more desperately than romantically

Part 1

@kingdonmicrofic • Day 13: Smoke • 295/295 • Rated: M

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Candlelight shot through the bottle and imprinted on the bar counter as Mel poured her patron another cup. Some unknown celebration brought half the town to her tavern.

“Busier than usual tonight, Melissa?” Doctor Langdon asked as he carried another bloodied drunkard from her table to his wagon for examination.

“More so than last week.”

“Better your establishment than mine!”

Mel disagreed of course, she relished their partnership—forged from transaction that grew to something enjoyable for both parties. As she carried her business, he stitched her rowdy, injury-prone clients. His work kept the reaper off her doorstep, her work kept him busy on his night off. Quid pro quo, he whispered to her the night they struck the deal.

They met shortly after her father passed, leaving her and her sister the family business. He promised protection and care over the King girls—out of kindness or pity, she couldn’t identify but she remained grateful. Goodness like that was rare in their small town, Mel would’ve been a fool to deny the help. Wiser, older, honourable, and well-versed in the world's unwritten rules. Doctor Langdon was a guardian angel of sorts. 

"Thank you, Doctor," she smiled, closing shop for the night. After he patched up the last customer, she slid a drink and a clay pipe over the counter. “A merchant paid with this earlier and I have no use for it."

“Mead free of cost, snuff free of cost,” he put the pipe between his lopsided smirk, “any more vices to offer tonight, little dear?”

After his breakup with pop icon ABBY (one name, like Beyoncé), rock star Frank Langdon goes off the rails. His team pitches one last-ditch solution: a PR relationship with Hollywood’s sweetheart, Mel King, who’s desperate to shed her wholesome image and prove she has an edge.

...

The engine idled, low and grumbly, headlights dull as they fanned out into the expanse of amber-leaved trees. Sunrise loomed just beyond reach; evidence of deep, burnt orange along the horizon as the sky steadily began to brighten.

Smoke curled from his mouth, thin and wispy, escaping through the cracked window without ceremony. She’d always hated the smell, and hated the habit more, but succumbed to the same vice after a lick of tequila or warm, frothy beer. The alcohol from their eventful evening lingered, threatening to turn over her stomach, along with whatever unsettling air they were sharing in the cab of his truck.

Mel didn't bother arguing with Becca. It had been an excruciating thirty minutes of Becca complaining about being the only one of them with a boyfriend, so by the time she informed Mel that they were going to cast a love spell on Frank Langdon, she just shrugged her shoulders. Whatever.

@thepittmonth: Week 3  patients, cases, and healthcare

Topics and Issues in American Healthcare

sexually explicit content 🚨😋😋

Mel used to be one of those kids, the annoying ones who would dramatically cough when someone smoking a cigarette passed by, to make them rethink their choices. She didn’t realize until later in life how black and white she saw the world back then, everything fitting neatly into the categories of good or bad.

Frank Langdon, she’d realized, was one of life’s many gray areas. He was smart, empathetic, strong; she watched him excel through the end of his residency, land a job as an attending at PTMC, and that didn’t even come close to the way he loved her. He braided her hair when she was too tired, made sure she took her medicine every morning, and had given her orgasms so mind-melting she couldn’t describe them.

He was also brash, self-doubting, and, since rehab, a smoker. He asked her out a few months after coming back, and when he picked her up for the first time, she struggled with the lingering scent of stale tobacco in his car.

“Sorry. I can quit smoking in here,” he said, rolling down the windows and blasting the AC.

“No, don’t worry,” she said, a daring hand moving to his thigh. “I’ll get used to it.”

The first time he’d kissed her, she tasted the smoke on his tongue, light and sweet. She liked the newness of it, the unfamiliarity. The first time he took her home, her face buried in his sheets, she smelled it, faint and mixed with the clean scent of his detergent, and she let out a moan.

The problem was that now, every cigarette she smelled reminded her of him. A patient came in after smoking three packs in a night, hyperventilating from nicotine overdose, and she zoned out, thinking only of his tongue against hers. When her neighbor smoked his pipe in the morning her stomach would flutter, remembering the fogged windows of his car, the pack of American Spirits that she saw in the center console when she leaned over to suck his cock.

In the ambulance bay one day, after a particularly devastating case, he lit one up while she held onto him, grounding each other until both of their breathing had returned to normal. The smell of the smoke took her brain elsewhere, watching the way it drifted from his perfect lips. She couldn’t help but lean in, kissing sloppily at his jaw when he moved to ash it.

“Woah, slow down,” he said with a smirk.

“I’m sorry,” she whined, “I can’t help it. I think the smell just drive me crazy now because it reminds me of you.”

He laughed and shook his head, taking another long drag as he stared at her.

“You can’t really be telling me that the smell of cigarettes makes you horny.”

She blushed, burying her face into the scrubs on his shoulder.