How many times in the middle of the night has Jack woken up to find her screaming her ears off, only to wake you up and deposit the bundle of sweetness into your lap with a kiss to your forehead and an apology in his mouth?

Gladly Jack would feed her if he were able to produce milk. But humans and other mammals alike, males are not genetically evolved to nourish their offspring. Because if he could, he would.

“Bug, there’s nothing here,” he tries telling her. Which does nothing good, except earn a chuckle Jack knew very personally. The voice and its owner — a perpetual pain in his butt since the first year of med school — make themselves known with another chuckle. To which Jack can only groan, “what’re you doin’ here?”

“Here to see my goddaughter.” Robby and his insane timing. Why must he choose this specific moment to display his affection? Of every low point Jack has quietly accumulated throughout his life, Robby has been there. It is impossible to figure out how Robby knows these embarrassing moments and decides to pop up, but he always does.

The statistical probability of this is insulting. Of all the rooms in this hospital, of all the moments in a day, Robby walks in for the exact one where Jack is being actively suckled at by his infant daughter. He could’ve walked in when Jack was skillfully changing her diaper — wait that’s not better. Thing is it’s unfair, with drool on his shirt and a six-month-old clamped to his pec, is when Robby decides to be a present and loving godfather.

“How did you know I was here?” Jack prods, all the while trying to keep your baby from latching onto his nipples through his shirt, it not being much of a barrier at all.

Robby completely ignores Jack’s question — like he usually does, like that one time when Jack asked him, directly, in plain English, whether he'd eaten the rest of his leftovers from the fridge, and Robby held eye contact with him for four full seconds and then asked if Jack had seen the new attending in neuro — and nods towards the baby, “she good?”

“Yeah, she’s — she’s just —” Jack cannot bring himself to say out loud that his daughter is gnawing at his muscles in hopes of quenching her thirst. Some things you just don't say. Some things you carry alone.

“God. Is she trying to — feed from you?” Robby throws his head back in a bashful laugh. Jack feels his hands itch to put him in a chokehold, the only thing keeping him away from doing that being his current object of affection, his lovely daughter. The laugh alone tells him this is a story that'll be recounted many years to come. Told at every bar they ever drink at, Christmas, at the next three people's weddings, at Jack's funeral probably, Robby having outlived the former purely out of spite. “Told you to go easy on the weights,” Robby continues, pushing past Jack’s glares. But the latter can only seem so intimidating with little sunshine on his arms, babbling with spit oozing from the corner of her mouth.

“You know what, why don’t you take her?” Jack practically shoves the baby into Robby’s arms, the latter immediately straightening up to hold her without missing a beat.

As Jack sorts out the spit situation, little bug has found residence in Robby’s chest, pawing at his scrub — worse condition than Jack's — as she tries to figure out a way to milk. So, the shape and geography of the area wasn’t the problem; your daughter is. If she’s that hungry, shouldn’t she latch onto the bottle? Apparently bottles are beneath her, as she pays them no mind, only snuggling deeper into Robby’s embrace now.

"See, it's not just me."

Like always, Robby ignores Jack's tantrums and rocks her, swaying from left to right as he eyes Jack, who now seems very victorious about establishing the fact that his daughter needs to be latched no matter the anatomy and physiology, and maybe is a little dumber than he’d thought. That is a terrible thing to think about a baby — much more, to think about his own baby — but that’s where Jacks head is at.

Thank god you decided to walk in that exact moment, confusion painting your face as you raise one eyebrow at the situation. Like a sunflower finding sun, your baby slots herself against Robby, straining her neck to find you, her own North Star. “What’s going on here?”

Jack has never felt luckier. That’s an overstatement, he knows. He’s felt lucky everyday since you came into his life, but particularly now with you glancing up at him with smile laced lips, and soft sighs from working for four hours straight without feeding.

“Our beloved daughter missed you, is all.” Missed you and your boobs, and tried to burrow into mine and Robby's, is what he doesn't say. Like she was summoned, your baby raises her arms from Robby’s hold, babbling a string of bah-bah-bah, exact to her social development, the little genius she apparently is, now that she has you in her sights.

The same child who spent twenty minutes trying to nurse from two men with no relevant equipment is now performing perfect developmental milestones on cue. Fine. She'll be fine.

Walking closer to both men, your own arms open, reaching in the air, a laugh bubbling up from your throat, the soft kind, the honest kind, the full kind. Jack sees your body sense little bug, smell, sound, and everything heightened. Coupled with the laughter, your letdown reflex makes itself known as two perfect patches of wetness coat your blouse, the warmth of it you register almost immediately, eyes darting between both Jack and Robby, a little insecure, a little flustered.

While Jack has seen you in everything and nothing, Robby hasn’t — of course, why would he? — and a redness climbs up his face, tinging his ears pink, as he tries to divert his gaze from your chest to the baby in his arms, who is now oblivious and content now that she has you within grasp.

Jack watches this unfold in real time. Robby, undone by a biological reflex. The ears going first, embarrassment creeping up from behind him, working its way forward.

Robby hands her over to you, immediately taking a step back, putting distance between you both as he rubs the nape of his neck with his hand, stuttering, “uhmm — I think— I should go.”

Not waiting for a response, Robby walks past you both, still completely red. Jack had never thought a biological response would petrify his friend, what with the countless number of bizarre things they've collectively and individually witnessed during their careers. A man who has genuinely seen everything emergency medicine has to throw at a person, walking very quickly away from a breastfeeding-adjacent situation like it might follow him into the hall.

Little bug throws her arms over your face, trying to grab your attention from her godfather.

“Poor Robby.” You mutter as you start feeding your daughter.

“He’ll live,” Jack replies instantly, though he knows the image of Robby's ears going full red while he stared intensely at the crown of the baby's head will sustain him through at least two more shifts. Maybe three.

When your baby is almost done, Jack takes that opportunity to ask you one thing that's been plaguing his mind forever. Forever would be a stretch, let's say almost six months. Six months of being in the general vicinity of a thing and very much not included in it. Watching his daughter treat this like the most obvious arrangement in the world, and Jack, who understands the oxytocin, the prolactin, the whole cascade, understanding perfectly well why, and still experiencing what he can only describe, clinically, as being left out. “You know, now that she's old enough to start complimentary feeds…” He looks at you expectantly.

“Mhmm?”

“It’s only fair I get a taste… since she's this addicted.”

A swat lands on his arm before he can close his mouth. But your face tells him a different story. And he knows exactly what it means.

also @goldiwrites and me at any given moment 😮‍💨

He'd watched you do it for the better part of a year now. Suture a kid's eyebrow while the mother sobbed in the doorway. Call a time of death in a voice that didn't waver once. Walk out of a trauma — that would've put most second-years on the floor — like it didn't do anything of significance to you.

He'd told Robby once, that one's gonna outlast all of us. Robby had just hummed, like he already knew. Like everybody already knew except maybe you.

He didn't know what to do with that. With you. Two decades of learning exactly how much a person could survive before they gave, and you'd never given. Not once, not in any way he'd been close enough to catch — and he had been close. 

Closer than he'd let himself admit, most nights. The sound you made when you were concentrating, he could pick it out with his eyes closed, how you could never stay down, even if anyone else in your position would've quit.

None of that should've mattered to a man who'd buried more people than he'd saved and still wore another woman's ring, solely because taking it off felt like one more door he didn't get to walk through.

Turning it without meaning to, he was thinking about the ring then, sitting three stools down from you at the bar nobody bothered to name, the place where everyone went to confirm they'd survived another shift.

It had been ugly that night. You'd handled it like you always did. Sunshine, somebody on the floor had called you once, not unkindly, and it had stuck.

You are sunshine. 

And Jack knew he wasn't someone who got to keep something like that for himself.

"Another round?" Mateo was flagging down the bartender down without waiting for an answer.

Jack shook his head before anyone could pour him one. "I'm good." One beer in, he had no plans to go further. Somebody at this table had to drive, and it was not going to be Mateo.

You said something about him always being good, warm enough that it caught somewhere he'd rather it didn't.

He looked at you a beat too long before he could stop himself. "Most days." The truest thing he'd said all night. 

Jack willed himself to look away, back toward whatever Ellis was saying about the new schedule, looking at you any longer was him being the opposite of good.

So many months spent looking sideways, stopping before the thought went anywhere it shouldn't. Whether that counted as discipline or cowardice, he hadn't decided.

Sixteen hours on feet would do that to anyone, let alone him, so Jack stretched his bad leg out under the table. 

Nobody here treated it like news anymore. You'd asked him about it once, early on. Lost it overseas, he'd told you.

You hadn't pushed. He was grateful for that. Most people pushed, prodded him with questions, or completely ignored it. 

You, once again, had fallen in the middle, his desired side. 

The jukebox was playing a song old enough that he could sing along if he wanted to embarrass himself in front of the entire bar, which he didn't.

Javadi was muttering under her breath and you laughed at it, and Jack watched. 

He'd noticed he liked watching you laugh more than was probably healthy for a man his age with his own collection of scars. But noticing it and doing anything about it were two very different problems, and he'd spent a year successfully keeping them that way.

He was still congratulating himself on that, more or less, when you said his name, followed by your slurry question, "Y'know what's stupid?" 

Jack already knew this wasn't going anywhere good. You only led with y'know what's stupid when you were three drinks past the point where you usually stopped yourself.

"Don't know." He leaned back against the bar, arms crossed, tried to look casual and probably failed. "You're gonna tell me though."

"Don't be smart with me right now. I'm fragile." You weren't fragile. In the period of watching you and knowing you, he'd never once gotten the sense that the word applied to you. But you'd moved closer, not bothering to keep your voice down.

"Oh, here we go," Santos muttered into her glass.

"What's stupid," you went on, leaning forward like the table had gotten further away in the last ten seconds, "is loving somebody who is never, ever gonna let himself be loved back. That's a stupid way to spend a Friday. A stupid way to spend a year, a whole life, actually, if we're being honest."

"Who?" Whitaker leaned in like this was the best thing to happen to him all week. "You gotta say who, you can't just throw a thing like that into a bar and walk away from it—"

Jack thought you didn't need any persuasion or encouragement to blurt out whatever was on your mind.

"You know who," you said, still not looking away from Jack.

He felt that burrow under his ribs and live there. Only thing he knew how to do and he did that, try to joke his way out before it turned into something heavier. "Let's take a break, shall we?"

"No, I wanna say." The no and say came out long and drawn, each syllable stretched with stubborn insistence.

"Say it, then." Whittaker's voice once again spurred you on.

You said the older man's name like it had been sitting behind your teeth longer than just tonight, no laugh in it to hide behind this time. Jack felt the table go quiet, listening even with their eyes pointed somewhere else.

"It's you," you whispered, then laughed, a sound so beautiful, Jack wanted to keep hearing it. "It's so obviously you I don't know why I bothered being subtle about it. Everybody already knows. Mateo has watched me watch you for — for — I dunno how long —"

From the far end of the booth came Mateo's voice. "No, I haven't."

"You're not subtle, Mateo."

"I —"

"It's okay." Your concentration came back to Jack, like the rest of the table had stopped existing, which — fair, he'd been doing the same thing since you opened your mouth. "It's been you for embarrassingly long. Professionally embarrassing. I should lose my license over how long it's been."

That earned a few laughs around the table and Jack wanted to pull you in, shield you from the attention you'd suddenly become the center of.

But he couldn't. 

The honest answer — the one that would never see daylight, if he had any say in it — was that he understood. More than he should've.

Long back, he'd started noticing what door you came through at the start of each shift. Your coffee. How you only remembered to eat if someone put food in your eyeline. None of that was the kind of attention an attending was supposed to pay a resident. 

That also extended to you'd been watching him, mostly when you'd thought he wasn't looking. So he knew. 

All that watching and he'd never once let himself do anything with it except stand in the same room and be relieved you weren't paying attention. 

He should've laughed it off clean. That was the move, the one he'd used on a hundred things he didn't want to look at directly for longer than a second. What came out instead was softer and more revealing. "Let's get some water into you."

"Don't wan' water. Want an answer." You sighed and plopped your head on the table, not caring about what had been on it before. Sober you would chastise this version. 

Crescents dug into his palm with the effort of not reaching to you. "You're gonna want the water in about twenty minutes. Trust me on this one."

"Is this happening?" Whitaker didn't bother lowering his voice, even though the question was only meant for Santos. "Are we just gonna sit here and watch this happen?"

"We are absolutely sitting here watching this happen," Santos deadpanned.

"I'm bein' serious, Jack." Your voice came as a whine.

"Yeah," he said. "That's what worries me." He was careful to keep it low, not let it carry. 

"I am serious. I'm the most serious person in this entire building, ask literally anyone —" The apparently serious effect you were going for was lost with the way you hiccupped at the middle of your sentence.

"Not wrong about that part," Whitaker offered, unhelpfully.

"Thank you, Huckleberry." 

Whitaker sighed, probably wishing he hadn't chimed in. 

"C'mon." Jack stood. The room tipped half a degree, byproduct of one beer and sixteen hours upright. His weight settled wrong into the leg for a second before it found the floor right, a half-beat nobody at this table had ever clocked because he'd gotten good at not letting them. "I'm taking you home."

"You're not listenin' to me." Your arms flailed before slotting themselves on his biceps for support.

"Listening fine. Up you get."

Robby caught his eye over the top of your head while Jack hauled you up by the elbow, the two of you doing the slow shuffle toward the door that he was not, under any circumstances, going to call a stagger out loud.

Unconscious weight trusting the near solid thing, your body went slump against his. He kept a hand at your back. Told himself it was practical. Perks of telling himself the same thing for God knows how long, he wasn't going to stop now.

Robby's lips played a smirk, the one he used to get back in residency whenever Jack tried to pretend a bad shift hadn't gotten to him. Said he saw exactly what this was and was choosing, out of something resembling mercy, not to say it yet.

"Don't," Jack said anyway, covering his bases.

"Didn't say a thing."

You didn't mean it. He held onto that the whole walk to the car, the whole drive, your head against the window and your eyes closing somewhere around the second red light.

You'd had — what, four? Five? Jack had counted without meaning to. The number added upto something you'd be embarrassed the next day. 

He got you up the stairs to your apartment with an arm under yours, and you went easy, pliant. The drinks had stripped you off any careful consideration you'd worn like a badge, now going loose, like you trusted him with holding you up. 

He got you water. He got you to the couch, because you point-blank refused the bed, something about if I lie down the room's gonna dance, Jackie, and Jack didn't ask. Couch should be fine. But he knew he'd never recover from the Jackie. 

"Jackie."

Of course. 

"Yeah."

"I meant it." Your eyes were already closing again. "Jus' so you know. For later. I meant it."

"Go to sleep."

"'M not gonna remember saying that."

"Probably not."

"'Kay," you mumbled, which undercut the whole I meant it pretty thoroughly.

Jack pulled a blanket up over you and told himself that settled it. He stood there longer than he needed to and just looked at you. 

He'd watched enough of you being one with the couch, only this was not the break room, and there weren't a myriad of factors fighting for his attention. 

But, not like this. 

He'd never quite let himself look at you when you were awake, openly, without the practiced distance he'd built between watching something and wanting it.

Whatever you wore through every shift had gone quiet. What was left was just you.

You were drunk. You didn't mean it.

That and how you said his name replayed in his head the whole drive home. He'd always been Dr. Abbot to you, and there was no recovering from either Jack or Jackie, especially the latter. Even drunk, your voice didn't waver, like you'd practiced it somewhere private long before that night gave you the nerve. He decided, somewhere around his third red light, that it didn't matter how you said it.

People said things drunk they wouldn't survive saying sober, and the kindest thing he could do, maybe the only thing he was actually allowed to do, was leave it exactly where it fell. At a bar. Five drinks in. Gone by morning.

It wasn't gone by morning.

He had a whole speech, something that would let the two of you step around this without either one having to look at it head-on. He never got the chance to use it though. 

You found him first, outside trauma two. Eyebrows drawn together, a small pout playing at your lips, a look he hadn't seen on you, having watched this place fail to touch you for months. 

Seemed like you'd already decided how to take whatever he was going to say. 

"Hey." You not so much looked at him as over him. "So — I wanted to say sorry. About last night. I had a lot to drink and I shouldn't have put you on the spot like that, in front of everybody."

He wanted to tell you not to apologise, that you didn't put him on the spot at all, only yourself, and he would do anything to make you forget it, his one good deed. 

"It's fine," he said, already half-turned back toward the chart in his hand. "Don't worry about it."

The absolute silence from you made him look back up. There was a small tilt to your mouth, like the start of a frown that got called off halfway through. "Oh," you said. "Okay."

"Hey —" He didn't love the sound that came out of you on those two words — worse than anger, a gentle resignation — opened his mouth to walk it back, except you got there first.

"Why didn't you take it seriously?"

"What?"

"Last night. You just… nothing — told me to drink water. Why didn't you take it seriously?"

"Because you'd had a lot to drink," he said like it was obvious. To him it had been, even if his subconscious would never agree with that. "You didn't mean it."

"No — no, that's — " You were shaking your head like you were trying to get the right words to fall into the right order. "I did mean it. Fuck it—" he'd never once heard you curse. "I'll say it now, even if saying it in daylight — I mean, it's nighttime, but — sober. Sober's the word I'm looking for. It's just me. Standing here. Telling you that I —"

"Trauma two minutes out," Lena called from the desk. "GSW, unresponsive."

"Bed three." Shen moved past the two of you like neither of you were rooted to the ground like statues. "Let's go, people."

Jack's hand found your shoulder without his permission, gone almost as soon as it landed, and then he was moving too, falling into step beside Shen like the last ten seconds hadn't just happened at all.

He was good at not thinking about things when there was something else that needed doing, probably his most transferable skill if anyone ever asked.

The case took eleven minutes to crash and another forty to claw back. His hands knew what to do faster than his head did, which was usually the only thing keeping him upright through one of these.

Until minute thirty, he didn't think about the hallway again, when he looked up across the bed for a clamp and caught you on the other side of it. Gloved hands steady. Voice steady, calling out vitals.

He'd watched you call a death and then go check on the family with nothing on you but patience. In all these months, the job had never once gotten anywhere near your eyes. Now it had.

And he knew exactly whose fault it was, looking at you over a man's open chest, and the knowing sat in him like something swallowed wrong, heavy and a little sick, the rest of the case.

With the adrenaline gone, and nothing left to cower behind, Jack followed you to the ambulance bay. 

"Hey."

Rushing a silence never made it shorter in his experience, and you needed a beat more than he did. He gave it to you.

"Hey." You didn't look at him.

"You good?"

"I don't know, Jack. Am I supposed to be good?" Now you looked at him, and it wasn't soft anymore. He hadn't expected the fire even though he probably should've. "You're the one who decided what I'm allowed to feel about any of this."

"That's not what I was trying to do."

"That's exactly what you did. You stood there and told me you didn't think much of it. Like I was a chart you forgot to sign."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"Then how'd you mean it?"

Practised, rehearsed speech was sitting somewhere behind his tongue, not one word of it came to his aid, happy with watching him scramble.

A gurney rattled somewhere behind him, two sets of footsteps moving fast toward bay four, somebody calling out a name he didn't catch. He registered none of it. 

The whole building could've gone up and he wouldn't have noticed, not with you looking at him like that, waiting on something he should've had ready an hour ago. A day ago. A year, probably, if he was being honest.

He thought about lying. Old habit, reaching for the smooth thing instead of the true one. But you'd see it. You always saw it, that was half the problem with you — you'd gotten too good at reading him for him to get away with the easy version anymore.

"I was scared." Jack hated how it sounded coming out of him, unfinished. 

He almost wished you would say something. Silence from you was worse than any yelling, than the fire from a second ago. At least the fire told him where he stood.

"I — I was trying to make it easy for you." He heard himself say it and knew, even as the words came out, that they weren't going to do what he wanted them to do. "So you didn't have to carry it."

"I don't want easy!" Your voice cranked at the end of it, loud enough that a passing tech glanced over before deciding very quickly to keep walking. "When have I ever once asked you for easy?"

"I don't know, maybe never, maybe that's the problem—"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You don't ask for anything." He hadn't meant to get into this here, hadn't meant to get into it at all, but it was coming out now whether he wanted it to or not. Two decades of watching people swallow things finally finding somewhere to go. "You take whatever the night throws at you and you swallow it and you smile and you call it fine. I figured you'd do the same with this."

Out loud, it sounded exactly as cowardly as it was.

"This isn't a trauma, Jack. You don't get to triage me."

"I know that."

"Do you? Because it really doesn't feel like you do."

"I know it, alright?" His voice was louder than he'd meant it to be, and he caught himself, brought it back down. You, of all people, didn't deserve to be the one who got it loud. "I've known since the second you said my name at that bar, and I — I told you it was fine. Because—"

"Because what?"

The easy thing resurfaced, sat right there in his mouth, but he looked at your face and it went nowhere. Again.

He thought of the ring. How he'd been using it, as an argument with himself. It stopped holding a long time ago. "Because if I told you the truth, I didn't know what I was gonna do with it."

"So you lied to me instead?" A sniffle worked up to your words, he hated it more than he'd hated most things this job had shown him. "That's worse, Jack. That's so much worse than just saying nothing."

"I know." Jack sighed. 

"Then why'd you do it?"

He'd had this conversation in his head half a dozen times. In his version he'd been more articulate, and you'd let him get through a full sentence. But you were looking at him like you actually wanted the answer and weren't going to let him get away without giving it.

"Because I look at you and I see somebody who's never once let this place touch you," he said. "Not all the way down — and I keep thinking, if I let myself want that, I'm gonna end up being the thing that finally does."

You went quiet, thrown enough that for a second you forgot to be angry at him. "What?"

He'd turned it over in his head so many times it had worn smooth, but that wasn't the same as saying it. Saying it made it actual. Made it a thing that existed outside of him, in the cold, between the two of you.

"I'm sorry."

"You think you'd ruin me." Softest person in this building and the most stubborn, and those weren't contradictions, you weren't going to let him off the hook.

The cold was getting into him through his scrubs and he didn't care. Some part of him thought he deserved to stand out here and freeze a little, penance for a thing he hadn't even committed yet, just the threat of it. 

He'd buried a marriage he didn't talk about, and somewhere along the way he'd decided that meant he didn't get a second one, didn't get to want it, like the universe only handed a man one shot at being soft with somebody and his had already come and gone.

"I think I've ruined plenty already." He'd thought he'd made peace with it a long time ago but he apparently hadn't. "I'm not in a hurry to find out if you're next on that list."

"That's not fair. You don't get to decide that for me either."

"Probably not."

"So stop deciding it!"

"I'm —"

"Don't say you're trying. You're not. You're standing there doing the exact same thing you did last night, you're just using better words this time."

"What do you want from me?"

"I want you to stop being so sure you already know how this ends before it's even started!" You tried to swallow a sob back down and failed. "I'm so tired of being the strong one. I don't — I don't want to be the strong one with you too."

It was awful watching you cry. He'd sat with families through the worst things this city could do to them and he knew that language — knew where to put his hands, what to say and how to be useful inside someone else's worst moment.

His own fault, and none of that applied here. The only useful thing would start with him closing the distance.

"Sweetheart." It came out before he'd decided to say anything at all. "Hey — c'mere."

Jack pulled you in before you could argue your way out of it, one arm coming around you, your face landing against his chest like it had been aiming for that exact spot the whole time.

Imagining this had been forbidden too him, he'd been disciplined about keeping the things he wasn't allowed to want in a place he didn't go.

But, the warmth of your body was real, and you fit against him perfectly. Absurd, if he had to think about it then, absurd that he'd wasted time. A very long time to have waited for something that felt this right.

His hand found the back of your head without him telling it to. He felt you shake once, just once, like your body was testing whether it was allowed.

Tighter, then. Just enough.

"Why won't you just let this be easy?" Your words were muffled, wrecked, into the fabric of his scrubs.

The same question he'd been asking himself, end of bad shifts, in the car, in all the hours he'd spent deciding not to do exactly this. He didn't have a good answer.

"Because nothing about me is easy." He said it into your hair. "You're—" He found a different way to say it, ended up going for the most obvious one. "You're sunshine. You don't even know you're doing it half the time. And I'm not that. I've got two decades of stuff in me that doesn't burn off, it just sits there. I didn't think it was fair to put that next to you."

"That's not your call to make."

"I'm not good for you."

"I don't care."

"You —"

"Stop." It was so much like you to cut him off.

He let out a breath that had been sitting in his chest since the bar the night before. "Okay."

Frozen in place, frozen in hug, the two of you stood there, morning sun peeking out from the clouds. He didn't let go. You didn't ask him to. 

There were things he should probably say, about the leg he didn't talk about, about the wife he talked about even less, about everything he'd carried out of those years that he still hadn't found a place to put down. 

But that felt like a conversation for some dawn that wasn't now.

"You really think I'm sunshine?" you asked eventually, voice still thick, pressed into him like you weren't ready to test your own legs yet.

It was the kind of question asked when you already believed something but needed someone else holding it with you. He'd heard it before, in harder rooms, from people with far less reason for it.

He hadn't expected it from you. You were the one who made every room feel like things were going to be alright. He hadn't known, until then, that you needed someone to do that back.

"You're everything."

BOYFRIEND!JACK who knows your exact coffee order. More often than not, you’ll find one waiting for you in the resident lounge with your name scribbled on it in his chicken-scratch handwriting, brightening the rest of your shift.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who keeps your relationship so thoroughly private that even Robby doesn’t suspect. Though he’s caught Jack smiling at his phone more than once. “What’s got you grinning like an idiot?” Robby will ask, and Jack just shakes his head, pockets his phone where you’ve sent him some dumb meme about old man life and knee pains. The secret is something just for the two of you in a hospital where nothing stays private for long.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who never, ever shows favouritism in the ER. If anything, he’s harder on you than the other residents, pushes you more, questions your decisions with that raised eyebrow that makes you want to strangle him sometimes. “Walk me through it, Doctor,” he’ll say. You know it’s because he sees everything you’re capable of. But when you’re alone in his apartment, he’ll pull you close and murmur how brilliant you were. The praise is different when it’s just his voice in the dark.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who’ll miraculously know when you’ve had a bad case. You’ll be in the break room, trying to catch your breath, and suddenly he’s there. Not touching — never at work, if he can help it — but close enough that you can feel the warmth of him. He never offers empty platitudes. Sometimes, he just stands there with you until you’re ready to go back out.

BOYFRIEND!JACK whose apartment became yours so gradually you barely noticed. First it was a drawer, then half the closet, then your shampoo in his shower and your textbooks colonizing his coffee table. He loves the invasion of it, how his space stopped feeling like a temporary landing spot and started feeling like home. Mornings when you pad around his kitchen in one of his old t-shirts, he has to remind himself not to stare like some lovesick teenager.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who insisted on ground rules when you first started dating. Complete professionalism at work, absolutely no preferential treatment. You’d rolled your eyes, “I know how to be professional, Jack.” But he’d been serious, almost worried. “I need you to succeed on your own merit. I need everyone to know how good you are,” he'd said. It took you a while to understand that he wasn’t protecting himself. He was protecting you.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who drives you home after double shifts, his hand finding yours in the dark of the car. You’re usually half-asleep by the time he pulls into his spot the apartment. He’ll carry you if he has to, ignoring your mumbled protests. “You’re old enough to have a bad back,” you’ll slur. He laughs, the sound vibrating through his chest and to you, “keep talking like that and I’ll show you exactly how not-old I am.”

BOYFRIEND!JACK who leaves you little notes in your locker — articles he thinks you should read, sometimes, just how proud he's of you. Always signed with just ‘J’ so no one looking over your shoulder would think twice. You keep every single one in a folder at home, this paper trail of how he sees you: brilliant, capable, going to be one of the greats.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who gets quietly, dangerously angry when other attendings are too harsh on you. He can’t say anything — won’t compromise you like that — but you can see it in the set of his eyes. If it happens again, to you or to someone else, he’ll inevitably pull that attending aside for a ‘conversation’ about teaching methods. They’re never quite as cutting after that.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who learns your cycle better than you track it yourself, showing up with heating pads and Midol before you even realize you need them. You don’t even ask how, he pays attention to everything about you. On really bad months, he’ll rearrange the resident schedule so you’re not on overnight shifts, and nobody has the nerve to question Dr. Abbot’s scheduling choices.

BOYFRIEND!JACK whose idea of a perfect day off is you, his couch, and absolutely no medical talk. He’ll put on some documentary about Formula 1 or deep-sea creatures, and pull you against his chest.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who keeps a spare pair of your scrubs in his office, just in case. You found them folded in his bottom drawer once and nearly cried at the way he thinks about you even in the small moments. When you teased him about it, he just shrugged. “You’re always spilling something on yourself. Someone has to be prepared.”

BOYFRIEND!JACK who keeps his hand on you at all times when you’re in his apartment. In public, at the hospital, you’re colleagues, professionals. Here, you’re his, and he likes the weight of the certainty.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who surprised you with a weekend getaway to a cabin two hours outside Pittsburgh, claiming he had a ‘medical conference’ while you conveniently had requested days off weeks in advance. The drive there was perfect, the cabin was much more. You spent two days doing absolutely nothing but existing together. Cooked breakfast in your underwear while he wrapped around you from behind, went on a hike that ended with him fucking you against a tree, spent an entire afternoon in bed just talking, touching, learning each other outside the constant urgency of the ER. Sunday night, driving back, you both had this satisfied look on your faces, completely gone for each other. Monday evening, Santos cornered you by the supply closet. “Funny thing,” she said. “You and Dr. Abbot both out Friday through Sunday. Both looking remarkably well-rested.” Jack nearly had a heart attack when you told him, but Santos never said another word, though she didn't pass up the opportunity to smirk knowingly whenever she saw you two in the same room.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who is obsessed with your body in a way that makes you self-conscious and desperately wanted all at once. He’ll strip you down and just look, hands mapping territory he’s covered a thousand times. Your tits fit perfectly in his palms, and he tells you so, rolling your nipples between his fingers until you’re squirming. He loves your stomach, presses kisses there, bites gently at the soft flesh of your hips. “So fucking soft,” he groans, gripping your thighs hard enough to leave prints. And your cunt — Christ, he worships it, goes down on you like he’s got something to prove, licks into you like you’re his last meal, tells you how pretty and perfect you are until you’re incoherent. Nothing’s ever felt as right as Jack between your legs, Jack inside you, Jack’s hands claiming every inch of skin.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who makes you practice difficult procedures on simulation dummies — yeah, the ones he got specifically for you — in his living room, walking you through the steps with infinite patience. His teaching voice is different here, softer, encouraging. When you nail it, he kisses your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth, before claiming your lips. “Knew you could do it, bunny.” The nickname started as a joke — something about how you hop around the ER — but now it makes you preen everytime he says it.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who insisted you take your boards seriously, made you study, helped you with flashcards. When you passed with flying colors, he took you to the nicest restaurant in Pittsburgh, held your hand and looked at you like you’d hung the moon. “So fucking proud of you,” he’d said, and you’d barely made it back to his car before you were on him.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who brought lunch for you one afternoon during your day shift. He walked into the ER with a bag from that Italian place you love, scanning for you, and didn’t notice Javadi clocking him immediately. “Dr. Abbot, what brings you in early?” she called out, grinning like the cat that got the cream. You had to bite your lip to keep from laughing at his deer-in-headlights expression. “Oh, I — brought food for Robby. He mentioned he didn’t eat breakfast.” Robby, across the ER, looked up with his eyebrows crossed in confusion. “I had —” “Great!” Jack interrupted too loudly. “Well, I got extra, so —” Suddenly the entire ER staff was looking at him expectantly, and you had to turn away to not rat him out. Jack shot you a look that promised retribution later before sighing, “fine. I’ll order for everyone. Text me what you want.” An hour later, the ER was eating on Jack’s dime, and you were getting mercilessly teased about being the only one who didn’t order anything. “Already ate,” you said stifling a laugh, and Jack’s ears went red. End of your shift, you found him in the parking lot. The second you were close enough, you burst out laughing, “Robby didn’t eat breakfast, huh?” “Shut up,” he muttered, smiling, as he pulled you in for a quick kiss. “You’re lucky you’re worth the hundred and fifty bucks I just spent.”

BOYFRIEND!JACK who hates opposite shifts with a burning passion. Nights when you’re coming home as he’s leaving, passing each other in the hallway with exhausted smiles and stolen kisses. Mornings when he crawls into bed and you’re already gone, leaving nothing but a warm spot and a note on the pillow. He’s thought about switching with Robby more than once, but that’s exactly the kind of attention neither of you can afford. So he suffers through it, lives for the shifts where your schedules align, hoards every moment he gets with you. You’re the best part of his day, and going twelve hours without seeing you feels fundamentally wrong.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who wanted to put his initial around your neck first, just a small gold J, subtle enough to pass as ordinary jewelry until you started wearing those V-neck scrubs and he realized he would spend every shift looking at it like an idiot, not to mention anyone else could see. The anklet was supposed to be safer, a thin gold chain hidden under your scrub pants, private enough that only the two of you knew what it meant. But on days you wear crocs, the gold shines through, his initial bright against your ankle, stirring something primal in him seeing you walk around with his name on your skin. Robby catches it by accident, glances down once, then looks at Jack. “New jewelry?” he asks, far too casually. You keep your eyes on the chart, “mhmm.” “Letter mean anything?” Robby prods, and Jack clears his throat so hard that everyone turns to him. You smile without looking up, “wouldn’t you like to know?” Robby laughs, and Jack looks like he is two seconds away from dragging you into an empty hallway to lecture you about professionalism, which is rich, considering he got you the damn thing.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who gets absolutely feral when you wear one of his t-shirts, the ones that are oversized but barely cover your ass. You’ll be making coffee, completely innocent, and he’ll come up behind you, hands sliding under the hem to grab your thighs. “I have thirty minutes before —,” you’ll warn. “Then we better not waste time talking,” he's quick in spinning you around and lifting you onto the counter. If you were late for shift that day, well, your attending is the one to blame.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who has a fantasy about fucking you in one of the on-call rooms that he will absolutely never act on because he has more self-control than that. Probably. You don’t make it easy, though, not when you bat your eyelashes at him during rounds, or when you bite your lip while concentrating on a chart. He’s a professional. He’s in control. He’s also thought about bending you over the desk in his office approximately seven hundred times.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who gets off on the secret of it all more than he’d ever admit. Standing across you in the ER, knowing exactly what you look like underneath your scrubs, knowing the sounds you make when he’s buried inside you. It’s intoxicating.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who takes his time with you, always. You’ll be squirming underneath him, begging, and he’ll just pin your hips down with one hand, maddeningly methodical. “Patience, baby doll. We’ve got all night.”

BOYFRIEND!JACK who loves when you get bossy in bed, when you tell him exactly what you want. “There,” you’ll gasp, hands fisted in his hair, pushing him into your cunt, and fuck if he doesn’t love being directed by you for once, love letting you take what you need. “That’s it, baby. Use me.” When you roll your hips, chasing your release, he’s never been so gone for anyone in his life. You're so gorgeous and demanding, he almost cums just by rutting into the mattress.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who leaves marks where only he can see them. The inside of your thigh, your hip, the underside of your breast are littered with little reminders of who you belong to, hidden under your scrubs while you save lives and slowly, surely, become the doctor he always knew you would be.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who talks you through it every single time, that rough voice in your ear telling you how good you feel, how perfect, how he’s thought about nothing else all day. “Wanted you since rounds,” he’ll growl, mouthing at your neck. “Watching you present that case, so fucking smart, and all I could think about was gettin’ you home.” The praise goes straight through you, makes you clench around him, he’ll laugh like that’s what he wanted to accomplish.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who never rushes aftercare, even when you’re both exhausted from back-to-back shifts. He’ll clean you up with warm washcloths, hands gentle on skin he was gripping hard enough to bruise minutes before. Gets you water, makes sure you drink it. Pulls you against his chest and presses kisses to your forehead until your breathing evens out.

BOYFRIEND!JACK whose prosthetic leg you traced with gentle fingers one night, asking quiet questions he answered just as gently. He’d been nervous the first time you saw it, nervous in a way you'd never seen him. But you just looked at him with those eyes and asked, “does it hurt?” and he’d nearly fallen in love with you right there. Now, you help him with the liner on bad days, press kisses to the scarred skin. One day though, you wrote both of your names on it with a sharpie when he was sleeping, and he almost cried when he saw it. Without you knowing, of course.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night just to watch you sleep, still half-amazed that you’re here, that you chose him. You caught him at it once when you woke up for water. “Go back to sleep,” he murmured, a smile lacing his words.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who keeps a photo of you in his wallet, you laughing at something off-camera during that cabin trip. He doesn't look at it often but knowing it's there always helps him during bad shifts.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who knows this can’t stay secret forever, but he’s selfish enough to want to keep you to himself just a little bit longer. Eventually you’ll finish residency, eventually the power dynamic will shift enough that it won’t matter, but right now? Right now you’re his in a way that nobody else gets to see.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who’s already planning your shared future, even if he hasn’t said it out loud yet. He sees you as an attending, sees you brilliant, confident and still his. He imagines lazy Sunday mornings, coming home to each other on hard days and eventually, something more permanent. A ring. His name attached to yours.

BOYFRIEND!JACK who loves you so completely it scares him sometimes, this fierce protective thing that lives in his chest. You’re his miracle and his match, the person who makes the brutal shifts and the impossible choices worth it. When you’re in his arms at 3 AM, both of you smelling like ER and exhaustion, he knows he’d do it all over again just to end up right here.

You just look up at him.

He loves you like this. Has since the first time, actually. The pliance of it, the trust, the way you stop thinking and just give yourself over and expect him to know what to do with you.

Robby is many things, a patient man isn't one of them. Not when it comes to you anyway. "Want me to fuck your mouth?" He asks the one thing that's been on his mind since you went down. Already knows the answer. Your eyes flick up and you nod around him.

Robby rises to his full height, now towering over you and pulls his cock out of your mouth. "Breathe through your nose, okay honey?"

A whimper slips past your lips as he feeds his cock into your mouth inch by inch, watching your throat work as he pushes deeper. The head of his cock nudges the back of your throat, making you gag.

He loves how you blink through it and look up at him like you'd take more if he wanted to give it.

What kills him is that you would. No question. He'd figured that out about you early, you give everything without being asked, all of it, every time, like you were made to. There's something deeply wrong with how much he loves that about you. He's aware.

His grip tightens in your hair, watching your lips stretch around him, jaw going soft and slack. Then a little faster. Your hands tighten on his thighs, holding onto him. "Atta girl," he breathes. "Just like that, baby."

After a few thrusts into your mouth, he pushes you all the way down and holds you right there. Nose against the hair at his base, throat tight around him, choking on him. One. Two. Three seconds, as he watches your eyes go wet, spit collecting at the corners of your mouth.

"You're okay." His thumb brushes your cheek. "You're doin' so good."

When he finally lets you up, you come off gasping, eyes streaming, spit connecting his cock to your chin. You look like a fucking dream.

The mess he's made of you. Mascara tracked down your cheek, lips swollen and spit-slick, and you're still on your knees looking at him like he's everything. He wonders sometimes if you know what that does to him. Probably not. Probably better that way.

"Again," he says. He doesn't go easy this time. His hips come up to meet you, short and shallow and then not so shallow. He can hear himself talking, can't really track what, just stay there and yeah and good girl.

Your eyes are unfocused and glazed, but still on him as you take all of it. You always look at him. Even when you've gone somewhere soft and far away, your eyes are on him. And god does it get him.

When he pushes into you again, he holds you there longer. Throat tight and fluttering around his cock, shaking just a little. He waits until he feels you swallow before he lets you breathe. "Fuck." He hisses. "Fuck, honey, feel so good."

The heat at the base of his spine is making decisions now, coiling tight, and you take it beautifully as his hips snap into you. "Gonna come."

You gasp when he pulls off, mouth dropping open. An invitation, always. He fists himself and watches it stripe across your cheek, your lips, catch in your lashes.

He breathes like he ran somewhere. Staring at the mess he's made of you. Glassy-eyed and wrecked and completely his.

Robby pulls you up as he falls into the couch, taking you with him. Now perched on his lap, his thumb drags slowly through the mess on your cheek. When he presses his thumb to your tongue, you clean him off without being asked.

Of course you do, you’re perfect like that.

"Good girl, baby." He brushes your hair off your face, mouth finding your temple. "Such a good girl. Did so good for me."

You go boneless against him, heavy and warm. He sits there and holds you. When he goes looking for whatever had been eating at him all day, he finds nothing.

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

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

That’s easy. Simple.

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

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

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

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

You’d had none of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That—” you’d started.

“Yeah,” he’d said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His eyes found you fast, without effort.

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

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

Fine. Completely fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wasn’t married anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You were in serious trouble.

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

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

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

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

“I like the walk.”

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

“End of shift. On-call room. B wing.”

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

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

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

At 7.55, you handed off your patients.

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

Do not open the door. What could go wrong?

It’s fine. It is absolutely not fine.

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

Against all odds, you knocked anyway and went in.

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

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

For the lighting, of course.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

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

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

“Dana told me. A while ago.”

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

“I know where you were.”

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

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

He stood up. “Yeah. Okay.”

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

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

You pressed your shoulders back against the door.

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

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

“It’s fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You pushed off the door and kissed him.

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

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

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

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

And then you stopped thinking.

“Frank—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Frank—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Here?” He asked against your navel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your hips moved. Chasing it.

He stopped.

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

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

“Frank—”

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

“No—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hate you.”

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

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

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

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

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

That alone made your skin go hot all over again.

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

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

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

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

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

“Stop,” you said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re looking at me.”

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

“Your on-call room?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Move,” you said when you could.

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

“Frank—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You feel—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Neither do I.”

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

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

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

Your hand stayed on the door.

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

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

You didn’t say yes.

You also didn’t say no.

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

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

my masterlist !

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

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

The ER is chaos. It always is but you forgot how much chaos because you haven't been here since before— well. Before your body decided to become a dairy factory. There's someone screaming about their foot, a kid crying, and the white lights are giving you a headache already.

You're about to ask someone where orthopedics might be hanging around when you hear his voice.

"— completely unacceptable. I need those scans now, I have —"

That's your husband. Sharp, cold, probably making some poor resident want to quit medicine entirely. You'd recognize that tone anywhere, the one that means Brendon is two seconds from snapping someone's head off.

He's standing near the nurses station, all six feet of beautiful irritation in his white coat — you didn’t even know he owned one of those, what with always coming home in his scrubs —, dark hair falling across his forehead, he keeps running his hands through it when he's pissed. Which is always.

You walk over before you can think better of it. "Brendon."

As soon as your voice reaches him, his face changes. A complete shift from shark to softness, something that makes your chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with how fucking full your breasts are right now. "Hey." His voice is different too. Quieter. "What are you doing here?"

"Brought you lunch." You hold up the tupperware like an offering. Brendon stares at it, then at you. There's this moment where you're suddenly very aware of how you look. Milk-stained shirt hidden under a cardigan, hair in a messy bun that's more mess than bun, the exhaustion that comes from a six-month-old who thinks sleep is optional.

You hear a crash, when you glance over there's a nurse staring at you. Then another one. A resident you don't recognize has stopped mid-step.

They're all staring.

"Uh."

Brendon's jaw tightens. He's noticed them staring too and he looks about ready to start firing people.

"Come on." His hand finds the small of your back and guides you away from the audience. You catch whispers as you walk past —did Park just —who is that—he has a wife?

Oh. Right. Brendon doesn't exactly share details about his personal life. You knew that, obviously you knew that, but somehow it didn't register that these people have probably never seen any evidence that he has a life outside of yelling at them about bone fractures.

There's a supply closet. Brendon pulls you inside and closes the door, which seems dramatic until you remember your husband thrives on drama as long as he's the one creating it. "You didn't tell me you were coming."

"It was spontaneous."

"Spontaneous." He repeats it like you’re dumb for even saying it. Then he takes the tupperware from your hands and sets it on a shelf next to boxes of gauze. "How's she doing?"

"Asleep when I left. Your sister's watching her."

Brendon nods, hands on your waist, thumbs rubbing small circles through your cardigan. It's such a casual thing, something he does without thinking, but it makes your whole body relax anyway.

A hiss leaves your moth as your breast twinges. It's been doing that for the past hour. Little reminders that you're about twenty minutes past when you should have pumped. The baby's been sleeping longer stretches which is amazing for sleep, terrible for your milk supply regulation. Your body keeps producing like she's still feeding every two hours and now you're engorged and starting to leak, standing in a supply closet with your husband who definitely doesn't need to know about this.

"You okay?" Brendon asks. The man notices everything, it's infuriating.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You made that face."

"What face?"

"The face you make when something hurts but you're pretending it doesn't."

Damn him. Damn his stupid observant doctor brain.

"It's nothing. I just need to —" You stop because how do you finish that sentence? I need to go home and hook myself up to a breast pump like a cow? "I'm fine."

Brendon's eyes drop. Zero subtlety, just straight down to your chest where your breasts are probably visibly larger than they were this morning. The nursing pads you shoved in your bra are doing their best but there's only so much they can absorb. "You need to pump." 

You feel your face heat up. This is mortifying. Bad enough that your body has become a milk machine, worse that your husband who spends his days putting people back together has to witness it. "I'll do it when I get home."

"That's an hour drive."

"I'll survive."

"You're in pain."

"Brendon—"

He cuts you off with a kiss. It's brief, barely a press of lips, but it shuts your brain up for a second. When he pulls back his expression is set, he's made a decision and you arguing is irrelevant. "There's a room. On-call room, it has a door that locks."

Your brain is trying to catch up. "I don't have my pump."

"So hand express."

"Into what, my hands? The sink?" The image is horrifying. You're already leaking through your bra, the idea of standing in a hospital bathroom squeezing milk into a drain seems like rock bottom.

Brendon's quiet, looking at you with an expression you can't quite read, dark and focused.  

"What?"

"I could help."

The words hang there. You're pretty sure you misheard because there's no way your husband just suggested —

"Help how?"

Brendon's mouth twitches, almost a smile but meaner. "You know how."

Oh. Oh fuck.

Did he just? Did your doctor husband just suggest he put his mouth on your breast and drink from you like —

"We're in your hospital." You say like every other part of the sentence was completely normal. 

"That’s fine —"

How is that fine? "Someone could —people will —" You can't finish sentences apparently. Your chest is aching, your pussy suddenly very interested in this conversation. Brendon looking at you like he wants to devour you doesn’t help your cause. 

"The room locks," he says again, his voice making your thighs clench. "And I told you, I can help."

This is a bad idea. Terrible idea. The worst idea either of you have ever had and that's including the time Brendon thought he could fix the garbage disposal himself. But your breasts hurt. And the thought of Brendan's mouth on you, his tongue, the heat and pressure and relief —

"Okay." You say it before you can take it back. Brendon's eyes flash, something predatory and hungry. Without missing a beat, his hand goes to your lower back guiding you out of the supply closet.

It’s completely normal for a doctor to take his spouse to an on-call room. They might have to talk, they could just eat. But your brain treats the walk like a death march, hyperaware of every person you pass, convinced they all somehow know what's about to happen. A nurse tracks you, looking above her reading glasses. But your husband doesn’t seem to care. 

When he closes the door behind you and locks, he speaks, "sit."

There's a bed, a tiny desk, a chair that's seen better days. You take the bed, legs feeling shaky like they might give out any second. 

Brendon moves in front of you, and starts unbuttoning his white coat.

"What are you doing?"

"It's in the way." When the coat comes off, you catch sight of the familiar scrubs.  You hate how good he looks. How unfair it is that he can spend twelve hours putting bones back together and still look like that.

Your cardigan is next. Brendon's fingers are gentle when they push it off your shoulders, careful like you might break. The nursing tank underneath is stretched tight across your swollen breasts, wet spots clearly visible where you've been leaking.

"Fuck." Your husband rarely swears, mostly because he can get his point across without having to raise his voice. More so lately after your daughter was born, he’s been all soft words and small smiles. But now he swears. It’s quiet, almost to himself, hand coming up to cup your breast through the fabric and you gasp. The pressure feels good and painful at the same time, relief and torture. "Sensitive?"

"Mhmm."

Brendon's thumb brushes over your nipple and milk leaks out, soaking through the already damp fabric. You can see the wet spreading circle. Your cheeks burn hotter with each second, arousal gathering within you,  making you want to hide and also spread your legs.

"I'm gonna —" You reach for the tank but Brendan stops you.

"Let me." He pulls the fabric down himself. Like they’ve been in confines all day, your breast spills out, heavy and swollen, nipple already beading with milk. The air feels cold against your overheated skin.

Brendon stares. You've been together for years, he's seen your breasts more times than you can count, but this feels different. More exposed. Your body is doing something it's supposed to do, natural and maternal, and he's looking at you like you're the hottest thing he's ever seen.

"Bren —"

His mouth closes around your nipple and your words fail. The first pull of suction is intense. Relief floods through you, almost immediately, overwhelming, better than any pump you've used. Milk flows freely and your husband swallows, tongue working against your sensitive flesh, and holy fuck this feels good. 

This shouldn't feel good. It's functional, practical, your husband helping you with a medical issue. But you can’t think of practical when his fingers are indented in the flesh of your hips, hard enough to leave marks, mouth spilling groans he can’t quite control.

One of your hands find his hair. The soft dark strands slip through your fingers when you pull, maybe too hard, but Brendon just sucks harder in response. "Oh god—"

You can feel the pressure in your breast easing, a gradual relief, but it's being replaced by a different kind of pressure between your legs. You're wet. Soaking wet, probably leaving a mark on your underwear.

Brendon pulls off with a wet sound, lips shiny with milk, pupils blown wide, looking fucked up in the best way. "Other side."

He doesn't wait for you to respond, pulling the other side of your tank down and takes your breast into his mouth. The relief is immediate again, almost dizzying. Brendon drinks it down like he's been thinking about this for months, not wasting a single drop. 

You've caught him staring sometimes when you're feeding the baby, look on his face that you couldn't quite identify. Hunger maybe. Want. You know, the want that makes people do stupid things like suggest sucking their wife's tits in an on-call room.

His free hand slides up your thigh, and under your skirt. In retrospect, you’re happy you chose the skirt instead of those overworn sweats, even though you weren't exactly planning for this. His fingers find the edge of your underwear. Your legs soread themselves immediately , on their own accord.  

"You're turned on." Brendon says it against your breast, muffled and matter-of-fact. Like he's diagnosing a condition. As if his fingers aren’t currently making their way to your pussy. 

"Shut up."

His fingers slip under the fabric and yeah, okay, there's no denying it. You're drenched, which kind of feels humiliating even though you’ve already known. His fingers slide through your folds easily, collecting wetness. You bite your lip to keep from moaning.

"This turning you on that much?" Brendon's voice is dark, teasing. "Me drinking from you?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe?" He bites down gently on your nipple and you gasp. "Liar."

Two fingers push inside you. You’re so wet there’s no resistance, and the stretch is perfect, an immediate fullness that makes your walls clench. Brendon's fingers curl, finding that spot inside you that makes your vision blur.

His mouth doesn’t part from your nipple, mil still flowing and coating his tongue, the dual sensation of it is too much, wet sounds filling the small room. "Brendon —"

He doesn’t look up to speak, not willing to part and lose the flow. "What?"

"I'm—fuck—I'm close."

He hums against your breast. The vibration shoots straight to your clit. His thumb finds the swollen bundle of nerves and circles it. "Come for me, honey." Your husband, who spends his days giving orders in operating rooms, is telling you to come and your body obeys.

Your pussy clenches around his fingers, walls fluttering. You have to slap a hand over your mouth to muffle the sound. Brendon works you through it, fingers pumping steadily, mouth still on your breast like he can't get enough.

Even though you’re shaking, your chest finally feels lighter, the ache replaced by a pleasant soreness. Brendon's fingers slip out of you and you watch as he brings them to his mouth, licking them clean.

"That’s disgusting."

He doesn’t seem to mind it. You watch his tongue slide between his fingers, cleaning off your wetness, and your spent pussy gives a valiant twitch of interest.

Brendon fixes your tank top, gentle hands pulling the fabric back into place. Your breasts are still visible through the wet fabric but at least they're covered. The cardigan goes back on next. "Better?"

"Yeah." You are better. Lighter. Less like you're about to burst. Of course now you're sitting in an on-call room having just had an orgasm while your husband drank your breast milk, so better is relative.

"I have to get back." Brendon's putting his white coat back on, smoothing down the front. He looks completely composed. Meanwhile you probably look like you've been thoroughly fucked. "You good to drive?"

"I think so."

"Text me when you get home."

"Okay."

He kisses you before you leave. It's soft, careful, and you can taste yourself on his lips. Sweet and tangy, weird but intimate in a way that makes your chest tight. "Thanks for lunch."

"You didn't eat it yet."

"Yeah, just drank it." His hand squeezes your hip. "Tonight when I get home we're doing that again."

Your face burns at his words. "The lactation thing or the orgasm thing?"

"Both."

You leave first. Brendon waits a minute before following, some attempt at discretion that's probably pointless. When you walk past the nurses station every head turns. You can feel their eyes on you, questions forming, gossip already spreading.

Park the Shark has a wife. She's soft and tired and apparently visits him at work. She also looks thoroughly debauched but they probably don't know that part.

Probably.

Your phone buzzes before you even make it to your car.

Bren: Everyone's asking questions

You: What did you tell them?

Bren: To mind their fucking business

You: Romantic

Bren: I'll show you romantic when I get home

Peterson was the same as you. Same year, same matching cycle, equally sleep-deprived and increasingly philosophical about whether any of this was worth it — the answer was yes, obviously, but only at certain hours and in certain lighting.

He was Ortho and you were EM. The hospital's hierarchy made you equals, but if anyone asked you, you'd say he was doing a little better than you. 

Officially he couldn't sign anything. Unofficially, he could tell you that you were right, and give you the right to say "seen by Ortho." Basically, an excuse wearing scrubs.

You keep Peterson on decent terms, he comes down earlier for consults. Everyone goes home.

Good networking, if you ever had to explain it out loud. Which you wouldn't, because there was one other reason, something that no one except you knew.

Peterson was the single most efficient way to get around a consult without having to see Park.

The problem wasn't that you didn't want to see Park. You wanted to see him, badly. It's just that, something happens when you do see him.

The brain that had passed med school, performed codes at asscrack hours, goes offline. You'd be a functioning person, and then Brendon Park would appear in your peripheral vision, and you'd be a nobody, standing with your mouth slightly open, aware that something was supposed to be happening somewhere and nothing beyond that.

You'd proven this spectacularly multiple times. The latest incident was a week ago. Park had come down for a consult, a MVC, called down to the ER by Robby himself. 

You'd been so committed to not watching him, and guess what had happened?

You walked directly into his chest. 

When asked about it, you'd learned to say "accidentally bumped into him." 

But 'bumped' was underselling it honestly. 

What happened was a whole body collision. Face-to-sternum. Your suture tray went in one direction. Everything on it — needle driver, forceps, the forever-in-shortage 3-0 ethilon — went everywhere else.

He'd caught your elbow for half a second, which to you, felt like years, everything playing out in slow motion. It was the kind of reflex one would use to steady a child. "Watch your step." His eyes did a quick pass over you, checking for any damage. "You good?"

You'd said something, that part you remember. For the life of you, you still couldn't figure out what exactly you'd said. 

He didn't seem to mind anyway as he'd kept walking, not even throwing a glance over his shoulder. You on the other hand, were rooted to the ground, staring at his interscapular distance, a longing wife sending her husband out to war, a wistful look on your face. 

Robby found you exactly like that. He brought you to your senses by snapping a glove at your shoulder, startling you. Without a single molecule of sympathy, he said, "stop drooling in my ER. And please pick those up." 

You picked up the tray and it's discarded contents. What you couldn't pick up was your dignity, it had taken residence at the cold hard linoleum floor of the ER. 

So yeah. Peterson. Earlier consults and a decent enough heart rate at all times. 

That was why he got sent the text. 63 year old woman, fell on an outstretched hand in her driveway, arrived with pain and swelling at the distal radius, classical dinner fork deformity. 

You got the X-ray. Classic Colles' — dorsal displacement, clean break. Needed Ortho eyes and a note in the chart and that was it.

You : Colles. You free?

You attached the X-rays, hit send and went back to your patient.

You didn't look at the screen.

You should have looked at the screen.

Forty-odd minutes later, Whitaker appeared at your elbow, looking pale. Well, paler than usual. "Why is Park down here?"

You looked up from your chart. "Sorry?"

"Shark." He lowered his voice, like the man could hear his own name from two rooms over. "I've checked the board twice. We only have one Ortho case and it's a Colles'." He frowned at his tablet like it had personally disappointed him. "He doesn't come down for a Colles'. He'd call every sleeping resident in the building before he personally came down here for a Colles'. Even if the systems didn't work, he'd make someone carry the films upstairs." 

You followed his line of sight to see Park. Big mistake, your brain started bidding you goodbye. But you feigned indifference and continued your chart. "Maybe they're short upstairs."

Whitaker looked at you like you'd suggested maybe the defibrillator was decorative. "He's the attending. If they're short, he makes their lives miserable, he doesn't physically transport himself four floors down for a Colles' fracture." 

"I don't know, Dennis. Probably came down for something else." You brushed him off, trying to block out the fact that Park was standing at a five metres distance and the traitorous organ inside your chest had already picked up on it. 

Whitaker wandered off, probably to some hole where no one — no, Park — couldn't find him. 

You continued for about one more minute. But then you remembered that Peterson hadn't texted you back. 

He always texted back within ten minutes. That was the entire arrangement. The one rule. Immediate response. You knew he wasn't in the OR. There were no emergency cases in the morning, and as far as you knew, Monday wasn't elective OR day. 

Peterson picked up sounding mildly surprised that you'd called instead of texted. No one called anyone anymore. "Hey. What's—"

"Did you get my text?"

"What — what text?"

The floor dropped out from under you. 

"I'll call you back," you hung up before he'd finished his next word, your messages already open, thumb scrolling backward —

Dr. Park Ortho.

No, no, no. You'd texted him. You'd made him come down. God, if you still believed in her, was a cruel entity. 

Park's name should not exist in your phone, a number you absolutely shouldn't have. You are not his resident, you are not even tangentially his responsibility, the only reason you have it at all is because you asked Peterson for it three months ago under the thin pretense of Robby asking for it. God knows why Peterson bought it, why the Chief of Emergency Medicine would need a measly resident to ask for the Ortho God's number, but he'd given it to you nonetheless. You just kept it there like a lottery ticket you knew wouldn't win.

Three images, sent at 2:23 PM.

Three? Shouldn't it be just two? X-ray wrist — AP and lateral.

Your thumb flied to the thread, and the first two photos were AP and lateral views.

The third though. 

You almost dropped the phone. Almost being the keyword. Because you couldn't afford to drop it down the floor, what with the photo on display. 

It's you. 

The photo was taken three days ago. Having bought yourself an actual matching set for once, lace, dark red, you'd taken one picture. Just the one, for yourself. Like you take a picture of a meal you were proud of cooking. Same logic. You'd honestly forgotten all about it. 

Until now. 

Now Brendon Park had a photo of yourself in red lace intended for absolutely no one on this earth, with the caption 'Colles. You free?' underneath it like the universe's cruelest punchline.

Your options were limited. Transfer request, clearly. A sudden and urgent family emergency in another state, and you could continue your residency in some second rated hospital there. But, you liked working here.

You could disappear right now, walk out of this building and never come back, let your absence become the cautionary tale they told at department holiday parties for years. There was something almost freeing about that last one. But once again, you liked working here. 

Also Robby would actually end you if you left mid-shift.

A throat being cleared brought you to the present. You looked up to see Park towering over you, shoulders so broad and perfect, you almost wanted to bury yourself in his chest and beg for forgiveness. 

"Present the case, doctor." 

"M-me?" You pointed at yourself with your free hand, like that one little duck from The Ugly Duckling, as though he'd asked you to march into battle, a bewildered look on your face. Like the medical degree you had held no value at all.

"You were the one who texted me, right?" He turned around and walked towards South 16, where the cause to all your problems peacefully existed, drinking orange juice. 

Without any other choice, you followed him. 

When you opened your mouth, you discovered that every word you'd ever known had evacuated your skull at once. 

Park, for his part, did not rush you, looking at you with a sort of expression reserved for kids who threw tantrums, a somewhat 'go on, I'd like to see you try' look evident on his face. 

"I, she's, it's a—" You looked down at the chart in your hands like it might volunteer to speak for you. It declined. "I-It's a wrist."

Transferring was the only option left for you now. 

"Glad we covered that." Park deadpanned. "Walk me through it." 

Okay, this was pushing it. There's no reason to walk him through a Colles'. 

That only meant one thing. He was mad and wanted to kill you. 

You were going to die in your own ER, of this, right here, in front of six witnesses. Whitaker was hovering at a respectful distance looking intensely curious. 

Your pulse was audible. Well, at least to you.

Park stepped forward, barely an inch, and his voice dropped, his cologne invading your senses almost immediately. "I'd love nothing more right now than to have you dumb on my cock." It was conversational, almost bored, like he was commenting on traffic. "But you've got a patient in front of you, so how about you focus?"

Like he didn't do anything ridiculous like suggest you die a painful death at his dick, he slowly retreated, a smirk playing on his lips, composure perfectly normal. 

You presented the case without making a fool of yourself any further than you already had. Mechanism of injury, dorsal angulation, neurovascular intact distally. Possibly because it was a play you knew well, watched and performed a thousand times, at a thousand other places, what with it being one of the most common fractures in the elderly. 

Your mouth ran the whole program without having to consult the rest of you, while you sat somewhere a few feet outside your own body and watched him nod along and glance at the films on the tablet like the last ninety seconds had never happened.

"Closed reduction. I'll send a resident down." He spoke to the room, not you. 

"Okay," you still responded, nodding your head for good measure. 

He looked at you for one more beat, a look with nothing professional left in it whatsoever. "Wait for me. After your shift."

Before you caught up with what had happened, he was walking away, pausing once to nod at Robby — who was glancing between the two of you — and then he was gone up the elevator. 

Once again, you stood at the middle of the ER, with your dignity at your feet. 

Luckily, Robby did not materialise behind you, only Whitaker did. "What was that about?" His brow was furrowed like he was already constructing six different worst-case scenarios in his head.

"Nothing." You were already walking the other way, shaky legs and all.

"Why do you look like you just saw a ghost?" 

If only he knew. 

The rest of your shift was something you survived rather than participated in. You sutured, discharged, charted, and your brain ran on a loop the entire time: dumb on my cock — wait for me — dumb on my cock, with occasional breaks to consider which state had affordable housing before promptly circling back to the cock thing. 

By the time you clocked out you'd made and unmade about nine decisions. You spent an embarrassing amount of time in the locker room that you'd defend as getting yourself together and anyone else who'd watched would describe it as you reapplying your lip balm.

Park was leaning against his car in the parking lot when you got outside, scrolling on his phone. He looked up before you'd made it halfway across the lot.

Your legs begged for you to turn back, it's not too late to maybe live out your days in the hospital, like Whitaker did that one time. 

Thanks or no thanks to your prefrontal cortex, you did not retreat back to the confines of your job, put one foot forward and reached Park. "You didn't have to wait outside." And, that that was the sentence your mouth had chosen, out of every sentence currently available in the English language.

"Wasn't standing in that lobby with Robby asking me forty questions about why I'm still in the building." He tilted his head toward the passenger side. "Get in."

With a nod reserved only for superiors, you got in. 

Your bag sat in your lap and you kept fiddling with the zipper, which you were aware of but couldn't stop doing.

"You gonna be okay over there?" His eyes were still on the road, but head slightly tilted over to your side. "Or should I be worried?"

"I sent an attending a photo of myself in my underwear. Attached to a wrist X-ray. Asking him to come look at it." You stared straight ahead, unable to look at him. "Doing great."

That pulled something out of him, not quite a laugh, more of an exhale through the nose, amused despite his best efforts not to be. "Wasn't my least favorite outcome of the day. And wasn't that lingerie?"

"That's an extremely unprofessional thing to say to a resident, Dr Park."

"Wasn't talking to a resident." The statement ended with your name, with the same monotone you used to deliver his. He didn't elaborate any further, and you decided, wisely, not to push.

Against better judgment, you looked at the side of his face though. You didn't know someone could look this good clean shaven. He did not mind you looking at him. Or if he did, he didn't show. 

"How'd you even know it was me?" you asked, mostly to fill the air. "You didn't have my number."

"Caller ID's a hell of a thing." He said it like that should have been obvious, which, you supposed, it was. "Been trying to find a reason to come down and see your face all shift. You handed me one."

Park the shark? Coming down to see you? 

You did not have a comeback, nor did you need one. 

You spent the rest of the drive looking very intently out the window, aware of him glancing over more than once, the anticipation of what's coming twisting your stomach in knots you'd rather not feel right then. 

His place was not what you'd expected. A man cave you could've predicted, preferred even. But this was more … homely, telling you this perpetually grumpy guy that you've been pining after has a soft side. 

There was a blanket actually balled up on the couch, when you hadn't expected a blanket at all.

A framed photo on the stairwell wall hung slightly crooked. You had the genuinely deranged thought that you wanted to fix it, like you lived here, like that was a thing you got to have an opinion about. You did not get to have an opinion about it. You'd known the man's address for nine minutes.

He dropped his keys in a bowl by the door, the single most domestic gesture you'd ever watched him make. You stood in the entryway feeling abruptly, stupidly out of place. 

"Shower," he said, moving toward the hallway, not framing it as a suggestion. "You smell like the hospital."

You almost laughed at the bluntness of it. The fact that he wasn't bothering to pretend this was smooth or romantic, loosened a knot in your chest. 

The last person you'd done anything like this with — a general surgery resident — hadn't cared what either of you smelled like. He'd had you on his bed in your hospital socks within four minutes of his front door closing. You remembered lying there afterward, painfully aware of the day's grime still on his sheets, wondering if that was simply what dating other doctors was always going to be like. Safe to say, you never called him back. 

But, this was shaping up to be a different experience entirely. 

Park pointed you toward the bathroom and went to shower himself.

You showered fast, mostly out of nerves, with a bodywash that smelled unreasonably good for something so utilitarian. When you came out wrapped in a towel, you could hear water running behind a different door somewhere down the hall. A folded gray t-shirt sat on the counter that hadn't been there before, soft form what looked like a hundred washes, a faded logo on the chest you didn't recognize and didn't try to.

You put it on. Nothing else. It seemed like an instruction that didn't need spelling out. Some reckless part of you was already curious to find out if you'd read it right.

Park came out of his own shower in grey sweatpants and nothing else. His chest was, well… there.

When he found you sitting on the edge of his bed, he stopped in his doorway just to look. Your knees were pressed together like that was somehow going to undo the last several hours.

"That's a good look on you." Which was interesting phrasing, from a man who looked like that.

"It's the only thing you gave me to wear." You crossed your arms in front of your chest, the t-shirt riding up with the movement, soft thighs delectable for him to look at. 

"Take the compliment." He crossed the room slowly and stopped right in front of where you sat, close enough you had to tip your head back to keep looking at him. 

He leaned down and kissed you before you could come up with anything of value, one hand braced on the mattress beside your hip, the other curving along your jaw.

You'd been kissed before. If anyone had asked you, you would describ them as fine. Only now, you were learning that 'fine' is not a word one should use to describe a kiss, this one rewriting every touch of lips you've ever had. 

A sigh escaped into it without you meaning to, a soft, helpless little exhale that you heard yourself make and immediately regretted because it meant he heard it too.

He pulled back maybe an inch, mouth still close enough that you felt the warmth of the words. "That good, huh?"

Smug fucking bastard. 

"Shut up."

He kissed you again, shorter this time, mouth crooked as it pressed against yours. "You sighed."

"People sigh."

"Not like that they don't." Calloused hands spanned your hips, warmth of it raising goosebumps across your skin even through the fabric, as he softly tugged at it. "Take this off."

"You gave it to me thirty seconds ago." 

"And now I'm asking for it back." A faint and wicked smile crept into the corner of his mouth. "Take it off."

Your hands weren't entirely steady when you reached for the hem, more nerves than cold as you pulled the shirt up and over your head in one fast motion. Mainly because you didn't trust yourself to do it any slower, letting it drop somewhere on the floor between you. 

The air hit your skin half a second later, followed quickly by the realization that you were now sitting on his bed with nothing on at all while he stood there covered from the waist down.

Reflex more than decision, your knees pressed together, automatic modesty your body apparently decided it needed. His eyes dropped immediately, mouth curving into a half smile.

Big, rough hands made contact with the softness in your thighs, rubbing up and down like he was calming your nerves, followed by a soft tap to your outer thigh. "Open up."

When you stared at him blankly, upstairs evacuating again, he crouched in front of you, hands settling on your knees, thumbs pressing slow circles into the inside of them. "Open up, baby. I want to see her."

You blinked at him. "H-her? Her who?"

Brendon laughed like you'd genuinely caught him off guard. "Your pussy, sweetheart. What'd you think I meant?"

Heat went straight through you, a different kind than the embarrassment, though the embarrassment hadn't entirely left the building either. The two emotions tangled tight together until you couldn't separate one from the other.

You let your knees fall open slowly, watching his face the whole time, needing to see what it did to him.

The sound that left him when he finally got a proper look at your core went straight back to it, slick gathering. "Fuck." His thumbs kept moving, working higher up your thighs. "Look at you."

Only a whimper slipped past your lips, unable to look at his eyes anymore, even if they weren't focused on yours, but an entirely different part of you.

He dragged one finger up the inside of your thigh, slow enough to border on cruel, stopping just shy of where you actually wanted him. "You're soaked, baby. All this from a wrist consult?"

"From you —" Your mouth caught up half a second too late, and you paused, pressing your lips together.

He looked up. "What was that?"

"N-nothing."

"Mm." His thumb made one more lazy circle over your skin and you realised he probably already knew. He sat back slightly as he studied you, fingers not yet reaching for the delicacy on display, content with only working you with his eyes now. "You know what I was thinking when I came down?" 

You were not going to ask. You were absolutely not — "What?"

"I wanted to see how you looked. You always get this look." He tilted his head to look at you, hands still stationed at your thighs. "When you see me. You know that?"

"What?"

"That one." He nodded at your face, like it was helpfully demonstrating itself for him right now. Knowing you, it probably was. "Like your brain just took a long lunch and forgot to clock back in."

"I do not."

"You do. The lights go out." He pressed a kiss to the inside of your knee.  "I've been curious what it looks like when I've actually got my hands on you."

"W-what?" 

A parrot. You were more parrot than human, what with all the 'what's you were repeating. 

"You're so clueless it's adorable." Clueless from his mouth wasn't any different, having heard it strug with a hundred other insults aimed at his residents. Adorable, on the other hand… 

"Don't say adorable."

"Why not?"

"It — it means something different when you say it." You pointed at him, which from your current position — naked, with his hands on your thighs — was a spectacular show of nothing. You held it anyway. "I'm not adorable. I'm a competent —"

"Mhmm."

"— medical professional."

"Okay." You knew every version of his okay. Months of listening to him from across rooms while pretending very hard you hadn't been doing that, and the 'okay' he'd just used meant he'd already won and had no further interest in pursuing the argument. 

The Peterson arrangement was there specifically to avoid this and here you were anyway, sitting on his bed, having been kissed and told you were adorable, like you were a squirrel. 

"You're not actually agreeing with me, are you?"

Brendon's eyes fluttered close with a soft smile on his lips. Domesticated almost, looking every bit different from the hospital version of him, damp hair falling onto his face without the usual gel to hold it back.

Piercing eyes bore into yours, an intensity that was miles ahead of what you'd experienced before. The tough guy act he usually dons at work seemed to have revealed itself for what it truly was — an act. "Do you want me to agree with you, or eat you out?"

It was so casual, interrupting your flow of thoughts about how soft Park the Shark looked. A minute to organise your head and you were stuck on the "eat you out." Who even asked things liked that?

Brendon was waiting for you and looked like someone who would be comfortable with the wait. He was good at that actually, the waiting it out. Once had even Robby cave, you still weren't sure how that happened.

"W-what?"

"Focus, babygirl." Babygirl. That was new, that was nice. "Use your words. What do you want?"

You'd think ER doctors would be good with words. You talked dying people down from panic, talked families through the worst sentence of their lives, knew exactly how to phrase things to a scared kid in triage. Words were the whole job, basically. 

Apparently that didn't transfer, and once again, this was proving to be an uncharted territory. A shark swimming around you in the ER, you can handle. That was shallow waters, and you had an upper hand, known turf. Whatever this was, you absolutely couldn't.

Trying to repeat that sentence was hard, you opened and closed your mouth like a fish out of water, one the shark would very gladly devour, as you finally settled on, "yes."

"That's not what I asked, was it?"

"E-eat me out." Finally out of your mouth, heat crawling up your neck as his lips curved into an all knowing smirk, quickly vanished by your utterance of "Bren."

You had never called him that before. Even under your own sheets, with your hands between your thighs, you've fantasised and moaned 'Brendon', but this one had simply arrived. A new development, one that softened the shark's cutting bite.

"Good girl." Brendon praised, and it went straight to your cunt. "Such a good girl." 

Shouldn't show all your cards the very first time you're together, you'd once decided long back, and had a stellar record of following it up until this point. With the way this night was going, you were pretty sure you'd be cardless by the end of it.

Before you could say anything, Brendon's mouth found your carotid, pressing soft kisses, and briefly — very briefly, for your disappointment — returned to your lips, a chaste kiss, a soft denial as you chased him. 

As he continued marking you with featherlight kisses and gentle suction, you were becoming increasingly aware of the bulge in his pants. 

There was this grey sweatpants theory your friend had told you about. Never had a reason to think about it before. You were thinking about it now. 

Brendon's palms settled on the sides of your ribs. You must've been sleeping with pocket sized humans, because both of his hands seemed to span the whole of your torso, clearly big enough, having absolutely no problem showing it. 

It wasn't like you hadn't noticed them before. You had, on numerous occasions, standing on the nurses' station while he picked up a severed limb to examine. But none of that actually showed you how large his hands were, and how it could make you look small in comparison. 

His mouth was now warm at your clavicle, your sternum, until it reached one of your breasts. A sudden gasp from you, and you felt him smirk over your skin.

One of his hands left your hip to hold your other breast, palming it as he ravished this one with a particularly strong suction that made your toes curl. 

Calloused fingers deftly played with your hardened nipple, and you yet again tried to stifle a moan. 

Brendon pulled apart reluctantly, only to chastise you. "I wanna hear you. Don't hold back."

The next one came out loud as you nodded, the second his mouth closed back around your other nipple, tongue flicking against it while his hand kept working the first one between two fingers. 

Your hips lifted off the bed on their own, looking for anything to grind against, and found nothing but air.

"Patience." He said it against your skin, not even looking up.

His trail of kisses lowered past your ribs, your stomach, the softest part of it you'd spent a considerable amount of time thinking about. 

Brendon didn't seem to mind though, only pressing more open mouthed kisses, saliva streaking over bare skin, even sinking his teeth a few times, evidence of it you were sure to find the next day.

When his hands met your thighs, they spread them so wide, completely exposing you, even though his eyes made contact with yours once before looking back at your wet core, basically inviting him to taste. 

Brendon's mouth descended to your cunt as his big hands kept your thighs open however he'd wanted. You squealed at the first touch of his tongue over your wetness, lips closing over your clit, while two of his fingers parted your slick folds with utmost care, the one contrasting his pull on the soft bud. 

"You taste so good," his voice was muffled against your folds, the raspy tone almost had you coming right then, just from that. 

One finger teased your entrance, circling it just right, his tongue taking the opportunity to delve into it, a high pitched moan — one that you didn't know you were capable of making — ripped past your lips. 

The hands that were bunched at the sheets went straight to his hair, a tug that he seemed to enjoy as a groan vibrated through him. 

His tongue worked slow circles around your clit while his fingers found a rhythm inside you, curling on every withdrawal, and your thighs started shaking against the sides of his head before you'd even seen it coming.

"Brendon —"

He hummed against you instead of answering, the vibration of it nearly enough on its own, and one of your hands left his hair to grab blindly at the sheet, twisting it into your fist like you needed somewhere else to put all of it.

He pulled back just enough to drag his eyes up your body. Chin wet and mouth shiny, as he reached for your hand — the one that had abandoned his hair — and manoeuvred it right back to where it was, encouraging you. "You can pull at me however you want."

Apparently he wasn't as attached to his hair as you'd thought. 

With that, his mouth met your cunt again, a smirk right against your clit before gently sucking it between his lips. 

The sound that tore through as you came wasn't one you were familiar with. Glad you weren't — it probably would've gotten you into trouble if this was your apartment. 

When your thighs shook at the aftershocks and your fingers tugged at his hair with all their might, Brendon gentled his attack over your pussy, but kept nuzzling into you like he didn't want to stop. 

He kissed his way back up. Your stomach, your sternum, your throat, and when he finally got to your mouth you tasted yourself on his tongue and didn't hate it the way you probably should have. "Gotta taste how sweet you are." It was said right against your lips.

A whimper left you in mock protest as you pushed at his chest with the heels of your hands.

"What? I'm not wrong." He kissed you one more time like he was trying to prove it. "You're sweet everywhere, you know that?"

"Stop it."

"Mouth." A soft peck to your lips, lingering there. He pulled back just far enough to watch your face catch up. "Neck." Shark teeth grazed the side of your throat gently, then again with more weight behind it, enough to make your breath catch. He stayed there a moment, mouthing slowly along your pulse.

"Clavicle." Of course the Orthopedician uses the anatomical term, instead of the romantic 'collarbone' you'd have gone for, but you weren't complaining, as his mouth pressed into the hollow of it.

His mouth found the space between your breasts next, a little towards the left, one kiss pressed right over your hammering heart, his breath warm and slow against your skin.

"Breasts." He took his time at your chest this time, mouth closing over one nipple while his thumb worked slow circles on the other, and you squirmed under him, fingers curling into the sheets, the whole idea of him making a point dissolving into the fact that he just wanted to.

His mouth dragged down over your ribs one at a time, like he was counting, his exhale warm the whole way down.

"Stomach." He said it against the soft give of you and pressed an open mouthed kiss into the part of yourself you were probably the most insecure about. But, insecurity didn't stand a chance against Brendon. He stayed there long enough that you squirmed again, and felt him smile against your skin like the squirming was exactly the reaction he'd been after. 

The last one he skipped saying out loud. He looked up at you once, a darkness already sitting in his eyes. Every kiss before this was focused on this lips, but this one, his tongue came into action, flat and slow against you, and you understood, with sudden total clarity, that he'd meant every word.

This part wasn't about making you cum, as he immediately started making his way up, no, kissing his way up, at the same pace.

By the time he reached your mouth you'd pushed yourself up to meet him, sitting on shaking legs, hands sliding over his chest, his ribs, the muscle flanking his spine you'd spent months pretending not to notice. 

When you dragged a thumb over his nipple out of pure curiosity, he jerked under your hand, a startled laugh breaking loose that didn't match the rest of the night at all.

"Did you just —" You did it again, intentional this time, grinning up at him.

"Don't." He caught your wrist before a third attempt, a boyishness flickering across his face. Evidence for later, blackmail for the next time he tried to act untouchable in front of everyone, dealt in private of course.

"You're ticklish."

"I'm not ticklish."

"Brendon Park." You said his full name like you were reading it off the board. "Attending Orthopedic surgeon. Ticklish."

"You're done." He caught both your wrists in one hand easily and pinned them gently to the side, just above your thigh. His other hand found your chest instead, thumb circling slowly over one nipple, watching your face the whole time. "That what you were trying to do?"

Your hands stayed pinned, no way to touch him back, and the lack of an outlet had your hips lifting off the bed before you'd decided to let them.

He let your wrists go, sitting back to look at you, a thought visibly surfacing behind his eyes. "You know people look at you, right?"

That came from absolutely nowhere, as you gawked at him, wondering who looked at you and where. "What?"

"At the hospital. People look at you."

"They do not."

"Night shift nurse. New surg intern." His eyes flicked toward the door like someone was about to walk through it. "Robby."

Robby couldn't possibly — "Robby looks at me to yell at me, those are very different things." 

You crossed your arms on instinct, and the motion pushed your chest up, drawing attention to the soft flesh, drawing his attention. 

He pressed you back into the mattress, mouth finding your nipple, tongue working slow circles while his hand kept the other one busy. "You'd know," he said between pulls, "if you weren't so busy ogling me."

"I don't ogle you." Your hands found his hair on their own, fingers soft against his scalp, betraying the indignation in your voice completely.

"Sure you don't."

"I don't." It came out breathier, not exactly your intended outcome. 

"Yeah." Agreement, except you both knew it wasn't. He hooked an arm under you and shifted you higher up the bed. Easy, like you weighed nothing. Something about being moved effortlessly, like being tossed like a blanket, settled warm inside your chest. 

Brendon kissed down your stomach again, on his way to sit up. When he finally shoved his sweatpants, you watched him do it without meaning to stare, except you were absolutely staring, probably with your mouth wide open. 

He kicked them off the end of the bed and you got the full, unobstructed view of exactly what the grey sweatpants had been hiding.

"You're huge." The words left you without you having a say in it, hands immediately flying to clasp your mouth as if you can claw them back by sheer willpower. 

"Yeah?" He wrapped his hand around himself and pumped slowly, watching you watch him do it. His hands pried yours from your mouth and wrapped your fingers around him in place of his own.

You barely managed to circle him, the size of him making your own hand look almost comical wrapped around it. 

Brendon hissed through his teeth when you gave an experimental stroke, hips twitching forward into your grip like he hadn't expected it either.

He let you work him a few more times, watching your face more than what your hand was doing, before he pulled you off gently and laid himself down flat against your stomach instead, the full hot weight and length of him resting there like he was giving you a preview of what was coming. "See how huge, baby?" 

A nod was all you could manage as you stared down at where he sat against your skin, leaking, a thin shine already smeared where he'd dragged himself there. The sight of him measured against your own body, against the soft of your stomach, made your mouth go dry all over again.

He tapped himself once against your stomach, a light thud right at your navel. "Say it again."

"No." Shaking your head, you wanted to disappear inside your own skin, the amount of attention lavished upon you almost overwhelming. The intensity of his stare alone made your knees feel like jelly. 

Thank god he had you spread out on his bed. If not for that, you'd definitely have made a fool of yourself in front of him. Again.

"C'mon." He rocked his hips, dragging himself an inch across your stomach, sure of himself. It would've been obnoxious on anyone else, but he looked incredibly gorgeous and that only made your thighs press together. "I like hearing it."

"That's not — I wasn't complimenting you."

"Sure sounded like one." He braced a hand beside your head and pushed in slowly, the stretch of him pulling a gasp out of you before he'd even finished the thought. "Wanna see?"

It took you a second to get what he was offering, and you nodded. Brendon reached up, cupping the back of your skull, guiding your head up so you could watch where he was already halfway inside you, your walls stretched thin and shining around the sheer width of him, more than you'd thought your body had room for. 

The sight was too much to take in directly, and your head dropped fully into his palm before he'd pushed in another inch, a laugh breaking out of him. 

Watching your face now instead of where your bodies met, Brendon kept pushing in. Your walls clenched around him at every fraction of an inch, a stretch that bordered on too much before settling into something pleasuring.

"You good?" He asked breathless, jaw tight, hips frozen in place as he filled you to the brim.

"Uh-huh." Barely legible syllables were all you could muster.

"Words, baby."

"Move, Brendon."

The air left your lungs in one go as he pulled back almost all the way and slammed back in, your spine coming off the mattress on its own.

Somewhere at the start of this, or the weeks leading up to this, you'd thought he'd be controlled and calm, not one word wasted. He somehow turned out to be the exact opposite but also the exact same.

It felt like you were being taken apart, one piece at a time, while he was also losing himself a little. You could tell by the way his jaw kept clenching, his breath stuttering against your ear like he hadn't planned on that part happening to him too.

His hand slid up from your hip to circle around your throat, more a question than a grip. 

"That picture." It barely registered as language. You were somewhere past language by then, his cock and his hand at your throat only things you could process. "Who was that for?"

"What picture?" It wasn't that you were being difficult on purpose. When put in a position you've been mostly dreaming about for the past however many months, the only thing grabbing your attention was right in front of — no, inside — you. 

The question floated somewhere above you like it belonged to a conversation happening in another room.

He laughed against your throat, and bit down right over your pulse, sharp enough to sting and soft enough to soothe a second later with his tongue.

On top of that, one of his hands found your nipple, twisting the peaked bud between two fingers, hips coming to a halt.

A half formed protest rushed out of you. "Wha — why'd you — why'd you stop?" Breathy and whiny, your hips tried to chase friction, trying to take whatever he'd stopped giving.

"Tell me, baby." Soft and merciless words in the same breath.

"I don't — don't know, Bren." Your hands found his shoulders, nails biting in without much intention behind it, just somewhere to put the desperation since he'd taken away everything else. 

"Did I fuck you dumb, sweetheart? 

You shook your head against the pillow, which wasn't even an answer to anything, more just a reflex, the kind of thing your body did now in place of words. 

His hips a dead weight notched right where you needed them moving, he waited, patient, that felt almost cruel given the state he'd left the rest of you in.

Like a browser with a hundred tabs open, your mind buffered, going through each of them until it landed on … The Picture. Right. The wrist X-ray, the caption, the —

Oh. 

Oh. 

The realization was so slow and stupid, the way answers always showed up two minutes after you needed them in a viva. "No one," you somehow got the words out. "I — I took it. For me. Wanted to see how it looked."

Brendon went still processing that — stiller than he already was. "Yeah?" His mouth dragged along your jaw, and his cock dragged out of you, then he pushed in all the way deep into you, like the confession had unlocked something in him he'd been keeping on a leash. "You looked real good, babydoll."

Heat crawled up your neck that had nothing to do with the stretch of him or the slow drag he'd settled into, just the stupid, helpless pleasure of being told that. 

Babydoll settled alongside sweetheart and babygirl, right in between them like it had always lived there, and it hit the same place good girl had, and you knew it was all over your face. Every card, every single one, face-up. He looked at you and saw all of them.

You knew and couldn't stop it. You preened. There wasn't a better word for it. Your whole chest just sat up and asked for more.

If he'd noticed, he didn't make a show of it. "Next time," he said, "you're wearing that. And I'm taking it off you myself."

Your cunt clenched around him at the word 'next', an involuntary thing. Of course, he'd felt it, a laugh coming out low and a little wicked against your collarbone. "Oh." His hips stuttered once, to test you or if he was that affected, you weren't sure. "She liked that."

You wanted to die. You wanted to die and also you wanted him to say it again, both feelings sitting side by side without bothering to fight each other for space.

He hooked his arm under your knee and dragged it higher over his thigh, opening you up wider underneath him. 

The new angle had you gasping before you'd even processed the shift, his cock pressing somewhere new and unbearably deep.

"Fuck, you feel —" His jaw went tight, breath catching against your ear, and the sentence just died there, unfinished.

You felt a little fierceness in you sit up too, a little smug. He wasn't unaffected. Whatever this was doing to you, it was doing it to him too. That single broken half-sentence felt like a win.

Somewhere underneath the noise, you understood it now. The thing the nurses whispered about — the god complex of it all. You'd rolled your eyes at every Ortho guy who’s acted like they personally invented bone. 

Now, you couldn't speak for the rest of them. You hadn't slept with all of them, for one, and didn't plan to start now.

So, the sample size you were working with was n=1, which was not statistically significant in the traditional sense, but you were convinced. 

This one. This infuriating, occasionally tender man currently splitting you open — he'd earned whatever god complex he wanted to keep. 

"Where do you want it?" His voice dropped, hips losing the rhythm he'd clinged to, like he was holding the last of his control together with both hands. "Tell me, baby."

"Inside." It came out before you could second-guess it. "Please, Bren. Inside."

"Fuck. Good girl." The praise went straight through you, the same way it had the first time. Except now it had nowhere left to land except your shaking core, your whole body drawing tight around the words and around him at the same time.

Brendon reached between you, two fingers finding your clit, and the combination of that and the angle and the low filthy murmur of 'want you' and 'need you' against your throat sent you over before you'd even braced for it, your whole body locking up around him, vision actually whiting out at the corners for a second.

He followed almost immediately after, a groan tearing out of him that didn't sound anything like the composed, deadpan voice you'd known, hips stuttering, before he stilled deep, spilling ropes into you, both of you breathing like you'd run somewhere.

His forehead dropped to your shoulder, one hand smoothing the line of your hip. 

You lay there underneath the weight of him thinking, distantly, that you'd never once associated gentle and Brendon Park before tonight and now you weren't sure you'd be able to separate them again.

Eventually he rolled to the side, pulling you with him against his chest, his hand now tracing slow lines up your spine.

"I should go," you said, even as your body did the exact opposite of going, settling deeper into him.

"Or," his mouth was against your neck, "you could stay."

"I'd be late." You'd already started counting the hours, and whether you had a fresh set of scrubs in your locker or if you'd have to do the walk of shame in yesterday's, whether anyone would actually notice or if you were just assuming the entire hospital revolved around tracking your sleep schedule the way you currently were. 

"I'll write you a note." He said it with such a straight face, you almost believed there was a version of this where that worked. Brendon Park scrawling an excuse on a prescription pad and Robby just accepting it without asking a single follow-up question. The image alone nearly made you laugh into his chest.

You propped yourself up enough to glare at him, even though the effect was probably ruined by whatever state your hair was currently in. "First of all, I'm not five. I’m not going to school. Secondly, you're not my attending."

His hand found the back of your head before you'd finished the sentence, guiding you back down against his chest. "Robby's the only attending you take orders from, huh?"

"Well. He is my attending."

"Mm." For a man who'd had you twice in the last hour, he sounded almost petulant. 

"Brendon. I'm in your bed." You tipped your head back to look at him, his mouth set in a soft frown, more like a pout. "You don’t have to be jealous of Robby."

"I'm not."

"You're jealous of Robby right now. Post-nut."

His nose scrunched up, and you immediately wanted to kiss it. "Don't — don't say post-nut."

A laugh cracked out of you, and not a cute one. "Park the Shark. Jealous. Of Robby." You dragged out the syllables, drawing it into a sing song taunt.

"Watch it."

You bit down on a smile and lost, mouth pressed flat against his chest where you figured he couldn't see it. 

Apparently he could feel it though, his hand stilled mid-stroke. "You're hiding." 

"I'm not hiding anything."

"You're smiling. I can feel it."

"Shut up, Brendon."

Ortho had a reputation and Brendon had leaned into it wholeheartedly. Fast, brutal, precise, and deeply uninterested in anything that didn't have to do with bone mechanics or operative planning. 

Park the Shark. He'd heard the name passed between residents in the corridor like a warning, and he hadn't minded. Warnings kept the noise down.

He was, all told, completely fine.

And then he met you. At the hospital coffee counter on a Wednesday morning, over a cup of black americano, and everything went sideways.

The barista set his coffee down and he was on his way to get it. Pretty normal stuff. Stuff that happened everyday. 

But before he could get there, there was you, his cup in your grasp, and then between your lips. 

He'd opened his mouth to say something. Sharply, probably. The same voice that made interns forget how to speak. But then, you drank. 

Your face did something spectacular. Nose scrunching up, eyes going slightly wide, mouth opened like a fish, as though you were offended, devastated, betrayed by a fucking beverage. You stared into the cup for a full second like you were waiting for it to apologize. "Okay," you said, to the cup, mostly. "That's — what is that?"

Brendon stared at you.

"What'd they put in this?" you continued, as if you were workshopping a complaint, a comical lilt to your voice. 

In the fifteen seconds of you taking his drink and drinking it, it didn’t occur to you that you’d just consumed something belonging to someone else. The coffee — he didn’t think you’d agree for it to be called a coffee, to be really honest — had shaken you so much that it took you a minute to compose yourself. 

When you did, you turned the cup in your hand, read the side and looked up, a sheepish smile on your lips. 

As you found him just standing there, gaze locked on you, your eyes dropped between him and the cup. "Oh, it's got your name on it." You had the audacity to look adorable — what the fuck did he just think? "Is this yours?"

Brendon nodded. Fucking nodded. 

Embarrassment should not have looked that good on anyone. How could someone look like that while questioning life decisions, evaluating choices that led to this moment?

"Right." You set it down on the counter between, like you were disarming a situation. "Sorry. I genuinely thought — mine's supposed to be a latte and I just grabbed it, I wasn't looking at the name. I'm really sorry."

Dark circles under your eyes, hair pulled back like it was done in thirty seconds without a mirror, lime green scrubs that had no reason looking good, no reason making you look good. Who even looked good in that colour? Who even chose that colour? 

You were somewhere between mortified and trying to hold it together, which was fair, because you had just walked up to a stranger's drink and had at it. "Can I at least — I'll pay for a new one, here—"

You were reaching into your pocket and Brendon, who had been on the verge of saying something very reasonable like it's fine, not a problem— "No."

Accidentally spoke in the voice. He didn't always mean to use, it just comes out that way by default, making fourth-year residents straighten their spines. And he’d used it. To you. 

You looked up at him with an expression he could only describe as a deer having second thoughts about the road.

He hadn't meant — he wasn't angry. He'd said no out of reflex. Most things he said were out of reflex, and now this person was staring at him like he'd personally threatened her. He had the strange and unfamiliar experience of wanting to walk it back. "I meant—" he started.

But you'd pulled yourself together, apparently deciding that whatever his problem was, it was his problem. 

"Okay, no." You held your hands up, like you were placating a toddler. "Noted. For future reference though, why would you get it like that, it's — is this fun for you? Like do you enjoy it?"

He blinked, heat rising up to his cheeks. He could only hope you didn’t notice it.

What you did notice was that he looked clueless and you clarified, "the coffee," you pointed to his cup. "There's nothing in it. I took one sip and I think my tongue is still reeling from it."

"That's what coffee tastes like," Brendon said.

"That's a very sad thing to believe." You stated, completely without malice, which made it worse somehow. A genuine opinion. To make matters worse, you were already looking back toward the counter, scanning for your actual order.

Brendon stood there holding his americano while everyone else and everything else continued their life, including you. 

The barista called your name. You went to get it, came back briefly into his sightline, and gave him a small, still-somewhat-mortified wave on your way out the door.

He watched you go and drank his coffee, the same one your lips touched. It tasted exactly like it always did, which was fine, he liked it fine.

Do you enjoy it?

He took another sip. It was objectively bitter.

Lime green. A colour he couldn't immediately place. It bothered him, sitting in the back of his head while he moved through his afternoon. 

PTMC colour-coded by department. He knew this. He just didn't have them all memorized, a gap he'd never needed to fill before.

He decided to ask his ward nurse, Delgado, at the end of his post-ops. Casual as he could make it, which for him was still pretty clinical — "lime green. You know which department?" 

Delgado looked up from her chart. "Lime green," she repeated, slowly, like she was checking the words for a hidden compartment.

“Yeah.” 

“Are we talking about scrubs here, Dr Park?” She had her eyebrows crossed like she was trying to read him. 

“Yes.”

“Neonatology,” she answered. 

Four floors up, the opposite end of the building, behind two sets of badge-locked doors and a hand-washing protocol longer than some of his procedures. He'd been in there exactly twice in his career, both times for consults that took fifteen minutes and ended in a referral elsewhere.

It made sense. You looked like sunshine incarnate, all airy and beautiful, effortlessly skilful — not that he’d seen you work, but he had an idea. 

"Right." He turned back toward the board.

"Dr. Park."

"Mm."

"Are you — Is there something involving neonatology that I should know about?"

A small, unwelcome lurch happened inside his chest. He kept his face the way he kept it in the OR — nothing on it, nothing to read — and he could tell, with horrible clarity, that it wasn't working.

“Something?”

“A case?” 

Brendon could see that she’d worded it carefully. "No."

"Okay," Delgado said. "No reason then." She didn't believe a word of it and had decided not to push, which was worse because he could’ve handled an argument. An argument had an end.

Without looking at her, he said, “you can go.”

"I'm charting."

"You can chart elsewhere."

"This is the nurses' station, Dr. Park."

She was smiling. He knew that without even looking. He went back to his board and did not say anything else, hoping this was the end of it. 

It was in no way shape or form, the end of anything. It only took him five minutes to look it up. Not you specifically, he wasn’t doing that. Yet, the back of his mind supplied. 

He was just reading about fellowship timelines, the NICU admission criteria for some reason? He also learned it’s two or three more years of training, all of it happening four floors above his OR in a unit he had approximately zero clinical reason to enter.

The fact that he even went down this road is embarrassing. But he went a whole another mile. 

Clavicular fractures were the most common birth-related bone injury. Unfortunately — now, he hated himself for even thinking the word — they were managed entirely conservatively. Swaddle the arm, follow up in two weeks. It wouldn't require an orthopedic surgeon, much less him, to stand in a NICU looking purposeful.

For about four seconds, he entertained inventing a reason. He got as far as picturing himself walking through those doors in his scrub cap with some flimsy excuse half-formed, and the picture was so stupid — so transparently, embarrassingly stupid — that he closed his laptop immediately.

The hospital was large and your departments were, in practical terms, on separate planets. 

You’d been in the coffee shop on Wednesday, which meant you probably used it, which meant theoretically he'd encounter you again just by existing in the building. He told himself he wasn't going to engineer anything, he was just aware of the possibility. That was all.

Two days passed. He did four surgeries including a complicated tibial nail revision that took three hours and came out beautifully, and one very satisfying conversation with a referring physician who had misread an MRI and needed correcting. Normal week, right? 

Next day, he got his coffee at six forty, same as every morning, and stood at the counter a beat longer than the transaction required, scanning the line behind him without meaning to. Nobody in lime green. He told himself that meant nothing, took his americano, and left.

Friday, same thing. He noticed himself doing it the second time, which didn't help — like catching his own reflection mid-expression and not recognizing the face looking back.

He didn't see you. Abnormal week. 

ER consult. Friday, mid-afternoon. A fracture dislocation that the ER attending had flagged as needing operative planning. Brendon came down at two-thirty, and found Abbot by trauma three looking over a film.

Coming down to the ER wasn't his favorite part of the day. Not the work — the work was fine, usually obvious, usually somebody else's problem until it became his — but the way the place ran, all motion and noise hot under his skin. Abbot, somehow, thrived in it.

They'd gotten through about two minutes of the consult — Abbot walking him through the case, Brendon pulling up the images, the two of them doing back-and-forth of people who'd worked a building together long enough to skip the preamble. Uneventful. 

But then the ER entrance on the left side of the bay opened and you walked through it.

Same lime green scrubs and a your Dunkin' cup in hand. Shen next to you, also holding a Dunkin' cup, saying something Brendon couldn't hear from this distance, and you were laughing. Brendon, to his disappointment, noticed it was not a poilte laugh. Your shoulder bumped into Shen’s with the force of it, a fully open-mouthed laugh, and you looked gorgeous.

The sight in front of him was only fogged by the fact that it was Shen who was at the receiving end of it.

The blush climbed before he could stop it, heat crawling up the back of his neck and into his ears. He thanked every god he didn't believe in, that Abbot was still looking at the film and not at him.

Brendon's jaw locked. Back teeth coming together, the muscle in his jaw pulling. He knew it’d give him a headache if he kept it up. 

He didn’t really know Shen, not really. Having entirely met him through corridors and in consultations. But in that moment he decided, with an immediate, total conviction usually reserved for diagnoses, that he didn't like him.

Because he didn’t want to stare, he looked back at the X-ray on the tablet. "So the fracture pattern —" he spoke.

"You okay?" Abbot cut in.

Brendon looked at him. Abbot looked like he already knew the answer and was just asking to pull his leg, like most ER attendings. 

"Fine," Brendon said. "The fracture is comminuted. Needs ORIF. I’ll book an OR, do it first case tomrorw morning."

Abbot nodded as he scribbled on the iPad. Didn't look fully satisfied with the fine but let it go. Brendon knew that about Abbot — the latter picked his moments.

Brendon looked back at the X-ray.

In his peripheral vision, you and Shen had stopped near the nurse’s station, still talking. You had the cup halfway to your mouth, nodding at whatever he was saying, and then you laughed again, smaller this time, shaking your head. Like whatever Shen had said was ridiculous and you were conceding it anyway.

His molars hurt from pressing down too hard. "ORIF tomorrow, first case," he said again, to the iPad at his hand, to no one.

"You already said that," Abbot noted.

He pulled up the next item on his consult list — a possible Montaggia fracture, a cakewalk for him, nightmare for others. "I'm confirming."

He was not confirming. He had no idea why he'd said it twice. 

You'd moved further into the ER now, past his sightline, and he found himself looking at the entrance you'd come through for a second before he caught himself and looked back at Abbot. The latter was watching him like he was trying very, very hard not to smirk.

"Do you need something?" Brendon asked.

"I'm just standing here," Abbot said.

"You're doing something with your face."

"I'm a person, Park, my face does things." Abbot tucked his hands in his pockets. Nodding towards the general direction of where you might be standing, Abbot said, "I didn't know you knew anyone in neonatology."

"I don't," Brendon interjected soon. Too soon. 

"Hm." Abbot’s head did a sweep of the ER, probably searching for you, and then looked back at Brendon. "Right."

Brendon put his iPad under his arm, said he'd have the operative plan by end of day and walked back toward the elevator, which took him directly past the nurse’s station, where you had apparently remigrated with Shen, talking to the desk coordinator about something.

He did not slow down.

But in the two seconds he passed within range, he did clock that you smelled like coffee and something warm underneath it, something sweet, vanilla maybe. You didn't notice him, but Shen did and nodded. Brendon nodded back and kept walking, very normal. Walk of a man who was fine.

The elevator took forty-five years to arrive.

He stood in front of it for all forty-five of those years, staring at the closed doors with his hands in his coat pockets, acutely, miserably aware that Park the Shark had just sped up his pace to get past a girl with a Dunkin' and was now standing at an elevator hoping it would hurry up.

Somewhere behind him, he was fairly sure, Abbot was still smiling.

It was a horrible week for the ortho residents. And it wasn’t even Tuesday. 

It wasn’t because of the caseload. The caseload was what it always was, a rotating carousel of fractures and dislocations and the occasional spectacular screw-up from another department who'd missed a bone scan. 

No, the residents had a terrible week because Brendon Park had decided, somewhere between Friday evening and Tuesday afternoon, that their technique was uniformly sloppy and their pre-op prep was an embarrassment to the profession, and he'd said so. Repeatedly. In front of each other.

It wasn't personal. He thought so and would tell you so, if anyone asked him. No one was brave enough. 

His residents just kept standing in his eyeline when he was already irritated, and that was their problem, really.

Delgado, to her eternal credit, had not said a single word about it. She'd watched him tear into a second-year over a chart — like who enters the date wrong? — and kept her face entirely professional. The kid went pale, stuttering through his apology, and Brendon didn’t care. 

He'd noticed it himself. The snapping. He was moving through the ward with even less patience than usual, which was saying something. He did a K wire banding, ate lunch at his desk, reviewed post-op films, and at six-fifteen found himself at the hospital coffee counter scanning the room before his order was called. It was mortifying enough on its own, and you weren't there, so it brought double the mortification. 

He went back Tuesday. Sat down, which was something he genuinely had never done. He had always taken his coffee to go. There was no reason to sit, the hospital was across the street, he drank it walking. 

But this time, he sat. Kept his phone out, drank his coffee and checked his messages. He absolutely did not look at the door every ninety seconds.

You weren't there Tuesday either. Which was fine. People had schedules. Neonatologists especially — the NICU didn't exactly run on a nine-to-five, he knew that much. He'd looked it up. For professional reasons, of course. For someone who’d prided himself for working 24/7, he was humbled real quick. 

Wednesday, he sat again. He had a consultation at nine, no reason to rush. He could drink his coffee like a human being who used chairs. He pulled up his post-op notes on his phone, found Abbot's message about a fracture dislocation follow-up, which Abbot didn’t have to do but does it anyway. Abbot was like that sometimes. 

When he looked up, his coffee was in front of him. And so were you.

Lime green scrubs, your own drink in your other hand, and you were sliding his cup toward him. The look on your face that said you'd been watching him not notice it for at least thirty seconds. He had been reading an MRI report. A fascinating one.

"I really should get you a coffee," you said.

Brendon laughed. It was him. That was his laugh. Coming out of his face, in a coffee shop, at seven in the morning.

It came out before he could stop it or do anything about it. Just a short, but real sound, surprising him enough that he almost looked around to check if someone else had made it. 

You were watching him with that same expression from the first time, like you found him interesting the way you'd find an unusual rock formation interesting. Curious but not unkind. It was doing things to his blood pressure.

"You're still doing that to yourself, I see." You nodded at his cup.

"It's coffee."

"Doesn't taste like it, though." Your nose scrunched up, just like the first time, just as adorable. Did he just say adorable again? 

He picked up the cup, took a sip purely out of spite, and looked back at you.

You sat down across from him. Which he had not expected and also had absolutely expected. Two things existing simultaneously, almost fucking him up. 

"You're here a lot," you said.

"The hospital's down the street."

"Is it?" You glanced at him, stirring your drink. "Because I've only ever seen you take it to go, and now you're sitting." You took out the stirrer and placed it on a tissue. "Three days in a row."

The back of his neck went warm, mouth opening to say something. Deny it probably, which was stupid and a waste of time. But you interrupted him. 

Brendon Park is not someone who’s interrupted. People let him talk, and only think about answering when they’re sure he’s finished. 

You, on the other hand, did not care. "You're kinda hard to miss with all the brooding going on."

"I don't brood."

You took a sip of your drink, watching him over the lid, expression doing a tremendous amount of work without saying anything. 

He held your gaze. You lowered the cup. "You totally brood. It's an ortho thing, right? Comes with it."

"You know I'm ortho?"

"Everyone knows you're ortho." You said it completely matter-of-factly. Like, yes Brendon, the sky is blue and you’ve got an Ortho bro vibe going on. "You have the whole —" You made a vague gesture in his direction, encompassing, apparently, all of him. "You've got the OR energy."

"Half the people here have OR energy. It's a hospital."

"No, see, ER people have this sort of —" you tilted your head, "— controlled chaos thing. They're always braced for something. But, you walk around like you’ve won everything already. It's very obvious, easy to pick out."

Pick out what? Him from a line-up?

He watched you say all of this with zero self-consciousness, just stating observations, a woman delivering a verdict. He realised his coffee was halfway to his mouth and he hadn't drunk it. You talked about him like he was a case study, and he was sitting there letting you, taking all of it.

"So where else do you brood," you asked, "besides here and the OR?"

"I don't brood."

"Besides here and the OR?" You prompted, dismissing his non-answer. 

"The ER… sometimes," he heard himself say it. See, he did not think of saying it, but said it anyway. Crystal-clear experience of a man who had just walked directly into something. He'd had five years of attendings trying to catch him out on rounds. None of them had managed it. You'd done it in under ten minutes, twice, while drinking a latte.

You made a sound. Not quite a laugh, more like an intake of breath with amusement in it. "The ER."

"Consults."

"Right." You traced the rim of your cup with one finger. "Were you in the ER last Friday?"

And… there it was.

He could've said he didn't remember. He could've been very busy, very unbothered, a man who passed through ERs constantly and didn't register the days. He was a surgeon. He was in various hospital departments routinely. There was nothing notable about Friday.

"Yes," his mouth admitted.

You nodded slowly, like something had confirmed itself. "I thought I saw you. You walked really fast."

He put his coffee down. "I had somewhere to be."

"Okay." The word stretched, like you weren’t entirely convinced. He wouldn’t blame it, he wasn’t exactly convincing. An infant could catch him in a lie, and you apparently were their queen. You went quiet for a second and then looked back at him, debating whether to say it or not. Affirmative won apparently. "You saw me with Shen."

It wasn’t a question. And he wasn’t exactly thrilled to answer it. He'd spent five days being awful to residents over it. A little late to play it cool.

"I figured." The amusement on your face was warm rather than sharp, which made the ache in his chest somehow worse. Whoa, whoa, what ache? "We have a thing going, me and Shen. Whoever lost the bet had to do the coffee run. I'd just lost." You paused. "For the fourth time. I'm apparently terrible at predicting admission numbers."

"The fourth time," Brendon parotted.

"In a month. I know." You shook your head, shaking the thought, a soft sigh leaving your parted lips. "I don't know why I keep agreeing to it. Every time I'm like, this time I'll get it right, and then the board goes completely feral and I'm standing at Dunkin' at two in the afternoon getting Shen's ridiculous—" You stopped to look at him, and he had his utmost attention on you. "Anyway. That was just the loser tax."

Loser tax. He sat with this for a second. The whole week reshuffled. Him being a monster to those unsuspecting residents — it’s not like it's unwarranted, but still. 

You and Shen, a bet. A coffee run. A losing streak that apparently had nothing to do with the bond between the two of you and everything to do with ER admission patterns, which, if he was being honest, were genuinely unpredictable, nobody could forecast those accurately, it wasn't —

"You walked so fast," you spoke again, this time interrupting his thoughts. He noticed you liked to do that, keep him on his toes. There was a laugh behind it now, delighted almost. "I didn't know an orthopedic surgeon could move like that without a reason."

"I had a reason."

"What was it?" You prodded.

I just couldn’t stand you bumping shoulders with Shen like you belonged together. 

His eyes dropped to his coffee at his hand and found you again. You looked back at him. You had the same ‘interested in rock formation’ thing going on, except closer now and clearer somehow. He had the increasingly urgent sense that you knew exactly what you were doing.

"You were with someone.” He sighed.

A smile adorned your lips like you’d won, finally beat him. 

Like your mind was displaying in neon, Sunshine neonatologist : 1. Big bad ortho guy : 0. 

You let it sit there between you while you took another sip of your drink. "I was getting Shen's order," you said finally. "Because I lost a bet."

"I know that now."

"But you didn't walk fast because of Shen specifically. Did you?"

His molars found each other again. What is with you and asking him impossible questions? Was this like your hobby? Hit the ortho guy until he falls over? At what point in medical school had someone taught you to do this, and could he have a word with them?

Without giving him a moment to recover, you spoke again. "So," you set your cup down, straightened up a little in the chair, met his eyes with an expression so direct it nearly made him blink. "When are you buying me a coffee?"

He stared at you. Staring was not his thing. He assessed, evaluated, and arrived at conclusions. What he did not do was stare, sit with his mouth slightly open like a fucking goldfish. 

"That's what you've been trying to do, right?" Your voice was mild, conversational, voice of a woman confirming a meeting time. "For three days. In a row. Sitting here."

The heat that climbed his face was complete, total and immediate, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. Park the Shark. Sitting in a coffee shop for three days like a golden retriever who'd learned to use a chair.

You laughed. It filled the air and came right back to him. And he thought, sitting there red-eared with his black coffee, that it was the best sound he'd heard all week.

Possibly longer.

He only remembered that you asked a question when you raised your eyebrows. Right. The question. Which he totally didn’t forget when he was staring at your lips and thinking about how they would feel pressed to his. 

"I have a nine o'clock," he said. "Seven works."

"That's very early."

"You work in a NICU. You guys are up since five."

You looked at him for a moment and he had no idea what you were looking at. But he sat very still, which was insane on his part. He only hoped he passed whatever test you were conducting. Apparently having looked enough, you picked your cup up, along with the tissue paper and the stirrer you discarded, and stood. "Seven," you said. "Don't brood while you wait."

He watched you walk out. He looked down at his americano. He drank it.

It still tasted exactly like it always did, and he liked it fine, and he was aware, in a dim and reluctant and completely inescapable way, that this was probably not going to be the last time he sat in this coffee shop.

Not by a long shot.

MY MASTERLIST !

You used to think that was the safest part of it. No staying meant nothing left to lose. You'd actually said that out loud once, alone, brushing your teeth, like saying a thing into a bathroom mirror could make it sound convincing.

It wasn't safe. You're aware of that now, eleven months in, thinking about stuff you have no business thinking about at 2 AM. How many times he's actually said your name versus just grunted it into your collarbone like a reflex he doesn't have control over.

You weren't insecure. You were not someone who rereads texts looking for a tone that wasn't there. Not a tear was shed when you'd found out your college boyfriend had cheated on you. You just changed the locks and ate an entire rotisserie chicken by yourself in front of the TV and felt, weirdly, fine. 

People used to call you unflappable. You liked being unflappable. It felt like a skill you'd built on purpose, brick by brick.

That went right out the window when it came to Robby. Now you're someone whose ribs go tight the second he so much as looks sideways at a woman he might actually like instead of just being decent to. 

There's a difference, and your body grew an awful radar for telling those two things apart when it came to him. It happened sometime around month four and never really left.

The radar pinged when you were bored out of your mind, chewing on the end of a pen that might have once belonged to Whittaker. 

He was at the nurses' station with Noelle. Her hand was close enough to his, on a chart neither of them was actually reading anymore. 

He laughed. Head tipping back a little, eyes doing the crinkle thing, the laugh you maybe get twice on a generous month, handed over to somebody else like it was nothing but easy. 

"Ouch." Santos appeared out of nowhere with an iPad on one arm, completely without the instinct most people have for reading a room, or she did but just didn't care. "That's rough. Watching your guy's ex flirt with him in broad daylight, front row seat and everything."

"He's not my guy."

"Sure." She wasn't even looking at you, eyes still on the iPad, chewing gum leisurely. "They dated. Robby and Noelle. Year and a half ago, give or take, before whatever you two have going on.” Her hands did a vague gesture spanning the two of you. “Mohan told me. Mohan doesn't lie about gossip. She lies about how much sleep she's getting but never gossip." Dropping the iPad on the rack, she actually looked at you, gum still going. "You good? You're holding the pen kinda tight there."

You put the pen down.

You didn't say anything to him for the rest of the shift, which felt like the mature call, right up until it didn't. 

Somewhere around hour four, it started feeling a lot more like a slow leak behind your sternum that nobody else could see.

Robby texted you at eleven. You up?

Same two words he always sent, and you typed back yeah before your brain got a vote. Maturity apparently left you as you'd entered your building. 

He showed up still smelling like the hospital underneath his cologne, antiseptic and something warmer you stopped being able to separate from the actual him months ago. 

Chapped lips met yours in your doorway, like it was nothing but routine, and you let him. Even if Noelle's laugh was sitting in your chest, a fish bone you hadn't managed to cough up yet.

Hands went under shirts before you'd even cleared the hallway, clothes dropped on your living room floor, his shirt on the couch, yours over his. 

You told yourself you weren't going to think about her. Genuinely tried, with his mouth dragging down your throat and his hand already working your pants open. 

For maybe four minutes it actually worked, his teeth scraping just hard enough at your clavicle to scatter every thought that wasn't more, now, please.

Without conscious effort, you found yourself on your bed and his fingers inside you, curling at the exact angle he's had memorized since the first time. 

Somewhere underneath all the noise your brain went and sabotaged you. 

Did he do this with her too? Did her thighs shake like this under his hand? Did she get the real laugh in bed the same way she gets it at the desk?

"Where'd you go?" 

You hadn't even noticed your hips had stopped moving until his did too, both of you stalled in a strange suspended quiet that only happens when somebody's head leaves the room without bothering to take the rest of them along.

"Nowhere." Nowhere good. 

"You went somewhere." If it was any consolation, Robby didn't pull his fingers out. It unfortunately wasn't. They stilled there, full and aching, which felt a little something like cruelty. "Tell me."

"It's nothing. Keep going."

"Not until you tell me what it is." His thumb found your clit , barely moved, like he could multitask being patient and torturing you in the same breath. "What happened?"

A lie was loaded and ready, something about being tired, a bad case. But his fingers curled again, reaching deeper than it had any right to at this moment. Your whole body betrayed you with an arch and a moan that had no performance in it at all. 

Right on the heel of the moan came the truth, ugly and completely unplanned. "I saw you with Noelle." Your voice trembled. "Laughing like that. And Santos told me you two used to date. I know I have zero claim to feeling anything about that, we never called this anything, but I felt sick. Standing there. And now you're —" you gestured to the situation, "— and I'm still thinking about her instead of you and I think that makes me fucking insane."

With the amount of hurry it took to stumble into the bedroom, neither of you had the slightest thought to turn on a light, not even the bedside lamp. So whatever his face did was between him and god, you remained oblivious to anything but his hands frozen in your cunt. 

"That was a year and a half ago."

"I — I know. That's not the point."

"Then what is?"

"You — you laugh like that with her and you've never once laughed like that with me. Not one time, Robby. I— I just lie here every single time wondering if I'm just what you do because the real thing already happened with her and ended… and you haven't bothered looking for anything else since." You turned your face into the pillow, mortified at the sound of your own voice saying it out loud. "You leave every time. You don't even turn the light on so you don't wake me. But I'm always awake. I just lie there and pretend, so I don't have to watch it happen in real time."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart, I didn't know that."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me." He pulled his fingers almost to the edge, and pushed them right back into you without warning. You gasped at the sudden fullness of it, his voice dropping into a rougher tone than you'd heard from him before. "I laugh like that with her because there's nothing left. It's easy because none of it means a damn thing anymore. Because you're the one person I actually —"

You felt the sentence die in the air between you, felt your stomach drop through the mattress in the silence that followed. "Actually what?"

Without answering, Robby pulled his fingers free and lined himself up, the blunt head of his cock pressed against you, teasing, his body needing a job to do while his mouth caught up to whatever it was trying to say.

"Care about," he said finally, and pushed into you in one slide that knocked every other thought clean out of your head. "That's the word. Care about."

"Robby —"

"I've been leaving because I didn't know how to stay without telling you why I wanted to." His hips bottomed out and went still, both of you frozen there, joined, neither one pulling apart even though this conversation had clearly outgrown the bed it started in. "Didn't want to say it out loud. I'm fifty two. Buried more people than I can count and most days I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast. Not exactly a catch."

"I don't care about any of that."

Hips stilling, he dropped his forehead to your temple, breath fanning the side of your neck, the slight tremble in him giving away how hard it was for him to stay perfectly still. "That's the part that scares me. I — That's the thing — I've been leaving so I wouldn't have to say."

"Say what?" Your own words were a breath lost in cold air.

"I love you."

Three words. 

You'd built entire personality traits around not needing to hear stuff like that from men, had a whole bit you did with your friends about how love confessions were basically a review nobody asked for.

Flat on your back with this man's hips locked against yours, none of that seemed true, completely unable to produce a single clever thought about it. Even though you knew it lessen the burden of the thing that's been eating at you for months. 

"You love me?" Buying time, the way your brain used to stall during viva in med school, repeating the question out loud while you scrambled for an answer.

"Yes."

You'd expected a nervous laughter to soften the landing, you'd even braced for it, but it didn't come.

"Was that why you left everytime?"

"If you say it like — yes. Yes, that was why."

That was so completely him, agreeing to a version of events instead of supplying his own, like the truth was easier to hand you secondhand than to actually build from scratch. If the two glasses of wine you'd had before he'd texted didn't make your chest loose, this definitely did.

He kissed you before you could ruin it with whatever your mouth was about to attempt. Slow at first, and then not slow, his hips finally moving again. You felt the difference in your bones. Heavier somehow, like he'd been holding something back this whole time and had only just now set it down.

You thought, stupidly, your mother's voice from years ago, some lecture about how men who can't say things outright will show you instead. You'd rolled your eyes at the time because it sounded like a fortune cookie. It didn't sound like a fortune cookie right now. 

Then came Noelle again, all the other times where they could've been like this. Wondered if he'd said the same thing about someone else to her.

You knew it wasn't fair. He wasn't some monster gaslighting you into believing he's a good guy.

The thought evaporated with Robby's hand sliding up to rest against your throat, like he needed somewhere to put his hand. "Don't think about her," he said against your mouth. "Not while I'm inside you."

"Hard not to," you admitted, and immediately hated yourself a little for saying it out loud. It was ugly.

But his hips snapped forward right then, your honesty earning a reaction out of him he hadn't planned on giving.

"She never had me like this." His voice had gone rough. The headboard started its soft, steady complaint against the wall, the same sound you'd heard a hundred different times over the past few months, but none of them felt like this. "Never had me saying the things I'm saying to you right now."

You wanted to ask what things he'd told her specifically, still room left in your brain for petty curiosity. But when his mouth found your jaw, the question dissolved somewhere between your teeth.

"Every time you see her face," he went on, breath hot against your ear, "I want you remembering whose bed I keep coming back to."

Somewhere distant, you knew what he was doing. Saying with his hips what he couldn't get out standing up in a hallway with the lights on. You'd have called it sad on anyone else. But you'd thrown a whole tantrum over a laugh mere minutes ago, you didn't have an upper hand. 

Even without being fair, your body had completely overruled whatever your brain was attempting to negotiate, as you clenched around him without meaning to.

The small, helpless noise that came out of you was something he clearly enjoyed. "There it is." You could hear the satisfaction crawling into his voice even through the strain of it. "You like hearing it."

"Say it again." No more point pretending it didn't matter.

"Yours." He bit down at the curve of your shoulder, enough for you to find the mark tomorrow. You'd find in the shower and touch it on purpose, the way you did with every other one he'd left over the months, a little private inventory of evidence of his body on yours. "You're the only one I want." You broke as the words left him, his name tearing loose from your chest mid cry.

Robby cared enough to notice, but kept going right through your aftershocks with none of the restraint you'd gotten used to from him, the confession having used up the last of whatever discipline he usually operated on. "Look at me. Look at me when I —"

You forced your eyes open through the blur, to find his, even though every nerve in your body was begging you to just shut them and float. "I'm here."

He came with his mouth pressed to yours instead of buried in your neck the way he usually finished, a monumental leap.

Your name broke apart between his lips in pieces, hips jerking through it before his arms finally gave out and his whole weight dropped onto you.

Robby was careful even falling apart, catching his own weight at the last second so he didn't crush you completely.

Somewhere in the haze, you thought that there was probably an entire personality you could write about a man based solely on how he chose to fall on top of someone.

His mouth found your shoulder as he left open mouthed kisses all over it. You could hear both your heartbeats slowing down at slightly different speeds. It was oddly endearing how his stayed a little fast even after yours settled down.

You half expected the scramble even now. Pattern recognition came easy too you, part of your brain already listening for the rustle of him finding his jeans in the dark.

It didn't come though.

Robby's breathing evened out near you, one arm slung heavy over your stomach, settling in instead of lunging towards the exit.

You thought about asking what time it was. An old habit you didn't even fully understand the function of anymore — maybe to give him an easy excuse if he wanted one, maybe just to confirm he was choosing this on purpose and not simply losing track of the clock the way exhausted people do after a double shift.

"You're not leaving," you said eventually, voice muffled into his chest. 

You felt him laugh, more breath than sound. "Said I wasn't going to."

"You say a lot of things."

His arm tightened slightly, pulling you closer in against him, his chin coming to rest against the top of your head. "Well, get used to this one."

You thought about Noelle, briefly, one last unwelcome flicker. You wondered if she ever got this, the staying part, the arm that didn't pull away, and decided, almost immediately, that you didn't actually care anymore, not the way you had three hours ago.

It felt less like jealousy now and more like a story that had already ended, one you'd just happened to read the last page of tonight.

"For the record," you said, "Santos has a big mouth."

"Santos has always had a big mouth." His hand was drawing idle shapes against your hip, only aimed at staying connected to you. "Glad she does, though. Wasn't sure I was ever gonna get around to saying it myself."

"You weren't?"

"Was planning on being a coward about it indefinitely." There was no real shame behind it, not really. "You kinda forced my hand."

"I had a mental breakdown over your ex. That's not forcing anyone's hand, that's just embarrassing."

"Didn't feel embarrassing though." His mouth pressed against your hair, brief, almost absent, like he wasn't even thinking about doing it. 

You didn't have a comeback for that, which was rare for you. You let the silence sit there instead of filling it, listening to the quiet of your own bedroom at — what, one in the morning? Two? You genuinely didn't know anymore. Hadn't looked at a clock once since he walked through your door, actually, and it took you a second to even notice that about yourself.

Peterson was the same as you. Same year, same matching cycle, equally sleep-deprived and increasingly philosophical about whether any of this was worth it — the answer was yes, obviously, but only at certain hours and in certain lighting.

He was Ortho and you were EM. The hospital's hierarchy made you equals, but if anyone asked you, you'd say he was doing a little better than you. 

Officially he couldn't sign anything. Unofficially, he could tell you that you were right, and give you the right to say "seen by Ortho." Basically, an excuse wearing scrubs.

You keep Peterson on decent terms, he comes down earlier for consults. Everyone goes home.

Good networking, if you ever had to explain it out loud. Which you wouldn't, because there was one other reason, something that no one except you knew.

Peterson was the single most efficient way to get around a consult without having to see Park.

The problem wasn't that you didn't want to see Park. You wanted to see him, badly. It's just that, something happens when you do see him.

The brain that had passed med school, performed codes at asscrack hours, goes offline. You'd be a functioning person, and then Brendon Park would appear in your peripheral vision, and you'd be a nobody, standing with your mouth slightly open, aware that something was supposed to be happening somewhere and nothing beyond that.

You'd proven this spectacularly multiple times. The latest incident was a week ago. Park had come down for a consult, a MVC, called down to the ER by Robby himself. 

You'd been so committed to not watching him, and guess what had happened?

You walked directly into his chest. 

When asked about it, you'd learned to say "accidentally bumped into him." 

But 'bumped' was underselling it honestly. 

What happened was a whole body collision. Face-to-sternum. Your suture tray went in one direction. Everything on it — needle driver, forceps, the forever-in-shortage 3-0 ethilon — went everywhere else.

He'd caught your elbow for half a second, which to you, felt like years, everything playing out in slow motion. It was the kind of reflex one would use to steady a child. "Watch your step." His eyes did a quick pass over you, checking for any damage. "You good?"

You'd said something, that part you remember. For the life of you, you still couldn't figure out what exactly you'd said. 

He didn't seem to mind anyway as he'd kept walking, not even throwing a glance over his shoulder. You on the other hand, were rooted to the ground, staring at his interscapular distance, a longing wife sending her husband out to war, a wistful look on your face. 

Robby found you exactly like that. He brought you to your senses by snapping a glove at your shoulder, startling you. Without a single molecule of sympathy, he said, "stop drooling in my ER. And please pick those up." 

You picked up the tray and it's discarded contents. What you couldn't pick up was your dignity, it had taken residence at the cold hard linoleum floor of the ER. 

So yeah. Peterson. Earlier consults and a decent enough heart rate at all times. 

That was why he got sent the text. 63 year old woman, fell on an outstretched hand in her driveway, arrived with pain and swelling at the distal radius, classical dinner fork deformity. 

You got the X-ray. Classic Colles' — dorsal displacement, clean break. Needed Ortho eyes and a note in the chart and that was it.

You : Colles. You free?

You attached the X-rays, hit send and went back to your patient.

You didn't look at the screen.

You should have looked at the screen.

Forty-odd minutes later, Whitaker appeared at your elbow, looking pale. Well, paler than usual. "Why is Park down here?"

You looked up from your chart. "Sorry?"

"Shark." He lowered his voice, like the man could hear his own name from two rooms over. "I've checked the board twice. We only have one Ortho case and it's a Colles'." He frowned at his tablet like it had personally disappointed him. "He doesn't come down for a Colles'. He'd call every sleeping resident in the building before he personally came down here for a Colles'. Even if the systems didn't work, he'd make someone carry the films upstairs." 

You followed his line of sight to see Park. Big mistake, your brain started bidding you goodbye. But you feigned indifference and continued your chart. "Maybe they're short upstairs."

Whitaker looked at you like you'd suggested maybe the defibrillator was decorative. "He's the attending. If they're short, he makes their lives miserable, he doesn't physically transport himself four floors down for a Colles' fracture." 

"I don't know, Dennis. Probably came down for something else." You brushed him off, trying to block out the fact that Park was standing at a five metres distance and the traitorous organ inside your chest had already picked up on it. 

Whitaker wandered off, probably to some hole where no one — no, Park — couldn't find him. 

You continued for about one more minute. But then you remembered that Peterson hadn't texted you back. 

He always texted back within ten minutes. That was the entire arrangement. The one rule. Immediate response. You knew he wasn't in the OR. There were no emergency cases in the morning, and as far as you knew, Monday wasn't elective OR day. 

Peterson picked up sounding mildly surprised that you'd called instead of texted. No one called anyone anymore. "Hey. What's—"

"Did you get my text?"

"What — what text?"

The floor dropped out from under you. 

"I'll call you back," you hung up before he'd finished his next word, your messages already open, thumb scrolling backward —

Dr. Park Ortho.

No, no, no. You'd texted him. You'd made him come down. God, if you still believed in her, was a cruel entity. 

Park's name should not exist in your phone, a number you absolutely shouldn't have. You are not his resident, you are not even tangentially his responsibility, the only reason you have it at all is because you asked Peterson for it three months ago under the thin pretense of Robby asking for it. God knows why Peterson bought it, why the Chief of Emergency Medicine would need a measly resident to ask for the Ortho God's number, but he'd given it to you nonetheless. You just kept it there like a lottery ticket you knew wouldn't win.

Three images, sent at 2:23 PM.

Three? Shouldn't it be just two? X-ray wrist — AP and lateral.

Your thumb flied to the thread, and the first two photos were AP and lateral views.

The third though. 

You almost dropped the phone. Almost being the keyword. Because you couldn't afford to drop it down the floor, what with the photo on display. 

It's you. 

The photo was taken three days ago. Having bought yourself an actual matching set for once, lace, dark red, you'd taken one picture. Just the one, for yourself. Like you take a picture of a meal you were proud of cooking. Same logic. You'd honestly forgotten all about it. 

Until now. 

Now Brendon Park had a photo of yourself in red lace intended for absolutely no one on this earth, with the caption 'Colles. You free?' underneath it like the universe's cruelest punchline.

Your options were limited. Transfer request, clearly. A sudden and urgent family emergency in another state, and you could continue your residency in some second rated hospital there. But, you liked working here.

You could disappear right now, walk out of this building and never come back, let your absence become the cautionary tale they told at department holiday parties for years. There was something almost freeing about that last one. But once again, you liked working here. 

Also Robby would actually end you if you left mid-shift.

A throat being cleared brought you to the present. You looked up to see Park towering over you, shoulders so broad and perfect, you almost wanted to bury yourself in his chest and beg for forgiveness. 

"Present the case, doctor." 

"M-me?" You pointed at yourself with your free hand, like that one little duck from The Ugly Duckling, as though he'd asked you to march into battle, a bewildered look on your face. Like the medical degree you had held no value at all.

"You were the one who texted me, right?" He turned around and walked towards South 16, where the cause to all your problems peacefully existed, drinking orange juice. 

Without any other choice, you followed him. 

When you opened your mouth, you discovered that every word you'd ever known had evacuated your skull at once. 

Park, for his part, did not rush you, looking at you with a sort of expression reserved for kids who threw tantrums, a somewhat 'go on, I'd like to see you try' look evident on his face. 

"I, she's, it's a—" You looked down at the chart in your hands like it might volunteer to speak for you. It declined. "I-It's a wrist."

Transferring was the only option left for you now. 

"Glad we covered that." Park deadpanned. "Walk me through it." 

Okay, this was pushing it. There's no reason to walk him through a Colles'. 

That only meant one thing. He was mad and wanted to kill you. 

You were going to die in your own ER, of this, right here, in front of six witnesses. Whitaker was hovering at a respectful distance looking intensely curious. 

Your pulse was audible. Well, at least to you.

Park stepped forward, barely an inch, and his voice dropped, his cologne invading your senses almost immediately. "I'd love nothing more right now than to have you dumb on my cock." It was conversational, almost bored, like he was commenting on traffic. "But you've got a patient in front of you, so how about you focus?"

Like he didn't do anything ridiculous like suggest you die a painful death at his dick, he slowly retreated, a smirk playing on his lips, composure perfectly normal. 

You presented the case without making a fool of yourself any further than you already had. Mechanism of injury, dorsal angulation, neurovascular intact distally. Possibly because it was a play you knew well, watched and performed a thousand times, at a thousand other places, what with it being one of the most common fractures in the elderly. 

Your mouth ran the whole program without having to consult the rest of you, while you sat somewhere a few feet outside your own body and watched him nod along and glance at the films on the tablet like the last ninety seconds had never happened.

"Closed reduction. I'll send a resident down." He spoke to the room, not you. 

"Okay," you still responded, nodding your head for good measure. 

He looked at you for one more beat, a look with nothing professional left in it whatsoever. "Wait for me. After your shift."

Before you caught up with what had happened, he was walking away, pausing once to nod at Robby — who was glancing between the two of you — and then he was gone up the elevator. 

Once again, you stood at the middle of the ER, with your dignity at your feet. 

Luckily, Robby did not materialise behind you, only Whitaker did. "What was that about?" His brow was furrowed like he was already constructing six different worst-case scenarios in his head.

"Nothing." You were already walking the other way, shaky legs and all.

"Why do you look like you just saw a ghost?" 

If only he knew. 

The rest of your shift was something you survived rather than participated in. You sutured, discharged, charted, and your brain ran on a loop the entire time: dumb on my cock — wait for me — dumb on my cock, with occasional breaks to consider which state had affordable housing before promptly circling back to the cock thing. 

By the time you clocked out you'd made and unmade about nine decisions. You spent an embarrassing amount of time in the locker room that you'd defend as getting yourself together and anyone else who'd watched would describe it as you reapplying your lip balm.

Park was leaning against his car in the parking lot when you got outside, scrolling on his phone. He looked up before you'd made it halfway across the lot.

Your legs begged for you to turn back, it's not too late to maybe live out your days in the hospital, like Whitaker did that one time. 

Thanks or no thanks to your prefrontal cortex, you did not retreat back to the confines of your job, put one foot forward and reached Park. "You didn't have to wait outside." And, that that was the sentence your mouth had chosen, out of every sentence currently available in the English language.

"Wasn't standing in that lobby with Robby asking me forty questions about why I'm still in the building." He tilted his head toward the passenger side. "Get in."

With a nod reserved only for superiors, you got in. 

Your bag sat in your lap and you kept fiddling with the zipper, which you were aware of but couldn't stop doing.

"You gonna be okay over there?" His eyes were still on the road, but head slightly tilted over to your side. "Or should I be worried?"

"I sent an attending a photo of myself in my underwear. Attached to a wrist X-ray. Asking him to come look at it." You stared straight ahead, unable to look at him. "Doing great."

That pulled something out of him, not quite a laugh, more of an exhale through the nose, amused despite his best efforts not to be. "Wasn't my least favorite outcome of the day. And wasn't that lingerie?"

"That's an extremely unprofessional thing to say to a resident, Dr Park."

"Wasn't talking to a resident." The statement ended with your name, with the same monotone you used to deliver his. He didn't elaborate any further, and you decided, wisely, not to push.

Against better judgment, you looked at the side of his face though. You didn't know someone could look this good clean shaven. He did not mind you looking at him. Or if he did, he didn't show. 

"How'd you even know it was me?" you asked, mostly to fill the air. "You didn't have my number."

"Caller ID's a hell of a thing." He said it like that should have been obvious, which, you supposed, it was. "Been trying to find a reason to come down and see your face all shift. You handed me one."

Park the shark? Coming down to see you? 

You did not have a comeback, nor did you need one. 

You spent the rest of the drive looking very intently out the window, aware of him glancing over more than once, the anticipation of what's coming twisting your stomach in knots you'd rather not feel right then. 

His place was not what you'd expected. A man cave you could've predicted, preferred even. But this was more … homely, telling you this perpetually grumpy guy that you've been pining after has a soft side. 

There was a blanket actually balled up on the couch, when you hadn't expected a blanket at all.

A framed photo on the stairwell wall hung slightly crooked. You had the genuinely deranged thought that you wanted to fix it, like you lived here, like that was a thing you got to have an opinion about. You did not get to have an opinion about it. You'd known the man's address for nine minutes.

He dropped his keys in a bowl by the door, the single most domestic gesture you'd ever watched him make. You stood in the entryway feeling abruptly, stupidly out of place. 

"Shower," he said, moving toward the hallway, not framing it as a suggestion. "You smell like the hospital."

You almost laughed at the bluntness of it. The fact that he wasn't bothering to pretend this was smooth or romantic, loosened a knot in your chest. 

The last person you'd done anything like this with — a general surgery resident — hadn't cared what either of you smelled like. He'd had you on his bed in your hospital socks within four minutes of his front door closing. You remembered lying there afterward, painfully aware of the day's grime still on his sheets, wondering if that was simply what dating other doctors was always going to be like. Safe to say, you never called him back. 

But, this was shaping up to be a different experience entirely. 

Park pointed you toward the bathroom and went to shower himself.

You showered fast, mostly out of nerves, with a bodywash that smelled unreasonably good for something so utilitarian. When you came out wrapped in a towel, you could hear water running behind a different door somewhere down the hall. A folded gray t-shirt sat on the counter that hadn't been there before, soft form what looked like a hundred washes, a faded logo on the chest you didn't recognize and didn't try to.

You put it on. Nothing else. It seemed like an instruction that didn't need spelling out. Some reckless part of you was already curious to find out if you'd read it right.

Park came out of his own shower in grey sweatpants and nothing else. His chest was, well… there.

When he found you sitting on the edge of his bed, he stopped in his doorway just to look. Your knees were pressed together like that was somehow going to undo the last several hours.

"That's a good look on you." Which was interesting phrasing, from a man who looked like that.

"It's the only thing you gave me to wear." You crossed your arms in front of your chest, the t-shirt riding up with the movement, soft thighs delectable for him to look at. 

"Take the compliment." He crossed the room slowly and stopped right in front of where you sat, close enough you had to tip your head back to keep looking at him. 

He leaned down and kissed you before you could come up with anything of value, one hand braced on the mattress beside your hip, the other curving along your jaw.

You'd been kissed before. If anyone had asked you, you would describ them as fine. Only now, you were learning that 'fine' is not a word one should use to describe a kiss, this one rewriting every touch of lips you've ever had. 

A sigh escaped into it without you meaning to, a soft, helpless little exhale that you heard yourself make and immediately regretted because it meant he heard it too.

He pulled back maybe an inch, mouth still close enough that you felt the warmth of the words. "That good, huh?"

Smug fucking bastard. 

"Shut up."

He kissed you again, shorter this time, mouth crooked as it pressed against yours. "You sighed."

"People sigh."

"Not like that they don't." Calloused hands spanned your hips, warmth of it raising goosebumps across your skin even through the fabric, as he softly tugged at it. "Take this off."

"You gave it to me thirty seconds ago." 

"And now I'm asking for it back." A faint and wicked smile crept into the corner of his mouth. "Take it off."

Your hands weren't entirely steady when you reached for the hem, more nerves than cold as you pulled the shirt up and over your head in one fast motion. Mainly because you didn't trust yourself to do it any slower, letting it drop somewhere on the floor between you. 

The air hit your skin half a second later, followed quickly by the realization that you were now sitting on his bed with nothing on at all while he stood there covered from the waist down.

Reflex more than decision, your knees pressed together, automatic modesty your body apparently decided it needed. His eyes dropped immediately, mouth curving into a half smile.

Big, rough hands made contact with the softness in your thighs, rubbing up and down like he was calming your nerves, followed by a soft tap to your outer thigh. "Open up."

When you stared at him blankly, upstairs evacuating again, he crouched in front of you, hands settling on your knees, thumbs pressing slow circles into the inside of them. "Open up, baby. I want to see her."

You blinked at him. "H-her? Her who?"

Brendon laughed like you'd genuinely caught him off guard. "Your pussy, sweetheart. What'd you think I meant?"

Heat went straight through you, a different kind than the embarrassment, though the embarrassment hadn't entirely left the building either. The two emotions tangled tight together until you couldn't separate one from the other.

You let your knees fall open slowly, watching his face the whole time, needing to see what it did to him.

The sound that left him when he finally got a proper look at your core went straight back to it, slick gathering. "Fuck." His thumbs kept moving, working higher up your thighs. "Look at you."

Only a whimper slipped past your lips, unable to look at his eyes anymore, even if they weren't focused on yours, but an entirely different part of you.

He dragged one finger up the inside of your thigh, slow enough to border on cruel, stopping just shy of where you actually wanted him. "You're soaked, baby. All this from a wrist consult?"

"From you —" Your mouth caught up half a second too late, and you paused, pressing your lips together.

He looked up. "What was that?"

"N-nothing."

"Mm." His thumb made one more lazy circle over your skin and you realised he probably already knew. He sat back slightly as he studied you, fingers not yet reaching for the delicacy on display, content with only working you with his eyes now. "You know what I was thinking when I came down?" 

You were not going to ask. You were absolutely not — "What?"

"I wanted to see how you looked. You always get this look." He tilted his head to look at you, hands still stationed at your thighs. "When you see me. You know that?"

"What?"

"That one." He nodded at your face, like it was helpfully demonstrating itself for him right now. Knowing you, it probably was. "Like your brain just took a long lunch and forgot to clock back in."

"I do not."

"You do. The lights go out." He pressed a kiss to the inside of your knee.  "I've been curious what it looks like when I've actually got my hands on you."

"W-what?" 

A parrot. You were more parrot than human, what with all the 'what's you were repeating. 

"You're so clueless it's adorable." Clueless from his mouth wasn't any different, having heard it strug with a hundred other insults aimed at his residents. Adorable, on the other hand… 

"Don't say adorable."

"Why not?"

"It — it means something different when you say it." You pointed at him, which from your current position — naked, with his hands on your thighs — was a spectacular show of nothing. You held it anyway. "I'm not adorable. I'm a competent —"

"Mhmm."

"— medical professional."

"Okay." You knew every version of his okay. Months of listening to him from across rooms while pretending very hard you hadn't been doing that, and the 'okay' he'd just used meant he'd already won and had no further interest in pursuing the argument. 

The Peterson arrangement was there specifically to avoid this and here you were anyway, sitting on his bed, having been kissed and told you were adorable, like you were a squirrel. 

"You're not actually agreeing with me, are you?"

Brendon's eyes fluttered close with a soft smile on his lips. Domesticated almost, looking every bit different from the hospital version of him, damp hair falling onto his face without the usual gel to hold it back.

Piercing eyes bore into yours, an intensity that was miles ahead of what you'd experienced before. The tough guy act he usually dons at work seemed to have revealed itself for what it truly was — an act. "Do you want me to agree with you, or eat you out?"

It was so casual, interrupting your flow of thoughts about how soft Park the Shark looked. A minute to organise your head and you were stuck on the "eat you out." Who even asked things liked that?

Brendon was waiting for you and looked like someone who would be comfortable with the wait. He was good at that actually, the waiting it out. Once had even Robby cave, you still weren't sure how that happened.

"W-what?"

"Focus, babygirl." Babygirl. That was new, that was nice. "Use your words. What do you want?"

You'd think ER doctors would be good with words. You talked dying people down from panic, talked families through the worst sentence of their lives, knew exactly how to phrase things to a scared kid in triage. Words were the whole job, basically. 

Apparently that didn't transfer, and once again, this was proving to be an uncharted territory. A shark swimming around you in the ER, you can handle. That was shallow waters, and you had an upper hand, known turf. Whatever this was, you absolutely couldn't.

Trying to repeat that sentence was hard, you opened and closed your mouth like a fish out of water, one the shark would very gladly devour, as you finally settled on, "yes."

"That's not what I asked, was it?"

"E-eat me out." Finally out of your mouth, heat crawling up your neck as his lips curved into an all knowing smirk, quickly vanished by your utterance of "Bren."

You had never called him that before. Even under your own sheets, with your hands between your thighs, you've fantasised and moaned 'Brendon', but this one had simply arrived. A new development, one that softened the shark's cutting bite.

"Good girl." Brendon praised, and it went straight to your cunt. "Such a good girl." 

Shouldn't show all your cards the very first time you're together, you'd once decided long back, and had a stellar record of following it up until this point. With the way this night was going, you were pretty sure you'd be cardless by the end of it.

Before you could say anything, Brendon's mouth found your carotid, pressing soft kisses, and briefly — very briefly, for your disappointment — returned to your lips, a chaste kiss, a soft denial as you chased him. 

As he continued marking you with featherlight kisses and gentle suction, you were becoming increasingly aware of the bulge in his pants. 

There was this grey sweatpants theory your friend had told you about. Never had a reason to think about it before. You were thinking about it now. 

Brendon's palms settled on the sides of your ribs. You must've been sleeping with pocket sized humans, because both of his hands seemed to span the whole of your torso, clearly big enough, having absolutely no problem showing it. 

It wasn't like you hadn't noticed them before. You had, on numerous occasions, standing on the nurses' station while he picked up a severed limb to examine. But none of that actually showed you how large his hands were, and how it could make you look small in comparison. 

His mouth was now warm at your clavicle, your sternum, until it reached one of your breasts. A sudden gasp from you, and you felt him smirk over your skin.

One of his hands left your hip to hold your other breast, palming it as he ravished this one with a particularly strong suction that made your toes curl. 

Calloused fingers deftly played with your hardened nipple, and you yet again tried to stifle a moan. 

Brendon pulled apart reluctantly, only to chastise you. "I wanna hear you. Don't hold back."

The next one came out loud as you nodded, the second his mouth closed back around your other nipple, tongue flicking against it while his hand kept working the first one between two fingers. 

Your hips lifted off the bed on their own, looking for anything to grind against, and found nothing but air.

"Patience." He said it against your skin, not even looking up.

His trail of kisses lowered past your ribs, your stomach, the softest part of it you'd spent a considerable amount of time thinking about. 

Brendon didn't seem to mind though, only pressing more open mouthed kisses, saliva streaking over bare skin, even sinking his teeth a few times, evidence of it you were sure to find the next day.

When his hands met your thighs, they spread them so wide, completely exposing you, even though his eyes made contact with yours once before looking back at your wet core, basically inviting him to taste. 

Brendon's mouth descended to your cunt as his big hands kept your thighs open however he'd wanted. You squealed at the first touch of his tongue over your wetness, lips closing over your clit, while two of his fingers parted your slick folds with utmost care, the one contrasting his pull on the soft bud. 

"You taste so good," his voice was muffled against your folds, the raspy tone almost had you coming right then, just from that. 

One finger teased your entrance, circling it just right, his tongue taking the opportunity to delve into it, a high pitched moan — one that you didn't know you were capable of making — ripped past your lips. 

The hands that were bunched at the sheets went straight to his hair, a tug that he seemed to enjoy as a groan vibrated through him. 

His tongue worked slow circles around your clit while his fingers found a rhythm inside you, curling on every withdrawal, and your thighs started shaking against the sides of his head before you'd even seen it coming.

"Brendon —"

He hummed against you instead of answering, the vibration of it nearly enough on its own, and one of your hands left his hair to grab blindly at the sheet, twisting it into your fist like you needed somewhere else to put all of it.

He pulled back just enough to drag his eyes up your body. Chin wet and mouth shiny, as he reached for your hand — the one that had abandoned his hair — and manoeuvred it right back to where it was, encouraging you. "You can pull at me however you want."

Apparently he wasn't as attached to his hair as you'd thought. 

With that, his mouth met your cunt again, a smirk right against your clit before gently sucking it between his lips. 

The sound that tore through as you came wasn't one you were familiar with. Glad you weren't — it probably would've gotten you into trouble if this was your apartment. 

When your thighs shook at the aftershocks and your fingers tugged at his hair with all their might, Brendon gentled his attack over your pussy, but kept nuzzling into you like he didn't want to stop. 

He kissed his way back up. Your stomach, your sternum, your throat, and when he finally got to your mouth you tasted yourself on his tongue and didn't hate it the way you probably should have. "Gotta taste how sweet you are." It was said right against your lips.

A whimper left you in mock protest as you pushed at his chest with the heels of your hands.

"What? I'm not wrong." He kissed you one more time like he was trying to prove it. "You're sweet everywhere, you know that?"

"Stop it."

"Mouth." A soft peck to your lips, lingering there. He pulled back just far enough to watch your face catch up. "Neck." Shark teeth grazed the side of your throat gently, then again with more weight behind it, enough to make your breath catch. He stayed there a moment, mouthing slowly along your pulse.

"Clavicle." Of course the Orthopedician uses the anatomical term, instead of the romantic 'collarbone' you'd have gone for, but you weren't complaining, as his mouth pressed into the hollow of it.

His mouth found the space between your breasts next, a little towards the left, one kiss pressed right over your hammering heart, his breath warm and slow against your skin.

"Breasts." He took his time at your chest this time, mouth closing over one nipple while his thumb worked slow circles on the other, and you squirmed under him, fingers curling into the sheets, the whole idea of him making a point dissolving into the fact that he just wanted to.

His mouth dragged down over your ribs one at a time, like he was counting, his exhale warm the whole way down.

"Stomach." He said it against the soft give of you and pressed an open mouthed kiss into the part of yourself you were probably the most insecure about. But, insecurity didn't stand a chance against Brendon. He stayed there long enough that you squirmed again, and felt him smile against your skin like the squirming was exactly the reaction he'd been after. 

The last one he skipped saying out loud. He looked up at you once, a darkness already sitting in his eyes. Every kiss before this was focused on this lips, but this one, his tongue came into action, flat and slow against you, and you understood, with sudden total clarity, that he'd meant every word.

This part wasn't about making you cum, as he immediately started making his way up, no, kissing his way up, at the same pace.

By the time he reached your mouth you'd pushed yourself up to meet him, sitting on shaking legs, hands sliding over his chest, his ribs, the muscle flanking his spine you'd spent months pretending not to notice. 

When you dragged a thumb over his nipple out of pure curiosity, he jerked under your hand, a startled laugh breaking loose that didn't match the rest of the night at all.

"Did you just —" You did it again, intentional this time, grinning up at him.

"Don't." He caught your wrist before a third attempt, a boyishness flickering across his face. Evidence for later, blackmail for the next time he tried to act untouchable in front of everyone, dealt in private of course.

"You're ticklish."

"I'm not ticklish."

"Brendon Park." You said his full name like you were reading it off the board. "Attending Orthopedic surgeon. Ticklish."

"You're done." He caught both your wrists in one hand easily and pinned them gently to the side, just above your thigh. His other hand found your chest instead, thumb circling slowly over one nipple, watching your face the whole time. "That what you were trying to do?"

Your hands stayed pinned, no way to touch him back, and the lack of an outlet had your hips lifting off the bed before you'd decided to let them.

He let your wrists go, sitting back to look at you, a thought visibly surfacing behind his eyes. "You know people look at you, right?"

That came from absolutely nowhere, as you gawked at him, wondering who looked at you and where. "What?"

"At the hospital. People look at you."

"They do not."

"Night shift nurse. New surg intern." His eyes flicked toward the door like someone was about to walk through it. "Robby."

Robby couldn't possibly — "Robby looks at me to yell at me, those are very different things." 

You crossed your arms on instinct, and the motion pushed your chest up, drawing attention to the soft flesh, drawing his attention. 

He pressed you back into the mattress, mouth finding your nipple, tongue working slow circles while his hand kept the other one busy. "You'd know," he said between pulls, "if you weren't so busy ogling me."

"I don't ogle you." Your hands found his hair on their own, fingers soft against his scalp, betraying the indignation in your voice completely.

"Sure you don't."

"I don't." It came out breathier, not exactly your intended outcome. 

"Yeah." Agreement, except you both knew it wasn't. He hooked an arm under you and shifted you higher up the bed. Easy, like you weighed nothing. Something about being moved effortlessly, like being tossed like a blanket, settled warm inside your chest. 

Brendon kissed down your stomach again, on his way to sit up. When he finally shoved his sweatpants, you watched him do it without meaning to stare, except you were absolutely staring, probably with your mouth wide open. 

He kicked them off the end of the bed and you got the full, unobstructed view of exactly what the grey sweatpants had been hiding.

"You're huge." The words left you without you having a say in it, hands immediately flying to clasp your mouth as if you can claw them back by sheer willpower. 

"Yeah?" He wrapped his hand around himself and pumped slowly, watching you watch him do it. His hands pried yours from your mouth and wrapped your fingers around him in place of his own.

You barely managed to circle him, the size of him making your own hand look almost comical wrapped around it. 

Brendon hissed through his teeth when you gave an experimental stroke, hips twitching forward into your grip like he hadn't expected it either.

He let you work him a few more times, watching your face more than what your hand was doing, before he pulled you off gently and laid himself down flat against your stomach instead, the full hot weight and length of him resting there like he was giving you a preview of what was coming. "See how huge, baby?" 

A nod was all you could manage as you stared down at where he sat against your skin, leaking, a thin shine already smeared where he'd dragged himself there. The sight of him measured against your own body, against the soft of your stomach, made your mouth go dry all over again.

He tapped himself once against your stomach, a light thud right at your navel. "Say it again."

"No." Shaking your head, you wanted to disappear inside your own skin, the amount of attention lavished upon you almost overwhelming. The intensity of his stare alone made your knees feel like jelly. 

Thank god he had you spread out on his bed. If not for that, you'd definitely have made a fool of yourself in front of him. Again.

"C'mon." He rocked his hips, dragging himself an inch across your stomach, sure of himself. It would've been obnoxious on anyone else, but he looked incredibly gorgeous and that only made your thighs press together. "I like hearing it."

"That's not — I wasn't complimenting you."

"Sure sounded like one." He braced a hand beside your head and pushed in slowly, the stretch of him pulling a gasp out of you before he'd even finished the thought. "Wanna see?"

It took you a second to get what he was offering, and you nodded. Brendon reached up, cupping the back of your skull, guiding your head up so you could watch where he was already halfway inside you, your walls stretched thin and shining around the sheer width of him, more than you'd thought your body had room for. 

The sight was too much to take in directly, and your head dropped fully into his palm before he'd pushed in another inch, a laugh breaking out of him. 

Watching your face now instead of where your bodies met, Brendon kept pushing in. Your walls clenched around him at every fraction of an inch, a stretch that bordered on too much before settling into something pleasuring.

"You good?" He asked breathless, jaw tight, hips frozen in place as he filled you to the brim.

"Uh-huh." Barely legible syllables were all you could muster.

"Words, baby."

"Move, Brendon."

The air left your lungs in one go as he pulled back almost all the way and slammed back in, your spine coming off the mattress on its own.

Somewhere at the start of this, or the weeks leading up to this, you'd thought he'd be controlled and calm, not one word wasted. He somehow turned out to be the exact opposite but also the exact same.

It felt like you were being taken apart, one piece at a time, while he was also losing himself a little. You could tell by the way his jaw kept clenching, his breath stuttering against your ear like he hadn't planned on that part happening to him too.

His hand slid up from your hip to circle around your throat, more a question than a grip. 

"That picture." It barely registered as language. You were somewhere past language by then, his cock and his hand at your throat only things you could process. "Who was that for?"

"What picture?" It wasn't that you were being difficult on purpose. When put in a position you've been mostly dreaming about for the past however many months, the only thing grabbing your attention was right in front of — no, inside — you. 

The question floated somewhere above you like it belonged to a conversation happening in another room.

He laughed against your throat, and bit down right over your pulse, sharp enough to sting and soft enough to soothe a second later with his tongue.

On top of that, one of his hands found your nipple, twisting the peaked bud between two fingers, hips coming to a halt.

A half formed protest rushed out of you. "Wha — why'd you — why'd you stop?" Breathy and whiny, your hips tried to chase friction, trying to take whatever he'd stopped giving.

"Tell me, baby." Soft and merciless words in the same breath.

"I don't — don't know, Bren." Your hands found his shoulders, nails biting in without much intention behind it, just somewhere to put the desperation since he'd taken away everything else. 

"Did I fuck you dumb, sweetheart? 

You shook your head against the pillow, which wasn't even an answer to anything, more just a reflex, the kind of thing your body did now in place of words. 

His hips a dead weight notched right where you needed them moving, he waited, patient, that felt almost cruel given the state he'd left the rest of you in.

Like a browser with a hundred tabs open, your mind buffered, going through each of them until it landed on … The Picture. Right. The wrist X-ray, the caption, the —

Oh. 

Oh. 

The realization was so slow and stupid, the way answers always showed up two minutes after you needed them in a viva. "No one," you somehow got the words out. "I — I took it. For me. Wanted to see how it looked."

Brendon went still processing that — stiller than he already was. "Yeah?" His mouth dragged along your jaw, and his cock dragged out of you, then he pushed in all the way deep into you, like the confession had unlocked something in him he'd been keeping on a leash. "You looked real good, babydoll."

Heat crawled up your neck that had nothing to do with the stretch of him or the slow drag he'd settled into, just the stupid, helpless pleasure of being told that. 

Babydoll settled alongside sweetheart and babygirl, right in between them like it had always lived there, and it hit the same place good girl had, and you knew it was all over your face. Every card, every single one, face-up. He looked at you and saw all of them.

You knew and couldn't stop it. You preened. There wasn't a better word for it. Your whole chest just sat up and asked for more.

If he'd noticed, he didn't make a show of it. "Next time," he said, "you're wearing that. And I'm taking it off you myself."

Your cunt clenched around him at the word 'next', an involuntary thing. Of course, he'd felt it, a laugh coming out low and a little wicked against your collarbone. "Oh." His hips stuttered once, to test you or if he was that affected, you weren't sure. "She liked that."

You wanted to die. You wanted to die and also you wanted him to say it again, both feelings sitting side by side without bothering to fight each other for space.

He hooked his arm under your knee and dragged it higher over his thigh, opening you up wider underneath him. 

The new angle had you gasping before you'd even processed the shift, his cock pressing somewhere new and unbearably deep.

"Fuck, you feel —" His jaw went tight, breath catching against your ear, and the sentence just died there, unfinished.

You felt a little fierceness in you sit up too, a little smug. He wasn't unaffected. Whatever this was doing to you, it was doing it to him too. That single broken half-sentence felt like a win.

Somewhere underneath the noise, you understood it now. The thing the nurses whispered about — the god complex of it all. You'd rolled your eyes at every Ortho guy who’s acted like they personally invented bone. 

Now, you couldn't speak for the rest of them. You hadn't slept with all of them, for one, and didn't plan to start now.

So, the sample size you were working with was n=1, which was not statistically significant in the traditional sense, but you were convinced. 

This one. This infuriating, occasionally tender man currently splitting you open — he'd earned whatever god complex he wanted to keep. 

"Where do you want it?" His voice dropped, hips losing the rhythm he'd clinged to, like he was holding the last of his control together with both hands. "Tell me, baby."

"Inside." It came out before you could second-guess it. "Please, Bren. Inside."

"Fuck. Good girl." The praise went straight through you, the same way it had the first time. Except now it had nowhere left to land except your shaking core, your whole body drawing tight around the words and around him at the same time.

Brendon reached between you, two fingers finding your clit, and the combination of that and the angle and the low filthy murmur of 'want you' and 'need you' against your throat sent you over before you'd even braced for it, your whole body locking up around him, vision actually whiting out at the corners for a second.

He followed almost immediately after, a groan tearing out of him that didn't sound anything like the composed, deadpan voice you'd known, hips stuttering, before he stilled deep, spilling ropes into you, both of you breathing like you'd run somewhere.

His forehead dropped to your shoulder, one hand smoothing the line of your hip. 

You lay there underneath the weight of him thinking, distantly, that you'd never once associated gentle and Brendon Park before tonight and now you weren't sure you'd be able to separate them again.

Eventually he rolled to the side, pulling you with him against his chest, his hand now tracing slow lines up your spine.

"I should go," you said, even as your body did the exact opposite of going, settling deeper into him.

"Or," his mouth was against your neck, "you could stay."

"I'd be late." You'd already started counting the hours, and whether you had a fresh set of scrubs in your locker or if you'd have to do the walk of shame in yesterday's, whether anyone would actually notice or if you were just assuming the entire hospital revolved around tracking your sleep schedule the way you currently were. 

"I'll write you a note." He said it with such a straight face, you almost believed there was a version of this where that worked. Brendon Park scrawling an excuse on a prescription pad and Robby just accepting it without asking a single follow-up question. The image alone nearly made you laugh into his chest.

You propped yourself up enough to glare at him, even though the effect was probably ruined by whatever state your hair was currently in. "First of all, I'm not five. I’m not going to school. Secondly, you're not my attending."

His hand found the back of your head before you'd finished the sentence, guiding you back down against his chest. "Robby's the only attending you take orders from, huh?"

"Well. He is my attending."

"Mm." For a man who'd had you twice in the last hour, he sounded almost petulant. 

"Brendon. I'm in your bed." You tipped your head back to look at him, his mouth set in a soft frown, more like a pout. "You don’t have to be jealous of Robby."

"I'm not."

"You're jealous of Robby right now. Post-nut."

His nose scrunched up, and you immediately wanted to kiss it. "Don't — don't say post-nut."

A laugh cracked out of you, and not a cute one. "Park the Shark. Jealous. Of Robby." You dragged out the syllables, drawing it into a sing song taunt.

"Watch it."

You bit down on a smile and lost, mouth pressed flat against his chest where you figured he couldn't see it. 

Apparently he could feel it though, his hand stilled mid-stroke. "You're hiding." 

"I'm not hiding anything."

"You're smiling. I can feel it."

"Shut up, Brendon."

He'd watched you do it for the better part of a year now. Suture a kid's eyebrow while the mother sobbed in the doorway. Call a time of death in a voice that didn't waver once. Walk out of a trauma — that would've put most second-years on the floor — like it didn't do anything of significance to you.

He'd told Robby once, that one's gonna outlast all of us. Robby had just hummed, like he already knew. Like everybody already knew except maybe you.

He didn't know what to do with that. With you. Two decades of learning exactly how much a person could survive before they gave, and you'd never given. Not once, not in any way he'd been close enough to catch — and he had been close. 

Closer than he'd let himself admit, most nights. The sound you made when you were concentrating, he could pick it out with his eyes closed, how you could never stay down, even if anyone else in your position would've quit.

None of that should've mattered to a man who'd buried more people than he'd saved and still wore another woman's ring, solely because taking it off felt like one more door he didn't get to walk through.

Turning it without meaning to, he was thinking about the ring then, sitting three stools down from you at the bar nobody bothered to name, the place where everyone went to confirm they'd survived another shift.

It had been ugly that night. You'd handled it like you always did. Sunshine, somebody on the floor had called you once, not unkindly, and it had stuck.

You are sunshine. 

And Jack knew he wasn't someone who got to keep something like that for himself.

"Another round?" Mateo was flagging down the bartender down without waiting for an answer.

Jack shook his head before anyone could pour him one. "I'm good." One beer in, he had no plans to go further. Somebody at this table had to drive, and it was not going to be Mateo.

You said something about him always being good, warm enough that it caught somewhere he'd rather it didn't.

He looked at you a beat too long before he could stop himself. "Most days." The truest thing he'd said all night. 

Jack willed himself to look away, back toward whatever Ellis was saying about the new schedule, looking at you any longer was him being the opposite of good.

So many months spent looking sideways, stopping before the thought went anywhere it shouldn't. Whether that counted as discipline or cowardice, he hadn't decided.

Sixteen hours on feet would do that to anyone, let alone him, so Jack stretched his bad leg out under the table. 

Nobody here treated it like news anymore. You'd asked him about it once, early on. Lost it overseas, he'd told you.

You hadn't pushed. He was grateful for that. Most people pushed, prodded him with questions, or completely ignored it. 

You, once again, had fallen in the middle, his desired side. 

The jukebox was playing a song old enough that he could sing along if he wanted to embarrass himself in front of the entire bar, which he didn't.

Javadi was muttering under her breath and you laughed at it, and Jack watched. 

He'd noticed he liked watching you laugh more than was probably healthy for a man his age with his own collection of scars. But noticing it and doing anything about it were two very different problems, and he'd spent a year successfully keeping them that way.

He was still congratulating himself on that, more or less, when you said his name, followed by your slurry question, "Y'know what's stupid?" 

Jack already knew this wasn't going anywhere good. You only led with y'know what's stupid when you were three drinks past the point where you usually stopped yourself.

"Don't know." He leaned back against the bar, arms crossed, tried to look casual and probably failed. "You're gonna tell me though."

"Don't be smart with me right now. I'm fragile." You weren't fragile. In the period of watching you and knowing you, he'd never once gotten the sense that the word applied to you. But you'd moved closer, not bothering to keep your voice down.

"Oh, here we go," Santos muttered into her glass.

"What's stupid," you went on, leaning forward like the table had gotten further away in the last ten seconds, "is loving somebody who is never, ever gonna let himself be loved back. That's a stupid way to spend a Friday. A stupid way to spend a year, a whole life, actually, if we're being honest."

"Who?" Whitaker leaned in like this was the best thing to happen to him all week. "You gotta say who, you can't just throw a thing like that into a bar and walk away from it—"

Jack thought you didn't need any persuasion or encouragement to blurt out whatever was on your mind.

"You know who," you said, still not looking away from Jack.

He felt that burrow under his ribs and live there. Only thing he knew how to do and he did that, try to joke his way out before it turned into something heavier. "Let's take a break, shall we?"

"No, I wanna say." The no and say came out long and drawn, each syllable stretched with stubborn insistence.

"Say it, then." Whittaker's voice once again spurred you on.

You said the older man's name like it had been sitting behind your teeth longer than just tonight, no laugh in it to hide behind this time. Jack felt the table go quiet, listening even with their eyes pointed somewhere else.

"It's you," you whispered, then laughed, a sound so beautiful, Jack wanted to keep hearing it. "It's so obviously you I don't know why I bothered being subtle about it. Everybody already knows. Mateo has watched me watch you for — for — I dunno how long —"

From the far end of the booth came Mateo's voice. "No, I haven't."

"You're not subtle, Mateo."

"I —"

"It's okay." Your concentration came back to Jack, like the rest of the table had stopped existing, which — fair, he'd been doing the same thing since you opened your mouth. "It's been you for embarrassingly long. Professionally embarrassing. I should lose my license over how long it's been."

That earned a few laughs around the table and Jack wanted to pull you in, shield you from the attention you'd suddenly become the center of.

But he couldn't. 

The honest answer — the one that would never see daylight, if he had any say in it — was that he understood. More than he should've.

Long back, he'd started noticing what door you came through at the start of each shift. Your coffee. How you only remembered to eat if someone put food in your eyeline. None of that was the kind of attention an attending was supposed to pay a resident. 

That also extended to you'd been watching him, mostly when you'd thought he wasn't looking. So he knew. 

All that watching and he'd never once let himself do anything with it except stand in the same room and be relieved you weren't paying attention. 

He should've laughed it off clean. That was the move, the one he'd used on a hundred things he didn't want to look at directly for longer than a second. What came out instead was softer and more revealing. "Let's get some water into you."

"Don't wan' water. Want an answer." You sighed and plopped your head on the table, not caring about what had been on it before. Sober you would chastise this version. 

Crescents dug into his palm with the effort of not reaching to you. "You're gonna want the water in about twenty minutes. Trust me on this one."

"Is this happening?" Whitaker didn't bother lowering his voice, even though the question was only meant for Santos. "Are we just gonna sit here and watch this happen?"

"We are absolutely sitting here watching this happen," Santos deadpanned.

"I'm bein' serious, Jack." Your voice came as a whine.

"Yeah," he said. "That's what worries me." He was careful to keep it low, not let it carry. 

"I am serious. I'm the most serious person in this entire building, ask literally anyone —" The apparently serious effect you were going for was lost with the way you hiccupped at the middle of your sentence.

"Not wrong about that part," Whitaker offered, unhelpfully.

"Thank you, Huckleberry." 

Whittaker sighed, probably wishing he hadn't chimed in. 

"C'mon." Jack stood. The room tipped half a degree, byproduct of one beer and sixteen hours upright. His weight settled wrong into the leg for a second before it found the floor right, a half-beat nobody at this table had ever clocked because he'd gotten good at not letting them. "I'm taking you home."

"You're not listenin' to me." Your arms flailed before slotting themselves on his biceps for support.

"Listening fine. Up you get."

Robby caught his eye over the top of your head while Jack hauled you up by the elbow, the two of you doing the slow shuffle toward the door that he was not, under any circumstances, going to call a stagger out loud.

Unconscious weight trusting the near solid thing, your body went slump against his. He kept a hand at your back. Told himself it was practical. Perks of telling himself the same thing for God knows how long, he wasn't going to stop now.

Robby's lips played a smirk, the one he used to get back in residency whenever Jack tried to pretend a bad shift hadn't gotten to him. Said he saw exactly what this was and was choosing, out of something resembling mercy, not to say it yet.

"Don't," Jack said anyway, covering his bases.

"Didn't say a thing."

You didn't mean it. He held onto that the whole walk to the car, the whole drive, your head against the window and your eyes closing somewhere around the second red light.

You'd had — what, four? Five? Jack had counted without meaning to. The number added upto something you'd be embarrassed the next day. 

He got you up the stairs to your apartment with an arm under yours, and you went easy, pliant. The drinks had stripped you off any careful consideration you'd worn like a badge, now going loose, like you trusted him with holding you up. 

He got you water. He got you to the couch, because you point-blank refused the bed, something about if I lie down the room's gonna dance, Jackie, and Jack didn't ask. Couch should be fine. But he knew he'd never recover from the Jackie. 

"Jackie."

Of course. 

"Yeah."

"I meant it." Your eyes were already closing again. "Jus' so you know. For later. I meant it."

"Go to sleep."

"'M not gonna remember saying that."

"Probably not."

"'Kay," you mumbled, which undercut the whole I meant it pretty thoroughly.

Jack pulled a blanket up over you and told himself that settled it. He stood there longer than he needed to and just looked at you. 

He'd watched enough of you being one with the couch, only this was not the break room, and there weren't a myriad of factors fighting for his attention. 

But, not like this. 

He'd never quite let himself look at you when you were awake, openly, without the practiced distance he'd built between watching something and wanting it.

Whatever you wore through every shift had gone quiet. What was left was just you.

You were drunk. You didn't mean it.

That and how you said his name replayed in his head the whole drive home. He'd always been Dr. Abbot to you, and there was no recovering from either Jack or Jackie, especially the latter. Even drunk, your voice didn't waver, like you'd practiced it somewhere private long before that night gave you the nerve. He decided, somewhere around his third red light, that it didn't matter how you said it.

People said things drunk they wouldn't survive saying sober, and the kindest thing he could do, maybe the only thing he was actually allowed to do, was leave it exactly where it fell. At a bar. Five drinks in. Gone by morning.

It wasn't gone by morning.

He had a whole speech, something that would let the two of you step around this without either one having to look at it head-on. He never got the chance to use it though. 

You found him first, outside trauma two. Eyebrows drawn together, a small pout playing at your lips, a look he hadn't seen on you, having watched this place fail to touch you for months. 

Seemed like you'd already decided how to take whatever he was going to say. 

"Hey." You not so much looked at him as over him. "So — I wanted to say sorry. About last night. I had a lot to drink and I shouldn't have put you on the spot like that, in front of everybody."

He wanted to tell you not to apologise, that you didn't put him on the spot at all, only yourself, and he would do anything to make you forget it, his one good deed. 

"It's fine," he said, already half-turned back toward the chart in his hand. "Don't worry about it."

The absolute silence from you made him look back up. There was a small tilt to your mouth, like the start of a frown that got called off halfway through. "Oh," you said. "Okay."

"Hey —" He didn't love the sound that came out of you on those two words — worse than anger, a gentle resignation — opened his mouth to walk it back, except you got there first.

"Why didn't you take it seriously?"

"What?"

"Last night. You just… nothing — told me to drink water. Why didn't you take it seriously?"

"Because you'd had a lot to drink," he said like it was obvious. To him it had been, even if his subconscious would never agree with that. "You didn't mean it."

"No — no, that's — " You were shaking your head like you were trying to get the right words to fall into the right order. "I did mean it. Fuck it—" he'd never once heard you curse. "I'll say it now, even if saying it in daylight — I mean, it's nighttime, but — sober. Sober's the word I'm looking for. It's just me. Standing here. Telling you that I —"

"Trauma two minutes out," Lena called from the desk. "GSW, unresponsive."

"Bed three." Shen moved past the two of you like neither of you were rooted to the ground like statues. "Let's go, people."

Jack's hand found your shoulder without his permission, gone almost as soon as it landed, and then he was moving too, falling into step beside Shen like the last ten seconds hadn't just happened at all.

He was good at not thinking about things when there was something else that needed doing, probably his most transferable skill if anyone ever asked.

The case took eleven minutes to crash and another forty to claw back. His hands knew what to do faster than his head did, which was usually the only thing keeping him upright through one of these.

Until minute thirty, he didn't think about the hallway again, when he looked up across the bed for a clamp and caught you on the other side of it. Gloved hands steady. Voice steady, calling out vitals.

He'd watched you call a death and then go check on the family with nothing on you but patience. In all these months, the job had never once gotten anywhere near your eyes. Now it had.

And he knew exactly whose fault it was, looking at you over a man's open chest, and the knowing sat in him like something swallowed wrong, heavy and a little sick, the rest of the case.

With the adrenaline gone, and nothing left to cower behind, Jack followed you to the ambulance bay. 

"Hey."

Rushing a silence never made it shorter in his experience, and you needed a beat more than he did. He gave it to you.

"Hey." You didn't look at him.

"You good?"

"I don't know, Jack. Am I supposed to be good?" Now you looked at him, and it wasn't soft anymore. He hadn't expected the fire even though he probably should've. "You're the one who decided what I'm allowed to feel about any of this."

"That's not what I was trying to do."

"That's exactly what you did. You stood there and told me you didn't think much of it. Like I was a chart you forgot to sign."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"Then how'd you mean it?"

Practised, rehearsed speech was sitting somewhere behind his tongue, not one word of it came to his aid, happy with watching him scramble.

A gurney rattled somewhere behind him, two sets of footsteps moving fast toward bay four, somebody calling out a name he didn't catch. He registered none of it. 

The whole building could've gone up and he wouldn't have noticed, not with you looking at him like that, waiting on something he should've had ready an hour ago. A day ago. A year, probably, if he was being honest.

He thought about lying. Old habit, reaching for the smooth thing instead of the true one. But you'd see it. You always saw it, that was half the problem with you — you'd gotten too good at reading him for him to get away with the easy version anymore.

"I was scared." Jack hated how it sounded coming out of him, unfinished. 

He almost wished you would say something. Silence from you was worse than any yelling, than the fire from a second ago. At least the fire told him where he stood.

"I — I was trying to make it easy for you." He heard himself say it and knew, even as the words came out, that they weren't going to do what he wanted them to do. "So you didn't have to carry it."

"I don't want easy!" Your voice cranked at the end of it, loud enough that a passing tech glanced over before deciding very quickly to keep walking. "When have I ever once asked you for easy?"

"I don't know, maybe never, maybe that's the problem—"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You don't ask for anything." He hadn't meant to get into this here, hadn't meant to get into it at all, but it was coming out now whether he wanted it to or not. Two decades of watching people swallow things finally finding somewhere to go. "You take whatever the night throws at you and you swallow it and you smile and you call it fine. I figured you'd do the same with this."

Out loud, it sounded exactly as cowardly as it was.

"This isn't a trauma, Jack. You don't get to triage me."

"I know that."

"Do you? Because it really doesn't feel like you do."

"I know it, alright?" His voice was louder than he'd meant it to be, and he caught himself, brought it back down. You, of all people, didn't deserve to be the one who got it loud. "I've known since the second you said my name at that bar, and I — I told you it was fine. Because—"

"Because what?"

The easy thing resurfaced, sat right there in his mouth, but he looked at your face and it went nowhere. Again.

He thought of the ring. How he'd been using it, as an argument with himself. It stopped holding a long time ago. "Because if I told you the truth, I didn't know what I was gonna do with it."

"So you lied to me instead?" A sniffle worked up to your words, he hated it more than he'd hated most things this job had shown him. "That's worse, Jack. That's so much worse than just saying nothing."

"I know." Jack sighed. 

"Then why'd you do it?"

He'd had this conversation in his head half a dozen times. In his version he'd been more articulate, and you'd let him get through a full sentence. But you were looking at him like you actually wanted the answer and weren't going to let him get away without giving it.

"Because I look at you and I see somebody who's never once let this place touch you," he said. "Not all the way down — and I keep thinking, if I let myself want that, I'm gonna end up being the thing that finally does."

You went quiet, thrown enough that for a second you forgot to be angry at him. "What?"

He'd turned it over in his head so many times it had worn smooth, but that wasn't the same as saying it. Saying it made it actual. Made it a thing that existed outside of him, in the cold, between the two of you.

"I'm sorry."

"You think you'd ruin me." Softest person in this building and the most stubborn, and those weren't contradictions, you weren't going to let him off the hook.

The cold was getting into him through his scrubs and he didn't care. Some part of him thought he deserved to stand out here and freeze a little, penance for a thing he hadn't even committed yet, just the threat of it. 

He'd buried a marriage he didn't talk about, and somewhere along the way he'd decided that meant he didn't get a second one, didn't get to want it, like the universe only handed a man one shot at being soft with somebody and his had already come and gone.

"I think I've ruined plenty already." He'd thought he'd made peace with it a long time ago but he apparently hadn't. "I'm not in a hurry to find out if you're next on that list."

"That's not fair. You don't get to decide that for me either."

"Probably not."

"So stop deciding it!"

"I'm —"

"Don't say you're trying. You're not. You're standing there doing the exact same thing you did last night, you're just using better words this time."

"What do you want from me?"

"I want you to stop being so sure you already know how this ends before it's even started!" You tried to swallow a sob back down and failed. "I'm so tired of being the strong one. I don't — I don't want to be the strong one with you too."

It was awful watching you cry. He'd sat with families through the worst things this city could do to them and he knew that language — knew where to put his hands, what to say and how to be useful inside someone else's worst moment.

His own fault, and none of that applied here. The only useful thing would start with him closing the distance.

"Sweetheart." It came out before he'd decided to say anything at all. "Hey — c'mere."

Jack pulled you in before you could argue your way out of it, one arm coming around you, your face landing against his chest like it had been aiming for that exact spot the whole time.

Imagining this had been forbidden too him, he'd been disciplined about keeping the things he wasn't allowed to want in a place he didn't go.

But, the warmth of your body was real, and you fit against him perfectly. Absurd, if he had to think about it then, absurd that he'd wasted time. A very long time to have waited for something that felt this right.

His hand found the back of your head without him telling it to. He felt you shake once, just once, like your body was testing whether it was allowed.

Tighter, then. Just enough.

"Why won't you just let this be easy?" Your words were muffled, wrecked, into the fabric of his scrubs.

The same question he'd been asking himself, end of bad shifts, in the car, in all the hours he'd spent deciding not to do exactly this. He didn't have a good answer.

"Because nothing about me is easy." He said it into your hair. "You're—" He found a different way to say it, ended up going for the most obvious one. "You're sunshine. You don't even know you're doing it half the time. And I'm not that. I've got two decades of stuff in me that doesn't burn off, it just sits there. I didn't think it was fair to put that next to you."

"That's not your call to make."

"I'm not good for you."

"I don't care."

"You —"

"Stop." It was so much like you to cut him off.

He let out a breath that had been sitting in his chest since the bar the night before. "Okay."

Frozen in place, frozen in hug, the two of you stood there, morning sun peeking out from the clouds. He didn't let go. You didn't ask him to. 

There were things he should probably say, about the leg he didn't talk about, about the wife he talked about even less, about everything he'd carried out of those years that he still hadn't found a place to put down. 

But that felt like a conversation for some dawn that wasn't now.

"You really think I'm sunshine?" you asked eventually, voice still thick, pressed into him like you weren't ready to test your own legs yet.

It was the kind of question asked when you already believed something but needed someone else holding it with you. He'd heard it before, in harder rooms, from people with far less reason for it.

He hadn't expected it from you. You were the one who made every room feel like things were going to be alright. He hadn't known, until then, that you needed someone to do that back.

"You're everything."

Ortho had a reputation and Brendon had leaned into it wholeheartedly. Fast, brutal, precise, and deeply uninterested in anything that didn't have to do with bone mechanics or operative planning. 

Park the Shark. He'd heard the name passed between residents in the corridor like a warning, and he hadn't minded. Warnings kept the noise down.

He was, all told, completely fine.

And then he met you. At the hospital coffee counter on a Wednesday morning, over a cup of black americano, and everything went sideways.

The barista set his coffee down and he was on his way to get it. Pretty normal stuff. Stuff that happened everyday. 

But before he could get there, there was you, his cup in your grasp, and then between your lips. 

He'd opened his mouth to say something. Sharply, probably. The same voice that made interns forget how to speak. But then, you drank. 

Your face did something spectacular. Nose scrunching up, eyes going slightly wide, mouth opened like a fish, as though you were offended, devastated, betrayed by a fucking beverage. You stared into the cup for a full second like you were waiting for it to apologize. "Okay," you said, to the cup, mostly. "That's — what is that?"

Brendon stared at you.

"What'd they put in this?" you continued, as if you were workshopping a complaint, a comical lilt to your voice. 

In the fifteen seconds of you taking his drink and drinking it, it didn’t occur to you that you’d just consumed something belonging to someone else. The coffee — he didn’t think you’d agree for it to be called a coffee, to be really honest — had shaken you so much that it took you a minute to compose yourself. 

When you did, you turned the cup in your hand, read the side and looked up, a sheepish smile on your lips. 

As you found him just standing there, gaze locked on you, your eyes dropped between him and the cup. "Oh, it's got your name on it." You had the audacity to look adorable — what the fuck did he just think? "Is this yours?"

Brendon nodded. Fucking nodded. 

Embarrassment should not have looked that good on anyone. How could someone look like that while questioning life decisions, evaluating choices that led to this moment?

"Right." You set it down on the counter between, like you were disarming a situation. "Sorry. I genuinely thought — mine's supposed to be a latte and I just grabbed it, I wasn't looking at the name. I'm really sorry."

Dark circles under your eyes, hair pulled back like it was done in thirty seconds without a mirror, lime green scrubs that had no reason looking good, no reason making you look good. Who even looked good in that colour? Who even chose that colour? 

You were somewhere between mortified and trying to hold it together, which was fair, because you had just walked up to a stranger's drink and had at it. "Can I at least — I'll pay for a new one, here—"

You were reaching into your pocket and Brendon, who had been on the verge of saying something very reasonable like it's fine, not a problem— "No."

Accidentally spoke in the voice. He didn't always mean to use, it just comes out that way by default, making fourth-year residents straighten their spines. And he’d used it. To you. 

You looked up at him with an expression he could only describe as a deer having second thoughts about the road.

He hadn't meant — he wasn't angry. He'd said no out of reflex. Most things he said were out of reflex, and now this person was staring at him like he'd personally threatened her. He had the strange and unfamiliar experience of wanting to walk it back. "I meant—" he started.

But you'd pulled yourself together, apparently deciding that whatever his problem was, it was his problem. 

"Okay, no." You held your hands up, like you were placating a toddler. "Noted. For future reference though, why would you get it like that, it's — is this fun for you? Like do you enjoy it?"

He blinked, heat rising up to his cheeks. He could only hope you didn’t notice it.

What you did notice was that he looked clueless and you clarified, "the coffee," you pointed to his cup. "There's nothing in it. I took one sip and I think my tongue is still reeling from it."

"That's what coffee tastes like," Brendon said.

"That's a very sad thing to believe." You stated, completely without malice, which made it worse somehow. A genuine opinion. To make matters worse, you were already looking back toward the counter, scanning for your actual order.

Brendon stood there holding his americano while everyone else and everything else continued their life, including you. 

The barista called your name. You went to get it, came back briefly into his sightline, and gave him a small, still-somewhat-mortified wave on your way out the door.

He watched you go and drank his coffee, the same one your lips touched. It tasted exactly like it always did, which was fine, he liked it fine.

Do you enjoy it?

He took another sip. It was objectively bitter.

Lime green. A colour he couldn't immediately place. It bothered him, sitting in the back of his head while he moved through his afternoon. 

PTMC colour-coded by department. He knew this. He just didn't have them all memorized, a gap he'd never needed to fill before.

He decided to ask his ward nurse, Delgado, at the end of his post-ops. Casual as he could make it, which for him was still pretty clinical — "lime green. You know which department?" 

Delgado looked up from her chart. "Lime green," she repeated, slowly, like she was checking the words for a hidden compartment.

“Yeah.” 

“Are we talking about scrubs here, Dr Park?” She had her eyebrows crossed like she was trying to read him. 

“Yes.”

“Neonatology,” she answered. 

Four floors up, the opposite end of the building, behind two sets of badge-locked doors and a hand-washing protocol longer than some of his procedures. He'd been in there exactly twice in his career, both times for consults that took fifteen minutes and ended in a referral elsewhere.

It made sense. You looked like sunshine incarnate, all airy and beautiful, effortlessly skilful — not that he’d seen you work, but he had an idea. 

"Right." He turned back toward the board.

"Dr. Park."

"Mm."

"Are you — Is there something involving neonatology that I should know about?"

A small, unwelcome lurch happened inside his chest. He kept his face the way he kept it in the OR — nothing on it, nothing to read — and he could tell, with horrible clarity, that it wasn't working.

“Something?”

“A case?” 

Brendon could see that she’d worded it carefully. "No."

"Okay," Delgado said. "No reason then." She didn't believe a word of it and had decided not to push, which was worse because he could’ve handled an argument. An argument had an end.

Without looking at her, he said, “you can go.”

"I'm charting."

"You can chart elsewhere."

"This is the nurses' station, Dr. Park."

She was smiling. He knew that without even looking. He went back to his board and did not say anything else, hoping this was the end of it. 

It was in no way shape or form, the end of anything. It only took him five minutes to look it up. Not you specifically, he wasn’t doing that. Yet, the back of his mind supplied. 

He was just reading about fellowship timelines, the NICU admission criteria for some reason? He also learned it’s two or three more years of training, all of it happening four floors above his OR in a unit he had approximately zero clinical reason to enter.

The fact that he even went down this road is embarrassing. But he went a whole another mile. 

Clavicular fractures were the most common birth-related bone injury. Unfortunately — now, he hated himself for even thinking the word — they were managed entirely conservatively. Swaddle the arm, follow up in two weeks. It wouldn't require an orthopedic surgeon, much less him, to stand in a NICU looking purposeful.

For about four seconds, he entertained inventing a reason. He got as far as picturing himself walking through those doors in his scrub cap with some flimsy excuse half-formed, and the picture was so stupid — so transparently, embarrassingly stupid — that he closed his laptop immediately.

The hospital was large and your departments were, in practical terms, on separate planets. 

You’d been in the coffee shop on Wednesday, which meant you probably used it, which meant theoretically he'd encounter you again just by existing in the building. He told himself he wasn't going to engineer anything, he was just aware of the possibility. That was all.

Two days passed. He did four surgeries including a complicated tibial nail revision that took three hours and came out beautifully, and one very satisfying conversation with a referring physician who had misread an MRI and needed correcting. Normal week, right? 

Next day, he got his coffee at six forty, same as every morning, and stood at the counter a beat longer than the transaction required, scanning the line behind him without meaning to. Nobody in lime green. He told himself that meant nothing, took his americano, and left.

Friday, same thing. He noticed himself doing it the second time, which didn't help — like catching his own reflection mid-expression and not recognizing the face looking back.

He didn't see you. Abnormal week. 

ER consult. Friday, mid-afternoon. A fracture dislocation that the ER attending had flagged as needing operative planning. Brendon came down at two-thirty, and found Abbot by trauma three looking over a film.

Coming down to the ER wasn't his favorite part of the day. Not the work — the work was fine, usually obvious, usually somebody else's problem until it became his — but the way the place ran, all motion and noise hot under his skin. Abbot, somehow, thrived in it.

They'd gotten through about two minutes of the consult — Abbot walking him through the case, Brendon pulling up the images, the two of them doing back-and-forth of people who'd worked a building together long enough to skip the preamble. Uneventful. 

But then the ER entrance on the left side of the bay opened and you walked through it.

Same lime green scrubs and a your Dunkin' cup in hand. Shen next to you, also holding a Dunkin' cup, saying something Brendon couldn't hear from this distance, and you were laughing. Brendon, to his disappointment, noticed it was not a poilte laugh. Your shoulder bumped into Shen’s with the force of it, a fully open-mouthed laugh, and you looked gorgeous.

The sight in front of him was only fogged by the fact that it was Shen who was at the receiving end of it.

The blush climbed before he could stop it, heat crawling up the back of his neck and into his ears. He thanked every god he didn't believe in, that Abbot was still looking at the film and not at him.

Brendon's jaw locked. Back teeth coming together, the muscle in his jaw pulling. He knew it’d give him a headache if he kept it up. 

He didn’t really know Shen, not really. Having entirely met him through corridors and in consultations. But in that moment he decided, with an immediate, total conviction usually reserved for diagnoses, that he didn't like him.

Because he didn’t want to stare, he looked back at the X-ray on the tablet. "So the fracture pattern —" he spoke.

"You okay?" Abbot cut in.

Brendon looked at him. Abbot looked like he already knew the answer and was just asking to pull his leg, like most ER attendings. 

"Fine," Brendon said. "The fracture is comminuted. Needs ORIF. I’ll book an OR, do it first case tomrorw morning."

Abbot nodded as he scribbled on the iPad. Didn't look fully satisfied with the fine but let it go. Brendon knew that about Abbot — the latter picked his moments.

Brendon looked back at the X-ray.

In his peripheral vision, you and Shen had stopped near the nurse’s station, still talking. You had the cup halfway to your mouth, nodding at whatever he was saying, and then you laughed again, smaller this time, shaking your head. Like whatever Shen had said was ridiculous and you were conceding it anyway.

His molars hurt from pressing down too hard. "ORIF tomorrow, first case," he said again, to the iPad at his hand, to no one.

"You already said that," Abbot noted.

He pulled up the next item on his consult list — a possible Montaggia fracture, a cakewalk for him, nightmare for others. "I'm confirming."

He was not confirming. He had no idea why he'd said it twice. 

You'd moved further into the ER now, past his sightline, and he found himself looking at the entrance you'd come through for a second before he caught himself and looked back at Abbot. The latter was watching him like he was trying very, very hard not to smirk.

"Do you need something?" Brendon asked.

"I'm just standing here," Abbot said.

"You're doing something with your face."

"I'm a person, Park, my face does things." Abbot tucked his hands in his pockets. Nodding towards the general direction of where you might be standing, Abbot said, "I didn't know you knew anyone in neonatology."

"I don't," Brendon interjected soon. Too soon. 

"Hm." Abbot’s head did a sweep of the ER, probably searching for you, and then looked back at Brendon. "Right."

Brendon put his iPad under his arm, said he'd have the operative plan by end of day and walked back toward the elevator, which took him directly past the nurse’s station, where you had apparently remigrated with Shen, talking to the desk coordinator about something.

He did not slow down.

But in the two seconds he passed within range, he did clock that you smelled like coffee and something warm underneath it, something sweet, vanilla maybe. You didn't notice him, but Shen did and nodded. Brendon nodded back and kept walking, very normal. Walk of a man who was fine.

The elevator took forty-five years to arrive.

He stood in front of it for all forty-five of those years, staring at the closed doors with his hands in his coat pockets, acutely, miserably aware that Park the Shark had just sped up his pace to get past a girl with a Dunkin' and was now standing at an elevator hoping it would hurry up.

Somewhere behind him, he was fairly sure, Abbot was still smiling.

It was a horrible week for the ortho residents. And it wasn’t even Tuesday. 

It wasn’t because of the caseload. The caseload was what it always was, a rotating carousel of fractures and dislocations and the occasional spectacular screw-up from another department who'd missed a bone scan. 

No, the residents had a terrible week because Brendon Park had decided, somewhere between Friday evening and Tuesday afternoon, that their technique was uniformly sloppy and their pre-op prep was an embarrassment to the profession, and he'd said so. Repeatedly. In front of each other.

It wasn't personal. He thought so and would tell you so, if anyone asked him. No one was brave enough. 

His residents just kept standing in his eyeline when he was already irritated, and that was their problem, really.

Delgado, to her eternal credit, had not said a single word about it. She'd watched him tear into a second-year over a chart — like who enters the date wrong? — and kept her face entirely professional. The kid went pale, stuttering through his apology, and Brendon didn’t care. 

He'd noticed it himself. The snapping. He was moving through the ward with even less patience than usual, which was saying something. He did a K wire banding, ate lunch at his desk, reviewed post-op films, and at six-fifteen found himself at the hospital coffee counter scanning the room before his order was called. It was mortifying enough on its own, and you weren't there, so it brought double the mortification. 

He went back Tuesday. Sat down, which was something he genuinely had never done. He had always taken his coffee to go. There was no reason to sit, the hospital was across the street, he drank it walking. 

But this time, he sat. Kept his phone out, drank his coffee and checked his messages. He absolutely did not look at the door every ninety seconds.

You weren't there Tuesday either. Which was fine. People had schedules. Neonatologists especially — the NICU didn't exactly run on a nine-to-five, he knew that much. He'd looked it up. For professional reasons, of course. For someone who’d prided himself for working 24/7, he was humbled real quick. 

Wednesday, he sat again. He had a consultation at nine, no reason to rush. He could drink his coffee like a human being who used chairs. He pulled up his post-op notes on his phone, found Abbot's message about a fracture dislocation follow-up, which Abbot didn’t have to do but does it anyway. Abbot was like that sometimes. 

When he looked up, his coffee was in front of him. And so were you.

Lime green scrubs, your own drink in your other hand, and you were sliding his cup toward him. The look on your face that said you'd been watching him not notice it for at least thirty seconds. He had been reading an MRI report. A fascinating one.

"I really should get you a coffee," you said.

Brendon laughed. It was him. That was his laugh. Coming out of his face, in a coffee shop, at seven in the morning.

It came out before he could stop it or do anything about it. Just a short, but real sound, surprising him enough that he almost looked around to check if someone else had made it. 

You were watching him with that same expression from the first time, like you found him interesting the way you'd find an unusual rock formation interesting. Curious but not unkind. It was doing things to his blood pressure.

"You're still doing that to yourself, I see." You nodded at his cup.

"It's coffee."

"Doesn't taste like it, though." Your nose scrunched up, just like the first time, just as adorable. Did he just say adorable again? 

He picked up the cup, took a sip purely out of spite, and looked back at you.

You sat down across from him. Which he had not expected and also had absolutely expected. Two things existing simultaneously, almost fucking him up. 

"You're here a lot," you said.

"The hospital's down the street."

"Is it?" You glanced at him, stirring your drink. "Because I've only ever seen you take it to go, and now you're sitting." You took out the stirrer and placed it on a tissue. "Three days in a row."

The back of his neck went warm, mouth opening to say something. Deny it probably, which was stupid and a waste of time. But you interrupted him. 

Brendon Park is not someone who’s interrupted. People let him talk, and only think about answering when they’re sure he’s finished. 

You, on the other hand, did not care. "You're kinda hard to miss with all the brooding going on."

"I don't brood."

You took a sip of your drink, watching him over the lid, expression doing a tremendous amount of work without saying anything. 

He held your gaze. You lowered the cup. "You totally brood. It's an ortho thing, right? Comes with it."

"You know I'm ortho?"

"Everyone knows you're ortho." You said it completely matter-of-factly. Like, yes Brendon, the sky is blue and you’ve got an Ortho bro vibe going on. "You have the whole —" You made a vague gesture in his direction, encompassing, apparently, all of him. "You've got the OR energy."

"Half the people here have OR energy. It's a hospital."

"No, see, ER people have this sort of —" you tilted your head, "— controlled chaos thing. They're always braced for something. But, you walk around like you’ve won everything already. It's very obvious, easy to pick out."

Pick out what? Him from a line-up?

He watched you say all of this with zero self-consciousness, just stating observations, a woman delivering a verdict. He realised his coffee was halfway to his mouth and he hadn't drunk it. You talked about him like he was a case study, and he was sitting there letting you, taking all of it.

"So where else do you brood," you asked, "besides here and the OR?"

"I don't brood."

"Besides here and the OR?" You prompted, dismissing his non-answer. 

"The ER… sometimes," he heard himself say it. See, he did not think of saying it, but said it anyway. Crystal-clear experience of a man who had just walked directly into something. He'd had five years of attendings trying to catch him out on rounds. None of them had managed it. You'd done it in under ten minutes, twice, while drinking a latte.

You made a sound. Not quite a laugh, more like an intake of breath with amusement in it. "The ER."

"Consults."

"Right." You traced the rim of your cup with one finger. "Were you in the ER last Friday?"

And… there it was.

He could've said he didn't remember. He could've been very busy, very unbothered, a man who passed through ERs constantly and didn't register the days. He was a surgeon. He was in various hospital departments routinely. There was nothing notable about Friday.

"Yes," his mouth admitted.

You nodded slowly, like something had confirmed itself. "I thought I saw you. You walked really fast."

He put his coffee down. "I had somewhere to be."

"Okay." The word stretched, like you weren’t entirely convinced. He wouldn’t blame it, he wasn’t exactly convincing. An infant could catch him in a lie, and you apparently were their queen. You went quiet for a second and then looked back at him, debating whether to say it or not. Affirmative won apparently. "You saw me with Shen."

It wasn’t a question. And he wasn’t exactly thrilled to answer it. He'd spent five days being awful to residents over it. A little late to play it cool.

"I figured." The amusement on your face was warm rather than sharp, which made the ache in his chest somehow worse. Whoa, whoa, what ache? "We have a thing going, me and Shen. Whoever lost the bet had to do the coffee run. I'd just lost." You paused. "For the fourth time. I'm apparently terrible at predicting admission numbers."

"The fourth time," Brendon parotted.

"In a month. I know." You shook your head, shaking the thought, a soft sigh leaving your parted lips. "I don't know why I keep agreeing to it. Every time I'm like, this time I'll get it right, and then the board goes completely feral and I'm standing at Dunkin' at two in the afternoon getting Shen's ridiculous—" You stopped to look at him, and he had his utmost attention on you. "Anyway. That was just the loser tax."

Loser tax. He sat with this for a second. The whole week reshuffled. Him being a monster to those unsuspecting residents — it’s not like it's unwarranted, but still. 

You and Shen, a bet. A coffee run. A losing streak that apparently had nothing to do with the bond between the two of you and everything to do with ER admission patterns, which, if he was being honest, were genuinely unpredictable, nobody could forecast those accurately, it wasn't —

"You walked so fast," you spoke again, this time interrupting his thoughts. He noticed you liked to do that, keep him on his toes. There was a laugh behind it now, delighted almost. "I didn't know an orthopedic surgeon could move like that without a reason."

"I had a reason."

"What was it?" You prodded.

I just couldn’t stand you bumping shoulders with Shen like you belonged together. 

His eyes dropped to his coffee at his hand and found you again. You looked back at him. You had the same ‘interested in rock formation’ thing going on, except closer now and clearer somehow. He had the increasingly urgent sense that you knew exactly what you were doing.

"You were with someone.” He sighed.

A smile adorned your lips like you’d won, finally beat him. 

Like your mind was displaying in neon, Sunshine neonatologist : 1. Big bad ortho guy : 0. 

You let it sit there between you while you took another sip of your drink. "I was getting Shen's order," you said finally. "Because I lost a bet."

"I know that now."

"But you didn't walk fast because of Shen specifically. Did you?"

His molars found each other again. What is with you and asking him impossible questions? Was this like your hobby? Hit the ortho guy until he falls over? At what point in medical school had someone taught you to do this, and could he have a word with them?

Without giving him a moment to recover, you spoke again. "So," you set your cup down, straightened up a little in the chair, met his eyes with an expression so direct it nearly made him blink. "When are you buying me a coffee?"

He stared at you. Staring was not his thing. He assessed, evaluated, and arrived at conclusions. What he did not do was stare, sit with his mouth slightly open like a fucking goldfish. 

"That's what you've been trying to do, right?" Your voice was mild, conversational, voice of a woman confirming a meeting time. "For three days. In a row. Sitting here."

The heat that climbed his face was complete, total and immediate, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. Park the Shark. Sitting in a coffee shop for three days like a golden retriever who'd learned to use a chair.

You laughed. It filled the air and came right back to him. And he thought, sitting there red-eared with his black coffee, that it was the best sound he'd heard all week.

Possibly longer.

He only remembered that you asked a question when you raised your eyebrows. Right. The question. Which he totally didn’t forget when he was staring at your lips and thinking about how they would feel pressed to his. 

"I have a nine o'clock," he said. "Seven works."

"That's very early."

"You work in a NICU. You guys are up since five."

You looked at him for a moment and he had no idea what you were looking at. But he sat very still, which was insane on his part. He only hoped he passed whatever test you were conducting. Apparently having looked enough, you picked your cup up, along with the tissue paper and the stirrer you discarded, and stood. "Seven," you said. "Don't brood while you wait."

He watched you walk out. He looked down at his americano. He drank it.

It still tasted exactly like it always did, and he liked it fine, and he was aware, in a dim and reluctant and completely inescapable way, that this was probably not going to be the last time he sat in this coffee shop.

Not by a long shot.

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