dirty and true!

It wasn’t just the affair that made him feel guilty about the thing with Mel. 

There was plenty to be guilty about, he knew that. More new things every day. The drugs, the lying, the stealing, the cheating, the baby. But, what actually kept him up at night was something he kept to himself. A private thing. He might even designate it as a kind of thought crime.

He’d noticed it soon after Mel got pregnant. She was so uncomfortable, suddenly. Tugging at the front of her shirt, squirming in her skin, bothered by smells and textures that hadn’t bothered her before. Sensitive to everything, even criticism, blinking back tears if Dana was sharp with her. 

One day, she’d wretched during a routine wound cleaning and had to excuse herself. In another hour, she’d spilled Mylanta down her top and nearly cried from the texture. When she’d excused herself to change, she’d come back in a shirt that had a tag that bothered her and Frank had cut it out with a pair of suturing scissors. Still, the shirt just hadn’t been right. Not soft enough for her sore chest, her itchy skin. She looked like she was caving in on herself, her shoulders hunched up by her ears, her hands wringing. 

And then: an ambulance had malfunctioned in the bay and the blaring alarm had gone off non-stop for twenty minutes while a patient was brought in with chest pains, all during her scheduled Facetime with Becca, now impossible.

Face flushed with frustration, she had clapped her hands over her ears, shoved her phone into her pocket and stormed inside, pushing past Frank and hurrying towards the stairwell in tears. 

He’d waited a bit to follow her, knowing that everyone had noticed that Mel was having a bad day, but no one was going to do anything about it but him. He wondered how those ten months had been before he’d return, how many times had she cried in the stairwell alone? Or had no one to fix her shirt tag? It didn’t make him sad, it sort of made him want to punch a wall. But simultaneously, there was something darker, something he didn’t want to admit to himself at all. 

He was glad no one had helped her. Because now, he got to give her exactly what she needed. 

He went to his locker and grabbed an extra t-shirt he kept on hand. Soft, worn cotton. No tag at all. Then, he went to find her, all curled in on herself at the bottom of the stairs, headphones in. 

Because the truth was: he loved her like this; Overwhelmed and crying. Pliant in his arms. Ready for him to wipe her tears, to clean her up, to change her shirt and kiss her forehead. To dim the lights and put her in a quiet room. 

“The ER can be a little bright and noisy…”