double down
part 2 of compromise
Jack Abbot x resident!reader
Synopsis: Jack’s tact for handling your tendency to take on the most volatile patients in the hospital is muddled slightly by your habit of ending up in his bed after a shift.
Warnings: more patient violence, very much closed-door smut (18+), concussions, mentions of being shot. Will NOT make sense if you don’t read first part soz
A/n: I’ve been literally possessed by this story buckle up
masterlist!
——
Just as Jack signed off on the report to the hospital administration about your attack, you’re required to submit a physician’s statement to his police department about his injury.
“Fuck,” you suddenly say, thinking about the report later that week.
“What?”
“I forgot to put that you refused a Plastics consult in my statement. Do you think I can still amend it?”
His groan vibrates against your neck. He mutters a “Jesus Christ” just for good measure, before he pulls back to level you with a look.
Your hooking up had started shortly after you treated Jack’s injury — you were a woman after all, one who was evidently pretty transparent, and it took everything in you not to bite down on Jack Abbot’s thumb in the middle of that South room.
Jack, perceptive as he is, gave you another chance to do so at his place the very next day after shift, and you really haven’t left besides for your shifts since. You need to text Javadi to water your plants, another mental note you file away for later, trying to focus back on the task at hand.
The task, in the form of your shirtless attending freshly roused from post-shift sleep and slotted in between your legs, is quite needy.
“That’s really what you’re thinking about? Right now?” Jack says, pitching himself up. He settles back onto his haunches, your bare legs thrown over his thighs.
“You won’t let me look at it,” you remind him, chin jutting out at his right shoulder. “Who knows what’s going on under there.”
Your hand had caught on the bandage, scrambling for purchase as his mouth had worked at your neck just moments ago, causing you to revisit the statement in your head.
You’d redressed his wound only yesterday after showering, and it had looked fine. Even better, there didn’t seem to be any internal damage after all, evident in the way he had woken only minutes ago, snatched your phone from your hands to set it on his bedside table and basically mounted you, kissing you like he needed to breathe you in in order to start waking up for the evening.
So the bullet graze probably is fine, all things considered. As you gaze up at him, his hands rubbing rhythmically over your thighs, his chest lightly heaving, his lips wet and his skin flushed in the afternoon light peeking through his blackout curtains — you maybe wish you’d have kept that thought to yourself.
But there’s just something about Jack that disables you from resisting a chance to mess with him.
“It’s fine,” he says, exasperation in voice not at all matching the way his hands start to paw at your panties. “Will you shut up now?”
“You first,” you say, one of your feet pushing on his shoulder.
“I’m really trying, baby.”
He manhandles your legs, finally slipping your panties off like he’d been attempting to for minutes now, casting them somewhere behind him haphazardly.
He bears down on his stomach, and you set your legs over his shoulders, scooching down in anticipation, not that you need to with the way his arms wrap around your thighs.
He presses a kiss to your inner thigh when your hand fists into his hair. He really needs to shave today, you realize, but your mouth falls shut when he levels you with another scorching look.
Only with his best efforts are you able to forget about the bandage on his shoulder that’s rubbing at the back of your calf.
—
“Last thing. Kind of a fun one. We have a football player from Pitt in Central 6,” Robby says at sign-out a few weeks later. “Surely concussed but refusing an exam all the same. Team doctor wanted him brought in to rule out a hemorrhage.”
“Linebacker?” Crus asks, brows furrowed.
“Tackle,” you say assuredly, beaming when Robby nods, a wry smile on his own face.
“All 280 pounds of him,” Robby sighs. “Coaches are a piece of work, too. McKay and Langdon had no luck. Santos didn’t have time. You want in?”
“Henderson,” Jack singsongs. “That’s all you.”
Crus doesn’t look surprised at all, walking off with a mere nod to the three of you as you stand dumbfounded, glancing between the two attendings.
“I don’t wanna hear it,” Jack says as soon as your moth drops open.
“But—”
“You picked up plenty of patients at rounds, did you not? Go start on them,” he says, finishing up reassignments on his tablet, letting it clatter to the desk at the central hub unceremoniously when he’s done.
“Whatever,” you say, pushing past him.
Jack guesses he’ll pay for that later, that you’ll probably text him at some point before 7am that you were going to ride the bus home and pick up the laundry you’d left in his dryer later, but in this moment he doesn’t care.
He could practically feel you vibrating with excitement as soon as Robby had presented the case — it was the exact kind of thing you thrived going right up against. You loved a tough case to solve, and you weren’t wary of them — and certainly not scared.
But your medical prowess does not in Jack’s mind override the way you’d looked when he saw that patient’s fist make contact with your face a few weeks back. When he can’t sleep, replaying the moment over and over again, he’s glad the gap in his blackout curtains that used to piss him off illuminates his bedroom enough that he can roll over and see that your face kept no memory of the incident, unlike his own mind.
“Whaaat are you doing, man?” Robby says quietly.
“You don’t like how I assign my residents?” Jack says, sniffing.
He’s looking at the board, not at Robby, but he can picture his friend raising his eyebrows in expectation, letting the silence drag with intention.
“Did we not both review her paper on missed concussion diagnoses in EDs last year?” Robby asks. “This is right up her alley.”
Jack shrugs his shoulders. “I’m not setting her up for anything that could go wrong until she cools off from that golf cart DUI last month.”
“Until she cools off or you do?”
“She’s a spitfire.”
“And a damn good doctor.”
“No one said otherwise.”
“You can’t protect her from everything, you know,” Robby says quietly, Jack suddenly acutely aware of the nurses around the hub who might be listening. “Emergency medicine can be messy, uncomfortable, dangerous. But she won’t be able to handle it if she doesn’t get to practice. Unsavory patients are part of our everyday.”
But Robby hadn’t even been there, had he? Hadn’t ran his hands through your hair inspecting for bumps and bleeds on your scalp, hadn’t helped slow your breathing by measuring it against his own — ragged, uneven in its own right — until it steadied, hadn’t wiped blood off of your chin or done a neurological exam all while his own heart pounded.
No — Robby just got to stroll in undisturbed hours later, giving you a quick once-over and a chin-check that made Jack’s hand flex near your forearm when Shen let everyone on day shift know your patient was violent.
“She can handle chaos,” Jack says, omitting the very inconvenient fact that he does not want you to. Ever again if he has anything to say about it. “But it’s like she runs toward it.”
Robby chuckles. “That sounds like someone I know.”
Jack is silent, tapping away at his tablet again mindlessly, pulling up imaging he doesn’t even need to look at.
“My last piece, and then I really need to get the fuck out of here,” Robby says, exhaustion curling around his words. He scans Jack’s face in the way that strips him to his core — something only his best friend has been able to do up until very, very recently. “If you’re worried about her bedside manner that’s one thing, and it’s on you to teach her. Which you know. So something tells me that might not be it.”
“I told you it’s casual,” Jack bites out.
“But it’s obvious, brother,” Robby answers. “You can’t send every scary lookin’ guy that comes through those doors over to Crus.”
“He knows I will,” Jack says. “We discussed it.”
Robby purses his lips, nodding slowly as he zips up his jacket, collects his coffee mug, then slaps Jack on the shoulder on his way out. “You are so fucked.”
—
You know what Jack is doing.
It hadn’t bothered you too much at first; nobody is going to complain about being pulled off of the rotating list of drunken frat boys and frequent flyers on the night shift board. You’d treated enough acute alcohol toxicity in men who couldn’t respect you less to last you a few lifetimes, so you’d been able to overlook the principle of Abbot downgrading your caseload, insulting your medical license, whatever you wanted to call it. Until it started to become egregious.
And not to mention embarrassing — poor Crus would mutter “sorry” every time he walked past you, wheeling a bed you both know you should be running with. He brought you in on patients whenever he could, which you were thankful for. It surely broke up the soul-crushing monotony of infected ear piercings and kitchen-injury sutures you were growing used to to these days.
But Crus was still just an R3 like you, and if you were gonna get even close to circumventing Jack’s authority — which you’d ironically really begun to enjoy in other contexts — you were gonna have to bring in the big guns.
“You want me to do what?” Shen asks, disinterested.
“Can you just put me on a good one? One good one. I’m so bored,” you beg. “And you know he’s sidelining me, Shen.”
You put on your best pout, the one that works half the time on Robby and always on Jack.
“Put that away,” he sighs, turning around to crane his neck up at the board. “Why don’t you go hop in on the football player?”
Your ears perk up immediately. “Wait, really?”
He shrugs. “Well, I don’t want it. Crus still can’t get consent for the exam, but they need a physician to sign off for their head coach or something stupid like that.”
“But Abbot said I couldn’t.”
“I’m not sure if I’m more offended that you’re forgetting I’m also your attending in this moment or shocked you haven’t just taken me at my word and ran over yet,” Shen says, assessing you with minor disdain — but it’s not hovering, micromanaging, suffocating attention. You owe him a cold brew for sure.
“But I’ll let you take it from here,” he finishes, shooing you away with an actual flick of his hand. “So don’t make me regret it.”
You fast-walk it to the room, not even needing to check the board for the number with the way you’d been sneaking glances into the room all day, trying desperately to get a pulse on how everything was going, your curiosity burgeoning every time Crus would emerge, shaking his head at you.
With one last look over your shoulder, you make sure your other attending is nowhere to be found before taking a deep breath and knocking on the door, shoulders back.
“Mr. Williams?” you greet, stepping into the room, pressing the pump by the door for sanitizer.
“Mason’s fine,” he greets, sitting up on the bed.
“Mason it is,” you say before introducing yourself, then clicking into his chart on your tablet. Again, not that you need to. “What’s going on?”
“I’m gonna cut right to it, ma’am,” a Southern accent from the corner of the room drawls. “You are about the fifth doctor we’ve seen today, and none of them have been able to send us on our way.”
“It’s getting late. Our boy here’s got practice at 6am,” the other coach says, checking his watch.
The two men, red-faced and exhausted, stand shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed. Matching hats and polos — you already know you’re going to wind up biting your tongue so hard it bleeds if they stay in your vicinity.
Jack won’t like that, you think off-handedly.
Your eyes flicker back to Mason, allowing you to realize for the first time just how accurate of a descriptor “boy” is. He was only 18, you remind yourself, frowning as you glance back at his chart.
“Would you two mind giving me a second with the patient?” you ask, turning back to Mason’s coaches.
“Why?”
“Just protocol,” you answer, tucking your tablet behind your back, standing up straight. “Standard of care, really. His right to privacy.”
You know you pushed it too far with that last bit, but you couldn’t help tacking it on. You’d immediately felt a titled stage upon entering the room, and you’ll bet anything Mason’s refusal has everything to do with the coaches reminding him of practice in a few hours.
“I want to get him home, and um, back on the… field as much as you two do,” you awkwardly add, attempting to soften it. You think of Jack again, his words about your mouth echoing in your head.
You might have to use the pout Shen had just grimaced at on these two — you had a suspicion it’d work.
“It’ll be super quick,” you continue, opting for placating diplomacy. “Promise. There’s coffee in the break room.”
They look at each other before nodding, some unspoken agreement passing between them, then exit the room, only to remain standing right outside in a way that makes you want to roll your eyes.
“Alright,” you sigh, finally pulling up a stool. “Where are you from, Mason?”
—
“Dr. Henderson, we really need that Pitt player’s bed.”
Abbot looks up, glancing between Lena and Crus, who just sighs. “I got nowhere. Maybe she’ll have better luck. Sorry.”
“You tap Ellis in?” Abbot asks off-handedly, his mouth twisting up at the backlog of charts populating his workstation’s display.
He looks up when he hears your name.
“Come again?” Jack says.
“Shen gave it to her,” Lena supplies. “She’s been in with the patient for half an hour.”
At the same moment he stands, Jack sees you emerge from the room he thought he made extremely clear to everyone that you weren’t allowed anywhere near tonight.
But you’re smiling — more than contentment, victory — as you approach both of the coaches waiting outside, exchanging a few words before nodding and keeping on your way.
The feelings Jack has about you directly defying him don’t even have time to spring to the surface of his mind when he sees one of the men reach for you, a paw-like hand gripping your forearm tightly.
“Out,” Jack barks immediately, his feet moving him around the desk, backlog of charts forgotten in an instant. “You’re out of here.”
He feels Crus at his back and hears Lena call for security, the hum of the ED quieting slightly at his outburst.
“Woah, woah, woah,” the other coach says, holding up his hands defensively as Jack approaches. “Let’s all calm down a bit. Simple disagreement.”
Jack’s not sure if you’d wrenched your own arm free or if the man had let you go after the threat of security, but you’re rubbing at the skin of your forearm as you wedge yourself in between himself and Crus, who make just enough space for you to pass between them — you all know the drill.
“Patient finally consented to the exam. Definitely concussed,” you say quietly as you pass by Jack, your head turned to him just slightly. “And I ordered a CT.”
“Good,” he says, his eyes drifting down to where you’re holding your arm. “You okay?”
You nod, giving him a tight smile that doesn’t reach your eyes. He doesn’t know what to do with his anger right now, but he knows he can’t set it on you.
“You did the neuro exam?” he asks instead, his eyes still trained on your arm.
You nod. “I was just going to finish charting it.”
“Have someone look at your arm,” he says. “And then go do that.”
As Shen, who’d come along with one of the night shift security guards, enters the mix, Jack watches from the corner of his eye as Crus follows you behind the central desk, nodding at him wordlessly as he winces.
—
You’re laid up in Jack’s lap the next evening, trying your best to enjoy a day off with the heartbeat that’s steady at your back, and the scruffy jaw that catches in your hair when he absent-mindedly presses his lips to your crown. Some action film series that had been on all day, barely paid attention to by either of you, drones on in the background of his living room.
“You gonna let me see now?”
You burrow down further, hoping the warmth of your body weight might be enough to assuage him. You feign interest in whatever movie really is playing — a car explodes, and you lose it immediately.
It’d been a gamble coming here after shift this morning, one you would’ve been wise not to make in hindsight. Jack hadn’t even asked if you wanted to come over, was the thing — he never really did. Sure it was unspoken in the way your car had been at your apartment untouched for days, your Tupperware were stacked neatly next to his coffee cups in his dishwasher, your skincare cluttering his bathroom counter, a duffel of your clothes tossed on a chair in the corner of his bedroom.
But he still never assumed at the end of shift that you’d be in his passenger seat — always extending the invite and then leaving it up to you, but slinging your bag over his shoulder in the parking lot as soon as you confirmed.
Halfway through your shift you thought there was no chance in hell you’d be here today, sick of his riot act and eager to move on. But bone-deep exhaustion and an ache in your arm had sent you right into his, barely a thought spared for how his disappointment in you might manifest as you walked beside him in the parking deck.
“Nothing to see,” you say simply.
“You didn’t shower with me and have been wearing a long-sleeve for 12 hours, so I know that’s not true,” he says.
“I knew you wouldn’t let me actually wash up,” you try weakly, knowing it’s futile and that Jack has learned you love nothing more than sitting astride his lap on the ledge in his shower after a long shift. “And it’s cold in your house.”
Before you can react, he grabs at your hand, his other hand hooking a finger into your sleeve and pulling it down to your elbow. The line of purple around your forearm isn’t serious, and it doesn’t hurt anymore, but he sighs against you all the same.
He’s reaching around you, stroking at the discolored skin with his thumb, his lips against your hair still. “I knew this would happen.”
“Yeah, well—”
“You don’t learn.”
You tug your arm free, and his hold breaks immediately. Your frustration grows, finally recognizing how overly-gentle he’s been in the last day. You feel claustrophobic in his hold, pushing yourself up and turning back to him, pretzeled between his legs.
“He got the CT and the team doctor is putting him in concussion protocol,” you say. “That’s all that matters. Way too much fuss over nothing when he wasn’t even aggravated.”
“His coaches clearly were,” Jack says.
“And that’s my fault? I’m not supposed to treat a patient because men can’t control their emotions when it comes to college football?”
“I didn’t say that,” he says. He pushes himself up to sit against the armrest of the couch. His gaze is steady, eyes full of disappointment, condescension — you can’t even tell at this point. It makes you want to retreat into yourself, so you do, scooting further away from him, sleeves tugged firmly over your hands.
“So what are you saying, then?” you ask.
“I didn’t assign you to that case for a reason.”
“And yet he went home about an hour after I saw him. Did he not?”
His mouth pulls up to the side. “And I had to fill out your second incident report in six weeks. You’re — You’re purposefully missing my point.”
“No one else got even close in the eight hours Mason sat in that room. He was dizzy, disoriented, slurring — not to mention being watched like a hawk by two men who couldn’t give less of a fuck about whether or not he’ll have CTE in five years,” you plead. “You’re missing the point. He’s a kid.”
Jack furrows his eyebrows. “Don’t try and act like you were taking up some noble cause now when we both know you just wanted to piss me off.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t insult my intelligence in front of all of my colleagues by putting me on MS3 cases,” you bite out. You feel hot tears pressing against the back of your eyes, and your bottom lip wobbles as you realize you’re for the first time really not enjoying fighting with him. “And d-don’t flatter yourself.”
You see the moment his face changes, when his defense crumbles as a tear escapes your left eye before you can catch it. You hate it — you hate how easily he gives up, how he lays down his arms because he thinks you’re vulnerable. When he can see your weakness.
Jack had never done that until you were attacked the first time. And you’d never had an issue controlling your emotions in front of him until then either.
But he’d somehow removed himself as a thorn in your side over the last few weeks and rather annoyingly instead burrowed himself into a new spot in your chest.
“I didn’t mean—”
“No,” you say, too loud for the room, standing up suddenly, feeling unsteady on your feet. “No. Fuck you, Jack.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Don’t,” you whisper, turning your face from his view. The last thing you need is him seeing the impact the term of endearment has on you.
Your eye catches on camo — his SWAT jacket on the coat rack by his front door, right next to your fleece jacket you wear to beat the AC’s chill in the ED, both of your work bags resting on the wooden shoe organizer beneath them, the dorky trail runners you make fun of him for deposited right next to your blue sneakers.
“I’m sorry,” Jack says, and you tear your eyes away, facing him again. His throat bobs as he swallows.
“You’re a hypocrite.”
You turn on your heel, beelining toward his bedroom, grabbing your bag from the chair and throwing as much of your shit as you can inside before he can follow you down the hall. His place had acquired far more of your things than you can even fit in the bag.
You shimmy a pair of scrub pants on, the first thing you can find to cover your bottom half, realizing belatedly that they’re his, the waistband not quite right.
“I’m a hypocrite?” Jack asks, darkening the doorway on his crutches.
“You’re blaming me for trying to do my fucking job,” you say. “Meanwhile, you’re the one running around getting shot at as an extracurricular.”
Jack sighs audibly as you continue into his ensuite, grabbing all of your cosmetics off of the counter and shoving those in your bag, too.
“That’s not remotely the same thing.”
“No? Seems like risk-taking behavior to me,” you accuse. You double back to the doorway he still occupies, your chests nearly touching. You see his eyes tracking the lines of tears you’d accidentally let out as you walked down the hallway. “We had a deal. Am I wrong?”
“Yeah? And who’s holding up their end?”
“Neither of us, I guess,” you say, adjusting the obnoxious drawstring in your pants again, hiking your overnight bag further up onto your shoulder, praying your expensive hair oil isn’t currently leaking all over your clothes. “Move.”
But Jack doesn’t budge, leaning directly into your face as you try to pass him.
“No. You wanna know what’s risky?” he asks, goading you to make eye contact, brows furrowed in frustration, that same look down his nose that makes you feel pathetic.
“I don’t wanna hear—”
“Fucking my resident,” he says. “That’s risky.”
Your words die in your throat. You wonder if you’d misheard him, seeing as he cut you off, but your mind immediately replays the way his lips formed the words, the harshness of his statement rattling around in your skull, and you know he’d said it.
It hangs in the air until your palm finds his chest.
You know you’re crying again, because he moves easily out of your way.
“Don’t worry about it then,” you choke, leaving him in the hall.
You don’t hear the click of his crutches as you grab the rest of your stuff by the front door, slamming it shut once you’re outside.
For all of his hovering at the hospital, Jack hadn’t even followed you down the hall.
