You hold the thin sheet to your bare chest and shift further up the headboard, bending your knees to accommodate his body when he sits on the edge of the mattress to tie his laces. Your eyes soften, waiting for him to look back at you.

He never does.

More quietly, you tell him, “I asked if you wanted to order food. ‘Cause I don’t really feel like cooking right now and, depending on what you want, we should probably wait to order ‘cause Love Island doesn’t come on for another hour, and—”

Jack’s scruffy chin brushes the thin fabric of his shirt as he turns his head slowly to look at you. There’s a distance in his eyes that cuts you off, like you’re a quick fuck that doesn’t know when to stop talking, like he’s waiting for you to stop so he can get away.

“I think I’m gonna head out now, actually,” he tells you, then returns to knot his laces.

“Oh…” you hum, half-breathless, and pretend his foreign dismissiveness doesn’t tear your chest in two. “Are you… Are you okay—?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs and rises from the mattress. “I’m fine. I just— Need to get home.”

You follow him with wet eyes as he rounds the bed for the opposite side, where his phone and wallet sit on the nightstand and his branded rucksack rests on the floor. “Well, do you want me to wait to watch it with you? ‘Cause then I have to text Princes and tell her not to spoil it for me in the morning—”

“Go ahead,” Jack shrugs, with a faint smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, as he slides the camo strap over his broad shoulder. “I think I’ll survive a week without it.”

Your frown deepens at his joke.

“Did I do something?” you wonder in a meek voice that makes his chest ache.

“No,” he scoffs. “Of course not. Why would you ask that?”

“I don’t know…” you murmur shyly, shifting on the mattress and grimacing slightly when the sticky sheets cling to your thighs. “You never leave right after we have sex, so I— I didn’t know if, maybe… It wasn’t good for your something, or if I said something—”

“No, it was great—” Jack interjects, but cuts himself off quickly thereafter, like he was about to say something he shouldn’t.

The word ‘honey’ was about to roll off his tongue the way it always does when he’s talking to you, but it feels wrong to say it now, for a reason he still can’t name that threatens to strangle him all the same.

“I just gotta go now. Okay?”

At a loss for what else to do, or what else to say that might make him stay, you just nod with a sad smile. “Sure…”

Jack leaves with a polite nod — like the sex was some sort of mindless transaction he’s thanking you for and not something you’ve done quite regularly for the past several months. He doesn’t speak another word to you when he walks out, and doesn’t look back at you once when he shuts the door behind him.

You stew in his absence and forget to eat.

Your tired body functions the following day on nothing but heartache and half a granola bar.

You drown in the bustling emergency department, and in the void of the white screen ahead of you, where you try and fail to do your charting. You can’t quite garner the strength to use your hands, much less use your brain to put letters on the screen that’ll just look like alphabet soup to you anyway. You’re stuck idling in the emptiness inside of you, where your heart withers along with your stomach.

Robby watches from afar, studying you as he flits between patients and residents requiring his attention. He has, self-admittedly, quite the soft spot for you — because you’re the smartest person on this floor and the most sensitive, too, which makes for a great doctor but very often the saddest person you’ll ever meet. He waits for you to correct yourself before he has to step in, and potentially make your day worse than it’s obviously already going.

You don’t move for six minutes straight.

He timed it.

“What is going on over here?” Robby wonders slowly, leaning over the top of the desk and peering down at you with a pair of stern brown eyes.

You blink rapidly to clear the haze of rumination from your vision and shrink into your cushioned seat like a scolded child. “Charting…” you answer with an unconvincing waver in your voice.

“Looks like it,” Robby scoffs with a hint of a smile that gets lost in his greying beard. He taps the desk with his palm and stands to full height again, nodding his head and urging you to follow him. “C’mon. Walk with me.”

He saunters off in the opposite direction of the work station, taking a tablet that Dana hands to him as he goes. It takes a long moment for his words to compute, and you scramble to your feet when he throws you an expectant look over his shoulder. You fall into step with the older man as he drags his glasses from the shirt pocket of his black scrubs.

Robby sets the black frames on the bridge of his nose and wonders aloud with his gaze turned to the screen in his hand, “What’s going on with you today, kid?”

“It’s nothing,” you shrug dismissively, sticking close to the man’s side as you weave within the crowded hall.

He flashes you an unenthusiastic glare in return. His eyes dart between your furrowed brows, to your anxiety-bitten lips (where your teeth dig into the delicate skin even now), to where you wrench the hem of your long-sleeved undershirt into trembling fists. Whatever it is, it’s very clearly not nothing.

“I’m not asking to be polite, kid,” the older man tells you, firm but not entirely unkind. “I can tell something’s wrong, and it’s affecting your work, so— Just tell me.”

You swallow hard and struggle to find the courage to speak, or to meet the man’s gaze as your eyes dart everywhere but back at him.

“It’s about your friend…” you confess in a sheepish murmur that gets lost in the droning of the bustling E.R.

It takes Robby a moment or more to catch your meaning.

“Jack?” he presses, because he knew the two of you were seeing each other, but not that it was quite so serious to warrant the off-day you’re having now. He makes a mental note to ream Abbot out for it the next time he sees him — ‘cause he can’t have any of his residents upset, least of all you.

You nod with an averted gaze. “He’s just… been off—”

“He’s always off,” Robby scoffs.

“Well, not with me,” you tell him, foreignly firm in your quiet argument. “And now he’s not talking to me, and I have no idea what I did…”

“Well, knowing Jack, you probably didn’t do a damn thing,” Robby concedes with a heavy sigh and flashes you a sympathetic look as you turn the corner. “Just give him some time, alright? He’ll come around. He always does. For now, you’ve got a patient in 8 that’s asking for you—”

Before you can make a guess on who it is — though you think you already know the answer — a strong hand wrenches suddenly around your wrist.

The man’s fingers are warm, calloused, and unwavering against your delicate skin. Your heart lurches into your throat at the sudden panic as your chin snaps towards the man towering over you. He’s tall, bearded, rugged, and so angry he’s red in the face.

“I have been waiting out there…” the man starts, taut voice wavering with a withheld fire. “…For four hours. When the hell am I gonna see somebody?”

“How did you get back here?” is the first thing you think to squeak out, because you vaguely recall McKay sending him back to Chairs after taking his vitals some time ago.

Robby steps in then, cutting between you and the stranger to urge him backward and away from you. You rub at your tender wrist when the man’s brutal touch is gone.

“We’re seeing the sickest patients first, sir. So count yourself lucky you aren’t back here,” Robby explains in an even voice, sounding much calmer than he really feels. “But touch anybody in here like that again, and you won’t be seen at all. Got it?”

The man caves with a heavy breath and with his weathered palms splayed in surrender. “I was just asking a question, man…”

“I’ll handle it, boss,” Ahmad cuts in, rushing towards the three of you after catching sight of the altercation from down the hall. He steps between the two of you and the angry patient and ushers him back toward the waiting room.

“Don’t touch me,” you hear the man spit, but complying anyway.

“Trust me, man,” Ahmad quips. “I don’t want to.”

It takes you a long moment thereafter to catch your breath.

It was certainly not the first time you’ve been grabbed by an unhappy patient, and it would certainly not be the last, but you can never quite get used to the fear. The panic is slow to ebb from your veins, even as the man is escorted back to Chairs. You find him sneering silently at you when you catch his eyes, moments before the door shuts behind him.

Robby steps into your tunnel vision, ducking down to meet your gaze with dark eyes glimmering with worry. “You alright, kid? Did he get you?”

“I’m fine,” you answer on muscle memory and muster a smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes. “I’ve seen my fair share of assholes, Robby. Today, even.”

“Well, yeah,” the man scoffs playfully. “You’re with Abbot— I’m sure you’re an expert at dealing with assholes by now…”

By all accounts, you were not supposed to have favorites at the PTMC. And you didn’t really; everyone who stepped foot into the E.R. got the same level of medical care from you — even the assholes. But Louie Cloverfield was different, special. He was the first patient you ever saw as an R1, and when he kept coming in, and you kept picking up his cases, he became your patient.

If Louie was in, and you were on shift, you were the one tending to him. Always.

So, you stay by his side when he loses his pulse, even when the rest of the E.R. reduces to the inevitable chaos of the afternoon rush — even when you know the rest of your co-workers could probably use your help out there now — even when you know there’s nothing more you can do for Louie to keep him alive.

Sweat beads on your forehead as you kneel at his bedside, pounding firmly at the man’s chest in a feeble attempt to keep his heart beating. You’ve lost feeling in your arms now — they’ve gone from aching, to burning, to utterly numb — but your attempt at resuscitation never stops, not even as dark crimson blood spits from his breathing tube; the clearest sign of blood in his lungs.

Robby watches from the back of the room, keeping a close eye on you and the bodies donned in camo outside the window — as the TEMS unit treats a trauma patient across the way, with Jack Abbot among them. He catches the man glancing around the crowded E.R. for a moment, peering over passing heads for a glimpse of you, before the work inevitably drags him away.

Robby knows you have not yet noticed Jack’s presence.

You’ve got the sort of tunnel vision you always get in a crisis, when you refuse to move on until you’ve helped the person in front of you first — which has undoubtedly made you the very backbone of the PTMC patient satisfaction score, though at a detriment to yourself perhaps. Because you never know when to stop; and then, when you inevitably have to, you’ll always find a way to blame yourself for it.

“Three minutes since the epi,” you hear Perlah say, over the sound of your pounding heartbeat in your ears.

“Hold compressions,” Robby commands.

You stop on instinct, and feel the ache done into your bones. You exhale heavy breaths as you wipe sweat from your brow with the back of your gloved hand, careful to avoid the drops of blood spotted there. You feel like your chest is tearing in two when that same, menacing beeping sound fills the air.

“Aystotle,” Robby sighs. “Resume compressions.”

“Give me another amp of epi— and more suction,” you say through panted breaths, situating your palms back over the older man’s sternum. You look past the rogue flyaways falling over your eyes and the nurses crowded around you, peering at Robby with a determined but no less pleading gaze. “What do we do? Should we— Should we give PCC?”

Robby shakes his head with his arms crossed over his chest. “No, it’s too late for that…” he hums sympathetically. “And he’s not an ECMO candidate, so—”

“Well, can you tell me something that we can do?” you snap, harsher than you mean to.

Robby only softens further, dark eyes going tender around the edges as he tells you, “There’s nothing else we can do for him, kid…”

“Robby,” you whimper, flinching like he’s hurt you, but never once stopping your compressions. “C’mon. Please, we can— We can think of something— We still have two more rounds of epi, maybe it’ll—”

“He’s gone, kid…” Robby tells you, voice taut. “It’s okay.”

You exhale a punched-out breath, like not being able to save Louie hits you like a fist to the stomach. Your aching arms tingle with numbness when you part from the unconscious man. That wretched beeping fills the air once more, ringing through your ears and pounding skull.

“12:07,” you hear Robby announce the time of death, as Perlah’s soft hands grasp gently at your shoulders.

“C’mon. I’ll clean up,” the woman tells you, sniffling. “You take a second.”

“I’m fine,” you shrug, half-strangled, as you slip the bloodied gloves from your half-numb hands. You blink back burning tears as you walk them to the trash.

“You’re not,” Robby murmurs, head bowed to meet your averted gaze. “And that’s okay. Just take a second.”

You remind yourself to breathe — in for seven beats and out for eight — as the muffled exam room breaks away into the chaotic E.R. The rest of it becomes a blur in your tunnel vision, and the calls for concern turn to inaudible slurs in your ears.

“Whoa… you okay?” you only vaguely hear Trinity ask as you storm past the work station.

“Fine,” you squeak on instinct, despite the obvious.

“Oh, yeah, he totally croaked in there,” Ogilvie murmurs, as though to gossip with her, but forgetting to be subtle about it.

“Do you ever think before you speak?” Santos quips. “Or is the stupidity genetic?”

Your heavy eyes search for an empty room to duck into, to at least muffle your screams before you cry in front of everyone. There is no patient in the bed in Central 15, so you burst into that one, still struggling to catch your breath.

Your much-needed inhale gets caught in your chest at the sight you find in the corner of the room — Jack Abbot, stripped off his shirt and wiping blood from his stomach, with Samira standing just behind him, tending carefully to the scrape on his back.

Your sneaker scuffs the tile as you still suddenly in place.

The sound of your sudden presence makes them freeze, too. Their heads dart in your direction, gaping with wide eyes and parted mouths as if you’d just caught them doing something terrible. In a way, it feels like you have.

It feels like you’ve stumbled upon some achingly tender moment between them, of which you had been deprived for some time now — because even when Jack was with you, he was a thousand miles away. You wonder if, maybe, a part of him wanted to be here — with Samira, perhaps — and if that’s why he had left you so abruptly last night, as if it had only occurred to him then that you were no longer what he wanted.

You wouldn’t have blamed him for it, if that were the case. You just wish he would’ve told you before now, so it would feel like less of a white-hot knife lodged into the center of your sternum to find him this way.

“Sorry,” you just barely manage to choke out, though it gets lost in a whimper as you fight back the urge to cry.

Jack’s scruffy chest pinches with worry at the crack in your fragile voice and the visibly frazzled sight of you, all wild-haired and glassy-eyed. It hurts him far worse than the wounds burning red-hot on his pale skin now.

“What happened?” he asks, greying brows lowered in concern.

Samira stills with her soft fingers on Jack’s broad, freckled shoulder, touching him with a tenderness he hasn’t let you give him in some time.

“Are you okay?” she wonders, soft with a worry that is always sincere coming from here, but finds you more like a slap in the face just now.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you answer on muscle memory, then sniffle as you shake your head at yourself. “I’m not, actually— I don’t know why I said that— Louie just died. Pulmonary hemorrhage. And I was just looking for an empty room to cry in, I didn’t mean to… to interrupt…”

“You didn’t,” Jack assures you, parting from Samira to take a step closer to you.

It takes quite a lot of strength from you to turn away from him, instead of leering at his shirtless form or cowering at the gentle look in his light eyes. “I-I’ll see myself out,” you stammer hopelessly. “Sorry…”

You just barely hear Jack calling your name before the heavy glass door shuts behind you.

With nowhere else to go, and not willing to face the embarrassment of walking back the way you came, you make a beeline for the ambulance bay. The automatic doors part for you, and the cool air outside takes your breath away a second later.

Your chest hitches as you inhale a sniveling breath, trying and failing to regulate your breathing. You stand at the edge of the curb with one hand balled into a fist and one hand clutching your aching chest. Your heart’s telling you that you’re having an embolism and you’re about to keel over at this very moment; your brain’s telling you that you’re just having a panic attack and you need to suck it the hell up.

“Hey,” a man calls from further down the sidewalk.

Your head snaps in the direction of the familiar voice. You tense at the sight of the man who had grabbed you earlier, and your aching heart forgets to beat when you see him storming over to you. You find he’s wearing a smile on his bearded face when he’s close enough, but it looks more cynical than kind.

“You’re the nurse who got me kicked out earlier, aren’t you?” he asks.

You don’t have the breath or the bravery to correct him now.

“I’m sorry, sir…” you sniffle, wet-eyed, and turn away. “It’s just… It’s been a long day, okay? I didn’t mean for you to get escorted out. You just scared me, that’s all. I’m—”

You turn to face him again when he’s standing ahead of you. But before the words of an apology can spill from your mouth, his weathered fist collides with your nose.

You hear a sharp crack, a wet whoosh, and then the dull slap of your body hitting the pavement. You grimace when the back of your skull meets the concrete, and struggle to blink away the black spots from your vision.

The very first face you see is Langdon’s, though you’re not quite sure how long it’s been since your eyes have closed — a few seconds, maybe, or several minutes. You’re still lying on the rough pavement when you come to, with Frank’s gentle fingers brushing the hair out of your eyes with one hand and shining his penlight into your eyes with the other.

“There you are…” the man coos. “What happened to you out here?”

You hardly hear him, like he’s speaking to you from underwater. You answer him with a question of your own, lifting your trembling fingers to the dull throbbing sensation in your nose.

“Is… Is it bad?” you wonder aloud, half-slurring. You grimace first at the wet feeling on your cupid’s bow, then at the bright scarlet blood staining your fingertips. You whisper, voice breaking. “Ow…”

“Whoa, careful there…” Mel wavers, rushing from behind Langdon to help you when you try to sit up on your own. She crouches down beside him and takes you by the elbows in a pair of gentle hands. She squints behind her glasses when your inhale rattles in your chest. “Did you fall on your back?”

“Did somebody hit you?” Langdon presses from her other side, bushy brows lowered in worry.

“Wow…” you mumble, blinking hard, and wincing when you taste blood in your mouth. “So many questions…”

Mel and Langdon share a panicked look you don’t see.

“Yeah, c’mon. Let’s go,” the older man sighs, urging you up by the elbows and steadying you when you sway softly in place. “Come with me…”

“I can walk,” you protest through your ragged breaths, and through the blood dripping from your cupid’s bow and into your mouth. You pull your arm out of his grasp when the strength to do so returns to you, and stagger the rest of the way to the entrance until you regain your footing. “Just… Be normal, alright?”

“Right…” Langdon scoffs and fights back the urge to laugh — because you obviously have no idea how you look right now, with the lower half of your face all covered in blood, as if you’ve just been rescued from a bar fight. There’s hardly anything normal about that.

You try to be, anyway, as you stroll through the crowded E.R., hoping to be blanketed by the chaos inside. Everyone’s too busy charting or rushing to patients to notice your being there. You’re five or more steps away from making it to the bathroom when Robby’s eagle-eyed stare locks in on you from behind his computer.

“Jesus fucking Christ…” the older man blurts, sliding off his glasses and rising from his chair. He abandons his work without a second thought and rounds the workstation to rush to your side.

“I’m okay,” you tell him with a dismissive wave of your hand, pressing onward even when you hear his footsteps nearing you. He stops you with a gentle hand on your shoulder and steps in front of you to block your path.

“What the hell happened to you?” he wonders aloud, looking past you to Langdon and Mel as he drags a pair of gloves from his scrub pockets.

“We found her like this,” Frank shrugs.

“I told you to take a break, not get into a bar fight.”

“Ha-ha,” you monotone, then flinch when it hurts to smile. “Ow…”

“Who did this, huh?” Robby asks, cupping your bloodied face in his gloved hands. He runs his fingers over the back of your head first, to make sure you have no wounds there, before pressing his thumbs gently to the apples of your cheeks. “It wasn’t that asshole from before, was it?”

“I didn’t see him,” you lie through your teeth.

“Any trouble seeing? Any double vision?”

You shake your head against his hands, then inhale another rattling breath.

“Did you fall on your back?” he asks you then.

You nod once.

“What about a headache?”

“I always have a headache,” you answer. “I’m fine, Robby. I just need to get cleaned up—”

“Look at you— You’re not fine,” the man snaps. “Now, c’mon. You’re coming with me.”

You have no choice but to follow him when he wraps a firm, gentle hand around your arm, ushering you to walk ahead of him. You ignore the looks and calls of concern from the coworkers around you, except for Mel’s voice, which comes from behind you.

“Should I find Dr. Abbot?” she wonders aloud.

Your head snaps over your shoulder to look at her, and it makes your vision swim.

“Absolutely do not do that,” you answer, a little harsher than you mean to.

“O-kay…” she stammers and trails off.

“In here,” Robby urges, swinging open the door to the nearest empty room. He keeps a steady hand on your back to keep you stable and turns back to Mel before he follows you inside. “Find Abbot,” he tells her.

You lie on your back on the hospital bed while Robby does an impromptu exam. He presses the cold chestpiece of his stethoscope to your skin and listens to your breathing until it evens out again, from where the air had rushed out of your lungs after the fall. He finds your pupils both equal and reactive, and your nose free from swelling or cracking — “Nothing that mother nature can’t fix,” he says, and takes to cleaning you up instead.

“These beds are so hard,” you murmur, shifting uncomfortably with an icepack pressed to your nose, which Princess had brought by some minutes ago. “We should really get new ones in here. How are patients supposed to be comfortable in these?”

“Yeah, I’ll go tell Gloria,” Robby scoffs, dabbing at your nose with a wet wipe. “I’m sure she’ll get right on that…”

He parts from you to chuck the red-tinted napkin into the bin at his side and waits for you to laugh at his stupid joke. You stay silent. You don’t even give him a pity giggle, and you always, at the very least, give him a goddamn pity giggle. His brows furrow in a mixture of confusion and concern.

“Can I ask you a stupid question?”

“Better than anyone I know, Dr. Robby…”

“Ha-ha,” he deadpans, reaching for another wipe with a gloved hand. It’s freezing against the burning skin of your neck as it dabs it gently there. “Why didn’t you want me telling Abbot about this, huh?”

“Because he doesn’t care…” you mumble cynically, almost inaudibly so.

“Oh, c’mon,” Robby scoffs. “Even you don’t believe that.”

You don’t. Not really. You know Jack cares, if only because it’s in his blood to do so. His basic human empathy is what made him such a good doctor. You just aren’t sure that he cares about you in the way you thought he did — in the way you wanted him to — and you’re not quite sure how to voice that to Robby now.

“He’s busy right now,” you answer instead, still half-hidden behind the icepack. “Too busy for me, and I don’t wanna bother him, so… Just drop it.”

Robby flashes you a sympathetic smile that you don’t see as he swipes at the last bit of blood from your skin. “I know he may not act like it, kid, but he does care about you.”

“You’re right,” you mumble. “He doesn’t act like it—”

Jack Abbot bursts into the room like a red-hot flame through a burning house. His broad chest heaves with panted breaths beneath the thin navy shirt he wears in place of his tactical gear, though his camo pants still sit heavy on his waist.

His wild eyes scan your form. “What the hell’s going on in here?” he blurts.

You glare at Robby from behind the icepack. “I hate you.”

“Yeah, I know…” the man sighs, dropping the crumpled wipe into the trash beside him.

“What happened?” Jack presses, more firmly this time.

“Nothing,” you murmur shyly, unable to meet his gaze when he towers at your bedside with his hands on his hips. “It’s not the first time someone’s swung at me—”

“Yeah, but it’s the first time it’s been this bad. Bad enough that someone had to come get me,” Jack argues, made a bit harsher with the concern pinching at his chest. His head whips over his shoulder. “Who the hell did this?”

“Some guy from Chairs, I think,” Robby shrugs. “Name’s Driscoll. Ahmad’s already handling it. He’ll deal with the police.”

“Good,” Jack nods, firm in a way you’ve always adored about him. He was inherently resolute where you were perpetually indecisive. It mostly came in handy when you struggled to figure out what to eat for dinner, not usually in situations like this. “‘Cause we’re pressing charges on this asshole, alright?”

“Honestly, Jack, I don’t care what you do…” you sigh. “But my head is really starting to hurt, and I really don’t feel like handling this right now.”

“On it,” Robby nods, taking the hint and stalking out of the room. He shuts the curtains after him and dims the light as he goes. The noise of the Pitt muffles again when the door closes behind him, leaving you and Jack alone in the not-quite-silence and the not-quite-dark.

“Here. C’mon,” the man urges suddenly, motioning with his chin. “Make room for me.”

“What?” you ask, eyes squinted in confusion as the man turns to sit on the edge of the twin-sized bed, adjusting his prosthetic to swing it over the side.

He gives you an expectant look over his shoulder. “Scooch,” is all he says, in a strangely strong voice despite the very silly command.

You shift on the thin mattress despite your better judgment to make room for him. Jack urges his right leg up first, then his left one second. He settles in beside you and urges the railings up to keep him from falling off the side. You try to do the same, though you possess a lot less strength with only one hand than the man beside you.

Your breath catches when he reaches over you with a strong hand, helping you lift the barrier the rest of the way.

“Thanks…” you mumble, half-shy.

“Don’t mention it,” he huffs politely, with one arm on his stomach and the other curled around your shoulders, keeping you close to accommodate both your bodies on the twin-sized bed. He smells of sweat and musky cologne and antiseptic. It takes everything in you not to melt into his warmth. You remain tense beside him, feeling slightly strange in his hold in a way you never have before.

“I’m sorry about, Louie—”

“You don’t have to do this—” you blurt simultaneously.

His head snaps over to you. He has to jerk his scruffy chin back to look at you properly from the dwindling proximity between you. His eyes dart between your averted gaze and the slowly melting icepack you fidget with like a stress ball.

“Do what?” he asks.

“I didn’t mean to walk in on you and Samira, okay?” you confess quietly, ‘cause any octave higher, and your voice will start to shake. “I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to make it a whole thing, you know? So you don’t have to come in and pretend to be all nice just because you think I’m upset, ‘cause I’m not.”

(Your rambling is hardly convincing in the matter, but he makes no mention of it.)

“Okay. I hear you,” Jack murmurs gently, always so patient with your rambling, even though he can only halfway comprehend it a lot of the time. “But I’m still not sure what Mohan has to do with this—”

Honey, he wants to say, but doesn’t allow himself.

“If you want to be with her, that’s okay— Or if it’s just because you don’t wanna be with me, that’s okay, too,” you explain in a strangely even voice. “But I wish you would’ve just told me, instead of bailing on me last night—”

“I didn’t bail on you—”

“—So then I wouldn’t have to catch you and Samira doing…” you trail off, face screwed. “Whatever the hell you were doing back there.”

“Catching us?” Jack echoes with a laugh you can feel rumbling against your shoulder. “That would imply we were doing something worth getting caught. She just walked in on me while looking for her patient, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well…” you hum, gaze averted to the icepack in your lap. “It seemed pretty intimate…”

“It wasn’t.”

“More intimate than you’ve been with me,” you argue sheepishly.

“Well, not to be crude here, but…” Jack trails off with an audible smile in his voice. “We literally had sex last night.”

“Yeah, and you left,” you spit, turning to look at him for the first time since he stormed in. You wear a wet look in your glassy eyes and a bruise blooming on the bridge of your nose. “And I cried myself to sleep about it. Which means I didn’t get to watch Love Island, which means I forgot to eat, which means I’m running on fumes on what has arguably been the worst shift of my whole life.”

You take a much-needed breath when the words are gone from your mouth.

Jack does not jump immediately to defend himself. He knows he doesn’t deserve it now. He just lets himself stew in your fiery words instead, so you know they’ll have a real impact on him before he responds.

“You’re right,” he sighs after a few long moments. “I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry,” you shake your head at his apologetic tone. “Just don’t… Don’t be so mean, you know? If you don’t wanna be with me anymore, why can’t you just say?”

“Because I do want to be with you,” he answers, weathered features screwed in offense. “How would you ask me that?”

“Because you aren’t acting like it—”

“Because I almost told you that I loved you,” Jack blurts suddenly, in a stern tone of voice that snatches the breath from your lungs. He swallows hard and continues. “Last night, I mean, when we… I almost said it… Because I felt it, but then I… I realized I hadn’t said that to anyone since my wife passed, and it freaked me out.”

“But…” you start in a broken whisper. “Why does that have to be such a bad thing?”

“‘Cause it makes me feel guilty,” Jack answers. “The way I love you makes me feel guilty, like I’m abandoning her. And I… I don’t know what to do with all that… grief.”

You feel your heart aching, for the third or hundredth time that day. You notice Jack’s right hand hanging on your shoulder, how his fingers fidget anxiously there, and how his left hand scratches at the rough fabric of his camo pants — made overwrought by his confession, and unsure what to do with it now.

“Why don’t you just give it to me?” you wonder quietly, then shrug at the confused look Jack gives you a second later. “Your grief, I mean. I can take it. You know, make it a little more bearable for you. So you don’t have to carry it all on your own.”

The softness of your words knocks the breath from Jack’s lungs.

The corner of his mouth quirks in a wavering smile as he blinks burning tears out of his eyes. “Jesus, we're a couple of goddamn sad sacks, aren’t we, honey?” he scoffs a sad laugh and runs his free hand down his scruffy face.

Your lips twitch upward, feeling giddy but fighting it. “That’s the first time you called me that in two days…” you observe distantly.

“What?”

“Honey.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I’m sorry for that, too…”

“Don’t be sorry,” you repeat, this time with a smile. “Just— kiss me or somethin’…”

“Gladly,” Jack says with a wider grin.

You tilt your chin up to meet him halfway when he leans down to kiss you. His nose bumps into the side of your bruised one, as your hand reaches for his wounded shoulder. You flinch against each other in tandem.

“Ow,” you whimper.

“Ouch,” Jack winces. “Shit, honey— Sorry.”

“Are you okay?” you ask with a sympathetic scrunch to your features, cupping his scruffy face in your delicate hands. “I haven’t checked in on you yet, I know you’re hurt—”

“I’m fine,” he assures with a shake of his head, leaning instinctively into your touch. “I got a little banged up, but… I’m good now.”

“Promise?” you whisper, swiping an eyelash from his cheek with your thumb.

“I promise. I'll tell you about later,” he nods once and smooths his calloused fingers across your temple, looking at you with a tenderness you’ve been craving all day. “What about you, honey— Are you okay?”

You inhale sharply through your bruised nose and nod on a slower exhale.

“I will be,” you answer honestly for the first time all day.

The constant will-they-won’t-they between you was buried under layers of hierarchy, rules, and morals — under the unsaid understanding that whatever this thing between you was could never be acted upon. Not while you were his resident, anyway. 

The obvious power imbalance was a line Jack Abbot would not let himself cross, no matter how desperately he wanted to.

Only now, that wretched line isn’t there anymore. For the first time since he met you, you’re both on even ground. The world is your oyster, as it were; all the opportunities lie now at your feet. You need only to reach out and take it.

“First intubation as an attending,” Jack hums from the opposite side of the hospital bed, eyes glittering with amusement behind his safety glasses. “How’s it feel?”

You scoff a quiet laugh and shake your head. “That question got old about the fourth time you asked it, Dr. Abbot…” you deadpan, sewing the trachael to the unconscious patient’s neck.

Reggie Brice; thirty-two-year-old male; exhibiting crush injuries to the chest and pelvis from a gnarly car pile-up. Seven people, including this one, were rushed in requiring immediate assistance. The rest were brought in with sustained head injuries, concussions, or minor fractures that needed tending to. You know that there has been at least one confirmed death.

“Well, it’s a big deal,” the man scoffs. “Why do you think we all chipped in two dollars to decorate the break room? Those grocery store cupcakes actually mean something, you know?”

“Well, I am honored…” you sigh in a distracted monotone.

Jack squints. “Yeah, I can tell. You look downright emotional—”

You take a step back to assess, gaze flickering to the monitor at your side. You find the man’s blood pressure continuing to climb, which is less than ideal for the injuries he’s sporting now.

“Pressure’s too high. We gotta fix that, or he’s gonna crash,” Jack announces in a sharper tone, though it never quite loses its laid-back edge. He always works best under pressure, in truth. “We could always crack the chest, cross-clamp the aorta—  buy him some time till we get him a room.”

“What about preperitoneal packing?” you suggest, gesturing over the patient’s lean stomach with gloved hands. “We do a simple midline incision below the umbilicus, pack like hell around the bladder, keep the bleeding in check until we get him upstairs.”

Jack’s silence is less than reassuring.

You peer at him behind the glasses sitting low on your nose, stumbling over yourself as you brace for an inevitable rejection. “I know it’s more of an OR procedure, and I’ve only done it once, but—”

“Hey…” Jack cuts in softly, brows raised to his hairline. “You’re the boss here, kid. Remember? We’ll do whatever you wanna do.”

Your eyes narrow, despite the funny feeling flaring in your chest. His voice, all deep and gravelly and gentle, has always had a way of piercing right through you.

“I’m not a kid anymore, Abbot,” you remind him. 

So there’s nothing standing in your way anymore, old man, you’re really saying.

Jack grins wide, like he can hear it in your silence.

“Force of habit,” he shrugs. “Now, c’mon. Let’s do it your way, boss.”

You’re wrists-deep in the conscious man’s pelvis, packing the blood clot around his bladder while Jack holds the Deaver retractor in a steady head. You fall into a strange sort of rhythm together, the way you always do, moving with each other without ever having to speak. Though, for some reason, you can’t seem to stop your hands from shaking.

“This is good, right?” you murmur behind your mask, shoving more gauze beneath the man’s sliced skin.

“You’re doing great,” Jack praises muffedly, without missing a beat, though he flashes you a stern look behind his glasses a second later. “You’re an attending now— You know what you’re doing.”

You swallow hard with an unsure nod. “Right… Yeah…”

Jack smiles at your sheepishness — a stark contrast to how methodically your hands move — though the expression gets hidden behind his blue surgical mask. “Don’t worry. It’s always a little weird at first. You’ll settle in in no time.”

You scoff a harsh breath through your nose. “You’ve been uncharacteristically sweet to me today. You know that?”

“I’m always sweet,” Jack squints. “But I can always get meaner, if you want. You know, if my kindness isn’t impressing you.”

“Hm,” you shrug and swipe your gloved fingers under the fatty tissue of the fleshy linea alba. “Jury’s still out.”

“Well,” his brows bounce. “I guess I’m just gonna have to try a little harder, then, aren’t I?”

“What can I say? I have high standards, Dr. Abbot.”

Your concentrated gaze flickers from the incision to the man standing across from you. Something mischievous glimmers in your eyes, crinkling at the edges with a smile he can’t see behind your mask. The air between you charges in a flicker.

“You doin’ anything after this shift?” the man wonders suddenly, passing you another stack of gauze with his free hand. “You know, to celebrate?”

“I don’t know…” you sigh and turn away again. “I guess it depends.”

“On?”

“Whether someone can give me something better to do than collapsing face-first into my bed.”

“I think I could make a pretty strong case,” Jack quips.

“Ooh…” you hum. “Do tell.”

“Something involving food. Definitely,” he starts. “Maybe something a lot more filling than two-dollar vending machine snacks.”

“Very compelling start, Dr. Abbot…”

“And maybe— if you’re so inclined,” he croons drily. “Something where we don’t talk about work for an hour. At least.”

You flash him a deadpanned stare. “Well, now, that’s just way too far.”

“Hm. It was worth a shot,” he shrugs.

“I guess we’ll just have to see how the rest of your performance goes...”

His eyes widen in amusement at your sudden teasing, not nearly as shy as he’s grown accustomed to. “Oh, so I’m the one being evaluated now?”

“Yep,” you nod once, popping the p.

“And what happens if I pass?”

You meet his gaze once more, with something a little shier around the edges. “Then I’ll… let me take you somewhere for breakfast in the morning,” you shrug, trying to be casual, though your wavering voice gives you instantly away.

A smile curls slow at Jack’s mouth behind his surgical mask. You can see it squinting the very edges of his light eyes as he nods in response. “Looking forward to it—”

The glass door across the room swings open without warning. 

Your heads whip simultaneously, half-expecting to find a grey-scrubbed nurse standing there, hopefully with some information about the state of the suddenly flooded OR. You find a strange man there instead — late fifties, bearded, tall but with a beer gut that hangs over the top of his baggy jeans. There’s dark blood on his t-shirt and the collar of his beige jacket, dripping from a cut on his temple.

His narrow face is strikingly hollow; his eyes are painfully empty. You figure he must be one of the victims from the pile-up. He wears the shock of it all over, no doubt.

“This is a sterile room, sir,” Jack tells him, authoritative but never unkind. “If you’re family, I’m gonna need you to wait outside. I’ll have a nurse give you the details— and maybe take a look at the cut of yours.”

“I’m not his family,” the man says in an even monotone, with a gritty drawl that insists he’s from somewhere further south. There is little inflection in his voice, the same way there is little emotion on his bearded face. He just lingers there in the doorway, frozen still in a way that feels almost uncanny.

Your wide eyes flit to Jack, glimmering with apprehension. Your stomach twists with it, too.

Jack’s firm gaze never wavers from the stranger across the room. “Either way, sir, you can’t be in here—”

The older man’s weathered right hand reaches slowly for the inside pocket of his jacket. Something silver glints beneath the bright white fluorescents overhead. It takes you a second too long to realize what it is — a gun.

The world narrows in an instant. The oxygen gets sucked out of the room all at once. Your chest hitches for a breath it cannot take.

You don’t realize until then that you’ve never seen a pistol this close before — or at all. Your brain detaches in an instant accordingly, protects you now by convincing you that this is no longer your reality. That you’re only dreaming. That everything around you is just a movie you’re watching from faraway.

“Hey, hey, hey…” Jack cautions on bated breath, bloodied hands raised in surrender. 

His wide eyes dart between the man and the glass door, where the stranger is just out of view of the hallway. He swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, as he takes slow steps towards the assailant. 

“Let’s just— Let’s just take a breath here, alright, man?”

The monitor beside you begins to beep wildly when your hands freeze. Your body jerks when the sound fills the silent room. 

Your gloved hands move on autopilot, adjusting the Deaver retractor in Jack’s absence and continuing to pack the bladder with the remaining gauze. The work is the only thing anchoring you now — the glaring acknowledgment that, if you don’t finish up here, the man in the bed will die before he makes it to the OR.

“That man there…” the stranger says in a distant voice, like he’s not all the way here either. “He was driving the car that hit my wife… Blew a red light… Came out of nowhere…”

Jack’s expression shifts. He reaches for his jaw with slow hands, plucking the surgical mask from his right ear, and letting the left side hang by his chin — allowing the man to see his face. 

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“He killed her… On the scene…” the man continues, gravelly voice tighter now. “I was trying to scoop her brains back into her skull— Do you have any idea what the kinda shit does to a person?”

“That’s hard, man,” Jack nods sympathetically but stands his ground at the head of the hospital bed all the same, planting himself firmly between you and the stranger across the room. “I get it.”

“You don’t—” the man snaps, harsher now.

You flinch when his voice rings suddenly through the room, trying to pack the wound tight with half-numb fingers.

“You don’t just get to— to fix him like nothing happened. Like her life didn’t matter—”

“It does matter,” Jack assures with a rapid nod. “Your wife matters, I promise.”

“Then let me do something about it—”

Jack’s chest tightens when the man’s knuckles turn white around the gun. He holds it steady despite his troubled state, like he knows exactly what he’s doing with it. Jack understands, then, that if he lets that gun off, it’ll hit exactly whatever this man wants it to — wherever he wants it to.

“There are two other people in this room who had nothing to do with what happened to your wife, man,” Jack tells him. “And I know you don’t want anyone else to get hurt. I know that.”

“You’re right… I don’t want anyone else to get hurt…” the man nods, voice heavy and trembling. “So tell her to stop—”

The gun shifts over Jack’s shoulder, aiming right for your head.

A pained whimper sounds in the pit of your tightening throat. You can hardly see the incision below you as burning tears gather at your waterline. Your shaking fingers scramble for the sutures to stitch him back up again.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Jack blurts, stepping in front of the gun again without a second thought. He keeps his gloved hands raised, but his sympathetic stare turns stern in a flicker. “You’re talking to me right now, alright? So put the gun back on me— We’re gonna figure this out together.”

“I said— tell her— to stop!”

His thumb flicks the hammer of the gun with a daunting click. 

“I can’t!” you hear yourself whimper. “I can’t stop, Jack— He’ll die.”

“I know, kid…” he says without looking back at you, with a voice much more even compared to yours. “I know. Just keep going.”

“Stop!” the man bellows. “Or I swear to god, I’ll shoot you both in the goddamn head!”

Jack is not perturbed by his yelling. He wants him to yell, wants him to cause a scene so that someone’ll check in and call in a Code Silver. He just doesn’t want that gun to go off. So he keeps his voice calm as he counters gently, “And what happens next? If you kill us— If you kill him. What are you gonna do after?”

The man hesitates for a moment. His grip falters on the gun, as if he hadn’t considered the question until that very moment.

“I know you want your wife back… But this isn’t gonna make it any better.”

“Maybe not,” the man says. “But it’ll make it stop.”

He doesn’t elaborate on what ‘it’ exactly is, but Jack doesn’t need him to. He’s been where this man is standing — not physically, maybe, not with a gun in his hand; but in the deep, dark void reserved only for a special, gut-wrenching sort of grief. 

“It won’t. Trust me,” Jack says with a shake of his silver head. “I lost my wife ten years ago. Not like you did, but it still hurt like hell, man, I can tell you that…”

The man softens slightly. It’s the first time since the crash that someone’s tried to level with him, that someone’s actually understood. 

Jack takes a hesitant step forward when he catches the stranger’s resolve starting to slip.

“And I can tell you it doesn’t stay that way forever…” he continues. “Whatever you’re feeling right now, I know you think it’s never gonna stop. But it will. You just have to let it.”

Another step forward.

“You see the woman you’re pointing that gun at?” Jack wonders with raised brows, nodding his silver head in your direction. “I like her… I really like her. And I didn’t think I was capable of feeling anything again.”

Your chest aches at his words. Your glasses fog from the warm tears clinging to your bottom lashes. Your clammy hands fumble with the surgical needle.

The man’s finger loosens slightly on the trigger, and Jack takes another cautious stop. 

“And this is really bad timing, man, ‘cause I was gonna take her out after this,” he confesses with a not-quite smile. “But for that to happen, I need us to walk out of here. All of us.”

The beat of silence thereafter feels borderline suffocating. It wraps its cold hands around your neck and strangles you.

Jack almost thinks he’s gotten through to the man. He can see the cracks starting to fissure throughout his hollow face; the flicker of hesitation, the realization of what he’s doing — where his dark mind has led him.

“So you’re saying…” the man trails off and swallows hard. His drawl is much too soft for the words that spill from his mouth a second later. “…If I shoot her, you’ll understand how I feel?” 

Your blood runs ice cold in an instant.

Jack’s shoes squeak hard against the tile as he lunges for the man before you can blink. He pushes him into the wall with an aggressive thud and tries to shove his gun out of your direction. You bend over the bed on instinct, covering your patient without a second thought.

Two shots ring out.

You expect to feel both of them, or perhaps nothing at all, as your limp body hits the floor. You keep your eyes shut and your jaw clenched tight, bracing yourself for pain or certain death.

The harsh ringing in your ears is slow to fade. When your hearing finally returns to you, and your eyes peek slowly open, you find a sea of bodies crashing into the room like a tidal wave — and you, yourself, still standing.

Your head swivels on your shoulder, still half-hunched over your patient. Your gaze drags unwillingly past the blur of bodies and dark scrubs until it finds Jack, lying flat on the ground instead of you.

It takes your brain a long moment to make sense of it — the strangle ngle of his body, the stuttering of his chest, the tear in his shirt from the bullet, and the wet crimson darkening the tile beneath him. The sight doesn’t fit, doesn’t belong. Not to Jack, anyway; not to the man who’s far too steady, too solid, to ever look like this.

And the worst part of it all — the part that will follow you long after this moment ends — is that that bullet was meant for you, and that Jack didn’t even hesitate to take it instead.

The ED descends into a different sort of chaos than you’re used to. The PTMC fractures, splinters into something unrecognizable, as voices overlap and distort in your ears. “Gunshot wound— Attending down!” you hear someone shout, followed by a quieter, “Help me get him up,” and a harsher, “Someone get me a fucking line!” 

None of it feels all the way real. 

It’s like looking through the rest of the world through a fishbowl, where everything is blurred and warped and muffled. You can see armed guards detaining the crying gunman in the foreground of it all, along with Jack’s body being transferred to a stretcher, right before Samira ducks into your tunnel vision.

Her dark brown eyes are lined with exhaustion from her double shift as they dart attentively across your face — the first person to reach out for you in the midst of all the chaos.

“What do you need me to do?” is all she says.

Your voice comes out strangled. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else entirely as you choke through panted breaths, “F-Finish up his— his sutures, and… and get him to the OR... Walsh has a… has a room ready for him, I think—”

Your legs feel half-numb as you step back from the patient before you, left totally unaware of the chaos surrounding him. You stumble for the entrance, peeling off your stained gown and bloodied gloves as you go, and follow Jack’s body as they lead him out of the room. 

You migrate to his side like it’s muscle memory to you, struggling to find your footing in the midst of the growing crowd as the doctors rush the gurney to the elevators. For every step you take, Shen and Crus seem to take three more. It makes it nearly impossible to keep up in your stupor.

You crane your head to catch a peek of the man from behind the towering bodies before you. “I-Is he okay?” you wonder breathlessly.

The gurney jerks too hard around the corner, scraping the side of the wall.

“Motherfucker!” Jack groans.

“Well, shit— He definitely sounds the same,” Parker quips from beside you.

“How are you feeling?” Crus calls from the man’s side. “Talk to me, Abbot— You’re still with us, right?”

“Not unless you two learn how to maneuver a goddamn gurney,” Jack jokes through gritted teeth.

“Page Walsh,” Shen tells Lena with a stern nod, pushing the button for the lift. “Make sure she’s got a room open.”

The doors part with a ding. They wheel the stretcher inside, and you make sure to squeeze in with them, elbowing past the attendings and nurses to get to Jack’s side.

He’s clammy and pale when he comes into view, writhing in place as he clutches at his ribs. His black scrubs are stained a darker color from the blood spilling from the wound, which turns the white towel pressed there a deeper shade of scarlet than you think you’ve ever seen.

Your trembling hand reaches for him on instinct. You press your palm over his bloodied knuckles — keeping some pressure there, reminding him that you’re still here.

“Jack?” you call to him in a voice taut, as your teary eyes dart wildly across his scruffy face. “Jack? A-Are you okay?”

He swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. His head turns slowly, just enough to find you, and he blinks wildly to clear the blur in his vision. The corner of his mouth twitches in a faint hint of a smile when he spots you standing over him.

He clears his throat, but his words still come out a little gravelly as he arches an expectant brow and says, “Told ya…”

You shake your head, features screwing in confusion. “Told me what?”

“That I’d make a good case…” 

Your chest flares. Something wells suddenly in your throat, though you can’t be sure if it’s a laugh or a sob. You just scold him instead. “It’s not funny, Jack—”

“Hey. You’re the one who said you had high standards, kid…” he rasps. 

His eyes fall over your form, trying to assess you despite his dwindling vision. You watch his scruffy features twist with concern a second later. His chest stutters as he questions breathlessly, “Whoa— Is that… Is that my blood? Or yours?”

You tilt your chin to follow his gaze. Only then do you feel the warm blood trickling down to your elbow; only then do you feel the white-hot, searing pain of the bullet that had grazed your shoulder. 

You feel very suddenly like the world is spinning around you. 

The stares you get return, as everyone else seems to notice too, only adds to the dizziness. 

“You’re bleeding,” Shen observes sharply. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you got hit?”

“I-I’m fine,” you insist despite the waver in your voice, shaking your head to fight the lightheadedness away. “I can’t— I can’t even feel it, okay? I swear.”

“Get someone to take a look at that when we get upstairs, alright?” Shen commands with a stern glare. “I mean it.”

Your wet eyes harden in an instant. “I’m not leaving—”

Jack’s hand, still weak on his side, twists over the damp towel to grab yours. His bloody fingers are cold and trembling as they struggle to find purchase on your smaller ones. You hold him with enough strength for the both of you.

“You got hurt ‘cause of me, kid. At least let someone—”

“Hey,” you snap, meaner than he’s ever seen you. “That was not your fault.”

“Let ‘em take a look at you, alright?”

You shake your stubborn head. “I need you to focus on yourself right now—”

“I am,” he insists. His gravelly voice never loses its humorous edge, and neither do his glassy eyes lose their tenderness as they flit back and forth between yours. “And I’m not gonna be okay if you aren’t, alright? So just… please.”

Your features crumple at the pleading look he gives you — with his eyes all squishy around the edges, and glazing over with unshed tears.

The elevator stills with a ding, shattering the tense moment. It jolts faintly, just enough to make your swimming stomach feel sicker. You catch yourself nodding despite your better judgment. 

“Fine…” you tell him in a fragile voice.

Jack tries to smile but finds the strength to slowly leave him, a little like the blood trickling from his side.

“I’m in good hands,” he assures you, then turns to the attending on his left. “Right, Dr. Shen?”

The younger man’s brows lower. “Didn’t you just call me a motherfucker?” he quips.

Jack’s weathered face twists as he’s wheeled out of the elevator. “…Did I?”

Your hand slips from his as you watch him go. Something about it feels wrong, though you can’t exactly place why. You just know it feels like something ripping in two — like the torn skin of your bloody shoulder, times a thousand.

The room they put you in is achingly quiet; the kind of quiet that makes everything else seem ten times louder. The green-white fluorescent bulb clicks and buzzes mercilessly over your head, drilling straight into your skull. The AC hums gently alongside it in a mundane sort of symphony that matches the empty room you’re in — where only one hospital bed sits beside a shuttered window, in front of a porcelain sink and mirror.

Everything smells like stale air, sharp antiseptic, and metallic blood.

You stand before the cloudy mirror with your scrub sleeve pushed up your shoulder, kept awkwardly in place by your chin. You struggle to do your sutures with a hand that won’t stop trembling. 

You don’t realize how ardently you’re still shaking until the needle slips across your skin — not enough to do any real damage, but enough to make you hiss through your teeth when it stings. You clench your jaw and pull the thread through, until the raging skin around the laceration pinches together again. Your features flicker as you try and fail to ignore the dull burn that spreads up and down your arm a second later.

The fiery sensation is the only thing keeping your mind distracted from all the rest of it — the way the gunshot made your ears ring; the way Jack’s body jerked before it hit the ground; the way the man called out for his wife when security pinned him to the floor.

You tug the sutures harder, relishing in the sting. You push the needle through once more, harder than necessary, and let it slip a little sloppier than you should — anything to take your mind off of it.

“Careful…” a voice cautions from the doorway.

Your head whips over your shoulder. You blink rapidly as your brain struggles to catch up — like you half-expect to find yourself back in that room; like you half-expect to find the man from before standing there.

You feel a little like the ground has been pulled from underneath you when you find Robby there instead, rubbing disinfectant between his calloused palms.

Someone downstairs must’ve called him about Jack, and about the Code Silver currently turning the PTMC to shambles. And, based on the surgical mask sticking out of his jacket pocket, you figure he must’ve just gotten back from checking in on him in the OR. 

His dark eyes flit from your face, to your shoulder, and to the supplies scattered across the sink before you.

“They said you were supposed to be getting looked at,” he says. “Not playing DIY surgeon.”

You huff out a breath that would’ve passed for a laugh any other time. 

“Everyone else is busy… At least I can make myself useful this way…”

You can’t bring yourself to meet his gaze. You can’t stand the way he’s looking at you now. His gaze is too sharp, too focused. It’s like he’s studying you, cataloging, assessing — the same way you do with your patients. The thought of being so helpless makes your stomach twist. 

Robby doesn’t argue, but instead lets his eyes linger on the slight tremor in your hands. The leftover adrenaline is likely buzzing like electricity in your veins just now. You’re bound to crash at any second.

“I know you don’t want my help,” he starts slowly, sauntering further in with his arms crossed over his chest. “But at least lie and say I did your sutures— so Jack doesn’t try to kill me when he wakes up.”

“I think he’ll know you didn’t do ‘em when he sees how neat they are,” you joke drily.

“Rude…” Robby scoffs, sneakers scuffing as he plants himself at your side. You can see the leftover slumber in his swollen eyes more clearly now, as he ducks down to look at you. “Want me to get you something for the pain, at least?”

You shake your head instantly, not trusting your voice enough to speak without wavering.

“You sure?” he presses.

“I’m fine,” you snap. “I’m not the one in surgery.”

He is not dismayed by your anger. He knows it’s not meant for him. 

“Well, Jack’s doing just fine. Walsh is finishing up with him now,” he tells you. “Honestly, I think the hardest part is gonna be keeping him off his feet for the next little while…. ‘Cause there’s about a hundred percent chance he’s gonna want to come back to work when he’s discharged.”

You exhale sharply through your nose in place of a laugh as you tie the sutures and cut the excess with a pair of small medical scissors. 

You just barely catch sight of your delirious smile in the cloudy mirror before a chuckle sputters suddenly from your mouth. The sound of it fills the quiet room as you tumble into a fit of half-drunken giggles, bowing your head and propping your gloved hands on the porcelain sink.

Your shoulders shake as your laughter turns quickly into sobs.

Robby softens instantly. “Shit… I’m sorry…”

“I’m fine,” you blurt once more and shake your head. Your voice is strangled through the tears in your throat, but you dismiss him anyway. “I’m fine. I-I don’t even know why I’m crying, so..”

“You went through something traumatic tonight,” he coos. “Everything you’re feeling is completely normal.”

You shake your head again. “I should’ve gone with him— I should be helping in there—”

“You’d just be a liability,” Robby shrugs, a little blunt but not entirely unkind. “You’re still in shock. Your hands are still shaking— I wouldn’t let you anywhere near an OR like this… You’re better off here, and you know it.”

You turn your head to flash him a teary-eyed look. Your chin quivers as your taut voice trembles, “He asked… He asked me if I wanted to go out with him when we got off,” you confess in a strangled whisper.

Robby’s brows raise to his hairline. “Did he?”

You nod slowly. “And I was gonna say yes…”

“Good…” the older man nods, lip flickering into a smile beneath his beard. “About time…”

“So he can’t… He doesn’t get to…” You stumble over yourself to get the words out. “He doesn’t get to not come back after that.” 

Robby’s sympathetic grin widens at the stern, wet-eyed glare you give him. He takes a slow step closer and splays a warm, comforting hand along your back.

“Jack Abbot is the most stubborn son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” he tells you. “If there’s even the slightest chance of him coming out of that OR just to take you out, then… He’s gonna take it. Trust me.”

“Yeah,” you quip drily. “He better…” 

Jack wakes after surgery to a tingling ache in his side and a heart monitor beeping faintly overhead, pervading the strange silence surrounding him — a silence he doesn’t usually allow himself.

His eyes crack slowly open, dry and unfocused for several long moments. They dance across the ceiling tiles as he blinks the haze of sleep from his gaze. He struggles to recall how he got here — in this dim recovery room, which he had never seen as a patient until now. He remembers the stranger with the gun first, the warmth of the blood that came spilling from his side second, and the way you cried from him third.

Your name spills from his dry mouth like it’s the only word he remembers.

“Great. Now I owe Crus twenty dollars,” he hears a familiar voice joke from his side. Jack’s head swivels until he finds Princess standing there, checking the IV hanging by his bed. She smiles softly down at him and quips, “He said the first thing you’d do is ask for her. I thought for sure you’d want a beer.”

“Yeah…” Jack rasps, then clears the gravel from his throat. “I could go for that, too…”

“Want me to go grab her for you?”

He hesitates. “Is she… Is she okay?”

“She’s great. Last I heard, Robby was patching her up,” the woman grins. “And, for what it’s worth, she was asking about you, too…”

The anticipation of seeing you again was somehow worse than the pain, blooming something sharp in his abdomen, and only slightly ebbed by the morphine drip. 

The minutes drag on. The heart monitor at his side counts the seconds instead of his pulse. His fists curl against the stiff hospital sheets when he remembers the sticky red blood that had dripped slowly down your arm — the way you so easily brushed it all off, the way you so desperately wanted to stay at his side.

The door creaks softly open.

Something tightens in his chest.

You linger in the doorway for several long moments, as if you aren’t allowed to come any closer just yet. You’re bathed in the shadow of the lamplit recovery room and backlit by the too-bright hallway outside. He can only vaguely see the outline of your features from here — weighed down with fear and exhaustion and relief. 

The laceration on your arm has been cleaned and sewn. It’s still raging a little around the marred edges, but will heal into a thin scar in a few weeks’ time — a story you’ll tell for years to come.

Jack grunts as he struggles to sit further up on the raised bed, but hides it by clearing his throat. “You look good…” he observes in a rasp.

“Are you flirting with me, Dr. Abbot?” you joke with narrowed eyes.

“I am,” he quips back. “Thanks for finally noticing.”

You scoff a faint laugh and shut the door behind you with a quiet click. You can’t help but feel a little like the air has thinned as you walk further inside. You focus on your wringing hands the entire way to his bedside. You don’t have the strength to meet his unwavering stare, still puffy from a medically induced slumber, but never once straying from your face.

“You okay?” he wonders aloud, shattering the silence between you.

You huff a weak laugh. “I’m not the one who just came out of surgery, Jack…”

“Fair point…” he nods.

“But yes… I’m okay,” you add, if only to appease him. “What about you? How do you feel?”

Jack exhales a heavy breath, chest deflating behind his thin hospital gown. “…Like I got shot.”

That almost gets a real laugh out of you. 

“Yeah. That— That makes sense…”

You flounder in place for a moment, before reaching for the chair by the curtained window and dragging it closer to his bed. Jack is able to eye you more clearly when you settle into the cushioned seat by his side. He can see the redness in your eyes, the tension in your jaw, the way your clammy hands hover like you’re not quite sure what to do with them. 

Whatever closeness you had before those shots rang out is long gone now. You orbit around him like he’s a stranger to you, like you’re not quite sure what to do with him, like you’re too scared to get any closer.

He bows his head, made of mussed silver curls, in a feeble attempt to meet your stare. He silently begs you to look back at him, but you never do.

“I’m okay, you know?” he coos to you, equal parts because it’s true and because he knows you need to hear it from him.

“No, I know, I just—” You cut yourself off when your fragile voice finally breaks. You shake your head to yourself and swallow hard, picking at the skin of your thumb until it starts to bleed. The scratch there blurs as burning tears gather once more in your gaze. “I can’t stop thinking about it, you know? If you wouldn’t have— have gotten as hurt if… you know, if you weren’t standing in front of me like that—”

His chest twists at the thought of you blaming yourself for it. The burning sensation there hurts him far worse than the one at his side.

“You would’ve gotten it a lot worse if I hadn’t.”

Your eyes snap finally to meet his gaze, though your stare is much more hardened than he’d like.

“But what if something worse had happened to you? Huh? What if you died, Jack?” you scold in words that spill faster from your lips than you can stop them. “Were you even thinking about that?”

“No.”

His honesty stops you cold as much as his lack of hesitation.

“I guess I was just thinking about you…”

The room goes eerily quiet, saved only by the even beeping of the monitor at his side and the distant voices talking in the hall. 

Jack holds your gaze even as it weakens around the edges, even as it glazes over with burning tears you can’t seem to keep away. A rogue droplet clumps your bottom lashes together when your eyes flick down to his abdomen, to the place beneath the blanket where you know the damage lies.

“You’re not supposed to do that to a person, you know?” you whimper. “It’s cruel.”

Jack’s brows furrow. “Do what?”

“Make someone like you, and then— And then get yourself shot,” you stammer, gesturing wildly with your anxious hands. “Make someone almost lose you before—”

Your breath hitches.

Jack leans further in. “Before what?” he presses gently.

“Before they’ve even gotten to have you…”

His lip flickers with a weak smile. “You do have me,” he assures. “You’ve had me way before I ever asked you out— You know that.”

“Yeah,” you scoff with a grin of your own, much sadder in comparison. “So much for that date, huh?”

Jack’s eyes narrow in a challenging stare. “And what makes you think it’s not happening?” 

You blink owlishly back at him. “Do you want a list, or…?”

That earns a weak chuckle from him, until he winces at the ache it puts in his side a moment later. He cradles the bandaged wound with a grimace, and your chair scrapes the tile when you stand. “I’ll tell Princess you need more morphine,” he vaguely hears you say, though he reaches for your hand before you can stray too far.

You still in place. Your wide eyes fall to the fingers around your wrist, warm like a furnace, and calloused like softly textured velvet.  

“I’m okay,” he tells you, then takes a wavering breath in before repeating more firmly. “I’m okay— And you’re not going anywhere— And I’m not missing our date for the world, alright?”

Your features screw, hardly convinced.

“We’ll order something here,” he shrugs. “Hell, we can eat the cafeteria food for all I care, just… Don’t leave. I mean, I kinda got shot, so…The least you could do is indulge me a little…”

You cave instantly under the weight of his light-eyed stare. Your chest hitches with a quiet laugh. “It’d be a pretty grim first date…” you quip.

“Yeah, well…” he trails off, smoothing his thumb over your knuckles. “I plan on having plenty more, less grim ones with you, so…”

Your eyes narrow in a cynical squint despite the smiling tugging at the edges of your mouth. “That’s very presumptuous of you, Dr. Abbot…”

“Well, you could always so no,” he croons drily.

“Not a chance,” you argue without pause, gripping his hand with great strength — an unsaid promise. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“Getting rid of you?” Jack echoes with a scoff, wincing when it hurts him but smiling up at you anyway. “That was never a part of the plan, kid— I took a bullet trying to keep you, in case you forgot."

He’s far too familiar with the faces here for anything else. Sonny’s had been standing for longer than he has, to be fair — he had his first drink here, back when no one cared how old you really were, so long as you weren’t totally stupid about it; he had his first kiss here, too, by the dumpster in an alley from a woman much older than he was, who he revered as some sort of god until he got to med school. 

Sonny’s had given him a lot over the years, so Jack figured it was only right that he give back in return. 

He’d gotten several of its patrons out of a number of sticky situations over the years. Everyone knew to call him if someone had gotten themselves into trouble — whether that be bathroom overdoses, bar fight aftermaths, or kids with fake IDs who’d drunk their weight in whiskey. They knew Jack Abbot would fix them right up. No questions asked, no money needed, no judgment at all.

Except for today, he hadn’t gotten a single call, nor had he heard a murmur of anything medical-related on the police scanner all afternoon. His day off had been exceptionally quiet, which he thinks is why he struggles to sleep tonight, without the adrenaline crash from a long day forcing him into slumber.

That’s why he comes into Sonny’s for an actual drink, for the first time in a long time — to escape the loneliness of his home for a while, and to down a few beers that’ll hopefully put him to sleep when he inevitably has to return to its emptiness. That’s why he welcomes the racing heart he gets, too, when you glance at him over your shoulder at the sound of his voice.

“Didn’t ya hear?” a familiar voice calls from the booth nearest to the door. “We’re celebrating!”

Jack turns his head to find Louie sitting in the cracked vinyl booth, ahead of two men who seem to be around his age. He nurses a sweaty pint in his sun-kissed hand, with two more empty ones sitting at his side. 

If Jack knows anything about Mr. Cloverfield, it’s that he’s already had much, much more than that tonight alone. ‘Cause the last time he saw Louie, he had a BAC of .420, and was walking and talking just fine — aside from the shakes he couldn’t quite get rid of.

“Weren’t you supposed to be taking it easy, Louie?” Jack squints.

“I was,” the older man assures with a lopsided smile that says otherwise. “But now we’re celebrating.”

“Oh, yeah?” he scoffs and walks further inside, ignoring the way his shoes threaten to stick to his hardwood with every step. “And what’s that?”

Louie motions to you with his half-gone beer. “That one’s starting a new job tomorrow.”

Jack’s eyes cut back to you. 

You duck away on instinct when his gaze locks with yours, only then realizing how long you’d been staring. You keep your head bowed like a shy child when he slides into the bar stool next to yours, replacing the scent of an ancient bar with the warmer scent of expensive cologne.

“Oh, really?” the stranger hums. “Where at?”

“Nowhere special. Just retail,” you say with a lazy shrug, struggling to find the courage to meet his unwavering stare. “But I just moved into town, so… I figured I’d buy a round for the house.”

You reach for the shot rack ahead of you, where three narrow glasses filled with clear liquid sit in a row. You go to pass one over to the strange man beside you, but he dismisses you with a shake of his head — made of greying curls that match the silver scruff on his jaw.

“Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t have a pretty girl buyin’ my drinks.”

A laugh sputters from your mouth, rolling off your half-numb tongue. “Pretty girl? What— Are you flirting with me, or is this just… your usual level of arrogance?”

“Neither. I’m just… stating the obvious,” Jack says with a cheeky half-smile, shifting on the squeaking leather stool to reach for the wallet in the back pocket of his jeans. He turns to the bartender and wonders aloud, “What’s her tab, Johnny?”

You burn red-hot almost instantly. “Don’t tell him—”

“$94.57—” the older man answers before you can get the words out, then cuts himself off with a weathered look of apology. “—Oh. Sorry.”

You grimace and hide your burning face behind your hands. “God, that’s so embarrassing…” you whine, muffled into your palms.

“Hey. You’re celebrating,” Jack shrugs. “I get it.”

You hear the man’s leather wallet flip open. You peek through your fingers to find him pulling out a heavy credit card. Your features flood with horror when he hands it off to the bartender.

“Oh, no— I can’t let you do that.”

“You’re not letting me do anything,” the older man scoffs, folding his freckled arms along the counter’s edge. “I want to. ‘Cause we’re celebrating, remember?”

You meet his smug smile with an unsure wince.

Jack caves with a sigh. “Okay, you can make it up to me by drinking with me tonight. How about that?”

Your chest warms with a funny feeling that you’d rather blame on the alcohol. You purse your lips to the side of your mouth before he catches you smiling too wide and nod slowly in response.

“Sure…” you shrug, feigning an air of nonchalance you lost the moment the pretty stranger caught you staring. “I guess I can handle that…”

The stranger — he hasn’t yet given you his name, nor do you bother to ask for it — buys you two more drinks after the fact. 

You sip slowly at the first one, then forget to taste the second, too busy catching his gaze every time he looks your way. Lingering eye contact had always perturbed you, but not his. You liked it when he held your stare whenever you turned to face him; you liked it even more when you could feel his eyes on you whenever you looked away again.

You give him this smile from time to time, a barely-there sort of smirk that glittered mostly in your eyes, whenever you tilted your chin to peer at him through your lashes. It was as sweet as it was heavy, honeyed and full of gravity, like you knew something about him that he didn’t — like you were searching somewhere deep in his soul.

Really, though, you were just wildly skeptical of him — eyeing him in silence and trying to figure out if he was real, if this was real. How many times have you played this game, old man? you’d ask him if you had the courage. How many hearts have you already broken? Am I gonna regret it when mine breaks next?

You’re not sure, but you let him walk you to your place anyway, and talk him into letting you buy him a donut from the shop across from your apartment building on the way. He tells you it’ll sober you up, even though you aren’t all that drunk anymore; you tell him that he’ll never want anything else once he’s tasted this one, and he fights the urge to make a sex joke.

“Thanks for walking me home,” you tell him through the wad of donut still stuck in your cheek, standing a step above him on the stony stairs to your building. “And for turning out not to be a serial killer.”

Jack balls his napkin of crumbs into his fist. “Well, there’s still time— You know, if you’re disappointed.”

“Eh,” you hum playfully, swallowing through the mouthful. “Maybe just a little.”

“Then I’ll see myself out, I guess…” the man huffs, feigning a morose disposition, and distantly praying you’ll stop him. “It’s getting pretty late.”

Your eyes narrow into thin slits, and it feels like his heart has stopped — like you’re using some sort of secret superpower to steal his breath.

You shake your head and tell him, “It’s not that late.”

So Jack follows you up to your apartment despite his better judgment, drawn to a siren song that he knows is bound to kill him sooner or later.

Your apartment is mostly empty, he finds, considering you had only just moved into it. 

There’s a couch, an air mattress, and a small television on a plastic bin shoved into the quaint living room. There’s one chair at the kitchen island, and a sea of boxes on the counter. You apologize profusely for the mess as you weave through the maze of cardboard for the refrigerator. You bring him a chilled bottle of white wine on the way back.

“I’d pour it into a fancy glass or something, but… I don’t have any,” you confess as you plop down onto the couch beside him, which still smells like the house you just bought it from. “I don’t even have cups. Or silverware. I barely even have a kitchen.”

Jack laughs. “You just moved here, and the first thing you thought to buy was wine?”

“Well, yeah,” you shrug like it’s obvious. “I had to get the essentials, obviously.”

“Obviously,” he echoes with a scoff.

The wine is bad. Almost comically bad. He nearly chokes on it when he takes his first sip, like he’s a teenager again, taking his very first ever drink of alcohol. It’s bitter with an extremely sweet aftertaste that coats his tongue long after he’s swallowed it down. But you don’t seem to mind it, though — you drink it like it’s some sort of delicacy, which he knows it must be for you, ‘cause he was young and broke once, too.

He takes slow sips every time you pass the sweaty bottle his way, if only because doing so means putting his lips where yours once kissed.

“So…” Jack starts after you’ve run out of things to say, sitting with his thighs spread and his heavy head tilted against the couch. He licks the sheen of alcohol from his mouth, passes you the wine, and wonders aloud, “What’s your story, huh?”

“My story?” you laugh into the lip of the bottle, curling your legs beneath you to face him better as you take a short sip. “Why do I have to have a story?”

“Everyone has a story,” Jack scoffs. “Think about it— There was something that led you to that bar tonight, right?”

“Most people would call that fate.”

“What about you?” he asks, then follows at the look you give him. “Would you call it fate?”

You think for a moment, then nod your head against your fist. “Yeah… I guess so.”

Jack nods slowly, scruffy cheek brushing the cushion beneath him. “So if I… I don’t know… If I kissed you right now… Would you call that fate, too?”

Your laugh washes over him like drops of summer rain. 

“Real smooth…” you croon drily.

“It’s just a hypothetical.” 

“Then, no. I wouldn’t call that fate.” You huff and lean forward to set the bottle onto the box you’re using as a makeshift table. “I think I’d call that taking what I want.”

Despite his own forwardness, Jack is still slightly surprised when you close the distance between you, rather than sit back into place across from him. You rest your knees on the sunken cushions instead, and rest your fist on the space between his spread thighs as you lean in closer. 

Jack gets a whiff of the perfume on your skin, then the bittersweet alcohol on your tongue, right before your wine-slick mouth catches his own.

He tenses on instinct at the feeling of you, then relaxes with a heavy breath through his nose a second later, when you lick into his parted mouth. It takes him a moment to kiss you back, because he doesn’t realize until that very second that he hasn’t made out with someone in years. 

He reaches for you with trembling hands, curling one around your arm and the other around the back of your neck to cradle you closer to him. 

You kiss him lazy and slow. You touch him lazy and slow, too, trailing your palms from his scruffy jaw to his broad chest as you straddle his lap. He wonders if you can feel his heart pounding beneath the thin t-shirt he wears — or his cock growing slowly stiff in the confines of his jeans. 

He tries to touch you with a similar confidence, with his wide hands resting on your hips, but he can’t seem to stop shaking.

You kiss and lick the thoughts from his brain. He thinks of nothing but the way you feel against him — feels nothing but your warm weight on top of him. He doesn’t realize he’s grinding you over his lap until he feels you moan into his mouth. Then he pulls away with a quiet smack, wearing your spit down to his chin and something honeyed in his eyes.

“We really doin’ this?” he wonders through panted breaths.

You smile with kiss-bitten lips, twirling your fingers in the silver curls at the nape of his neck. “Depends… Do you wanna do this?”

“Depends,” he echoes. “Are you too drunk for this?”

“I’m not drunk,” you scoff. “I’m a big girl— I can hold my liquor.”

Something dark flickers in his heavy eyes.

Your smile widens.

“What about you, huh? Do you think you got drunk off a few sips of wine? Or can you handle your alcohol… big boy?” 

Jack feels his chest flare with a white-hot feeling. He forces himself to breathe through it as he jokes back, “Big boy, huh? Are you flirting with me or is this just— what was it you said— your usual level of arrogance?”

“Neither,” you hum with a cheeky grin. “This is me very humbly, and only slightly embarrassingly, asking if you wanna fuck me on that air mattress over there?”

He’s fleetingly stunned by your forwardness but recovers even quicker. He thinks he’d do just about anything you asked of him in this moment, without question or second thought. It frightens him almost as much as it excites him.

“Yeah…” Jack sighs, half-breathless. “Want me to prove it to you?”

You nod until the words catch up to you. 

“Yes, please.”

You’re a pair of anxious limbs on the cheap air mattress across the room. Jack can’t seem to stop apologizing — first when his pants are off and you see his prosthetic for the first time — “Sorry,” he’d said, only because it felt like he should, “For what?” you shrugged back, with your bra strap slipping off your shoulder. 

He apologized a second time when the flimsy mattress shifted under his weight and sent him toppling gracelessly on top of you; and then a third when he pierced you for the first time, a little rougher than he intended to.

“Sorry. Are you okay?” he wonders, half-strangled, ‘cause you’re gripping his cock like a vice. “Is this too much— Do you need me to—?”

“No, no. It’s okay,” you assured through labored breaths. He had prepped you with his fingers beforehand, to be fair. The orgasm he’d given you with them had you slicker than honey, but hadn’t totally prepared you for the girth of his cock. “It feels good, I promise.”

“You don’t want me to stop?” he presses, just to be sure.

“I’m already close, and you haven’t even moved yet,” you confess through a breathless chuckle. “So, no… I don’t want you to stop…”

The only way he can fuck you properly is on your side. The air mattress gives less under your weight in that position, with you wrapped in his arms and with your leg thrown over his hip. He curls one hand under and over your back while his other digs bruises onto the plush skin of your ass, pulling you into him every time he thrusts inside of you.

Your strangled whines and his grunted moans echo through the expanse of your empty apartment.

“Tell me it feels good,” he pants against you — warm breath fanning over your jaw, nose bumping against your own. “Tell me you want me.”

You obey without thinking, babbling brainlessly. 

“Feels so good…” you whine through gritted teeth, digging crescent shapes into the skin of his freckled shoulders. “Want you so bad— Want you to make me cum— Fuck, I want you—”

Want you, want you, want you.

You repeat it like a mantra.

You cum on his cock a second later, and it feels like praying.

The pretty stranger is not next to you when you wake up on the half-deflated air mattress the next morning. 

Golden sunlight peeks through the blinds in flaxen streams from where you’d forgotten to close them the night before. You squint your eyes and blink rapidly to clear the haze of sleep, trying to place when the stranger must’ve left. You hadn’t felt him get up, so you figure it must’ve been pretty early — right after he fucked you so good it put you to sleep, maybe. 

His clothes are gone. The only trace of him ever being there is the imprint of his body in the tousled sheets beside you, and in the soreness in the very pit of your stomach where you can still feel him inside of you. 

A distant part of you misses the stranger, but a bigger part of you is thankful — because the only thing worse than a one-night stand with a stranger you just met, is having to share awkward goodbyes the morning after with a stranger you just met.

“Thank god…” you grumble as you stretch your tired limbs, plucking your phone from its charger on the floor before trudging down the hall for the bathroom. You only vaguely notice that the door is shut, and that there’s a thin strip of light peeking out from underneath it before you swing it open.

“Morning,” a familiar voice greets, gruff and half-muffled.

Your head snaps up from your phone. Your tired eyes go wide when you’re faced suddenly with the pretty stranger from last night — already dressed for the day and brushing his teeth by the sink. Your feet stumble backward on instinct. Your back hits the doorframe as your free hand flies to your pounding chest.

“Oh, my god—”

“Shit. Sorry,” the older man laughs. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He bends at the waist to spit into the sink.

You try to catch your breath.

“I… I didn’t know you were still here… Sorry…”

He scoffs like he’s half-offended by the notion. “I wasn’t just gonna leave. I’m not that big of an asshole…”

Your brows furrow as you tilt your head to the side in a confused sort of look. Because that was sort of the point of one-night stands, after all — the leaving. 

“Oh, and I, uh— I found a pack of toothbrushes under the sink,” he tells you. “I hope that’s okay.”

“No, yeah, that’s… That’s fine,” you shrug and cross your arms over your chest. You slouch slightly in place, trying to keep the hem of your sweatshirt from rising and revealing that you’re naked underneath it — ‘cause it still feels a bit weird, even though he got pretty well acquainted with your naked body barely six hours ago. “But, um… I do have to leave for work. Like, super soon, so…”

“You wanna ride?” the man wonders through the orange toothbrush in his mouth. “I can walk back down to Sonny’s. Bring my truck back around.”

“No, that’s— that’s okay.” You shake your head and laugh before you mean to, because so much kindness from a one-night stand feels nothing short of alien to you. “You know, we don’t… We don’t have to do… all this…”

Jack plucks the toothbrush from his mouth. The look of confusion that contorts his scruffy face matches your own as he echoes, “…All what?”

“You know…” you trail off with an awkward laugh. “The whole… song and dance of it all… The pretending we care…”

“I do care.”

“Right. Yeah. But… We’re never gonna see each other after this, right? So… Does it really even matter?”

Jack only then seems to remember that he had only just met you, not even twelve hours ago, and that the night before would very likely be the last time he ever got to touch you. He forgot that very important fact somewhere along the line, and tricked himself into thinking you really wanted this, wanted him. The realization hits him like a fist to the stomach.

“Oh… Right…”

He turns away again, half-mournful, and runs the toothbrush under the faucet. Your bleary eyes dart wildly over the weathered edges of his profile, right before you face twists with mortification.

“Oh, god…” you murmur to yourself. “I didn’t take your one-night stand virginity, did I?”

Jack manages a quiet laugh as he wipes his hands on a nearby towel. 

“No. Not— Not really,” he tells you. “I think I’m just a little out of practice, you know? I haven’t been with anyone since I got married.”

“Oh, my god— You’re married?!”

“No!” he shouts, laughing louder at the horrified look on your face. “I mean, I haven’t had a one-night stand since before I was married. And definitely not since my wife died, so…”

“Oh, jeez…” you wince, shifting awkwardly on your bare feet. “Sorry…”

The sorrowful look you give him is the same look he’d been trying to avoid this whole time. It finds him very suddenly wanting to get out of here as quickly as he can. 

“I’ll, uh… I’ll see myself out, I guess,” he tells you.

“Okay,” you nod with a wavering smile. “Thanks…”

He pauses mid-stride in the doorway, towering over you as he flashes you an amused look — all furrow-browed and smiling. “For what?” the man scoffs.

“I don’t know, actually…” you laugh. “I don’t know what I said that, I just… I felt like I should, you know? I had a pretty good time last night…”

You trail off, and only then realize that you hadn’t yet gotten his name.

“…Jack,” he finishes for you.

“Jack,” you repeat with a firm nod and a shy smile.

And he’s heard his own name a million times, but something about the way you say it sounds different — like everyone else has been saying his name wrong his whole life; like he’s spent years hearing it in a foreign language, and yours is the only one he really understands. 

When he leaves your apartment, it’s with the knowledge that he’ll probably never hear his name the right way ever again.

You make it three hours on your first shift at the PTMC before all hell breaks loose — or, rather, a rollercoaster. 

Several carts derail from the tracks at a nearby theme park, injuring everyone on board and many more on the ground below. It sends a sudden influx of patients straight to your emergency department. You do more in an hour than you did in weeks at your small-town hospital back home, where you interned and did the bulk of your residency, which now feels rather lackluster in comparison.

You’re still wearing the bright crimson blood from the emergency thoracotomy you did in the ambulance bay, when the heart of a young boy with a steel rebar through his chest gave out before he could be wheeled inside. You were forced to work quickly to cut through his chest cavity and reach through his ribs for his heart. You knelt on the gurney and pumped manually at the artery while the EMTs wheeled you to the nearest trauma room. 

You’re only just finishing the transfusion on the patient when another trauma is called in.

You can still feel the boy’s heart in your hand when you peel off the bloodied PPE, replacing it with a fresher set of gown and gloves, as you follow Dr. Robby to the ambulance bay. You struggle to keep up with the man’s longer strides as he passes through the automatic doors, where the fresh air outside smacks you in the face with its sudden reminder to breathe.

“Holy shit…” you hear yourself huff, still half-dazed from the previous operation. “Is it always this bad? Please tell me it’s not always this bad.”

“It’s not always this bad,” the older man affirms without looking back at you. “But I have seen a whole lot worse than this, R3, trust me— Alright, what do we got?”

Robby peers through the back of an open ambulance parked crooked in the bay. He grits his teeth to help lower the gurney to the ground, and an older man comes into view. He’s bloodied and unconscious, and his camo uniform has been cut down the middle to accommodate intubation. 

As you rush to Robby’s side, a familiar voice fills your ears: “My buddy, Officer Hiro, high-velocity GSW— He’s getting harder to bag.”

Another camo-wearing officer steps out when the gurney hits the ground. He stands at the head of the narrow bed, squeezing rhythmically at the intubation bag in his fist. His hand is stained with dark red blood. He’s immediately familiar to you, though in your daze, it’s hard to place from where. 

You blink once and realize it’s the stranger from the night before — the one you all but kicked out of your apartment this morning. The man from Sonny’s who cleared your tab, who you shared a bottle of cheap wine with on your secondhand couch, who fucked you dizzy in the center of your flimsy air mattress barely twelve hours ago. 

You’re filled with an immediate horror at the sight of him. You think death would be a kinder fate when his gaze locks suddenly with yours. 

Jack’s eyes squint the same way yours did, like he’s not sure if it’s really you he’s seeing. They widen with realization a second later, but he turns away without a word, continuing to brief Robby on the man’s sustained injuries while you rush him to the nearest trauma room. 

“Help me cut down a 6-0 ET tube,” he tells you without glancing your way. 

You’re grateful for his apathy, feeling like you’ve been spared from the awkwardness of being faced with a stranger you were never supposed to see again. You wouldn’t have let him into your empty apartment at all if you knew, much less fucked him on an air mattress. And you maybe would’ve practiced a little more humility before kicking him out this morning if you realized he was gonna be your goddamn attending.

You’re only able to breathe again when you leave his side to cut the tube. The exhale gets knocked out of your legs all over again when you turn to face him once more, finding him wearing a smile that you already know means trouble.

“Fancy meeting you here, by the way,” he squints behind his safety glasses.

“Likewise,” you nod once, gaze averted, as you pass him the clear tube in your gloved fingers.

Jack works with deft hands, utterly concentrated, even despite his nonstop teasing. “That retail gig didn’t work out for you, I take it?”

“Retail?” you hear Robby murmur from somewhere behind you.

Your face burns hot.

“I was let go this morning, actually,” you try to joke, though your wavering voice gives your timidity away. “And I realized I always wanted to be a doctor anyway, so I just… Snuck in here, threw on a coat, and nobody was the wiser.”

You flash him a playful grin, which fades when you get a weird look from the nurses standing just behind him.

“I’m kidding!” you blurt with an awkward chuckle. “I-I’m totally kidding. I’m in R3— I just moved here from—” 

“Hey,” Jack blurts, peering up at you from the glasses sitting low on his nose, and saving you from yourself. “Help me out with this ET tube, please?”

“Yes, sir…” you nod and don’t miss the smug grin he gives you in response.

You somehow manage to make it through the rest of the endotracheal intubation without making a total fool of yourself — until Robby catches you on the way out, that is, once Hiro is finally stabilized. He chucks his gown and gloves into the biohazard bin beside the door and asks how you and Dr. Abbot know each other.

Jack answers honestly before you can think to make up a lie.

“We met last night, actually,” he’d said. “At Sonny’s.”

“The bar, huh?” Robby nodded slowly. “Hope you didn’t come in hungover, R3.”

Your mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, until you were finally able to stammer out a measly, “O-Of course not, sir!”

Robby only laughed. “I’m joking, kid. I watched you keep a boy’s heart going with your hand shoved in his chest cavity… If you’re hungover, I can’t wait to see what you can do sober.”  

He claps you on the shoulder before he walks away. You feel an overwhelming sense of relief at his words. Jack’s praise, on the other hand, makes you feel a little like dying.

“Good work back there,” he says, pulling off his gloves with a dull pop.

“Thanks…” you say with a wavering smile that you hardly mean. “But I, uh— I should probably get going, Dr. Abbot. Dr. Al said she needed me for—”

“Dr. Abbot, huh?” the older man scoffs. “This morning I was Jack.”

“Yeah, well, this morning you were a stranger and notmy attending, so…”

Your gaze is stern but glittering still. You tilt your chin to keep his stare when he towers over you — feet spread shoulder length apart, hands crossed behind his back, light eyes peering at you from the bridge of his nose. 

Even despite his strong stature, something playful swims in his squinted stare as he jokes, “Would you have taken advantage of me, then? You know, if you knew I was gonna be your boss?”

You shove him hard by the shoulder, arguing in a sharp whisper. “I did not take advantage of you, Dr. Abbot.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Jack shrugs. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

You meet his smug smile with a pair of narrowed eyes that dart back and forth between his softer ones — all squishy around the edges with a look that makes your chest feel warm.

“Don’t look at me like that…” you deadpan.

“Like what?” 

“Like you’ve seen me naked,” you scold under your breath, brushing his shoulder with yours as you storm past him down the hallway. “It’s not appropriate, Dr. Abbot.”

Jack watches you with a smile, anyway, while you walk away from him with something swift in your step. He can’t help but eye the way your scrubs cradle your body, which he had held in his hands only last night. He can still remember how your ass felt in his palms; how the sweat on your neck tasted on his tongue; how your features crumpled together right before you came for him.

He goes half-dizzy at the memory.

Not appropriate, indeed.

You’re about an hour away from finishing your shift when you nearly lose your first patient. 

Everything that came before ceases to exist in that moment.

You had seen death. A lot of it. You had scrubbed in on numerous surgeries where patients flat-lined on the operating table. You’d seen illnesses eat a person from the inside out. You’d seen children try and fail to fight off infections that their tiny bodies just couldn’t handle. 

But this time was different — because this time felt like your fault.

Amara was a six-year-old girl who was rushed in, barely conscious, with a fever of 105. By all accounts, she should’ve been your easiest patient of the day — considering the shitshow that preceded her arrival. And you did everything right. Everything that med school taught you. 

You wrapped her in ice packs along her major arteries, gave her a cold IV to cool her internally, and did every test in the book to determine the cause of her raging fever.

“I just don’t understand why her fever isn’t slowing down,” you’d rambled to Jack in the break room, where he’d insisted you take a breather, when he saw the moment getting to you. “I’ve done everything right. It should be going down by now, right?”

He’d stopped your pacing with a firm but gentle hand along the outside of your elbow. 

“Fevers can be stubborn. You know that,” Jack had told you, ducking down to catch your gaze when you tried to look away. “This isn’t about you missing something, alright? It’s just her body taking time. We can reassess when the tests come back. We’re not out of options yet.”

But then she started seizing, and it triggered an arrhythmia in her heart, and the organ started to fail altogether. She’s flat-lining before you can blink. 

You quickly lose count of the minutes you spend doing compressions. You vaguely hear Jack from behind you, telling you to switch positions like you’re supposed to, but you keep on going.

“I got it,” you’d spat through gritted teeth. “I’m fine.”

Your arms grow slowly numb from the strong, never-ending rhythm. Beads of sweat begin to pearl along your forehead, rolling slowly down your temples. You can feel your hair tie slipping from its place, already loose from the long day, before it hits the ground somewhere by your feet. The wild strands fall around your face, billowing with every punched breath from your mouth.

When you feel Jack standing behind you, gathering your hair into his gentle fist, you don’t think about how he was a stranger to you barely a day ago. 

You don’t think about what he did to you with the hand he uses to pull your hair back. You don’t think about the awkward exchange from that morning, or the constant teasing all afternoon, or the way you haven’t been able to think without running into thoughts of him.

You think only of saving this girl.

It takes three rounds of epi to get her heart back into a shockable rhythm, and 40 joules to reset it to its natural beat.

Jack helps you off the bed with two firm hands around your arms — because your legs had all but locked into position from the lengthy compressions — and tells Langdon to take over the remainder of the young girl’s care.

“You alright?” you hear the man ask, while you blink the haze of adrenaline from your eyes. He pats you gently on the back, in a silent reminder to breathe. You nod slowly through a wavering inhale, and he smiles at the wordless affirmation. “You ever thought about going into cardiology?”

“That’s not funny,” you deadpan.

“I’m not joking,” Jack scoffs. “I think you might be the heart whisperer, Doc.”

The nickname catches on by nightfall.

Robby tells you to clock out early, that you deserve it, and you don’t push him on the matter. 

You don’t say a word, actually, as you trudge to the locker room for your bag and leave through the waiting room doors. The cool night air rushes over your burning skin like silk. Your tired body migrates on autopilot to the park across the street, where two benches sit facing each other, lit only by a single amber streetlamp.

You don’t know how long you sit there by yourself — only that you’ve counted nearly a hundred bricks in the pavement by the time Jack Abbot finds you. 

“You’re not thinking about quitting, are you?” he wonders aloud, shattering your train of not-quite thought.

“Hm?” you perk on instinct as your head whips to face him. “Oh. No. Of course not… No one else would take me.”

Jack exhales a quiet laugh at your quip and slides his camo bag from his shoulder. He huffs as he plops down onto the creaking bench beside you, leaving an aching inch or more of space between your bodies. 

Though he’s out of the tactical gear he’d arrived in — left now in his baggy pants and a form-fitting undershirt — the scent of blood still lingers on his skin. It’s only partially drowned out by his cologne; the smell of musky leather reminds you instantly of Sonny’s Tavern.

“Well, I’m sure Common Thread around the corner is probably hiring,” he jokes.

You feel yourself laugh for the first time all day.

“I don’t think Common Thread has been around since the 90s.”

“Really?” the older man huffs, crossing his strong arms over his chest and exhaling a punched-out breath. “Jesus… I need to get out more.”

Your eyes dart over the edges of his profile when he turns away. Your gaze grows soft and wet with the apology you’ve been thinking about all day, which rises to the tip of your tongue just now. 

“I’m sorry, by the way,” you blurt. “For lying to you last night.”

Jack shrugs. “Who cares? We didn’t even know each other.”

“Yeah, but now we do— And now the rest of our relationship is gonna be built on the foundation of a stupid lie.”

Jack arches a greying brow in your direction. “Our relationship, huh?”

“Our working relationship,” you squint. “I’m not going out with you again, Dr. Abbot.”

“I didn’t even ask if you wanted to go out with me!”

“Well, no, but—”

“So do you wanna go out with me?” he blurts with a smug grin.

“No!” you shout, giggling despite yourself. “It’s not appropriate. We have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Oh, yeah?” he hums. “Where?”

“Here!”

“Right here?” 

Jack glances down at where you motion to the space between your bodies. You nod with a poorly held back laugh, and he slides to close the distance between you. You feel almost suffocated by the warmth of his body heat. Your head spins when his thigh brushes the outside of yours. 

“So, by your assessment, would you say that I am now crossing that imaginary line?” the older man jokes drily.

“I’d say you’re crossing several lines, Dr. Abbot.”

He meets your smiling eyes with something more serious glimmering in his. 

“Do you want me to stop?”

You know that you could say yes and that all of this would be over with. All the teasing, all the lingering touches, all of the everything that came before. You could start over. Clean state. You’d be the R3, and he’d be the attending, and that’d be that. Only now that sounds like a total fucking nightmare. The thought of having any less of him now feels like ripping your own heart out through your chest.

You swallow hard and shake your head. “No… I don’t want you to stop.”

“Good,” he nods.

“Good,” you echo with a firm nod and stupid smile.

“We are clocked out now, you know?” Jack tells you, feigning an air of nonchalance. “I technically wasn’t even working in the first place, so… You know, if we kissed right now, I don’t think it’d violate that many HR policies.”

He catches your eyes flitting somewhere over his shoulder before you quip, “No, but your friends might look at us a little funny…”

Jack glances behind him and finds the rest of the day shift crossing the street together. Their distant chatter draws nearer, and you fight back a laugh when the older man slides slowly away from you — before any of them could catch how close the two of you had been. Donnie arrives first, and places his square cooler in the space between you.

“Dr. Abbot and The Heart Whisperer…” the man croons in place of a greeting. “Here. Take the first beer. You deserve it.” 

“Thanks…” you murmur shyly and take the chilled can he motions to you. It opens with a heavy click and a faint hiss. You take a slow sip from it, and nearly forget how to swallow when you feel Jack’s eyes still on you. “Do you… Do you guys do this after every shift?”

“Not always,” Robby answers from the bench across from yours, popping open his own beer with an expert hand. “Usually it’s a lot more lively than this, but…”

“So it’s not always that crazy in there?” 

“No, it’s always a little crazy,” Santos quips from where she stands between Mohan and Whitaker. “But today, Heart Whisperer, is what we call baptism by fire.” 

“Yeah,” Samira scoffs. “Our first shift was the Pittfest shooting.”

“Oh, shit…” you grimace.

“But the good thing is, I can pretty much guarantee that the next shift will be easier.”

You meet Mohan’s kind smile with a wavering one. “Yeah… I hope so.”

“So, what do ya say, R3?” Robby asks with a smile that’s mostly concealed behind his greying beard. “Think you’ll stick around after today’s shitshow?”

You ponder for a long moment, glancing down at the can you nurse in your lap. You trace the circular edge of the aluminum with your free hand as a smile curls slowly at your mouth.

“Yeah, I think I will…” you hum with a slow nod. “If only because I live right across the street from this really nice donut shop— like the best you’ll ever have, so...”

“So now you have to like it here, huh?” Jack finishes for you, with a knowing squint in his light eyes — because he can still taste your mouth the same way he can still taste the late-night pastry he’d shared with you the night before.

“Yeah,” you smile back. “And it’s crazy because I really wasn’t planning on liking it here…”

“Well, donuts tend to have that effect on people, I’ve found,” he squints behind the beer he brings up to his mouth

“Oh, do they?” you wonder sarcastically.

Jack nods slowly, licking the sheen of alcohol from his mouth. “Yeah, actually.”

“Oh, please, tell me more, Dr. Abbot,” you say, giggling despite yourself.

While you watch Jack talk out of his ass about a statistic he totally made up, you vaguely hear Santos turn to Whitaker and mumble, “Okay, so is ‘donuts,’ like, a euphemism for something, or did this shift make us all ten times dumber?”

You flinch so hard your shoulder hits the fridge. You swipe your palms over your wet eyes and cheeks, rapidly scrubbing the evidence of your misery away, before turning in the direction of the masculine voice. You find Jack Abbot lingering in the threshold, eyes wide and attentive, with one weathered hand still wrapped around the silver handle.

Neither of you says a word for several long moments. It could’ve been three seconds or three years; you can’t quite be sure.

“Are you… okay?” the older man presses.

“No. Yeah. I’m—” Your voice breaks, betraying you instantly. You shake your head despite yourself. “I’m fine.”

Jack’s head lowers. His light eyes squint. He doesn’t try to argue; he just looks at you, really looks at you.

“I know I seem crazy,” you laugh through a quiet sniffle. “But I’m fine.”

He steps further inside, closing the door behind him with a soft click. The chaos of the crowded ER goes muffled in an instant.

“Did something happen?” the attending asks lowly. He’s visibly on edge from the Code Hula Hoop from earlier that day — silver head bowed to keep your gaze, strong arms crossed over the chest of his thin black tee.

“No. Nothing like that,” you assure him quickly. “It’s just… It never gets easier, you know?”

Jack’s expression shifts when you turn away to lock up the small fridge behind you. His alarm ebbs into something more sympathetic. “Yeah. I get it…” he mumbles. “Go take a breather, if you need it.”

You shake your head, dismissing the thought immediately. “Robby’s been on my ass all week about taking too much time with my patients as it is. If I don’t pick up a few before I go, he’ll—”

“I’ll deal with him,” Jack cuts in, firm but not entirely unkind. “You go take a break.”

You turn back around, looking half-shy as you cross your arms tight over the chest of your wrinkled scrubs. “I… I can’t…” you mumble.

“…You can’t?”

“I’m like a shark— if I stop swimming, I’ll die.”

Jack would’ve laughed at that if you weren’t so solemn about it; if he hadn’t remembered, in that moment, that you’ve been working since seven the evening before. Almost twenty-four hours ago. “You haven’t slept today, have you?”

“I was going to,” you tell him, a little too quickly. “And then we got all those patients from the waterslide collapse, and then the systems went down, and then Ilana came in, and…”

His brows knit together. “So you haven’t slept since you started your double?”

“No,” you shrug. “I’m just… I’m not tired.”

Jack studies you for a long moment — your wet eyes, your worry-bitten lips, your arms crossed like you’re trying to make yourself as small as possible. You wear the long day all over, along with the grief you’ve been trying to hide all day. Jack knows the signs; he’s seen them in his patients, in his staff, in himself.

It usually starts with a double, and then a patient or two that spikes the adrenaline like a triple shot of espresso. That’s when the mania sets in, the belief you don’t need sleep despite the obvious, which inevitably leads to a crash. And that’s exactly where you’re heading.

“Can I ask you something?” Jack wonders lowly, taking a slow step forward and never once taking his eyes off of you. “Something kinda… personal?”

You hesitate, brows lowered, then nod despite yourself. “Yeah?”

“Do you… Do you see someone?”

You blink owlishly at him. “See someone?”

“Yeah. You know, like a… therapist,” he clarifies. “It’s good, you know, to have someone to talk to about… all this.”

He motions vaguely all around him, to the muffled chaos outside.

“No,” you shake your head, almost amused by the thought. “I’m fine. I don’t need a therapist—”

“Everyone needs a therapist,” Jack huffs a faint laugh. “Especially the people who choose to work here. We’re all lunatics.”

“Well, I’m fine,” you shrug and look away. “It’s everything else that’s so… fucked up.”

Jack exhales hard through his nose, nodding sympathetically. “Yeah, I… I heard about Barry. And his mom. I’m sorry…”

That’s what does it. The reminder of the memory — only from earlier that morning, which you had not forgotten but had tried hard to bury anyway — does it. You feel the dam break, crumbling into nothingness under the weight of an unrelenting pressure. 

“See, that’s— that’s what I’m talking about,” you start with a wet, maniacal sort of laugh. “I spend two hours coding a pre-school teacher, then another two treating her four-year-old, all while trying to get him to talk about what happened. And then I have to act like none of it fazes me, or else I’ll get that whole spiel from Robby— again. And then I do a sexual assault kit that no one will pick up because nobody gives a shit!”

Your voice rings through the quiet room.

You don’t seem to notice it, though, so Jack pretends he doesn’t either. He knows you need this, knows you’ve spent the past near twenty-four hours keeping all of this trapped inside.

“Barry’s dad won’t see the inside of a jail cell for what he did to them, and Ilana’s abuser won’t either, because the police won’t do their job— because nobody fucking cares—”

Your breath comes out sharp, like the air is being punched out through a tight chest. Your words spill from your mouth faster than you can stop them.

“And I’m supposed to help them, right? But how can I when nobody else gives a shit?”

“Hey— Hey…” Abbot coos, taking another step closer when he catches you starting to spiral. “Take a breath, kid…”

His voice is grounding. Steady, almost. A firm sort of comfort you’ve been searching for all day — a tenderness that feels like proof that you’re broken. Suddenly, you feel like you’ve said too much.

“I’m sorry,” you huff with a shake of your bowed head. “I-I have to go— I’m sorry.”

You storm past him to the door, and don’t stop when he calls your name.

Jack looms over the monitor of the now-functioning workstation. 

While the rest of the PTMC scrambles to scan their paper documents into the system, Jack peruses your file. His narrowed eyes flit across the screen, searching for your emergency contact. He holds his phone in his free hand and prepares to dial the number — to tell whoever is on the other line that you need them. 

Because someone did it for him once upon a time, and sometimes he thinks that’s the only reason he’s standing here now.

He’s got his thumb hovering over the green button to call when Robby catches his eye — the same way a dark black storm cloud swirling overhead would catch his eye. The older man tilts his head to glance at the overhead monitor and scratches at the grey patch in his beard.

“Who’s supposed to be overseeing the kid in pedes?”

“I’ll do it,” Jack tells him, half-distracted.

“I have a senior resident who’s supposed to be doing it,” Robby scoffs.

“I told her to take a break.”

The older man’s head snaps in his direction in an instant. His brows lower as his lip twitches into a faint smirk, looking half-offended as he crosses his arms over his chest. “And why would you do that?” he squints.

“She’s had a hard day,” Jack shrugs.

“We’ve all had a hard day,” Robby laughs. “And if we all took off because of one bad shift, none of us would be on this floor right now.”

“And if you had a little bit more basic human empathy, maybe your residents wouldn’t be falling apart, brother.” 

He flashes the older man an unamused glance. Robby flinches slightly at his words, chin jerking like he feels them physically. Jack would’ve apologized for being so harsh any other time — if he hadn’t almost gotten shot today, and if he weren’t already slightly angry at Robby for mistreating you.

“Excuse me. I gotta take this,” he mumbles and brings his phone up to his ear.

Robby scoffs a quiet laugh and shakes his head as he walks off in the opposite direction.

Jack watches him go with an unblinking stare as his phone starts to ring. Once, twice, and then— 

A sharp, grating chirp fills the crowded ER, swelling over the droning chatter and distant beeping. Jack’s eyes snap to the red phone on the other side of the work station, while his own stays pressed to his scruffy jaw. 

Dana peers at the man over the top of her glasses. Her eyes flit from his shocked face to the ringing telephone at her side. She picks it up with a lazy hand and holds it to her ear.

“PTMC charge nurse,” she greets without taking her eyes off Jack. “You mean to call this number?”

“Yeah, I was just—” Jack clears his throat and glances at the monitor below. “This was the emergency contact on file.”

“Well, sorry to get your hopes up…”

She flashes the man a sympathetic smile before hanging up the phone. 

The dial tone beeps in his ear for several long moments. He tries to guess why you would’ve made the E.D. your emergency contact — because you don’t have anyone outside of work, maybe, or because all of your closest friends work here, or because you’d want the ER to know first if something ever happened to you.

It makes his chest hurt either way.

He exhales a slow, heavy breath and shoves his phone back into his scrub pocket. He turns on his heel and makes a beeline for the stairs, hiking up to the roof despite the distant ache it puts on his prosthetic. Because he knows that’s where you are.

Because it’s where he would’ve gone, too.

“Y’know…” a familiar voice cuts through the quiet of the roof, lit only by distant streetlamps. “You’re in my spot, kid.”

You don’t turn to look at him. You’re too tired to take your eyes off the pitch-black hills rolling in the far-off distance, further away from the PTMC than you’ve been in months. Years. You get lost in your own head, and only vaguely register the sound of Jack’s nearing footsteps scuffing against the concrete rooftop.

“It’s getting pretty late…” the man continues, all casual, like you’re not standing on the very edge of the hospital roof. “If you’re hungry, there’s this DoorDash guy. Name’s Marco. He’ll trek up here for an extra ten—”

“Twenty if you want beer,” you finish for him, voice weighed down by something heavy.

“Ah…” Jack hums, closer now. “You come up here often then, huh?”

You exhale a heavy breath that he thinks is meant to be a laugh, though it comes without a usual smile. “I guess you could say that…”

He reaches the metal railing just a few feet from the ledge, where you stand on the other side, with only a thin glass pane keeping you from the roof’s edge. Even though you aren’t looking at him, you can feel him just beside you. The silken summer breeze carries the scent of his cologne as he bends at the waist to rest his elbows along the barrier between you.

“You wanna talk about it?” he wonders quietly, after a few beats of not-quite silence, filled by the sound of passing cars and chatter from the city below. “It’s good to talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” you shrug with a shake of your head. “I just… I thought I was doing some good, you know? By showing up here every day…”

“You are,” Jack insists, firm and immediate. His stare hardens as it flits across your emotionless profile, silently begging for you to look back at him. You avoid his gaze at all costs. “Those people down there— They need you. They need all of us.”

“But what’s the point?” you scoff. “If I can’t help him, then what’s the point?”

“You do help them.”

You scoff a teary laugh.

Jack burns from the inside out.

“You may not see it, kid, but I do,” he tells you. “That little boy in there— He’s still alive because of you.”

“But his mom’s not,” you argue in a detached tone of voice. The starry sky above you starts to blur as you blink back the warm tears gathering at your waterline. “And when Barry grows up, he won’t remember his mom— what she smelled like, what kinda music she liked to listen to in the car— but he’ll remember how the system failed her… Both of them…”

You trail off. Jack stays silent, letting you say all the words that have been raging in your head all day — untrue or otherwise.

“And it’s the same with Ilana, too, you know? I spent three hours with her in that room, doing something I know was triggering for her, and… for what? For the kit to sit in that fridge for two weeks because no one else gives enough of a shit to actually pick it up?”

The dull amber streetlights turn your unshed tears to gold when you finally turn to look at him. Your features are largely emotionless, fixed into the sort of automatic deadpan you train yourself to do as a doctor. But your eyes are wide and glittering with emotion despite yourself when you turn to the man beside you.

“I tricked myself into thinking I was actually doing some good for these people, but…” Your jaw clenches to stave off a sob as you shake your head at yourself. “Turns out, it’s all just… bullshit.”

The corner of Jack’s lip flickers upward into a sympathetic smile, because he knows exactly how you feel. “It’s not, kid…” he murmurs lowly.

“It is,” you insist, still stern despite the way your features crumble. “What I do in there doesn’t matter— None of this shit matters—”

Jack can sense you spiraling, can sense you about to turn away from him before you’ve even done it. He reaches out for you, catching your chin between his thumb and pointer finger to keep your eyes on his.

Your gaze flickers with surprise at first, stunned momentarily by the warmth of his touch, before it softens around the edges with something tender — as if you’d been craving this kindness all day. Your glitter irises follow Jack when he rises to full height, towering over you from the other side of the thin metal railing.

“Hey,” Jack snaps, firm but still strikingly soft with you. “You saved a life today, kid. That matters.” 

Your eyes sting.

“You helped a girl through the hardest day of her life,” he continues, with a stare just as merciless as his words. “That matters, too.”

You shake your head against his calloused hand, trying and failing to repel his words. You need them more than anything, and still, you can hardly stomach them.

“The officers will pick up that kit, I promise you that. And the asshole who hurt her will pay for what he did, I promise you that, too.”

“But you can’t,” you whimper. “You can’t promise me that. You can’t promise anyone that.”

“Well, I am,” Jack says. “Because I’m gonna make sure it happens. Because I believe it— Because I believe in Barry and Ilana, just like I believe in you. And without you… If you weren’t here for them today… Who knows what would’ve happened?”

His gentle grip on your chin softens when he knows you aren’t going to turn away from him again, but he still doesn’t let you go.

“That’s the point,” Jack tells you, so softly you could cry. “That’s why it matters. That’s why we need you here, understand?”

You sniffle quietly and nod despite yourself, if only to free yourself from this suffocating moment — from Jack’s unrelenting tenderness, which you feel hardly deserving of now.

He clicks his lips against his teeth and smiles softly as he murmurs, “Yeah, I’m gonna need to hear you say it…”

Your wet eyes are stern with unsaid protest, with lashes all clumped together from unshed tears. Your voice is small and more fragile than glass as you abide him anyway. “I understand…”

“Oh, c’mon…” Jack lilts drily. “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, kid— At least try to make it sound like you believe it.”

You roll your glassy eyes, more in embarrassment than annoyance.

Jack grins wider. “Yeah, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I can get real annoying if I need to…”

A faint smile pulls at the corners of your mouth despite yourself.

“…I understand,” you repeat, slightly steadier this time.

“Yeah…” Jack praises with a slow nod. “There we go…”

There’s a lingering beat thereafter, where you think he’s about to let go of your chin. Only he doesn’t. 

And it isn’t till then that you realize how intently he’s looking at you now, with eyes heavy and glittering beneath the dim starry night. Your heart lurches in your chest when you think he might kiss you — a fleeting, irrational thought that makes your breath shudder and your mouth fall gently agape.

A sudden boom cracks suddenly through the air.

You flinch hard as a blue-pink firework crackles in a navy black sky.

“Shit…” you huff, clutching at your racing heart. “That scared me…”

Jack’s chest aches with a similar fear. He reaches for you on instinct as his own hands start to tremble. 

“Here. C’mon,” he mumbles to himself, calloused hands firm on the outsides of your elbows. “Come back on this side before you give me a damn heart attack, kid…”

He assists you over the railing. You swing one leg over, and then the other, in a motion that feels practiced. Familiar. Until your left foot catches slightly on the edge, that is, and sends you stumbling into the older man’s chest.

“Whoa—“

“I got you,” Jack murmurs, steadying you with firm hands.

For a second, you’re closer than you’ve ever been. You can feel his heart racing against your palms. He can feel your breath fanning across his scruffy cheek. You can see his heavy eyes flitting wildly between yours, and again, you think he might kiss you — you want so desperately for him to kiss you.

Then the heavy door to the roof swings open, and the two of you jerk rapidly apart.

Laughter and muddled conversation come spilling out as a handful of the day shift emerges, with Donnie and Princess leading the charge, carrying a square blue cooler between them. The former smiles when he finds the two of you standing there together.

“You guys are early to the party, I see,” the man shouts over another set of booming fireworks.

“You kinda have to be when you’re the life of one,” Jack shoots back. “It’s more polite that way.”

“Here,” Princess says, handing the man a chilled beer. “Figured you could use one after getting shot today.”

“Shot at,” he corrects drily and takes the can from her grasp. “But I’m not drinking— I’m still on the clock… But she’s not.”

He turns to you, holding the beer out expectantly between you.

“I-I still have a few rounds to finish up,” you shake your head.

“I’ll do ‘em,” Jack shrugs. “You take a load off, alright? You deserve it.”

You hesitate for a moment, swallowing hard before reaching for the can with trembling hands. “…I deserve it,” you repeat under your breath, as though you were trying the words on for size.

“Yeah, you do,” Jack squints.

The can cracks faintly when you open it. You bring it to your mouth and take a slow sip, watching as the fireworks continue raining down overhead. 

The day shift gathers around you at the railing with their own beers, while sparkling rainbow hues decorate the dark rooftop. You lean against the cool metal, now on the other side of it, and a little bit better than you were before.

Jack lingers just next to you, and forgets to watch the show playing overhead.

He doesn’t even realize he’s staring until you turn to look at him, eyes wide with worry.

“You’re okay, right?” you mutter sheepishly, licking the sheen of alcohol from your mouth. “It’s not too loud out here, is it? ‘Cause we can go back inside if you want.”

The corner of Jack’s mouth lifts in a smile at your concern, and at your use of ‘we.’ The warmth you put in his chest far outweighs the lingering panic settled there. 

He shakes his head with a glassy-eyed gaze, “I’m right where I wanna be,” he assures in a honeyed voice.

You turn away, face flaring, and hide your smile behind your beer.

“Yeah…” he hears you mumble. “Me, too…”

“If this is all it takes to rile you up, wait until something actually goes wrong,” Dr. Park had scolded. “Now do you want me to go easy on you, or do you wanna get better, Crybaby?”

You stayed. And he made you better. But the nickname stuck.

Crybaby became a term of endearment, a symbol of how far you’d come since your interning days, and was shortened to Baby somewhere down the line. “Baby, take this patient down to CT for me, will you?” and “Cut me an ET tube, Baby, six millimeters,” and—

“Good luck getting that consult, baby,” Jack Abbot says from the opposite side of the exam room, with his strong arms crossed over his chest. The nickname sounds different spilling from his lips. It always has. “The OR’s backed up with Westbridge patients. It could be hours before we get a room booked.”

“She doesn’t have hours…” you murmur under your breath, squeezing past Whitaker and Ogilvie as you part from your unconscious patient. “Excuse me…”

“W-What are you doing?” the former boy stammers.

“Getting us a consult…” you say, half-distracted, as you reach for the red telephone on the wall. You press the cool plastic to your ear and dial the ortho extension.

Jack watches attentively from the sidelines as you make the call upstairs. 

“You already sound like you’re gonna say no, so I’m just gonna ask quickly,” you say. “I know, I know— Terrible timing. But we both know I’m your favorite, so just hear me out.”

“Favorite…?” Ogilvie murmurs. “Wait— Who is she calling?”

“Park the Shark,” Whitaker answers solemnly.

“Or as I like to call him— Doctor Dick,” Jack says with a cynical smile. “On account of him being a dick.”

Whitaker nods in concurrence. “To everyone but her.” 

You hang up the phone and return to your spot at the patient’s bedside. “Ortho consult’s on its way,” you tell them, half-distracted, as you check the ketamine levels in her IV drip.

“How’d you do that?” Ogilivie squints.

“I asked nicely,” you shrug.

Brendon Park comes into the emergency department barely five minutes later, and brings a tense air in with him that matches the unsmiling look on his narrow face. The way his dark blue eyes lock on you the second he walks in can only be described as sharklike. 

“What do we got, Baby?” he asks you, and only you, utterly ignoring the other bodies in the room as he makes a beeline to your side. He smells of sea salt and sandalwood when he towers just behind you, standing several inches taller.

Jack swallows down the anger that swells suddenly in his throat like bile.

“Ten-foot fall onto a metal fence,” you tell him. “Tib-fib amputation— Pretty clean cut.”

“Sliced right through the bone like a guillotine,” Whitaker adds.

Park turns slowly, dark eyes zeroing in on the mulleted boy. “Was I talking to you?”

The boy’s cheeks flare red. He clears his throat. “Uh— No. No, sir.” 

“Let me see the X-ray,” the attending says to you, much softer in comparison, and follows you the short distance to the bulky machine in the corner.

“See?” you hum. “Not too bad, right?”

His eyes flit from the x-ray to your hopeful gaze. The corner of his mouth flickers faintly upward as he nods once in response. “Yeah. Should be pretty fun— Where’s the leg?”

“Double bagged on ice.” You motion across the room. 

Whitaker watches the older man walk past him with an unblinking gaze. “I didn’t know he smiled…” he whispers incredulously under his breath.

“Yeah, me neither, kid,” Jack mumbles, swaying softly in place, as he keeps his eyes locked on the two of you. 

His jealousy is misplaced, but inevitable. Everyone had a certain soft spot for you, but he couldn’t quite stand it from Park — the man who didn’t seem to like anyone or anything but his work and you. Jack knows it makes a part of you feel special, you are special, but he wants to be the only one making you feel that way.

“Tell him how we prepped the limb, Ogilivie,” you tell the MS3.

“Oh, please, not me,” the curly-haired boy mumbles under his breath, looking instinctively to Whitaker for assistance. He swallows hard when Brendon’s dark eyes snap to his. “Uh— Sterile saline in the inner bag, ice water in the outer bag. No direct ice to skin contact.”

Park nods and turns away, unwrapping the severed leg on the table below. “Good…”

“Thank you.”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” the attending snaps. His eyes soften the second he turns to you. “Let me guess— You wrapped this?”

“How’d you know?” you grin.

“Because it’s neat,” Park quips drily as he pulls the bluing limb from the plastic. “And I don’t think Abbot suddenly developed fine motor skills.”

“Stop flirting with me, Shark,” Jack monotones.

“Antibiotics?” the man squints.

“Cefazolin and gent,” you answer. “And we’re already cleared her chest, abdomen, and pelvis.”

Park nods to himself, examining the severed leg with his gloved hands. “Clean wound… No rush injury… Rapid transport time…” he mumbles to himself, visibly pleased in a way that makes your stomach do a backflip. “Replantation is a go. I’ll go ahead and book an OR, get it taken care of for you.”

“Thanks…” you say, smiling a little wider than you realize. Because ever since the day he embarrassed you in front of all your coworkers, you’ve made it your personal mission to impress him.

“What’s the catch?” Jack quips from across the room. “You already got a packed OR so… What? You’re just doing us a favor out of the kindness of your heart?”

“Hell, no,” Brendon scoffs. “Baby’s gonna scrub in with me.”

Your breath hitches in your throat. You’re not sure whether to be happy or horrified, ‘cause you haven’t done a surgery with him since you were an intern.

“Holy shit— Really?”

“Yeah. As long as you promise not to fuck up again,” Park deadpans, though there’s something distinctly soft in his eyes as he quips, “And if you can keep your guard dog on a leash for a few hours.”

Your eyes turn instinctively to Jack. You find his features slightly hardened but mostly emotionless. He shrugs despite the distant searing in his chest.

“She doesn’t need my permission.”

“Then why are you glaring like I’m about to steal your favorite toy, old man?” Brendon scoffs.

Jack’s eyes widen. His head swivels slowly over his shoulder, as if he were looking for someone standing behind him. “I know you’re not talking about me,” he quips drily.

“I would love the opportunity to scrub in, Dr. Shark— I mean, Park,” you stammer.

“Alright, then. Let’s go,” he nods, pulling off his gloves with a low pop as he storms back towards the door. “The rest of you, irrigate the hell out of this with three liters.”

“Wait— three liters?” Whitaker blurts.

Park glares. “Of saline, genius.”

“I… I knew you meant saline…”

You stop short in the doorway with Jack at your side, right before you turn to follow Park into the elevator. You flash him a wide-eyed look full of hope and distant worry, “You’re not mad at me, are you? For doing this with Shark?”

“I couldn’t be,” Jack scoffs.

“Well, then, I’ll let you know how it goes later?” you murmur sheepishly, shifting on your feet like a shy child. “Over dinner?”

“Sure,” he nods. “I’ll take you somewhere nice. You know, to celebrate.”

He gives you a soft smile that fades the second you’ve turned the corner. He feels the weight of his own insecurity sitting heavy on his chest. The notion that he’s much too old for you tends to follow him like a shadow, but it rears its mean, green, ugly head a little extra now. 

“Hey…” Robby greets, then slows his stride when he walks past the tree men leaving the exam room. “What’s the long faces for?”

Abbot flashes him an unamused gaze. “Shark attack,” he deadpans.

Robby nods sympathetically. “Yeah, that’ll do it…”

The familiar chaos of the ED wraps around you like a blanket when you come down from the OR — the beeping monitors, the rolling stretchers, the hundred different conversations. It feels welcoming, in a strange sort of way; it fuels you in a way it hasn’t in a long, long time. It feels less like you’re surviving your shift now, and more like you could solve every medical inquiry in this hospital if someone asked you to. 

You feel ten feet tall and lighter than air as you weave your way through the crowded emergency department. Jack can see it from where he watches you at the workstation with an eagle-eyed stare. Your scrubs are creased from your hours in the OR; your eyes are as wild as the distant smile sitting crooked on the very edges of your mouth. 

You plant yourself at the computer next to his, and Abbot pretends like he hasn’t been waiting for you this whole time.

“How’d it go?” he asks distantly, trying to be casual.

“Great,” you nod with a proud smile. “Like really great. There was a twisted artery, and I was the only one who caught it. I got to reroute it all on my own— It was crazy.”

Jack feels himself smiling despite himself, basking in the rays of your sunshine disposition.

“Really?” he hums, nodding once. “Good job, baby.”

You couldn’t possibly count how many times you hear that nickname on a daily basis, but it’s different coming from Jack. It’s warmer, more familiar — makes your stomach do backflips like it’s the first time you’re hearing the word from his mouth. You go dizzy accordingly, as your fingers flit across the keyboard below.

“I’m just glad I didn’t make a total fool of myself like I did the first time,” you scoff.

“Yeah, me too,” a familiar voice quips from behind you.

You glance over your shoulder and catch a glimpse of Dr. Park as he appears suddenly behind you, dropping a file on the desk next to you mid-stride. His sea salt cologne pervades your senses instantly, clashing with Jack’s softer, muskier scent.

“I thought I heard the Jaws theme playing…” the older man quips in a dry monotone.

“You should be proud, Abbot— Your resident was a star in surgery today,” Park says with a knowing smirk hinting at the very corners of his mouth, so subtle it’s barely there. “Can’t wait for her to be my protégé in the OR someday.”

Jack’s frown deepens when the man claps him hard on the shoulder as he walks back for the elevator, though not without tossing a “let me know when you need a letter of rec for that fellowship, Baby,” over his shoulder as he goes. 

He watches the younger attending until he turns the corner, and looks back at you with his jaw clenched a little tighter than before. His chest sears at the distant smile on your face, as the flames of his jealousy burn white-hot behind his ribcage 

“Well,” Jack hums drily after a beat of silence. “You guys are getting awfully close, aren’t you?”

You scoff like it’s funny to you, because the thought of Park the Shark liking anyone is funny to you.

“What? No,” you laugh, then shrug at the unconvinced look Jack gives you in response. “He’s just nice to me. That’s all.”

Jack lets out a sharp exhale through his nose in place of a laugh. He turns back to his computer and deadpans, “Yeah. Because he likes you.”

You open your mouth to argue.

Jack beats you to the punch. 

“And I don’t blame him, either. I think it’d make me a hypocrite if I did.”

Your face flares as a red-hot heat crawls up your neck. Your adrenaline-induced confidence fades into something softer as you struggle suddenly to meet the older man’s gaze. You glance down at the chart Park left, unable to hide the small smile on your mouth when you peer at Jack again from beneath your lashes.

“Where are we going for dinner after this again?” you wonder, half-sheepish.

The expression on his scruffy face shifts slightly, less tense but mischievous still. “We aren’t,” he says and logs out of the computer.

Your eyes narrow into a suspicious squint as you watch the man round the front desk. “What happened to ‘I’ll take you somewhere nice?’”

“Yeah…” Jack nods slowly, huffing sympathetically, as his hands curl around either end of his stethoscope. “I think we’re gonna miss that reservation, baby.”

Your stomach does a backflip.

By the time you make it to Jack’s place, the adrenaline has worn off just enough to leave you pleasantly exhausted. 

He can feel it in your kiss, as you straddle him on his sunken couch in the middle of his dim living room — so quiet compared to the ER that it feels like stepping into a completely different world. You prop yourself over his lap with your palms cradling his silver scruff and lick into his parted mouth in slow, languid motions. 

You’ve been at it for a while now. So long that Jack can feel your spit down to his chin. You could kiss him for hours and hours and never get bored — a testament to your youth, perhaps, because Jack doesn’t think he’s made out with someone this long since he was in college.

But, for you, he keeps his head tipped back against the sofa and his mouth obediently parted, letting you kiss him however you want — for however long you want. His wide hands fidget with anticipation on either side of your bare thighs, from where your shirt rides up to your hips. 

You’d changed immediately into one of his old tees when you arrived, after a shower your body had been craving all day. You smell like his body wash and lotion as you sit on his lap, running your hands down his clothed chest like soft drops of summer rain. 

Your fingers brush the tie in his dark navy sweatpants, and he tenses on instinct. You don’t seem to notice, though, as you leave a trail of wet kisses down his scruffy neck.

“Are you gonna fuck me tonight?” you mumble into his pulse. “’S why we didn’t go out for dinner tonight, isn’t it? ‘Cause I’ve been thinking about it all day…”

Jack goes dizzy at your words — at the otherwise innocent mouth they spill from. His stomach warms, and he jerks back from you before he means to; his mouth wet and rosy from the intensity of your kisses.

“Yeah, fuck— Yeah, I just…” he trails off, though it’s more of a dismissal than a true affirmative. “I just gotta go to the bathroom real quick, yeah?”

“Okay,” you smile politely, unaware of his subdued panic that he’s learned to keep well-hidden. You slide off his lap and onto the other side of the couch. “Sure.”

Jack rises from the sunken sofa with a low grunt in the back of his throat. There’s a slight limp in his step from where the long day has taken a toll on his prosthetic. “Feel free to make yourself at home while I’m gone,” he tosses mindlessly over his shoulder, before he disappears down the dim hallway, making an immediate beeline for his lamplit bedroom.

There’s a bottle of sildenafil in his nightstand drawer, with only one pill taken out of it — which he thinks is somehow even more embarrassing. He’d only taken it to masturbate once, after his SSRIs plummeted his libido and he was itching for a release after a long day. 

The small orange bottle feels strangely heavy in his hands now, as he tips his head back to shake one of the tiny blue pills into his mouth before he can talk himself out of it. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he swallows it dry. The pills rattle faintly when he sets the bottle down beside him again. 

He drops onto the edge of his bed, mattress squeaking under his weight. He rests his elbows on his knees and hunches over to dig his palms into his eyes. He tries to will himself hard for you, even though he knows that isn’t exactly how that works.

He thinks of you — all young and pretty and waiting for him out there — wasting your youth on an old man who can’t get hard to save his life. It leads to a cycle of self-hatred that prevents him from getting turned on at all. And it’s maddening.  

The ajar door creaks quietly as you push it open without knocking.

You slink inside the dim bedroom and freeze at the sight of the man on the bed, like you weren’t expecting to find him there. Jack’s head whips to your form across the room and spins when he finds your underwear peeking out from the bottom of his shirt — a soft orange color patterned with dark black bats, several months out of season.

“What are you doing?” he squints teasingly, blanketed half by shadow and half by golden lamplight.

“What are you doing?” you retort. “I’ve been waiting out there forever.”

“It’s only been five minutes,” Jack scoffs.

“Yeah, tell me about it…”

You’re all but skipping to his side then, bare feet padding along the thin carpet as you go. The thin fabric of his shirt swishes around your thighs when you walk to stand between his. When you wrap your arms loosely around his neck and duck down to kiss him, Jack tips his chin back and opens his mouth to welcome you — until the open drawer beside you catches your attention, as well as the orange pill bottle sitting on the corner of the nightstand, as if he’d just pulled it out of there.

“What’s that—?”

“Nothing,” Jack answers, a little too quickly, and reaches less than casually around you to chuck the bottle into the drawer again. The pills rattle loudly in the quiet bedroom when he shoves it shut a second later.

He can tell by the look in your eyes that you’ve already gotten a glimpse of the label. Your gaze is soft with sympathy and glittering with something wild that he can’t quite place.

Jack says nothing for several long moments, and instead waits for your response.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed…” you murmur when you catch his scruffy cheeks flaring a soft pink.

“I’m not embarrassed,” he blurts, less than convincingly, eyes shifting away and back again. “I’m just… selectively unthrilled with this timing…”

Your nose scrunches at the shy smile you give him. His warm hands settle again on your waist while your fingers twist in the silver curls at the nape of his neck. Your eyes soften with something tender when you wonder shyly, “Is that why… Is that why you haven’t wanted to… you know?”

“No,” Jack answers instantly, then tilts his head to think for a moment. “Well, I mean— a little, I guess, but… I only take ‘em ‘cause of my SSRIs, you know? It’s not… It’s not because of you or anything.”

“Okay…” you nod and struggle to meet his gaze when you ask, “Do you know, like, how long it takes to kick in… or whatever?”

“Last time I tried, it took about twenty minutes—”

“Last time?” you echo with raised brows.

“I was just trying it out!” Jack defends with a crooked smile, slightly egged on by your misplaced jealousy after stewing in his own all day. “I was by myself when I took it, if that makes you feel any better.”

“It does make me feel better, actually…”

Jack’s light eyes narrow. “What’s that look for, huh?”

“Nothin’…” you lilt quietly, with a poorly hidden smile. “I just… I think it’s kinda hot… That’s all…”

His expression flickers in an instant — surprise first, suspicion second, then something darker third. A white-hot desire threads through the distant embarrassment still swimming in his stomach.

“Yeah?” he presses lowly, with a voice like honey.

“Yeah…” you nod once, unable to take your eyes off his prying stare. 

He studies you for another beat, before huffing a quiet laugh of disbelief. 

“You’re somethin’ else, baby, you know that?” he mumbles with a shake of his head, smoothing his calloused palms slowly up your bare thighs until they disappear under his shirt.

“I know…” you mutter on bated breath, trying and failing to be casual when you ask, “What do you wanna do then, huh? You know, for the next twenty minutes, anyway?”

You fight back a shiver when his thumb brushes over the center of the delicate mound peeking beneath the hem of your t-shirt, concealed by the thin cotton panties you wear. 

Jack hears your breath catch in his throat. His darkened gaze flits from your Halloween-patterned underwear to your heavy eyes, now glazed over with a layer of honeyed desire. 

A sly smile curls at the corner of his mouth.

“I think I have a few ideas…”

You felt your own mouth curling into a quiet smile despite yourself. “So this must feel really nostalgic for you then, huh?”

“Extremely,” he deadpanned.

“Well…” you sighed. “Got any tips for me then, old man?”

Jack exhaled a heavy breath and turned to face you while the heavy machine beeped and buzzed beside you. He tucked his hands into the front pockets of his camo pants and shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, look at it this way— Today is gonna suck, but… That means every shift from now can’t possibly get worse than this one, right?”

“Yeah,” you scoffed. “That, or we just… keep descending into another circle of hell every day.”

Jack smiled wider at your cynicism, patting you softly on the shoulder before sauntering off the way he came. “That’s the spirit, kid.”

You still feel his hand on you even now, wide and warm over your thick black scrubs, while you trudge through the rest of your charting. You hate the effect he has on you; you hate how often he plagues your every thought. It takes a great amount of muscle memory, you find, not to accidentally jot his name down as your hand moves the pen on autopilot. 

You don’t think it’d feel quite as pathetic if you thought that there might be an inkling he felt the same way about you. But now, all you are is an R4 with a stupid schoolgirl crush on her boss, and half a mental breakdown away from scribbling little hearts in her notes with his initials scrawled inside.

“You plan on getting in on this?” Santos asks in place of a greeting as she slides her swivel chair next to yours. She wears a faint smirk on her lips and a mischievous glint in her light eyes that gives you great pause.

Ink smudges on the inside of your wrist as you halt your scribbling to flash her a dubious look. “…On what?”

“Ahmad got bored after Princess won the last bet,” she tells you, reaching behind her to tighten the half-ponytail at the crown of her head. “Said the grid was too good to take down so soon, so… He started a new one.” 

You scoff a dry laugh and turn away again. 

“Yeah? What is it this time— Which one of us is gonna be the first to have a breakdown and quit? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure I’d win that one…”

“Close…” Trinity croons, leaning in like she’s about to tell you some sort of secret. Her eyes flit somewhere over your shoulder, in the vague direction of where Mohan stands with Jack across the room, before she confesses. “It’s about Abbot and Samira. I have it on good authority that they were getting pret-ty close in Central 4 together…”

“C-Close?” you echo on bated breath. 

Your head whips over your shoulder to the other side of the workstation, where Jack and Samira exchange information about one of her patients. You hadn’t given their closeness a second thought before now. It’s like you blinked, and now the sight of them together makes you feel sick. 

You hope Santos doesn’t see the hurt weighing down your features when you turn back to her. “What— What do you mean close?”

“I mean, Dr. Abbot was half naked while Samira was tending to his shoulder,” Trinity explains with a scoff and turns back to her own clipboard. “Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought anything about it until I heard her say, ‘It’s our little secret—’” 

She mocks in a high-pitched voice, which sounds nothing like Samira’s, before laughing to herself.

“—Like, c’mon. You guys could at least try to be subtle about it.”

You know she expects you to start laughing with her, but you struggle to find the energy to do so now.

“Yeah…” you sigh instead, hardly audible as you struggle to speak through the sudden tightening in your chest. “Right…”

“You should go place a bet,” she tells you, half-distracted by the files before her. “You could win back the money you lost and then some.”

“With what?” you joke with a sad scoff. “The three dollars I have left to my name?”

She flashes you a deadpanned look. “If that’s all you have to lose, I think I’d take those odds.”

You figure Trinity’s right. You have nothing more to lose, in truth — not after the shit day you’ve already had, and the money you’ve already lost, and the teenage heart inside of you that’s already broken. 

You finish up your charting, return the clipboard to the patient rack, and retrieve your wallet from the locker room. Because, as you see it, you’ll either leave this shift about a hundred dollars richer or with nothing at all; either totally vindicated or with a bank account just as empty as you feel on the inside.

You find Ahmad in the security room, and he flashes you a toothy grin as you slink through the doorway like a shy little storm cloud. He motions with the notepad he holds in a sun-kissed hand. “I knew you’d wanna get on the books, kid— What’d it take to convince you this time?”

“I don’t know,” you shrug with a mournful sigh. “I just… realized that I have nothing else to lose, I guess…”

Dr. Barker laughs from beside you.

“Well, that’s always the best reason to make a bet, in my experience,” he jokes with a pearly white smile, pushing the sleeves of his navy button-down up to his elbows to reveal the expanse of his tanned, scruffy forearms. 

Nick Barker stands quite a few inches taller than you — which you hadn’t expected before now, since he’d spent most of his time in the E.R. sitting behind the portable radiology machine. He has to look down at you from the bridge of his broad nose from this angle, with eyes so dark they’re almost black. 

He’s almost effortlessly handsome. Like, Disney prince sort of handsome. The kind of handsome that makes it impossible to look into his eyes without blushing like a schoolgirl.

“I’m normally a lot more responsible than this, but… I figured all things considered…” you trail off with a sheepish shrug.

“Yeah, you’re talkin’ to the girl who hasn’t taken a day off since I started here— Two years ago,” Ahmad scoffs. “I think you deserve to let loose every once in a while, Doc, all things considered.”

He taps you gently on the head with his notepad. You roll your eyes and reach into the pocket of your scrubs, cheeks burning under the weight of the sudden attention you’re getting. 

“Just put me down for $10—” you say, but cut yourself off when Ahmad hisses through his teeth. “…What is it?”

“Minimum this time twenty,” he grimaces.

Your shoulders deflate with a sigh. “Seriously?”

“We had to up the ante this time, kid— Rules of the game.”

“Then I guess put me down for twenty…” you huff and pluck your wallet from your scrub pockets. “For… unrequited…”

“Unrequited by who?” Ahmad presses with his brows raised to his hairline.

“I don’t know. Samira, I guess,” you shrug, half-timid, ‘cause it’s not like you totally believe it either. You’re just trying to take a page out of Trinity’s book, really, and manifest something good for yourself for a change — pretending that Abbot isn’t into her in the hopes that it’ll make it somehow real.

“What?” Ahmad laughs like it’s funny. “You’re telling me you don’t believe in love?”

You flash him a solemn look in return. “I’ll start believing in something again when the systems come back up,” you answer in a monotone.

“Touche…” he nods slowly while Dr. Barker exhales a quiet laugh through his nose. 

A familiar voice comes suddenly from the entrance:

“I think that is the single sanest answer I’ve heard all day,” Jack Abbot himself hums in a gritty deadpan. 

You nearly break your neck with how fast your head whips over your shoulder, finding the man leaning against the doorway with his toned arms crossed over his chest and a smug smirk dancing on his lips. 

Your skin prickles with a red-hot heat while your pounding heart drops to your stomach. If he wasn’t into you before, he certainly won’t be now — not with you making bets on his love life like a crazy person with nothing better to do. (Though, in many ways, that is exactly what you are.)

“Dr. Abbot…” Ahmad croons, trying to play casual despite knowing his secretive betting ring’s finally been found out. “That’s funny— We were just talking about you.”

“Robby may or may not have told me,” Jack confesses as he saunters slowly into the security room, boots heavy on the white linoleum. “Wanted me to tell him if there was something going on with Mohan and me, so he could recoup the money he lost in the last bet.”

“…Well, is there?” Nick wonders lowly.

“C’mon, Barker. Where’s the fun in that?” Jack scoffs a dry laugh, then goes strangely solemn again in a flicker. “Even though, as an attending, I think I have to say that I am very against this— I feel like this has H.R. violation written all over it.”

“Well, what Gloria doesn’t know, won’t hurt us, right?” Ahmad quips.

“I’ve been livin’ by those exact words for years, brother.”

Your hands are clammy and trembling for a reason you can’t name as you pull two crumpled bills from your wallet — a dingy, pastel Polly Pocket billfold you’ve had since you were twelve — as if you needed another reason to look any less cool in front of Jack. The pale pink interior is left glaringly empty, save for a few folded receipts and miscellaneous fortune-cookie slips.

“Wow…” you huff as you pass Ahmad the twenty. “That is all the cash I have to my name. I’m officially more broke than I was in med school— I didn’t even know that was possible.”

“I can take you out to dinner with my winnings, if you want,” Nick offers suddenly. 

Your head snaps in his direction, and his eyes widen, as though surprised by his own forwardness. He swallows hard, pronounced adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, scruffy with a five o’clock shadow. 

“You know, if you— if you wanna… let loose or whatever.”

Your lip flickers upward in a shy smile when Dr. Barker sighs and shakes his head to himself. A few rogue strands of dark hair fall from their gelled quaff and hang over his forehead until he pushes them back in place again. 

“Sorry, that, uh…” He chuckles awkwardly at himself. “That came out weird.”

“I might be stuck in charting jail for the rest of the night, actually,” you say with an apologetic grimace, wringing your clammy fingers into knots. “Can I get back to you on that?” 

“Yeah!” he blurts, a little quicker than he means to. He clears his throat and, in an octave lower, repeats himself. “Yeah. Totally. No worries.”

You dismiss yourself with a quiet smile and lack the courage to look Jack in the eye when you pass him on the way to the door. He watches you leave and waits for you to glance back at him with his heart in his throat. You never do. 

Still, though, he can’t help but feel a little proud of himself; after watching you turn down the handsome radiologist every woman on this floor has been fawning over all day. He turns back around and hisses through his teeth, trying not to look as smug as he feels. 

“Damn,” Jack deadpans. “That was cold, man…”

Nick’s dark eyes widen and flit wildly between the two men on either side of him. “Wait— Really?”

“Ice cold…” Ahmad affirms with a slow nod. “Girl said she’s broke, and you think she’s gonna say ‘no thanks’ to some free food? In this economy? Yeah… She’s not into you, man.”

Jack claps the solemn boy hard on the shoulder. “You win some, you lose some, kid… Don’t take it too hard.”

You forget all about the stupid bet and Nick’s offer some hours later, when Robby sticks you with Ogilvie and tells you to walk the MS4 through your canthotomy patient. 

You talk aloud as you slice your scalpel through the young girl’s eye, where the socket is raging red and bulging from the pressure behind it. The boy doesn’t say a word the whole time, just holds the plastic cup where the bright crimson blood drains from the eye, and doesn’t move a muscle until it stops.

“I think that’s the closest I’ve come to puking since I started med school,” the boy confesses when it’s done, standing just over your shoulder while you fill out the patient’s med slip. “I didn’t even get that close during cadaver lab, when all of us started craving meat from the formaldehyde— I’m pretty sure five people dropped out that day alone…”

His voice trails off when Samira catches your eye, rushing by the desk with her wild curls falling from her claw clip. She wears the hard shift all over as she makes a beeline directly for Jack, planting herself ahead of the older man; so close she has to tilt her chin to meet his gaze. 

Your hand freezes around the pen as you keep your eyes on the two of them, staring harder than you probably realize as you struggle to make out their conversation. Their words are drowned out by Ogilvie’s rambling, and the surrounding beep and chatter of the crowded E.R. 

Mohan talks wildly with her hands and says something about “a letter,” while Jack nods along sympathetically and says something along the lines of “give me your number.” 

Your chest flares with a white-hot feeling when you watch the man pass Samira his phone to plug her number into. It’s like the world has fallen out from under you and swallowed you whole, like you’re drowning in the fire of your own envy. 

You’re barely seven hours on the job, and you’ve already lost all your cash — you’ll be doomed to the three-day-old leftovers in the fridge, if the newfound heartache hasn’t already snatched your appetite for the evening. That means you’ll be running on fumes tomorrow morning — still broke, still hungry, still heartbroken.

Then you remember Dr. Barker — Disney prince Dr. Barker — and his offer of dinner from earlier in the security room. 

You make the terribly impulsive decision to take fate into your own hands and forget to properly dismiss yourself before dropping the finished order slip off across the room. Ogilivie is quick to follow close behind, lacking any real sense of personal space. He nearly trips over himself to keep from running into you when you freeze suddenly in place.

“You don’t have to follow me anymore,” you tell him.

“Oh… Well, then… What am I supposed to do?” the blonde boy shrugs.

“I don’t know. Do whatever you want…” you trail off and glance around the bustling work station. You spot Trinity standing at the chart rack and motion over to her. “Go help Dr. Santos with her next patient.”

The dark-haired girl turns at the sound of her name. 

“Oh, please don’t—” She cuts herself off with a sigh when Ogilvie makes his way towards her anyway. “Fuck. Fine…”

You continue your trek to the other side of the crowded work station, where the portable radiology machine takes up the majority of the room. You can smell the man’s expensive, musky cologne before he ever comes into view.

“Hey, Nick…” you greet, then wince at how weird it sounds a second later. “I mean, Dr. Barker— Sorry—”

He glances up from his work at the sound of your voice. “Nick is fine,” he assures with a kind grin and a pair of chocolate-colored eyes.

You try to smile back, but your nervousness makes it look more like a grimace. “It’s not, like, totally too late for me to take you up on that offer for dinner, is it?”

“No!” he blurts with a shake of his head. “Of course not!”

“Great…” you say with a relieved sigh.

“Yeah, I’ll— I’ll text you the details later.”

“Oh. Well, you don’t…” You scrunch the bridge of your nose in a sheepish look. “You don’t have my number…”

His mouth falls softly agape with the realization. “Oh. Right. Duh.”

You smile wider despite yourself, ‘cause he’s almost as awkward as you are, which you didn’t think was possible before now — especially not for someone as pretty as he is. 

You turn away and grab the nearest pen, clicking it on with your thumb before reaching for his arm. You scribble your number over the dark blue veins on his wrist with a newfound confidence — one that you never had before now, one spurred on by the man’s obvious shyness. 

You feel Nick’s eyes on you when you look away, flitting wildly across your profile. 

“This isn’t… This isn’t just because of the bet, is it?” he wonders with a waver in his voice.

Your brows furrow in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“You know, the whole thing you said about… losing all your money or whatever,” Dr. Barker explains with a sheepish laugh. “You’re not just going out with me for a free meal, are you?”

“Well, isn’t that kinda the point of going on dates? The free food?” you joke with a dry laugh, which fades instantly at the confused look Nick gives you in response. Your face floods with horror a second later. “I’m kidding! I’m totally kidding— Of course not.”

“Okay,…” Dr. Barker says with an awkward chuckle. “Good.”

“Good,” you echo with a sigh and rise to full height again.

“I’ll, uh— I’ll text you.”

“I’ll be waiting,” you chirp with a polite nod and a giddy grin, which ebbs the second you turn away from him. You shake your head as you slink back through the bustling emergency department, squeezing your eyes shut and murmuring under your breath in disgust, “I’ll be waiting—?”

You nearly trip over yourself when you ram suddenly into a firm body. Two calloused hands grasp gently at your elbows as you stumble backwards. You almost lose your breath when you find Jack Abbot towering over you.

“Shit… you huff. “Sorry, I— I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Where’ve you been hiding?” Jack squints. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Your shy smile fades into a disbelieving squint almost instantly; at the bitter reminder of Jack and Samira — of the seemingly intimate conversation they’d shared just minutes ago, and of the bet you know you’re bound to lose now.

“No, you weren’t,” you deadpan.

“I was,” he insists. “I feel like I always am, some way or another.”

Your chest warms at his words. You choke on the funny feeling when you force yourself to swallow it down. “I was just— walking one of the interns through a lateral canthotomy,” you stammer as you step back out of his hold.

“Gnarly,” Jack hums with a slow nod.

“Did you, uh… Did you need me for something?”

“Yeah, I have a patient over in Trauma 2— Sliced through his left hand with a circular saw,” Jack explains, staring down at you from the bridge of his nose as he crosses his strong arms over his chest. “But the crazy part is, he used his right hand to take the nail gun and—”

“Oh, my god,” you blurt before you mean to. “He tried to put his hand back on with the nail gun, didn’t he?”

“Close…” he hums with a knowing glint in his eyes. “He used the gun to fire two nails into his temple— Said he thought it would distract him from the pain in his hand. And the weird thing is, he’s walking and talking just fine.”

“Holy shit…” you mumble, wide-eyed. “Why do you always get the cool cases?”

“You can have it,” he assures you, with something soft swimming in his eyes. “That’s why I wanted to find you— so you could do it with me.”

Something about it feels way more intimate than being asked out for dinner.

You finish the rest of your shift as normal — feeling like a shell of your former self after hours of running on fumes; both excruciatingly tired and buzzing with white-hot adrenaline all at once. 

The only real difference between today and every other day before this one is that, for the first time in a long, long time, you actually have plans outside of work — almost like a real human person with a social life would.

You return home after the long day, only for an hour or so, to shower and change out of your scrubs. You wash away the scent of blood, sweat, and antiseptic from your skin, and only cut your knee once when you shave your legs for the first time in weeks. You pull out a nice top, a short skirt, and a real bra from the depths of your closet. You go as far as to break out the expensive perfume that you’ve had for years, ‘cause you only use it on extra special occasions, which tend to be few and far between for you.

You feel like an entirely different person when you meet Dr. Barker at the address he’d sent you a few hours ago — a nice bar, just a few blocks down from your apartment building, that you’d been meaning to visit for years but found every excuse in the book to stay home instead. You find the man sitting alone in a far booth in the dimly lit room, sipping slowly at the beer he nurses in his hand, and feel a little like a fraud when you slide into the vinyl seat across from him. 

Nick has only known you for the better part of a work shift, to be fair, not counting the handful of times you’d smiled politely in passing when you clocked out for the day. You know he’s got some version of you in his head already, like all men do — someone much cooler than you really are, someone much better at separating their work life from their personal life than you are.

You prove him wrong in record time, sharing a plate of loaded nachos between you and forgetting to eat any of it as you get too easily lost in your ramblings. You tell him of the long shift, and of the man you met with two nails in his skull, and fail to remember that not everyone can talk of blood and gore over a meal as easily as you can.

“—Honestly, I’m still surprised it didn’t hemorrhage! The X-Ray showed one of the nails was, like, half an inch away from nicking an artery,” you ramble with a giddy grin. “I pulled them out with some local anesthetic, and he was totally fine— Well, except for the hand, obviously. ‘Cause he did lose a few fingers, but… Dr. Abbot took care of that, so…”

“Did he?” Nick hums, hiding his smile behind the pint he brings to his mouth. 

He thinks this must be the fifth or so time you’ve brought up the man’s name tonight alone — not that you seem to notice. He doesn’t know whether that’s supposed to make him feel better or worse.

“Yeah— I always tell him he would’ve been an amazing surgeon if he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination of, like… A half-blind sloth,” you say, then swallow hard at the playful look Nick gives you in response. “‘Cause, you know, sloths are really clumsy, and they… Sometimes mistake their own limbs for branches, so… They fall a lot…”

You trail off and reach for the glass of water at your side, becoming very suddenly self-aware of your inability to stop rambling.

“You talk about him a lot,” Nick observes with a kind smile, licking the sheen of alcohol from his lips.

 “…Who?” you wonder with furrowed brows.

“Dr. Abbot.”

Your features flood with terror. “Do I?”

His broad nose scrunches with a breathy laugh. “A little bit, yeah.”

“Oh, god…” you groan and hide your face behind your hand. Nick’s laugh gets lost in the rock music playing overhead. “That’s so annoying. I’m sorry—”

Your phone glows to life as it buzzes against the wooden table it sits on. You reach over to flip it face down before you can read the message on the screen.

“I didn’t… I didn’t even notice… I’m so sorry.”

It vibrates again, twice more in quick succession.

Your stomach twists with the anticipation of what it might say.

“It’s whatever,” Dr. Barker shrugs, pushing the sleeves of his button-up to his elbows. “I get it. He’s your boss and everything, so…”

Your phone buzzes on the table once more, for longer this time, now with a phone call. 

You tense, but make no move to answer it, for fear of making this more awkward than you already have — though your pretending not to hear it doesn’t make it any better. 

The corner of Nick’s lip twitches into a sympathetic smile, ‘cause he can tell that you’re trying to be polite, even though you’re fidgeting at the thought of answering it. Because your friends usually only ever text you, so if someone’s calling, it’s bound to be important.

“You can get that if you need to—”

“Thank you,” you sigh before he’s properly gotten the words out, scrambling for your phone with anxious hands. “I’m so sorry. It’ll be quick, I swear. I’m sure it’s just… Fuck.”

The call ends before you can answer it. 

Nick’s eyes widen at your reaction. “Everything okay?”

“It’s Parker…” you answer with your eyes trained on the blue-white screen. Your chest deflates with a heavy sigh beneath your skin-tight top. “And I know it’s serious because she despises double-texting and she just sent me four back to back, so…”

Your eyes are wet and preemptively apologetic when they dart to the man across the table, who meets the disaster of you with a tender grin.

“You gotta go back in, huh?” he squints.

“I do…” you sigh. “I’m so sorry—”

“Just make it up to me next time,” Nick shrugs, watching with kind eyes as you scramble for your phone and purse. “When I win that bet, I mean. I’ll take you out somewhere nice— We can do this for real. If you want.”

You slide out of the cracking vinyl booth with a grimace — equal parts unnerved at the idea of doing this a second time and half-surprised that Nick would even want to, after you did nothing but anxiously ramble before bailing on him out of nowhere.

“Yeah…” you waver anyway as you stand to full height again. “Yeah. Sure. Maybe.”

“Thank you again— I’d kiss you right now if I could,” Dr. Ellis tells you when you pass her in the ambulance bay, where she hurries out of the E.D. on long limbs. She calls over her shoulder, moments before she’s out of earshot. “You look hot, by the way!”

The passing reminder of what you’re showing up to work in hits you like a punch to the stomach. 

The double doors of the PTMC part for you, and the air-conditioned emergency room wraps its cold fingers around every inch of your exposed skin — your shaven legs, arms, and collarbones; all of which are normally concealed by your dark scrubs and undershirts. 

You can’t help but feel a bit like you’re doing the walk of shame as you race past the work station with your head bowed, barely noticing that the systems are up and running again as you go. You’re too busy trying to make yourself as small as possible on your way to the scrub dispenser down the hall.

Jack smells you before he sees you.

He gets a sudden whiff of something sweet and creamy, like whipped vanilla and fresh raspberries, something candied enough to eat. Then he looks over his shoulder, from where he’s stood at the front desk, and finds you rushing past him in a hurry. His neck nearly cracks with the strength of the double take he gives at the back of you — short skirt swishing around your thighs, tight shirt showing a sliver of your lower back. He feels a little like he’s in middle school again, going wild at the mere sight of a girl’s bare shoulder. 

By the time his brain starts working again to greet you, you’ve already turned the corner.

“Whoa, gotta hot date tonight?” he hears Shen ask as you walk by.

“Just left one, more like,” you scoff.

“Damn. Poor guy,” the man quips, then laughs when you flip him off.

“…What the hell?” Jack mutters under his breath, with his eyes still trained on the empty hall you’d just disappeared down.

“What? You didn’t hear?” McKay wonders aloud, from where she’s hunched over the monitor across from him, still closing down for the day now that the ED isn’t in analog hell anymore. She peers up at him with tired blue eyes, half-hidden beneath her wild fringe. “Don’t tell Princess, but apparently, she went out with that Dr. Barker guy from radiology.”

“Oh, really?” Jack hums, nodding slowly to feign interest. He hopes the hurt flaring in his chest doesn’t show all over his face as he turns back to his computer. “Sounds fun…”

Javadi eyes him from behind McKay’s shoulder. Her dark, observant stare traces the edges of his face as she twirls the string of her lavender jacket with her pointer finger. 

“Well, don’t look so upset about it, Dr. Abbot,” she jokes with a quiet laugh, half-dazed from the long day. “I have a lot riding on this bet about you and Mohan, you know—?”

Cassie flashes the younger girl a wordless look.

Victoria’s eyes go wide when they flit back to Jack’s. 

“—Which I wasn’t supposed to mention in front of you…” she blurts and fakes an awkward laugh. “There is no bet, actually. I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

Jack doesn’t ease the tension by telling her that he already knows; that he has known all day. He just flashes her a half-smile and a pair of squinted eyes as he steps back from the monitor. 

“Real smooth, kid…” he jokes before he walks away.

He leaves the work station and turns the corner to find you cradling a pair of black scrubs to your chest and making a beeline for the restroom nearest to the break room. He rushes on long legs to catch up with you, limping slightly from his prosthetic. You freeze at the sound of your name from his lips, echoing from down the long hall. Your skirt swishes around your thighs as you spin in place to face him.

“Hey…” Jack greets, only slightly out of breath when he towers finally over you.

Your brows lower in confusion at the sight of his flustered state, but you smile nonetheless. “Hey…?”

“How was the, uh… The date?”

“Date?” you scoff. “What date?”

“The one you had with Dr. Barker.”

His biceps strain against his scrubs when he crosses his arms over his chest, peering down at you from the bridge of his nose. Your cheeks flare instantly. You can’t help but feel like you’ve been caught, like he’s just found out you’ve been cheating on him or something — even though the two of you aren’t even together, even though it’s abundantly clear that he wants someone else.

“Well, it wasn’t— it wasn’t really a— a date,” you stammer and turn away. “It was just… dinner.”

“Right,” Jack scoffs and follows behind you the short distance to the bathroom. “Because the two of you weren’t flirting in the security room or anything.”

You huff an emotionless laugh and roll your eyes at him, even though you know he cannot see you. “Yeah, because you and Samira weren’t flirting in Central 4 this morning or anything…” you echo in a gritty monotone.

Jack catches the bathroom door before it can shut behind you. You glance over your shoulder when you hear it hit his palm. You find the man looming in the doorway with something mischievous glittering in his narrowed eyes.

“I’m trying to get changed,” you deadpan, despite the distant fluttering in your chest.

Jack passes through the threshold and lets the door shut behind him, leaving the two of you alone in the empty bathroom, where the white-blue fluorescent lights buzz overhead. 

“Am I hearing things, or do you sound a little jealous?” the older man quips, glittering eyes trained on the back of you as you duck into the singular stall across the room.

It clicks shut behind you. 

“Aren’t you the one who came chasing after me, Dr. Abbot?”

“Aren’t you the one who ran off from your date just to come back in?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” you laugh.

“C’mon,” Jack scoffs. “You know what.”

Your short skirt pools around your feet with a quiet thud. You step out of it and toe off your right shoe, sliding on the adjoining pant leg before slipping the sneaker back on again. You do the same for the left side, and Jack has to shake the visual of your half-naked body from his head.

“I thought we had… You know, I thought we had a thing going on…”

“A thing?” you repeat, half-muffled, as you slide your shirt over your head. You hang it over the stall before reaching for your scrub top. “I wouldn’t exactly consider flirty comments and lingering eye contact a thing.”

Jack catches a glimpse of your bare spine through the sliver in the door frame. He swallows hard and forces himself to look down at his feet.

“You say that like I don’t wish I could do more,” he tells you. “I’m an attending— I can’t just go around making moves on my residents. It’s not a good look.”

The stall door squeaks open again. You come into view, now dressed in your scrubs, and wearing a hardened scowl on your dolled-up face. “Well, that didn’t stop you from getting Samira’s number, did it?” you argue. “Or letting her patch you up this morning?”

“I gave her my number because she asked for a recommendation letter, and I told her I’d give her one,” Jack confesses, watching you with a glittering gaze as you storm past him with your clothes cradled to your chest. He makes room for you by the sink and fights back a grin while you scrub angrily at your hands. “And I was patching myself up, actually, until she walked in looking for her patient.”

“Well, how convenient…” you grumble.

Jack smiles wider. “You are jealous,” he croons.

“I am, actually,” you deadpan, with your eyes trained on the soap you suds between your fingers. Even still, you can see the man in your peripheral vision, standing in the mirror just behind you. You can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, and smell the cologne lingering on his clothes.

“So that’s why you went out with the Barker guy, huh?” Jack lilts. “You just wanted to make me jealous…”

“No, actually,” you tell him. “I went out with Nick because I figured I should probably stop chasing after a guy that obviously doesn’t want me.”

You turn off the faucet with your fist and reach for the paper towel dispenser at your side.

Jack follows your every move.

“Yeah?” he hums lowly. “And who said I didn’t want you?”

You turn around to glare at him despite the newfound heat swimming in the pit of your stomach. 

“Well, I think you’ve made it pretty clear, Dr. Abbot,” you deadpan. “I don’t think the entire floor would be betting on you and Samira otherwise.”

Jack takes a daring step closer, until you have to tilt your chin to keep his gaze when he towers suddenly over you. With his hands crossed over his chest, he bows his head and tells you, “Well, I don’t want Mohan. And I don’t care about that stupid bet. Is that clear enough for you?”

Your chest warms with a familiar feeling. Your features crumple under the weight of it as you murmur sheepishly, “Okay. I’m not even trying to be funny right now, but if you’re trying to tell me that you do like me, you’re going to have to say that outright, or else my brain won’t—”

You feel his hands on you, wide and warm around the outsides of your elbows. You feel your feet stumbling on the tile, and your chest colliding with his, and then his mouth pressing against yours. You feel his chapped lips, his coarse scruff, and his exhaled breath from his nose as it fans warm over your skin. 

You freeze against him, too stunned that he’s kissing you at all to remember to kiss him back.

Jack pulls away from you a dizzying second or more later. He peers down at you with a heavy gaze and smiles when he realizes you haven’t yet taken your eyes off him.

“I like you…” he tells you slowly, as though to make sure you’re really hearing him. “Are we clear now?”

You swallow hard and nod your head, licking at your kissed lips in a feeble attempt to taste him again. 

“Crystal,” you quip drily.

You rise to the tips of your toes and wrench your free hand in his scrub top, with every intention of kissing him again — for real this time. You flinch in a fleeting panic when the bathroom door squeaks open a second later. 

Samira slips inside, too distracted by the phone in her hand to see what she’s walking in on. You and Jack freeze against one another accordingly, as if being so still will somehow make you invisible.

The door closes behind her and muffles the never-ending chaos outside. Only when it clicks shut again does Samira look up from her phone, dark eyes wide as they flit wildly between the two of you.

“Holy shit…” she mumbles under her breath, almost as if she hadn’t meant to say it out loud at all.

You push the man away from you on instinct. 

“We weren’t doing anything!” you blurt, hardly convincing in the matter.

Jack’s soft eyes cut over to you. “Real smooth,” he mumbles.

Samira’s look of shock ebbs into a giddy smile. 

“I knew it!” she exclaims, voice ringing through the tiled restroom. “Ahmad looked at me like I was crazy when I put forty dollars on the two of you, but I knew I was right!”

Your brows furrow in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“The bet,” she shrugs with a smile. “I put mine on the two of you. Which means I just got a couple hundred dollars richer, at least.” 

  The realization hits you like a punch to the stomach. 

“Which means I just lost all of my money…”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I can spare some of my winnings. I mean, it’s only right, right?” Samira says with a pretty laugh. “You guys can go out for drinks or something special. My treat.”

It becomes suddenly very difficult to imagine yourself from five minutes ago — back when you were overcome with jealousy just by the sight of her alone — knowing now that she had been rooting for you this whole time. Jack seems to know this, too, based on the smug smile he gives you.

“This real nice of you, Mohan,” he says. “But if I’m taking my girl out for drinks on a first date, I’m gonna be the one payin’ for ‘em— No offense.”

“None taken,” she shakes her head. “Means more money for me.”

You’re still catching your breath in the meanwhile, ‘cause the newfound title has all but punched the breath from your lungs. My girl, he’d said, and god, you wanted nothing more than to be his girl.

“We should, uh—” You clear your throat when the words get stuck there. “We should probably get out of here before the others think something weird is going on…”

“Something weird is happening— The entire E.D. is betting on my love life,” Jack scoffs as he follows you out of the bathroom, where the chaos of the E.R. finds you almost instantly. “Sorry you lost, by the way. The bet, I mean…”

He catches himself nearly reaching out for your hand. He balls his own into a fist instead to fight the urge. You can see the longing to glittering in his eyes, anyway, when you turn to flash him a sheepish look in response.

“Well, I didn’t lose completely,” you lilt with a lazy shrug. 

“No?” Jack hums.

“No…” you grin. “I think I won where it mattered.”

Robby rushes in with Dr. Al-Hashimi just behind him a second later, shattering the playful tension between the two of you with a thousand different questions. You’re left as the only resident in a sea of attendings and nurses; Dr. Al passes you the reins accordingly. “This is a learning hospital, right? Time for you to learn how to be the boss, R4.”

“Hear that, Abbot?” you joke as the older man migrates inevitably to your side, smelling of blood and sweat and the cologne he always leaves on your pillow. “I’m the boss here.”

“Well, you could try to be a little more humble about it, sweetheart,” he squints and tugs on a disposable PPE gown, which Perlah helps him tie in the back. “Let’s do some skin hooks— 4 Shiley. Sound good?”

You hiss through your teeth and drag the clear blue sleeves of your own gown over your shoulders, while Robby stands behind you to knot the garment in place. “I don’t really like the curve of a Shiley… Especially not if we’re about to rush him up to the O.R.”

“I didn’t know you were so picky.”

“Well, you should know better than anyone, Dr. Abbot,” you grin. “Cut me an ET tube, will you? 6-0?”

“Yes, ma’am…” the older man nods and holds back his giddy grin until he turns away from you.

Robby grumbles a noise of disgust in the back of his throat in the meanwhile — quickly realizing that the two of you were much easier to stomach when you were working night shifts together, and he only had to see you for half an hour in passing, at most. 

“Jesus Christ— Get a room, you two.”

“Well, technically, this is a room,” Jack quips distantly as he returns to your side with the endotracheal tube in tow. You make room for him at the head of the gurney on instinct, and drape a thin blue cloth over the patient’s neck, centering the aperture over the gushing wound. 

Robby moves to the opposite side of the bed and pulls the haphazardly placed intubation bag from the man’s mouth with careful hands. “One without me in it, preferably,” he argues.

“Ooh…” you lilt. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, Dr. Robby.”

“Just focus,” he scolds in a gritty tone of voice.

“You need to find the second and third tracheal rings,” Dr. Al instructs, sliding between the crowd and motioning to his neck with her gloved pinky. “You’ll be able to feel them with your fingers— just make the incision through the cricoid cartilage and be careful to avoid hitting the vocal cords, yeah?”

She flashes you a dark, doe-eyed, and distantly unamused look, seemingly immune to the playful banter surrounding her. 

You nod once, scalpel in hand. “Yes, ma’am.”

You make the incision while Jack preps the tube. You work together with deft hands and a relative silence, aside from a few procedural directions. For the most part, the two of you communicate without words — you locate the man’s ruptured trachea in a sea of bright red blood while Jack slides the thin tubing to make an airway.

“I’m in,” he blurts after a few tense minutes. “Balloon up.”

The rapid beeping of his dropping SATs begins to even out almost instantly. 

“I’ll sew the tracheal to the skin,” you announce within a sigh of relief. “2-0 silk, please.”

Jack passes you the round of sutures with a proud nod and a quiet smile. “Not too shabby, Doc… We make a pretty good team.”

“Or maybe I’m just really good at telling you what to do, Abbot,” you quip.

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “That, too.”

Robby and Dr. Al take their leave when the chaos dissipates, and Garcia comes down from the O.R. for a consultation. They trade the crowded trauma room for an equally crowded emergency department — slowly filling to the brim, like a pot bound to boil over. But, even still, it’s not nearly as tense as whatever you and Abbot have going on.

“Are they always like that?” the woman wonders aloud, nodding her tied-back curls towards the room behind them.

“Yep…” Robby nods with a heavy sigh, rubbing hand sanitizer between his calloused palms. “But they’re not usually dayshift, so… My philosophy is— let the night crew deal with it.”

You and Jack decide to follow Robby’s advice and find a room of your own — on the half-abandoned wing of the eighth floor, where everything smells like dust and time gone by, and the dying overhead lights only work a quarter of the time. It’s a good enough place to be alone with him, though; it gives you ample time to patch up the wound on his shoulder, and saves Jack the trouble of getting caught with the injury and being forced to fill out a mountain of paperwork accordingly.

He sits on the edge of the hospital bed with his shirt off and his broad arms crossed over his chest. The tendons in his freckled back twitch despite himself when you smooth a fresh bandage over his freshly cleaned scrape.

“Does it feel okay?” you ask him.

“Yep…” he nods once, trying and failing to get a peek of the gauze from over his shoulder. “Fine.”

Your concern doesn’t waver. Your brows lower with it, in a palpable look of worry that etches across your face. “You’d tell me if you were, like, in pain, though, right?”

Jack ponders for a moment, lips jutting faintly. “No, probably not,” he answers, too blunt for his own good.

“Well. At least you’re honest…”

You sigh and turn on the heel of your sneaker to chuck the dirtied napkins and crumpled wrappers into the bin across the room. Jack watches you go with something mischievous glimmering in his gaze.

“But I am fine, though— If you’re really all that worried about me,” he assures you with a quiet smile. “I’m a little banged up, but… I’ll survive.”

“So I can still come over tonight?” you wonder, half-shy.

Jack nods slowly and tilts his scruffy chin to keep your gaze when you walk the short distance back over to him. “Yes, sweetheart— I still plan on buying you dinner tonight,” he answers in a dry, sarcastic lilt.

Because that’s usually how it goes nowadays. You keep him company for a night, and he gets you food, pays off your grocery bill, or covers your rent — and then you go to work the next day like none of it ever happened. 

It didn’t always used to be that way, though, this quid pro quo thing that the two of you had struck up over time. Jack bought things for you because he cared about you, because he didn’t want you to go hungry or homeless when he knew he had the money to help. It was all a part of his job, he figured, to help his residents out whenever he could. But, somewhere down the line, he became more than just your attending, and a whole lot less than your boyfriend. It was more like a secret, third thing that the two of you never bothered to put a label on.

You frown. “That’s not why I was asking, smartass.”

“Well, that’s the arrangement, though, right?”

“Calling it an arrangement makes it sound like I’m your— mail-order bride or something,” you scoff and cross your arms over his chest, following his form with a squinted gaze as he reaches for his discarded shirt. “You don’t have to make it sound so formal, Jack. I know this is fun for you, too.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t…” he quips with a faint wince as he slides the thin black t-shirt over his head, grimacing at the burn that blooms beneath the bandage as he does so.

“And no pressure or anything, obviously, but, uh…” You trail off and swallow hard, struggling to find the courage to continue as your eyes flit everywhere but at the man before you. “My student loans are about to hit for this month, and I—”

“I know,” Jack interjects with a polite nod. “I already took care of it.”

You lose your breath almost instantly, for a reason you can’t quite name.

“…Seriously?”

He scoffs like it’s obvious and rises from the bed, towering several inches over you. “Well, yeah. I told you, sweetheart— You don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. As per the arrangement...” he croons lowly, with a playful half-smile, before bending softly at the waist to press a fleeting kiss to your lips.

You’re too busy trying to remember how to breathe to respond.

You struggle to finish the rest of your charting through the thoughts of Jack still plaguing your mind. You don’t think you’ve been so taken care of before; so seen, so held. You’re not entirely sure what to do with all of it now — these feelings that you’re harboring for your boss, of which you’re almost certain there is no room for in such an arrangement, as he so lovingly calls it. 

Because he doesn’t take care of you because he loves you. He takes care of you so you’ll come over at the end of every night, and remind him what it feels like to be a little less lonely. And even still, you run hopelessly to his side anyway — half-ashamed because you don’t even care that he’s using you; half-ashamed because you like it.

“Have you seen Dr. Abbot?” Samira wonders through panted breaths, disrupting your distracted train of thought. She enters your tunnel vision from the opposite side of the desk, and all of a sudden, you’re back in the E.R. The distant droning of constant noise fills your ears when you’re shoved back to reality again. “I’ve been trying to find him for, like, ten minutes at this point.”

“Uh… No— Not recently, no,” you stammer.

Her chest deflates with an exhaled breath. “Shit…”

Your eyes narrow as they scan over her form, frazzled and sweaty, with dark curls falling out of her claw clip to frame either side of her face. “You okay? What happened?”

She sighs and leans her elbows on the desk in front of her.

“Nothing, I just… I should’ve planned this better,” she murmurs, mostly to herself. She talks with her hands as she rambles, “My patient doesn’t have any insurance. And he’s already in a mountain of medical debt as it is, so I was gonna send him home with some supplies, right? But then I lost him, and I was gonna Uber the stuff to his house, but then Dr. Abbot said he’d pay for it, and… Now I can’t find either of them, so…”

She trails off with a deep huff.

You forget that it’s your turn to respond, too hung up on the fact that Jack had offered to help her pay. It shouldn’t bother you as much as it does, but it hits you like a punch to the stomach all the same. Because you weren’t special, Jack was just kind; and you’re only realizing now that this arrangement of yours was never exactly exclusive.

“Sorry,” Samira shakes her head. “I know I’m rambling. It’s just… been a long day.”

You blink rapidly, clearing the haze of hurt from your eyes. “No, I— I totally get it. You should check upstairs. He might be with Hiro in the O.R.”

“Thanks,” she says with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, that disappears the second she heads back for the elevator across the room.

You return to your charting when she’s gone, but forget to do any of it. You lose yourself in the void of the stark white computer screen, instead, while your hurt and distant jealousy scratches at your chest from the inside out.

Robby watches from afar, giving you a few minutes alone, before dismissing himself from the interns and shattering your cynical stream of consciousness. “How’s the charting coming along?” he asks in lieu of a greeting as he walks to stand at your side.

“Great,” you deadpan, muffled into the hands holding up your heavy head.

He scoffs out a quiet laugh. “Not to say I told you so, but… I did kinda tell you so…”

You turn slowly, peeking at him with one glaring eye as he leans against the desk beside you with his arm crossed over his chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?” you question in a gritty monotone.

“I told you not to get involved with Abbot,” Robby shrugs. “Not until you were done with your residency— ‘cause you already repeated one year, and if you want that neuro fellowship, you can’t have Jack screwing with your head.”

“Oh, yeah?” you squint, feigning interest as you slouch back in your chair. “The same way you screwed with Heather’s? When you got her pregnant when she was your resident?”

You say it to hurt him, and you can tell that it does, though it doesn’t feel as rewarding as you thought it would.

“Yeah, actually…” Robby nods and scratches at the greying patch in his beard. There’s a hurt look swimming in his dark eyes that almost makes you cower when he peers down at you. “Look, kid. I don’t care what you and Abbot get up to in your free time. That’s not what this is. But I’ve known you since you were an MS3— and I know you’re gonna go off to do great things, because I’m the one that taught you, right?”

Your frown deepens.

He smiles wider. “I just don’t want some relationship getting in your head, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s not, so…” you trail off with a less than convincing waver in your voice. 

“Really?” he hums, eyes narrowing in a challenging squint. “Have you checked in with that fellowship you wanted?”

You smack your lips against your teeth. “Not yet…”

“And why’s that?”

“When did you become my mom, exactly, Dr. Robby?” you joke and spin in your chair to face him. “‘Cause it feels a little like you’re reprimanding me here—”

“I am reprimanding you,” he tells you, only partially joking, before turning at the distant call of his name. He stands to full height again and flashes you a playfully stern look as he walks away. “Take care of it, alright? Or else I’m grounding you.”

“For how long?” you call after him.

“However long it takes to get your head out of your ass—”

You’re left reeling for the rest of the day, trapped in a merciless cycle of want and unwavering doubt. 

Jack is not yet close enough, even when he’s all but smothering you in the center of his bed, pressing you into the mussed sheets below with his broad body propped on top of yours. He smells distinctly of sweat, stale cologne, and the steak dinner he took you to after your shift ended. 

You wrap your arms around his freckled shoulders in a feeble attempt to pull him impossibly closer, careful to avoid the bandage still stuck on his left shoulder blade. You bury your nose in his greying curls while he sprinkles warm, wet kisses along the tendons of your neck, relishing in the salty tang of sweat staining your skin.

But even as he slots himself between your spread thighs, even as he marks his territory in the lovebites he litters on your collarbone, you can’t shake the feeling that he’d rather be somewhere else — that there’s someone else he’s thinking of, someone else he’ll call after you’ve left for home, someone else he’ll take care of when you’re gone.

The train of thought leads you inevitably back to the root of your cynicism, which you struggle to shake out of your mind once the visual has entered it.

“Did you ever find Samira?” you hear yourself ask, shattering the honeyed quiet of his lamplit bedroom. 

Jack’s head is far too cloudy to hear you properly the first time. 

He pulls away from you with a quiet smack and sits back on his haunches. Your hands fall to your stomach, clad only in a thin white tank top, while his rest over your bare thighs, propped on either side of his waist. Your cotton panties are the only thing keeping you hidden from him now, and his form-fitting boxers cradle a hardening length that threatens to make your mouth water.

He wears a swirled look of confusion across his scruffy face, along with his spit on his swollen, kissbitten mouth, as he asks, “Did I ever find what?”

“Samira,” you echo, brows raised to your hairline. “She was looking for you a little bit before we left— Said she needed your help paying for something.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Jack hums, pale shoulders bouncing in a lazy shrug. “Her patient needed some supplies Ubered to his house, so… I took care of it. No big deal.”

He bends down to kiss you again, but freezes with his nose pressed against the bridge of yours when he feels you tense below him. His heavy sigh fans warm across your jaw before he sits back again, features screwed in a faint grimace.

“And I’m realizing now that that’s probably not the best phrase to use, but… I was just helping out a friend— a patient, actually,” he rambles. “That’s it.”

Your eyes narrow in a playful squint. 

“That’s it?” you echo.

“Trust me, sweetheart,” Jack scoffs and shifts between your thighs, lifting your hips with his wide hands cradling your ass and bending at the waist to press his mouth over the bow in the center of your underwear. “The only girl getting her student loans paid off by me, is you.”

He leaves another chaste kiss on the cotton of your panties, right over the place where you throb like a heartbeat for him. Your stomach blooms with warmth.

“Because I’m special or because you don’t have the money to afford anyone else?” you ask.

Jack squints, light eyes glimmering with mischief in the low light. “Because you’re special and because I don’t have the money to afford anyone else. How about that?”

You roll your eyes despite the soft smile hinting at the corners of your mouth. “Just get to work, Dr. Abbot,” you scold in a distant monotone.

“With pleasure,” he mumbles, right before sliding his fingers through the hem of your underwear, pulling them to the side, and kissing your glittering pussy the way he would your mouth.

The lamplit bedroom swells with panted breaths and the heavy scent of sex. 

Jack slouches against the headboard, heavy-eyed and wearing a mixture of your cum and spit down to his scruffy chin. His toned chest is coated in a thin layer of hair and glittering sweat. You watch a rogue bead trail down his sternum from where you’re perched on top of him — with the sheets bunched around your hips, and your thighs straddling his waist. Your pussy still clenches with the aftershocks of your orgasm while his spent cock softens slowly inside of you. 

His calloused hands trail slowly up and down the length of your torso — from your shoulder blades, down to your ribs, over the bend of your waist, and up again. His touch is softer than summer rain, warmer than the cum leaking slowly out of you now.

“Do you think you could write me a letter of recommendation?” you ask, tracing the freckles on his chest with your pointer finger. “You know, for the neuro fellowship we talked about?”

“Wow…” Jack croons drily, brows raised to his hairline. His words slur slightly together as he comes down from the remnants of his high. “No aftercare, huh? Not even a little pillow talk? Just… straight to the point?”

You flash him a playfully stern look from beneath your lashes, lips quirking in a shy smile. “‘M just asking a question…”

“Yeah, while I’m still inside you,” he scoffs a tired laugh. “You know you don’t have to sex with me to get what you want—”

You frown. “That’s not what I was—”

“—You can just ask.”

“I’m having sex with you because I like it, Jack,” you blurt, very foreignly stern with him, as your eyes harden in a glare. “And I’m asking you for a letter of rec because I respect your opinion—”

“And because you don’t trust Robby to give you a good one, I’m assuming?” he quips with an arched brow.

“Exactly,” you nod.

Jack laughs. You can feel it rumbling in his chest beneath your palms. “I’ll e-mail it to you later. How about that?”

“There’s no rush,” you assure him. “Seriously. I haven’t even applied for it yet—”

“Don’t worry about it. I already wrote it.”

He steals the breath from your lungs for the second, third, or hundredth time that day.

“You already wrote it?” you echo, brows furrowed. “When?”

“When you told me about it the first time,” he confesses, bouncing a bare shoulder in a lazy shrug. “I knew you’d need a letter of rec eventually, so... I wrote while I had some free time and just… waited for you to ask, I guess.”

Your face screws with skepticism. It burns somewhere in your chest, too. 

Even with him softening inside of you, leaking out of you, you can’t help but feel slightly suspicious of his sincerity. You still can’t quite believe that he cares about you this much.

“…Really?”

“Yeah,” he laughs and squeezes gently at your sides. “Why do you look so shocked? I do care about you outside of… all this. You know that, right?”

“I didn’t…” you confess, painfully shy, and lacking the courage to meet his gaze for several long moments. You focus instead on your hands, and the shapes you trace along his chest. “Not until now…”

“Well, what do I gotta do to prove it to you, huh?” Jack asks within a huff as he rises from his slouched position against the headboard. 

The mattress creaks softly as his weight shifts. His warm chest presses firmly to yours, smothering your breasts against his heartbeat, as he cradles you to his chest. His glittering eyes dart back and forth between the two of yours as he says, “I’ve already given you everything, sweetheart…”

“I don’t want everything,” you murmur with a shake of your head, unable to tear your gaze from his attentive one. “I just want you.” 

“It’s okay,” you assure her with a dismissive wave of your hand. “Trust me— I’m used to it.”

“We’re never too busy for you, hun. C’mon. Let’s find you a room,” Dana assures with a gentle pat on your arm. She cranes her neck and shouts across the work station, “We got anything open, Princess?”

The woman bends at the waist to check her computer, then calls over her shoulder, “Psych 1 should be.”

“One of you find Abbot, will ya?” Dana asks the younger residents, peering at them over the top of the glasses sitting low on her nose as she escorts you down the hall. “Tell him his wife is here.”

You tense instinctively under her touch at the turn of phrase — a bitter reminder of the stack of divorce papers on the coffee table back home, which says that pretty soon you won’t be Jack’s wife anymore, or his honey. You dread telling his coworkers almost as much as you dread signing the wretched thing.

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” you assure her with a wavering grin. “It’s nothing, D, really.”

“That’s what they all say, hun,” the woman rolls her eyes.

The remaining residents share weary looks once the two of you have disappeared into the crowd — because telling Abbot his wife is in is one thing, but telling him in the middle of the unforgiving chaos of a rather brutal shift is entirely another.

“Well, I have a patient to check on, so…” Santos trails off, ambling backward with her thumb cocked over her shoulder. She spins on her sneaker and dismisses herself with a curt wave. “Later, losers.”

“Look at this place, we all have patients to check on,” Whitaker scoffs, then cowers at the expectant looks he gets from the two women at his side. He swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing. “But, yeah, I… I have to go, too…”

Samira laughs as she watches the blonde scurry off behind Santos.

“What’s his deal?” she scoffs and turns over her shoulder to look at Mel. Her dark brows furrow when she finds the girl backing slowly away. “Dr. King?”

“Oh, I’ve already completed all my rounds, I just… don’t wanna do it,” Mel confesses, forgetting to lie. She grimaces and turns away. “Sorry…”

Samira watches them go with a confused look twisting her features. She doesn’t understand their apprehension, or their subtle looks of sympathy — as if she’d just gotten stuck diffusing a ticking time bomb.

“O-kay, I guess I’ll do it then…” she mumbles under her breath and turns on the heel of her sneaker, starting the hunt for Dr. Abbot.

Dana stashes you in a small room on the farthest end of the E.R., away from all the chaos on the opposite side, which has since been reduced to a muted droning behind the shut door. She leaves the curtains drawn and the lights dim to ease the unwavering migraine she knows you’ve been sporting for some days now — which inevitably means it’s been plaguing you for at least a week or more before you told anyone about it.

You lie back against the angled exam table with your knees bent and your arms crossed over your eyes, feeling the pounding in your skull down into your bones. You struggle to even out your breathing and harder to relax — you tense on instinct when the door clicks open, and not just because every noise feels like a knife right to your temple.

Your stomach twists with the anticipation of seeing Jack, a sick sort of feeling at potentially having to confront the night before and the uncertain future ahead. You exhale a breath of relief when Robby slides in instead, letting in a sliver of white-blue light and a trickle of noise.

“Dana told me you were in,” he says in lieu of any real greeting, shutting the door behind him with his elbow as he reaches for the hand sanitizer on the wall at his side. He rubs it between his palms and wonders aloud, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you assure him despite the faint grimace that twists your features when you struggle to sit up straighter on the bed. “Don’t worry about me— What the hell’s going on out there?”

Robby exhales hard through his mouth, bearded cheeks puffing. “Huge wreck, right off the highway— You didn’t see it on the way here?”

“No,” you shake your head.

“Good…” he nods. “I damn near had a heart attack when Dana told me you were in— I’m sure Abbot’s head is gonna cave in when he finds out.”

He exhales a quiet laugh and waits for you to make another stupid joke in response, just like you always do. But you avert your gaze instead and shift uncomfortably on the thin mattress, like the mention of Jack’s name is enough to make you nervous.

“What’s going on?” the man wonders with furrowed brows. You give him a shocked sort of look in response, half-confused that he’d even know you and Jack were on the outs in the first place. He elaborates soon after, “Dana said you’ve been having headaches for a while now— so that means it’s been a week, at most.”

“You guys know me so well…” you deadpan with a pair of squinted eyes. “It’s nothing, Robby. Really. I just… Had another fainting spell. And usually I wouldn’t even come in for them, but Jack said if it happened again that he’d drag me down here himself, so… I figured I’d save him the trip.”

Robby’s dark eyes narrow at the cynical smile you give him.

“Well, I’m gonna save you the lecture about waiting this long to come in… Since I’m pretty sure you’re gonna hear it from Abbot anyway, so…”

“Thank you,” you sigh.

“You sure you don’t want me to tell him you’re in?” Robby presses tentatively. “He’s with another patient right now, but he’d drop it in a second if you—”

“No,” you shake your heavy head almost instantly, ‘cause you’re not so sure how true that is anymore — Jack hasn’t exactly been too keen on dropping his work these days, which is essentially the entire reason you’re in this mess to begin with. “I don’t wanna… worry him over nothing, you know?”

Robby has a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t nothing, and that there’s something you and Abbot aren’t exactly telling him, but he doesn’t press the issue now.

“Yes, ma’am…” he nods with a huff and drops down in the cushioned stool at your bedside, silently preparing himself for the hell Abbot’s gonna raise when he inevitably finds out you’re here.

Samira finds Dr. Abbot in Trauma 2, performing an emergency surgery on a patient whose pelvis was crushed in the crash, with Dr. Garcia and a crowd of other residents at his side. The younger girl slinks through the glass door into the windowless room, and doesn’t flinch at the overwhelming scent of blood and bitter antiseptic heavying the air inside.

She plucks a surgical mask from the dispenser beside the door and holds it over her mouth as she calls out a hesitant, “Dr. Abbot?”

“Little busy here, Mohan,” Jack answers without looking at her, elbows deep in the unconscious man’s open pelvis as he readjusts the metal clamps there. Bright crimson blood stains his gloves and the stomach of his blue PPE gown as he works with expert hands.

“It’s sort of important, sir…”

Jack says nothing in response; just gives the girl a silent, expectant look from behind the safety glasses sitting low on his nose.

“Your wife is here,” she tells him, dark eyes wild from behind the mask she holds over her mouth. “She’s totally fine, she’s in psych 1 with Dana, but she—”

“Since when?” Jack snaps before she can properly get the words out, flaring red-hot with an immediate worry and a suffocating tinge of regret despite Samira’s reassurances.

Flashes of the crash plague his anxious mind. He can’t help but picture you lying as limp and as bloody as the man before him now. The brutal image hits him as hard as the memory of the last thing he said to you the night before, right before you slept in separate bedrooms.

“Well, if my work schedule makes you so damn miserable, then why don’t you just sign the goddamn papers—?”

“Um… I’m not sure,” Samira answers with a waver in her voice. “About ten minutes ago, I think? I did a few rounds before I came in here, so—”

Jack stills suddenly in place. His head snaps in the younger girl’s direction, and Samira cowers at the hardened glare in his eyes.

“Is there a reason you didn’t come to me directly?”

Samira flinches at his unusually harsh tone. Her wide eyes flit between his stern ones and the anxious looks from the residents just behind him. “Well, she said not to… But then Dana said that I should, so I wasn’t exactly sure who to listen to—”

“Me,” Jack snaps. “You listen to the attending, who told everyone to come get him if his wife came in—”

He doesn’t have time to notice his slip-up, or otherwise correct it, when Garcia steps in.

“I’ll take over here,” the older woman says in her usual deadpan. “If you guys wanna argue like children somewhere else.”

Jack doesn’t argue as he steps back from the patient, peeling off his bloodied gown and gloves with suddenly anxious hands. He chucks the PPE in the biohazard bin with an obvious fire in his touch. The sudden shift in his usually calm disposition makes Samira’s chest ache, while Garcia grins behind her mask.

“Tell your wife I said hi, Dr. Rabbit,” the woman croons with a teasing lilt and a mischievous look behind her glasses.

“She’s still not interested, Garcia,” Abbot calls over his shoulder as he storms towards the door.

“Dammit…”

Samira cowers when Jack slides past her in the doorway, not looking at her once, like he barely recognizes that she’s there at all. She watches through the glass door as he disappears into the bustling crowd outside, hands balled into trembling fists at his sides.

“Don’t worry about him, kid,” Garcia sighs, half-distracted, as she fishes her bloodied hands in the unconscious man’s open pelvis. “He’s been on his period for about a week now, and we’re all paying the price for it…”

Samira’s chest deflates with a huff. “So, that’s why no one else wanted to do it…”

The two-minute trek across the E.R. feels nothing short of two years.

The entire walk there, Jack’s anxious mind struggles to discern what Mohan could’ve meant by totally fine. Were you just a little scraped up? Were you terribly injured, but at the very least alive? Was Samira trying to soften the blow, or did she truly mean totally fine?

Jack can’t help but picture the worst-case scenario, and he expects to find you hurt.

“No, I just kinda have this headache that comes and goes, you know?” he hears you say, right before he storms inside.

“Oh— And there it is,” Jack jokes when Abbot appears suddenly in the doorway, bringing in a wave of light and noise and unadulterated panic in with him.

Jack’s tight chest relaxes slightly when he finds you totally fine — lounging in a dim room with Robby at your side, laughing at his stupid joke as he draws dark red blood from the inside of your arm.

He’s relieved that you’re okay, of course, but the sight of you smiling — when Jack hasn’t quite been able to keep food down for days with the worry that you might be leaving him — hurts him in a completely different (and only slightly jealous) way.

“Oh, fuck…” you hear yourself say when Jack storms in like a white-hot flame. Because, sure, you’ve sort of made it a point to avoid the man at every turn, but you didn’t want him finding you like this.

You know what this looks like. You know it looks like you’re going behind his back and purposefully taunting him by going to his friends instead of straight to him. You know it hurts his feelings. And you may not like him so much right now, but you never want to see him sad.

“Yeah, 'oh fuck' is right,” Jack nods as he closes the door behind him, muffling the noise as the room goes dim again.

Robby inhales sharply through his nose. He can feel the sudden tension between the two of you pressing hard on either side of him. “Little pinch,” he murmurs to you, right before sliding the needle from your vein.

“Why didn’t you come get me?” Jack asks.

“Because you were busy,” you sigh, then mumble more quietly under your breath. “Go figure…”

“Why didn’t you call before you came—”

You fight the urge to rehash the fight from the night before and roll your eyes instead. “Because it’s not a big deal, Jack—”

“Yeah, I think I’ll be the judge of that,” the man concludes with narrowed eyes and biceps that strain against his scrubs when he crosses his arms over his chest.

Robby’s dark eyes flit between the two of you behind the glasses perched on his broad nose. When he’s sure the arguing has ceased, he looks over his shoulder at Abbot and begins to explain. “I’m doing an electrolyte panel to check for any imbalances— It’ll also help us rule out anemia and hypoglycemia.”

Jack nods, brows lowered in concentration. “Okay… What about—?”

“I was gonna do an ECG when the results came back,” Robby finishes for him. “Her heart sounds fine, but I’ll have to wait for a room to open up if the bloodwork comes back abnormal, and… Who knows how long that’s gonna be?”

“Alright,” Jack nods again. “Sounds good.”

Robby turns to you, brows raised expectantly. “Sound good?”

“You’re the boss, Robinavitch,” you shrug.

“Hear that, brother?” Robby scoffs as he rises from his stool, taking the vials of blood work with him as he heads for the door. He elbows Jack on the arm when he walks by and flashes the frowning man a smug grin. “I’m the boss.”

Robby opens and shuts the door behind him, and all the playful energy leaves with him. The subsequent silence feels borderline suffocating. You and Jack, barely breathing, try to break it at the same time.

“I’m fine, Jack—”

“I can’t believe this—”

You huff and tip your aching head back. “I’m fine. So you can go back and do whatever it is you were doing before. I’m sure it’s more important.”

Jack’s light eyes narrow into thin slits. His firm stature never wavers — arms crossed tight, sneakers spread shoulder-length apart — like he’s interrogating an enemy on the battlefield.

“What happened? Did you faint again?”

“Yeah…” you answer suddenly sheepishly, averting your gaze to a faded stain on the knee of your jeans. “It was in your shower chair this time. I think I had the water too hot.”

“I told you about the hot water—”

“I know,” you huff like a stubborn child. “And you also told me that if I passed out again that I needed to come in so… I came in.”

“I still wish you would’ve called me first,” he tells you — not angry this time, not truly, but still obviously hurt. “When Mohan told me you were here, I thought something bad happened to you.”

“Well, considering you told me to leave last night, I honestly didn’t think you really gave a shit anymore, Jack...” you confess with a smile you hardly mean.

“I told you to leave because you said you wanted to,” Jack argues through gritted teeth. “You act like I pulled that shit out of thin air— Like you haven’t been looking for an out for weeks.”

“An out?” you echo, a little louder than you mean to, as your face screws in offense. “You’re the one who’s never home, Jack. So if anyone’s been looking for a fucking out, it’s you— Fuck…”

You whimper when a white-hot flare surges suddenly across your skull, from temple to temple and down the base of your neck. You wince and close your eyes, tentatively tipping your head back against the bed once more.

Jack forgets to be angry in an instant. His chest stings at the pained look that etches across your features. His legs carry him to you before his brain has decided whether or not he should.

“What?” he presses, eyes wild. “What’s wrong?”

“My head…” you squeak out.

Jack huffs. “Here…”

You know he’s towering over you without having to open your eyes. You can feel him there, warm like a heater, and smelling of cologne and a long shift at the E.R. He braces himself with one hand on the mattress beside your head and covers your eyes with his free one. You don’t flinch when his gently calloused palm splays suddenly over the length of your forehead, pinky curving in the bend of your closed eyelids.

He couldn’t possibly count the number of times he’s done this over the years — hundreds, at least. It’s the only way he knew how to soothe your headaches when the medicine was taking its sweet time kicking in. It’s the pressure that helps, though you’ve always argued that Jack must have some secret healing superpowers that he isn’t telling you about.

You’re only able take your first good breath in two weeks when he’s finally touching you so gently.

“Better?” he wonders, half-detached but still strikingly soft.

You nod once beneath his palm and fight back the urge to cry when his thumb rubs softly over your temple.

“Contrary to popular belief, honey,” the older man murmurs. “I didn’t come in here to fight with you.”

“It always ends in a fight with us, Jack,” you sigh. “You know that.”

“I thought you were hurt,” he confesses, in a voice so soft it makes you feel like crying. “Bad hurt. When Mohan came and got me, I thought for sure you were involved with all the shit going on out there.”

“Well, I’m not… So you can go now…” you tell him in a trembling voice, which you’d rather blame on the lingering ache in your skull and not the fact that you don’t truly want him to leave — that you never really wanted him to leave.

You miss the quiet smile Jack gives you in response, because he can see right through you.

“Yeah, I’m not going anywhere, honey…” he says on a gentle exhale. “And I’m not signing those stupid papers.”

Your heart drops at the mention of them, at the bitter reminder of their existence, even though it’s been plaguing your every waking thought for some weeks now.

Your trembling hands reach for the one he holds over your eyes. You wrap your fingers around his wrist and knuckles, peeling his palm away to peer up at him with a glassy gaze.

“What do you mean?” you ask on bated breath.

Jack meets your weary look with a softer, sadder smile.

“Well, I just got about a… three-minute glimpse of what my life was gonna look like without you,” Jack sighs, in lieu of confessing all the gory worst-case scenarios he couldn’t quite get out of his head. “And, turns out, I’m not strong enough for that, so… I’m officially declining your divorce, honey.”

“Jack…” you protest feebly, features crumpling at his poor excuse for a joke, while his calloused palm slips from your forehead and cups gently over your warm cheek.

He ducks down to meet your gaze when you try to turn away, bending slightly at the waist and bracing himself with his free hand curled around the top of the mattress. His nose is mere inches from yours — you can feel each of his exhales fan across your chin. You couldn’t shy away from him if you tried.

“I’m serious, honey,” he says with a stern but no less sincere look swimming in his light eyes. “You were right— I’m working too much—”

“No, don’t…” you protest with a shake of your head, because the affirmation doesn’t feel as rewarding as you’d expected it to. Instead, it makes you feel a little sick. Your gaze falls to the dog tags slipping from the inside of his scrubs, glimmering in the darkness as they sway just ahead of you. Your fingers reach to fidget with the chain on muscle memory. “It’s your job, Jack. I shouldn’t dictate how much you work—”

“You’re my wife, honey. You shouldn’t feel second to my job, because you’re not,” he tells you, brows raised to his hairline. “So, I’ll— cut down on my hours, I’ll stop picking up so many shifts, I’ll… I’ll do whatever the hell you want me to do, baby, ‘cause I’m not going anywhere, alright?”

You feel his words physically, like a white-hot knife lodged in the center of your sternum and twisting.

You struggle to find the words to respond, just as you struggle to find the air in the room to breathe. Because you’ve spent weeks thinking you’d failed at your marriage, and now you’ve failed at failing your marriage. It’s a stupid tug of war that makes you hate yourself all the more.

“Well, maybe we should wait for Robby to get back…” you murmur quietly, shifting on the mattress beneath him. “You know, before we have this conversation or whatever…”

Jack ducks his head to chase your averted gaze, brows furrowing in confusion. “What the hell does Robby have to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” you shrug. “I might have, like, a super rare blood cancer or something—”

“Jesus,” Jack grimaces before you can properly get the words out, flinching away from you when you shatter the sincere moment. “Why would you say something like that?”

“I might only have a week left to live or something,” you retort with wide eyes, only partially playful. “So we might not even have to worry about any of this, you know? …Who knows?”

Jack meets your sparkling, half-crazed look with a firm scowl. “You’re real morbid, honey. You know that?”

“Well, what can I say?” you shrug and fight the urge to smile. “Your cynicism’s rubbing off on me, Abbot.”

Robby returns about a half hour later, to a room considerably less tense than it was when he left. He forgets to comment or otherwise pry about it when he slips inside, gaze averted to the glowing iPad resting on his palm. His free hand scratches at the grey patch in his beard — an anxious tic you’ve come to know well.

“Hey, uh—” he clears his throat behind his fist when the words get stuck there.

“Oh, shit…” you waver when the door clicks shuts behind him. “I was just kidding about the whole blood cancer thing, I swear—”

Robby’s brows lower in confusion. “…What?”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jack huffs, rising from the stool at your side for the first time in thirty minutes as he rushes to Robby in long strides — ‘cause he can feel the man’s trepidation like heat off a bonfire. “What did the blood work say?”

Robby inhales sharply through his nose as he passes the man the tablet. He crosses his arms over his chest and splays his right hand over the lower half of his bearded face. His wide eyes dart between the lit-up iPad and the edge of Jack’s profile, eagerly awaiting the man’s reaction.

You watch with your heart in your throat as Jack’s eyes flit wildly back and forth across the screen. His scruffy jaw slackens slightly in shock, and Robby nods slowly in a quiet concurrence.

“Okay, what the hell?” You shatter the heavy silence. “Are you guys just gonna communicate telepathically the whole time, or is someone gonna tell me what’s going on with me?”

“You’re fine— You’re totally fine,” Robby reassures you, gesturing wildly with his right hand. “Your bloodwork came back normal, but… There’s a high level of hCG in your bloodstream. And I think that’s what’s been causing your dizziness and fainting spells.”

“HCG?” you echo, eyes darting wildly between the two men in front of you. “What the hell is hCG?”

“Human chorionic gonadotropin,” Jack answers on instinct, half-strangled, and never once taking his eyes off the screen in his hands. “Means you’re pregnant, honey…”

You feel the world fall out from under you for the second or third or hundredth time that day. You hide your crumpling features behind your hands as your head falls back against the exam table. Your following words come out muffled.

“You have got to be shitting me…”