You’d told yourself it would be fine. You’d been telling yourself that for so many months, you’ve started to believe it a bit.

He’d come back, you’d be professional, you’d be exactly what you were supposed to be. A third-year resident with a decent attending’s evaluation and no catastrophic personal decisions on her record.

That’s easy. Simple.

You’d kissed him once. People kiss people all the time. People kiss people once and recover. It's normal.

But people don’t kiss married people who are not married to them.

The kiss had happened on a Tuesday, which still bothered you, because things like that were supposed to have context. There should be a reason like bad shifts, long nights, the particular delirium of hour thirty of a 36 hour stretch.

The least it could’ve been is a Friday, when the week has already gone sideways.

You’d had none of that.

It had just been a regular Tuesday at the end of a totally regular shift. You were in the on-call room, Frank was saying something about the new bet, and you were laughing.

After that, details blurred. He’d kissed you. Or you’d kissed him. It was one of those things that happened in the half-second before the brain catches up with the body. His hand framed your jaw, the touch enough to send your body into a frenzy.

The brain soon caught up because you both pulled back. The kiss was brief enough that you could’ve called it an accident, if either of you had been willing to do that.

But neither of you were. So you just sat there afterward in the specific silence of two people who’ve tremendously fucked up.

He was married. He was your attending. Two reasons. Two very big, very destructive reasons.

You’d catalogued them both in real time, sitting three feet apart on a cot that smelled like disinfectant, staring at your respective patches of wall.

“That—” you’d started.

“Yeah,” he’d said.

And that was the whole conversation. The stand and the end of it.

As fate would have it, he went to rehab the next day. While he was there, his wife had filed for divorce. Dana told you that in the break room with the specific tone of someone who has noticed more than they’ve said.

You’d nodded and gone back to work and spent the subsequent months telling yourself that you were fine, that it was nothing, that you’d kissed him once and he’d gone to rehab and his marriage had ended and that it was his fate, not yours. That the divorce had nothing to do with you. That you weren’t a contributing factor in the quiet dissolution of a marriage you’d had no business brushing up against. That the timing was coincidence.

You’d repeated that one a lot. The timing was coincidence. It probably was.

It would be fine when he came back. You’d be fine.

You walked into the morning handoff and saw him standing at the nurse’s station with a chart in his hand. Your whole nervous system clocked you as the most terrible liar in the history of liars.

He was just standing there, and your hear rate was nearing a hundred. That’s not the behaviour of a person who’s going to be fine.

He hadn’t even looked up yet and your brain had already filed the entire situation under dangerous and started running contingency plans.

If things were going wrong already, he looked up and that was the start of things going wrong-er.

His eyes found you fast, without effort.

He gave you a nod. You nodded back. Very professional. Completely normal.

The handoff started. You listened and took notes and were a model of clinical focus. You also thought about the way his hand had felt against your face. About his wife. About whether she knew she’d been married to a man capable of kissing someone the way he’d kissed you, and whether that knowledge would’ve changed anything for her, or for you.

Fine. Completely fine.

You avoided him for the first four hours through a combination of genuine busyness and strategic routing decisions. It also helped that he was banished to the triage.

The east hallway was longer but the west hallway meant walking past him, so east it was.

You took your lunch break at a time you knew he wouldn’t be in the break room.

You reported back to Dr. Robby, and Dr Al Hashimi, even though she was new, and you don’t do well with new people.

Things were fine, even starting to look up, maybe a little more than fine, until Dr Al Hashimi brought him back.

That didn’t faze you though, because here’s the problem, the real problem, the one you’d been talking around for ten months.

He wasn’t married anymore.

That was one reason down. Which left you with one more reason.

That one was real and serious and you weren’t dismissing it. Except your body had apparently decided that one reason was an inconvenience rather than an actual deterrent.

Because every time his name appeared on the screen or his voice came, the back of your neck went hot and you thought about that Tuesday with a clarity that was frankly insulting.

You caught yourself thinking about it during a wound closure at two in the afternoon. His hand on your face. The fact that there was no hesitation in that kiss whatsoever. The small sound he’d made.

And underneath all of it, the thought you kept trying to bury: his wife had filed while he was in rehab. While he was already at the lowest point of his life, she’d filed. You didn’t know the marriage. You didn’t know what had happened inside it, what years of him had looked like from the inside, what she’d absorbed. You had no right to feel anything about it.

You felt things about it anyway. That was its own kind of guilty.

You were in serious trouble.

As most unavoidable things, he caught you in the supply closet at four. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

The tone was diagnostic, it was almost funny. Almost because it was happening to you.

You didn’t look up from the IV bag. “I’ve been busy.”

“You went around the triage like you were avoiding a plague.”

“I like the walk.”

Silence. You could feel him looking at you with that attending’s focus, the kind that made patients confess things they’d planned to keep to themselves, and you kept your eyes on the bag and your face very still.

“End of shift. On-call room. B wing.”

He walked away before you could respond, which was probably intentional.

You stood in the supply closet, contemplated your life choices and went back to work because you’re a resident and you have no other choice.

You should’ve probably got an Oscar or at least an Emmy, because you played ‘unbothered doctor’ so well for someone who was actively dying on the inside.

At 7.55, you handed off your patients.

At 8.36, you stood outside the B wing on-call room with your hand not quite on the door and had a brief, intense internal argument with yourself.

Do not open the door. What could go wrong?

It’s fine. It is absolutely not fine.

It’s one conversation. It's supposed to be one kiss too. Actually it wasn’t even supposed to be one kiss.

Against all odds, you knocked anyway and went in.

He was already there. Sitting on the edge of the cot, still in his scrubs.

The lights were off, it was just the small strip of light from the door. It was a terrible idea to notice what that did to the angles of his face, so you didn’t, officially. You let the door shut behind you. That should be better.

For the lighting, of course.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

All that waiting and you were back to that. You crossed your arms, which you were aware was a tell, and stayed near the door. Walking closer could and would result in improper physical contact.

“You heard about the divorce,” he said. Same way he’d say a diagnosis.

“Dana told me. A while ago.”

He nodded. “I wanted to tell you myself. I was—” he exhaled through his nose. “I was in rehab, so.”

“I know where you were.”

“Right.” He looked up to meet your eyes, you blamed your amazing dark adaptation. “How’ve you been?”

“Frank.” His name came out sharper than you intended. “Can we skip the—”

He stood up. “Yeah. Okay.”

He was closer standing up. You’d forgotten, somehow, in ten months of his absence, the specific fact of how he occupied a room.

There was no way anyone could ignore his presence. And you were not just anyone, you’re the one who kissed him, or who he’d kissed. Anyway, it’s much harder for you to ignore him.

You pressed your shoulders back against the door.

“I thought about you… in there. More than I should’ve. I’m aware that’s—” a pause where he looked like he’s recollecting himself. “I’m not telling you that to make something happen. I just didn’t want that to be the way things were left.”

You thought about what it meant, that he’d been sitting in a facility in western Pennsylvania doing the serious work of rebuilding himself, and you’d been one of the things occupying space in his head. Whether that was flattering or just sad, you honestly couldn’t tell. Both, maybe. It felt like both.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. You’ve been going out of your way all day. I’ve watched you do it.”

“Because this is complicated,” you interjected him too fast. “Because you’re still my attending. It’s your first day back from rehab, and you’re my attending, and I—” you stopped, because you had only one argument. “You’re my attending, even if the married thing is gone. I’m aware. But you’re still—”

“I know what I am.” He took a step toward you. “I know exactly what this is.”

“Then you know why I’m standing by the door.”

“Yeah.” He was close enough now that you could see the tiredness in his face, the hollowness of his eyes. He looked like a man who had been forced to do stuff, even if that stuff would only make him better. Whether he wanted to or not, the result was something steadier than what you remembered. It made things harder. “I know why you’re standing by the door.”

He just looked at you with those dark eyes, and you thought about the Tuesday, and the ten months after the Tuesday.

No, no you should not do this. You should absolutely not kiss him.

You pushed off the door and kissed him.

He met you in the middle of it. This kiss was nothing like the first time. The first time had been this cautious, surprised thing, a moment catching both of you off guard.

This was not that. This was the two of you grabbing at each other in the dark of an on-call room with the full information of what you were doing and doing it anyway.

His hands were in your hair and yours twisted in the front of his scrubs. The sound he made was nothing like the one he made ten months ago, but this one had the same effect. You’d be thinking about this for ten more months. Or forever, who’s to say.

He walked you back into the wall, kissed your throat and you let your head hit it. There was a moment when his hips pressed onto yours, and you realised with complete lucidity that this is going to be a disaster.

And then you stopped thinking.

“Frank—”

“Yeah.” His hands worked your scrub top up and over your head and yours did the same to his. You spread your palms on his chest and felt the warmth of his skin and the unsteady rhythm of his breathing, that somehow comforted you. That you had the same effect on him that he had on you.

Mirroring that, he looked at you in the dim light with an expression that had absolutely no composure left in it. You’d never seen his face like that before. It made your stomach bottom out.

“How long?” You were not entirely sure what you were asking.

He seemed to know anyway. “Longer than that Tuesday.”

That’s wrong on so many levels. On that Tuesday, you were an R2 and he was married. Which meant there’d been a stretch of time where Frank Langdon had looked at you in a way that wasn’t professionally appropriate while he was still going home to Abby. You didn’t know what to do with that. You filed it under later, which was the same drawer you’d been stuffing things into all night.

You also liked how he remembered that it was indeed a Tuesday. You did have the same effect on him, that he had on you.

Then, you grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his mouth back to yours.

He unclipped your bra with one hand, the other flat on the wall beside your head, and dropped it somewhere behind him like it was irrelevant. Which it was.

His palm cupped the heavy swell of your breast, thumb brushing the hardened peak of your nipple with a stroke that made your breath hitch. Soon after, his mouth dragged down from your throat to your collarbone, then lower, latching onto the sensitive bud with a hot, wet suction that sent a jolt straight to your core. You felt the warm pressure of his lips close around your nipple and your head knocked back against the wall.

“Frank—”

He only sucked harder, his tongue swirling around the peak in lazy, teasing circles while his teeth grazed the underside just enough to make you gasp. His eyes though, they were locked on your face the whole time. Watching.

That was the thing that made you unravel. The watching, constant and clinical and completely indecent all at once. Like he was memorizing every twitch, every flush creeping across your skin.

His teeth grazed again, a sharp little nip that bordered on pain, and you grabbed the back of his head to keep him there, which he seemed to find interesting, because he smiled against your skin before switching to the other side.

Your fingers tightened in his hair. He took his time. His patience was now pointed somewhere it had absolutely no business being.

The sounds coming out of you had already exceeded what you’d have considered acceptable for an on-call room, but the part of your brain monitoring ‘acceptable’ had clocked out around the time he’d walked you into the wall.

Eventually his mouth moved lower. He traced the valley between your breasts with his tongue, dipping into the dip of your navel before kneeling slightly. His breath ghosted hot over the waistband of your scrub pants as his hands hooked into the elastic. His hand slid into your waistband.

“Here?” He asked against your navel.

“Obviously here.” Your voice came out wrecked. “Don’t stop.”

Something that was almost a laugh came out of him, felt more than heard. His fingers found you and you were already embarrassingly wet, slick heat coating his fingertips as he parted your folds with a slow, exploratory stroke, circling your entrance teasingly before dragging up to smear the wetness over your swollen clit.

Nothing could’ve prepared you for the sound he made. It was rough, involuntary, pressed into your skin like he was trying to muffle it.

“Christ.” Like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. His forehead dropped to your ribs. “Ten months.”

“Don’t.” The more he spoke about the ten months, the more you thought about how unfair and horrible this all is.

“Don’t what?” He looked up at you. Even in the dark the expression was legible. “I’m just observing.”

He worked one finger into you first, then a second, stretching you open with a curl that hooked right against that spot inside you that made stars burst behind your eyelids, his thumb pressing firm circles over your clit in a rhythm that had your thighs trembling.

He worked two fingers into you slowly, watching your face do things you had no control over. The stretch of it pulled a sound out of you that you’d be cringing about in approximately two hours. His thumb found your clit and moved in a slow circle, the kind of pace that made it very clear he wasn’t in a rush, that he intended to do this for exactly as long as he wanted, and the fact that you had opinions about the timeline was charming but irrelevant.

Your hips moved. Chasing it.

He stopped.

Not all the way though. His fingers were still inside you, thumb lifted just enough. You made a sound that was not your finest moment.

“Tell me something,” he spoke against your skin, the soft underside of your breast.

“Frank—”

“You went around the hallway twice.” His fingers moved barely, a suggestion of a touch. “You took your lunch break forty minutes early. You reported to Al-Hashimi, who you don’t even know, rather than coming to me.” The fingers curled slightly and your jaw went slack. “So tell me. Have you been thinking about this all day, or just since you knocked on that door?”

“No—”

“Wrong answer.” He withdrew his fingers entirely and delivered a sharp, stinging slap right to your soaked pussy, the wet smack echoing in the dim room as your hips jerked forward involuntarily.

A fresh wave of heat flooded between your legs at the unexpected bite of it. The embarrassing part wasn’t the sound it made. The embarrassing part was how much more wet you got from it. You genuinely could’ve wept from the sudden emptiness, your clit throbbing from the impact.

He waited, eyes locked on yours, that gaze daring you to lie again while his hand hovered, fingers glistening with your arousal in the faint light. “Try harder.”

You bit your lip, thighs clenching as the sting faded into a pulsing ache, but he noticed and slid his hand back up your thigh, teasing the edge of your folds without giving you more. “Frank, please—”

“Not good enough.” Another slap, firmer this time, landing square on your clit with a slick, obscene sound that made your knees buckle, the jolt of pleasure-pain ripping a whine from your throat as your body arched toward him. His thumb brushed the stinging flesh soothingly after, just enough to make you chase it again.

The denial burned in your chest, but so did the need, coiling tighter with every denied thrust of his fingers. “All shift,” you gasped finally, the words tumbling out broken. “Since handoff. God, since I — ahhh — saw you.”

“Closer.” He rewarded you with one finger plunging back in, shallow and torturous, his palm grinding against your mound but not quite hitting where you needed it most. “But not all of it. Keep going.”

You shook your head, dignity fraying, as he added a second finger, scissoring them slowly to stretch you wider, the wet sounds of your arousal filling the room like an accusation. “I can’t—”

“You can.” He pulled them out again, the loss making you clench around nothing.

This time, the slap was a quick, targeted flick to your inner thigh, inches from your dripping core, making you spread your legs wider. “Or I walk out right now, and you finish yourself off thinking about what you almost had.”

The threat hung there, his fingers tracing lazy patterns over your hip instead, close but not touching, until the ache became unbearable. “All day.” The words came out before your dignity could intervene. “Since — Since you looked up and I imagined you bending me over the desk, fucking me raw right there with everyone listening.”

“Fuck.” Back in with his fingers, deeper this time, three fingers now, curling hard against your g-spot while his thumb pressed down with actual intent, rubbing firm, insistent circles over your throbbing clit that had your walls fluttering around him. And the sound you made echoed somewhere it shouldn’t have. “Was that so hard?”

“I hate you.”

“No.” His mouth was at your ear. “You’ve been wet since 7 AM — soaking through your panties during rounds, clenching around nothing everytime you heard my voice. Try again.”

He fucked you with his fingers in earnest,, the heel of his hand grinding against your clit with every thrust, building you up until your vision blurred.

You came with your fingers digging crescents into his arm, your forehead dropped hard to his shoulder.

The orgasm wrung you out in waves, and left you feeling stupid. He worked you through every second of it without stopping, prolonging it with a final, twisting curl of his fingers that had you gushing over his hand, your release slicking his wrist.

When you finally stopped shaking, he withdrew his hand and you heard him licking his fingers clean with a groan, the wet suction of his tongue obscene in the silence.

That alone made your skin go hot all over again.

When you looked at him, his expression was very focused and very dark and had no composure left in it whatsoever.

He kissed you before either of you could say something that would ruin it.

Getting the rest of the scrubs off was not graceful. Yours caught on your ankle, the cot made squeaks when you both hit it, his elbow found the wall with a thud that you both ignored.

He settled between your thighs, his thick cock nudging insistently against your soaked entrance, smearing your wetness along his length as he rocked his hips teasingly. His precum coated you in return.

He looked like exactly what he was: a man who’d done real damage, to himself and other people, who’d spent months in a room somewhere reaping what he sowed.

“Stop,” you said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re looking at me.”

“I’m allowed to look at you.” He dropped his head to kiss your jaw, your throat. “You’re in my on-call room.”

“Your on-call room?”

“I was here first.” His hips shifted and you felt him right there. The blunt head of his cock breached you just enough to stretch your entrance, teasing the slick, sensitive rim without pushing deeper.

And every coherent thing you’d been about to say dissolved completely. Your body did something embarrassing and obvious, tilting your hips toward him, asking without asking. “You know what I keep thinking about?” He asked.

Words apparently couldn’t make out of your mouth, you only whined in response.

“You knocked on that door.” His words were muffled against your throat. “You stood outside it for a while first. I could see the shadow under the door. But you knocked anyway.” He pushed in, just the head, parting your walls with a slow, burning stretch that made you gasp as your body yielded to him inch by torturous inch, and breath left you entirely. “And now look at you.”

He paused there, buried only shallowly, his cock throbbing inside you as he gripped your hip hard enough to bruise, letting you feel every ridge, every vein pulsing against your clenching heat.

Then he pushed inside fully, bottoming out in one smooth, deep glide that filled you completely, your pussy stretching around his girth until your walls fluttered and gripped him like a vice.

The sensation was so overwhelming you could feel him nudging against your cervix. His whole body went still at it, every muscle locked, breath coming out slowly against your cheek while he waited.

You felt everything. You felt the stretch, the fullness, the particular and specific reality of Frank Langdon that your 2 AM imagination had constructed and gotten completely wrong.

You’d underestimated it. Ten months of underestimating it, underestimating him.

“Move,” you said when you could.

“Mm.” He pulled back slowly, dragging his cock out until only the tip remained, coated in your creamy arousal. He pushed in slower, grinding deep on the re-entry so his pubic bone pressed flush against your clit. “You had a whole plan, didn’t you? You’d stand by the door, hear what I had to say, then go home.” Another slow drag, the wet slide of him pulling free making your pussy clench emptily, and your fingers curled into his back. “What happened to that?”

“Frank—”

“You’re taking my cock in the on-call room is what happened.” His pace stayed measured, each push intentional, his hips rolling in a way that made his shaft stroke every sensitive inch of you. “All that effort today. All those reroutes.” His mouth brushed your ear. “And here you are, creaming all over me like you were made for it.”

“Shut up,” you managed, which would’ve landed better if your voice hadn’t cracked down the middle.

“You shut up.” He shifted his angle, hooking one of your legs over his shoulder to open you wider, allowing him to plunge even deeper, his balls slapping wet against your ass with every thrust. He did it again, watching your face, filing it. “There. That’s the one —right there, where you're squeezing me so tight I can barely move.”

He pounded into you now with a rhythm that shook the cot, as he chased that angle, his cock splitting you open over and over, your tits bouncing with the force of it.

The filthy sounds of it were loud enough in the quiet room that you were dimly grateful for the distance to the nurses’ station.

Somewhere in the back of your head, your brain supplied that he’d been sober for ten months. This was his first night back. And you were here, you were the thing he’d come back to, or one of them. What did that make you in the story of his life. What part were you playing.

You pulled him closer. You’d think about that later.

You stopped trying to maintain anything. To hell with the composure, the distance, the careful architecture of self-possession you’d been constructing and maintaining for ten months.

It came down. All of it, at once, under the specific and targeted demolition of Frank Langdon. His forearms were braced on either side of your head, his face close to yours, refusing to let you look anywhere else.

“You feel—”

“Don’t stop.” Not at the sentence. At all of it.

“I know... you feel fucking incredible.” His hips snapped forward, burying himself to the hilt in a brutal thrust that made your vision white out. “You’ve been wanting this since that day and so have I, and we both—” another thrust, harder, his pace turning feral as he fucked you into the mattress, the slick sounds of your pussy taking him mingling with his ragged grunts. His control was gone, you could feel it dissolve. “We both made different choices and none of them—” his rhythm stuttered. “None of them fixed it —none of them stopped me from jerking off to the memory of your mouth on mine, imagining this exact fucking thing.”

That almost made you cum. The thought of him jerking off to you, like marriage be damned. Your nails were in his back. You’d apologize for that later, maybe. The pressure was building fast and you grabbed his shoulder and held on, your cunt starting to spasm around him, milking his cock with rhythmic squeezes that had him cursing under his breath.

“Come on then,” he said, almost gone. “Let me feel it. You’ve earned it, all those months—cum on my cock like the good girl you are, let me fill this pussy up.”

You came apart completely. Your orgasm crashed over you in waves, your walls clamping down hard on his thrusting length, gushing around him as you cried out.

He shuddered and followed. His whole body went taut, cock pulsing as he spilled inside you, hot ropes of cum flooding you, marking you deep as he ground against your cervix with a final, broken groan of your name.

His weight was half on you, half off, his softening cock still twitching inside you, a trickle of your combined release leaking out around him.

You stared at the ceiling and let your pulse find its way back down from wherever it had gone.

He moved first. Rolled to the side, pulling out with a wet pop that made you both wince, his spend dripping down your thighs in a sticky reminder.

There was now cold where he’d been, and you didn’t react to it. You sat up, found your scrubs on the floor, and started putting yourself back together. He did the same beside you.

Your badge was near the foot of the cot. You lipped it back on. The normalcy of the gesture felt briefly insane. “I don’t know what this is.”

“Neither do I.”

That was honest, at least. You stood. He stayed sitting on the edge of the cot, staring at the floor. His usual composure was not fully reassembled. You’d done that. You did that to him.

When you got to the door, you could hear his voice, “tomorrow.”

Just tomorrow. Like it was already a given. like it was already on the calendar, like you’d both signed off on it somewhere between the wall and the cot and the rest was just the hours between now and then.

Your hand stayed on the door.

The thing was, he wasn’t wrong. You’d known it when you knocked. Known it when you kissed him, known it when you stopped running the argument halfway through and just let it go. Probably you’d known it since the day, ten months ago. Since you’d pulled apart and told yourself this was a thing that would not happen again.

The responsible and correct thing, the thing a person with any functional self-preservation instinct would do, was to say no. Or nothing. To leave and let the silence be its own answer. To remember that he is your attending, that this is your career, that you’d spent ten months building very sensible walls and had just spent the last forty minutes enthusiastically dismantling them.

You didn’t say yes.

You also didn’t say no.

You just let go of the door handle and walked out, and the thing that followed you down the hallway wasn’t guilt, exactly.

It was something more complicated than guilt. Something that didn’t have a clean name yet and would probably still be sitting in your chest tomorrow morning. Something you hoped would prevent you from knocking the same door at the same time tomorrow.

my masterlist !

extras. I lowk suck at writing mean characters, sorry if the smut was boring or bad 😭

I do have a taglist, it is just Bucky atp, but I do plan on writing Frank more. Lmk if you want to be added.

You'd always loved working with kids, working as a nanny during college and volunteering at different foster facilities. You had gone to med-school with the goal of becoming a pediatrician and after many years of internships and residency you had landed a job at UPMC Presbyterian. You'd had loved it there for years, but about a year and a half ago a position had opened at PTMC, with the chance to become Chief of pediatrics in a few years.

Initially you had wanted to turn it down. You had worked in the same hospital as Jack years ago as a resident, but had left when you kept being referred to as "Abbot's wife", instead of people seeing you as a doctor in your own right. Even though you'd kept your maiden name they seemed to link your medical abilities to your husband, and you hated it, so you'd always worked in a different hospital since then. You'd worked too hard on your career to be okay with being treated like that. Jack had been sad that you couldn't drive into work together anymore, but he respected your decision and fully supported your career.

Jack had convinced you to take the job at PTMC in the end, agreeing to keep your marriage secret except for a select few. None of the staff had questioned it so far and working at PTMC had been great. You loved the pediatrics team and the chances you had been given by performing new and exciting surgeries.

You especially loved being the on-call pedes surgeon every couple of shifts, consulting down in the Pitt. With PTMc being a level 1 trauna centre a lot of interesting cases were brought in every shift.

You knew everyone's name in the ER. They thought it was because you put in a lot of effort to get to know them, but you secretly knew because Jack would gossip about his staff with you. So not only did you know their names, but you knew that Javadi had a crush on Mateo, and Trinity had her eyes on Garcia. Sometimes you were the one delivering gossip to Jack, because you brought his nurses coffee and pastries which meant they told you everything.

Besides the treats, they liked you because you were always bright, happy and just incredibly good with children. You could calm down even the kids that McKay had trouble with. You had bright patches with dino's on your coat and had stickers for a ton of specific interests, ranging from cars to animals to TV-shows. You'd given Whitaker a sticker to soothe his feelings on more than one occasion and carried a special pack with some of Mel's favourites.

No one in the Pitt had even entertained the thought that you, with your bubbly personality and ever present smile, could be married to their very own anxious, demoralised and borderline suicidal attending.

You had spent that morning in surgery, fixing up a kid's lungs from a major pneumothorax after a consult in the Pitt. You'd been alerted that the child's father had arrived in the pedes' waiting room and that he had been asking for you.

You took a deep breath and turned the corner with Kiara right behind you. "Mr. Morgan?" You called out. A man raised his head at you and you nodded for him to follow you out of the waiting room.

"Your son's nursery brought him in this morning, he had a fever and was complaining of pain in his chest and back. We operated on a collapsed lung this morning. It was collapsed because of trauma, and it was so severe we could not treat it without surgery. We suspect someone kicked the boy in his ribs. I was called in for a consult by the doctors in the ER, and we found several old injuries during our assessment. Bruises and sprained ribs. Burns on his leg. It appears to us that the child has been hurt over a longer period of time."

You tried to control the anger in your voice. Your place was not to judge the man, but to help his son, but you were having trouble keeping yourself in line.

"This is Kiara, she is the social worker that is tied to the Emergency Department. She's been with your son since he was brought in. We want to have a conversation with you, and then child protection services and the police will be here to investigate further. There might be a reasonable explanation for all of this, but we are legally obligated to make a report and involve the police. Could you follow me into my office please?"

Mr. Morgan stood still in the hall. "You're saying you got the police involved?" His face grew red with anger. You raised an eyebrow, apparently the man was more worried about getting caught than trying to deny the accusation.

Kiara stepped in. "Yes, as the doctor explained, we have to report suspected cases of child abuse. I can talk with you about the next steps, so we can ensure this all goes smoothly for your son."

Mr. Morgan took a step towards you, his breath touching your cheek. He smelled of stale coffee. "You reported this to the police?" He asked again. You nodded, trying to step backwards to create distance. He grabbed your wrist to stop you. His voice grew louder. "I'll raise my boy however the hell I want to raise him. A nosy bitch like you has no say in it. Fucking whore of a doctor who thinks she's all that. Bet you've never raised kids of your own. Where is my son! I'm taking him home!" A bit of spit reached your face from the intensity of his outburst. Several people had poked their heads out of doors in the hallway, alarmed by the raised voice. You felt nervous by the way this was enfolding so you tried to deescalate the conversation once more. "Sir, the law in Pennsylvania states that I have to report you. If you've hurt your child, these are the consequences. There's nothing I can do about that. Your son is what we are worried about here, he's just had surgery because of his injuries. Let's try to talk and see what we ca-."

You felt the punch before you could have seen his fist flying at you. He was a big man and the force of it knocked you to the ground. Your hands flew up to your face, holding your nose. "Fuck." You groaned. You tried to inspect your nose, which, in hindsight, was a mistake, because you missed the foot that came flying into your ribs. A second kick landed soon after.

Kiara cried out next to you, calling for help. A group of nurses came flying in, grabbing mr. Morgan and pulling him off of you. You groaned and turned on your side, trying to breathe. Panic was taking over.

The chief attending came running up, assessing your nose and ribs with soft fingers. The touch grounded you and you tried to steady your breathing. You didn't say much, the pain in you body and the anger that was circling your mind keeping your throat closed.

"I need you to talk to me dear," she whispered. "Does this hurt?" You groaned. "Right, you need an x-ray so we can see what's going on. Let's get you down to the ER. Let's call 'em to let them know we're coming. Somebody get a gurney!"

You felt your heartbeat pick up as she mentioned the ER. Your fingers brushed her arm as she shouted orders. "No ER, please." You groaned at her. "I- I'm fine. Doesn't hurt that bad, I promise." You winced as you tried to put a smile on you face. "Try to convince someone else on that. I'm not keeping you out of the ER just so you can keep your husband in the dark." You groaned, again. "Don't call him. He'll worry. I'm fine." Your attending smiled at you. "Don't worry, I'll leave that to dr. Robinavitch. I would rather not be the one to tell you husband we let you get hurt while working."

Robby, Langdon and Whitaker were waiting in front of the elevator. They took over the gurney when the doors opened and rolled you into one of the rooms. Langdon tried very hard not to hurt you further and assessed your face carefully. You still winced when he brushed your left eye. "Sorry." He whispered at you. Robby was poking your ribs in the meantime. You turned you head towards him.

"Robby," You started, "You didn't call yet, did you?" He nodded and poked a particularly sore spot. "Let's asses first, I'll call him after." You whined at him. "Don't, Robby. He'll just be mad, I'll tell him when I get home." Robby looked at you sternly. "We'll talk about this later." You pouted at him and let Langdon inspect your face again. "Yes dad." You murmured. Langdon couldn't help a laugh escaping him.

Half an hour later you were working on convincing Robby not to call Jack. Your ribs were bruised and you had a massive black eye, but the CT's showed no breaks in you face or your ribs. It did hurt like hell though.

"I am a patient now, Robby, I do not give consent to cal my emergency contact and I am perfectly capable of making that decision right now." Robby nodded fiercely at you. "Yes, those are very pretty words, and very true, but the matter of the fact is that Jack will kill me when he finds out you are in his ER and I did not call him. My life's on the line here, not yours. It's bad enough that Gloria's coming down to investigate, I can not handle an angry Jack on top of that." You almost felt sorry for him.

"I just don't want him freaking out. I'll tell him when he comes in, then he can immediately see that I'm fine." Robby sighed at you. "That won't stop him from killing me and Dana." You grimaced back at him, pain pulsing through your bruises because of the movement. "He won't kill Dana, he'll hold you responsible."

Robby threw his hands in the air in surrender and was called away by an incoming trauma, leaving you alone.

You had planned to stay in the ER bed for another hour to make sure you had no concussion, but five minutes before you wanted to leave the curtain around your bed was ripped open.

"I was going to bring you a coffee upstairs and when I arrive one of the nurses tells me you've been knocked down by a parent and you're in the ER. And when I asked when it'd happened, they told me it was over two hours ago." Jack's face was angry. You opened your mouth to argue but where interrupted.

"So, let's see how you're doing" Langdon stepped in through the curtain and was shocked to see Jack standing there. "Dr. Abbot," Langdon called out, "What are you doing here so early? You shift doesn't start for an hour and a half. Is there a big trauma coming in?" Jack turned, still angry. "Where's Robby?" He demanded. "He's in curtain four, I think. He's been screaming to Gloria about hospital security for the past thirty minutes. But what are you doing here, do you need to discuss something with dr. Robby?" Jack grunted. "Bring him here." You winced at his tone. "Jack, come o-" Jack turned towards you. "Don't. Langdon go get Robby." Frank was confused. "He's in four with a patient. Why can't you just go to him? I've gotta check up on this patient." Jack turned fully towards him and Langdon could see the fury in Abbot's eyes. "Because my wife was brought into the ER this afternoon, and dr. Robinavitch did not contact me. That's why."

Langdon looked around the Pitt. "Your wife was brought in? When? I don't see an Abbot on the board? Where is she."

Jack pointed to you and you grew red.

Langdon opened his mouth but no sound came out. Whitaker kept looking from you to Jack.

"That is your wife?" Langdon gasped after a moment. "She's here all the time! How did you never tell us?" Jack shrugged and gently pushedsome hair out of your face. "Not like you ever asked." You leaned in to his touch. "You can hover around, but let Frank take a look at my face please." Jack's finger brushed your eyebrow. "I can do that. I don't want a resident working on my wife."

You took his fingers and pulled them down, kissing them softly. "Langdon can take care of it. Just sit tight and hold my hand. I'm fine Jack, I promise." You could see some of the worry leave your husband's face. "Sit down. We'll ask someone to cover your shift so you can take me home after. You can make me dinner and we'll hang out on the couch all evening, all right?" Jack resigned and took a seat next to you on the gurney, stroking your thigh with his free hand.

Langdon discharged you a couple minutes later and you managed to get Jack out of the Pitt without bumping into Robby. Jack was still mad that he had been blindsided, but he knew your injuries weren't bad. He'd promised you he'd be screaming at Robby tomorrow, but you were pretty sure you could get him to forgive his friend before then.

Tomorrow was going to be confronting enough, by then the entire hospital would know that the bubbly pediatrician and the grumpy ER physician were married.

Jack helped you into his car and leaned over you to fasten your seatbelt. "Jack," you told him when he was satisfied it was on tightly, "I'm not a kid, I can fasten my own seatbelt." Jack looked up into your eyes. "I know you're not. But you're my wife and I want to take care of you. You scared me darling. I was just going to take you a cup of coffee and I find you in my ER. That's something out of a nightmare. That elevator ride down was the longest of my life. I know you're going to be okay, but I was really terrified for a second there. So just bear with me while I treat you like you're made of glass, all right? It'll make me feel better about it." He walked around the car to get into the driver's seat.