against his shirt — half a sob, half a laugh, maybe the ruined cousin of both — and he felt it go through the cotton and land warm against his skin, felt your fingers uncurl a fraction from the fist they’d made then re-fist, like even now some part of you was checking he was still there to hold onto. 

Jack held still for it, same as you had in the family room for him. He was good at holding still, it was half the job, but this was a different kind — he supposed — where there was a plain animal willingness to be a wall for as long as you needed one and not move a muscle that might spook you out of it. 

He rested his chin at the top of your head, murmuring, “I don’t have to tutor you anymore, if that’ll help.” He swallowed, closing his eyes as he breathed in your faint perfume. “We can scrap the whole thing, if that’s what’s making you feel so bad.”

You stilled for a second, then made a small sound against him. 

Despite himself, despite it all, he let out a short chuckle. “S’okay. I’m the reason you got a seventy-one. You’re allowed to switch.” 

“You’re the reason it’s a seventy-one and not a thirty,” you said, and it came out muffled and immediate. You almost sounded cross, like you didn’t want the slander against him to stand even now.

After a moment against him, you added, “I don’t want to be just someone you help, I think. I don’t want to be somebody — I guess — that you’re just good to.”

When Jack hummed, you continued, “I don’t know what I wanna be instead. Just — a friend — or, I don’t know. Something that goes both ways.”

Jack’s chest swelled at the words. He felt that he’d have been anything you asked of him, simply because it had just become how it was. It was almost outrageous how, if you’d asked, he’d have handed it over, the whole rest of it, whatever you wanted the name to be, whatever box you needed him in.

A man his age was supposed to be past this. He was supposed to have calcified somewhere in the second decade of the job into something that didn’t reorganize himself around what someone he’d known properly only for the better part of the year had asked him.

“Consider it done,” he murmured, letting the word settle. Friend.

You breathed against him, and Jack felt himself want to remain exactly here and knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that the kind thing now was to give you somewhere to put your face that wasn’t his chest, some ordinary ground for you to set your feet back down on. 

“C’mon.” He got a hand on your shoulder and eased you off him gently, a slow, slow reclaiming of the eight inches of air between your body and his. He dipped his head to catch your eyes, which were pink-rimmed and swollen and doing their utter best to avoid his now that the worst was out of you. “Do you want me to order food?”

Your neck rolled back slightly as you met his eyes, caught slightly off-guard at the shift of tone. You blinked. “That was a lot, and now you’re asking about food?”

“It was a lot,” he agreed. He reached up and thumbed a smudge of leftover mascara from under your eye briskly, and you let him. “And now it’s done. So, food, and we can watch the stupid video you sent me before you head home.”

It had been six days since you showed up at his apartment, and Jack had embarrassingly counted every single one of them. You’d left his apartment somewhere past two with your eyes finally dry and a paper bag of his leftover Thai you’d protested and taken anyway, and he’d walked you down to your car and stood in the lot like some idiot in a movie until your taillights turned off his street, and then he’d gone back up to a quiet that felt, for the first time in years, like something had been in it.

Since then it had gone like it always had and nothing like it; you still turned up with flashcards and left a graveyard of half-drunk coffees on every surface. But he’d noticed how you started letting him sit closer now, let a compliment land without flinching off, and once, mid-story, had reached over and fixed his scrub top where it had folded under, casual as breathing. 

Friend was the word you’d settled on. Jack was thinking about that when Shen dropped into step beside Jack with a cup of fresh Dunkin sweating in his hand. 

“You know it’s not standard to let your girlfriend occupy the family room for three hours of your shift, right?” 

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jack immediately clarified. It seemed more important to do now than it was earlier, when people only knew you when you came in as an emergency. Still, it felt wrong, like a key going in the wrong hole. “And you got a problem with it?” 

Shen lifted the coffee in surrender, unbothered. “You know we’ve grown to her. She and I do the Wordle every midnight.” Then, he spread one hand. “Administratively, she’s not staff. She’s not a patient. She’s not family of a patient. Which leaves the category I’d have to call —” He tilted his head, faux thoughtfulness. “ — Abbot’s girlfriend, and I don’t think that’s in the handbook.” 

“Try again,” Jack drawled, thumbing a form he wasn’t reading that didn’t need to be read. “She’s a nursing student getting hours of free tutoring off a board-certified attending. Put that in the handbook. Teaching hospital. I’m teaching.”

Shen shook his head, letting out a small laugh. “Alright. Alright. She’s not your girlfriend. Mind if I ask her out, then?” 

Jack snorted. “If you could only be so lucky.” 

“Clearly she has a type for attendings,” he pressed, grinning. “Or is it just the ones with gray hair?”

Jack looked at him sideways. “This is getting a bit weird, even for you.” 

“I’m happy for you, man. Even if you’re gonna make us all watch you not do anything about it for the next six months.”

“Mind your own damn business.”

“Sure,” he turned, lifting a hand over his shoulder as he went. “Close the blinds anyway. There’s a window on that door. Everyone can see her making you dumb.” 

Jack looked down the hall and set the form down before going there to close the blinds — telling himself it was for the window, for Shen’s real talk — and knowing, somewhere under that, that he was really just going to you. 

He could see you through the window in the door before he reached it, which was, he supposed, exactly Shen’s point. You had a textbook open in your lap and you were chewing the end of your highlighter, brow pulled in, mouthing something to yourself, working a card over your head. You’d pulled the sleeves of one of his old sweatshirts down to your hands, the one you’d swiped from his locker two weeks ago and never given back and that he’d never once asked for, because he’d found he didn’t want it back, found he liked seeing it swallow you.

You gave him a smile when he walked in. He reached up and tipped the blinds shut on the window with two fingers, the floor outside tipping away. 

“Why’d you close them?” you asked, slightly bored.

“Apparently the whole department’s been getting a show.”

You furrowed your brows then. “A show of what? Me failing?”

“Somethin’ like that.” He let it go at that, coming around and lowering himself onto the couch beside you, the cushion dipping and tipping you toward him a degree, what it always did that neither of you ever corrected. “How’s it going? Honest.”

“Honestly?” You blew out a breath, closing the highlighter. “I’d kill for a drink.”

“Oh?” Jack settled back against the couch, his arm coming up along the top of it behind you. “Telling that to the one man who’s seen what you look like at the bottom of the bottle.”

“Jaaaack,” you said, almost in a whine. “Let’s go to a bar.”

He snorted, dragging a hand down his face. “Now I’m wondering what’s pushing you toward the edge.”

He picked the flashcard you had set on the textbook, the one you’d been studying. He read the front of it without much intention — your handwriting was cramped and looping, a star drawn next to it — and turned over and checked the back. He did the same thing he always did, the story, the image; he’d done it a hundred times by now. He could do it half-asleep, and most nights he half was. 

You thought about it for a second, your bottom lip tugged between your teeth, then walked yourself to the answer. 

“Mhm. See. Good,” he murmured. He flipped the card to the back to check you, and you’d had it. Of course you’d had it, you’d had more of this than you ever gave yourself credit for. “Tell you what. Get the next three right, and I’ll get us a drink once your exams are done.” 

Your brows narrowed. “Bribe?”

“It’s an incentive.” He held up the next card, eyes on you. “Don’t think. Just answer me.” 

You did. One, then the next, then the one after. You were quicker now that there was something on the end of it, your lip caught between your teeth as you walked yourself there each time. He noticed you worked when there was something to earn. After all three, he hummed. “See. Good girl, there you go.” 

He felt you go still beside him, and his eyes flickered up to you to see your eyes dropping to your textbook. He stayed silent a second, eyes raking over you, your thumb running the worn edge of a card back and forth. 

Jack knew better than to point out how you being flustered was almost silly when he’d said the same words many times while taping you up or shining a penlight in your eyes. He let his arm stay where it was along the couch, hand not quite touching your shoulder, and watched the side of your face.

“You wanna do some more?” he said finally, voice coming out rougher. “Or are we done for the night?”

You held up a finger, as if telling him to wait.

“Okay, then,” he mumbled, leaning back further against the couch. “Take your time.”

After a second, he turned to say something dry to break the silence. You’d turned your head, too, and were closer than he initially realized, your eyes coming up off the card and finding his, near enough that whatever he had bubbling in his throat died there immediately. 

Jack hummed involuntarily. You closed the sound by pressing your mouth to his, the feeling of the plushness so very featherlight, there and barely there, the softest press. 

He went still as stone, every system in him locking at once. His hand was still along the back of the couch and his mouth hadn’t answered yours, not because he didn’t want to — God, he did — but because the entirety of him had gone still with the disbelief of it, with the you, here, choosing this — him — and the half-second of nothing stretched into a second, too damn long. 

He’d seized on you, the fact you’d nearly walked, had stood in his kitchen finding the kindest way to disappear, and here you were, closing the last of the distance yourself.

You pulled back like you’d touched a stove, a gasp leaving your mouth, replacing where his own had been. 

“Oh god.” Your hand flew up to your mouth, your eyes going wide before pinching shut completely. “I’m sorry — I’m so sorry, Jack. I read that so, so wrong. You’ve been so nice and I — fuck, I’m sorry.”

Jack made a pained sound that was lost somewhere in your ramble, at the sight of you snatching it back. Nothing had gone wrong. Jack knew you’d read nothing wrong, and that the only thing that had happened was that he’d been too slow, too stunned, too thirty-years-rusty to catch what had been handed to him in good reflex.

His hand came off the back of the couch and he caught your jaw, thumb on your chin as he pushed slightly against your skin. He was distantly aware that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so afraid about leaning in to kiss a woman, and went in to try and give you back the second he lost, mouth finding yours the exact way every bone in his body knew he should’ve the first time. 

You made a startled sound against him before the entirety of you melted. His mouth worked against yours, thoroughly, making sure not to fumble it twice. His thumb stayed on your chin, tilting your face the half-degree he wanted it, and when your lips parted on half a breath, his entire upper body leaned in to follow it, deepening it. 

It was you who moved first. Of course, it was you, always you. You followed it, the kiss pulling you up and forward, your knee coming over his thigh, and then you were settling over him. Jack let out the throatiest of a chuckle, still intent on keeping your mouth, as your hands slid from the front of his scrubs to his jaw. 

Jack’s hands caught yours on instinct — one at your waist, one at your hip — steadying you down to him, your hips still slightly in the air like you weren’t sure you could close the last of the distance, your weight held in the suspended air in the ache of almost, thighs braced on either side of his. 

Jack pulled back just enough to look at you, letting his head fall back against the back of the couch, dragging his eyes up the length of you poised over him. He blew out a short breath, the corners of his lips kicking up as his palm glided up and down on the side of your waist, catching onto your tank top on accident to show a sliver of skin at your lip — warm, soft, the band of your shorts sitting low — and he watched his own hand do it before he dragged his eyes back to your face.

“Nothing halfway with you, huh?” he said, the words practically coming out from his chest. His thumb rested against that bared sliver of you. “Climbing me at my work.”

You lowered your head, and your nose grazed against his. “You started it.”

“I did?”

“You closed the blinds.”

He let out a surprised laugh. “I can promise you I didn’t expect this when I did that.” 

Your lips ghosted over his for a second, and his chest swelled at the sight of you trying to tamp down the sweetest smile. “Problem?” 

“No.” The words came out immediately, because apparently somewhere in him, there was still something insatiable and teenage that had lurched up at the sight of you. “No. No problem.”

His hand spread flat and warm against the small of your back, fingers slipping under the hem of the top to your warm skin there, and he drew you down, finally, that last suspended inch collapsing as he settled your weight flush over him. 

He had to pinch his eyes shut a second, then open them again to take in the whole sight of you. His hand came up to your jaw. The light caught the loose hair at your temple, the bare line of your shoulder where the strap had slipped. Your mouth was full and flushed from his, parted slightly, your breath coming. The skin under his hand at your back was hot to the touch, and he spread his fingers wider against it just to feel more of it. 

You were trying not to smile. Your lip caught between your teeth, the corners pulling anyway. 

His finger perched against your jaw moved to your lips, dragging slowly across the lower one, parting it under the pad of his thumb. He watched it give, your breath warm against his skin. 

Your eyes flicked up to his as your lip closed around the first knuckle, your tongue hesitantly pressing flat against the pad, the wet heat of it catching him so completely off guard that the air went out of him in a rough exhale. His other hand fisted at the small of your back, turning over to gather the hem of your tank in his grip. 

“Oh.” His eyes had dropped to your mouth and fixed there, his jaw slack as his head cocked to the side. “Pretty.” 

His gaze was locked on the sight of his thumb disappearing past your lips, no hesitation in it, that same no-halfway boldness turned filthy and sweet all at once. The tired man in him went down all at once. 

His thumb dragged free, catching on your bottom lip and tugging it down before it slipped loose. His chest heaved harder now under the warm weight of you. 

“Where’d that come from?” he muttered gruffly, almost to himself, thumb pressing the slick of your own lip back against you. His palm moved to cradle your face, tapping your cheek softly once. “Can’t be doing things like that here, doll. I’m on call.” 

“Then don’t make it so easy.” Your lips brushed his thumb, then you moved down to press your mouth to the line of his jaw, the stubble catching your lips, then lower to the warm of his throat.

“You callin’ me easy?” he said through a chuckle, letting his head tip back. You scraped your teeth over the cord of his neck and felt the whole of him go tight underneath you, his fingers flexing hard into the bare skin of your back. 

“Alright.” His voice had dropped to stone. “You’ve had your fun.. No more of that,” he said, though made no move to stop you.

You peppered a line of pecks down his throat down to where his collar had started, your lips dragging over the jut of his collarbone through the thin cotton. He swallowed. One of your hands slid up to the back of your neck, fingers pushing into the soft gray at his nape, scratching light, and the other flattened over his chest, over the steady-then-not rhythm, fisting slow in the fabric just to feel him breathe wrong because of you.

You sat back an inch to look at him. His head was still tipped back against the couch, his throat bared where you’d left it momentarily pink and glossy, his eyes half-lidded. His hands had gone heavy and possessive at your hips, giving up pretending he wanted them anywhere else, you anywhere else.

You dragged your thumb over his bottom lip, watched it give, the same way he did to you. 

“Can I ask you something?” you asked, quietly, your hips settling more firmly into his lap. 

“Mm.” His hands spread wide, settling you down harder against him. “My social security number is — ”

You laughed. 

“Two-two-six — ”

“Jack — ” You swatted at his chest, the seriousness dissolving into something giddier. “I’m being serious. Stop.” 

“Okay, okay.” The corners of his mouth lifted up, and his hands squeezed slightly at your hips. He pulled his head up off the couch to meet your eyes properly. “Shoot. Doubt I could stop you.” 

“Are you seeing anyone?”

He let the question sit, humming. His thumbs moved idly at your hips, head tilting against the couch like the question required any real thought. “There’s a few women,” he said, lowering his voice as he looked at you, like he was letting you in on a secret. “There’s a nice lady who brings me fruit baskets.”

Your hand, on the flat of his chest, slid up slow to his throat and he kept talking like he didn’t notice.

“ — there’s this nurse on days who keeps leaving me her number at the station — ”

You leaned in and closed your teeth slightly on his earlobe. He let out a short laugh, one that was dragged out of him, his head tipped to give more of it to you without permission. 

“Alright. Okay,” he said as your nose dragged the line of his jaw. “Stop doin’ that. I don’t wanna explain teeth marks to the whole floor.” 

Your hips set firmer into his lap. “Jack,” you warned. “I can’t do this if you’re seeing fifty other women.” 

He sobered a degree, his thumb going still at your waist, his eyes coming up to actually hold yours. The joke drained out of his face as he realised the edge of seriousness you tried to tamp down, and he momentarily short-circuited at how it was even possible for you to wonder. 

“Hey.” His hand came up off your hip, pushed the hair back from your face and stayed there, cradling. “Until five minutes ago, there were zero women. Forget fifty.” 

Your only response to that was a smile and your cheek leaning further against his palm. He let his thumb move once across his cheekbone, watching the way your cheek turned into his hand. Your eyes drifted half-shut. There was a speck of dried highlighter ink on the side of your finger where it curled against his throat. The strap of your top had slid off your shoulder again; he looked at all of you and stopped bothering to pretend, even to himself, that he was looking at anything other than the only thing in the room he wanted.

“What about you? You seein’ anyone?” His thumb stayed where it was, but his voice had gone quieter. “‘Cause I’ve seen people bring you in. And I never liked one of ‘em.”

You huffed a small laugh, your nose grazing his. “Jealous, Doctor?” 

“Yeah.” He watched the laugh stall on your face at how easy he gave it up. “If there is, he should be worried. I’d like to take you on a nice date to change that.” 

“Ohhhh,” you drawled through a laugh. “There’s no one, but I won’t say no to the date.”

“Then you’ve got yourself one, doll.” He kissed you on it — short, sure, his hand still cradling your face — sealing the thing as the corner of his mouth caught yours before he pulled back. He let his forehead rest against yours for a second and breathed you in. 

Then, with a short groan, he tipped his head back off of yours. 

“I gotta get back out there.” His thumb was still moving at your jaw, clearly working against the very thing he was saying. “My work ethic’s going wrong and my residents might actually report me.” 

Then, his hands found your waist and he lifted you off, setting you off his lap and onto the cushion beside him where the entire thing had started. You landed with a small affronted sound, your hand fisting in his collar a beat longer before he had to let it go. 

You flopped back into the cushion where he’d deposited you, one hand pressed flat to your chest, the picture of wounded. “I guess it’s true what they say about old men. They use you. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” 

He stood up and scrubbed his palm down his face like he could wipe the last ten minutes off it before he had to walk out and be a doctor again. He could still feel the heat sitting at the back of his neck and even though he’d tried to scrub your gloss off, he was sure there was a remnant somewhere the worst possible person would notice. 

“Yup, got exactly what I wanted. Thank you, ma’am.” His hand came down to rest at the top of your head and gave it a slow, condescending pat, ruffling the wreck of your hair worse than it already was. “I’m a terrible man. You’re welcome to stay here while I go be one somewhere else.” 

He made himself step back and snagged his pen off the table, the badge, the small armor of the job clipping back into place piece-by-piece. The whole time his eyes kept catching on you, sprawled and rumpled where he’d set you down, looking up at him like the night had gone exactly where it was supposed to. He’d seen this room a thousand nights. He’d never once not wanted to leave it. 

“Mm. Gotta go home. S’almost three,” you mumbled. “And you get off at seven.” 

“I do.”

“So.” You pushed yourself off the cushion, slow, gathering your hair back off your face and pushing up your strap, putting yourself back together piece by piece the same way he was, the night closing in on both ends. “I’ll go and let you be a doctor. You’ve been very neglectful.” 

“Don’t I know it,” he muttered. He watched you reach for your textbook, your highlighter, the flashcards, and sweep it all back into your bag, feeling the small stupid pull of not wanting the room to empty out. 

He stepped in before you finished, catching your jaw, tilting your face up to kiss you once more. You went still under it, the bag forgotten halfway zipped, your hand coming up to rest light on his chest. He pulled back an inch to look at you.

“Text me when you get home,” he said, thumb dragging along your jaw. 

You chuckled, brows pulling in. “It’s a ten minute drive.”