#classical conditioning

“You would switch places,” Mel, who is sitting next to him on patio furniture that still has the tags on, repeats bemusedly. “With a dog.”

Yeah, maybe it’s kind of fucked up to say aloud. But the self-loathing inevitably tunnels to the surface on occasion, and Mel is an easy sounding board. Somewhat accidentally, providentially, they’ve fallen into a deep friendship since his divorce.

“Sure,” Frank defends himself. “Wouldn’t you? No ‘what’s for dinner’, no rent to pay, no hoping you don’t kill someone’s kid at work because you forget to take your Ritalin.”

Mel peers at him. “I didn’t know you were finding work that stressful,” she said carefully.

Okay, maybe that last example was a little dark.

Frank feels behooved to continue lest she raise concerns about his post-divorce psych medication regimen. Again. “Unconditional love. Endless belly rubs. Being called a good boy. Treats.” He waggles his eyebrows salaciously.

“Hm,” Mel replies. She whips out her phone. He can’t see what she’s doing because of that privacy screen on her phone, which he hates because he’s nosy and always wants to know what she’s looking at.

Langdon gets distracted—maybe Millie needs a snack, or maybe Tanner stepped in the dog shit that he forgot to bag up—and Mel drives herself home before the kids’ bedtime.

He forgets all about this little conversation until six months later, when he’s humping Mel’s leg on the sofa, shivering and shaking as she drags her nails down the nape of his neck. When she’s calling him a good boy in her gravelly voice. That’s when he realizes that it all started here. The rewards.

—

There’s no average day at the Pitt—that’s why he chose emergency medicine, right, because no day is the same?—so maybe that’s why Langdon doesn’t discover Mel’s new routine for five weeks.

He’s standing at the command station, having just sent his last case up to surgery.

Mel stands next to him, hands in her pockets. “What will you take next?”

Langdon sighs beleagueredly. He wants a crack at the construction worker with the crush injury that just arrived, but he’s been hogging the trauma bay all morning. “I guess I should take the constipation in North Three.”

Mel nods. “Yes, that would be considerate.”

Langdon has his open palm out toward Mel before he even realizes what he’s doing.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Santos saunters up from the trauma bays, eyeing Langdon’s extended hand like it’s holding a weapon. Princess, sitting at the nurse’s station beside them, watches them with curious eyes.

“He wants a mint,” Mel says. “His mouth is dry.”

Langdon tongues his teeth inside his mouth, staring at his open palm in confusion. What the fuck is he doing? He has no idea why he’s supplicating to Mel like a beggar, but she’s right.

His mouth is dry.

Mel solicitously hands him a mint from the tin she keeps in the front pocket of her scrubs.

He downs it. “I wanted Starburst,” he complains, because lately she’s been giving him Starbursts during shifts. Never orange, only pinks and reds. Usually it’s mints from Trader Joe’s though, like today.

Mel shakes her head. “Starbursts are for special occasions. Too much sugar.”

Langdon shrugs in acceptance. He bustles toward his next case in his hyperactive way, and Mel peels off in the other direction to check on her patient with abdominal pain.

Langdon misses the way Santos and Princess eye each other, their matching ‘what the fuck’ looks.

—

Langdon’s breath has never been so minty fresh. He doesn’t even really like the spearmint flavor. It’s just—there’s something about Mel taking the tin out of her scrub pocket and carefully dropping a mint into his hand. He tongues it in his mouth, savoring it, knowing he owns her regard.

“Did you take your medication this morning?” is one of her go-to questions, an easy one to get right, once he searches on the Pittsburgh subreddit for pharmacies that reliably stock Ritalin. “Did you eat lunch?” is another common one, so he starts packing tupperwares the night before his shift along with the twins’ lunchboxes.

She’s always careful in the way she phrased her questions; she never asks with judgment, like: “Should you be drinking that third Red Bull?” They’re always neutral, information-gathering. “How many Red Bulls did you drink today?”

And when he answers “Three, plus a Celsius,” she doesn’t outwardly disapprove. She doesn’t withhold her friendship or anything. She just hums and moves on to her next case. No mint.

It doesn’t stop him from slinking through the Pitt with his tail between his legs for the remains of the day.

—

A few weeks later, Langdon makes a nice save on a teenager who passed out after his basketball game. The kid is about to get discharged with a simple dehydration diagnosis—his parents are raring to go, trying to make the tournament semifinal that evening—when Langdon has a crazy idea.

He delays the discharge. He listens to the boy’s heart sounds for the second time, just in case. He follows the kid with his stethoscope through all the maneuvers: standing, squatting, Valsalva.

Langdon hears a whisper of a systolic murmur.

Bingo.

To the parents’s dismay, he grabs the point-of-care ultrasound (“You don’t understand, he’s the pointguard. He really just needed the IV fluids.”) and scans the kid’s heart.

The myocardium is way too thick, which is a definitive enough diagnosis. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. If not caught on physical exam, HOCM is one of the congenital conditions that ends in sudden death, classically in teenagers playing sports. The heart just stops ticking.

This kid’s basketball career is over, unfortunately.

Robby takes Langdon aside later to congratulate him. “You’ve been on point lately,” he says, clapping Langdon on the back. “Seems like the old Frank is back.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Langdon, ready to get to his next case.

A couple months ago, he would have killed for feedback like that from Robby. It’s just that Abby took the twins to Florida for a month, so he’s been feeling a little…

Blue.

Melancholic, maybe.

It’s nothing serious. Everyone feels this way sometimes, right?

But after he hands his patients off to night shift, Mel follows him to the parking garage.

He holds his hand out for a mint, but she sidesteps it and embraces him.

“Are you proud of yourself?” Mel asks, voice muffled in his chest. “You should be. You saved that boy’s life.”

Langdon shrugs. “I guess,” he says. He doesn’t really care, honestly.

“You should be,” Mel repeats, rearing back from the embrace to look him in the face.

He’s struck by the strength in her expression. The warmth and the positive regard that he sees there. For a second, his brain spins, lost in her brown eyes. “Are you? Proud of me?” he croaks out.

Mel immediately shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Yes,” he insists. “Yes, it does matter.”

“Oh.” Mel’s mouth is an ‘O,’ like she has just realized something. “Yes, Frank. Yes, I’m so proud of you. You did such a good job.”

Warmth blooms in his chest, and he pulls her by the shoulders back into his chest.

Mel is proud of him. So yeah, maybe he’s proud of himself too.

—

Mel starts giving him a hug in the parking garage after the good shifts.

—

Frank learns pretty quickly how to make the shifts good.

—

He stays far away from Santos. He stops antagonizing Yoyo so much in front of Mel. He learns to avoid Kim Tate, not because he bickers with her, but because they have a long-standing flirtation. It’s harmless, all in good fun—she has a fiancé—but he pieces together that Mel hugs don’t happen if he works more than a couple of cases with Kim per shift.

Interesting.

So Langdon lets his casual flirtations with Kim fall to the wayside. He actually starts avoiding her entirely.

Needs must, after all.

—

Langdon isn’t entirely stupid. He puts the pattern together. He knows Mel is doing some weird Pavlovian shit to him. She’s using her Jedi mind tricks to get him to behave. She’s giving him treats, filling his bowl with food, scratching the back of his neck. And Langdon is leaning in. He’s determined not to question it for fear of causing this new, weirdly good thing in his life to go away.

But Mel isn’t stupid either. She’s probably putting the pattern together, too. She sees the way he lingers by her car after their shared shift. She has to be feeling him brick up against her soft stomach during their after-shift embraces. She hears his broken-off whimpers as she cards her nails through his scalp, his choked moans as she rubs his neck down.

He hopes to god that she knows what she’s doing.

—

Mel comes over to his rental on a Wednesday they both have off to work on an assignment for residency. It’s afternoon and the pale winter sun leaves streaks of light across the carpet. The kids are at daycare and Sonny is snoozing in one of those sun patches.

The assignment is dumb, a time-waster, and the old Frank Langdon would have bitched about it endlessly in the four weeks until the due date, then misappropriated his ADHD meds to crank it out the night before it was due. Then he would have misappropriated stolen benzos to counteract the methamphetamines to catch a couple hours of sleep, before doing it all again the next day.

The old Frank Langdon was a dumbass.

The new Frank Langdon, sitting on the sofa next to Mel with upright posture, has carefully compiled a bibliography way more thorough than necessary. Mel has a puritanical work ethic, he’s learned, and she is fond of watching him apply himself.

“I’m done,” he says, clicking submit hastily and turning towards her. “I’m done, Mel.”

“I’m still working,” she scolds gently. She keeps her eyes on the screen in front of her. “Be patient, Frank.”

So Langdon waits, vibrating in his seat, as Mel meticulously double- and triple-checks her sources. She hits submit and closes her laptop with a click, setting it on the coffee table as she turns on the sofa to face him.

“You submitted the assignment early,” Mel notes. “I can tell you tried your best. You were very focused.”

Langdon beams at the praise. “Yes,” he agrees, trying not to look too eager.

“Do you want a hug?” she asks. “Since you did so well?”

The hug is his usual prize for behaving on shift, meted out in the parking lot or in the locker room, where they could break away in an instant if someone were to see. But today they’re alone in his apartment, and finishing this assignment was way harder than working.

He shakes his head, hair flopping back and forth.

“Tell me what you want, then,” Mel asks, eyes curious behind her glasses.

Langdon gulps. “I want… I want to lie down. In your lap.”

Mel visibly melts, nodding and reaching for his hair, running her hands through the hair on his scalp, down his shoulders, to his biceps and the veins on his forearms. “I would love to do that,” she agrees.

At first, Mel arranges herself sitting upright on the end of the sofa, so he can lay his head on the soft pillow of her thighs. But that, he tells her in quiet frustration, isn’t what he’d imagined, so she bemusedly allows him to arrange her supine form like a doll on the sofa. (This is a break in character, but she’s a good sport about it. It doesn’t feel too weird for him to take charge of the scene, since he has a specific vision.) Then he lays himself on top of her lower half, his head resting in the softness of her abdomen.

He sighs in satisfaction. “Your nails, Mel,” he pretty much begs.

She acquiesces, carding her strong nails across his scalp. It gives him the full-body shivers, the cold egg cracked over his head sensation, and inexplicably an erection as well.

His rapidly growing dick is wedged between the couch cushion and Mel’s shin. The next time that Mel swept her nails down his neck, he can’t help rutting into her shin reflexively.

He freezes.

It’s one thing to form a half-chub when a coworker gives you a hug after you’ve behaved all shift. That’s inevitable, Langdon has reasoned, and fairly mindless.

It’s another thing to hump your coworker’s leg, like, on purpose.

But Mel’s deft fingers keep up the scalp massage. “It’s okay,” she says. “You should do what feels good, Frank.”

Frank turns facedown into Mel’s stomach, nosing at her white cotton tank. He brackets his arms on either side of her waist to give himself leverage. His fingers quest to the bottom of her shirt, trying his luck.

She yanks his head up from her belly by his forelock. It’s so sexy that he moans reflexively.

“Clothes stay on,” Mel orders. She is flushed too, all the way down to her collarbones. Her pupils are so dilated that her eyes look black. “Go ahead.”

Langdon starts rutting against her leg in earnest. His forehead rests against her stomach, and he mouths at the sliver of skin between her pants and top, though he’s careful not to push the fabric up.

Langdon has had good sex before. His sex life with Abby had been energetic and passionate, if conventional. Abby had been a figure skater, super flexible, very sexy, so you can just imagine the acrobatics.

But that sex paled in comparison to how out of his mind he feels right now, rubbing his cock against his coworker’s leg. He’s never been this turned on in his life. Mel is still rubbing his head, scratching the nape of his neck, whispering sweet encouragement into his ear. He whuffles down the seam of her jeans, nosing at her mound. He smells her arousal through the denim.

Langdon comes in his pants.

Mel holds him, after. He’s a sweaty mess, but he lets her haul him up the length of her body so she can hold him properly.

“You came from that?” she asked.

Now he’s so blissed out that he only blushes a little. “Yeah,” he admits into her chest. It is embarrassing that he shot off from humping her leg for a couple minutes. Going off the SSRI probably affected his stamina.

But Mel beams. “Good boy,” she says, and Langdon nestles in closer, smooshing his face into her boobs shamelessly.

—

Langdon grits his teeth through a shift from hell at the Pitt. Doug Driscoll returns, a year and a half after assaulting Dana, but this time it’s the real deal. Langdon (who drew the short straw) stares at the EKG in disbelief: ST elevations, clear as day.

The EMTs brought Driscoll in, diaphoretic and in-and-out of consciousness. Driscoll is violating his restraining order by being on the premises, but Langdon can’t refuse his care under EMTALA.

At least he gets to send the bastard straight to the cath lab. “I don’t want that bastard even looking at my staff,” Langdon barks at transport. “Get him out of here.”

The transport guys hustle the hospital bed through the South Wing of the Pitt, but not before Mel, who just came off break—who’s a little face-blind on a good day, and definitely doesn’t remember a face from the most eventful shift of her life—walks up to the bed as they wait for the elevator. She smiles at him, tells him earnestly that “He’s going to get great care here, so don’t be nervous.”

Driscoll sweeps his eyes up and down her modest black scrubs and baldly asks Mel to join him in the hospital bed.

Langdon is stomping over, fists clenched. He’s ready to hop in that bed himself and pay Driscoll back for that hit to Dana’s nose last year, plus interest.

But Mel, his sweet Mel, who’s too good for this world and definitely too good for the scummy humans at the Pitt, just laughs it off. “Inappropriate and unoriginal,” she chirps before walking away.

Doug Driscoll grabs his chest again as he watches her leave, gasping for breath. He’s a caricature of a guy having a heart attack, and Frank wants to kill him.

Mel meets Frank as he’s halfway to the elevator and grabs his wrist. She must see the murder in his eyes. “Don’t go over there,” she orders.

“That’s the guy that assaulted Dana last year.”

Her mouth falls open. Now she gets it. Now the inappropriate come-on (sadly all too common for his female colleagues) takes on a more sinister bent.

But she grabs his wrist and tugs him back to her side. “Stay, Frank,” she mutters under her breath.

It’s herculean, the strength he extends to keep his feet rooted next to her. Obeying her goes against every single cell in his body, everything he thought he knew about fairness, justice, right and wrong.

But she tells him to stay, so he stays.

The elevator dings, and Doug Driscoll takes his trip up to the cath lab. Door-to-balloon time: twenty-two minutes. A record low.

A feeling of resentment lingers through the rest of the shift.

Usually, Langdon wants to be good. Yes, the thing with Mel is helpful. She’s waving a carrot in front of his nose. But deep down in his core, Frank wants to do the right thing all on his own.

Today, though, he had wanted to be bad. Hours later, as he walks with Mel to her car in the parking deck, he regrets that he hadn’t given into his dark impulses. He should have punched that guy on the hospital bed in the midst of his heart attack. He should have sent him to hell himself.

And now there was an itch under his skin too deep to scratch. He was furious at Mel. Frustrated at the display of power she had shown over him. He shook his neck out like a wet animal, grabbing her wrist.

“What do I get?” he bites out.

“What?” Mel asks, eyes wide behind her glasses. They stood in the garage, where it smelled like piss and garbage.

He laughs caustically. “I behaved all day. I stayed on your fucking leash, didn’t I? So what do I get?”

“I—I guess…” she stammers. She’s stuck. Poor, innocent Mel, who’d started out feeding him mints on a schedule and created a monster. “I guess you’re right. What do you want this time?”

A wicked smile creeps up his cheeks as he leers down at her.

Langdon wants her to bounce on his dick in the backseat of his car. He wants to see her tits bounce.

“Not—penetrative sex,” Mel clarifies. “I have plans for that.”

Langdon files that away for later.

“Your mouth,” he pivots.

Her cheeks pink. “I’m not…” she starts.

“No blowjobs?” he asks, mind already flipping through a filthy Rolodex of other scenes. (A handjob might be a more natural progression, if she’s intent on dragging things out stepwise. Maybe she’ll lift her scrub top up and let him masturbate to a view of her tits.)

“I’m not very experienced,” she murmurs, looking down at her shoes.

“Oh, baby,” he says, bringing her hand up and kissing the inside of her wrist. “That just means you don’t have any bad habits. I’ll teach you what you need to know.”

She brightens. “I’ve always gotten feedback that I’m teachable.”

“Me too, apparently,” says Frank, bad mood forgotten. “With the right incentive.” He entwines his hand in hers and swings it like a teenager. He’s going to drive his car up to the top floor of the parking deck, where his best friend will suck his dick with some bizarrely original techniques that are probably only so hot to him because he’s in love with her. He’s going to last approximately sixty seconds, punching the car ceiling as he comes in a failed attempt to stave off orgasm.

And at the end, she’ll offer him a mint from her tin and call him a good boy with a new hoarseness in her voice.