giorgina.

You loll your heavy head to your shoulder to flash the man beside you an unenthusiastic, slow-blinking stare, from where he sits on the left side of the brick threshold. The rusted metal door, now missing a knob and refusing to open, sits between the two of you. Something about it feels like a metaphor.

“Because I knew you’d be a shitty husband,” you confess, perhaps a little more truthful than you need to be. “And, turns out, I was right, so…”

Langdon laughs at your honesty, though it comes out more like a punched-out breath. “Wow…”

With your head tipped back against the brick wall behind you, you turn back to face the golden blue sunset, made of a sea of milky pink and orange clouds. The view is far too pretty for the ugly day you’ve had, and for all the ugly you feel inside of you right now.

The music from the sports bar across the block swells distantly, in an unintelligible humming that blankets the momentary silence between you. The smoky scent of freshly cooked hamburgers fills the air, too, making your empty stomach grumble in a silent plea for a meal you haven’t gotten the chance to eat all day. You feel the early-evening chill down into your tired bones, piercing right through your black scrubs, which do little to cushion you from the cold, unforgiving concrete below.

“Gee, twist the knife, why don’t you…” Langdon hums cynically.

You meet his look of boyish offense — made of squinted blue eyes and a deep furrow between his heavy brows — with a narrowed gaze fixed into a firm glare. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that this was the ever-oblivious asshole you spent four years of your life with, though that feels like a couple thousand light-years ago now.

“You’re selfish, Frank. You’ve always been selfish, even when we were kids. That was practically your whole thing,” you ramble with a lazy shrug. “You’re the kinda guy who thinks buying presents, cooking dinner once a week, and getting the mother of your toddlers the most high-maintenance dog on the planet is gonna make up for you never being home.”

The words of an instinctive argument die on Frank’s tongue when his eyes fall to his left hand, hanging off of his bent knee, and noticeably missing his gold ring. The thumb and forefinger of his right hand migrate to the top of his knuckle, twisting the pale tanline where his wedding band would usually be. The anxious tic is muscle memory to him now.

“Yeah, that was… That was a stupid move on my part,” he murmurs with a heavy sigh, and with his blue-eyed gaze averted to his bare ring finger.

Your eyes run over the sharp edges of his profile, bathed in soft shadows and orange sunlight. His chiseled jaw clenches until his temples shift; his brows raise until his forehead wrinkles; and his pink lips quirk into a cynical half-smile.

“And you know what the craziest part is?” he wonders with an emotionless laugh. “I’m pretty sure that’s the reason Abby left me… It wasn’t that I was never home. It wasn’t that I was working with my ex-girlfriend. It was the goddamn dog… And the sonofabitch doesn’t even like me—”

“It was all of it, Frank,” you tell him in a quiet, sympathetic lilt. “And you not understanding that is exactly why we never worked out.”

Langdon scoffs another half-hearted chuckle in response. He feels the ache of your words somewhere deep in his chest, like he’s feeling the pain of losing you all over again. It feels a little like being torn in two. He can’t recall the last time he felt whole since you left him, but he tries not to think about that.

“And what? You think you were the most innocent girlfriend in the world. Is that it?”

You roll your eyes with a chest-deflating huff and cross your arms over your bent knees. You could’ve seen this coming from a mile away. You learned long ago that Frank never learned how to take criticism without needing to hit someone where it hurt right back.

“That’s not what I’m saying—”

“Like you didn’t put me through the fucking ringer, too?”

“Frank—”

“You know what I did the entire time I was with you?” he wonders aloud, with a particular bite in his deep, melodic voice. He shifts on his weight, propping his left hand on the cool concrete as he turns to face you more. The dark strands of hair draping his forehead sway over his brows as he points to you with his free hand. “I worried that every single time I took my eyes off you, that you were gonna throw yourself off the goddamn roof—”

You inhale sharply through your nose, then click your lips against your teeth. “Wow…” you repeat in the same distantly incredulous murmur.

His words pierce you right back. The memories within them, more so.

It was hardly Frank’s fault that you had spent your years together just waiting — waiting to be someone else, waiting to become the person you always thought you were on the verge of becoming, waiting for your life to start finally making sense.

You could never quite shake the constant feeling of abandonment; the nagging thought that the world was constantly gathering in a room that you were not invited in. And Frank’s love for you never felt like enough. You craved affection from him so badly that you began to detest it. And, on the off chance Frank was emotionally available enough to love you, it felt as hard to take as violence.

It took several years of unlearning the filth you had taught yourself — it took finding Jack and realizing that love didn’t always have to be so complicated — to finally feel at home on an Earth that felt like it was constantly leaving you behind. And that thought isn’t lost on either of you.

Frank, particularly, is now forced to live out the rest of his day burdened by the weight of not having been enough to save you — that being with him would’ve killed you; that you would’ve thrown yourself off the roof of the apartment building you used to live in together just to get away from him.

The old memories burn him like a fresh, white-orange flame.

“So, you know what? Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t work out,” Langdon concludes with a slow nod as he settles back into place again, grimacing softly when the brick snags the fabric of his black scrubs. “Because we actually found people who could put up with all our fuckin’— neuroses… Well, you did, I guess…”

He turns to you again, with softer eyes this time, and with a solemn twist to his chiseled face that you don’t see ‘cause you no longer have the strength to meet his gaze.

The thin chain around your neck glitters in the golden hour sun. A gold wedding band hangs at the center of it, usually hidden beneath your scrubs, but now draped at your chest and staring him right in the face.

Jack had given you the ring a few years ago, after three years shy together and a not-quite wedding. You’d eloped quietly, then spent the three days you had off work together on a makeshift honeymoon. No one other than Robby and Heather — your only witnesses at the courthouse the day you got your marriage certificate — even knew you had gotten married until you and Jack showed up to work some days later, with a pair of matching rings hung around your neck.

Frank had a panic attack in the locker room when he found out, which he opted to blame on the unforgiving shift.

The ring feels particularly heavy around your neck now, made leaden under the weight of this unwarranted conversation, of which you know you should not entertain but can’t seem to help yourself otherwise. You pinch the gold band between your thumb and forefinger, dragging it absentmindedly across the thin necklace in a faint swish, swish, swish sound.

“Yeah…” you sigh, blinking away the tears that sting at the backs of your eyes, made perhaps more emotional than usual from the long day. “Because Jack would never say something like that to me…”

He meets your glass-eyed glower with a crooked grin, just like he always used to — back when he was still a starving med student, and all of his problems felt like the end of the world, which only really meant that all of yours couldn’t possibly be as serious in comparison.

Sometimes they weren’t, to be fair. Sometimes, not getting your hair to cooperate in the morning sent you into a spiral the rest of the day. Sometimes, all Frank could do was laugh and hold you tighter and wait for you to put yourself back together again. Other times, you felt unearthly, not at home in the world, and you needed him to really care, but he didn’t know how to.

“Oh, please,” Langdon scoffs. “Fighting is what we’re good at. I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing we ever did right… Other than the sex, obviously—”

“Oh, my god! Frank!” you scold, though a laugh sputters from your lips before you can stop it. “You can’t just say that stuff to me!”

“Hey, I’m not trying to hit on you or anything, alright? I’m just… making an observation,” he shrugs with a quiet smile and with his wide palms splayed in surrender. “We loved each other, we just… didn’t know how to show it—”

“You never loved me, Langdon,” you correct with a sad sort of smile, weighed down with a heavier reminiscence. “You loved the idea of me. You loved the idea of having someone that would’ve stuck around no matter what, even if we fought all the time—”

“That’s not true,” Langdon insists, with his ocean blue eyes narrowed into thin slits.

“Face it, Frank,” you laugh with a lazy shrug. “You want someone who will love you and be loyal to you, no matter how many times you hurt them—”

“No, that’s not—”

“Someone that’ll keep on loving you no matter how many times you fuck up—”

“Can you… Can you just let me talk—”

“You don’t want a wife, Langdon, you wanted a fucking dog!”

“No, I want you!” he hears himself shout.

His voice rings across the expanse of the concrete rooftop, forcing him to hear the words that he’d immediately take back if the universe allowed it. It might’ve been easier to take if you didn’t look at him like you were halfway horrified, flinching back like his words had pained you somehow physically. His cobalt-colored eyes widen in a similar look of alarm.

“I mean, I— I wanted you,” he stammers, stumbling over himself to get the words out. His hands flail wildly as he explains, like they always did when he was nervous. “E-Even if I didn’t exactly know how to treat you at the time. I did… I did love you, you know? And I… I think we could’ve been good together. That’s all…”

You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes out right away.

Your breath hitches in your throat instead, as your mind races a million miles a minute. The knock that comes suddenly at the door beside takes you out of your stupor and makes you flinch — hard. You feel the two hard raps against the locked entrance in your burning chest. The familiar voice that accompanies it melts your heart into specks of ash that you can feel trickling down into your swimming stomach.

“Guys?” your husband calls, half-muffled from within the stairwell. “You up there?”

“Jack?” you call back on bated breath.

You share a wide-eyed look of apprehension at the man beside you, whose ocean-blue stare bores right into yours. Neither of you can shake the feeling that you’ve just been caught doing something horrible — and, in a way, you have.

You scramble to your feet and feel the blood rush back to your tingling legs almost instantly as you stand before the rusted door, resting your palms along the cool metal.

“How long have you guys been out here?”

“Too long,” Frank answers in a huff, still slouched against the concrete.

You scoff a breathy laugh despite the tight feeling in your chest. “How long did it take everyone down there to figure out we were stuck?”

“Yeah, I don’t think they have yet,” Jack chuckles. “I just got here, and Robby said you guys were getting some air, so…”

He trails off.

You can hear the smile in his gritty voice when he asks, “How’d you two idiots manage to get stuck up here, anyway?”

“The universe hates me,” you deadpan in a non-answer.

You hear Jack laughing from behind the heavy door between you, a sound more golden than the setting sun painting everything a flaxen shade of orange. It makes a wavering smile curl at the very edges of your mouth, though it’s weighed down by a more palpable dread that Frank can see from here, with his glittering eyes still trained on your profile.

“I’ll go tell maintenance, alright?” Jack tells you. “Just… don’t do anything else stupid up while I’m gone.”

“Yeah, no promises,” Frank jokes back with his own artificial grin that deflates the moment Jack’s muffled footsteps descend back down the stairwell.

He slouches back against the unforgiving brick with a heavy sigh, feeling the exhaustion settling heavy in his bones — the acknowledgement that, once he’s back inside The Pitt, he’ll never get to be alone with you like this again; and that he’ll have to spend the rest of his life pretending like he isn’t constantly grieving your absence.

You step away from the door with a trembling sigh. You try to turn away before Frank sees the emotion crumpling your face, but he catches it anyway — there’s nothing about you that he wouldn’t immediately notice.

“Hey, I… I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t,” you snap, turning on your heel to face him. You wear a stern glare on your face that makes him falter as he rises from the cold concrete to stand to full height. The golden hour sparkles in your glassy eyes, wetting with unshed tears. “Just… don’t, alright? Because if you make this a whole thing, I’m gonna have to tell Jack—”

“Tell him what?” Frank presses, brows raised to his hairline until three fine lines wrinkle at his forehead.

His shoes scuff the pavement when he goes to take a hesitant step forward. You flinch back again, like he’ll burn you if he gets too close — like he already has burned you and like you refuse to be kissed by that flame again.

He stops short, splays his wide palms before him in surrender, and continues quietly, “That I’m right? ‘Cause I really don’t think this upset if I were wrong—”

“Of course, I’m upset!” you shout, voice cracking and ringing across the empty rooftop. A breeze rolls by, cooler than silk, rippling in your scrubs and billowing in your hair. “But that doesn’t mean that us not being together is the wrong choice! It’s just— Something we’re gonna have to carry!”

“Then why can’t we just have it out—?”

“Because we tried,” you agonize through a stuttering breath. “And it ended up like this! Every single time!”

Frank shakes his head, strong jaw clenched, too stubborn to listen.

“The only reason we were ever together is because we were…” you trail off, gaze darting wildly as you search for the right words. “Pathologically terrified of abandonment—”

“What are you? My shrink?” he scoffs cynically, biceps straining against the sleeves of his scrubs when he crosses his milky white arms across his chest.

“We knew, before we started dating, that we both were incapable of giving each other what we really needed,” you tell him, half-strangled, as you fight back the emotion wrapping itself around your throat. “And we did that because we knew that when we inevitably didn’t work out, neither of us would be at a totally substantial loss! I mean, why do you think we both moved on so quickly?”

Langdon flinches, chin jerking as his pretty face screws in offense. Your words find him like a punch to the stomach — they knock the breath from his lungs, make him feel like the world is swaying below his feet.

“Substantial loss?” he echoes with his brows raised in an incredulous look. He exhales an emotionless laugh and looks away. His tongue darts out to wet his mouth before he clicks his lips against his teeth, waving an accusatory finger in your direction. “No, see… See, that’s the difference between us. Because I was with you, because I actually loved you—”

“Key word here being loved. Past tense,” you snap with a clenched jaw, mirroring his rigid stature with your arms folded over your scrubs. “We were never gonna work out, Langdon. So whether or not we would’ve been good together doesn’t mean anything anymore, alright? It’s too late, so just… Just drop it.”

“So what?” he calls to you when you turn away again. “All those years we put each other through hell and back, that meant nothing to you?”

“It meant everything,” you confess tearily, knuckles blanching around the cold metal railing you lean against. You lack the strength to look over your shoulder at him, lest you see the boy you used to love in the man standing behind you now. “And it’s over now. And it’s been over for a long, long time…”

“Yeah, not for me…” Frank tells you, voice breaking into a fragile whisper. He clears his throat a second later, half-strangled by the words that’ve been stuck in his throat since the day you left.

Your head snaps over your shoulder, delicate features crumpling in a pained look. “You can’t say that to me,” you repeat, voice coated with tears this time instead of laughter. “You can’t just say that, Langdon—”

Your breath hitches as a sob swells in your throat. You hide your face behind your palms before he can see the way it twists at your face. Langdon feels your hurt like it’s his own, a burning somewhere deep inside his sternum, as he rushes to you on instinct.

“Look, okay? I-I know I’m not a perfect guy— I know that I’m not half as good as Abbot, alright? I know that—”

His fingers are long and warm when they curl gently around your wrists, urging your hands away from your face. You’re swaddled immediately in the warmth of his musky cologne, much stronger than Jack’s, but just as familiar to you.

He ducks his head to meet your gaze, navy-blue eyes glittering as they dart between both of yours. You peer up at him from beneath your lashes, which are now clumped together with unshed tears.

“But I-I’m different now. I am,” he tells you, nodding rapidly. “I wouldn’t be the asshole I was before. I’d be different— I’d be good for you this time.”

“You are, okay?” you choke out, pointing a stern finger at his chest, hands still caught in his unwavering hold. “You are a good man, and I am so grateful to you, and I am so proud of you, but we would be miserable together—”

“Don’t say that,” Langdon murmurs, chiseled features screwed together like your words have pierced him somehow physically. “Why— Why are you saying that?”

“Because look at us!” you laugh through the tears clinging to your lashes. “Love isn’t supposed to feel this way, Frank! This isn’t normal! I can’t even remember the last time Jack made me cry— I don’t even know if he ever has!”

Your words take the breath from his lungs. His fingers slip slowly from your wrists. His chin jerks back like he’s flinching. The hair draping his forehead sways as he shakes his head to himself.

“It always goes back to him, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does…” you sigh, deflating as you watch him walk away again, going blurry from the warm tears gathering at your waterline. “Because that’s what love is, Frank… And even if you and Abby are done for good, you will find someone, okay? And she will worship you, and she will love you in all the ways you need her to. Just because I can’t give that to you, doesn’t mean you can’t love somebody else—”

“That’s exactly what it means…” Langdon concludes with a heavy sigh, slouching back against the brick again.

He drops hard to the ground and rests his arms over his bent knees. His teary gaze, painted a lighter blue, focuses on the golden skyline behind you, slowly dimming to a darker pink color.

You sigh and muster a sad sort of smile. “Self-pity is not a good look on you, Langdon.”

“I’m just being realistic,” he shrugs. “You and… You and Abbot will be together forever, and you’ll have kids, and you’ll move on, and… I’ll watch…”

“Frank—”

“Don’t. It’s— It’s okay,” he interjects with a foreign sort of tenderness about him, as his pink lips curl into a distant half-smile. “Cause I… You know, I’d rather have a piece of you than— than nothing at all, so… You’re right. I’m just too late…”

You exhale a heavy breath and turn away again, bending at the waist to rest your elbows on the metal railing a few feet from the roof’s edge. You prop your forehead in your hands, watching a heavy tear fall from your bottom lashes and splatter hard on the concrete below.

You have to fight back the urge to climb over the barriers keeping you from the ledge, physically shaking the thoughts of doing so out of your head — of how free it would feel to jump, to fall and reach an inevitable darkness. It would feel much easier than being trapped up here, on this roof, and in this life, and in this skin that doesn’t feel like yours.

The train of thought always has a way of finding you, no matter where you are, no matter how happy you are. Sometimes, you find yourself physically startled by your very existence — like it’s some great mystery to discover that you’ve survived at all.

And, like always, Jack’s is the voice that pulls you back from the abyss.

“Alright, losers— As you were!”

His low, melodic voice shatters the heavy tension blanketing the quiet rooftop. But if he notices, he doesn’t show it. And if he heard anything that came before, he doesn’t say so.

You hurry to wipe the warm tears from your cheeks, swiping your middle and ring fingers below your eyes to remove any evidence that you’d been crying. You spin on the heel of your shoe to face him, mustering a tight-lipped smile as the man walks out into the cool, orange-pink evening — biceps straining against the black sleeves of his scrubs as his hands grasp either end of the stethoscope around his neck.

Robby walks out just behind him, brown eyes darting around as if he were surveying the rooftop — undoubtedly searching for dead bodies after being told that you and Langdon were trapped up here together. His brows bounce in silent shock to find that neither of you had killed each other.

The maintenance workers in navy blue coveralls stand just behind the two of them, replacing the broken knob with a newer one less likely to snap in half in record time.

“See?” Jack hums. The golden hour shines in his salt-and-pepper curls as he turns his head to the man beside him. “Told you I wasn’t lyin’, brother.”

“Yeah, thanks for caring about us, Robinavitch,” Frank huffs, grimacing at the ache in his lower back when he rises to full height again.

“Hey, I thought you deserved the break,” Robby says with his calloused palms splayed before him in surrender. “I just didn’t realize you guys had been forced into having one.”

Langdon says nothing in response, just slinks back through the opened threshold to what should feel like freedom, but finds him more like a slaughterhouse.

Robby watches him go, brows pinching in a wordless confusion, before his eyes dart back to you. His dark brown gaze glitters with curiosity as he nods his head towards Langdon’s disappearing figure, scratching at the grey patch in his beard with his left hand.

“What’s his deal?”

“I’ve been asking myself that for years…” you sigh, trudging across the rooftop like your feet are made of nrick. You inhale sharply through your nose and just barely manage to find the strength to joke, “Just please tell me this cuts a half hour off my double?”

“No, it means you gotta work a half hour overtime. Obviously,” Jack scoffs, wrapping his strong arm around your shoulder when you’re close enough to reach.

You stumble hopelessly into his side, immediately blanketed by his innate warmth. You inhale deeply, and let his musky cologne fill your lungs — smelling of home in every sense of the word, and replacing all the remnants of Langdon (also in every sense of the word).

“Don’t worry, honey,” he croons in a low, gritty voice. “I’ll keep you company through the dinner rush, if you don’t mind bein’ stuck with me for the next twelve hours… And the twelve hours after that… And the twelve hours after that—”

“Alright, we get it…” Robby huffs, narrow features twisted in an only halfway playful look of disgust. “Go ahead and get it out of your system, you two. You gotta long night ahead of you…”

He follows Langdon back down the stairwell, footsteps echoing as he hurries back down to the main floor to help the day shift prep the night shift. The weight of his words remains long after he’s gone. You should feel preemptively fatigued by them, and in many ways you are, but just being in Jack’s arms now is enough to reinvigorate you — like a shot of espresso, or like sunshine after days of stormy weather.

You know you should probably be sick of him by now, ‘cause when you’re not working with him, you’re living with him. But even still, on the rare days your schedules don’t align, you find yourself missing him anyway. You’re always missing him. And every day you are with him, you can’t help but wish for a hundred more. A lifetime with Jack Abbot isn’t nearly enough, but you’re glad to have at least gotten this one.

“You know, I never thought that I’d say this, but…” you trail off with a heavy exhale as you melt into his side, smoothing your left hand up his spine. “After a half hour trapped up here, I wouldn’t exactly mind being stuck with you, Dr. Abbot.”

His thin lips curl into a quiet grin, though the expression glitters mostly in his hazel eyes, which crinkle softly at the edges. He can’t help but hold all his love for you there. You’ve never once had to guess where you stand with him, or if he truly cares about you, ‘cause he wears it all in his eyes.

“See, that’s the kinda spirit I’m looking for, my darling wife,” he lilts sarcastically and ducks down to press a chaste kiss to your cheek, before this sort of PDA becomes a strict no-go when you’re back in the trauma center together. His greying scruff scratches at your delicate skin there.

You only pray he doesn’t taste the salt on your cheek, from where your tears are still drying.

                            ★。＼｜／。★

it's starting to burn, and i wanna go home . . .

You loll your heavy head to your shoulder to flash the man beside you an unenthusiastic, slow-blinking stare, from where he sits on the left side of the brick threshold. The rusted metal door, now missing a knob and refusing to open, sits between the two of you. Something about it feels like a metaphor.

“Because I knew you’d be a shitty husband,” you confess, perhaps a little more truthful than you need to be. “And, turns out, I was right, so…”

Langdon laughs at your honesty, though it comes out more like a punched-out breath. “Wow…”

With your head tipped back against the brick wall behind you, you turn back to face the golden blue sunset, made of a sea of milky pink and orange clouds. The view is far too pretty for the ugly day you’ve had, and for all the ugly you feel inside of you right now.

The music from the sports bar across the block swells distantly, in an unintelligible humming that blankets the momentary silence between you. The smoky scent of freshly cooked hamburgers fills the air, too, making your empty stomach grumble in a silent plea for a meal you haven’t gotten the chance to eat all day. You feel the early-evening chill down into your tired bones, piercing right through your black scrubs, which do little to cushion you from the cold, unforgiving concrete below.

“Gee, twist the knife, why don’t you…” Langdon hums cynically.

You meet his look of boyish offense — made of squinted blue eyes and a deep furrow between his heavy brows — with a narrowed gaze fixed into a firm glare. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that this was the ever-oblivious asshole you spent four years of your life with, though that feels like a couple thousand light-years ago now.

“You’re selfish, Frank. You’ve always been selfish, even when we were kids. That was practically your whole thing,” you ramble with a lazy shrug. “You’re the kinda guy who thinks buying presents, cooking dinner once a week, and getting the mother of your toddlers the most high-maintenance dog on the planet is gonna make up for you never being home.”

The words of an instinctive argument die on Frank’s tongue when his eyes fall to his left hand, hanging off of his bent knee, and noticeably missing his gold ring. The thumb and forefinger of his right hand migrate to the top of his knuckle, twisting the pale tanline where his wedding band would usually be. The anxious tic is muscle memory to him now.

“Yeah, that was… That was a stupid move on my part,” he murmurs with a heavy sigh, and with his blue-eyed gaze averted to his bare ring finger.

Your eyes run over the sharp edges of his profile, bathed in soft shadows and orange sunlight. His chiseled jaw clenches until his temples shift; his brows raise until his forehead wrinkles; and his pink lips quirk into a cynical half-smile.

“And you know what the craziest part is?” he wonders with an emotionless laugh. “I’m pretty sure that’s the reason Abby left me… It wasn’t that I was never home. It wasn’t that I was working with my ex-girlfriend. It was the goddamn dog… And the sonofabitch doesn’t even like me—”

“It was all of it, Frank,” you tell him in a quiet, sympathetic lilt. “And you not understanding that is exactly why we never worked out.”

Langdon scoffs another half-hearted chuckle in response. He feels the ache of your words somewhere deep in his chest, like he’s feeling the pain of losing you all over again. It feels a little like being torn in two. He can’t recall the last time he felt whole since you left him, but he tries not to think about that.

“And what? You think you were the most innocent girlfriend in the world. Is that it?”

You roll your eyes with a chest-deflating huff and cross your arms over your bent knees. You could’ve seen this coming from a mile away. You learned long ago that Frank never learned how to take criticism without needing to hit someone where it hurt right back.

“That’s not what I’m saying—”

“Like you didn’t put me through the fucking ringer, too?”

“Frank—”

“You know what I did the entire time I was with you?” he wonders aloud, with a particular bite in his deep, melodic voice. He shifts on his weight, propping his left hand on the cool concrete as he turns to face you more. The dark strands of hair draping his forehead sway over his brows as he points to you with his free hand. “I worried that every single time I took my eyes off you, that you were gonna throw yourself off the goddamn roof—”

You inhale sharply through your nose, then click your lips against your teeth. “Wow…” you repeat in the same distantly incredulous murmur.

His words pierce you right back. The memories within them, more so.

It was hardly Frank’s fault that you had spent your years together just waiting — waiting to be someone else, waiting to become the person you always thought you were on the verge of becoming, waiting for your life to start finally making sense.

You could never quite shake the constant feeling of abandonment; the nagging thought that the world was constantly gathering in a room that you were not invited in. And Frank’s love for you never felt like enough. You craved affection from him so badly that you began to detest it. And, on the off chance Frank was emotionally available enough to love you, it felt as hard to take as violence.

It took several years of unlearning the filth you had taught yourself — it took finding Jack and realizing that love didn’t always have to be so complicated — to finally feel at home on an Earth that felt like it was constantly leaving you behind. And that thought isn’t lost on either of you.

Frank, particularly, is now forced to live out the rest of his day burdened by the weight of not having been enough to save you — that being with him would’ve killed you; that you would’ve thrown yourself off the roof of the apartment building you used to live in together just to get away from him.

The old memories burn him like a fresh, white-orange flame.

“So, you know what? Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t work out,” Langdon concludes with a slow nod as he settles back into place again, grimacing softly when the brick snags the fabric of his black scrubs. “Because we actually found people who could put up with all our fuckin’— neuroses… Well, you did, I guess…”

He turns to you again, with softer eyes this time, and with a solemn twist to his chiseled face that you don’t see ‘cause you no longer have the strength to meet his gaze.

The thin chain around your neck glitters in the golden hour sun. A gold wedding band hangs at the center of it, usually hidden beneath your scrubs, but now draped at your chest and staring him right in the face.

Jack had given you the ring a few years ago, after three years shy together and a not-quite wedding. You’d eloped quietly, then spent the three days you had off work together on a makeshift honeymoon. No one other than Robby and Heather — your only witnesses at the courthouse the day you got your marriage certificate — even knew you had gotten married until you and Jack showed up to work some days later, with a pair of matching rings hung around your neck.

Frank had a panic attack in the locker room when he found out, which he opted to blame on the unforgiving shift.

The ring feels particularly heavy around your neck now, made leaden under the weight of this unwarranted conversation, of which you know you should not entertain but can’t seem to help yourself otherwise. You pinch the gold band between your thumb and forefinger, dragging it absentmindedly across the thin necklace in a faint swish, swish, swish sound.

“Yeah…” you sigh, blinking away the tears that sting at the backs of your eyes, made perhaps more emotional than usual from the long day. “Because Jack would never say something like that to me…”

He meets your glass-eyed glower with a crooked grin, just like he always used to — back when he was still a starving med student, and all of his problems felt like the end of the world, which only really meant that all of yours couldn’t possibly be as serious in comparison.

Sometimes they weren’t, to be fair. Sometimes, not getting your hair to cooperate in the morning sent you into a spiral the rest of the day. Sometimes, all Frank could do was laugh and hold you tighter and wait for you to put yourself back together again. Other times, you felt unearthly, not at home in the world, and you needed him to really care, but he didn’t know how to.

“Oh, please,” Langdon scoffs. “Fighting is what we’re good at. I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing we ever did right… Other than the sex, obviously—”

“Oh, my god! Frank!” you scold, though a laugh sputters from your lips before you can stop it. “You can’t just say that stuff to me!”

“Hey, I’m not trying to hit on you or anything, alright? I’m just… making an observation,” he shrugs with a quiet smile and with his wide palms splayed in surrender. “We loved each other, we just… didn’t know how to show it—”

“You never loved me, Langdon,” you correct with a sad sort of smile, weighed down with a heavier reminiscence. “You loved the idea of me. You loved the idea of having someone that would’ve stuck around no matter what, even if we fought all the time—”

“That’s not true,” Langdon insists, with his ocean blue eyes narrowed into thin slits.

“Face it, Frank,” you laugh with a lazy shrug. “You want someone who will love you and be loyal to you, no matter how many times you hurt them—”

“No, that’s not—”

“Someone that’ll keep on loving you no matter how many times you fuck up—”

“Can you… Can you just let me talk—”

“You don’t want a wife, Langdon, you wanted a fucking dog!”

“No, I want you!” he hears himself shout.

His voice rings across the expanse of the concrete rooftop, forcing him to hear the words that he’d immediately take back if the universe allowed it. It might’ve been easier to take if you didn’t look at him like you were halfway horrified, flinching back like his words had pained you somehow physically. His cobalt-colored eyes widen in a similar look of alarm.

“I mean, I— I wanted you,” he stammers, stumbling over himself to get the words out. His hands flail wildly as he explains, like they always did when he was nervous. “E-Even if I didn’t exactly know how to treat you at the time. I did… I did love you, you know? And I… I think we could’ve been good together. That’s all…”

You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes out right away.

Your breath hitches in your throat instead, as your mind races a million miles a minute. The knock that comes suddenly at the door beside takes you out of your stupor and makes you flinch — hard. You feel the two hard raps against the locked entrance in your burning chest. The familiar voice that accompanies it melts your heart into specks of ash that you can feel trickling down into your swimming stomach.

“Guys?” your husband calls, half-muffled from within the stairwell. “You up there?”

“Jack?” you call back on bated breath.

You share a wide-eyed look of apprehension at the man beside you, whose ocean-blue stare bores right into yours. Neither of you can shake the feeling that you’ve just been caught doing something horrible — and, in a way, you have.

You scramble to your feet and feel the blood rush back to your tingling legs almost instantly as you stand before the rusted door, resting your palms along the cool metal.

“How long have you guys been out here?”

“Too long,” Frank answers in a huff, still slouched against the concrete.

You scoff a breathy laugh despite the tight feeling in your chest. “How long did it take everyone down there to figure out we were stuck?”

“Yeah, I don’t think they have yet,” Jack chuckles. “I just got here, and Robby said you guys were getting some air, so…”

He trails off.

You can hear the smile in his gritty voice when he asks, “How’d you two idiots manage to get stuck up here, anyway?”

“The universe hates me,” you deadpan in a non-answer.

You hear Jack laughing from behind the heavy door between you, a sound more golden than the setting sun painting everything a flaxen shade of orange. It makes a wavering smile curl at the very edges of your mouth, though it’s weighed down by a more palpable dread that Frank can see from here, with his glittering eyes still trained on your profile.

“I’ll go tell maintenance, alright?” Jack tells you. “Just… don’t do anything else stupid up while I’m gone.”

“Yeah, no promises,” Frank jokes back with his own artificial grin that deflates the moment Jack’s muffled footsteps descend back down the stairwell.

He slouches back against the unforgiving brick with a heavy sigh, feeling the exhaustion settling heavy in his bones — the acknowledgement that, once he’s back inside The Pitt, he’ll never get to be alone with you like this again; and that he’ll have to spend the rest of his life pretending like he isn’t constantly grieving your absence.

You step away from the door with a trembling sigh. You try to turn away before Frank sees the emotion crumpling your face, but he catches it anyway — there’s nothing about you that he wouldn’t immediately notice.

“Hey, I… I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t,” you snap, turning on your heel to face him. You wear a stern glare on your face that makes him falter as he rises from the cold concrete to stand to full height. The golden hour sparkles in your glassy eyes, wetting with unshed tears. “Just… don’t, alright? Because if you make this a whole thing, I’m gonna have to tell Jack—”

“Tell him what?” Frank presses, brows raised to his hairline until three fine lines wrinkle at his forehead.

His shoes scuff the pavement when he goes to take a hesitant step forward. You flinch back again, like he’ll burn you if he gets too close — like he already has burned you and like you refuse to be kissed by that flame again.

He stops short, splays his wide palms before him in surrender, and continues quietly, “That I’m right? ‘Cause I really don’t think this upset if I were wrong—”

“Of course, I’m upset!” you shout, voice cracking and ringing across the empty rooftop. A breeze rolls by, cooler than silk, rippling in your scrubs and billowing in your hair. “But that doesn’t mean that us not being together is the wrong choice! It’s just— Something we’re gonna have to carry!”

“Then why can’t we just have it out—?”

“Because we tried,” you agonize through a stuttering breath. “And it ended up like this! Every single time!”

Frank shakes his head, strong jaw clenched, too stubborn to listen.

“The only reason we were ever together is because we were…” you trail off, gaze darting wildly as you search for the right words. “Pathologically terrified of abandonment—”

“What are you? My shrink?” he scoffs cynically, biceps straining against the sleeves of his scrubs when he crosses his milky white arms across his chest.

“We knew, before we started dating, that we both were incapable of giving each other what we really needed,” you tell him, half-strangled, as you fight back the emotion wrapping itself around your throat. “And we did that because we knew that when we inevitably didn’t work out, neither of us would be at a totally substantial loss! I mean, why do you think we both moved on so quickly?”

Langdon flinches, chin jerking as his pretty face screws in offense. Your words find him like a punch to the stomach — they knock the breath from his lungs, make him feel like the world is swaying below his feet.

“Substantial loss?” he echoes with his brows raised in an incredulous look. He exhales an emotionless laugh and looks away. His tongue darts out to wet his mouth before he clicks his lips against his teeth, waving an accusatory finger in your direction. “No, see… See, that’s the difference between us. Because I was with you, because I actually loved you—”

“Key word here being loved. Past tense,” you snap with a clenched jaw, mirroring his rigid stature with your arms folded over your scrubs. “We were never gonna work out, Langdon. So whether or not we would’ve been good together doesn’t mean anything anymore, alright? It’s too late, so just… Just drop it.”

“So what?” he calls to you when you turn away again. “All those years we put each other through hell and back, that meant nothing to you?”

“It meant everything,” you confess tearily, knuckles blanching around the cold metal railing you lean against. You lack the strength to look over your shoulder at him, lest you see the boy you used to love in the man standing behind you now. “And it’s over now. And it’s been over for a long, long time…”

“Yeah, not for me…” Frank tells you, voice breaking into a fragile whisper. He clears his throat a second later, half-strangled by the words that’ve been stuck in his throat since the day you left.

Your head snaps over your shoulder, delicate features crumpling in a pained look. “You can’t say that to me,” you repeat, voice coated with tears this time instead of laughter. “You can’t just say that, Langdon—”

Your breath hitches as a sob swells in your throat. You hide your face behind your palms before he can see the way it twists at your face. Langdon feels your hurt like it’s his own, a burning somewhere deep inside his sternum, as he rushes to you on instinct.

“Look, okay? I-I know I’m not a perfect guy— I know that I’m not half as good as Abbot, alright? I know that—”

His fingers are long and warm when they curl gently around your wrists, urging your hands away from your face. You’re swaddled immediately in the warmth of his musky cologne, much stronger than Jack’s, but just as familiar to you.

He ducks his head to meet your gaze, navy-blue eyes glittering as they dart between both of yours. You peer up at him from beneath your lashes, which are now clumped together with unshed tears.

“But I-I’m different now. I am,” he tells you, nodding rapidly. “I wouldn’t be the asshole I was before. I’d be different— I’d be good for you this time.”

“You are, okay?” you choke out, pointing a stern finger at his chest, hands still caught in his unwavering hold. “You are a good man, and I am so grateful to you, and I am so proud of you, but we would be miserable together—”

“Don’t say that,” Langdon murmurs, chiseled features screwed together like your words have pierced him somehow physically. “Why— Why are you saying that?”

“Because look at us!” you laugh through the tears clinging to your lashes. “Love isn’t supposed to feel this way, Frank! This isn’t normal! I can’t even remember the last time Jack made me cry— I don’t even know if he ever has!”

Your words take the breath from his lungs. His fingers slip slowly from your wrists. His chin jerks back like he’s flinching. The hair draping his forehead sways as he shakes his head to himself.

“It always goes back to him, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does…” you sigh, deflating as you watch him walk away again, going blurry from the warm tears gathering at your waterline. “Because that’s what love is, Frank… And even if you and Abby are done for good, you will find someone, okay? And she will worship you, and she will love you in all the ways you need her to. Just because I can’t give that to you, doesn’t mean you can’t love somebody else—”

“That’s exactly what it means…” Langdon concludes with a heavy sigh, slouching back against the brick again.

He drops hard to the ground and rests his arms over his bent knees. His teary gaze, painted a lighter blue, focuses on the golden skyline behind you, slowly dimming to a darker pink color.

You sigh and muster a sad sort of smile. “Self-pity is not a good look on you, Langdon.”

“I’m just being realistic,” he shrugs. “You and… You and Abbot will be together forever, and you’ll have kids, and you’ll move on, and… I’ll watch…”

“Frank—”

“Don’t. It’s— It’s okay,” he interjects with a foreign sort of tenderness about him, as his pink lips curl into a distant half-smile. “Cause I… You know, I’d rather have a piece of you than— than nothing at all, so… You’re right. I’m just too late…”

You exhale a heavy breath and turn away again, bending at the waist to rest your elbows on the metal railing a few feet from the roof’s edge. You prop your forehead in your hands, watching a heavy tear fall from your bottom lashes and splatter hard on the concrete below.

You have to fight back the urge to climb over the barriers keeping you from the ledge, physically shaking the thoughts of doing so out of your head — of how free it would feel to jump, to fall and reach an inevitable darkness. It would feel much easier than being trapped up here, on this roof, and in this life, and in this skin that doesn’t feel like yours.

The train of thought always has a way of finding you, no matter where you are, no matter how happy you are. Sometimes, you find yourself physically startled by your very existence — like it’s some great mystery to discover that you’ve survived at all.

And, like always, Jack’s is the voice that pulls you back from the abyss.

“Alright, losers— As you were!”

His low, melodic voice shatters the heavy tension blanketing the quiet rooftop. But if he notices, he doesn’t show it. And if he heard anything that came before, he doesn’t say so.

You hurry to wipe the warm tears from your cheeks, swiping your middle and ring fingers below your eyes to remove any evidence that you’d been crying. You spin on the heel of your shoe to face him, mustering a tight-lipped smile as the man walks out into the cool, orange-pink evening — biceps straining against the black sleeves of his scrubs as his hands grasp either end of the stethoscope around his neck.

Robby walks out just behind him, brown eyes darting around as if he were surveying the rooftop — undoubtedly searching for dead bodies after being told that you and Langdon were trapped up here together. His brows bounce in silent shock to find that neither of you had killed each other.

The maintenance workers in navy blue coveralls stand just behind the two of them, replacing the broken knob with a newer one less likely to snap in half in record time.

“See?” Jack hums. The golden hour shines in his salt-and-pepper curls as he turns his head to the man beside him. “Told you I wasn’t lyin’, brother.”

“Yeah, thanks for caring about us, Robinavitch,” Frank huffs, grimacing at the ache in his lower back when he rises to full height again.

“Hey, I thought you deserved the break,” Robby says with his calloused palms splayed before him in surrender. “I just didn’t realize you guys had been forced into having one.”

Langdon says nothing in response, just slinks back through the opened threshold to what should feel like freedom, but finds him more like a slaughterhouse.

Robby watches him go, brows pinching in a wordless confusion, before his eyes dart back to you. His dark brown gaze glitters with curiosity as he nods his head towards Langdon’s disappearing figure, scratching at the grey patch in his beard with his left hand.

“What’s his deal?”

“I’ve been asking myself that for years…” you sigh, trudging across the rooftop like your feet are made of nrick. You inhale sharply through your nose and just barely manage to find the strength to joke, “Just please tell me this cuts a half hour off my double?”

“No, it means you gotta work a half hour overtime. Obviously,” Jack scoffs, wrapping his strong arm around your shoulder when you’re close enough to reach.

You stumble hopelessly into his side, immediately blanketed by his innate warmth. You inhale deeply, and let his musky cologne fill your lungs — smelling of home in every sense of the word, and replacing all the remnants of Langdon (also in every sense of the word).

“Don’t worry, honey,” he croons in a low, gritty voice. “I’ll keep you company through the dinner rush, if you don’t mind bein’ stuck with me for the next twelve hours… And the twelve hours after that… And the twelve hours after that—”

“Alright, we get it…” Robby huffs, narrow features twisted in an only halfway playful look of disgust. “Go ahead and get it out of your system, you two. You gotta long night ahead of you…”

He follows Langdon back down the stairwell, footsteps echoing as he hurries back down to the main floor to help the day shift prep the night shift. The weight of his words remains long after he’s gone. You should feel preemptively fatigued by them, and in many ways you are, but just being in Jack’s arms now is enough to reinvigorate you — like a shot of espresso, or like sunshine after days of stormy weather.

You know you should probably be sick of him by now, ‘cause when you’re not working with him, you’re living with him. But even still, on the rare days your schedules don’t align, you find yourself missing him anyway. You’re always missing him. And every day you are with him, you can’t help but wish for a hundred more. A lifetime with Jack Abbot isn’t nearly enough, but you’re glad to have at least gotten this one.

“You know, I never thought that I’d say this, but…” you trail off with a heavy exhale as you melt into his side, smoothing your left hand up his spine. “After a half hour trapped up here, I wouldn’t exactly mind being stuck with you, Dr. Abbot.”

His thin lips curl into a quiet grin, though the expression glitters mostly in his hazel eyes, which crinkle softly at the edges. He can’t help but hold all his love for you there. You’ve never once had to guess where you stand with him, or if he truly cares about you, ‘cause he wears it all in his eyes.

“See, that’s the kinda spirit I’m looking for, my darling wife,” he lilts sarcastically and ducks down to press a chaste kiss to your cheek, before this sort of PDA becomes a strict no-go when you’re back in the trauma center together. His greying scruff scratches at your delicate skin there.

You only pray he doesn’t taste the salt on your cheek, from where your tears are still drying.

                            ★。＼｜／。★

it's starting to burn, and i wanna go home . . .

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.