#dtp

She’s wondering whether to call him now or wait until she’s home (even though a tiny part of her wants to open Facebook first, because Alex deactivated his Facebook again, so what could possibly be going on?), when a series of texts from Frank breaks her brain. The phone is ringing, but she has no memory of deciding to dial.

“Hi Mel,” Alex answers, sounding completely normal, which also makes no sense. “How was your shift?”

“Is Frank divorced?” Mel squawks, a noise she has never heard come from her body before. 

“What makes you say that?” Alex asks, tone cautious, which means 1. Frank is divorced and 2. Alex somehow knew before her.

“Is Frank divorced and you knew before me?” Mel cries, pressing her palm against her forehead. She wonders if a patient pushed her over mid-shift again, but she’s so concussed she already forgot about it. 

“Again, what makes you say that?”

The bus pulls up, then, but Mel hates when people talk on the phone on public transit, so she steps away from the stop. She realizes this might take a minute, so she starts walking, even though it’s almost an hour to her apartment by foot.

“Frank asked me if I would help him decorate Tanner’s bedroom this weekend, which is also very exciting, and then he said that he’s not sure what to do and something about not realizing that getting divorced would lead to so much time on Pinterest? And then asked if I have any ideas, which I haven’t answered, so hold on––” She types out something about glow-in-the-dark stars, and Alex is talking when she puts the phone back to her ear.

“––text message?” Alex finishes.

“What?” 

“This was all over text?” Alex repeats.

“Yeah, he was off today,” Mel answers absently, before she remembers the plans he had mentioned. “Although he said that you two were going to go play running again.”

“Mel, we’ve been over this before,” Alex sighs. “It’s just running. It’s not play running. It’s not a team sport.”

“But you’re doing it together.” She will not be swayed on this. “Did you see him this morning?”

“We had a very interesting conversation,” Alex says cryptically. She wishes she could see him, instead of talking on the phone. Actually…

“Are you home? Can you pick me up? I’m walking home, but it’s 3 miles, so that was kind of silly, but I didn’t want to get on the bus––”

“Chill, Mel,” he says, which always makes her laugh, because it’s such a useless thing to say. When has telling somebody to chill ever made them feel better? Although, now that she thinks about it, it kind of does relax her at this point, since it’s such an established script between them. “I can be there in 10. I’ll watch your dot on Find My.”

“Thanks.” She couldn’t tell you where she is, anyway. “Alex. Is Frank divorced?”

“I really hoped he was going to actually tell you, like, face to face,” Alex mutters, and she can hear his door closing, his feet on the stairs.

“I’m so confused,” she says, trying to think of any clues that things had been going badly between him and Abby. He showed her a picture of Abby with both kids just the other day, Penny clinging to her leg, Tanner throwing up a peace sign. Abby looked as beautiful as she always does, her brown hair clipped back in one of those elegant, seemingly effortless updos that women who weren’t Mel mastered at some point. They were in the break room, eating protein bars and debriefing a trauma, when the text came through on his phone, and Mel watched him smile softly before flipping it around to her. 

“Aren’t they the cutest?” Frank had asked, and Mel nodded with a forced smile, her protein bar turning to ash in her mouth. She felt so stupid, then and now, to think that she could compete with a woman like Abby, that she would ever want to compete.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Alex says, bringing her back to the present. 

“If you have any additional information that might, y’know, make me less confused, feel free to share anytime.” Her head has started pounding, the spot behind her right eye that she associates with cramming for tests or preparing to meet with lawyers. 

“Frank is divorced,” Alex says, a simple declarative sentence that she still can’t understand. Frank. Divorced. “Frank lives alone, except for when he has his kids.” That makes even less sense. Didn’t she ask about Abby when they toured apartments? “His apartment is actually, like, the poster child of single divorced dad. Plus a lesbian flag.”

“What?” Every word he says makes less sense.

“Ignore the lesbian flag.” As though that could possibly be the part that Mel was hung up on.

“Why were you in his apartment?” she asks. When in doubt, stick to practical questions about logistics. Logistics make sense. 

“He needed to grab his wallet so we could get acai,” Alex says, which doesn’t feel as complete an answer as he seems to think it is. “It’s real divorced in there, though. Like, TV on the floor bachelor pad vibe. Besides the lesbian flag, but again, that’s not important.”

“Then why do you keep mentioning it?” Mel tugs the ponytail holder out of her braid and finger combs it apart. It doesn’t feel right to try to process this information with her hair still in a neat braid, which also doesn’t make sense.

“I liked it,” Alex replies. Does he think he’s helping? “Hey, can you stay where you are? You’re at a good corner for me to stop at. I’m 5 minutes out.”

“Keep your eyes on the road,” Mel says automatically. 

“Easier if you stop moving and I can close Find My.”

“I’m stopped. I’m seated. The play attendant is asking me to leave, or whatever that meme that Becca likes says.” 

As ever, attempting to invoke a meme was the wrong move, because Alex laughs for a solid minute, then tries to tell her what the actual meme is, then they get into an argument over whether there is such thing as a “play attendant,” and Alex is finally pulling up beside her.

“Hey good lookin’,” he calls through the open window. “Come here often?”

“Oh no,” Mel frowns, reading her search results. “I guess play attendant usually means somebody who works with kids in daycare settings.”

“Fucking called it,” Alex crows, and Mel closes her phone, which reminds her why he’s here, and her brain is breaking again. 

“Divorced?” she asks, even though they’re past that point. Thankfully, Alex understands where she’s coming from, and he nods solemnly. “For how long?”

Alex winces. “Are you sure you want to know from me? Not wait for him to tell you?”

Mel leans back against the headrest and frowns up at the ceiling of Alex’s car. There’s a whole tangled knot of emotions in her head and heart and chest right now, and she’ll probably be up half the night trying to tease out the different strands. One that is immediately clear to her, though she doesn’t want to acknowledge or let it in, is hurt.

Frank is one of her best friends. How could he not tell her that he’s divorced?

“I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me,” Mel says, which isn’t an answer, but is her truth.

“I actually do have the answer to that one, and I don’t think he’ll be saying it anytime soon,” Alex says, tone betraying nothing. She turns to him so she can try to read his expression. He looks…amused?

“Do you think it’ll make me feel better or worse to know?” 

Alex tilts his head and taps his index finger against the steering wheel. It makes her think of how Frank fidgets while he drives, drumming against the wheel and bouncing his leg and nodding his head along to the music, and her heart hearts. “I actually think it’ll make you feel better. But then maybe worse, because Langdon’s a dumbass.”

Despite it all, Mel can’t help but snort. “He’s Langdon now, huh?”

Alex nods, surprisingly serious. “We had a solid conversation. He’s my bro now.” 

Frank would like that, she thinks, remembering his distinction between being a bro and someone’s bro, and she hates that it’s impossible to stop thinking about him, that she’s let him worm his way into her brain so deeply.

“Ok, tell me,” she sighs as Alex parallel parks on his street. For somebody who grew up in the suburbs, he’s surprisingly good at it. It’s the kind of thing she thought about when she thought she was in love with him.

Alex turns the car off and turns to her. “He did tell you.”

Mel blinks. Squints at him. Frowns. “I think I would remember if he told me something like that.”

“He told you,” Alex repeats, watching her, and she hates that he still looks a little amused. “He just told you in a situation where you didn’t hear him.” 

“Is this a riddle? The bear is white, and we’re on the North Pole.”

Alex laughs and shakes his head. “According to him,” he says, in a very don’t kill the messenger kind of way. “He told you his first week back, when you were out in the ambulance bay together.” If it were anyone other than Alex, she might be blushing. She’s told Alex a lot about the ambulance bay’s role in their friendship (can she say relationship now??). And maybe in her dreams. “He asked you to call him Frank. And then he said something about how he went to rehab twice and got divorced in the last year.”

Mel stares at him. She pushes her glasses to her forehead and presses her palms against her eyes, hard enough that her vision whites out for a second. 

The thing is, she knows the exact conversation he’s referencing, because she’s replayed it a thousand times. He called her their best resident. He said she was an excellent resident. He said they would learn from each other. He told her that his friends call him Frank, and that they would be friends, so she should call him Frank. He told her not to spread something around, but before she could ask what he meant, he had to run off.

Somehow, she missed him saying that he was divorced, all the way back during their first real week together.

“He’s been divorced since last July?” Mel asks. Her heart sinks. She hadn’t realized it had even risen enough to sink. “But he and Abby are getting back together, then. He still called her babe. And said I love you.”

Alex shakes his head, vehement. “Nope, completely platonic.” Mel shoots him a skeptical look. “Seriously. They aren’t together, and he’s over her.” 

Divorced.

Since last July.

“I can’t handle any more of this,” Mel decides. “Do you have any ice cream? I think I deserve to have ice cream for dinner.”

“You deserve to have whatever you want, Mel King,” Alex tells her, unbuckling his seatbelt. “Even when that includes well-intentioned dumbasses who are in love with you.” At Mel’s glare, he holds up his palms in surrender. “Who we won’t talk about this evening. I have chocolate and mint chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer. That good?”

Mel almost tears up at that, the idea that Alex keeps her and Becca’s favorite flavors of ice cream on hand, but she’s felt enough for the evening, so she just gets out of the car instead.