Welcome Everyone,
I am a thirty-something woman (she/her) living with severe anxiety, PTSD, Social Anxiety, and chronic pain. I am probably one of the most awkward women on the planet and I think that reflects in my writing. I also try to be as inclusive as possible. Everyone deserves to feel seen and to be represented. And at the very least I hope I can make you laugh. 🤭
So sit back and enjoy and remember comments, reblogs, and likes are very appreciated.
I am a thirty-something woman living with severe anxiety, PTSD, Social Anxiety, and chronic pain. I am probably one of the most awkward women on the planet and I think that reflects in my writing. I also try to be as inclusive as possible. Everyone deserves to feel seen and to be represented. And at the very least I hope I can make you laugh. 🤭 So sit back and enjoy and remember comments, reblogs, and likes are very appreciated.
first time she pointed out the townhouse, jack didn't think much of it. he hummed in response, holding onto her smaller hand even tighter as a biker was passing them on the sidewalk.
they were walking back from their favorite coffee shop, paper cups warming their hands against the chilly pittsburgh morning.
she'd stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, staring across the street with that dreamy look she got whenever something captured her attention.
"ugh.” she swooned. “that's my favorite house," she'd said.
jack had followed her gaze.
it was a beautiful townhouse. it was about three stories of brick and black shutters with overflowing flower boxes beneath the windows. it was elegant without being flashy. it was lived-in without looking old.
he'd hummed his acknowledgment and continued walking.
that should have been the end of it.
but it wasn't.
because the next week she pointed it out again.
and the week after that… and the one after.
soon it became part of their routine.
coffee, pastries, the townhouse.
every single saturday morning and every single time they passed it, her pace slowed.
sometimes she'd admire the little balcony on the second floor, or the iron railings, even the huge windows that flooded the interior with sunlight. and other times she would just smile at it quietly before continuing down the block.
jack never teased her about it.
he just listened the way he always listened.
collecting and gathering every detail she offered without her realizing it.
it was like he was storing them away somewhere safe.
—
months later, she was standing in front of the pastry display at the coffee shop when jack casually mentioned the open house.
she looked up immediately.
"what.. really?" she said is disbelief. “i didn’t see a sign, though. are you sure?” she said in the middle of taking a bite of her banana loaf.
"yeah they’re showing the townhouse today.” he repeated with that signature sideways smile. “it’s a private showing.” he shrugged.
the excitement that lit her face was instant and for a moment, jack almost felt guilty because she had absolutely no idea…
when they arrived, the house was somehow even more beautiful inside.
sunlight spilled through oversized windows, warming polished hardwood floors and pale walls.
the entire place felt bright, open and comfortable.
it was a place that people built lives together and they could feel the warmth of a loved and cherished home.
jack spent most of the tour watching her instead of the house.
watching her wander into every room with wide eyes, watching her run her fingertips along the bathroom countertops.
watching her stand in front of windows and imagine things.
he knew she was imagining things because she'd always done that. her imagination was everything that made her into the dreamer that she was.
even in their tiny conversations, or while walking down the street.
she saw dreams everywhere and a beautifully bright future in every empty space.
"this kitchen is incredible." she mused, as she rounded the kitchen island and peered out the windows that rested right above the kitchen sink.
her voice echoed softly through the room as jack leaned against the doorway.
her shoulders sank as she peered into the lush backyard garden.
"It is." he said as he watched her in quiet awe.
she moved toward one of the windows, sunlight caught her hair. the sight of her standing there nearly stole the breath from his lungs.
because she looked like she belonged there.. with him. he nearly groaned at the sight of her. her hair falling behind her shoulders while she playfully pretended to wash the dishes.
he smiled wildly as she looked behind her at him and wiggled her eyebrows, causing them both to giggle.
it looked like she wasn’t visiting.
or imagining.
she was just belonging.
as if the house had been waiting for her this whole entire time.
the realtor eventually left them alone to explore.
that was when the trouble started.
because the more she saw, the more she fell in love with it.
and the more she fell in love with it, the more impossible it became for her to hide her disappointment.
by the time they reached the living room again, she was trying very hard to be realistic.
jack knew that look it was the one where she talked herself out of wanting something.
it's okay," she said softly.
nobody had even asked a question.
jack raised an eyebrow as she laughed a little sadly.
"this place is just..." her gaze drifted toward the windows.
the fireplace.
the staircase.
everything.
"it's perfect." she hummed as jack placed his hand on the back of her small back. her words came out as barely more than a whisper as she looked up at him.
jack felt something squeeze painfully inside his chest.
because she wasn't being dramatic.
or materialistic, or unrealistic, she just genuinely loved this place.
the same way she loved old bookstores and small coffee shops and rainy afternoons cuddled with a good book.
she loved things completely, with her whole heart.
"a girl can dream, right?" she said softly to him. her smile small.
jack stared at her for a long moment— long enough that she did a double take when she wanted to pull him out and go back home.
"w-what?" she looked at him in confusion.
his hands slipped into his pockets, a nervous habit which was one she rarely ever saw.
then he nodded toward the room around them.
"good thing you don't have to." he nodded earnestly.
confusion flickered across her face. she laughed his name, "what are you talking about?"
"you don't have to dream about it, baby."
the silence that followed stretched before he finally said it.
"i bought it."
she blinked…once…twice.
the words clearly didn't fully register and he wanted to kiss her stupid as she gave him a look of purse confusion.
"i bought the townhouse, baby.” he said stalking closer to her, his shoes echoing throughout the kitchen.
still nothing.
her mouth opened slightly.
closed.
opened again.
jack fought back a smile because for someone so smart, she looked completely lost.
"you..." her voice disappeared.
jack nodded trying to get it out of her.
"i bought it." he said cocooning her into his arms as if to block her away from the rest of the world.
another heartbeat passed.
then another.
finally her eyes widened.
not a little.
a lot.
the kind of realization that arrives all at once. it was sudden and overwhelming and her heart was beating so fast she could have sworn that he could hear it.
"f-for us?" the question cracked in the middle.
jack's expression softened immediately.
"yeah." his voice was gentle, “so we can have somewhere that's ours."
the tears arrived instantly.
jack sighed.
because of course they did.
she slapped both hands over her face.
which somehow made it worse.
"sweetheart—"
"you bought me a house?”
his laugh filled the room. "i bought us a house."
"a whole house, jack."
"technically it's a townhouse." he teased causing her to let out a watery laugh.
then immediately started crying harder.
“i want you to decorate it however you want and i’m gonna help you.” he said softly, moving her hair behind her shoulders as she looked up at him. “we’re gonna make it ours.”
the next thing jack knew, she was throwing her arms around his neck as he wrapped his strong arms around her small frame.
of course he caught her automatically.
strong freckled arms wrapping around her waist as she buried her face against his chest.
the familiar scent of coffee and aftershave surrounded her instantly.
safe, comforting, home.
kack rested his chin on top of her head, holding her tightly. neither of them spoke for a while.
they just stood there in the middle of their future living room as the sunlight poured in around them.
the house quiet and waiting.
finally she tilted her head back enough to look at him.
her eyes were red and her cheeks damp.
beautiful.
"you remembered." the words were tiny they made jack frown.
"remembered what?" he wanted to know, as he wiped his thumb against her wet cheeks.
she laughed softly. "the windows."
his expression immediately melted because of course that's what she was talking about.
not the price, or the size and not even the investment of it all.
the windows.
the thing she'd mentioned months ago during a random walk.
"the balcony." her voice trembled.
"the flower boxes."
jack brushed his thumb against her bottom lip as it quivered.
"i remember everything you tell me." he mused.
and judging by the way her face crumpled, that might have been the most emotional thing he'd said all day.
—
later, after the realtor returned and paperwork was discussed and the reality of it all slowly settled around them, they found themselves standing on the little front patio.
the one she'd always admired and pointed out dozens of times.
jack handed her the key, simple and unassuming. yet somehow heavier than anything she'd ever held before.
she stared at it in her palm, then up at him, then back at the house.
their house. their future.
their home.
jack leaned down and kissed her forehead softly before giving the smile that destroyed her every single time because it was the kind of smile he reserved only for her.
"what do you say we go back and start to unpack" he hummed.
and this time, when she looked at the townhouse, she didn't have to imagine anymore.
Summary: You finally talked Jack into ditching the hospital for a beach getaway since every other trip you've taken together has been during colder seasons, buried under layers. Stripping down to swimwear, you're reminded of how just damn good your man looks under the Italian sun.
Warning: SMUT (MDNI 18+) established relationship, language, pet names, flashbacks to so much vacation sex (p in v sex, oral - both m&f), heavy petting/teasing, insecurity (jack's leg and prosthetic), alcohol consumption, pushy italian man not understanding you aren't interested, protective jack, lots of physical touch (dat man is obsessed with you), dirty talk, praise, semi-public smut, (jack fingers you in the ocean - hallelujah), possessiveness, casual dominance, its basically a story about vacation sex, but with plot and love okay? (y'all are both severely horny for one another), jack’s perfect (as per usual)
A/N: How are there not more vacation!jack fics? Please send them all my way. I hope people have some fun upcoming vacations planned as summer ramps up! GIF by @sammy-bryant found HERE. Dividers as always by @saradika-graphics.
Thank you for reading!! if you comment/reblog i love you so much <3.
POSITANO, AMALFI COAST ITALY
You woke slowly, the morning light filtering through the curtains of your suite at Le Sirenuse. Jack lay on his stomach beside you, one arm tucked under the pillow, the other relaxed at his side. His face was turned toward you, lashes resting against his cheeks, mouth slightly parted. You had talked your man into ditching the hospital for a sunny getaway. Jack was utterly deserving of this rest. You leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead, breathing in the faint scent of salt and his skin. He had been working tirelessly lately, and dating someone in such a high-stakes profession wasn’t easy, but he had recently switched to the day shift, telling you he didn’t like your opposite schedules anymore. Knowing he wanted to spend more time with you made you feel truly special.
You slipped out of bed and moved to the kitchenette, brewing coffee while the sea breeze drifted in from the open balcony doors. Once it was ready, you carried your mug outside and settled into one of the chairs overlooking the glittering water. It was Day 4 of the trip. The first day had been quiet, just wandering Positano’s narrow streets until Jack pulled you back to the suite and fucked you deep and slow until you fell apart for him. You felt his warmth flood your pussy before you both passed out after the long travel day.
Day 2 started with you going down on him, but he stopped you before things could go further. He pulled you up, his breathing heavy, and pressed you against the wall on the private terrace. Your legs wrapped around his waist as he thrust into you with harsh rolls of his hips, the morning sun warming both of you. You came with your forehead against his shoulder, and he followed soon after, breathing hard against your neck.
You then went to the hotel pool. Jack had said he would join you after lunch, but ended up staying inside and told you he got wrapped up in a book. Later, you drove to Tramonti, toured the vineyard, and drank tons of wine and cheese for hours. You both were probably a bit tipsy by the time you came back for dinner to sober up with some food and water. Before you went to sleep, you enjoyed another round. Jack ate you out from behind before bending you over the bed, taking his time to reach that spot that had your vision swimming with tears and your voice breaking over his name while he whispered words of encouragement in your ear. His teeth bared when he pumped you full of his spend, and you continued to scream his name into the mattress.
Yesterday’s boat cruise was an 8-hour journey along a breathtaking coastline, featuring sights like Emerald Grotto, Furore Fjord, Amalfi, Maiori, Minori, Atrani, and Nerano. Despite the warm sun and the stunning scenery, Jack stayed in his T-shirt and jeans the entire time, while you relaxed in your bikini and cover-up. Both of you ended up talking with a lovely couple visiting from California. For most of the cruise, you hung out with them, sharing stories and enjoying the beautiful views together before returning to the hotel and just sleeping in each other’s arms.
You sipped your coffee and cast a quick glance back inside. Jack was stirring, still half-asleep. You couldn’t stop thinking about how something was slightly off with Jack, and you weren’t an idiot. This was the first summer (and first beachy vacation) you’d taken together in the two years you’d been a couple. The other big trips had been travelling across the Maritime Canadian provinces one autumn, and exploring Japan one winter, hopping between cities on train platforms and staying bundled in layers the entire time. In his everyday life, it was rare for Jack to wear shorts unless he was in the privacy of your shared home—he even preferred his athletic pants when he ran every day back in Pittsburgh. But here, in this quiet, sun-soaked place, you hoped he might finally feel comfortable enough to shed those layers, to wear shorts or trunks like everyone else.
The soft scrape of crutches pulled your attention away from the glittering sea. Jack stepped onto the balcony without his prosthetic, the morning light catching the smooth, healed skin just below his knee. His chest was bare, and his boxer briefs hung low on his hips, revealing the sharp cut of muscle that disappeared beneath the waistband. His curls were mussed, eyes still heavy-lidded from rest. God, he looked so fucking good on vacation.
"You look beautiful," he said, voice gravel-rough from sleep, the corner of his mouth lifting in that familiar half-smile.
Warmth bloomed in your chest. "I never want to leave this place. It’s perfect."
Jack lowered himself into the sofa beside you and set the crutches aside. You reached for the bare skin of his amputated limb, fingers gliding over the smooth, warm flesh to massage it. He let out a low, rumbling groan, head tipping back against the chair, throat working as his eyes fluttered half-shut. The sound vibrated straight through you, heat pooling low in your belly.
You leaned in to quickly kiss him, not thinking it would escalate to anything, but then his hand slid up your side, strong fingers curling around your waist as he pulled you onto his lap. Your thighs spread over him, the heat of his body pressing up between your legs. His mouth claimed yours again, tongue sliding hot and deliberate against yours. He cupped your breast beneath your shirt, thumb dragging slow circles around your nipple until it tightened into a stiff peak. You felt yourself growing slick, the fabric of your underwear clinging damply as he rocked you subtly against the thickening ridge in his briefs.
"Feel that?" Jack murmured against your lips. "See how fucking hard you make me?"
"I have plans for us this morning," you whined as you began to pull away. "Stop trying to distract me."
"We’re on vacation, pretty sure this right here is the plan," his hand drifted lower, palm pressing firmly between your thighs, rubbing slow, teasing circles over the damp cotton. You whimpered softly, hips twitching forward into his touch. Your lips parted, breath coming quicker as your fingers curled into his shoulders. Jack’s eyes stayed locked on your face, watching every flicker of pleasure cross your expression—the way your lashes fluttered, the soft sound that escaped your throat when he pressed a little harder.
"That’s it, pretty girl," he whispered, lips brushing the shell of your ear. His palm rocked against your clit through the thin fabric, steady and deliberate, building the ache until your thighs trembled around him. You could smell the faint musk of his skin, hear the distant crash of waves below, feel the sun warming your back as your body grew hotter, wetter, needier.
"J-Jack," you moaned breathlessly, feeling yourself giving in.
"Keep those perfect eyes on me," he demanded, his tone making you shudder.
You made sure to listen and Jack’s breathing deepened—chest rising and falling faster, jaw tight, pupils blown wide as he watched you. A low groan rumbled from him when you rocked harder, the sound vibrating through his chest into yours.
"God, you’re the most gorgeous thing. I want to lay you out right here, and taste every inch of you until you’re shaking." His free hand slid up your spine, fingers threading into your hair as he kissed you again...slow and fucking filthy.
You moaned into his mouth, hips rolling, the wet heat between your legs growing slicker with every teasing press of his palm. Your nipples ached against the fabric of your shirt, every nerve alive and begging for more. When you finally pulled back enough to speak, voice breathy, you said:
"I booked us that exclusive Arienzo Beach Club pass for today."
"Oh?" Jack’s expression shifted instantly. The heat in his eyes cooled, the easy warmth fading.
"Yeah, it’s a short walk away."
His hand stilled between your thighs. He looked away, a deep crease forming between his brows.
"One of the hotel concierge staff told me about this little walking tour. Kind of a hidden‑gem thing. Figured we might check it out." It was a flimsy excuse, and the lie was obvious—he probably hadn’t thought about it for even a second before saying it.
You leaned closer, voice dropping into something silky. "Don’t you want to be in one of those private cabanas with me?"
He withdrew his hand with a final, reluctant twitch of his fingers, then gently lifted you from his lap and settled you onto the sofa beside him. Leaning over, he pressed a soft kiss to your shoulder.
"I don't want to take away from your beach time. You should go, and we can meet up afterwards."
Jack reached for his crutches, stood, and headed inside without another word. The door clicked shut behind him, and the sound of running water soon drifted out. The frustration (and horniness) hit you hard, twisting together in your chest as you sat alone on the balcony, the morning sun suddenly feeling too bright...and too empty.
The water hit Jack’s skin hard, almost scalding, but he didn’t turn it down. He braced one hand against the tile with his head bowed down. He hated disappointing you. Hated the look in your eyes when he shut down.
Traveling with him wasn’t simple, and he knew it. Checking his crutches at the airport. Packing the waterproof prosthetic. Making sure the shower chair fit in his duffle. Calling hotels ahead of time to double-check handicap accessibility, even when they promised everything was fine. It was exhausting. It required planning. It was stressful.
And he hated that you had to deal with any of it.
What he hated more was the thought that you might be pretending it didn't matter.
He pressed his forehead against the tile, letting the fear and self‑loathing churn through him. Jack’s insecurities about his leg didn’t usually own him. Most days, he moved through the world with his usual stubborn defiance. But trips like this, where his body was on display and mobility mattered… it brought every buried doubt roaring back. He hated the way he felt less on days like this—less capable, less appealing, less easy, less fun. He hated that he had to think about terrain, distance, accessibility, and pain levels. Hated that spontaneity wasn’t simple for him.
Jack also didn't want you dealing with the stares at the pool or the beach. The curious looks, the pitying ones, the ones that stuck around too long. He didn't want to slow you down. Didn't want to be the thing you had to work around. Didn't want to be the weight dragging down your plans. The truth was he wanted the cabana, the sun, and your skin under his hands.
He stepped out of the shower, steam curling around him as he reached for the towel. He dried off, sat on the bench, and reached for the prosthetic. The socket slid on with a familiar hiss of air, the weight settling against his residual limb. He flexed his foot experimentally, testing the response. Good. No pain today, at least. He dressed quickly, and when he emerged into the suite, you were already dressed. The cover-up was one of his favorites—that lavender cream-colored thing that fell from your shoulders and hinted at the curves beneath without revealing them. Your sunglasses were pushed up on your head, holding back your hair, and you were reaching for a book from the side table, your tote bag already slung over your shoulder.
His chest tightened. You'd been ready to go without him.
"No brunch together?" he asked, and even he could hear the wounded edge in his voice.
You glanced up, and he watched your expression shift—a flicker of something that might have been frustration, quickly smoothed over into something lighter.
"The beach club pass includes food and alcohol," you said, moving toward him with that knowing smile playing at your lips. "But I was waiting for you to get out of the shower to ask if you wanted to eat with me first. You know…if you have time before that 'walking tour' of yours." The sarcasm was gentle, but it was there.
He deserved that.
"I do have time," Jack said quietly. He closed the distance between you and kissed you, pouring everything he couldn't quite say into the press of his mouth against yours. When he pulled back, he kept his forehead against yours.
"I love you," he murmured. You were quiet for a moment, and he felt the weight of what you weren’t saying hang between you. He appreciated that you weren't calling him out, weren't demanding explanations or forcing a conversation he wasn't quite ready to have. But he also knew you deserved better than a man who was too afraid to just be with you at the beach.
"I love you too," you replied, and because you were perfect, you changed the subject as you both headed toward the door.
"There are rumors that George and Amal got here last night," you winked, stepping into the hallway. "They might be staying at this very hotel."
Jack followed, catching your hand and bringing your fingers to his lips as you walked toward the elevator. "I still can't believe you read celebrity gossip," he said, against your skin, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth as you pressed the elevator button. You were a highly respected wealth advisor at a massive institution managing over $7 billion in assets. Jack found it fascinating that you could dissect market volatility before breakfast and had an encyclopedic knowledge of who was dating who in Hollywood.
"It's Page Six," you squeaked in protest, as the elevator doors slid open. "It's basically required reading."
He grinned, watching you step into the elevator with that easy confidence you carried everywhere. God, he loved you.
"Oh, and Dua Lipa and Callum Turner just got married," you added as the doors closed, descending toward the lobby. "She looked so beautiful in her custom Schiaparelli skirt suit."
Jack paused. "Who?”
You gave him a look that suggested this was common knowledge as the elevator dinged softly. "You’re lucky you’re hot."
The sun blazed overhead, turning the water into liquid sapphire that stretched out in gentle rolls toward the horizon. You peeled off your cover-up in the cabana, the purple bikini clinging tighter than your usual suits, and the bottoms riding high on your hips. A quick squeeze of sunscreen across your shoulders and thighs left your skin gleaming. The beach wasn’t deserted, with couples lounging on loungers, and a few families splashing at the shoreline. But, the crowd was sparse compared to the packed stretches you had seen elsewhere. You wished Jack were here with you.
You settled into the padded chair, watching the scene unfold. A silver-haired man in linen shorts kept his arm draped around a much younger woman in a white micro-bikini; she laughed at everything he said and let him feed her strawberries from a silver bowl. Two cabanas down, another older man scrolled on his phone while his companion, maybe 22, knelt between his knees applying lotion to his calves, her ass in the air. The dynamic was clear everywhere you looked: older money, younger beauty, easy transactions wrapped in flirtation and sunblock.
A young waiter in crisp, white shorts and a polo shirt appeared at the edge of the cabana, a small notepad in hand.
"Good afternoon. Can I start you with any drinks from the beach bar?" he asked with a surprisingly Australian accent.
"A mojito, please."
"Right away, Signorina," the waiter said with a polite nod, already turning to head back to the thatch-roofed bar nestled among the palms. Less than five minutes later, the waiter was back, presenting a tall, frosty glass.
"Grazie," you said.
The mojito was perfect and just what you needed.
You cracked open one of the paperbacks you had packed, but then your phone buzzed with that unmistakable Outlook chime you had sworn you were ignoring this whole trip. You’d been doing a surprisingly good job of not checking emails on this trip, but curiosity tugged at you until you finally reached for the phone, muttering to yourself that you were just as bad as Jack when it came to being too dedicated to your job. One new email sat at the top from a long-time client whose portfolio had taken a beating in the market downturn. The message detailed how he'd panic-sold half his positions at the bottom last week; now he was second-guessing everything and wanted to move the rest into cash. You sighed, closed the app, and tried to focus on your book instead.
After a while, the heat became too much. You walked down to the water, the first cool rush licking up your calves, then your thighs, until you dove under. The sea felt silky against your sunscreen-slick skin, the salt stinging pleasantly at the edges of your bikini. You swam lazy laps parallel to the shore, and the current tugging gently at your body. When your arms started to tire, you waded back out, droplets sliding down your stomach.
You were halfway to the cabana when a tall man in board shorts stepped into your path.
"Bella, you swim like a goddess," he said in a thick Italian accent, eyes dropping to your chest. You smiled politely and kept walking, but he matched your pace.
"You’re not from around here, are you?"
"Nope."
"That explains it," he said, grinning. "The locals don’t look like you."
"Lucky them," you muttered.
"I would love to buy you a drink," he said, stepping a little closer.
"I can buy my own drink," you said, tone still polite but firmer now.
He tilted his head, amused. "Ah, independent."
"I guess."
"Come on, bella. One drink. You’ll enjoy it."
"I’m not interested."
"Oof. You’re breaking my heart here," he said, acting wounded. You closed your eyes for just a moment, gathering patience.
"You’ll live." You sort of hated that you had to say the next part, "Also, I have a boyfriend," but it felt like he was operating under the assumption that your rejection needed a reason he would accept. A simple lack of interest wasn’t going to be one. Maybe if you referenced another man's 'claim' on you, he would take you seriously.
"If you looked like that and were mine, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight, bella."
"Good thing I’m not yours, then."
He opened his mouth to fire back, but then his expression shifted. Not toward you, but past you.
A familiar voice cut through the air behind you, calm but edged with steel.
"Is there a fucking reason you’re harassing her?"
Jack stood shirtless in swim trunks, a t-shirt twisted between his hands, the afternoon light catching the scatter of freckles across his shoulders, chest, and arms. His salt and pepper curls looked so fucking luscious on this trip. His jaw was clenched, his hazel eyes fixed on the man with an intensity that made the air itself feel heavy. He didn't raise his voice. Didn't need to. There was something about the way he looked at people…that did all the talking.
The Italian man straightened, but you could see the hesitation flicker across his face. Jack took a step forward, unhurried, and his prosthetic caught the light as his leg shifted beneath him with each measured stride. The man's eyes locked onto it for a fraction of a second, and his confident smirk faltered.
"I asked you a question," Jack said, his voice dropping lower, more dangerous. "You deaf, or just stupid?"
"Look, I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to be a disrespectful asshole?" Jack's smile was all teeth, no warmth. The man took an actual step back. Jack didn't move; he just continued to look at him, that cold, assessing stare that suggested he had already decided exactly what he'd do if this continued.
"Listen carefully, you prick," Jack's voice was ice. "Women deal with enough without guys like you pretending that persistence is charming. She said she wasn’t interested. That’s your fucking cue to leave."
The man held up his hands and practically stumbled backward. "I'm g-going. I'm—I'm g-gone."
You stared at Jack, surprised and instantly warm between your thighs at the protective edge in his tone. He rarely swooped in, usually letting you fight your own battles and handle your own shit. But this was different; he had stepped in because someone had disrespected you, not because you were his property to protect. He did it without that ugly display of ownership and gross possessive edge some men mistook for devotion.
Jack balled up the t-shirt in his hand and tossed it into the cabana behind him before he grabbed your towel without a word and began drying you, slow passes over your arms, your stomach, the curve of your ass. The towel moved across your shoulder blades with surprising gentleness, and you realized his jaw had already unclenched.
"You okay?" he grunted, tossing the towel aside. You turned to face him, still damp, still warm from the sun and something else entirely.
"Yeah. I am."
He tucked a wet strand of hair behind your ear, his thumb brushing your cheekbone. "Good."
"That was a little caveman of you," you murmured, the corner of your mouth lifting.
"Yeah, well," he muttered, while a faint flush crept up his neck, settling high on his cheekbones. "He was out of line."
You stepped closer, nudging his arm with your shoulder.
"Relax, handsome," you said, smile widening. "I liked it." You pulled him into the cabana, the canvas flaps falling closed behind you. The waiter appeared almost immediately to take your drink orders. Once he returned, Jack took his beer and settled on the wide lounger, pulling you between his legs so your back rested against his chest. You set your second mojito of the day on the mantle nearby. His hands stayed on you, thumb stroking the inside of your thigh, fingers tracing the edge of your bikini bottom.
After the waiter left, the mood shifted. Jack’s fingers stilled. "I’m sorry about earlier," he admitted quietly. "Over the years, I’ve just… gotten tired of the stares. I didn't want you dealing with people looking at my prosthetic, wondering what you're doing with me. Honestly…" his voice dropped to a mutter, barely loud enough for you to catch. "…sometimes I wonder what you’re doing with me."
You turned in his arms, cupping his face, and his eyes that now looked green were fixed somewhere past your shoulder.
"Jack, look at me." You waited until his eyes met yours. "Talk to me."
"I can't remember the last time I went to a beach or a pool without dreading it. Years, probably. I've spent so long avoiding situations like this—all the stares, the questions people have asked, the way I've convinced myself that you probably regret travelling here instead of going with someone who could just... be normal."
"Hey." You tilted his chin up. "Stop. You are normal. And I'm not going anywhere."
"You say that now—"
"I'm not finished." You softened your tone but kept it firm. "I know you've probably convinced yourself that your prosthetic makes you less than, or that it's some kind of burden to be around." You traced his jawline. "But that's not the truth, Jack. Not even close." He exhaled slowly, his shoulders dropping slightly as he listened. "I love every part of you. Your leg doesn't change that—it never could." You kissed his forehead, then his temple, then his lips. "I love you."
His arms tightened around you, pulling you closer.
"And I really appreciate you for being here, and coming to the beach," you continued, your voice soft against his skin. "But I don't ever want you to put yourself in a situation where you feel uncomfortable either. It doesn't matter if we're here or in fucking Antarctica. I just want to spend time with you. That's it. That's all that matters to me." He pulled back just enough to look at you, his expression vulnerable. "If something doesn't feel right," you said, brushing a curl from his forehead, "you tell me. We figure it out together. We do what feels good for us—not what you think you're supposed to do or what you think I want. Your comfort matters just as much as mine."
His eyes glistened slightly as he nodded, his jaw working like he was fighting to keep his composure.
"For the record. I’m loving this trip, sweetheart. This might be the best vacation I’ve ever been on."
"Really?" you asked meekly.
Jack swallowed, his gaze locked on your mouth. "Really."
You leaned in and kissed him, slow and deep. His palm slid up your side, thumb brushing the underside of your breast through the thin purple fabric, before he cupped you fully, squeezing just enough to make your breath hitch.
"4 more days of paradise," you murmured against his lips when you finally pulled back, voice dreamy.
Jack smirked, teeth grazing your bottom lip. "I could get used to this. You, half-naked all the time. Might never let you put clothes on again." He nipped at your jaw, then kissed the spot he’d bitten. You pulled back with a soft laugh, eyeing his pale, freckled skin (and the faint farmer’s tan he would absolutely deny having).
"We’re going to need another bottle of sunscreen just for you," you said as you reached for the bottle.
"For the record, I can tan," he rolled his eyes. "Eventually… After several medical interventions."
You giggled, squeezing sunscreen into your palms and began smoothing it over his chest and shoulders, careful and thorough. His skin warmed quickly under your hands, and he stayed still, letting you work while he reached down to cover the top of his thighs. Once you were done, he tugged you closer again. His hands never left you—stroking, squeezing, mapping every inch like he couldn’t get enough. The cabana stayed quiet except for the distant waves and the low murmur of your voices, the two of you wrapped around each other while the sun climbed higher outside.
"I haven’t seen this bikini before," he said, voice low. "It’s fucking sexy on you. Those little triangles barely cover anything. I keep thinking about peeling them off."
"You don’t think it’s too revealing?" you teased.
"Baby, it’s perfect. You look incredible. I can’t stop touching you." There was something almost disorienting about the way he was looking at you… like you were the only thing in his entire world worth seeing. It was still hard to understand why Jack saw you as sexy. Past boyfriends had never made you feel that way… but Jack? He fucking worshipped you. You had never experienced this kind of adoration before. Being someone's everything.
You lounged together for a while, then swam into the ocean. The water enveloped you both in its cool, briny embrace as Jack pulled you deeper, the waves lapping at your breasts while the sandy bottom shifted beneath your feet. The scent of sea air and his natural musk filled your nostrils, heightening every sensation as his breath mingled with yours in short, excited puffs. He leaned in, pressing his lips to yours, with your tongues dancing in a playful, teenage frenzy of sucking and exploring every corner of each other's mouths. Salty droplets ran down your faces, mixing into the kiss, while the smell of wet skin and ocean breeze enveloped you. His hands were on your hips, and he pulled you tighter against the hard evidence of his own arousal pressing through his swim trunks.
A sharp gasp hitched in your throat, your eyes flying wide.
"Jack," you whispered, your voice a shaky mix of awe and sudden, dizzying arousal. "What are you doing?"
A slow, utterly wicked smile spread across his lips, and his eyebrows lifted in a silent, unmistakable challenge.
"Shhh, just relax," he murmured, his lips brushing your ear. "I've got you."
You felt his fingers trace the edge of your swimsuit bottoms, a teasing hint that made your breath catch. "Jack, wait—" you breathed, your voice tight with a fear that was half genuine alarm, half intoxicating thrill. Your gaze shot to the shore, a frantic scan of the distant, blurred figures. "Someone could... what if someone sees."
"Half are asleep,” he whispered, his breath hot on your damp skin. "The other half are staring at their phones, trying to figure out if the weird shadow on their screen is a cloud or a notification that their life is profoundly boring." He dipped his head, his nose gliding along the column of your throat, inhaling the scent of saltwater and sunscreen on your skin.
His logic was a seductive trap.
"But..." you managed to say (not really knowing what else to say), as your hips gave a tiny, involuntary roll against his hard cock.
He hushed you gently, nuzzling into the damp hair at your temple. "I'm just finishing what I started earlier," he whispered, his voice a low, tender rumble. "Let me take care of you now."
His fingers slipped beneath the fabric, and your eyes went wide. A soft, surprised "oh" escaped you as he found your clit, circling with a touch that was electrifying. You could hear the distant laughter and chatter of beachgoers, the rhythmic crash of waves, but it all faded into the background.
Jack loved watching that little hitch in your breath. He loved that he could undo you like this. You were usually all sharp wit and raised eyebrows, but here…here you were just soft sighs and pliant for him. Your fingers dug into his shoulders, clinging for stability as your knees felt weak, even supported by the water.
"Jack," you breathed out, the name itself a plea. The sun warmed the top of your head while the underwater world remained your private haven.
"I know, baby," he murmured, his lips pressing a soft kiss just below your ear. "You’re doing so good for me."
You were so responsive. Every little circle, every shift of his fingers, and you were shivering. He was looking at your face… and all the tension was gone. Just pure, sweet surrender. He could do this forever, just watching you fall apart. His fingers continued their gentle, persistent torment. Then, slowly, he began to slide a finger inside you. The sensation made you gasp sharply, your body tensing for a split second at the new, fuller pressure.
"Shhh, easy," he soothed, his voice a velvet command. He stilled his hand, letting you adjust, his thumb never ceasing its soft circles. "Just relax into it, sweetheart. There you go… that’s my girl."
As your body accepted him, he began a slow, shallow rhythm, his fingers moving in and out with a slippery ease aided by the water and your own growing wetness. Your head lolled against his shoulder, your mouth falling open in a silent, overwhelmed gasp. The dual sensations were too much—the focused, maddening friction of his thumb and the soft, filling stretch of his finger moving inside you. A low, helpless moan finally broke free.
Jack caught the sound with his mouth, kissing you deeply, swallowing your noises as the waves gently rocked you both. His kiss was tender but consuming, his tongue stroking yours in time with the rhythm of his hand. When he broke for air, his praise was a hot whisper against your slick lips.
"Listen to you," he breathed, his own voice rough with want. "So pretty. So perfect.”
His movements became more deliberate, his fingers curling slightly, searching. When he found that sweet spot inside you, your entire body jolted against him. A sharp, broken cry tore from your throat.
"God, Jack, please..." you whimpered.
"There?" he asked, his voice thick with satisfaction. He pressed against it again, and your second cry was louder, less controlled, a raw sound of pleasure that echoed slightly over the water before being swallowed by a wave. Jack’s eyes, filled with lust, flicked toward the distant, indistinct shapes on the shore.
"Shhh, baby," he whispered, but there was a new, teasing edge to his tenderness. He pressed another soft kiss to your temple. "You don’t want everyone to hear, do you?"
He curled his finger again, rubbing that sensitive spot of yours. Another moan, high and desperate, was ripped from you as your hips jerked against his hand. You tried to stifle it, biting your lip, but it was useless. The pleasure was too overwhelming.
A low, husky chuckle vibrated against your skin. His lips were right by your ear. "Or… maybe you do," he murmured, his voice dripping with a filthy, knowing amusement. "Maybe you like the idea that someone might hear how good I make you feel."
He added a second finger alongside the first, stretching you just a little more, the sensation making you gasp. Every slight shift of your bodies rubbed him against you.
"Fuck," he groaned, the word strained. His fingers never stopped their sinful work, pumping into you with a steady, deepening rhythm now, his thumb a relentless counterpoint on your clit.
"God, I wish I could fuck you right now. Make you scream my name so loud the whole beach knows who you belong to."
The vividness of his words, the possessive heat in them, sent a fresh wave of arousal crashing through you. Your own sounds were becoming impossible to control—soft, choked sobs of pleasure with every inward stroke of his fingers.
"Jack..." your voice, a ragged, breathless mess against his neck. "Jack... I love you. I love you, don't stop, please don't ever stop..." The words tumbled out, unfiltered and soaked in pure, delirious pleasure. You were babbling, lost in the storm he was orchestrating with his hands. He shushed you again, but it was a mockery of comfort now. He loved this. He loved the raw, unfiltered honesty of your pleasure, the way you completely fell apart for him and him alone. Hearing you babble his name and those three little words while he had you at his mercy was the most potent aphrodisiac he'd ever known.
He trailed his mouth down your jaw, your neck, sucking a wet, salty path to your collarbone. The contrast of his hot mouth and the cool ocean sent shivers racing over your skin, pulling you tighter against his hard cock.
"I love you too," he murmured, while his eyes held yours, with flecks of green and gold that were endless. "You're going to come for me right here." His fingers curled, pressing that perfect spot with unerring precision as he spoke. "And when you do, I want you thinking about how when we go back to the hotel room, I'm going to spend an hour between your legs, tasting you until you come again, just from my tongue."
"Oh f-fuck," you gasped, feeling your orgasm building, a tidal wave of sensation starting deep in your belly, threatening to crest and drown you with the cool water lapping at your waist. Your hips began to move against his hand of their own volition, a frantic, shallow rhythm seeking more friction, more of him.
"And when you're shaking, when you're begging for it, that's when I'm finally going to fuck you."
He saw the panic and the pleasure warring in your eyes, the desperate clamp of your jaw as you fought to stay quiet. It only spurred him on. His thumb became relentless on your clit, a firm, circling pressure, while his fingers fucked into you with a deep, steady rhythm that hit that perfect, devastating spot every single time.
"Hard and fast," he growled, his own breath starting to come faster, his control fraying at the edges just watching you. "I'm going to fill you up so completely that you'll feel me for days. You're going to come on my cock just like you're coming on my fingers right now, aren't you, baby?"
The command in his voice, the filthy, vivid promise, was the final thread to snap. Your body went rigid, a silent scream locked in your throat as the orgasm detonated, a white-hot shockwave of pure, shattering pleasure.
He saw it the second it hit you—the way your eyes rolled back, the tears that instantly welled and spilled over. He captured your mouth in a deep, consuming kiss, swallowing every choked sob and whimper of ecstasy. His tongue swept against yours, tender and claiming, as he gentled the movements of his hand. He tasted the salt of your tears and felt the helpless tremors still coursing through your limbs.
You were a boneless, quivering weight against him, your face buried in the damp skin of his neck, breathing in the scent of salt, sunscreen, and him. His own breathing was ragged, his body a tightly coiled line of tension pressed against your stomach. For a long moment, he just held you, one arm a solid band around your back, the other hand gently cupping the back of your head.
"You did so good for me."
He shifted slightly, and you could feel him. The hard, insistent length of his cock straining against the fabric of his swim trunks, pressing into your stomach—a stark contrast to your own spent, liquid state. A weak sound of concern escaped your lips.
"Don't you worry about that." Jack gave a strained chuckle, the sound vibrating through you. "We'll take care of it later. Right now... we'll get you some water. And some shade."
He turned around, and you draped limply over the broad expanse of his back. Your cheek rested against the wet skin between his shoulder blades; the world reduced to the sound of his breathing and the gentle lap of the water as he swam. He reached the shallows where the waves gently broke. With a grunt of effort, he stood up, the water dropping from his torso. He kept you secure on his back, your legs hooked over his hips, his hands firmly under your thighs.
Jack walked up the beach in an almost casual stride, nodding at a few scattered sunbathers who glanced your way and were probably staring at his prosthetic (or his raging hard-on). You, clinging to him, were just the tired girlfriend getting a piggyback ride from her attentive boyfriend. The perfect, innocent picture. He reached the private cabana, and with a final, effortless heave, he swung you gently off his back, depositing you onto the lounger. You landed with a soft thump, your limbs still feeling like over-cooked spaghetti.
He turned and grabbed the bottles of chilled water that the waiter offered immediately. Crouching down in front of you, he uncapped it with a sharp twist.
"Open," he said, his voice low. He didn't hand you the bottle. Instead, he brought it to your lips. When you parted them automatically, he tilted it, the cold water pouring into your mouth. "Drink," he ordered, watching your throat work as you swallowed. A little trickled down your chin, and his gaze followed the droplet's path over your collarbone. You drank until the bottle was empty.
"Thank you," you whispered, the words barely audible. A shaky, sated smile touched your lips as you looked up at him through half-lidded eyes.
"Good girl," he said, his voice dropping that utterly intimate register of his. He leaned in, his lips brushing your forehead in a kiss.
"You wore me out," you mumbled, your voice thick and drowsy. Your head lolled back against the cabana bed. The sun felt like a warm blanket, and the intense pleasure had left your body feeling heavy, deliciously used, and utterly spent. "Just... gonna close my eyes for a minute..."
Your words slurred into a soft sigh as your eyelids fluttered shut. The world faded to the sound of the distant waves and the feeling of the warm lounger beneath you. You were already slipping into a contented, post-coital doze. He watched you, the bottle of water hanging loosely from his fingers. You were his masterpiece... and beautifully ruined. He sat down in the shade, the frame creaking softly under his weight, and leaned back, stretching his legs out.
"Come here," he said, his voice leaving no room for question. He patted his chest, right over his heart.
Still floating in that boneless, sated haze, you didn't hesitate. You crawled the short distance from where you were and settled against him, your head finding its perfect place on the solid pillow of his muscle. His arm came around you, heavy and secure, his hand splaying possessively over the curve of your hip. His other hand began tracing those lazy, hypnotic circles on the small of your back.
Your eyelids grew too heavy to hold open.
"I love you," you murmured.
"I love you," he echoed, just as you were slipping away.
You stirred, consciousness returning slowly, and pleasantly. The world came back in pieces: the dappled shade of the cabana, the distant cry of seagulls, the solid, warm weight beneath you. You blinked, your eyes adjusting, and glanced at your phone screen where it lay beside the lounger. 4:00 PM. You’d been out for over an hour.
You tilted your head up. He was awake, watching you from behind his sunglasses, a soft, unguarded curve to his mouth. You leaned up and pressed a slow, lingering kiss to his lips.
"Mmm," you hummed against his mouth as you pulled back just an inch. "I think I need a snack before dinner. All that... 'swimming'.. worked up an appetite." His hand slid from your back to cup your ass, giving it a firm, appreciative squeeze.
"Is that right?" he said, his voice gravelly with disuse. "What kind of snack are you craving?"
"Something sweet," you teased, nipping lightly at his bottom lip. "Maybe something I can eat right here."
"Tempting.” His gaze was hot and appreciative. "But if I start feeding you here, we won't make it to dinner. Let's pack up." He gave your ass one last, playful smack before releasing you. "Up you get."
You pouted dramatically, making a show of stretching your still-tingling limbs. He stood, pulling his t-shirt over his head, the fabric clinging briefly to his torso.
"Watching the people here is fascinating, isn't it?" he mused, his tone conversational but his eyes locked on you. You followed his gaze out to the beach. A group of young women were taking an absurd number of selfies a little way down the shore, angling their bodies and drinks just so.
"Right?" you squealed, playing along, putting a hand on your hip and mimicking their poses with exaggerated flair. "The struggle is so real! Do I look aspirational? Do I look like I have my life together?
He chuckled, shaking his head as he finished smoothing his shirt.
"You," he said, stepping close and pulling you to the edge of the sofa bed, "look like you just got fucked senseless. Which is infinitely better."
You laughed and swatted his chest, and wriggled out of his grasp to reach for your cover-up draped over the back of a chair and shimmied into it. The two of you stepped out of the cabana and began walking hand-in-hand, but you were surprised when Jack started pulling you closer to the shore. You saw Jack raise a hand, catching the eye of one of the influencer girls from the selfie group. She was tall and clad in a minuscule neon green bikini, her phone held up as she surveyed the light.
"Scusi," he called. He made a frame with his fingers, pointing at you and himself, then pretended he was taking a picture with an invisible camera. She immediately lowered her own phone.
"Oh! Photo! Yes, of course, I speak English," she said, her accent a pleasant, unplaceable blend, as she gracefully stepped away from her own photoshoot.
He handed her his phone, while whispering to you. "Is it that obvious that I'm American?"
"Yes," you giggled.
She grinned, positioning you both close, his arm tight around your waist, his waterproof prosthetic clearly visible in the frame. The fact that he wanted the photo with his leg showing made your eyes sting. Influencer girl took a few steps back, expertly using the natural light and the stunning views as her canvas.
"Get closer! Yes, like that. Perfect."
He pressed a kiss to your temple as the girl snapped the first photo.
"Beautiful! Now look at each other. Give me a real smile!" she coached, moving slightly to adjust the angle.
You turned your face toward Jack, and the look in his eyes stole your breath. It was open affection, a quiet joy at simply being there with you, exactly as you both were. Your smile changed, becoming real and unguarded. The camera clicked several times in rapid succession.
"Amazing! You two are gorgeous. That light is everything."
"Grazie," Jack said, the Italian word clumsy but earnest.
"Thank you," you said.
As the girl returned Jack's phone, she lingered for a moment and asked the usual small talk question about where you were from. You answered, and within seconds, the conversation shifted with the realization that you and she had grown up in the same country. What a small world. Your attention was suddenly fully on her, and you were completely absorbed talking to her in your native mother tongue and discussing the last time you had been back home. Jack took advantage of the moment and opened his messages to Robby and attached one of the many photos.
Surprisingly, Robby answered almost instantly since it was a little past 10 AM, which was usually when he sneaked in a snack.
Robby: She’s so out of your league.
Jack snorted under his breath. Out of his league? Absolutely. He’d known that from day one, and he still couldn’t believe you’d chosen him anyway. His thumb hovered over the send button for a full second before he finally tapped his next message.
Jack: I think I’m going to do it tonight.
Robby: Holy shit. About damn time, you’ve been carrying that ring around for a year.
Jack: I’m nervous as hell.
Robby: She’s perfect. Go get her, brother.
Robby then sent another quick message.
Robby: You look happy. Happier than I’ve ever seen you.
Jack thought about the man he’d been before he met you. He was convinced that good things weren’t meant for him. And then you showed up…and you made him want things he’d never let himself want.
When Jack looked up, you were turning back toward him, waiting with that patient little smile he loved more than he could ever say. Jack smiled, slipped the phone away, and reached for your hand as you walked back toward the hotel.
The house was quiet in the way it only got after midnight.
Not peaceful, exactly.
Just quiet.
There was a difference.
Peaceful meant Andrew's boots by the door because he had kicked them off badly. Peaceful meant the bathroom light left on because he forgot it half the time and denied it the other half. Peaceful meant his weight on his side of the bed, one hand finding your hip in his sleep like even unconscious, he needed to know where you were.
This was just quiet.
The kind that hummed.
The kind that made the fridge downstairs sound too loud and the wind outside feel like someone moving through the hallway.
You lay on your side beneath the covers, phone balanced on the pillow beside your face, one hand curved over the round of your stomach.
Andrew's old T-shirt stretched over you now. Not dramatically. Not yet. But enough that the fabric pulled slightly at the middle, enough that you had started sleeping with one of his flannels tucked against your back like a poor substitute for the man himself.
It was pathetic.
You had decided it was allowed.
The baby shifted beneath your palm.
A slow roll.
You smiled in the dark.
"Yeah," you whispered. "I know."
The phone rang at 12:17.
You grabbed it on the first ring.
The automated voice came first.
It always did.
Flat. Mechanical. Rude.
You have a prepaid call from an inmate at—
You closed your eyes.
—Andrew Cody.
You pressed one before the recording had finished telling you how.
The line clicked.
Static.
A distant clatter.
Then his voice, low and rough around the edges.
"Hey."
Your whole body softened into the mattress.
"Hey."
"You asleep?"
"No."
"You should be."
"I was waiting for you."
He went quiet.
You could hear prison noise behind him. Not much. Muted at this hour, but still there. Voices farther away. A door closing. The occasional crackle of a guard's radio.
Then Andrew said, "You shouldn't wait up."
"You always say that."
"Because you shouldn't."
"And I always do."
A pause.
Then, softer, "Yeah."
You smiled and turned your face further into the pillow.
It was ridiculous how much a single word could do. How his voice could fill the room without changing anything in it. His side of the bed was still empty. His boots were still by the door. The green paint samples were still taped to the nursery wall down the hall, three shades of almost-right, one shade of absolute soup.
But he was here.
A little.
Enough for tonight.
"You okay?" he asked.
You laughed quietly.
"There it is."
"What?"
"Your opener."
"I waited this time."
"You waited fourteen seconds."
"That's better."
"It's really not."
"You okay?" he repeated.
You rolled your eyes, but your hand smoothed over your stomach. "Yes."
"The baby?"
"Also yes."
"She moving?"
"She was a second ago."
He went quiet again.
You could picture him standing at the prison phone, head slightly bowed, eyes narrowing in concentration like he could listen hard enough to hear through you.
"She's stubborn at night," you said.
"Like you."
"Like you."
"You're the one awake."
"You called me."
"You answered."
"You see how marriage works?"
His breath moved through the line, almost a laugh.
You loved the almost laughs.
You loved the full ones too, but the almost ones felt private. Like Andrew was handing you something before he had decided whether he was allowed to.
The baby shifted again.
You sucked in a soft breath.
Andrew heard it immediately.
"What?"
"She moved."
"Yeah?"
"Mm-hmm." You pressed your palm more firmly over your belly. "I think she knows it's you."
Andrew was silent for a second too long.
Your heart pinched.
"You still there?"
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
Another pause.
Then, quiet and honest, "I like when you say that."
"That she knows it's you?"
"Yeah."
You smiled into the dark.
"She does."
"You don't know that."
"I do."
"How?"
"Because I'm her mother and I have decided I know."
"That's not science."
"She's currently kicking me in the ribs. I'm allowed to claim authority."
"She kicking hard?"
"Not hard. Just enough to be rude."
Andrew huffed softly.
You let your eyes close.
For a while, neither of you spoke.
You could hear him breathing. He could probably hear yours. Between you, the line held static and distance and all the things you had learned to live around.
Then he said, "Did you get the list?"
Your eyes opened.
"What list?"
"The names."
You smiled before you could stop yourself.
Of course.
You had sent him a list two days earlier. Two pages of baby girl names written in your messy handwriting, copied twice so one could be cleared for him. Some names you loved. Some you liked. Some you had added just to make him react.
He had been weird about it when you told him you were sending it.
Not bad weird.
Andrew weird.
Too quiet. Too serious. Like names were not just names but doors into the future, and he needed to make sure he did not choose one that led somewhere wrong.
"They gave it to you?" you asked.
"Yeah."
"And?"
"And you put ridiculous names on it."
You grinned. "Which ones?"
"Juniper."
"That is not ridiculous."
"It is."
"It's sweet."
"It's a tree."
"It's also a name."
"It's a tree name."
"You picked green for her room. You don't get to be anti-tree now."
"That's different."
"How?"
"Walls don't have to introduce themselves."
You laughed into the pillow.
Andrew went quiet to listen to it.
You knew he was doing it. You could almost feel the way his attention settled.
"What else?" you asked.
"Clementine."
"That one was a joke."
"No, it wasn't."
"It mostly was."
"You wrote it with a heart beside it."
"I have a whimsical side."
"You have a dangerous side."
"A baby named Clementine Cody would be adorable."
"She'd sound like fruit."
You snorted.
Andrew's voice went slightly softer. "Don't laugh like that. You'll wake yourself up."
"That is not how laughing works."
"You're supposed to be sleeping."
"And yet here we are discussing fruit names."
"Because you wrote fruit names."
"One fruit name."
"Still."
You smiled and shifted carefully, adjusting the pillow beneath your belly.
Andrew heard the rustle.
"You uncomfortable?"
"A little."
"Need to move?"
"I just did."
"Need water?"
"I have water."
"Drink some."
"Bossy."
"Drink."
You reached for the bottle on the nightstand and took a sip. "There. Happy?"
"Yeah."
"You're very easy to please tonight."
"No."
"No?"
There was a pause.
Then he said, "I liked some."
Your smile softened.
"The names?"
"Yeah."
"Which ones?"
He did not answer immediately.
This was the part you had expected.
Andrew could argue about soup-green paint and fruit names just fine. But saying he liked something? Saying he wanted something? That was different.
Want was vulnerable.
Want could be used against you.
You gave him space.
The baby rolled lazily under your hand like she was waiting too.
Finally, Andrew said, "The short ones."
"Short ones?"
"Yeah."
"You'll have to be more specific, baby. There were a lot."
He went quiet at the pet name.
You smiled faintly.
Even now, after everything, sometimes calling him that still knocked him off balance.
"Mara," he said.
Your smile softened. "I like Mara."
"It's good."
"Good?"
"Strong."
"It is."
"Not too much."
"No."
He breathed out softly. "Nora too."
"You liked Nora?"
"Yeah."
"That surprises me."
"Why?"
"I don't know. It's sweet."
"I can like sweet things."
The words landed quieter than he probably meant them to.
You stared into the dark.
"Yes," you said gently. "You can."
Andrew didn't say anything.
You let him have that silence too.
Then, after a moment, you asked, "Any others?"
"Willa."
Your eyebrows lifted. "Really?"
"You don't like it?"
"I do. I love it actually. I just didn't know if you would."
"It sounds..." He stopped.
You waited.
"Safe," he said finally.
Your throat tightened.
"Yeah," you whispered. "It does."
Willa.
Safe.
You pictured it for a second. A little girl with soft green walls and yellow ducks and a father who would pretend not to know all the words to her bedtime books before memorizing them by the second week.
Then Andrew cleared his throat.
"But maybe not."
"Why?"
"Sounds like someone else's kid."
You laughed softly. "That is such a strange but weirdly useful review."
"It does."
"Okay. Willa is someone else's kid."
"Maybe."
You shifted again and winced slightly when the baby pressed against something low and uncomfortable.
Andrew's voice sharpened. "What?"
"Nothing. She's just rearranging furniture in there."
"She hurting you?"
"No."
"You sure?"
"Yes."
"She needs to stop."
You smiled despite yourself. "I'll pass that along."
"Put the phone there."
"What?"
"On your stomach."
"For what?"
"I'll tell her."
You laughed, but did as he asked, moving the phone from your ear to rest gently against your belly.
"Okay," you said, voice slightly raised. "Go on. Parent her."
Andrew was quiet for half a second.
Then, low and serious, he said, "Hey. Stop kicking your mom like that."
You pressed your lips together.
"She's trying to sleep."
The baby moved directly under the phone.
You gasped, then laughed.
You brought the phone back to your ear. "She kicked you."
Andrew went silent.
"She what?"
"She kicked right where the phone was."
His breathing changed.
You smiled at the ceiling.
"She's already ignoring you. Very advanced."
"She heard me."
"I think she did."
For a second, there was only static.
Then Andrew said, "Good."
One word.
Soft enough to hurt.
You swallowed around the lump in your throat.
"She likes your voice," you said.
"You think?"
"I know."
"That science too?"
"Yes. Mother science."
He huffed quietly.
You closed your eyes again.
The room felt warmer now.
Still empty on his side of the bed, yes.
Still missing him in every corner.
But warmer.
"Did you hate any names?" you asked.
"Yes."
You laughed. "That was fast."
"Paisley."
"You hated Paisley?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"It sounds like a shirt."
You burst out laughing.
"It does not."
"It does."
"Paisley is a perfectly normal name."
"It's a pattern."
"You are so opinionated for someone who claimed he didn't know anything about names."
"I know I don't like shirt names."
"Oh my God."
"Also Pearl."
You blinked. "You hate Pearl?"
"No."
"But?"
"It sounds small."
"Pearls are literally small."
"Exactly."
You smiled. "Okay. No Pearl."
"Maybe as a middle."
Your smile softened.
"A middle name?"
"Yeah."
"You've been thinking about middle names?"
"No."
"Andrew."
"A little."
You grinned into the dark.
He sounded mildly defensive, which meant he had absolutely been thinking about it.
"What kind of middle name?" you asked.
"Don't know."
"You do."
"I don't."
"You paused."
"I'm allowed to pause."
"You pause when you're hiding something."
"I pause because you ask too many questions."
"I ask charming questions."
"You ask trap questions."
You smiled harder.
The baby shifted again, slower this time, settling under your palm.
"You want something simple?" you asked.
"Maybe."
"Pretty?"
"Not too pretty."
You laughed softly. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know."
"You absolutely do."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, "Something that means something."
Your chest softened.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Not just because it sounds nice?"
"It can sound nice too."
"That helps."
He made a quiet sound.
You stared into the dark, hand resting over your daughter.
There were words you both had not said yet. Not properly. Words that had been near the conversation for weeks without either of you putting them down in the middle of the room.
Hope was one of them.
Not as a first name.
Not something you were ready to settle.
Just a word that belonged near your daughter somehow.
Near Andrew too.
Near the strange, stubborn brightness that had kept finding you in all the places it should not have been able to reach.
You didn't say it.
Neither did he.
Not yet.
Instead, Andrew asked, "What about Grace?"
You blinked.
"Grace?"
"Yeah."
"That's pretty."
"You like it?"
"I do."
"Too pretty?"
"A little," you admitted.
He huffed. "You're picky."
"You rejected Paisley because of shirts."
"It is a shirt."
"Pattern."
"Same thing."
You smiled.
"What about Mae?" you asked.
"Mae?"
"Simple. Pretty. Not too much."
He was quiet.
You could almost hear him testing it silently.
"Maybe," he said.
"That means you like it."
"It means maybe."
"You are impossible."
"You married me."
"I was clearly unwell."
His almost laugh came warm through the line.
You held onto it.
"What about Rose?" you asked.
"No."
You laughed. "Immediate."
"Too..." He stopped.
"Too what?"
"Everyone has Rose."
"Fair."
"And flowers die."
You paused.
Then made a face in the dark. "That's bleak, even for you."
"It's true."
"We are not putting that on a baby-name list."
"Good."
"What about Claire?"
"Maybe."
"You like Claire?"
"It's okay."
"That's not a ringing endorsement."
"It's not bad."
"Andrew Cody, poet of our time."
He ignored you. "What about Anna?"
Your hand stilled.
"Anna?"
"Yeah."
"That wasn't on the list."
"I know."
"You came up with that?"
"Maybe."
Your expression softened.
Anna.
Simple. Gentle. Classic.
Not the name.
But sweet.
"You like it?" you asked.
"It's okay."
"You brought it up."
"I said maybe."
"You're very committed to maybe."
"Maybe is safe."
That one landed quietly.
You looked toward the ceiling.
Maybe was safe.
Maybe did not ask too much. Maybe did not make promises. Maybe did not break your heart if the world changed again.
But maybe was also where Andrew lived most comfortably when things mattered.
Maybe meant he was thinking.
Maybe meant he was close.
Maybe meant he had not run.
"Anna is pretty," you said softly.
He was quiet.
Then, "Yeah."
"We can keep it on the list."
"Okay."
You smiled.
The call settled after that into a gentle rhythm.
Names offered.
Names rejected.
Names held for later.
Clara was "too clean," which made no sense until he explained that it sounded like someone who never spilled things, and then somehow it made perfect sense.
Sadie made him pause, but he said it sounded like someone who would steal his keys.
You liked that as an argument in its favour.
He did not.
June made both of you go quiet for a second, not because it was perfect, but because it sounded warm.
Like sunlight through curtains.
Like a baby sleeping against your chest.
Like a month when things might be softer.
You wrote it down on the notepad beside the bed.
Andrew heard the pen.
"You writing?"
"Mm-hmm."
"What?"
"The maybes."
"How many?"
"Four."
"Four?"
"We need options."
"We need one."
"Eventually."
He grunted softly.
You smiled.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"You smiled."
"How do you know?"
"You breathe smug."
"I do not breathe smug."
"You do."
"I am glowing with pregnancy and wisdom."
"You are lying in bed making lists after midnight."
"Also that."
The baby gave one firm kick.
You gasped, hand flying to your stomach.
Andrew's voice sharpened immediately. "What?"
"She kicked hard."
"You okay?"
"Yes." You laughed breathlessly. "She either loves June or hates it."
"Which one?"
"I don't speak fluent baby yet."
"You should learn."
"I'll add it to tomorrow's tasks."
He went quiet in that listening way again.
"Put me on," he said.
You moved the phone to your stomach without asking what he meant.
"Okay," you whispered.
Andrew's voice softened when he spoke.
"Hey, baby girl."
Your eyes closed.
"We're trying to pick your name."
The baby moved faintly beneath the phone.
"Your mom likes too many."
You smiled.
"I'm trying to help, but she put tree names and fruit names on the list."
You mouthed, rude, into the darkness.
Andrew continued, his voice low and careful.
"We'll find it. Okay? Something good. Something that sounds like you."
Your throat tightened.
He paused.
Then softer, "You don't have to kick so hard. She needs sleep."
The baby kicked again.
You laughed, pulling the phone back up. "She did it again."
Andrew was silent.
Then, very quietly, "She's trouble."
"She's your daughter."
"Exactly."
You grinned.
The call timer beeped faintly.
Your smile dimmed.
"How long?" you asked.
"Five."
You hated that sound.
Every time.
Even when the call was soft. Especially when it was soft.
Because soft made the end worse.
You looked down at the list beside the bed.
Mara.
Nora.
Willa.
Anna.
June.
A few others crossed out with tiny notes beside them.
Fruit, according to Andrew.
Shirt, according to Andrew.
Probably steals keys, according to Andrew.
You smiled despite the ache.
"We didn't decide anything," you said.
"No."
"Good."
"Good?"
"I don't want to decide while you're tired and I'm emotional."
"You're always emotional right now."
"I am carrying your daughter. Choose your next words carefully."
"I said right now."
"Still dangerous."
He made that almost-laugh sound again.
Then he said, "I like talking about it."
Your heart softened.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Names?"
"Her."
You closed your eyes.
"Oh."
"The room. The ducks. The way she kicks. The names." His voice lowered. "All of it."
You pressed your palm over your stomach.
"Me too."
"Makes her real."
"She is real."
"I know." He paused. "More real."
You understood.
You always did with him, even when the words came out sideways.
"She's very real over here," you said. "She's currently using my ribs as personal property."
"She gets that from you."
"My ribs?"
"Taking over."
You laughed softly.
"I love you," you said.
The words came out suddenly.
Too full.
Andrew went quiet.
Then, "I love you."
You blinked hard.
"And her," he added.
Your throat closed.
"Yeah," you whispered. "She knows."
"Tell her anyway."
"I will."
The timer beeped again.
"One minute," he said.
You curled slightly around the phone, like you could keep the call from ending by making yourself smaller around it.
"You need to sleep," he said.
"I will."
"Drink water."
"I did."
"Again."
"You're so bossy."
"You like it."
"Unfortunately."
Another tiny almost laugh.
Then silence.
Neither of you wanted to spend the last seconds on jokes.
You stared at his empty side of the bed.
"Andrew?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm glad she's yours."
He stopped breathing.
You heard it.
The sudden quiet.
The words had slipped out before you could soften them. Before you could make them easier for him to hold.
But you didn't take them back.
You meant them.
Every part of them.
When he spoke, his voice was rough.
"Baby."
"I am," you said. "I'm glad."
The line crackled.
For a second, you thought he might not answer.
Then he said, very quietly, "Me too."
The call clicked off.
No goodbye.
No soft ending.
Just silence.
You lay there for a moment with the phone still pressed to your ear.
Then you lowered it slowly.
The bedroom settled around you again.
The fridge hummed downstairs.
The wind moved against the windows.
His side of the bed stayed empty.
But your hand was warm where it rested over your daughter.
You picked up the notepad from the nightstand and looked at the maybes.
Some pretty.
Some sweet.
Some safe.
None of them certain.
Not yet.
You added one more line at the bottom.
Not a name.
Just a note.
Something good.
Then you set the pen down, tucked the phone beneath your pillow, and curled carefully around the shape of your daughter beneath your ribs.
The baby shifted once, slow and sleepy.
You smiled into the dark.
"Don't worry," you whispered. "We'll find you."
And somewhere far away, behind concrete and wire and locked doors, Andrew Cody went back to his bunk with a list of names folded into the pocket of his prison shirt.
Mara.
Nora.
Willa.
Anna.
June.
He lay awake longer than he should have, staring at the ceiling and mouthing each one silently.
Trying to imagine a little girl answering.
Trying to imagine a future where he got to call her in from the yard, buckle her into a car seat, tell her not to climb things the way her mother did.
None of the names fit perfectly.
Not yet.
But for once, that did not scare him.
For once, maybe felt less like uncertainty.
More like time.
More like the life waiting for him outside was still saving him a place.
Andrew turned onto his side and tucked the list beneath his pillow.
Before he closed his eyes, he thought about your voice in the dark.
I'm glad she's yours.
His throat tightened.
He put one hand over the folded paper beneath his pillow.
And for the first time all night, he let himself believe his daughter's name would find them when it was ready.
━━ ⋆ . 𐙚 ̊ . jack abbot x morgue tech!reader ; after your shift, you go upstairs to the er looking for jack and you run into a few of your boyfriend's coworkers, they bring to your attention just how large jack abbot really is ━ 4.2k
field trip ⋆ . 𐙚 ̊ . to THE MORGUE
By the time you finished shift change down downstairs, the hospital had already begun its slow transition from night to morning. The morgue never changed much regardless of the hour.
The fluorescent lights still hummed overhead with the same dull persistence they had at midnight. The air stilled smelled faintly of antiseptic and cold metal and the industrial cleaner the day shift janitors liked to use too heavily.
The prep tables remained clean and pristine despite the three autopsies that you had preformed. It was peaceful for lack of a better word. But upstairs, however, the hospital would be just beginning to wake up.
The emergency department at six in the morning was an entirely different beast than the morgue tucked neatly beneath it. This place moved fast even when exhausted.
The whole floor pulsed with motion and noise and overstimulation.
You hated it.
Don't mistake your dislike for the environment for the dislike of the people inhabiting it. You wouldn't say you were friends with the ER staff, but you were on chit chatting terms with a lot of them since beginning dating Jack. But the sheer amount of everything put you especially at unease.
Too many voices, too many bodies darting from one side of the ER to the other, and that meant too many opportunities for someone to accidentally touch you in passing.
Which is why you usually stayed downstairs until Jack came to get you. That had become your routine somewhere along the line. Most mornings, by the time you clocked out and gathered your things, Jack was already leaning against your desk in the morgue office with that perpetually exhausted look on his face and a coffee in his hand.
Then the two of you would leave together before either of your brains fully registered another twelve hour shift had passed.
This morning, however, he hadn't shown. You were a little disappointed but you weren't outrageously upset about it. You knew that Jack got held up all the time and while this meant you would have to brave the ER again, it wasn't his fault.
Trauma cases sometimes came in unexpectedly, shift hand off lasted longer when it was busier than usual, and you knew that Robby had a tendency to trap Jack into talking about things that didn't have anything to do with the hospital. Like his new on again, off again situationship with Noelle Hastings from social work.
So after a few minutes, you simply slung your bag over your shoulder, grabbed your water bottle, and made your way upstairs. The elevator ride alone nearly convinced you to turn around.
By the time the doors opened onto the ER floor, the department was already in full swing. Phones rang somewhere in the distance. Someone laughed too loudly near the nurses’ station. A monitor beeped insistently from one of the trauma bays, while an exhausted nurse muttered something under her breath about needing a Red Bull.
You immediately regretted coming up here.
Keeping your head down, you slipped towards the break room near the back hallway, careful not to drift into anybody's path. The last thing you wanted after twelve hours underground was to become collateral damage in the organized chaos of emergency medicine.
You set your things down carefully on the small table inside the break room before leaning your head just barely out the doorway. To the left sat the employee lockers and a supply alcove. To the right was the command desk, where everyone eventually flocked and housed the patient boards.
Jack stood there with Robby and Dana, one hand braced against the edge of the counter while the other rested loosely on his hip.
Even from across the department, you could easily see the exhaustion that sat heavily across his shoulders.
The dark scrub top stretched across his back whenever he shifted slightly, and the dark wash cargo pants he wore instead of scrub bottoms sat low on his hips beneath the hem of his shirt.
You couldn't hear from where you were, but you could see Robby's mouth moving and Dana's wholly unimpressed look. You can only imagine what they were talking about. Jack, meanwhile, looked like a man mentally calculating how quickly he could escape the conversation.
Whether he saw you immediately when you entered the ER or simply felts your stare, you didn't know, but his head turned after a moment.
His eyes landed on you instantly and his whole expression changed, annoyance discarded and replaced with pure unadulterated affection. The change was small enough that most people wouldn't have noticed it. But you spent more time staring at Jack Abbot's face than most, so it was easy for you to spot.
Jack's brows lifted slightly before he brought his hands together in a quick apologetic and his mouth formed the word sorry from across the room. You smiled at him despite yourself. He glanced down at his watch before holding up five fingers.
You nodded once. His mouth curved with something guilty and fond all at once before his expression returned to what it was before he saw you and he turned back towards Robby. It was almost comical how fast the stoicism settled over his face again like armor sliding back into place.
You watched him for another moment longer than you probably should've. Long enough to notice the slight tension around his jaw. Long enough that you begun to wonder if his prosthetic was bothering him after being on it all night and then forced to stand there while Robby prodded him for dating advice.
Long enough that the clap against your back caught you completely off guard and nearly sent your soul directly out of your body. You startled violently. "Oh my god—"
"Morning, Morgie."
You turned to find Trinity grinning at you like she'd just caught you with your pants down and your hand in the cookie jar. Dennis lingered behind her with the distinct energy of a man who already regretted participating in whatever conversation was about to occur.
You exhaled slowly, trying to calm your pulse. "Hi, Dr. Santos."
"You headed out?" she asked, a mischievous look in her eye.
"Trying to," you answered honestly.
Trinity barely acknowledged the response. She leaned casually against the doorway beside you like the two of you were old friends instead of occasional workplace acquaintances who primarily exchanged polite nods in passing.
You had known people like Trinity your entire life. Loud people, you mean. People who filled silence immediately and naturally. People endlessly willing to push boundaries just to see what would happen. That wasn't to say you didn't like her.
If anything, you suspected under different circumstances you could probably even be friends. Unfortunately, friendship required social energy you often did not possess after working nights in basement with dead people.
Still, you tried. If not for your sake, then for Jack's. These were his coworkers and you were his girlfriend, you were bound to run into them more often than not, so a good relationship was paramount in your opinion.
"How are you doing?" you asked politely. She had ignored the question entirely, opting for her own line of questioning. "So," she started, eye bright with mischief already, "you and Abbot are like a thing, right?"
You stomach dropped. "What?" Never in a million years did you think that was going to be her question.
Dennis looked like he wanted the floor to open and consume him whole. Trinity, meanwhile, looked absolutely delighted with herself. "Oh, come one," she said. "You guys are not subtle."
You blinked at her.
You genuinely had not realized that people knew. You and Jack were not actively hiding your relationship persay. The two of you just simply hadn't announced it. You didn't exactly have a social circle to update, and Jack was not the type to stand in the middle of the ER making declarations about his personal life.
But apparently none of that really mattered.
Apparently the entire hospital had functioning eyeballs. Before you could figure out how to respond to that, Trinity continued. "But I gotta ask," she said lowering her voice slightly despite the wicked grin still pulling at her mouth, "is he packing? Because that man walks like it's heavy."
Your brain stalled completely.
Packing? Walks like it, what? Those were only some of the thoughts running through your head. You frowned in confusion. "What?"
Trinity stared at you, disbelieving. "You know," she waved her hands slightly as if that would suddenly make you understand what she was referring to.
"No," you admitted slowly, "I actually don't."
For one horrifying second, you genuinely thought she was talkng about his prosthetic. You eyes flicked instinctively toward Jack again. He shifted slightly near the desk, probably trying to relieve pressure from standing too long.
Concern immediately sparked in your chest. Was his leg hurting him?
"Santos," Dennis whisper hissed, scandalized, "you cannot ask people stuff like that."
"What?" she asked. "I've been catching print for the last hour. I'm curious!"
Now you were even more confused. What did that even mean, catching print? Surely she wasn't referring to his prosthetic. You didn't have the greatest view of his leg as it was obscured by the other, but even so it was very difficult to notice it under his cargo pants even under the right circumstances.
"Catching what?" you asked.
She blinked at you incredulously. Dennis covered his face with one hand. "You don't know what that means?" she asked.
"Should I?"
In hindsight, the grin that spread across Trinity's face then should have terrified you, but all you felt was embarrassment beginning to creep up your neck. "Oh my god," she breathed. "Okay. Wait."
Before you could react, she stepped closer beside you and pointed subtly towards the command desk. You followed her gaze automatically. Jack still stood talking with Robby and Dana, completely unaware he was currently the subject of discussion.
"I'm confus—"
"Wait for it," Trinity interrupted.
Jack shifted his weight to his good leg, trying to relieve some of the pressure. You noticed immediately because you always noticed when he was compensating with his good leg after a long shift. You eyes dropped instinctively toward the prosthetic, mentally cataloguing the stiffness in his posture and the slight adjustment of his hips.
Beside you, she groaned dramatically. "Higher," she muttered.
Your brows furrowed but you did as you were told and slowly your gaze dragged upward. Past the heavy line of his thigh. Past the dark wash cargo pants that stretched tighter from the weight shift. You finally understood as your gaze landed on his crotch.
Oh.
Oh.
Your entire body stilled because now that you saw, there was no way for you to unsee it. The fabric across the front of his pants had pulled taut enough to reveal the unmistakable outline of him beneath.
It wasn't obscene or at all intentional. But it was incredibly, horribly noticeable once pointed out. Your stomach dropped directly into hell. Which is exactly where you felt you were. Was it getting hot in here?
It wasn't like this was new information to you. It wasn't like you hadn't seen him naked plenty of times before. It was quite the contrary. You knew exact what Jack looked like beneath his clothes.
You knew the weight of him in your palm, the way his hands gripped your hips when he lost control, you knew the vulgar things that came out of his mouth when he got worked up enough.
This was different. This was public.
This was your boyfriend standing in the middle of the emergency department discussing hospital operations while his coworkers apparently conducted active investigations into the outline of his dick.
Another reason you hated the ER, pointless conversation about topics that were better left unspoken.
And to make matters worse, Jack clearly had no idea. Because you knew that had Jack been turned on right now, his neck would be flushed under his stubble, his fists would flex unconsciously, his shoulders would tense.
Instead he remained entirely relaxed, still focused on whatever Robby was saying. Meaning that it was simply him. Your face went hot enough to physically hurt. Beside you, Trinity looked seconds away from tears from how hard she was trying not to laugh.
You couldn't speak.
You couldn't breath.
Trinity watched your expression transform in real time and absolutely lit up with satisfaction. Because not only had she succeeded in getting her answer, she had effectively embarrassed the life out of you.
"There it is."
Your eyes remained locked on Jack against your will. Because now that you noticed, your brain seemed insistent on replaying memory after memory. Dear God.
Had it always been that noticeable?
You felt mildly sick and somehow even sicker knowing Trinity was watching you realize it. "I, um, have nothing to say on the matter." She finally broke and a loud laugh burst out of her before she slapped Dennis on the shoulder.
"Come on, Huckleberry," she cackled, still grinning wildly. "We've ruined Morgie's morning enough." Then she simply walked away. Leaving you standing there in the break room doorway, staring at your boyfriend across the ER.
You almost didn't answer the door.
The thought had crossed your mind somewhere between your bed and the kitchen island, sometime after you'd buried yourself beneath your comforter and convinced yourself that if you ignored the problem it would eventually disappear.
Unfortunately, simply not answering the door wouldn't make everything alright again, because Jack wasn't actually the problem.
The problem was you.
It was how Jack made you feel.
Jack was thoughtful and kind.
The sort of man who noticed when you skipped meals, remembered your favorite takeout order and worried when you took the bus home when he was supposed to drive you.
The sort of man currently standing in your apartment hallway balancing enough food to feed a small family. You chewed nervously on your lip for a moment as you stared through the peephole.
You hesitated opening the door but ultimately unlocked the dead bolt and pulled open the heavy door. "Jack?" you questioned.
The second the door opened, his attention settled on you. "Hey, pretty girl."
The greeting came naturally as if it had been your name forever rather than just for the last few months. His gaze moved over you quickly but it didn't feel invasive or scrutinizing. You could tell he was looking for signs of the sickness you had told him you'd suddenly come down with.
"Can I come in?"
You didn't really understand why but with those four words, your guilt doubled. Your stomach lurched as you stepped aside without argument. "You didn't have to do all this."
"Yeah, I did," he muttered.
He leaned his crutches against the kitchen island as he began to pull out the various food items.
The apartment suddenly felt smaller with him inside it, and it wasn't because his large frame took up most of your kitchen. His broad shoulders seemed to take up more space than physically possible. But more importantly, when he was here, it felt warmer and homey. Jack made your tiny studio feel different simply by existing in it.
"You look better than I expected."
You could tell the statement was carefully curated. Meant to reassure himself of your state but not as to blatantly say I knew you were lying when you said you were sick.
So you did what you do best in these situations. You doubled down. "I told you it wasn't serious," you explained.
"Mhm." The hum could have meant absolutely anything and the different possibilities were making your head spin.
You watched him continue unpacking the food. Container after container appeared. Then you also noticed the drink carrier and the large water bottle he pulled out from under his arm.
"I didn't know what sounded good," he explained. "So I got options."
You stared. "Jack . . ," you trailed.
"Breakfast sandwich. Turkey club, incase you were thinking lunch and chicken noodle, if you're feeling nauseous." Another container joined the lineup. "Hash browns, too."
"Jack, thats too much."
"I know you forget to eat sometimes and I am almost ninety nine percent sure that's what's making you feel sick." He finally glances over at you. "So please. Eat."
Your chest tightened because there it was again. That awful problem. The caring and the concern. The complete inability to stop looking after people.
You had spent the entire bus ride home feeling ridiculous. Now you felt ridiculous and guilty. A terrible combination, especially when it came to you.
"You sure your head's the only thing bothering you?" Your eyes snapped upward.
Jack had settled on to the couch now, crutches leaned against the coffee table as he pulled off his prosthetic. Then leaned back against the cushions with the exhausted posture of a man who had spent twelve hours standing.
He tilted his head back and rolled his neck. His legs spread as he shifted further into the couch. Your eyes gravitated towards his thighs and for the first time, you noticed he was wearing gray sweatpants. You immediately looked elsewhere.
"I'm just tired," you said quickly, averting your eyes by any means necessary.
"Baby, you've been tired before." His voice remained calm, very matter-of-fact. "This is different," he continued.
You cursed yourself for letting this silly situation spiral like this. You cursed yourself for letting him in the door and most of all, you cursed yourself for being so damn readable.
He had been in your apartment for all of ten minutes and he had already noticed the change in your behavior. Very Jack Abbot of him and very much the bane of your existence.
You groaned loudly, "Oh my god, I'm acting weird."
"A little." You hadn't expected him to agree with you so outright, so your face fell a little when you heard his words. Jack immediately softened. "Not bad weird. Just a little off."
The apartment fell quiet. You looked away. Suddenly finding everything else more interesting. The outside city noises. A dog barking somewhere down the street. The soft hum of your ancient refrigerator.
"Honey?"
"Hm?" You respond but you definitely don't look towards him.
"Tell me what's going on."
You continued to stare stubbornly at the floor. If you didn't answer maybe he'd forget. At least that's what your were foolish enough to think. Unfortunately for you, Jack Abbot possessed the patience of a man who spent his life talking terrified patients through terrible situations.
Silence didn't scare him. It merely encouraged him to wait longer. When you sill didn't answer, he sighed. A change in tactics was in store for you. "C'mere."
You blinked, confused, "What?"
"Your shoulders are practically touching your ears." He tipped his chin towards the couch. "Sit down," he ordered.
"I don't think—"
"Sit."
His command wasn't malicious or harsh. It wasn't even particularly forceful. Yet somehow you found yourself crossing the room anyway. He shifted immediately to make space for you. The moment you sat down, he maneuvered you until your back was facing him and his hands settled on your shoulders. You nearly folded in half at the feeling.
"Oh my god."
"I told you." His thumbs worked slowly through the knots gathered at the base of your neck. You hadn't noticed how tense you'd gotten until this moment. How every muscle in your body had tightened up in your fucked up sense of self preservation.
But as his hands continued to work over the area, the more you relaxed and in more ways than one. The problem was that Jack's hands felt entirely too good. The problem was also that Jack himself felt entirely too good. The problem was definitely not helped by the gray sweatpants and the fact that you were still very much in the proverbial doghouse you had put yourself in.
"You're tight as hell," he mumbled and a strangled sound escaped before you could stop it. Jack froze, one eyebrow raised. "Okay, seriously. What is going on?"
You immediately covered your face as heat flooded your cheeks. "Hey." A hand squeezed your shoulder. "Come on, baby. We talked about communicating, it's important to me."
You groaned into your hands. "Ugh, it's so embarrassing. I don't wanna tell you."
"Well, now you have to," he teased. "It's just me."
"Exactly my point. It's you." You swear if he lifted his eyebrows any further they'd brush his hairline. "Alright, now I'm definitely confused."
You debated lying again. Considered a different excuse, something wholly more believable. But again, Jack had that way about him, which somehow made honesty inevitable.
"While I was waiting for you," you finally muttered, "Santos came up to me and she said—"
Jack straightened immediately. "What? If she crossed a line, I'll have a talk with her."
"No." You sat upright and turned to him so fast his hands slipped from your shoulders. "No. That would definitely not help."
"Okay," he conceded, though suspicion still laced his voice. "Can you tell me what she said?"
You sighed. "She was just being . . ." You searched for the appropriate description. "Being Santos."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"No, I know." You looked down at your hands. "She asked if we were together."
Jack frowned. "Does that make you upset? That people know?"
"No." You almost shout, the answer coming immediately. You softened slightly. "I mean, I know we weren't necessarily hiding it. I just didn't realize how many people knew."
Understanding flickered across his face. Then disappeared almost as quick as it had appeared. "Alright," his voice gentled. "Then what's got you so twisted up?"
And there it was.
This was the moment. The point of no return.
You stared at the wall. Then the floor. Then your hands. Anywhere except Jack. Finally, mortified beyond belief, you mumbled, "she asked if you were 'packing.'"
The silence that followed was immediate.
"What?"
You squeezed your eyes shut, mentally preparing for your next words. "And then she said—and I quote—'he walks like it's heavy.'"
For one glorious second, Jack looked too stunned to react. Then he laughed.
It wasn't a cruel laugh or mocking. Just genuinely surprised. Which somehow made it worse. "Oh my god." You buried your face in your hands. "You're laughing at me. I knew this was stupid."
"No, baby." He was still smiling but he was shaking his head and waving his hands. "I'm not laughing at you."
"You literally are," you said bluntly because he really was still laughing.
"It's just kinda silly," he confessed.
"Silly?" you repeated. "What about this is silly?"
Jack shook his head. "So what if people noticed?"
"You don't understand."
"No. I do."
The corners of his mouth twitched. "So what if you noticed? Ain't nothing you haven't seen before."
"Jack."
"What?"
His expression remained entirely too innocent. "It's the truth."
"Jack!" Your panicked voice earned another laugh. You groaned dramatically. "Stop laughing."
"I'm trying." He absolutely was not. The smile gave him away.
"C'mere." His hand found your wrist before you could retreat again. The gesture was gentle and familiar. "Baby." The amusement faded slightly and he continued, "you're acting like this is some terrible thing."
"It is terrible."
"Why?"
"You weren't there."
"No." His thumb brushed across your skin."Sounds like I missed a hell of a conversation though," he joked.
You glared. The effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that he looked unbearably fond. “I just—" you exhaled. "I know what you look like, okay? Obviously. But that's private."
Your hand waved vaguely between the two of you. "That's ours."
For the first time since arriving, Jack's smile softened completely. "Then suddenly she points it out and now I'm standing there staring at your pants in the middle of the ER like some kind of pervert."
"Oh."
You narrowed your eyes. “What do you mean oh?”
The grin returned instantly. "Are you jealous other people noticed?"
"No!"
You stood without really thinking it through. This was how it was with you. Your instinct was always flight over fight. Unfortunately, Jack caught your wrist. "Nope." The grin widened. "You started this conversation. You're finishing it."
"I hate you."
"No, you don't."
His eyes lingered on your face. "You're embarrassed because Dr. Santos pointed out something you already spend a lotta time thinkin' about."
Your mouth dropped open.
"I do not."
One eyebrow lifted. You immediately looked away. Which told him everything he needed to know.
His laugh returned. "Hey." Your eyes remained firmly fixed on the opposite wall. "Pretty girl."
"Jack, that's not helping."
"You know I like knowing you think about me like that, right?"
Your face somehow became hotter. "Stop."
"What?" His expression remained shameless. "Sweetheart, we've slept together. More than once."
"Please stop talking."
"There is nothin' embarrassing about bein' attracted to me." You stared. Jack shrugged. "Frankly, I'd be a little concerned if you weren't."
Despite everything. Despite the embarrassment. Despite Trinity Santos. Despite spending over two hours making yourself miserable, a laugh escaped.
The moment it did, Jack's expression softened.
"There she is."
You rolled your eyes. The words settled somewhere warm despite your best efforts to resist them.
And the knot that had been sitting in your chest since sunrise finally began to loosen.
Hey, sorry I’ve been MIA. In the last two weeks have been busy. A fibro flair—still in action BTW—my birthday, and my idiot pharmacist forgetting to fill all my meds. That was a fun pain in the ass. But I am sitting down tonight with my blanket and finishing the next chapters. ETA probably Saturday. 🤞🏻
working nights in the morgue means you’ve gotten used to being overlooked. quiet ones always are. but dr. jack abbot notices you anyway.
he notices your careful hands, your lowered eyes, the way you fluster when he says your name. and somewhere between late-night charting, fluorescent lights, and exhausted confessions whispered in empty hallways, jack realizes he wants something he probably shouldn’t.
CHAPTER ONE — NINE ⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅ completed ❪ 18.9k words ❫
⊹ ࣪ ˖ act one follows the reluctant tension-filled evolution of jack abbott and a quiet, anxious morgue tech. it begins with exhaustion, mutual annoyance, and an unfortunate first impression. it ends ( temporarily ) in confessions, broken rules, and hands brushing too long by the trauma bay sink and a single earth shattering kiss. best read in descending order for understanding!
⟢ cold and predictable
⟢ cold storage
⟢ a cold shoulder
⟢ too cold to touch
⟢ cold cut
⟢ caught in the cold
⟢ cold hands
⟢ left out in the cold
⟢ let in from the cold
CHAPTER TEN — NINETEEN ⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅ ongoing ❪ tbd words ❫
⊹ ࣪ ˖ act two follows post-confession. you’ve admitted too much. jack’s heard too much. and yet neither of you knows what to do with the silence that follows. you keep pretending. he keeps showing up. the hospital keeps getting hotter. best read in descending order for understanding!
⟢ heat source
morgue notes - 001
⟢ heat on contact
morgue notes - 002
⟢ after the heat
⟢ heat in your hands
⟢ the sound of heat
morgue notes - 003
⟢ held in heat
⟢ heat flash ( coming soon )
⟢ heat bitten ( coming soon )
morgue notes - 004
⟢ heated words ( coming soon )
morgue notes - 005
⟢ heat of the moment ( coming soon )
morgue notes - 006
morgue notes - 007
morgue notes - 008
˚₊‧ 𐙚 THE APPENDIX ⊹ ࣪ ˖
⊹ ࣪ ˖ NIGHT SHIFT — MORGUE NOTES
˚₊‧ 𐙚 *part one
˚₊‧ 𐙚 part two
˚₊‧ 𐙚 *part three
˚₊‧ 𐙚 *petnames from jack
˚₊‧ 𐙚 *petnames for jack
a little revamp for the ggc masterlist + a few reminders
one : the taglist is disbanded temporarily
two : the morgue notes are apart of the ggc "canon" and are best read with their corresponding chapters. the appendix morgue notes can be read in any order and probably won't be referenced in the main story line
thank you all for reading and sticking around despite my hiatus 😞
I really fucking hated how that AI-generated picture spread, so I made this quick edit of Pope and Shawn like a week ago. Use the damn Photoshop instead of using AI, guys.
/ one / two / three / four / five / six / seven / eight / nine / ten / eleven / twelve / thirteen / fourteen / fifteen / epilogue /
summary: A beer. A pickup line. A bar bathroom. That should’ve been the end of it. Right?
notes: mdni 18+, sammy bryant x ob/gyn!baby mama!ofc, inadvisable ob/gyn behavior, strangers to one night stand to parents to roommates to lovers, slow burn but they’re having sex the entire time, idiots in love, takes place season 3 and on, shameless use of the accidental pregnancy trope, probable medical inaccuracies, inadvisable obgyn behavior, inaccurate medical procedures, mentions of childbirth and perineal tearing, previous infidelity, violence with hornets, izzy’s ex-husband (a warning all on his own), mentions of STDs, tammi (a warning all on her own), mentions of violence, mentions of blood, imagining this chapter with ron howard voiceovers à la arrested development, izzy is a lil spicy in this one
Jail. Straight to jail. Men who still made that joke actually deserved prison time.
Izzy was grateful for the mask covering half the expression that crossed her face as her hands stilled over the rather brutal third-degree perineal tear she was stitching. Her eyes dragged slowly upward from blood and sutures to the man responsible. The goofy little fuck stood grinning beside the bed like he’d just delivered the punchline of the century instead of helping create the medical catastrophe currently laid open under fluorescent lighting. His wife looked miserable, face pinched tight with lingering pain and exhaustion, hospital gown slipping off one shoulder while she awkwardly balanced their newborn against her chest. Meanwhile, her husband stood there with two perfectly functional, entirely empty arms.
Useless.
Though honestly, what else had Izzy expected from a man who’d asked one of the nurses—while his wife was actively breathing through contraction pains—where he could set up his Xbox in the room?
She tied off the last stitch, clipped the suture, and finally leaned back with a slow exhale through her nose. Her eyes lifted over the top of her mask toward the new mom who had just spent twenty-nine miserable hours in labor so Seinfeld over here could workshop material beside the bed. The poor thing looked mortified on his behalf. She tried to offer Izzy an apologetic little smile around the baby tucked against her chest, but it dissolved into another sharp wince before it fully formed.
“Sure,” Izzy said flatly, peeling off one glove with a snap. “How small do you need it?”
His grin faltered instantly. Beside him, his wife let out a startled snort that clearly hurt the second it escaped her, face scrunching as she hissed through her teeth. “Oh my God,” she mumbled weakly, somewhere between horrified and delighted.
Izzy shrugged, utterly unrepentant as she dropped the gloves into the bin. “Sorry. Apparently we’re all making inappropriate jokes during active medical procedures today.”
One of the nurses at the warmer choked on a laugh loud enough she had to disguise it as a cough. The husband blinked at her for a long second, like he couldn’t decide whether he’d just been insulted or spiritually humbled. “I— that’s not—”
“No, no,” Izzy cut in, already adjusting the blankets over his wife’s legs with far more gentleness than she’d afforded him. “Don’t let me interrupt. I’m fascinated. Tell me more about the vaginal tailoring package you think we offer here at Sacred Heart?”
The man fell silent, face going impressively red beneath the fluorescent lights. Brutal? Maybe. But she’d had to pull a power cord out of the wall before the first thing this man’s child heard was Halo: Reach, and if Izzy had a dollar for every time she’d heard that joke in a delivery room, she’d be able to put both of the twins through college without putting so much as a dent in her finances.
She softened as she turned back toward his wife, helping guide her shaking legs back together beneath the blankets with practiced care. “All done, babe,” she said gently. “You doing okay?”
The woman nodded immediately, ponytail bobbing against the pillow even as the grimace tightening her face betrayed her. “Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Thank you, Doctor Collins.”
Izzy snorted softly as she stripped off her gloves. “Honey, you do not have to thank me for coochie repair. That is quite literally what I’m here for.”
That finally earned another tired laugh from the new mom, quieter this time. Izzy tossed the gloves into the trash before glancing back at her.
“You need anything? Water? Juice? Food? The cafeteria makes a dangerously good brownie.” She rubbed absently at the small bump tucked beneath her scrubs and added, “Trust me. I’d know. These two have kept them in business over the last few weeks.”
The woman laughed softly, exhaustion pulling the sound thin around the edges as she looked back down at the tiny baby sleeping against her chest. “That sounds amazing, honestly.”
“Yeah?” Izzy smiled despite herself, sneaking another glance at the squishy little face tucked beneath the striped hospital hat. The baby had the deeply offended expression all newborns seemed born with that Izzy could never get enough of, squishy cheeks mashed against her mother’s skin, tiny mouth hanging open in sleep. “I got you. Brownie, extra ice water, probably enough snacks to concern your nurse.”
“No such thing,” Jenn called from the warmer. The L&D nurse offered the new mom a conspiratorial grin. “I know where they hide the good stuff.”
Izzy smiled and straightened with a quiet groan that came from both pregnancy and crouching over a delivery bed for the better part of an hour. God, if this was fourteen weeks, she didn’t even want to think about what the coming months were going to look like. Then she looked at Dad. He immediately looked wary. She snapped her fingers once and pointed toward the door. “Sounds like you’re up, Dangerfield.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Brownie run. Chop chop.” She made a little shooing motion with both hands. “Your wife just pushed an entire human being out of her body. The least you can do is return with chocolate.”
The woman laughed again, softer this time, while the man pointed at himself like he couldn’t believe he was being medically assigned errands.
“Yes, you,” Izzy said. “Go be useful. Reach will still fall when you return.”
Dad scurried out of the room with the kind of speed usually reserved for medical emergencies and men who realized too late they’d been annoying the obstetrician holding sharp instruments.
Was it her most professional moment? Absolutely not. But Izzy had also found that no new mother particularly minded the bossy OB, especially when that bossiness was aimed exclusively at everyone else in the room—especially mother-in-laws. The second the door shut behind him, the room seemed to settle. Quieter now. Softer. Just the steady monitor beeps, the rustle of blankets, and the tiny sleepy snorts from the baby curled against her mother’s chest.
The woman glanced back up at Izzy, her gaze catching on the curve beneath her scrubs before she smiled faintly. “How far along are you?”
Izzy’s hand drifted instinctively to her stomach again. It felt like the slope of it had appeared overnight, stretching the fabric of her scrubs tighter every morning she put them on. She’d known twins would make her show early—all her multiples patients did—but it still caught her off guard every time she passed a reflective surface. Logically, most of it was probably bloating. Emotionally, however, she already felt enormous.
“A little over three months,” she answered.
“You and your husband must be so excited,” the woman said softly, smiling down at the baby sleeping against her chest.
My baby daddy slash roommate who has another baby on the way with my former patient? Oh yeah. We’re thrilled.
The thought came automatically now, dry and sharp out of habit more than anything else. A few weeks ago it would’ve landed like a bruise pressed hard enough to ache for hours afterward. Instead, something warmer fluttered low in her chest. The same strange little pull she’d felt during that ultrasound when two heartbeats had appeared on the screen instead of one. The same feeling that had crept up on her the other night when she’d half fallen asleep against Sammy on the couch and his hand had found her stomach without thinking, thumb brushing lightly over the curve beneath her shirt like it already belonged there. Like they already belonged there.
The throwing up hadn’t stopped though. Last night, she’d thrown up because of the clicking sound her night retainer made when she put it in. Then Sammy threw up because she threw up. So she threw up again, because he was throwing up. So that was significantly less magical.
Izzy glanced down briefly at her belly before looking back at the woman and smiling faintly.
“We are,” she said quietly.
Her pager went off a second later. Izzy closed her eyes briefly before tugging it off her waistband and glancing down at the screen.
V. Ack — Need u downstairs ASAP
She exhaled through her nose. ER triage. Which usually meant somebody had waited approximately seven business days too long to come to the hospital and was now attempting to have a baby somewhere deeply inconvenient while an attending encouraged a terrified intern to take the reins on a whole ass entrance to the world.
Fantastic.
She clipped the pager back onto her scrubs and turned toward the bed again, expression softening immediately when she looked at the new mom. “I’m gonna get out of your hair and let you get some rest, okay?”
The woman smiled back, already looking half asleep herself now that the adrenaline had started wearing off. The baby shifted faintly against her chest with a tiny squeaky sigh. Izzy adjusted the blanket one last time over her legs before patting her gently on the shin. “You kicked ass, by the way. Seriously. Twenty-nine hours and a third-degree tear? That’s warrior behavior.”
The woman laughed weakly. “I don’t feel very warrior-like.”
“None of you ever do,” Izzy said knowingly. “Congratulations again, mom.”
Izzy smiled softly and reached out with one finger, rubbing gently over the baby’s tiny back. “And happy birthday to you, sweet girl,” she whispered. “Thanks for letting me come to your party.”
The newborn fussed immediately in response, little smushed face twisting up before opening into an enormous yawn that seemed comically too big for her body.
“Oh, big yawn,” Izzy murmured fondly. Then she slipped out of the room, pulling the door shut quietly behind her.
Labor and Delivery was calm for the hour. It usually was in the afternoons, the chaos dipping briefly into something almost peaceful for a few hours until the evening hit and poor over-exhausted parents would start calling for help. The halls stretched long and sterile white beneath fluorescent lights, carrying only the occasional squeak of sneakers, the soft cry of a newborn somewhere down the wing, or grown-up tears, for that matter. Izzy stood there for a second in the quiet, and without thinking, her hand found her stomach again.
She’d been doing that more and more lately. Absentmindedly. Constantly. Violet had noticed the first time almost immediately, of course. One raised eyebrow from across the nurses’ station while Izzy stood reviewing charts with her thumb brushing slowly over the soft little swell beneath her scrubs.
“You’re doing it,” Violet had said.
“Doing what?”
“The pregnant thing.”
Izzy had flipped her off without even looking up. Now she caught herself doing it everywhere. While charting. While driving. While standing in front of the fridge deciding if string cheese counted as dinner. Apparently, she was becoming one of those pregnant women now, because the hand-to-belly contact was nonstop lately. She was practically petting herself like she was a golden retriever.
Especially around Sammy. His hand had started finding her stomach too, almost hesitant every time, like he still wasn’t entirely sure he was allowed to touch her there. Usually followed by the same quiet question against her shoulder or temple while they sat together at night under the same blanket in a totally platonic, roommate way.
“When can we feel them?”
And every time, she’d give him the same answer while her thumb brushed lightly over his wrist. “A few more weeks.”
He’d nod seriously like he understood, then five minutes later insist he’d felt something anyway beneath her skin. She never really had the heart to tell him that she was ninety percent sure he was emotionally bonding with trapped gas.
“Maybe this’ll be our room,” she told them softly, thumb brushing over her belly again as she started down the hallway.
The thought hit her suddenly as she passed the recovery rooms she’d walked through a thousand times before. Same whiteboards. Same awful floral artwork someone in administration probably thought looked calming. Same recliners she’d watched exhausted husbands fold themselves into while their wives slept beside bassinets at three in the morning. Only now she caught herself looking at them differently. Trying to picture Sammy there. Trying to picture herself there.
She slipped into the elevator just before the doors closed behind a set of bright-eyed grandparents stepping off with an obnoxiously large bouquet of blue flowers and a matching helium balloon screaming HE’S HERE! in giant glitter letters. One of them nearly tripped in excitement hurrying toward the nurses’ station. Izzy smiled faintly to herself as the doors slid shut. Then she leaned a hip against the wall and rubbed slow circles over the pale blue fabric stretched beneath her gray fleece.
“Or maybe not,” she amended quietly to her stomach. “The recliner in there kind of sucks. Maybe we’ll get the one down the hall and be nice to your dad.”
Oh man, that sounded weird. The word sounded strange to her ears. Not wrong, because biologically speaking, it wasn’t. But something about it panged in her chest in a way she couldn’t quite put a name to. She guessed she was just going to have to get used to hearing it. Not that she really minded. The elevator hummed softly as it descended.
Izzy stared at her reflection in the brushed metal doors for a moment, hand still resting low against the curve only she really noticed yet. It was strange, sometimes, how quickly this had started feeling real. Not in the terrifying abstract way it had at first. Not just lab results and ultrasounds and logistical nightmares. Real in tiny flashes—Sammy reaching for her in his sleep. Two heartbeats echoing through a dark exam room. Talking to them when she was alone without even thinking about it anymore.
The elevator doors slid open, and Izzy barely managed a single step before nearly walking directly into Violet.
She stopped short immediately. Violet was already standing there waiting for her, teeth worrying hard against her bottom lip, one hand clutching a thick envelope tightly enough to wrinkle the edges. She rocked faintly on her heels beneath her pink scrubs, eyes too bright in a way Izzy recognized instantly.
Uh oh. That was Violet’s tell. That little anxious sway usually came right before she said something guaranteed to ruin Izzy’s day.
Izzy narrowed her eyes immediately. “What?”
“What do you mean what?” Violet asked too quickly, innocence so fake it practically had subtitles.
Izzy stared at her flatly. “I mean what.”
The elevator doors started sliding shut behind her again, and Izzy automatically stuck an arm out to bump them back open without looking away from Violet’s face. A horrible realization hit her.
“Ah, fuck,” she groaned immediately. “Do I have to do another ER C-section? Damn it, you know I hate those.” She was already pushing back out of the elevator now, irritation building momentum. “They don’t keep their stuff where I keep my stuff. And Danielson is the day attending today, and I don’t have the patience to listen to him tell everyone how he biked here today. Can’t they get her upstairs first—?”
“No, no, no,” Violet cut in quickly, grabbing her forearm before she could fully launch into the rant. “No emergency surgery.”
Izzy eyed her suspiciously for another long second. “Okay,” she said slowly. “So not an ER section.”
“No.”
“Placenta previa?”
“No.”
“Shoulder dystocia?”
“Nope.”
“Oh god, did someone try to freebirth in the valet line again?”
“That happened one time.”
“And I still think about it. Every day.”
Violet was still clutching the envelope, thumb worrying at the flap now instead of answering her.
Izzy’s eyes narrowed immediately. “Why do you look like you’re about to ask me to help you bury a body?”
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do.” She pointed at her. “You’ve got guilt posture.”
“I don’t have guilt posture.”
“Then why,” Izzy asked slowly, “are we downstairs right now being downstairs people when we are very obviously upstairs people?” She gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. “Our entire ecosystem is up there. Babies. Epidurals. Tiny hats. Why are we in the wild?”
Violet looked at her for a long second before asking carefully, “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
Izzy’s eyebrows shot up immediately.
“The fact that there’s both is deeply concerning.” Her eyes dropped to the envelope again. “How bad is the bad news?”
Violet winced. “Well…”
“Violet.”
Violet blurted it out all at once. “Ryan’s here.”
Fuck me. Izzy felt her stomach drop so fast it practically hit her shoes. The fluorescent hallway suddenly felt about ten degrees hotter.
“…Ryan?” she repeated slowly.
“Your Ryan.”
“Nope. Not my Ryan,” Izzy corrected instantly, disgust immediate. “That man is a community problem.”
Before Violet could answer, Izzy looked past her toward the reception desk across the lobby, eyes skimming over the cluster of visitors and patients milling around like one of them wasn’t immediately identifiable from orbit.
There he was. The bitch ass himself. Ryan stood near the sliding front doors holding a cheap bouquet wrapped in crackling plastic while flirting with the receptionist like he was physically incapable of behaving normally in public. Tall enough to tower over everyone around him, broad shoulders squared, chest puffed out with all the subtlety of a bird performing a mating dance on Animal Planet. The receptionist laughed at something he said. Izzy watched him lean casually against the counter like he hadn’t detonated multiple lives in the last year alone.
God. What the hell had she ever seen in that man?
Objectively, she knew the answer. Ryan was charming in the same way fireworks were charming—bright, loud, exciting for a few seconds before something inevitably caught fire and ruined a household. Unfortunately, twenty-four-year-old Izzy had apparently seen that and gone yes, absolutely, let me climb directly into the explosion.
Current Izzy felt significantly less enthusiastic. Current Izzy wanted to throw things at him. Like bombs.
She rolled her eyes so hard it nearly qualified as a medical event before turning back toward Violet. “What the fuck does he want?”
Violet shrugged carefully. “He said he needs to talk to you.”
“Oh, I’m sure he does.” Izzy laughed once, humorless. “Did he finally contract a medieval plague? Is that why we’re in the ER?” Her eyes flicked back toward him suspiciously. “Ooo, wait! Did something large and preferably venomous bite him?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
Across the lobby, Ryan said something else to the receptionist that made her laugh again, his grin widening immediately like he was being rewarded for it.
“He looked nervous,” Violet offered carefully.
“Good.” Izzy watched Ryan lean a little harder against the reception counter, just enough to flex tattooed biceps at the poor receptionist. “I hope it’s terminal.”
“Izzy—”
“I hope he has dysentery,” she continued flatly.
Violet sighed. “Izzy…”
“I don’t care that he’s still friends with your traitor of a husband, Vi. I’m allowed to wish pioneer diseases on him.”
“My husband is not a traitor.”
“He plays poker with Ryan voluntarily. That’s treason.”
Violet rolled her eyes. “Please. Aim bigger. Hope for a brain-eating amoeba.”
Izzy snorted. “It would starve.”
Across the lobby, Ryan’s attention finally snagged on them. His whole posture shifted immediately as he straightened away from the desk, grin flickering across his face the second his eyes landed on Izzy.
The idiot waved at her. Actually waved. Like they’d run into each other at a farmer’s market instead of after he’d detonated their relationship like a controlled demolition project.
Violet turned to look too, then scoffed softly. “It would.”
Ryan jerked his chin toward her with that same easy grin that once upon a time would’ve made her stomach flip embarrassingly fast. Back then, it had felt impossible not to get pulled into it. Like when he looked at her, she was the only person in the room worth seeing. Except she hadn’t been. Izzy knew that now. Hell, she didn’t think she’d ever really been anything more than the option standing closest to him at the time.
The realization didn’t hurt the way it used to anymore, but it still left behind something hot and ugly enough to make her want to commit light acts of domestic terrorism. Specifically against his truck. God. She should’ve let her brother put that hornet nest in there when the offer still stood.
Ryan started toward them, the heels of those old worn boots clicking against the polished hospital floors. Boots he’d owned the entire time she’d known him. Boots that usually came with some stupid line about “you can take the man outta Texas…” before he’d grin at her like he’d invented comedy itself. Izzy bit the inside of her cheek hard as she watched him get closer. God, she hated that she still recognized the sound of his footsteps.
“You better give me that good news right now,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth to Violet.
Violet snapped back into motion immediately. “Right—okay. Your free cell results came back,” she said quickly. “Both babies are very low risk for everything. Like, boringly healthy. No concerns, no flags, everything looks great. Yay for sex strangers with good genes!”
That stopped Izzy cold for half a second. “…Oh.”
“Yeah,” Violet said, shoving the envelope into her hands. “Everything’s in there. Full report, sex markers too if you wanna know. Or you can let me have a cake made for you and Sammy! Offer still stands!”
Izzy took it automatically, attention splitting awkwardly between the envelope and the increasingly large ex-husband approaching them from across the lobby. The universe really loved multitasking her emotional crises. Violet, meanwhile, apparently decided this was the perfect moment to become deeply attached to Izzy’s unborn children.
She stepped forward, planted both hands gently on Izzy’s stomach, and chirped, “Hi babies!”
Izzy looked horrified. “Vi—”
“Glad your chromosomes are behaving,” Violet continued warmly to her abdomen.
Ryan was close enough now to definitely hear this.
“Oh my God. Stop.”
“Auntie loves you so much!” Violet grinned, completely unrepentant, then kissed her hands and patted her belly twice before pivoting smoothly toward the elevator. “Okay, bye babies!”
“You coward—”
“Don’t commit a felony!” Violet called as the elevator doors opened behind her.
“Hey, Vi!” Ryan called after her, all dimples and easy familiarity like they were old friends meeting up for brunch instead of whatever the hell this situation was about to become.
Violet pointed at him without even turning around. “Burn in hell, Satan.”
Then she slipped inside and vanished, leaving Izzy standing there clutching prenatal test results while Ryan closed the final few feet between them with flowers in hand and entirely too much confidence for a man she’d once considered releasing hornets onto.
The last few steps felt entirely too close. Ryan stopped in front of her with that same dumb grin stretched across his face, meeting her flat stare like this was some normal little reunion instead of the first time they’d stood this near each other without lawyers present in months.
The last time he’d been remotely within arm’s reach of her had been across a polished conference table in a mediator’s office while two legal representatives pretended not to listen to them argue over assets and betrayal. Now he leaned forward slightly, like he was actually considering trying to hug her. The familiar smoky cologne hit her a second before he did, and Izzy immediately took a step back.
Absolutely the fuck not.
Ryan hesitated, thankfully getting the message before she had to physically fend him off with hospital equipment. Izzy’s gaze dropped instead to the bouquet in his hands. Cheap rainbow-dyed daisies wrapped in loud crackling cellophane. And somehow the idiot hadn’t even bothered to remove the little card still jammed between the flowers.
GET WELL SOON, GRANDMA!
How thoughtful.
She looked back up slowly, expression remaining perfectly flat compared to the grin still pulling at his mouth, a little crooked beneath the dark stubble shadowing his jaw. At one point, she must’ve found him handsome. Objectively, she supposed she understood it. Bright blue eyes. Tanned skin. Broad shoulders. That stupid crooked nose broken too many times from bar fights and training exercises gone wrong and a square jaw. The kind of face people trusted immediately despite every warning sign attached to it.
She guessed she must’ve loved it once, considering the seven years of marriage—and the two years she spent desperately trying to have his baby because some ugly little part of her had hoped a child would finally make him stay still long enough to love her correctly. Her perfect, handsome Ryan.
Now? Now all she saw was a six-foot-three migraine in a Grunt Style T-shirt that her children were having a visceral reaction to, given the bile creeping up her throat.
“Hey there, gorgeous.” He said it easily. Casually. Like he was walking through their kitchen again after rolling in late from a shift, damp hair curling at the ends after showering off the smell of someone else’s perfume in a truck stop bathroom before coming home to her to kiss tears off of her cheeks as she handed him yet another negative pregnancy test.
Izzy rolled her eyes immediately and shoved the envelope into her jacket pocket. Oh, fuck all the way off. So this was the game today, apparently.
“Don’t,” she said flatly. “What do you want?”
Ryan’s grin softened around the edges, leaning into something almost boyish. Manipulatively so. “A man can’t come see his wife just because he misses her?”
“Ex-wife,” Izzy corrected automatically. His mouth twitched.
“And not even legally that unless you finally signed the divorce papers I sent you two months ago.” Her eyes dropped meaningfully to the bouquet in his hands. “Those are some weird-looking documents.”
Ryan glanced down at the flowers like he’d forgotten the stupid things were there. To be fair, judging by the aggressively cheerful GET WELL SOON, GRANDMA! card still poking out between the dyed daisies, he probably had.
“These are actually for you,” he said, lifting the bouquet slightly. “Your favorites, for my favorite girl.”
Ugh, barf. Izzy bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper. Her favorites were dahlias. Not that it had ever mattered enough for him to remember. They’d only been in each and every one of their wedding arrangements. Still, she smiled pleasantly—pleasantly enough that Ryan visibly relaxed for half a second—and took the bouquet from his hands with exaggerated grace.
“Oh,” she said lightly. “They’re pretty.”
Then she turned and dropped them directly into the nearby trash can.
Ryan stared at her. “Really, Iz?”
“I’m allergic to daisies. And don’t call me that.”
She started walking away before he could answer, already hearing his boots fall into step behind her almost immediately. “Since when?”
Izzy sighed heavily through her nose without slowing. “Since the entire time you’ve known me, Ryan.”
That shut him up for at least three seconds. A new personal record, as far as she was concerned.
Izzy turned toward the cafeteria without inviting him to follow. At least if she was going to be harassed by her ex-husband before noon, she could maybe get mozzarella sticks out of it. Her stomach lurched painfully at the thought.
Really, you two? No mozzarella sticks? We are going to run out of foods at this rate.
Ryan followed anyway, boots echoing behind her across the tile. Naturally. They stepped into the cafeteria, fluorescent lights humming overhead while a tired cashier restocked chip bags with the energy of someone one minor inconvenience away from quitting publicly. Izzy grabbed a tray from the stack harder than strictly necessary and headed straight for the salad bar before she did something professionally compromising, like claw Ryan’s eyes out in front of witnesses.
“Can we talk?” he asked behind her.
“Unless you’re carrying signed divorce papers in those boots, there’s nothing to talk about.”
“Iz—”
“No, seriously.” She picked up a pair of tongs and aggressively moved cucumber slices around without actually taking any. “I already sent the paperwork. Already signed—with flags and highlighted marks to make it even easier on you. You could have saved yourself the drive and just faxed it to my attorney like you were told to do.”
Ryan exhaled a quiet laugh through his nose. “You always get meaner when you’re hungry.”
“Then I must live in a state of constant malnourishment.” She snapped. “Get to the part where you tell me what you want so I can tell you to leave.”
He trailed beside her as she moved down the food line, expression softening in that way that used to work on her before she developed self-respect and hypertension. “I already told you why I’m here—I miss you, baby. Can’t that be a good enough reason?”
She finally looked over at him then, expression cool as she tightly gripped the tray to give her hands something to do besides committing felony assault with serving utensils. She was starting to understand Sammy’s little daily shouting match phone calls she could hear him having on the back patio more and more.
“No,” she repeated. “Get to it, Ryan.”
Ryan rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly looking significantly less charming and significantly more like a man realizing he’d walked into the wrong conversation.
“Some lady came by the house this week,” he said. “Put a for sale sign out front.”
Izzy reached into the cooler for a bottle of lemonade without looking at him. “Mmhm. ‘Some lady’ would be Diane—my realtor.”
He stared at her. “What’s that about?”
“Because it’s for sale,” she answered simply. “I’m selling it.”
Ryan blinked. “What? You’re selling the house?”
“That’s what ‘I’m selling it’ usually implies.” She finally looked over at him then, expression flattening further at his confusion. “My attorney informed your attorney a month ago.”
“I haven’t talked to my attorney in like—”
“Yes,” Izzy cut in dryly. “That has become painfully clear.”
Ryan frowned now, following after her while she moved farther down the line. “Why would you sell it? We loved that house.”
That one almost got her. Not enough to hurt anymore, but enough to irritate something deep in her chest.
“I did love that house,” she said finally. “Which is why I bought it. For us. Remember? Big backyard. Extra room we kept pretending would eventually be a nursery. But now I need a new house. Preferably, one that you and your mistress don’t live in.”
His mouth opened slightly.
“And unfortunately,” she added, “HGTV has yet to invent the ‘remove ex-husband from property’ renovation package.”
Ryan exhaled heavily. “Ashley moved out.”
Izzy snorted. Of course that’s all he took away from that. “Smart girl.”
“Okay, then where am I supposed to go?” Ryan asked, finally sounding irritated. “You’re seriously just gonna sell the house out from under me?”
Izzy shrugged lightly, staring down at the little rack of salad dressings like ranch versus balsamic required deep emotional consideration.
“I genuinely don’t give a fuck what you do. Hence the dissolution of our marriage.”
Ryan blinked at her.
“No, seriously,” she continued calmly. “You are a thirty-seven-year-old man with a VA loan, government benefits, and the survival instincts of a cockroach. Figure it out.”
“Izzy—”
“You managed to coordinate multiple affairs while maintaining a full-time career and a marriage. I have complete faith in your ability to locate an apartment, Ryan.”
Ryan rubbed both hands over his face now, visibly losing steam. “Look,” he sighed. “I know I fucked up.”
Izzy looked over immediately. “You’re gonna need to narrow that down dramatically.” His eyes closed briefly. She snorted. “See? That’s the issue right there.”
“I’m serious.”
“And I’m listening.” She leaned against the counter slightly. “Which apology tour stop is this? Ashley? The bartender? The waitress from Carlsbad? That stripper who really, really liked you? Or are we circling back to the emotional affair with your brother’s wife because you’re feeling nostalgic? Let’s not forget the tech from Salem’s vet!”
“That’s not fair.”
“Oh, shut up.” She laughed once, sharp and humorless. “You don’t get to pull the wounded cowboy routine now.”
Ryan stepped closer anyway, reaching for her hand out of instinct more than confidence this time. His rough calloused fingers wrapped around hers briefly.
“Iz,” he said quietly. “Just come home.”
There it was. The same line. The same voice. The same pathetic little tug at her heart he’d used every single time before.
I love you. I’ll do better. Come home.
Say what you would about Sammy’s whole fiasco, but at least he had the self-respect to stay gone the first time.
Ryan squeezed her hand lightly. “I love you. You know that.”
Izzy ripped her hand away from him like he’d burned her.
“I’d rather shit in my own hands and clap,” Izzy said plainly, already turning away from him with her tray balanced against her hip. “I have a patient at eight centimeters, so if we could wrap this up before somebody starts crowning, that’d be fantastic.”
“Izzy, come on.”
She kept walking. Ryan followed.
“I just—” He let out a frustrated breath behind her. “I don’t understand why you can’t forgive me.”
Izzy stopped so abruptly he nearly walked into her. Slowly, she turned back around. Heat climbed up her throat, so hot and immediate and intense that she almost laughed at the audacity of it.
This motherfucker.
For a second she just stared at him, genuinely speechless that those words had managed to leave his mouth with confidence. Like he’d been unfairly denied customer service instead of detonating nearly a decade of marriage through repeated, deliberate choices.
“You don’t understand,” she repeated slowly.
Ryan spread his hands helplessly. “I said I was sorry.”
“Oh, well, shit,” Izzy snapped. “Why didn’t you lead with that? Somebody call the courts. Pack it up, everybody! Ryan said sorry!”
Heads turned briefly from nearby tables.
“You cheated on me for years,” she continued, voice low and shaking now. “Not once. Not some drunken mistake. Years. Repeatedly. Creatively, honestly.”
“I know I fucked up—”
“Fucked up? You looked me in my face while I was tracking ovulation cycles trying to have your baby and still went out and slept with other women.” That finally shut him up. Izzy laughed once, sharp and furious. “And now you’re standing here asking why I can’t forgive you?” She pointed at him with the hand not gripping her tray. “You should honestly be grateful I haven’t poisoned you.”
Ryan exhaled through his nose like he was trying very hard to stay calm. “Do you think that might be a little dramatic?”
For half a second, the cafeteria noise kept going—plates clinking, coffee machine hissing, someone laughing near the drink station like nothing in the world was on fire. She slammed her tray down against the counter hard enough that the plastic rattled.
“You gave me fucking chlamydia, Ryan!” Izzy hissed, her eyes darting over his shoulder, scanning the cafeteria for any hint of attention. A couple of nurses lingered by the coffee station, laughing over something trivial, blissfully unaware. Good. The last thing she needed was to become the cautionary tale of the week. She snapped her gaze back to him, dropping her voice to a razor-edged whisper. “After fucking your teammate’s wife on my goddamn couch!”
“So?” he shot back, hands flying up in exasperation like she was the one being unreasonable. “I told you! You got the antibiotics! You’re fine now!”
Oh, she was going to fucking kill him. She was actually going to kill him. She was going to rip this LEGO person of a man apart with her bare hands in the middle of the hospital cafeteria. But noooo. Her therapist would tell her that line of thinking was unproductive. So instead, she just stood there in the cafeteria noise, looking vaguely homicidal. Her jaw tightened so hard it ached.
“That’s not the fucking point, dipshit, and you fucking know it!” The whisper came out sharp and vicious, her composure slipping just enough that she had to drag it back in with a breath through her nose. Great—now she was whisper-screaming in front of a salad bar. She wasn’t sure where this ranked on her list of personal lows, but it was somewhere between “humiliating” and “rock bottom,” she decided. Not dead last, but close enough to still earn a trophy.
Ryan scoffed, shaking his head like she was overreacting, like this was all just another argument he could brush off and wait out. That, more than anything, snapped the last thread of her patience. God, hadn’t that been how he treated everything in their fucking marriage? Like if he just stood there and stared at it long enough, it would just magically undo itself before he had to deal with it?
“So excuse me for not signing over the house that I fucking paid for just so you can keep playing house for free,” she continued, jabbing a finger into his chest. His expression shifted then, irritation flickering into something tighter, more calculating, but she didn’t let up. There he is, she thought. “The agent’s bringing her photographer by on Friday. Listing goes up Monday.”
“Izzy—”
“Don’t,” She cut him off clean, no room left for negotiation, for charm, for whatever half-assed excuse he’d been about to spin. “You need to be out by Thursday. End of story. And if you need it explained to you again, call my attorney. At least then someone’s getting paid to deal with you.”
She snapped up her plate before she could reconsider and stepped around him, dumping it onto the cashier’s scale with a sharp, irritated huff. The girl behind the register didn’t even blink, just tapped a few buttons like this was any other lunch rush transaction. For a fleeting second, Izzy thought maybe something she’d said had finally cracked through that thick, elephant-hide skull of his and he would crawl back into whatever crack in the Earth’s mantle he’d clawed his way out of.
She got about five blissful seconds of that illusion. Then his footsteps fell right in behind her as she swiped her card.
Izzy closed her eyes for half a second, her grip tightening around the thin strip of plastic before she yanked it back out of the reader. Jesus Christ. She wanted to throw something at him. Not a tray, not a fork—something with a little more… pizzazz. Explosives, preferably. Something that would leave a perfectly Ryan-shaped scorch mark on the tile like a cartoon character blasted away by dynamite.
“I just don’t understand why you have to sell it,” he said from behind her, like the concept itself was deeply confusing, like the words I need to sell this house so I can buy a house hadn’t been said in plain English multiple times.
Slowly, she turned to face him, leveling him with a stare that was usually reserved for… well, him. And Sammy last week when he’d scoffed and confidently informed her she was wrong about IUD implantation, because that stood for improvised explosive device, and they don’t put bombs up there—obviously. But that had more just made her pause to set down the fork she’d been holding to rub her face and sigh than consider if she could pull off wearing orange for the rest of her life.
“I’m going to say this one more time,” she said slowly, like she was explaining it to a very small, very dumb child. “Because clearly repetition is the only language you understand. I am selling my house so I can buy a new one. Without you in it.”
Preferably with the father of the babies cooking inside of her in it, but that part felt strictly on a need-to-know basis. Ryan blinked at her like that was somehow new information. He opened his mouth, which she immediately stuck a hand out in front of, making a noise like she was redirecting a dog.
“Ah! You don’t get to cheat on me, give me an STD, and then stay in the house I paid for like it’s some kind of extended vacation rental,” she continued. “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
His jaw shifted, like he was gearing up to argue again, to twist it, to minimize it—but she was already shaking her head.
“No,” she cut in, holding up a finger before he could get a word out. “We are past the part where you get to talk.”
Behind her, the cashier awkwardly slid her receipt across the counter. Izzy grabbed it without looking, her attention locked entirely on him.
“Thursday,” she reminded him. “Pack your shit. Be gone.”
She turned away from him, plate still in hand, only to immediately regret it. The sharp, acidic smell of the vinaigrette she’d chosen specifically because she hadn’t gagged at the sight of it hit her wrong this time—too strong, too sour—and her stomach lurched in protest. Izzy swallowed hard, lowering the plate away from her face, breathing carefully through her mouth as she scanned the cafeteria for a trash can. Cool. Great. Perfect. She could have just thrown five bucks directly into the trash and saved herself the headache.
“Fine,” she muttered under her breath as she started walking. A hand hovered briefly over her stomach, more instinct than thought. “You win. In-N-Out for the third day in a row it is, you little monsters.”
She’d barely made it three steps.
“Is this because of that cop you’re fucking?”
Izzy slowed mid-stride, the words hitting like a slap she refused to react to. Her teeth sank into the side of her tongue, hard enough to taste blood, and she closed her eyes for a second.
Oh, this is fun. This is exactly how I wanted today to go.
She turned back around slowly, dragging her tongue across her teeth before she spoke, her expression smoothing into something dangerously calm.
“Excuse me?”
“James told me,” Ryan snarled, like he’d just unveiled some grand betrayal. Izzy closed her eyes again. Thank you, Violet’s husband. Orange was starting to look better and better.
Izzy took a slow breath. Frankly, she was one more sentence away from either professionalism or violence, and everyone present should pray for professionalism.
“Okay,” she said evenly, “here’s what’s going to happen.”
Ryan frowned slightly. “Iz—”
“Nope.” She lifted a finger. “No interrupting. You used up your interrupt budget during the chlamydia section.”
That shut his mouth for half a second.
Good.
She kept going.
“What I do,” she said, “and who I spend my time with, is none of your business.”
Ryan scoffed quietly. “That’s not—”
“It is now,” she cut in. “Congratulations. You’ve been demoted.”
His jaw tightened. Izzy didn’t care. She was more focused on getting upstairs to get her keys so she could go eat her weight in fast food in the silence of her car.
“It hasn’t been your business for a while,” she continued. “I am not coming back. I am not reconsidering. I am not having a ‘big emotional talk in the rain’ moment where I suddenly remember the good times and forget you detonated our marriage like you had orders to do so. The house is being sold. If you somehow missed the twenty-seven emails, texts, and legal notices about that, I admire your commitment to selective literacy.”
Ryan’s expression shifted. “You can’t just—”
“Oh, I can,” she said lightly. “And I did. If you have questions, you can ask Alan Carmichael at Winger & Associates. Eight to five. He gets paid by the hour to explain reality to you.”
Ryan stared at her like he couldn’t decide whether to be offended or impressed. Izzy turned toward the elevator.
“And if you show up here again,” she said over her shoulder, tone almost conversational as she stabbed at the call button, “I will have you trespassed.”
Ryan kept walking after her. That, more than anything, made something in Izzy’s brain short-circuit.
“So you are fucking him?” he asked again, like he needed confirmation for a case he was building in his head.
Izzy stopped so abruptly she almost spun on her heel. Then she laughed. A bright, incredulous little sound that had zero warmth in it whatsoever. Fine! Fine. Let’s be crazy then. Her capacity for maturity was only dwindling in each waking moment she had to be near this stupid, stupid man.
“Oh my God,” she said, bouncing once on the balls of her feet like she physically couldn’t decide between laughing and committing a felony. “You are unbelievable.”
Ryan frowned. “Just answer the question.”
“Oh, I’m going to.” She turned fully to face him, eyes bright in a way that promised consequences. “Yes. Yes. I’ve been fucking him for weeks,” she continued, hands starting to move now, gesturing like she was presenting evidence in court. “We fucked last night. We fucked this morning. Honestly, I’m impressed I even have time for hobbies anymore.”
Ryan’s jaw ticked. “Izzy—”
“Oh, no! You asked!” she said, holding up a finger. “And you know what, Ryan? It’s great. You know why? Because I don’t have to beg him to pay attention to me like it’s a chore. I don’t have to fake orgasms, or convince him to go down on me. I don’t have to pretend I’m asleep to get out of mediocre sex that I don’t even want.”
Well, that part—unfortunately—wasn’t entirely accurate. She’d done exactly that at least twice this week. Granted, she had a good excuse, with the whole crippling first trimester lethargy thing. She’d immediately felt guilty afterward and gone to find Sammy anyway like a disaster with legs, but that was between her and her poor life choices. Details-schmetails, though. Izzy straightened again, exhaling sharply through her nose.
“So unless you are going to finally sign the papers,” she called over her shoulder, “or you’re wearing a little paper hat and about to ask if I want my fries animal-style, go the fuck away and do not contact me again.”
Behind her, Ryan stopped.
“Fine,” he snapped.
And because she was, first and foremost, a grown up, she responded with, “Fine.”
Nothing more mature than a matching set of mutual fuck yous dressed up as language, right?
“I’m leaving,” he spat, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Fucking great!” She hissed. “Go!”
“Last chance, Iz,” he called, turning away.
“Leave, Ryan!” She practically growled.
Ryan held her stare like he expected it to turn into something else. Then, he turned and walked off. Izzy watched him go for exactly one second too long, like her brain was still waiting for the argument to continue out of habit.
Then she kicked at the empty space he’d been occupying, cursing under her breath. You know—like a grown up. She straightened up, turning back towards the elevator doors, unclenching and clenching her fingers as she tried to take deep breaths. Sammy just got phone calls. And texts. Noooo, she got the ex that just showed up.
“Unreal,” she muttered, turning on her heel.
She was still muttering by the time she made it to the elevator.
“Unbelievable. Actual clinical insanity. I should qualify for worker’s comp after that conversation—”
The doors slid shut. Izzy stabbed the button for the fourteenth floor hard enough that her nail bent backward slightly.
“Fuck—”
That did not improve her mood. The muttering continued all the way past floor three.
Past five.
Past eight.
Then she froze mid-rant, and slowly looked down.
Her keys were clipped to her waistband. Had been clipped to her waistband the entire fucking time. Izzy stared at them in silence for one long beat before leaning her forehead against the elevator wall with a dull thunk.
“You know what,” she whispered to herself, “maybe I am being punished by God specifically.”
The elevator dinged cheerfully and began changing direction. Her muttering did not cease. It continued through floor six. Through five.
It continued when the elevator stopped again and the cute orthopedic surgeon from two weeks ago stepped inside—the one who had asked her to dinner and had smiled at her like she wasn’t visibly one inconvenience away from becoming folklore. He glanced over.
Izzy was still quietly hissing, “I hope his dick falls off. I hope it just detaches.”
The surgeon blinked once.
“…Rough day?”
Izzy pointed at him vaguely without lifting her head from the wall. “Don’t get married.”
He laughed nervously.
The muttering continued. It continued as she stomped across the parking garage toward her car, shoes squeaking aggressively against concrete. Continued while she unlocked the door. Continued while she hauled herself into the driver’s seat hard enough to rock the suspension slightly. And it absolutely continued when she slammed the car door behind her and finally screamed, paying no mind to the Honda idling in the spot next to hers.
Just one loud, furious—
“AAAAAAAAAUGH!”
—into the privacy of her vehicle before she stopped, raked her hands through her hair, took a breath, threw up her hands and muttered, “I’m fine.”
Izzy took another long breath through her nose, gripping the steering wheel hard enough to make her knuckles ache.
Okay.
Fine.
Whatever.
Ryan was gone. She was going to get fries. Maybe a milkshake, if Ducky and Bee were feeling generous, and pretend this entire interaction hadn’t shaved six months off her life expectancy. Maybe she’d even call Sammy and share the life-changing news printed on the paper still shoved into her pocket. Or maybe just because hearing his voice might make her feel a tiny bit less horrendous.
She shoved the car into reverse, and backed out of the parking spot. Her tires hadn’t even fully cleared the white lines before her pager shrieked. Izzy slammed on the brakes hard enough to make the tires squeak against the concrete.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—”
She snatched the pager off her waistband.
L&D CHARGE: patient in A-12 is in transition
Izzy stared at it for one long, exhausted second. Then let her head fall forward onto the steering wheel with a dull thunk.
Of course.
Of course.
The tires squeaked again as she threw the car back into park and jerked the wheel hard enough to slide herself back into the spot crooked. She killed the engine and shoved the door open again in one violent motion, muttering under her breath the entire time as she stomped back toward the hospital entrance.
Fucking, Ryan.
Maybe she had been a little hangry.
In her defense, though, pregnancy had turned hunger into a full-contact sport.
At any given moment, Izzy was either experiencing the most aggressive starvation of her natural life or staring at a food she’d eaten happily twelve hours earlier like it was a biohazard scraped out of a drain pipe. There was no middle ground anymore. Just violent, unpredictable oscillation between feed me immediately or I’ll die and if that yogurt comes one inch closer to me I will burst into tears.
Honestly, it was probably alarming for the people around her. Especially Sammy. Poor guy had completely stopped trying to guess what she wanted after the grilled cheese incident last week. Now whenever she complained about being hungry, he just quietly started sliding different foods toward her across the counter like he was approaching a stressed zoo animal until something finally stuck.
Crackers? No.
Apple slices? Tasted too much like apples, but not in a good way.
Mac and cheese? Too wet. Will cry.
Chicken nuggets? Maybe.
String cheese? Suddenly life-saving. They were buying it in bulk.
And every single time, he accepted the verdict with the exhausted patience of a man defusing bombs professionally. That man deserved patience in return, even if he was technically half the reason she currently lived in a constant state of nutritional instability.
Ryan, however, did not.
Had she maybe been a little harsh? Sure. Maybe. Whatever. Who cared? Certainly not Izzy. She had cheese fries now.
The rest of the day dragged by in one long, exhausted crawl toward a Double-Double. Her patient in transition had barely made it through Izzy snapping gloves onto her hands before baby boy decided he had places to be and launched himself into the world like he’d personally paid for expedited shipping. Twenty minutes later, everyone was crying except Izzy, who had long since developed emotional immunity to delivery room tears unless someone actively coded in front of her.
The couple from that morning monopolized the lactation consultant for nearly two straight hours afterward. And honestly? Good for them. It wasn’t Izzy’s turn to become a dairy cow yet, but get that support for your tits, girlfriend. She fully intended to terrorize every lactation consultant in the building when her time came.
Violet, meanwhile, had spent nearly thirty minutes absolutely chewing her husband’s ass out over the phone for telling Ryan anything at all, which had personally healed several parts of Izzy’s nervous system.
At least until a giant bouquet and takeout from that little Thai place Violet liked showed up at the nurses’ station. Then suddenly Violet was smiling at her phone again like a woman experiencing the horrors of heterosexuality voluntarily. Though, to her credit, Izzy did watch her happily eat James’ peace treaty crab rangoons before immediately texting him that it changed nothing—he was still sleeping on the couch. Respect, honestly.
By the time night shift started filtering in with fresh coffees and suspiciously functional energy levels, Izzy was Done. Capital D. Frankly, she assumed that was how she’d ended up in her current situation to begin with.
Whatever.
Not her problem right now.
Right now, the only thing calling her name—or, technically, Ducky and Bee’s—was the In-N-Out she was absolutely demolishing one-handed behind the wheel.
Well.
That and the envelope currently burning a hole through her passenger seat.
Izzy glanced at it again at the next red light, immediately regretted it, and shoved half a fry into her mouth like carbohydrates could physically suppress curiosity. It wasn’t working.
When Violet had handed it to her downstairs, her brain had still been too flooded with fight-or-flight and homicidal ideation to fully process what was actually inside it. She’d just taken it automatically, tucked it under her arm, and moved on to surviving Ryan without catching a charge and embarrassing the cop living in her house.
But once the adrenaline wore off—and after a very long text message to her attorney detailing exactly why she wanted Ryan removed from the house by Thursday or launched directly into the sun—it had started creeping back in.
Twins.
Low risk.
Sex markers included.
The thought had haunted every quiet second of her day since. Between deliveries. While charting. While pretending to listen during shift change. Even while Violet dramatically ate crab rangoons and announced she was “still mad, but isn’t he just the sweetest?”
Every idle thought eventually circled back to the envelope.
To the fact that two tiny little people were currently floating around inside of her causing psychological warfare and cheese fry dependency. And apparently they already had names she didn’t know yet. Faces she couldn’t picture. Futures she couldn’t fully wrap her head around. Izzy tightened her grip on the steering wheel slightly, chewing slower now. The idea still felt strange in a way she couldn’t explain. Not bad. Just… huge.
Real.
Terrifyingly real.
Because finding out meant they stopped being abstract little gummy bear shapes on a grainy ultrasound screen and started becoming actual people she’d someday know. People who would eventually walk and talk and slam doors and maybe inherit Sammy’s inability to fold a towel correctly.
Or worse.
Her personality.
She and Sammy had talked about it. A lot, actually.
The sex of the babies had become a recurring topic over the last four weeks Sammy had been living in her house, eating her food, and sleeping in her bed on all the nights she conveniently forgot to remind him about their very official Tuesdays-and-Thursdays-only arrangement. Which, in her defense, was hard to enforce when he looked warm and sleepy and kept absentmindedly reaching for her in the middle of the night like she belonged there.
Names had been thrown around too. Most of them died immediate, horrible deaths. Every boy name she suggested apparently belonged to either a guy Sammy’s arrested or someone he’d once had to tase. Every girl name Sammy suggested somehow ended with, “Oh, no, absolutely not. I had a patient named that once.”
Her brothers were identical twins, too, which meant there was a very real possibility they could end up with a matching set of their own. And despite all her sarcasm and bitching and emotional support cheeseburgers, some soft little part of her found itself wondering every single time her hand drifted across her stomach who exactly they were becoming in there. Who they’d look like. Who they’d laugh like. If one of them would inherit Sammy’s stupid dimples. Or her temper. God help society if it was both.
The answer sat less than two feet away now in a grease-stained envelope on the passenger seat. And she couldn’t open it. Because she’d promised they’d do it together like an idiot. And of course, Sammy wasn’t back until late tonight, because he was busy dragging Nate to Castaic to get the rest of his shit.
So now she was stuck driving home beside the single most psychologically devastating envelope in the continental United States. Izzy glanced at it again at a stoplight, and then immediately looked back at the road.
Are you there, God. It’s me—Izzy. Can you cut a bitch a break?
But God would not, in fact, cut a bitch a break. Instead, her gas light flicked on. Izzy stared at the dashboard for a long second in exhausted disbelief before sighing so hard it fogged the windshield slightly.
“Of course,” she muttered.
She scraped a smear of sauce off the front of her scrub top with a fry and immediately ate the evidence, one hand steering while the other searched the road ahead for a gas station that didn’t look like the opening scene of a true crime documentary.
The sun was starting to sink behind the skyline now, bleeding foggy orange and bruised reds across the late November sky. More importantly, it meant her window for getting gas at a decent station before dark was rapidly shrinking before this became a wake up early and deal with it tomorrow problem.
Traffic crawled around her in miserable little bursts. And there was a Honda directly on her ass. Izzy changed lanes. The Honda changed lanes. She frowned slightly, glancing in the mirror.
“Okay,” she muttered around another fry. “Maybe back the fuck up before we both meet God today.”
The Honda lingered stubbornly behind her anyway, headlights bright in her mirrors. Izzy swallowed down the string of curses trying to climb their way out of her throat and adjusted her grip on the steering wheel instead.
Whatever. Fifteen more minutes. Then she’d be home. Back to her cat. A hot shower. And hopefully the untouched pint of Cherry Garcia she knew she had buried in the back of the freezer unless Sammy had gotten into it. And then eventually Sammy would stumble through the front door, late and exhausted, smelling faintly like cold air and soap and whatever godforsaken coffee sludge cops drank at this hour, and she’d make him open the envelope because she wasn’t sure she could do so without throwing up.
Izzy glanced down at the phone abandoned on her center console. Then back at the Honda in her mirror. Then at the gas gauge. Then back at the phone.
“…You know what,” she muttered, snatching it up. “Let’s get an ETA on your late arrival, shall we?”
She punched Sammy’s contact and switched lanes again, thumb tapping impatiently against the steering wheel while it rang. Once. Twice. Then—
“What?!” he barked into the phone. Izzy jerked slightly at the volume blasting through the speakers.
“Woah!” she said immediately. “Jesus Christ. Relax. It’s just me.”
A heavy sigh crackled through the line. She heard fabric rustling faintly, like he was dragging a hand down his face.
“Sorry,” he said after a second, voice rougher now. “I thought you were—doesn’t matter. It’s been… it’s been a long fuckin’ day.”
Izzy snorted softly at that, stealing another fry from the rapidly dwindling carton in her lap. “You and me both.”
Her eyes landed on the glowing Circle K sign a few blocks ahead and she debated whether the risk of gas station roulette outweighed the increasingly aggressive fumes currently powering her vehicle.
“You headed back from Casstank yet?” she asked.
“Yep,” Sammy answered tightly.
Izzy frowned slightly, eyes flicking briefly toward the dashboard display before back to the road.
“You alright?” she asked finally, the irritation drained out of her voice almost automatically when it came to him, despite her best efforts to maintain some semblance of emotional self-preservation.
“Yeah,” Sammy said. But the word came wrapped in a loud exhale that told her the exact opposite. Izzy’s frown deepened slightly.
“Okay…” she said slowly, not pushing it. The Honda behind her swerved into the next lane again, riding so close to her bumper in the process that Izzy threw a hand up instinctively.
“What the fuck is your problem?” she snapped at the mirror before looking back toward the road.
Then, because she was trying very hard to redirect this conversation somewhere less tense—
“Did your TV fit in the car?” she asked, reaching for another fry. “I can get the living room ready and get everything unplugged before you get ba—”
“No,” Sammy cut in sharply. The word cracked through the speakers hard enough to make her sit up straighter. “No, I didn’t. You wanna know why? Because she changed the fucking locks. On my fucking house, Izzy.” His breathing sounded heavier now, anger bleeding through every syllable. “I tried to get in and my own fucking key didn’t even fucking work.”
Izzy’s brows shot up. She straightened fully in her seat now, fries forgotten in her lap.
“Oh,” she said carefully.
The Honda was still there. Still hovering too close, but her attention had shifted completely now.
“She changed the locks?” she repeated slowly.
“Yep.”
“While you were gone?”
“Apparently.”
The laugh that left him then wasn’t really a laugh at all. Just sharp disbelief wrapped around fury. “Neighbors got to watch me stand on my own porch like a goddamn burglar, and of course, one of them called the fucking cops after I threw a rock through the window—.”
“You threw a rock through the window?”
“It’s technically my fucking window, Iz!”
She tipped her head, listening to him bitch under his breath as she flicked on the blinker, and shrugged. Honestly, she could understand the impulse. The first six months after she moved out, she used to call and have the power randomly shut off at the house just to inconvenience Ryan. Changed the security code every week too—usually to the phone numbers of girls she found in his phone. Divorce made you weird.
“Okay, crazy,” she said, turning into the gas station parking lot.
The Honda followed her in. It slid into a spot in front of the food mart, angled just slightly too intentional for her liking, while Izzy rolled up to a pump and slowed the car to a stop. She unbuckled, killed the engine, and let the sudden quiet settle.
“I’m gonna text my attorney,” she said into the phone, already reaching for her bag. “There has to be a rule against that. You can’t just change locks on someone’s house… right?”
Sammy made a low, exhausted sound on the other end but didn’t interrupt. Izzy paused, gaze still half on the Honda.
“…Anyway,” she added, “I’ve got a surprise for you when you get home too.”
On the other end of the line, Nate groaned loudly.
“C’mon, man,” he said immediately. “It’s on speaker.”
“Not like that,” she said, lowering her voice automatically, fingers brushing over the envelope sitting on the passenger seat like it had its own gravity. Izzy swallowed, suddenly aware of how loud the gas station felt even through glass and steel.
“I got our test results back,” she said.
The phone rustled on the other end—fabric shifting, a muffled curse, then Sammy’s voice changed, like he’d finally pulled it off speaker.
“Wait—both of them?” he asked, breathless in a way that didn’t match the earlier anger at all.
Izzy’s mouth softened despite herself.
“Both of them,” she confirmed.
“You—have you looked yet?”
She glanced down at the envelope again, still sitting there like it had been quietly ruining her entire day from a distance.
“Nope,” she said, almost gently. “Waiting for you.”
There was a pause on the line—something like a breath caught halfway between relief and panic.
“Okay,” Sammy said quickly. “Okay. I’m thirty minutes out. Just—wait for me, alright?”
Izzy leaned back in her seat, watching the gas pump flicker faintly in the reflection of her windshield.
“Yeah,” she said. “I will.”
“Are you home yet?”
She shook her head automatically before remembering he couldn’t see her.
“No,” she said. “Stopped for gas.”
“No,” Sammy said, firmer now. “Go home. I’ll take your car tonight.”
Izzy huffed a small laugh through her nose. She tugged her purse into her lap, digging through it for her wallet with one hand, the other tugging at the door handle. She lifted the hand holding her wallet slightly, eyebrows knitting together.
“I’m already here,” she said, glancing out through the windshield. “Besides, I’m like five miles from our place—”
“Don’t care,” Sammy cut in immediately.
“That whole area turns to shit the second the sun goes down,” he said, voice tight. “And you’re pregnant. Go home. I’ll go out tonight.”
“So it’s safe for you,” she said flatly, leaning back in her seat, “but not for me?”
“I’m the one with a gun, aren’t I?” he replied.
“…Touché,” she muttered. She reached over, tugged her door shut, and started the car again. The engine turned over with a low rumble.
“Fine, detective,” she said into the phone, shifting into gear. “I’m going home.”
There was a faint exhale on the other end—something like relief, still edged with leftover tension.
“Good,” Sammy said.
Izzy rolled her eyes, easing out of the pump lane. “I’ll see you in a bit, alright?”
“Alright,” he echoed. “See you at home.”
Before the call could fully end, Izzy caught Nate’s voice again in the background—amused, too loud. “Not your girlfriend, huh?”
“Shut up,” Sammy snapped immediately.
The line clicked dead. Izzy stared at her phone for half a second longer than necessary, then huffed out a quiet laugh through her nose.
“Idiots,” she muttered. She eased the car back out onto the main road. Too focused now on the envelope sitting like a weight in the passenger seat to notice the Honda slipping into traffic behind her.
By the time she turned onto their street, the sun had fully given up. Dusk settled over cracked asphalt and sun-bleached bungalows, porch lights flicking on one by one like reluctant participation trophies for surviving another day. Izzy pulled into the driveway and rolled forward until she hit her usual stop point at the end, leaving space behind her for Sammy’s truck.
Her door thunked shut behind her as she stepped out, the cool air hitting her face immediately. Somewhere down the street, a car pulled into a spot and cut its headlights, the brief flash reflecting off her windshield before disappearing. Izzy gathered her things from the passenger seat—bag, keys, a crumpled In-N-Out bag, and the half-finished vanilla milkshake she fully intended to destroy before Sammy got home. Then she shut the door with her hip and headed inside.
The house was dark when she stepped in, juggling her things under one arm, keys gripped in the other hand. Heavy paws thudded against the hardwood, collar bell chiming in the dark like the world’s most useless security system.
“Salem, if you start screaming at me I swear to—”
She didn’t finish. Because Salem immediately launched himself into her ankles like a furry missile and did exactly that.
“Okay, okay,” she muttered, nudging the door shut with her hip as Salem continued to aggressively remind her of her obligations as a pet owner. She kicked her sneakers off mid-step, not bothering to untie them like a civilized person, and followed the cat into the dark house.
“Relax, drama queen,” she told him as he wound between her ankles again. “You act like I abandoned you in the wilderness.”
She dropped her things onto the kitchen table. Salem immediately launched himself onto it with surprising determination for something that weighed approximately twelve pounds, and let out another offended yowl like he was issuing a formal complaint.
She poured kibble into his bowl. The second it hit ceramic, Salem went silent. Immediately. Like someone had flipped a switch. He started batting individual fish-shaped pieces out of the bowl one by one before dramatically crunching them like he was performing quality control on each bite.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered, watching him. “You were just starving to death five seconds ago.”
Salem did not respond. He was busy.
Izzy exhaled through her nose, rolling her shoulders back until something in her spine popped. Her eyes drifted without permission to the fridge. To the ultrasound photos held under the Stanford magnet she’d had since med school. To the small, grainy shapes frozen mid-becoming that Violet had happily labeled with arrows pointing to each fetus, announcing them as Ducky! <3 and Bee! <3, respectively. She stared at them for a moment longer than she meant to.
The envelope hit the counter with a soft, final tap. She didn’t open it. Instead, she stood there for a second, fingers hovering near it like it might bite.
“…Okay,” she breathed quietly to herself. She touched her belly, drawing small circles over her skin.
Izzy turned down the hallway on autopilot, already halfway into the mental checklist of scrubs off, shower, ice cream, pretend today didn’t happen.
She made it three steps before stopping in front of Sammy’s half open door. Inside, the bed was exactly what she expected: crumpled sheets, pillow shoved sideways, the general chaos of a man who could function in crisis but apparently lost all domestic competence the second he stopped actively using his brainpower to solve gang crimes.
She pushed into the room and grabbed the sheets in one practiced motion, stripping the bed clean and yanking everything into a tangled heap. It was Thursday, after all. Not like he was sleeping in here anyway. Her eyes snagged on a T-shirt draped over the end of the bed. She hesitated just long enough to regret noticing it, then shrugged. She stripped her scrub top off in the same irritated motion she used for everything lately and tossed it in. Bra followed. Scrub pants followed. She then snagged a pair of boxers that were probably clean and tugged them on.
Good enough, she figured.
Arms full, Izzy shifted the laundry against her chest and backed out of the room. In the living room, Salem let out a long, irritated yowl—low at first, like a warning, then climbing into something sharper before tapering off into a hiss.
“Yeah, I hear you,” Izzy called without looking up, shouldering the laundry room door open. She dumped the whole bundle into the machine.
“Whatcha see, bud?” she called over her shoulder, already fishing a pod out of the plastic container. “Another kitty intruder? You got beef with the neighbor cat again?”
She tossed the pod in, and hit start. The machine hummed to life. Salem answered with another hiss. She wiped her hands on her borrowed shirt and turned—
Something outside crashed. The sound made her spine go instantly alert before her brain even caught up. Izzy jolted. A second bang followed, sharper.
Salem exploded into motion. Black fur streaked down the hallway like a panicked shadow as he bolted straight for her bedroom and vanished underneath the bed with zero hesitation, zero dignity, and maximum survival instinct.
“What the fuck?” Izzy muttered.
She slammed the lid shut hard enough that the machine rattled, then was already moving. Bare feet slapped against the floor as she jogged toward the living room, already running through a mental checklist without permission—trauma bag in the trunk, airway kit, gloves, she still had a fresh pack of gauze—it had been a while since her ED rotation, but she still knew the basics.
People sped down this street all the time. Drunk drivers, teenagers, delivery trucks cutting corners like physics didn’t apply to them. It was only a matter of time before she ended up playing doctor in her own front yard.
Izzy’s hand was already on her phone, 911 half-dialed, thumb hovering over call like muscle memory had taken over before her brain had fully caught up. Then she shoved the curtains aside, expecting to find metal twisted around metal. Smoke. A mess of broken physics and bad decisions.
Instead, a Honda was parked on the street, perfectly intact, the back door wide open. Izzy’s fingers stilled over her phone.
“…What the fuck,” she breathed.
Another crash echoed from the driveway. Her eyes snapped toward it, and she felt her body go stiff.
“Oh, fuck no.”
She was moving before the thought fully finished forming. Through the front door. Down the steps. Bare feet hitting cold concrete.
And there she was.
A familiar blonde pixie cut, shoulders squared in a way that was almost comical given the weapon in her hands. Tammi stood with her back turned to her, fully focused, like this was a task she had scheduled and intended to complete with efficiency.
“Hey!” Izzy shouted, taking quick steps across the small yard. Broken glass blanketed the driveway, the porch light catching on the shards littering the grass. “What the fuck are you doing?!”
Tammi raised the baseball bat again, and it came down hard on the passenger window. Glass spiderwebbed instantly. Tammi let out a sharp, frustrated shriek, then swung again.
“Stop!” Izzy shouted, already picking her way forward, careful not to step on the glittering scatter of glass across the driveway.
Too late. Tammi yanked the bat back like she was winding up for another pitch and swung again. This time straight into the windshield. The impact landed with a heavy, ugly THUNK.
The glass didn’t fully collapse—but it buckled inward, a deep, spreading crater blooming across the spiderweb fractures like the car had been punched in the face. Izzy’s stomach dropped clean through her ribs.
“Tammi!” she shouted again, sharper now. Her hand was already moving before she even finished saying it. Phone out. Thumb stabbing at the top contact in her recent calls.
Sammy.
Call.
Ring.
She didn’t even get the first tone before Tammi finally turned.
Her blonde pixie cut stuck slightly to her face, breath coming too fast, eyes too wide. Then her gaze dropped—locked onto Izzy—and something in her expression shifted instantly. Recognition. Then fury. Then something uglier than both. Her shirt stretched tight over her belly, the fabric thin enough that it was impossible to miss now. Tammi’s mouth twisted.
“You!” Tammi spat, pointing the bat straight at her like it was a weapon and an accusation all at once. Her chest heaved under the thin fabric of her shirt, the baby bump shifting as she moved. “You—you bitch!”
“Are you fucking nuts?!” Izzy shrieked back, taking in the full damage in one sweeping glance—shattered glass, crumpled windshield, one headlight already hanging at an angle like it had given up on life. Tammi let out another raw scream before she whipped around and brought the bat down again.
This time the windshield gave.
A loud, violent crack split the air as glass finally collapsed inward, shards cascading across the hood and driveway like a glittering, dangerous rain. Izzy made a choked sound—half disbelief, half rage—eyes wide as Tammi immediately turned her attention to the headlights.
“No—hey—you’re going to hurt yourself! This is bad for the baby! Stop! “Izzy surged forward, phone still in her hand, dropping it onto the concrete as she reached out. “Tammi, stop!”
Her fingers closed in on the bat just as Tammi jerked it back.
Tammi snapped toward her instantly. Fast. Too fast. The bat came up in a sharp, uncontrolled arc—no warning, no hesitation—and swung.
Summary: You were only unloading Jack’s dishwasher. That was all. You were in his kitchen, barefoot and comfortable in one of his old shirts, waiting for him to come home from tactical training. Domestic. Normal. Safe. And then Jack walked in wearing tactical gear. The vest. The boots. The radio. The duty belt. The quiet, knowing look on his face when he realized you could not stop staring. You tried to be normal about it. Jack noticed. Of course he did.
Warnings: 18+ only, smut, established relationship, tactical gear/uniform kink, dom/sub dynamics, praise kink, light restraint, orgasm denial, oral sex, rough sex, kitchen counter sex, consent-heavy dominance, aftercare, Jack being smug and quietly devastating.
Author's Note: You’re welcome, readers. Tactical gear Jack has been in my head for far too long, and today I am making that everyone’s problem. This is for everyone who looked at that vest and immediately understood the vision. the boots, the radio, the command voice, the smugness, the “leave it on” of it all.
We did this together, and honestly? I think we should all be ashamed.
But we won’t be.
Xoxo, Del
MDNI 18+
You knew Jack’s kitchen well enough to know he had run the dishwasher. That was the first problem. The second problem was that you also knew Jack well enough to know he had absolutely no intention of unloading it before he left for tactical training.
You found the clean dishes by accident.
You had been at his townhouse for almost an hour, tucked into the corner of his couch in one of his old T-shirts and the soft lounge shorts you kept in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Jack pretended not to notice they had taken up permanent residence there. You pretended to believe him.
The TV murmured low in the living room. Your phone was facedown beside you. Late afternoon light stretched warm across the hardwood, catching on the coffee table, the arm of the couch, the spot near the entry where Jack always kicked off his boots, even though he complained when you did the same thing.
He had told you to let yourself in.
He always did now.
That was dangerous information if you let yourself think about it too long, so mostly, you didn’t.
You used your key. You kicked off your shoes. You curled up in his house like it had started making room for you without either of you saying it out loud.
Then you wandered into the kitchen for water, saw the clean light glowing on the dishwasher, and sighed as if this were somehow your responsibility.
“Of course,” you muttered.
The dishwasher door opened with a soft hiss. Warm air rolled up, damp and clean, smelling faintly like detergent and steam. The heat brushed your bare legs. Jack had loaded the bowls in the wrong direction again, because apparently, a man could be trusted with a trauma bay, tactical medical support, and other people’s lives, but not proper dishwasher geometry.
You started unloading it anyway.
Not because you were trying to be domestic. Not because the green mug already in his cabinet made something soft move behind your ribs. Definitely not because this had started to feel like your kitchen too.
You were simply a helpful person.
A generous person.
A person who had taken her bra off the second she got comfortable because Jack was not home yet, and you had planned to do nothing more strenuous than drink water, watch terrible television, and bully him into ordering Thai food when he got back.
You put the plates away first. Then the bowls. Then the mugs. The green one went on the second shelf, where Jack always reached for it in the morning, even though he claimed he did not have a favorite.
You were stretching to slide a mug into place when the front door opened.
You did not look over right away. “You ran the dishwasher and abandoned it,” you called, rising onto your toes. “I’m choosing to believe that was a cry for help.”
Jack did not answer. That was your first clue. Your fingers paused on the cabinet handle. The house changed when Jack entered it. You never knew how to explain that without sounding ridiculous. It was not sound, exactly. Not silence. Not even presence.
It was pressure. A subtle rearranging of the air.
You lowered yourself back onto your heels and turned.
Jack stood just inside the kitchen entry.
And your entire brain stopped. Not paused. Stopped. You had seen him in scrubs. You had seen him in old T-shirts and jeans, and the gray sweatpants he pretended were not specifically engineered to ruin your life. You had seen him half-asleep at this very counter, hair flattened on one side, making coffee with the grim focus of a man performing surgery on a French press. You had even seen him at work when he got sharp and calm, voice low, hands steady, the whole room rearranging itself around him because Jack Abbot had decided panic was not useful.
But this—
This was different.
Camouflage tactical pants tucked into boots. A tan quarter-zip stretched across his chest and shoulders, darkened slightly at the collar from sweat. Camouflage sleeves pushed up enough to make his forearms a personal attack. Protective glasses shoved into his hair. A radio clipped at his shoulder. A duty belt low on his hips, heavy with equipment you did not know the names for, and suddenly wanted explained to you in unnecessary detail.
And the vest.
God help you, the vest.
It was not sleek. It was not pretty. It was bulky and practical and worn in, half-unfastened, like he had started taking it off and gotten distracted. A black patch across the front read POLICE in block letters.
It should not have done anything to you.
It did several things.
Several immediate, humiliating things.
Jack’s gaze moved from your face to the mug still in your hand.
His mouth twitched. Barely. “You okay?”
You opened your mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
“Yeah.” Your voice caught. “I—yeah.”
Jack’s eyebrows lifted. Not much. Enough.
Heat rushed up your neck.
You turned back to the cabinet too quickly and shoved the mug onto the shelf. The wrong shelf. The green mug sat neatly beside his stack of bowls. The kitchen went horribly quiet.
Jack looked at the mug. Then at you. “That’s the bowl cabinet.”
Your fingers were still on the cabinet door. “I know.”
“You put a mug in it.”
“It’s visiting.”
Jack’s mouth curved. Small. Slow. Awful.
You shut the cabinet like that would erase the evidence, and bent for a plate from the dishwasher. A plate was normal. A plate was safe. A plate had never come home from tactical training looking like it could ruin your life with one raised eyebrow and a vest buckle.
Jack stepped farther into the kitchen. His boots sounded heavy on the tile.
You stared very hard at the plate. “Training was good?”
Jack hummed. “Mm-hm.”
“Good.” You croaked.
“Long.”
“Right.” You nodded too quickly. “Yeah. Long is… training often is that.”
Jack went quiet. That was worse than if he had laughed.
You lifted the plate toward the cabinet. Wrong cabinet. Again. You froze with your arm half-raised.
Jack did not say anything. He did not have to.
You could feel him looking at the cabinet. Then at the plate. Then at you.
“Don’t,” you said.
“I didn’t.” Jack replied.
You couldn’t look at him. “You were about to.”
“No.”
Somehow, that was worse.
You lowered the plate slowly and opened the correct cabinet with all the dignity available to a person actively losing a fight with kitchen storage.
Jack leaned one shoulder against the doorway. Still in the gear. Still quiet. Still watching.
“You’re flustered.”
You laughed. It came out too high. “I am unloading the dishwasher.”
“Badly,” Jack murmured.
You exhaled, “You’re welcome.”
His eyes dropped. Not crudely. Not obviously. Just enough. Bare legs. Soft lounge shorts. His T-shirt. Your bare feet on his kitchen tile. You, too comfortable in his house to have expected him like this.
When his gaze returned to your face, something had shifted. Still amused. Still warm.
But darker now. More certain. “Oh.”
Your stomach dropped. “No.”
Jack’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You said ‘oh.’”
“I did.”
You pressed your lips together, “Don’t.”
He pushed off the doorway and took one slow step closer. You looked at the vest.
Mistake.
Jack noticed. His hand rested briefly against the front of it, fingers brushing one of the buckles like he had all the time in the world and knew exactly where your eyes were.
You looked away so fast that your shin almost caught the open dishwasher door.
Jack’s mouth curved. “Careful.”
You gripped the counter. “I’m fine.”
“Sure?”
“Yep.” Too fast.
He came closer. Not too close. Close enough. The kitchen smelled like detergent, steam, and him now. Work and heat and Jack.
You picked up another mug. Then forgot why you were holding it.
His gaze flicked to it. Then back to you. “Need help?”
“No.”
“You sure?” He asked.
“Yes.” You answered quickly.
Jack glanced at the mug in your hand, “You’ve been holding that for a while.”
You looked down. You were, in fact, still holding the mug.
“Oh my God,” you muttered.
Jack’s smile deepened. Small. Unbearably pleased.
You shoved the mug into the correct cabinet this time and immediately wished you had not looked proud of yourself for completing a task toddlers could master.
Jack caught that too. “Good job.”
Your face went instantly hot. The words were mild. Too mild.
That was the problem.
He had said them like he was talking about the mug, but his voice had gone just low enough to make your pulse stumble.
You turned to him. “Don’t do that.”
His expression stayed innocent. Too innocent. “Do what?”
You glared, “You know.”
“I don’t.” Jack shrugged a shoulder.
“You absolutely do.”
A beat passed.
His eyes dropped to the way your hand curled around the counter edge.
When he looked back up, his voice was quieter. “You like the gear.”
Your mouth went dry. “I—what?”
Jack’s eyes held yours. “You heard me.”
You shook your head, “I do not.”
He raised a brow, “No?”
“No.” Your eyes betrayed you, straight to the vest.
Jack saw. The smugness sharpened.
You shut your eyes. “Damn it.”
A low sound left him. Almost a laugh. Not quite. “That’s what I thought.”
You opened your eyes.
He was close now. Close enough that you could see the dust on his boots, the tired edge around his eyes, the way the tan quarter-zip pulled across his shoulders beneath the vest.
You swallowed.
Jack watched your throat move. Said nothing.
Which was, frankly, rude.
“You’re enjoying this,” you said.
“A little.” Too honest. Too calm.
Your stomach flipped. “You’re supposed to deny it.”
“No.” The single word landed low.
Your hand slipped on the counter.
Jack’s gaze dropped to it. Then back to your face. His smile softened into something darker.
More focused. “Oh, baby.”
Your entire body went warm. “Don’t call me that right now.”
His head tilted. “Why?”
“Because I’m already—” You stopped.
Jack waited. His eyes stayed on your face, patient and pleased and quiet enough to make the silence feel like a touch.
You cleared your throat. “Because I’m unloading the dishwasher.”
He looked at the open dishwasher. Then, at the single spoon still sitting in the rack. Then back at you. “Almost done.”
You hated him.
You wanted him so badly your knees felt unreliable.
Jack stepped closer. Your back met the counter. He did not touch you.
Not yet.
His gaze moved over your face, taking in the blush, the uneven breathing, the way you kept trying not to look at the vest and failing every time.
Then his hand lifted. Slow enough that you could have moved away. You didn’t. His fingers brushed the loose collar of your T-shirt where it rested against your shoulder.
Barely. Not enough. Too much.
His voice dropped, “You want me to take it off?”
Your eyes jumped to his. “The shirt?”
His mouth curved. “The vest.”
Oh. Right. The vest.
You looked at it again, because apparently, you had learned nothing.
Jack watched you look. Watched your breath catch. Watched your fingers tighten against the counter.
When you dragged your eyes back to his, he looked unbearably smug. Your voice came out smaller than planned. “Maybe don’t.”
Jack went very still. The kitchen went quiet around you.
His thumb brushed once against your shoulder. “Maybe don’t.”
You nodded.
He waited. Right. Words.
“Yes,” you said softly. “Maybe don’t.”
Jack smiled then. Slow. Private. Absolutely lethal.
“Hands on the counter.”
Your breath left you. “What?”
Jack’s eyes held yours. “You heard me.”
The words were quiet. That was the problem. Jack did not raise his voice. He did not have to. The command settled into the kitchen with the same calm certainty he carried into rooms where people were used to listening when he spoke.
Your hand tightened around the edge of the counter.
Jack saw. His gaze dropped to your fingers, then came back to your face.
“You good?”
You nodded, then caught yourself because his eyebrow moved. Barely. Still enough.
“I’m good.”
Jack believed you. That was worse. Better. Both.
His mouth curved faintly, not quite a smile, not quite mercy.
“Then, hands on the counter.”
The kitchen seemed to shrink around the sentence.
The open dishwasher breathed out the last of its heat beside you. The single spoon still sat in the rack, ridiculous and bright beneath the kitchen light. Somewhere in the living room, the television murmured to itself, low enough to be forgotten but not low enough to let the house feel empty.
You turned because he told you to. That was the first thing. The second was that Jack noticed the exact moment you realized you liked it.
Your palms met the counter. Cool stone. Smooth beneath your hands. You spread your fingers over it and tried not to think about how exposed the gesture made you feel. Tried not to think about the soft lounge shorts riding high on your thighs, the oversized T-shirt slipping loose at your shoulder, the fact that your back was to him now, and you could no longer use his face to prepare yourself for what he might do next.
Behind you, Jack did not move.
The silence was deliberate.
You felt it travel down the line of your spine.
Your skin prickled. “Jack.”
His boots sounded once on the tile. Then again. Slow. Measured. Not stalking. Not rushing.
Just coming closer because he had decided to, and because you had put your hands where he told you to put them.
He stopped behind you, close enough that the heat of him reached you before his hands did.
The vest touched you first.
A brush of hard tactical fabric between your shoulder blades. Warm from his body underneath, rough at the edges, practical in a way that made it feel more obscene than anything designed to be sexy ever could.
Your fingers curled against the counter.
Jack’s mouth came near your ear. “I didn’t tell you to move.”
You had not moved. Not really. But your hands had lifted by a fraction, your fingers starting to curl like they wanted to reach back for him before you remembered yourself.
You flattened them again. The counter was cold. Your skin was not.
Jack’s hand settled at your waist. Warm. Steady. A single touch, and your whole body went too aware of itself. The old cotton of his shirt against your skin. The loose waistband of your shorts. The bare line of your shoulder where the collar had slipped. The cool air in the kitchen. The hard vest behind you.
His thumb moved once against your side. “Good.”
One word. No flourish. No smirk you could see.
Still, your breath went uneven.
Jack heard it.
His hand stayed where it was, not moving higher, not moving lower, like he had all the time in the world and no interest in giving you anywhere to hide. “You like that.”
Your eyes shut. “I don’t know what you mean.”
His mouth brushed the side of your neck. Barely there. “Liar.”
It should not have sounded affectionate. It did. A shiver moved through you before you could stop it. Jack’s palm flexed at your waist, grounding you without letting you pretend he had missed it.
The kitchen smelled like detergent, fading steam, and him.
Cold air still clung to his clothes from outside. Beneath that was sweat, dust, soap, and the faint metallic edge of gear and training equipment. It was not cologne. It was not polished. It was Jack after a long day doing something physical and dangerous enough that your body had apparently decided common sense was optional.
His other hand came to your opposite hip. Now he had you between him and the counter. Not trapped. Held.
There was a difference. Jack knew it. Worse, he knew you knew it too.
His mouth touched your shoulder, a slow kiss just below the place where your shirt had slipped. The touch was soft enough to make your knees go weak. His hands tightened at your hips before you could sway.
Jack’s thumbs moved in slow arcs beneath the hem of your shirt, finding skin. Your breath caught. The refrigerator hummed. The dishwasher clicked softly as it cooled. Jack’s vest shifted against your back when he leaned closer, and the sound of it—fabric, buckles, the faint scrape of equipment—went straight through you.
His fingers skimmed your stomach. Not high enough. Not low enough. Just enough to make you feel the shape of his restraint.
You started to turn your head toward him.
His hand left your waist and came to your jaw, two fingers beneath your chin, guiding your face forward again. “No.”
Your pulse jumped. The word was quiet. Simple. Devastating.
You faced forward again.
Jack’s thumb brushed once along your jaw before his hand dropped back to your side. “Stay there.”
You pressed your palms more firmly to the counter. “That’s bossy.”
His mouth hovered near your ear. “You like bossy.”
Your face burned. “I did not say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
A frustrated sound escaped you before you could swallow it down.
Jack stilled. Then, softly, “There.”
Your stomach flipped. “What?”
“That sound.” His lips touched the back of your shoulder.
The hand beneath your shirt slid slowly up your stomach, then stopped at your ribs. Waiting. Teasing. Holding back exactly enough to make you feel the absence of everything he was not doing.
You went silent.
Jack’s mouth moved along your neck. Slow. Patient. Awful. Every touch felt measured. Not because he was hesitant, but because he had figured out that patience ruined you and was immediately putting that information to use.
His palm flattened over your stomach and drew you back against him. The vest pressed hard into your back. The duty belt brushed the back of your thigh. You felt him there, solid and warm and controlled, and your body gave one helpless little shift backward before your mind could stop it.
Jack’s grip tightened. Not a warning. A response. His breath changed against your neck. For the first time since he had walked through the door, the smug control slipped just enough for you to feel the man underneath it.
You caught it.
Your mouth curved despite yourself. “There he is.”
Jack went still. The air changed. His hand stayed flat over your stomach, but his thumb stopped moving.
You had gotten him. Only a little. Only for a second. But enough.
His mouth came close to your ear. “Careful.”
Your smile widened, shaky but real. “With what?”
His hand slid to your hip and pulled you back into him again, slower this time.
Your smile disappeared. Every thought went with it.
“Thinking you’re in charge because I let you have one.”
You swallowed hard. “That was one?”
His mouth brushed your neck. “One.”
The word should not have undone you. It did. You were suddenly aware of your hands again, of how badly you wanted to take them off the counter. To reach back. To touch the vest. The straps. His belt. His hands. Anything. You wanted to turn around and get your mouth on his, wanted to make him stop sounding so calm when you could feel he was not.
Your fingers flexed.
Jack saw. “Hands.”
You flattened them.
He kissed your shoulder. A reward. You hated how fast it worked. You loved how fast it worked.
Jack’s hand slipped beneath your shirt again, slower now, knuckles brushing bare skin on the way up. His touch stayed to the edges: waist, ribs, stomach, the underside of wanting without giving it a name. He was not rushing toward the places your body begged for. He was making you feel every inch before then.
You let your head tip to the side. More room. You did not say it.
Jack did not need you to. His mouth found the space you gave him. His lips were warm against your neck, then his teeth grazed just enough to make your breath catch, and your hands press flat again against the stone.
“That’s it,” he murmured.
The praise sank into you slowly like heat. You had been embarrassed before. Flustered. Mouthy because it was easier to be difficult than honest. But somewhere between the counter under your palms and his vest at your back, the fight in you had softened.
Not gone. Changed.
You were still aware of how ridiculous this should have been. The open dishwasher. The last spoon. The clean mug sitting in the bowl cabinet. His kitchen lit golden in the late afternoon while Jack stood behind you in tactical gear and touched you like he had all night and no intention of wasting a second.
But the embarrassment had started to dissolve into something heavier.
Relief, maybe. Relief at not having to hide how much you wanted him. Relief at being told exactly what to do by someone who would stop the moment you asked.
Relief at Jack’s quiet certainty, at the way he gave commands like promises and praise like reward. His hands slid down to the hem of your shirt.
You tensed, not from fear. Anticipation moved through you so sharply that your breath caught in your throat.
Jack felt it. His mouth touched the back of your shoulder. “Still good?”
“Yes.”
He trusted it.
His thumbs hooked beneath the fabric. “Arms up.”
The command was simple. That made it worse. You had been told to keep your hands on the counter. Now he was telling you to move them. The shift itself felt intimate, as if he were changing the rules and trusting you to follow.
You lifted your hands slowly.
The counter disappeared from beneath your palms, leaving you briefly unanchored. Your arms rose above your head. The position pulled the shirt higher, exposing the line of your stomach, leaving you open to him in a way that made your face burn before he had even taken anything off.
Jack watched. You could feel him watching. His hands rested at your waist for one long second, as if he was taking in the fact that you were standing there because he had told you to.
The silence made your pulse beat harder.
Then he began to lift your shirt. Slowly. The cotton slid up your stomach. Over your ribs. Higher. He did not rush. Of course, he did not rush. Jack had learned that patience ruined you and had apparently decided to make it your problem.
You made a small, impatient sound before you could stop yourself.
The shirt stopped. You froze.
Jack’s mouth came near your ear. “Something you need?”
Your eyes closed. Terrible man. “No.”
His fingers held the shirt exactly where it was. Not up. Not down.
A strip of kitchen air cooled your skin.
“No?”
Your pride made one final, useless attempt at survival. It failed immediately.
“Please.”
Jack’s breath changed. Only slightly. Enough.
His mouth touched your shoulder. “Please, what?”
The word sat on your tongue, embarrassing and simple, and exactly what he wanted.
“Take it off.”
A pause.
Then his lips curved against your skin. “That wasn’t so hard.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You’re still listening.” He lifted the shirt the rest of the way.
The fabric dragged over your chest, your shoulders, your raised arms. For a second, it covered your face, warm cotton and the faint smell of him, and then it was gone, dropped somewhere behind you onto the kitchen floor.
The air touched your bare skin.
Jack went still. Completely. Your arms were still raised. Your breathing had gone uneven. The vest pressed warm and hard against your back. And Jack, who had been so smug, so pleased, so devastatingly in control, did not say anything. For one second. Two.
The silence reached your pulse before his voice did. “You weren’t wearing anything under this.”
Your face went hot. “I was comfortable.”
His hand came back to your waist. Slow. Firm. “In my kitchen.”
“You weren’t home.”
His fingers tightened once. “I am now.”
The words landed low and heavy between you.
You started to lower your arms.
Jack caught the movement immediately. “Ah.”
You froze.
His mouth brushed your shoulder. “I didn’t say you could move.”
Your whole body went hot. Slowly, you lifted your arms back into place.
Jack’s hand slid over your waist, controlled, almost reverent, like he was taking a second to recover and refusing to let you see how badly he needed it.
Unfortunately for him, you knew him too well.
Your mouth curved despite the heat in your face. “Oh.”
His fingers paused.
You smiled, breathless. “Oh, baby.”
Jack’s grip tightened at your waist. “Careful.”
You turned your head slightly, just enough for your cheek to almost brush his. “Did you not know?”
His mouth hovered near your ear. His voice was low. Still controlled. Barely. “I know now.”
A shiver moved through you.
Jack felt it.
His mouth touched the side of your neck. “There you go.”
Your arms ached faintly from being raised, but you did not lower them.
He had not told you to.
Jack noticed.
You felt the exact moment he noticed: the way his hand stilled, the way his breath went rough, the way his body pressed closer behind yours until the vest brushed your bare back again.
He leaned in, mouth at your ear. “You’re waiting.”
Your eyes fluttered. “You didn’t tell me I could move.”
For a second, he was silent.
Then his hand spread over your stomach and pulled you gently back into him. “That’s my girl.”
The praise hit harder than you expected.
Your breath shook.
Jack’s mouth moved along your neck, slower now, rewarding every second you kept your arms lifted. His hand stayed at your waist, then drifted over your stomach, then back to your hip. Teasing. Learning. Not attempt to hide how much he liked the way you were listening.
Finally, his voice came low against your skin. “Hands down.”
You lowered them slowly. Relief moved through your shoulders.
Before you could decide what to do with your hands, Jack spoke again.
“Behind your back.”
Your pulse jumped. The kitchen blurred softly at the edges. You turned your head a fraction.
Jack was waiting there over your shoulder, eyes dark and steady, giving you time because he always gave you time.
Your hands slid behind you. Slowly. Obediently.
His mouth curved. “There she is.”
The words were soft. Too soft for what they did to you. Your hands stayed behind your back, fingers curling around your opposite wrist, because you had no idea what else to do with them. The position pulled your shoulders back and left you open to him, skin still warm where his mouth had been and cooler now beneath the kitchen air.
Jack did not touch you right away. He looked. You felt the weight of it move over you. Down the side of your neck. Across your shoulders. Along the line of your spine where the vest had been brushing you. The kitchen felt too ordinary amid the silence: the open dishwasher, the clean spoon still abandoned on the rack, the soft ticking of cooling metal, the fading detergent steam caught beneath the sharper scent of him.
Then he stepped closer. The vest touched your back first. Hard fabric. Warm underneath. A scrape of tactical gear against bare skin that made your stomach pull tight.
Your breath caught.
Jack heard it. His hand moved behind you, slow enough that you could have stepped away, and closed around both of your wrists. Not tight. Not rough. Just firm. Certain.
Your eyes fluttered shut.
His thumb moved once over the inside of your wrist, and the carefulness of it almost made the whole thing worse. He held you like he meant it. Like he knew exactly what you were giving him and had no intention of taking it lightly.
“You good?” he asked against your shoulder.
Your answer came out quieter than you expected. “I’m good.”
His grip settled.
His free hand came to your waist, palm spreading warm against your skin. Then he drew you back by degrees, not pulling hard, not forcing, just guiding until your spine met the vest and your hips met the solid line of him behind you.
Your lips parted.
The air left the room.
Jack’s mouth touched the side of your neck. Barely.
You felt it everywhere.
He kissed you slowly, once beneath your ear, then again lower, where your pulse had become embarrassingly easy to find. His hand slipped from your waist to your stomach, flat and steady, holding you against him while his mouth learned what made your breath change.
You tried to swallow. It came out as a sound instead.
Jack’s grip around your wrists tightened. Not a warning. A response.
He liked that.
You knew because his breath shifted against your neck. Because the calm line of him behind you went a little less calm. Because his hand pressed you more firmly back into him, making sure you felt exactly what listening to him had done.
Your eyes opened. The kitchen cabinets blurred in front of you. The cabinet with the mugs. The bowl cabinet with the green mug still sitting in the wrong place because neither of you had bothered to fix it.
You should have found that funny.
You would have, if Jack’s mouth had not opened against your shoulder. If his teeth had not skimmed just enough to make your knees loosen. If his free hand had not slid to your hip and pulled you back again, slower this time, letting you feel him through all that gear, all that restraint.
“Jack.” His name came out thin.
He hummed against your skin. Not a question. Not yet. He knew what you wanted. That was the problem. He knew, and he was taking his time with the knowledge. His hand dragged slowly over your stomach, then back to your waist, then lower to the band of your shorts. He did not go beneath it yet. He only rested there, fingers spread, the heel of his hand warm against the place where your body had gone tight with waiting.
You pulled against his grip without meaning to. His hand around your wrists did not move. The reminder went through you like a spark.
You were not trapped.
You were held.
There was a difference, and Jack knew exactly how to make you feel it.
His mouth came to your ear. “Tell me.”
Only two words. Soft. Rough at the edges.
You closed your eyes.
The old instinct rose—joke, dodge, say something difficult enough to make the wanting less obvious. But your shirt was on the floor. His vest was against your back. His hand was at your waistband. And you were tired of pretending you were not shaking.
“Touch me,” you whispered.
Jack went still for half a second. Then his mouth pressed to your shoulder. A reward. His hand slipped lower into the waistband of your shorts. Slowly. The first real touch made your whole body lock. Jack held you through it. One hand around your wrists, the other moving with maddening patience, his mouth warm at your neck, his breath uneven now.
He did not ask again.
He trusted the way you leaned into him. He trusted the way your head tipped back against his shoulder. He trusted the way your fingers curled helplessly in his grip instead of pulling away.
And because he trusted you, you gave him more.
A breath. A sound. His name, softer this time.
Jack moved as if he were learning you by touch and already knew he would remember every answer. Every shiver. Every little hitch of breath. Every helpless attempt to chase his hand when he slowed down.
“Easy,” he murmured.
Your body listened before your pride could object.
A low sound moved out of him, almost a laugh, pleased and dark and far too close to your ear. He liked that too. He liked it when you listened.
You could feel it in the way his grip tightened around your wrists. In the way his mouth became less patient at your neck. In the way his body leaned heavier into yours for one second before he reined himself back in.
“You’re doing so good.” The praise sank into you, warm and devastating.
Your head fell back against him. The ceiling light caught in your vision. Soft gold. Too bright. Too ordinary for this. His kitchen. His counter. The open dishwasher still breathing out the last of its heat.
Jack’s hand moved again. The world narrowed. The hard vest. The radio is brushing your shoulder. The duty belt against the back of your thigh. His mouth at your throat. His breathing is no longer even.
He brought you closer slowly. So slowly, you almost did not recognize what he was doing until your hands tightened in his hold and your legs started to tremble.
Your breath broke. “Please.”
The word slipped out raw.
Jack stopped kissing your neck. Everything in him seemed to listen. His hand did not stop.
Not yet.
“Please what?”
You made a sound that was not quite an answer.
He slowed. Cruel. Controlled. Patient enough to ruin you.
Your forehead nearly dipped into the counter in front of you. “Jack.”
His mouth touched your shoulder. “That’s not an answer.”
Your face burned. Not shame. Something warmer. Something that made the wanting sharper because he was making you stand inside it and speak.
“Please don’t stop.”
His breath left him rough against your neck. There. That got to him.
The knowledge made your knees weaker.
Jack gave you what you had asked for, and your whole body went soft and tight at once. Your wrists strained in his hold. His grip steadied you immediately, keeping you exactly where he wanted you while his mouth returned to your neck and his fingers worked over you in slow, tight circles.
You were close enough now that the room started to slip.
The tile beneath your feet. The cabinet in front of you. The hum of the refrigerator.
All of it blurred around him. His hand. His vest. His voice in your ear. “That’s it.”
You shook against him.
He felt it.
He gave you more.
Then, just as your body started to tip toward the edge, just as your breath caught and stayed caught, just as your fingers curled helplessly behind your back—
Jack stopped. Completely.
For one impossible second, you could not process the absence. Then you made a sound so desperate it should have embarrassed you.
It didn’t.
You were too far gone for that.
Your body tried to follow his hand.
Jack’s arm came around your waist immediately, holding you still, holding you up, his mouth pressing to your shoulder in something almost tender. “Easy.”
You let out a broken breath. “Jack.”
“I’ve got you.” He murmured.
“You stopped.”
His mouth curved against your skin. “I did.”
You pulled at your wrists, helpless now, frustrated enough that your eyes burned. “Why?”
His hand rested flat over your stomach. Still. Warm. Maddening.
His lips brushed the shell of your ear. “Because you begged so pretty.”
Heat rushed through you, full-body and humiliating.
“And I want to hear you do it again.”
For a second, you could not answer. You could only stand there with your hands still held behind your back, Jack’s vest pressed against your bare skin, his arm firm around your waist, his breath warm at your ear. The kitchen felt too bright for what he had done to you. Too normal. Cabinets. Counter. Open dishwasher. The last spoon was still sitting in the rack like neither of you had any intention of finishing what you started.
You whispered his name.
Jack’s mouth touched your shoulder. “Turn around.”
Your pulse jumped.
His grip loosened around your wrists. For a second, you did not move. Not because you did not want to. Because the absence of his hold made you feel strangely weightless, like your body had forgotten what to do without his hand telling it where to stay.
Jack noticed. His fingers brushed once over the inside of your wrist before he let go completely.
“Slow.”
One word. You obeyed. You turned carefully, bare feet shifting against the cool tile, counter at your back now, open dishwasher to your side, Jack in front of you.
He looked almost unfairly composed for a man whose breathing had gone rough against your neck moments ago.
Almost.
His vest was still half-unfastened. The tan shirt beneath it clung to his shoulders. His hair was mussed from the protective glasses shoved into it. There was dust on his boots. A shadow along his jaw. His eyes moved over your face first, then lower, and the effort it took him to bring them back up made your stomach twist.
“There,” he said softly.
Your fingers found the edge of the counter behind you. “What?”
Jack stepped closer. His hands settled at your waist. “I wanted to see your face.”
The sentence should have been tender. It was. That made it worse. His thumbs moved once over your skin, slow and warm. He watched you take the touch. Watched your lips part, your shoulders lift, the way your body could not decide whether to lean into him or brace against the counter.
Then he bent slightly.
“Jack—”
His hands tightened at your waist. A warning. A promise.
Then he lifted you.
The counter was cold beneath you.
You gasped at the sudden shock of it, the stone pressing against the backs of your thighs, cool enough to make your whole body jolt. Jack stepped between your legs before you could close them, his gear brushing you, his hands still steady at your waist.
The house was quiet around you. Too quiet. The television in the living room had gone to some muted commercial you could not place. The refrigerator hummed. The dishwasher clicked again, cooling metal, soft and domestic and absurd.
Jack stood between your knees like he belonged there. Like he had always intended to put you there.
Your hands moved toward him before you thought better of it.
He caught your wrists. Fast.
Your breath stopped.
Jack looked down at your hands, then back at your face. “Not yet.”
You made a soft, frustrated sound.
His mouth curved. “Hands on the counter.”
You stared at him. “You just let me turn around.”
“And now I’m telling you where to put them.”
Heat crawled up your neck. “You’re very bossy.”
Jack guided your hands to the edge of the counter on either side of your hips.
His fingers pressed over yours until you gripped it. “Hold here.”
Your hands curled around the counter. The stone was cold under your palms.
Jack waited until he saw your fingers tighten. Then he let go. “Good.”
The word went through you with humiliating ease.
Jack saw that too. His gaze sharpened. “You’re going to be a problem now.”
You tried to breathe normally. “You already knew I was a problem.”
“I knew you were mouthy.” His hands slid to your knees. Slow. Firm. “This is different.”
Your heart kicked hard against your ribs as he eased your legs wider. Not rushed. Not rough. Just certain. Every inch of space he made felt deliberate.
Your fingers tightened around the edge of the counter. “You love my mouth,” you said.
Jack stopped. For half a second, the entire kitchen went still.
Then his eyes lifted to yours. Dark. Amused. Worse than amused. “Yes.”
The answer was immediate. Too immediate. Your pulse stumbled.
Jack’s thumbs moved once over the inside of your knees. “But right now,” he said, voice low, “I’m interested in what it does when I tell you to be quiet.”
Oh.
Your mouth parted. Nothing came out.
Jack’s expression warmed with satisfaction. “There she is.”
Your face burned. “That was mean.”
“No.” His hands moved higher on your thighs, slow enough to make your thoughts scatter. “That was honest.”
The kitchen air felt cool against your bare skin. Jack felt warm everywhere he touched you. The vest shifted when he leaned down, hard fabric brushing the inside of your leg before he caught himself and adjusted.
Still controlled. Still careful. Still somehow making every careful thing feel worse.
His fingers found the waistband of your shorts. You went still. Jack noticed. His gaze lifted to your face. “You good?”
Your throat worked. “I’m good.”
His thumbs slipped beneath the soft fabric. “Hands stay.”
Your fingers curled harder around the counter.
Jack drew your shorts down slowly. Not because they were difficult. Because he wanted you to feel every second of it, the fabric dragged over your hips, your thighs, catching briefly beneath you until he lifted you just enough to ease it free. The movement was smooth and effortless, one hand at your waist, one at your thigh, his body still between your knees, the vest brushing your skin whenever he leaned close.
You stared at the ceiling because looking at him felt impossible. That did not help. The ceiling was too ordinary. The kitchen light was too warm. The dishwasher was still open. Your shorts slid down your legs and fell somewhere near his boots.
Jack did not move for a moment. He just looked.
The quiet of it made your pulse beat everywhere. “Jack.”
His hands settled back on your thighs. “I’m here.”
The answer came immediately. Grounding. Ruinous. His thumbs moved slowly over your skin, and he eased your knees apart again, reclaiming the space he had made before.
Your breath caught.
Jack’s mouth curved. “Still with me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He lowered his head and kissed the inside of your knee.
Soft. Patient. A beginning.
Your head tipped back against the cabinet.
Jack’s voice came low against your skin. “You asked so nicely before.”
Your eyes fluttered shut. “I was desperate.”
“I know.” The smile was in his voice.
You hated that. You loved that.
His mouth moved higher. Still not enough. Your hands twitched on the counter.
Jack noticed without looking up. “Hands stay.”
Your grip tightened immediately.
The reward came as another kiss, slow and warm, higher than the last.
You let out a shaking breath.
Jack looked up at you. Focused. The kind of focus that made rooms go quiet around him. “Then take it.”
The words emptied your lungs.
Jack lowered his mouth.
The first touch made your whole body jerk. Your fingers clamped around the counter. The cold stone bit into your palms. Your shoulders hit the cabinet behind you with a soft thud, and Jack’s hands tightened on your thighs to keep you there, open and still and absolutely nowhere near in control.
“Oh, my God.” The words broke out of you before you could stop them.
Jack paused. Barely.
You felt the shape of his smile against you. “Quiet.”
You inhaled sharply.
Then he did it again. Slower this time. Like he wanted to feel the exact second you lost the fight with yourself. Your head tipped back against the cabinet. The kitchen light went soft and gold behind your closed eyes. Everything narrowed to Jack between your thighs, the rough brush of his vest against your leg, the pressure of his hands, the heat of his mouth, the way he seemed to listen with his entire body.
You tried to move.
Jack held you still. Not harsh. Firm enough. A reminder.
Your hands stayed on the counter. Barely.
His thumb stroked once over your thigh, approval without words, and the gentleness of it almost made you unravel faster than the rest. You made another sound. Smaller. More helpless.
Jack hummed low, pleased, and the vibration went through you like a spark.
Your eyes flew open.
He looked up. That was worse. His mouth was still close. His eyes were dark and steady, watching your face like he was reading every answer you gave him. “You like that?”
Your voice had vanished. You nodded.
Jack’s hands stilled.
The silence pressed hot against your skin. Right. Words.
“Yes.”
His mouth curved. “Tell me.”
Your fingers dug into the counter. “I like that.”
He rewarded you immediately.
Your breath broke.
Jack’s hands slid beneath your thighs, adjusting you closer to the edge, and the movement made the counter colder, him warmer, the room smaller. You wanted to touch him so badly your hands ached around the stone.
One hand slipped. Only an inch.
Jack lifted his head. “No.”
The word was quiet. Your hand froze.
He did not look angry. He looked pleased. Terribly pleased. “Where do your hands stay?”
Your face burned. “On the counter.”
His thumb stroked the inside of your thigh. “That’s right.”
He waited until your hand curled back around the edge.
Then his tongue found you again. A reward. A ruin. You were a mess within seconds. Not gracefully. Not prettily. Completely. Breath snagging. Thighs trembling. Shoulders pressed against the cabinet. Hands locked around the counter because Jack had told you to keep them there, and somehow that command had become the last solid thing in the room.
Jack took his time. Of course he did. He had learned that patience ruined you, and now he was proving it. Every time you thought you knew the rhythm, he changed it. Every time your body started to rise toward something, he softened. Every time you whispered his name, he gave you enough to make you do it again.
“Jack.”
His hands tightened. You heard his breath change. Felt it. He liked his name like that. You knew it now.
You used it. “Jack, please.”
He lifted his mouth just enough to speak against your skin. “Please what?”
You let out a broken little laugh, almost angry with how badly you needed him. “You know.”
“I do.” His mouth brushed higher. Not enough. Not yet. “I want to hear you.”
Your head fell back. The cabinet was cool against your shoulder blades. Your own breathing sounded too loud in the small kitchen. “Please don’t stop.”
Jack’s hands flexed. There. He liked that. The knowledge made you ache.
He gave you more. The room slipped sideways. The hum of the refrigerator disappeared. The TV disappeared. The open dishwasher, the cooling spoon, the late afternoon light across the tile — all of it blurred into sensation.
Jack’s mouth. Jack’s hands. Jack’s voice, when he murmured, “Good girl,” like praise, was another way to touch you.
Your hands started to loosen from the counter. You caught yourself.
Jack saw anyway. “That’s it,” he said, voice rougher now. “Hold on.”
You did. Your fingers curled around the edge until your knuckles ached. Your thighs trembled under his hands.
He brought you close slowly. Too slowly. You could feel it building, feel yourself tipping toward that bright, impossible edge he had denied you once already. Your breath came in pieces. Your body tried to move with him, tried to chase, tried to close around him.
Jack held you open. Held you still. Kept you there.
“Jack,” you whispered.
He lifted his eyes to yours. The sight almost ended you by itself. Still in gear. Still composed enough to look up like he knew exactly what he was doing to you. Not composed enough to hide the roughness in his breathing.
“What do you need?” The question was quiet. Devastating.
You swallowed. The begging came easier this time. Too easy. “Please.”
His mouth touched your thigh. “Please what?”
Your cheeks burned.
You did not hide. Not this time. “Please let me.”
Jack went still. His eyes darkened. For one breath, all the smugness slipped, and what was left underneath was hunger so sharp it made your fingers tighten on the counter.
Then his mouth curved slowly. “There it is.”
He kissed your thigh. A reward. “Again.”
You shook your head once, breathless. “Jack.”
“Again.” His voice was rougher now. Less teasing. More affected.
And because you could hear what it did to him, because you could feel that he was not nearly as untouched as he pretended, you gave him the words.
“Please,” you whispered. “Please let me come.”
Jack’s eyes held yours. Then he lowered his mouth again. This time, he did not stop. Your whole body went tight. The counter edge cut into your palms. Your breath caught and stayed caught. Jack’s hands held you through the first shudder, then the next, one arm pressing over your hips to keep you exactly where he wanted you while the rest of you broke apart around him.
You heard yourself say his name. Once. Twice. Too soft to be a scream. Too ruined to be anything else.
Jack stayed with you through all of it. Not rushing. Not moving away. His mouth is softer now, his hands gentler, easing you down instead of dropping you.
Your body went heavy. Boneless. Your head fell back against the cabinet, and the kitchen came back in pieces.
The hum of the refrigerator. The detergent smell. The cool counter under your palms. The sound of Jack breathing. He kissed the inside of your knee. Then the lower part of your thigh.
Then he looked up at you. His hair was mussed. His mouth was wet. His vest was still on. And he looked unbearably pleased with himself. “You still good?”
You stared at him, chest rising and falling hard. “I think you know I’m not.”
His mouth curved. Warm. Smug.
So comepletely Jack, you almost laughed.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I do.”
He rose slowly, stepping back between your thighs.
His hands settled on the counter on either side of you, caging you in without touching you. He leaned close enough that the vest brushed your bare skin again, and you shivered even now.
Jack noticed. His smile deepened.
You closed your eyes. “I hate the vest.”
“No, you don’t.”
Your laugh came out weak. “No,” you admitted. “I really don’t.”
Jack’s mouth brushed yours. Slow. Deep. A reward and a promise. When he pulled back, his eyes had gone dark again.
Your hands slid from the counter toward him. This time, he let you touch the vest.
For one second.
Only one.
Then his hand closed gently around your wrist. “Not yet.”
Your breath caught.
Jack’s thumb moved over your pulse. “I’m not done with you.”
The words landed low.
Your hand was still caught in his. Your fingers had barely touched the vest before he stopped you, and somehow that single second had made the wanting worse. Rough fabric beneath your palm. The hard line of the strap. Heat beneath it. Jack beneath all of it.
You stared at him.
Jack stared back. His thumb moved once over your pulse. Not soothing. Not really.
A reminder.
The kitchen still felt tilted around you. Your body was loose and shaking from what he had already done, your thighs still bracketed around him, the counter cold beneath you, the cabinet cool against your back. Everything smelled like detergent and sweat and Jack. The open dishwasher had stopped steaming now, but the clean scent lingered beneath the sharper edge of his gear.
Your voice came out thin. “You’re not?”
Jack’s mouth curved faintly. “No.”
Your fingers flexed in his hold.
He looked down at the movement. Then back at your face. “You want to touch me.”
It was not a question.
You swallowed. “Yes.”
His eyes darkened.
For a second, the smugness softened into something heavier. Hungrier. The kind of look that made you realize he had been holding himself together too. Not unaffected. Not even close. Just disciplined enough to make you think the ruin had been one-sided.
It had not.
The proof was in the tension along his jaw. The roughness of his breathing. The way his hand tightened around your wrist before easing again, like he had to remind himself not to rush just because he wanted to.
Jack leaned in. His vest brushed your bare skin.
Your breath caught.
He noticed. “Soon,” he said.
Your eyes fluttered. That one word felt like a promise and a punishment. “Jack.”
His mouth touched yours. Not a kiss. Almost. “Hands up.”
Your pulse kicked. “What?”
Jack’s gaze held yours. “Above your head.”
The kitchen seemed to go quieter.
You were still sitting on the counter, still trembling, still trying to recover from him, and now he wanted your hands where he could see them. Where you could not reach for him. Where he could take that final inch of control before giving anything back.
Your fingers curled once against his.
Then you lifted your hands.
Slowly.
Jack guided them the rest of the way, his palm firm around your wrists as he pinned them above your head against the cabinet.
The wood was cool behind your knuckles.
Jack’s body filled the space between your thighs. His gear brushed you everywhere. The hard vest. The duty belt. The heavy weight of him still mostly dressed while you were bare and breathless on his kitchen counter.
He looked at you like that did something to him. Like he had meant to keep the upper hand and had not accounted for the sight of you listening this well.
His mouth moved against your jaw. “Still good?”
You nodded once. “I’m good.”
His grip settled around your wrists. “Stay there.”
Your answer came out as a breath. “Okay.”
Jack kissed you then. Slow at first. Deep enough to make your hands flex above your head, your wrists pressing into his palm, your body shifting toward him before he had given you permission to move. His mouth tasted like heat and restraint and the ruin he had pulled out of you minutes ago.
Then the kiss changed. Something in him shifted. The edge of all that careful patience wore thin. His free hand slid down your side, over your hip, beneath your thigh, drawing you closer to the edge of the counter with one controlled pull. Your breath broke against his mouth. The counter dragged cool beneath you. His gear scraped softly, buckles and fabric and belt, the sound rough in the quiet kitchen.
Jack’s forehead touched yours. His breathing was no longer even. Not even close.
“You sure?” The question was rougher now. Less composed.
You looked at him. Really looked.
At the dark focus in his eyes, the strain in his jaw, the way he was still holding himself back because your answer mattered more than his urgency.
Your chest tightened. “Yes.”
His hand tightened around your wrists. “You want this?”
“Yes.”
Jack’s eyes closed for half a second. Like the answer hit him somewhere deep. When he opened them again, the smugness was gone. What remained was worse.
Need, disciplined down to a blade. “Say it.”
Your breath caught.
His mouth hovered over yours. “Tell me.”
You swallowed. The words felt different now. Less like begging. More like choosing.
“I want you to fuck me.”
Jack went still. The whole kitchen held its breath with him. Then he kissed you hard. Not careless. Never that. But harder than before, deeper, the last of his patience burning down to something urgent and raw. His hand stayed around your wrists, keeping them above your head while his other hand moved between you.
You heard the shift of his belt.
The low rasp of a zipper.
Your whole body went tight.
Jack felt it immediately.
His mouth brushed your cheek. “I’ve got you.”
“I know.”
He pushed his pants and boxers down only as much as he needed. No more. The gear stayed. The vest stayed. The boots, the belt, the tan fabric pulled tight across his shoulders. He was still dressed like he had walked in from training and found you in his kitchen, and that fact made everything feel sharper. More desperate. Less polished.
Jack’s hand came back to your hip.
He looked at you. Waited.
Your wrists flexed above your head. “I’m good,” you whispered.
His gaze softened for one breath. Then he moved closer. He pushed into you slowly, stealing the air from your lungs. Your head fell back against the cabinet.
Jack stopped. Completely.
Every muscle in him seemed locked with the effort of it. “You okay?”
“Yes.” The answer came immediately. Breathless. Certain.
Jack’s mouth brushed the corner of yours. “Good.”
Then he moved. Slowly at first. Controlled even now. He gave you time to feel every inch of the change, the stretch of being held open to him, the pressure of his body against yours, the hard edge of his vest against your chest every time he leaned in to kiss you. You tried to move your hands down on instinct, needing to touch him, needing something to hold onto besides the cool cabinet and his command.
His grip tightened around your wrists. “Not yet.”
A sound left you. Frustrated. Needy.
Jack’s mouth found your neck. “I know.”
He moved again, deeper this time, harder, and the whole room tilted. Your legs tightened around him. His breathing broke. A real break. Low and rough against your throat.
You caught it even through the haze. “There,” you whispered.
Jack lifted his head enough to look at you. His eyes were dark. “What?”
Your lips parted around a shaky breath. “Right there, Jack. Please.”
He drove into you again, harder, and the words disappeared from both of you. The counter creaked softly beneath you. The cabinet knocked once against your wrists. The spoon in the dishwasher shifted with a tiny metallic sound that should have been funny and was not, because Jack was moving now like the control he had used to wreck you had finally turned on him.
Still measured. Still focused. But rougher. More urgent. His mouth found yours again, catching the sounds you could not swallow. His hand kept your wrists pinned above your head. His other hand gripped your hip, dragging you closer, holding you exactly where he wanted you while the vest brushed and pressed and turned every thrust into another reminder of how this had started.
You were shaking again.
Already.
Jack felt it. His mouth curved against yours, a flash of smugness cutting through the roughness. “Already?”
You would have snapped at him if you could breathe. Instead, you made a broken sound and pulled against his grip.
He held you there.
“You did that on purpose,” you managed.
“I did.” His voice was rough. Pleased. Not nearly as steady as he wanted it to be.
That made you smile despite yourself. “You’re not as calm as you think.”
Jack’s eyes lifted to yours. For a second, the room narrowed to that look.
Then his hand released your wrists. “Touch me.”
You did not need to be told twice. Your hands came down fast. One grabbed the edge of the vest. The other slid to the back of his neck, fingers pushing into his hair, finally, finally holding on to him the way your whole body had been begging to since he walked through the door.
Jack groaned. A real sound. Low. Uncontrolled. The sound ruined you.
Your fingers tightened in his hair. “There he is.”
Jack caught your mouth with his. The kiss turned messy. Hotter. Less careful around the edges. His hand slid beneath your thigh and hitched you higher on the counter, changing the angle until your nails dug into the back of his neck and your whole body jolted against him.
The gear scraped against your skin.
His vest. His belt. The rough line of fabric and equipment. The hard, practical pieces of him still on while his control came apart under your hands. He was still dominant. Still the one setting the pace. But now you could feel what it cost him. Every breath. Every rough sound against your mouth. Every time his rhythm faltered because your hands found another strap, another edge, another place where his body was warm beneath the gear.
“Jack.”
His forehead pressed to yours. “I’ve got you.” The words came rough. Almost broken.
“You keep saying that.”
His hand tightened on your hip. “Because I do.”
Your chest pulled tight. For one second, the heat went soft at the center. Then he moved again, and you lost the thought completely. The kitchen blurred. Your hands clutched at him, one fisted in the vest, one at his neck, holding him close as he drove you higher. The refrigerator hummed somewhere far away. The counter was cold beneath you. His mouth was hot against yours. His breathing filled your ears.
His praise came low and rough, no longer polished, no longer smug in the same way. “That’s it.”
Your eyes closed.
“Good girl.”
Your fingers tightened.
“Just like that.”
Your body answered every word.
Jack knew it. He used it. He kept one hand at your hip and brought the other to your jaw, making you look at him when your head started to fall back.
“Stay with me.”
Your eyes opened.
He was close. You could see it now. In the tension around his mouth. In the way his breath caught every time you pulled him harder against you. In the way the rhythm turned rougher, less perfect, more honest.
“Jack,” you whispered.
His thumb brushed your cheek. “I know.”
“I’m—” You tried.
“I know.” His mouth touched yours. “Let me feel it.”
The words tipped you over. Your whole body went tight around him, hands clutching at the vest, mouth open against his, his name breaking somewhere in your throat as the room disappeared in a rush of heat and sound and Jack holding you through it.
Jack’s forehead dropped to yours, his breath breaking hot against your mouth.
“Oh, fuck.”
Your hands tightened in the front of his vest. “Jack.”
His grip dug into your hip, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to tell you he was there with you, right there, as gone as you were.
“I’m gonna come,” he said, voice wrecked now. “Oh—fu-fuck.”
The sound of him losing control almost tipped you over again.
His mouth brushed yours, messy and barely there.
“God, you’re doing so good,” he breathed. “So good for me.”
You clung to him, his vest rough beneath your hands, his body tense and shaking against yours.
“Jack,” you whispered again.
That was what did it.
His eyes closed. His breath caught. His whole body went tight, and then he buried his face against your neck with a rough, broken sound.
“Fuck,” he whispered against your skin. “Good girl. Good—God, baby.”
His hand tightened once at your waist. Then loosened. His body stayed pressed to yours, still shaking in small aftershocks he could not quite hide. For a moment, there was no command. No teasing. No smugness. Just Jack breathing hard against your throat, vest rough beneath your hands, his body warm and heavy and finally, completely undone.
His mouth pressed to your skin. His body went still.
For a long moment, there was only breathing.
Yours. His.
The hum of the refrigerator returning slowly. The cooling dishwasher. The ordinary kitchen gathering itself around the wreckage of what had just happened on the counter.
Your hands stayed on him. One in his hair. One curled into the vest.
Neither of you moved. Then Jack laughed once. Soft. Rough. Disbelieving.
His forehead stayed against your shoulder. “You okay?”
Your laugh came out weak. “I think my soul left my body.”
His shoulders moved with a quiet laugh. The sound warmed your skin. “Still good?”
You nodded against him. “I’m good.”
His hand, no longer commanding, slid slowly up your back.
Gentle now. Careful.
The dominance loosening into care before you could fully come down from it.
He lifted his head and looked at you.
His face had softened. His hair was a mess. His mouth was warm and swollen from kissing you. The vest was still on, crooked now, one strap half-loose, the POLICE patch no longer centered.
You reached up and touched it with two fingers.
Jack looked down. Then back at you. His mouth curved. Smug again. Barely. “You still hate the vest?”
You stared at him. Then at the vest. Then back at him. “I need you to understand that I am currently too vulnerable to answer questions.”
Jack laughed, low and warm. His thumb brushed your cheek. “That bad?”
You let your head fall back against the cabinet. “Worse.”
His smile softened. “Come here.”
“You are already kind of in my personal space.” You exhaled a laugh.
“Come here anyway.”
This time, there was no command in it. Just him. You leaned into him, and Jack gathered you carefully against the front of all that gear, one arm around your waist, one hand cradling the back of your head. The vest was still hard against your skin.
Somehow, in his arms, it felt softer.
He kissed your temple. Then your cheek. Then the corner of your mouth.
“You did so good,” he said quietly.
Your eyes closed. That praise hit differently now. Not sharp. Not dangerous. Warm.
You let out a slow breath against his neck. “Don’t be smug.”
Jack’s mouth brushed your hair. “I’m not.”
“You are.”
“A little.”
You laughed, boneless and breathless.
He held you tighter for a second, like the laugh mattered.
Behind you, the dishwasher clicked one last time.
Your eyes opened.
“The spoon,” you whispered.
Jack went still. Then he started laughing against your shoulder.
You felt it more than heard it. Deep. Quiet. Helpless.
You smiled into the side of his neck. “Your dishwasher is still open.”
“I know.”
“You’re breaking kitchen safety rules.”
Jack lifted his head enough to look at you.
His eyes were still dark, but softer now. “You want to finish unloading it?”
You looked down at yourself. Then at him. Then at the vest. “Absolutely not.”
His smile came slow. Warm. Entirely too pleased. “Good answer.”
You ended up in Jack’s bed after.
Not right away.
There was the shower first, warm water and his hands gentler than they had been in the kitchen. He washed the places where the counter had pressed into your skin. He kissed your shoulder under the spray. He wrapped you in a towel without making a joke about how unsteady your legs still were, which you appreciated enough not to mention how smug he looked about it.
Then one of his shirts.
Then water.
Then bed.
The room was dim by then, the late afternoon light gone blue at the edges of the blinds. You were curled against his side, cheek resting over his heart, one leg tangled with his beneath the sheet. Jack’s hand moved slowly over your back, up and down, steady enough that your breathing had started to match his without you meaning for it to.
He had been quiet for a while. Not distant quiet. Jack had different kinds of quiet. You knew them now.
This one was warm. Settled.
His fingers paused at the center of your back. “Hey.”
You lifted your head enough to look at him.
His face was softer than it had been in the kitchen. Hair damp. Jaw relaxed. No gear. No vest. No command in his voice now.
Just Jack.
“Hey,” you said.
His thumb moved once against your side. “You okay?”
You smiled faintly. “I’m good.”
He nodded. No hovering. No second-guessing. Just belief. Then his gaze dropped to where his hand rested against your back. For a second, you thought he might make a joke. Something about the vest. Something about the spoon. Something dry enough to pull you both back onto safer ground.
He didn’t.
His voice was low when he spoke. “Thank you.”
Your brow softened. “For what?”
Jack’s hand stilled. His eyes came back to yours. “For trusting me like that.”
The room went quiet around the words. Not empty. Full.
Your throat tightened before you could stop it.
Jack looked almost careful now, like the sentence had cost him more than any command he had given you downstairs. Like this was the part where he had less armor. No tactical vest. No smugness. No easy way to turn the weight of it into heat.
Just him, telling you he knew what you had handed him.
You shifted closer, your hand settling over his chest. “I do trust you.”
His jaw moved once. “I know.”
His fingers resumed their slow path over your back, but his voice stayed rougher than before. “I just don’t want to ever take it lightly.”
Oh.
That landed deeper than you expected.
You pressed your cheek back against his chest, listening to the steady beat beneath your ear.
“You don’t.”
Jack’s arm tightened around you.
Not much.
Enough.
You felt his mouth touch your hair. “Good.”
You closed your eyes.
For a while, neither of you said anything.
The house was quiet. The kitchen was downstairs with its open dishwasher and its abandoned spoon and the counter you were still not emotionally prepared to think about. The vest was somewhere else now. The boots. The belt. All the hard edges stripped away.
But Jack’s hand stayed warm on your back.
And when he kissed the top of your head again, it felt like the softest part of everything he had meant all along.
Summary: After a violent patient attack leaves you critically injured, Jack is forced to confront what it means to almost lose the person he loves.
Word count: 12k+
Warnings: patience violence, severe injury, angst, fluff
A/N:
read part 2 here
hey guys !! i’m genuinely so excited to finally post my first jack abbot fic, and i’m so excited for you guys to read it 😭
because tumblr hates me and this fic apparently exceeded the block limit, i had to split it into two parts <3 but i really hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as i enjoyed emotionally ruining myself while writing it.
anyways !!! thank you so much for reading, and please be nice this is my first time writing for the pitt/jack hahahah. if i used any medical terms wrong, my apologies 🫶
English is not my first language, so I apologize if I made any (grammar) mistakes. Feedback, requests, talks, vents, recommendations or just simple questions are always welcome.
Happy reading xxx
I do NOT give permission for my work to be translated or reposted on here or any other site.
The rain had started sometime before dawn.
By the time you merged onto the interstate, the entire city looked washed out and miserable beneath sheets of gray rain and smeared headlights reflecting across wet pavement. Your windshield wipers moved at full speed and still barely kept up with the storm. The coffee sitting untouched in your cupholder had gone cold nearly an hour ago, though you were honestly too exhausted to care anymore.
The overnight shift had turned into fifteen hours instead of eight after two trauma admissions arrived back-to-back near the end of the night, and now every muscle in your body ached with the kind of exhaustion that settled deep into your bones. You genuinely could not remember the last time you slept more than four uninterrupted hours.
Traffic slowed suddenly ahead of you.
At first you assumed construction or flooding because of the weather, but then smoke curled upward through the rain and your stomach dropped immediately.
Cars sat mangled across three lanes of traffic at impossible angles. One SUV had spun into the median while another sedan looked almost folded around the back of a delivery truck, its front end crushed so badly it barely resembled a vehicle anymore. Hazard lights blinked weakly through the storm while people stumbled across the interstate in shock.
Your body moved before your brain fully caught up.
“Oh my God.”
You were already unbuckling your seatbelt before the car completely stopped.
Adrenaline sliced straight through your exhaustion hard enough to make your hands shake as you reached for the trauma bag in the passenger seat. Rain hit you instantly the second you shoved the door open, cold water soaking through your clothes within seconds while distant screaming echoed somewhere through the storm.
Someone yelled that a driver was trapped.
Another voice screamed for a medic.
A woman near the shoulder sobbed hard enough she could barely breathe, blood running down the side of her forehead while a man beside her stood completely frozen, staring blankly at the wreckage like his brain had stopped processing reality altogether.
You were already running.
“I’m a doctor,” you shouted over the rain. “Move back and give me some room.”
People listened immediately.
The trapped driver looked somewhere in his forties, pinned awkwardly behind the wheel of the crushed sedan. Blood streamed from a scalp laceration down the side of his face while the airbags hung deflated around him. His breathing came too fast beneath the sound of rain hammering against twisted metal, panic beginning to sharpen around the edges of every inhale.
You crouched carefully beside the shattered driver’s side window, ignoring the glass biting through your scrub pants into your knees.
“Hey,” you said, forcing calmness into your voice despite the adrenaline roaring through your chest. “Can you hear me?”
The man blinked slowly toward you, dazed. “Think so.”
“Good. That’s good.” You adjusted the flashlight between your fingers while quickly checking his pupils. “What’s your name?”
“Leon.”
“Okay, Leon. I’m Dr. Y/L/N.” Your voice stayed steady automatically, years of emergency medicine taking over before panic had a chance to settle in. “Don’t move your neck for me, alright?”
A shaky breath of laughter escaped him. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
Despite everything, you smiled a little.
“You’re doing great,” you assured him quietly. “Stay with me.”
And he did.
His eyes kept finding yours every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.
Your hands moved automatically after that.
Pressure against the head wound. Monitoring responsiveness. Keeping him conscious and talking while you assessed what you could from outside the vehicle. Rainwater mixed with blood beneath your fingers while traffic backed up for what looked like miles behind you, headlights glowing dimly through the storm.
Leon kept looking at you every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.
“You work at the PTMC?” he asked weakly after spotting the hospital logo embroidered onto your soaked jacket.
“Unfortunately.”
That got a real laugh out of him, brief and pained but enough that relief loosened slightly in your chest.
“You always this calm when you see a car crash?”
You let out a tired breath through your nose. “No. I’m panicking beautifully internally.”
That made him laugh again.
Patients relaxed faster once they laughed. It was something you learned early in residency, fear loosened the second people felt human again instead of helpless.
So you stayed with him.
Even after the paramedics arrived.
Even after they started finishing the extrication, peeling back what remained of the driver’s side door while rain poured endlessly over the wreckage.
You stayed crouched beside him talking him through every step because shock was already creeping in around the edges of his expression, and every time panic threatened to overwhelm him again, his eyes found yours immediately.
“You’re okay,” you kept saying quietly. “Stay with me. You’re okay.”
The interstate blurred around you in streaks of red brake lights and flashing hazards. Rain soaked through your jacket and scrubs completely now, damp fabric clinging uncomfortably to your skin while your hair stuck to the back of your neck. The adrenaline that had carried you through the crash scene was already fading, leaving behind an exhaustion so heavy it felt physical.
An EMT looked up from the stretcher and did a double take.
“Dr. Y/L/N?”
You snapped back into focus automatically.
“Male, approximately forty-two. Restrained driver. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen currently. Complaining of left-sided rib pain. Possible concussion. Neuro status intact for now, but keep an eye on him.”
The EMT nodded once while adjusting the cervical collar. “Got it.”
They moved quickly after that, securing straps, checking vitals, loading equipment through the rain while Leon tracked every movement with the wide-eyed focus of someone trying very hard not to think too much about what had almost happened.
Your knees ached from kneeling on broken glass. Your hands had started trembling slightly now that nobody urgently needed anything from you anymore.
But you stayed beside him anyway.
Leon caught your wrist weakly just before the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.
“Hey.”
You looked up immediately.
His face looked pale beneath the blood and rainwater, eyes glassy with pain and adrenaline, but there was something steadier there too.
Gratitude maybe.
“Thank you for taking care of me.”
The words landed somewhere deeper than they should have.
You swallowed hard before giving his hand one quick squeeze.
“Yeah,” you said softly. “Of course.”
For a second, you just stood there breathing.
The interstate still smelled like gasoline and smoke. Somewhere farther down the road another paramedic shouted instructions while tow trucks crawled through the rain toward the wreckage. Traffic in the opposite lanes slowed almost to a stop as people stared through fogged windows at what was left of the crash.
“You riding in with us?” one of the EMTs asked.
You glanced once toward your abandoned car still trapped in unmoving traffic nearly half a mile behind the accident scene. The thought of trying to get back to it right now felt impossible.
“Yeah,” you answered tiredly.
The ambulance doors shut behind you a second later, sealing you inside with the sharp smell of antiseptic, wet clothing, and adrenaline.
Leon talked for almost the entire ride to the hospital.
Nervous talking.
The kind trauma patients did when they were scared enough to fill every silence because silence meant thinking too hard about how close they came to dying. You’d seen it hundreds of times before. Some people cried. Some got angry. Some went terrifyingly quiet.
Leon talked.
So you let him.
He rambled about his job, about his daughter’s soccer game this weekend, about how his wife was going to kill him for wrecking the car because they still hadn’t finished paying it off. Every few sentences his voice shook slightly before he forced another joke out anyway.
You stayed beside him the whole ride, monitoring pupils and vitals while keeping him talking just enough to assess mental status without making it obvious you were doing it.
“You always pick up patients on the highway on your day off?” he asked weakly at one point.
You let out a tired breath of laughter. “Only the lucky ones.”
That earned another shaky smile from him.
The ambulance doors burst open, paramedics already rolling the stretcher down the bay entrance while rainwater dripped steadily from the wheels onto the floor.
By the time the ambulance rolled through the bay doors at The Pitt, you were freezing hard enough your teeth almost hurt. Your scrubs were soaked completely through, your shoes squelching against the floor while trauma staff moved around you in organized chaos.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Santos called across the ER the second she spotted you climbing out of the ambulance bay. “Always a pleasure seeing you this early, Iron Woman.”
You groaned immediately.
You earned the nickname after accidentally mistaking a patient for Robert Downey Jr. during a twenty-hour shift.
To be fair, the goatee had been identical.
“Dana,” you called immediately, falling into step beside the stretcher. “What’s open?”
Dana barely looked up from the nurses’ station. “Trauma Two’s clear.”
“Perfect.” You pushed damp hair back from your face before glancing toward the department. “Whitaker, Javadi, you’re with me. Perlah, can you help set up Two?”
Perlah nodded immediately and disappeared ahead of the group while Whitaker grabbed gloves from the wall dispenser on his way past.
“You look cold,” Whitaker informed you conversationally.
“Thank you,” you replied flatly.
Javadi appeared beside the stretcher while all of you pushed through the trauma bay doors together. “What happened?”
“Restrained driver, approximately forty-two,” you answered automatically. “High-speed MVA during the storm. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen on arrival, complaining of left-sided rib pain and worsening headache. Possible concussion.”
“Vitals stable en route,” one of the paramedics added while helping transfer Leon onto the trauma bed.
Whitaker immediately started attaching monitors while Javadi pulled supplies from cabinets with the frantic efficiency of someone still trying very hard to look calmer than she actually felt.
Then Jack looked up from the computer station.
And somehow, in the middle of the packed emergency department, everything softened slightly around the edges.
You caught the exact moment recognition crossed his face. The exhaustion behind his eyes shifted immediately into concern as his gaze moved slowly over you. Soaked scrubs, blood smeared across your gloves, rainwater dripping steadily from your hair onto the floor beneath you.
Jack crossed the trauma bay almost immediately.
“You okay?” he asked quietly. “What happened? I thought you went home.”
His voice grounded you in a way almost nothing else could anymore.
Maybe it was because he always sounded calm even during chaos. Maybe it was because after years together your body recognized him before your brain consciously caught up. Or maybe it was simply that exhaustion hit harder the second somebody else arrived to help carry it.
“I’m fine,” you answered automatically while stripping off your soaked gloves and replacing them with clean ones. “Probably need a head CT.”
Jack’s expression tightened instantly.
“For you?”
You blinked at him before realizing what you’d said. “What? No. For the patient.”
Behind you, Perlah had already started cutting away Leon’s soaked shirt while Whitaker attached cardiac leads to his chest.
“BP’s holding,” Whitaker called.
“Sinus tach at one-ten,” Javadi added while checking another monitor. “Probably pain and adrenaline.”
“Good,” you answered automatically before stepping back beside the bed.
“Where’s Robby?”
“Overdose in Four,” Dana answered from the doorway.
You nodded once and reached for your penlight again, checking Leon’s pupils carefully while rain continued tapping faintly against the ambulance bay doors behind you.
Santos wandered into Trauma Two looking personally offended. “Why does huckleberry and crash get invited? I can help.”
“You can stand there and look pretty while actual doctors save lives,” you shot back immediately.
Santos gasped dramatically. “Dr. Abbot, your girlfriend is bullying me again.”
“She bullies everybody,” Jack muttered.
But there was no heat behind it.
His eyes lingered on you a second too long.
You knew that look by now.
Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to bury concern beneath sarcasm and exhaustion, but you still caught it every time. He noticed the dark circles under your eyes. The slight tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline was wearing off. The way your shoulders sagged whenever you thought nobody was looking.
“You’re freezing,” he said quietly.
“You are correct. I am freezing.”
Without another word, Jack pulled his hoodie off the back of the nurses’ station chair and draped it carefully around your shoulders before you could protest. It was still warm from him, smelling faintly like coffee, antiseptic, and the cologne he only remembered to wear maybe twice a month.
Something in your chest tightened stupidly at the gesture.
Behind him, Santos gagged theatrically. “Oh my God. Romance in the trauma bay. I’m going to throw up.”
“Go chart something,” Jack said flatly.
Whitaker looked up from the monitor leads. “Actually, I think it's very sweet."
“You’re all miserable,” you informed them while pulling the hoodie tighter around yourself.
“No,” Javadi corrected while checking Leon’s blood pressure. “You two are just aggressively in love in public.”
Jack looked genuinely offended. “Aggressively? I don't get it."
Despite yourself, you laughed softly while stepping back toward Leon’s bedside.
Leon noticed the interaction immediately.
“That your boyfriend?” he asked weakly from the trauma bed.
“Husband to the emergency department,” you corrected while snapping fresh gloves on. “Boyfriend in real life.”
Jack rolled his eyes while typing orders into the computer. “Don’t encourage her, Leon.”
Leon grinned despite the pain. “You guys are disgustingly cute.”
Under the brighter trauma lights, bruising had already started blooming dark purple across his ribs beneath the rain-soaked skin.
“Headache worse?” you asked while checking his pupils again.
“A little.”
“You nauseous?”
“Not yet.”
“Good,” you answered. “Let’s keep it that way.”
Javadi palpated carefully along his left side while Whitaker adjusted the blood pressure cuff.
“There’s something strangely comforting about you people,” Leon admitted weakly after a moment.
“You say that now,” Javadi muttered.
That earned another tired laugh from him before he winced sharply afterward.
“There it is,” you said softly. “Still joking. Good sign, buddy.”
There was something oddly comforting about patients who stayed conversational. After years in emergency medicine, you learned to appreciate moments where humanity still existed between procedures and bloodwork and trauma assessments.
Sometimes those tiny conversations mattered almost as much as the medicine itself.
Jack stepped beside you while reviewing Leon’s vitals, his shoulder brushing yours briefly in the cramped trauma bay. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic, damp fabric, and rainwater now that Leon’s soaked clothing had finally been cut away.
“You should change,” Jack murmured quietly while adjusting one of the monitor leads. “I got this, baby.”
You barely glanced at him, still focused on the chart. “Don’t worry. I’ll survive.”
A tired look crossed his face immediately.
“That’s usually what people say right before passing out.”
You shot him a look over your shoulder, though exhaustion dulled most of the energy behind it. “You’re dramatic.”
“You’ve been awake how long now?”
“Eighteen hours.”
Jack stared at you flatly. “That’s not comforting.”
“You stopped at a major accident scene after an eighteen-hour shift?” Javadi asked incredulously.
You shrugged slightly.
And that alone made Jack’s jaw tighten, because that was exactly the kind of thing you always did.
The adrenaline carrying you through the crash scene had almost completely faded now, leaving behind exhaustion so heavy it felt physical. Your wet clothes clung coldly to your skin beneath Jack’s hoodie while every muscle in your body ached now that the immediate crisis had passed.
Jack exhaled softly through his nose before lowering his voice.
“You don’t always have to run yourself into the ground trying to save everybody.”
The words landed harder than they should have.
You focused instead on adjusting Leon’s blanket over his chest, smoothing the fabric carefully just to give your hands something else to do.
Jack knew you too well by now to push after saying something like that.
That was part of what made loving him dangerous sometimes. He noticed things you worked very hard to hide from everybody else.
He noticed the way your hands trembled after bad trauma calls once the adrenaline wore off. How you skipped meals without realizing it during difficult shifts. How every patient death stayed with you longer than you ever admitted aloud.
Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to compartmentalize just enough to survive it, which somehow only made him better at recognizing when you weren’t doing the same.
His hand brushed briefly against the small of your back as he moved toward the monitors again.
“Don’t worry, Leon,” Jack said easily while checking the cardiac tracing. “You’re in good hands.”
Leon looked toward him before his gaze drifted back to you.
“I figured that out already,” he said softly. “She stopped on the interstate for me.”
You glanced up from the chart, slightly surprised by how steady his voice sounded now despite everything.
“You didn’t have to do all that,” Leon continued quietly.
You shrugged lightly, pushing damp hair away from your face. “Part of the job.”
“Maybe,” he answered softly, still watching you carefully. “But most people would’ve kept driving.”
Something warm and uncomfortable settled low in your chest at that.
Most patients never saw the moments in between all of this. They saw calm voices and steady hands. They saw competence because that was what they needed from you in moments like these.
They never saw the aftermath.
The exhaustion. The panic doctors swallowed in real time just to keep functioning. The way people occasionally locked themselves in supply closets for thirty seconds after bad cases just to breathe before walking back out like nothing happened.
But Leon had seen you kneeling beside twisted metal in freezing rain with blood on your hands while traffic screamed past only feet away.
He’d seen the human part too.
And somehow that felt far more exposing than expected.
Before you could answer, something shifted.
Subtle.
Small enough most people in the room probably would have missed it entirely.
But after years in emergency medicine, your body noticed changes before your brain consciously caught up.
Leon’s breathing changed.
One second it was slow and uneven with postictal exhaustion.
The next it caught strangely in his chest.
His eyes lost focus somewhere over your shoulder while every muscle in his body tightened beneath the blankets all at once.
Your stomach dropped instantly.
“Leon?”
Jack looked up from the monitor station at the exact same moment Leon’s entire body stiffened violently against the mattress.
“He’s seizing!”
Everything exploded into motion.
The seizure hit hard and fast, violent enough that the entire trauma bed rattled beneath him. His back arched sharply while his arms convulsed uncontrollably, knocking equipment sideways as monitors erupted into sharp screaming alarms throughout the room.
“Clock started,” Perlah called immediately.
“Two minutes on the seizure pads,” Whitaker added while grabbing suction.
“Turn him,” you ordered.
You and Javadi moved together automatically, carefully rolling Leon onto his side while his body continued jerking violently beneath your hands. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten through his tongue while every breath came in horrible choking gasps between convulsions.
“Airway’s clear,” Javadi said quickly, though her voice still sounded tight with adrenaline.
Across the room Jack was already pulling medication from the crash cart while Dana called CT from the doorway ahead of transport.
Then finally, slowly, the seizure broke.
Leon’s body slumped heavily back against the mattress drenched in sweat while ragged breaths tore unevenly from his chest. The room fell briefly into that strange silence that always followed emergencies, where everybody still moved quickly even though the worst part had passed.
For now.
“Let’s get a CT stat,” Jack said immediately.
You nodded once, trying to ignore the tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline spike was crashing again.
“I’ll stay with him until transport.”
Jack hesitated.
Only briefly, but long enough for you to notice.
Something unreadable crossed his expression while his eyes flicked from Leon back toward you.
Concern maybe.
The same quiet tension he always carried after particularly violent trauma cases.
“You sure?” he asked softly.
You frowned slightly. “Yeah.”
Whitaker glanced briefly between both of you like he noticed something too, but before he could say anything Dana appeared in the doorway again.
“Trauma Three needs help now.”
Jack’s jaw tightened.
His fingers brushed briefly against your wrist before he stepped away toward the hallway, disappearing almost immediately back into the noise and chaos outside the trauma bay.
The room quieted afterward.
Machines beeped steadily while rain tapped faintly against distant ER windows somewhere down the hall. Whitaker and Javadi had already been pulled into another room, leaving you alone beside Leon while he lay motionless in exhausted postictal confusion.
You dimmed the overhead light slightly before adjusting the blanket higher over his chest.
“Hey,” you said gently when you noticed him beginning to stir. “You’re okay. You had a seizure.”
No response.
His eyes stayed fixed upward, unfocused and confused.
Postictal.
You had seen it hundreds of times before. Disorientation. Confusion. Agitation sometimes. Patients waking terrified because their brains had not fully caught up to reality yet.
Your shoulder ached dully now that exhaustion was settling deeper into your body again. You reached absentmindedly for the chart at the foot of the bed, mentally running through differentials and imaging priorities while waiting for CT to call back.
You missed the shift in him by less than a second.
One moment Leon lay motionless against the mattress, the next his eyes sharpened violently.
Not recognition.
Fear.
Pure terrified instinct.
Your stomach dropped.
“Leon—”
He surged upright before you could finish the sentence.
His hand closed around your throat with terrifying force, slamming you backward into the cabinet hard enough to knock the air violently from your lungs. Pain exploded across the back of your skull as your head cracked sharply against metal.
“Leon!”
The sound came out broken and strangled.
But he wasn’t seeing you.
That was the horrifying part.
His eyes looked completely wild now—unfocused, terrified, empty all at once. Pure neurological panic stripped entirely of recognition.
For one terrible second, training overrode fear.
“Leon,” you gasped desperately, grabbing his wrists instinctively instead of striking him. “Listen to me. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”
Nothing reached him.
His grip tightened harder around your throat.
Air stopped.
Panic slammed through you instantly now, sharp and animal and overwhelming in a way you almost never allowed yourself to feel. Your vision flickered violently while you clawed uselessly at his hands, trying desperately to drag in even one full breath.
You needed help.
Safe word.
Your mouth opened automatically.
“H—”
Nothing came out except a rasp.
Leon shoved you backward harder, your skull slamming against the cabinet again hard enough that white exploded across your vision.
The hospital safe word.
You just needed to say it.
“Hula—”
The sound collapsed into another strangled gasp as his fingers crushed tighter against your airway.
Your lungs burned.
Tears blurred your vision from pain and lack of oxygen while movement echoed faintly somewhere outside the trauma bay. People were still moving through the ER completely unaware of what was happening behind the curtain.
Your body was weakening fast.
You forced one shredded breath into your lungs and screamed:
“HULA HOOP!”
The entire department reacted instantly.
The trauma bay doors burst open hard enough to slam against the wall while voices shouted over each other.
Hands grabbed Leon, trying to drag him backward while he fought wildly in blind confusion and terror.
But before anyone could fully pull him away, he shoved you violently across the room.
Your shoulder struck the edge of the cabinetry with a horrible crack before the rest of your body collapsed hard onto the tile floor.
Pain tore through your arm instantly, sharp and wrong enough it barely felt real.
You couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t think.
The room blurred violently while alarms screamed overhead and people shouted your name somewhere nearby.
And through all of it, through the pain and chaos splitting apart around you, your brain found one thing instinctively.
Jack.
You thought about the way he always found you in crowded trauma bays without even trying. The way his hoodie still smelled faintly like coffee and antiseptic around your shoulders. The quiet brush of his hand against your back only minutes earlier.
You wondered irrationally if he was going to blame himself for leaving the room.
That thought hurt almost as badly as the pain itself.
Your eyes slipped closed just as the world dissolved completely into noise.
Jack was halfway through finishing a chart when he realized he had not seen you in several minutes.
He looked up automatically, scanning the department for you out of habit more than anything else. Usually he could spot you immediately no matter how crowded the ER became. You moved quickly when you worked, sharp and focused and impossible to miss once he knew what to look for.
But you were nowhere.
“Hey, Javadi,” he called while signing off medication orders. “Have you seen Dr. Y/L/N?”
Javadi looked up so quickly, like she was a deer caught in headlights. “Uh… no,” she answered quickly. Too quickly. “I haven’t seen her since I left Leon. Sorry.”
Then she disappeared almost immediately toward another patient before he could ask anything else.
He pushed himself upright from the workstation, the familiar ache radiating faintly through his prosthetic. Long shifts always made it worse. The socket rubbed raw after enough hours on his feet, especially during busy trauma nights when he barely sat down.
Normally he ignored it.
Right now he barely felt it at all.
“Dana,” he called, already moving toward the nurses’ station. “Have you seen Y/N?”
Dana barely looked up from the chart she was reviewing. “Pretty sure she’s still with Leon. Why?”
Jack turned the iPad slightly toward her. “They haven’t gone to CT.”
That got her attention.
Her eyes flicked quickly toward the tracking board before settling back on him. “They’re probably backed up upstairs.”
“Maybe.”
But something still felt wrong.
Dana sighed softly. “Jack, she’s a big girl. She can handle herself.”
He knew that.
God, he knew that better than anybody.
You were one of the strongest people he had ever met. Smarter than most attendings twice your age. Calm during trauma activations that made residents freeze completely. You handled combative patients, pediatric codes, catastrophic MVCs, and grieving families with a steadiness that still amazed him after all these years.
But that feeling in his chest would not go away.
Dana pointed down the hallway. “I actually need you in Central Fourteen. Chest pain rule-out and Dr. Garcia wants another set of eyes before she calls cards.”
Jack exhaled through his nose, still staring at the tracking board.
“Right,” he muttered distractedly. “Yeah. Okay.”
He turned reluctantly toward the direction of Central Fourteen, adjusting his pace automatically as the prosthetic clicked softly against tile beneath his scrub pants. Fatigue had settled deep into the joint hours ago, making his gait slightly uneven now that the adrenaline from earlier trauma activations had worn off.
Then he heard it.
“HULA HOOP!”
Everything in his body stopped instantly.
The voice was barely recognizable.
Raw. Ragged. Strangled around obvious pain and panic in a way that made every hair on the back of his neck stand upright immediately. For one horrible second his brain refused to process it properly because it did not make sense. Not your voice. Not like that.
And then recognition hit him all at once.
The hospital safe word.
Trauma Two.
Jack’s heart dropped so violently it almost hurt.
No.
The thought hit him before anything else.
No no no.
Adrenaline detonated through his bloodstream hard enough to make him dizzy.
Then instinct took over completely.
“No,” he breathed aloud, already moving before the word fully left his mouth.
He pivoted so sharply pain shot violently through his prosthetic, the sudden turn grinding pressure through the socket hard enough that under normal circumstances it would have staggered him. But right now he barely felt it beneath the sheer overwhelming panic flooding his system.
Fear swallowed everything else whole.
Not the controlled fear he knew from trauma medicine. Not the clinical kind that sharpened your focus during codes and mass casualty calls.
This was different.
This was personal.
Jack shoved past a stretcher hard enough that the wheels screeched across tile while people all around him started reacting at the exact same time. Nurses turned toward Trauma Two instantly at the sound of the safe word. Dana’s head snapped upward from the nurses’ station. Santos was already running before half the department fully understood what was happening.
But Jack got there first.
The curtain outside Trauma Two jerked violently as shouting erupted from inside the room. Monitors screamed overhead loud enough to echo through the entire department while equipment crashed hard against the floor somewhere beyond the drapes.
“Get him off her!”
The words barely registered through the roaring in Jack’s ears.
His pulse was so loud now it drowned everything else out.
He hit the doorway hard enough that the curtain ripped halfway off the track as he shoved inside.
And then he saw you.
Lying on the floor.
Motionless.
For one horrifying second his brain simply stopped functioning.
You were crumpled unnaturally against the tile beside the cabinets, one arm twisted wrong beneath you while blood streaked across the side of your face from where your head had struck something hard enough to split skin open. Jack noticed everything all at once in the brutal hyperclarity trauma doctors developed after years in emergency medicine.
The bruising already forming around your throat.
The abnormal angle of your shoulder.
The way your chest barely moved.
And somehow that was the part that terrified him most.
You were not moving enough.
Leon was still screaming somewhere nearby while Ahmed and two nurses fought to restrain him against the opposite wall, his face wild with postictal confusion and terror. Somebody was yelling for sedation meds. The entire trauma bay had dissolved into complete chaos.
But Jack barely registered any of it.
Because you were on the floor.
And you were not getting up.
Something inside his chest seemed to cave inward violently.
“Oh, honey.”
Then he said your name, and the sound that came out barely resembled the steady, composed voice Jack used during traumas and codes and every impossible shift the hospital threw at him.
This was different.
There was no clinical calm left in him now.
Only fear.
Pure terrified fear.
He dropped beside you so fast pain tore sharply through his prosthetic as his knee hit tile, but he ignored it instantly. His hands shook hard enough he almost missed your carotid pulse the first time he checked.
Then finally.
There. Weak, but there.
Relief hit so hard it almost made him nauseous.
“Oh my God,” he whispered shakily, one bloodstained hand cradling the side of your face carefully while the other pressed against your neck searching for injuries. “Hey. Hey, stay with me. Come on.”
You did not respond.
Jack’s stomach turned violently.
Training forced itself back online in fragmented pieces despite the panic threatening to choke him alive. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Neuro. He assessed automatically even while his brain screamed at him that this was you beneath his hands.
His eyes flicked instantly toward your throat again and rage flooded him so suddenly it nearly stole his breath.
Finger-shaped bruises were already darkening against your skin.
He hurt you.
The realization nearly made Jack physically sick.
“Jack,” Dana’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as she dropped beside him. “We need to move.”
But Jack could barely hear her.
Your eyelashes fluttered faintly for half a second before falling closed again and something inside him broke completely at the sight.
“No no no,” he whispered frantically, brushing damp hair away from your face with shaking fingers. “Stay awake. Baby, stay awake for me.”
His voice cracked hard on the last word.
That terrified him almost as much as the sight of you bleeding on the floor.
Because Jack Abbot did not lose composure.
Not during traumas, not during mass casualties, not while pronouncing deaths.
But right now panic was tearing straight through him so violently he could barely breathe around it.
And for the first time in years, he had absolutely no idea how to separate being a doctor from being the man who loved you.
“What the hell happened?”
Robby’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as he pushed into Trauma Two with Mohan directly behind him, but for half a second, both of them stopped cold.
The room looked catastrophic. Leon was still fighting violently against security near the far wall, his movements frantic and disorganized while Santos shouted for more sedation. Equipment littered the floor around the trauma bay, overturned trays and scattered supplies crunching beneath people’s shoes as alarms screamed overhead loudly enough to make the entire room feel claustrophobic.
And in the middle of all of it, you were lying motionless on the floor with Jack kneeling beside you.
Blood streaked down the side of your face and disappeared beneath the collar of his hoodie still hanging around your shoulders. Bruising had already started darkening visibly around your throat, ugly fingerprints blooming beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while your left arm rested at an angle that made Mohan’s stomach immediately drop.
“Jesus Christ,” Mohan breathed.
“Security’s got the patient,” Dana snapped, already dropping beside you with Santos. “Probably postictal aggression after the seizure. He went after her.”
Robby moved instantly after that, years of trauma medicine overriding shock the second he reached your side. “Get her on a gurney now. C-spine precautions. Santos, I need vitals. Dana, page CT and tell them we’re coming immediately. Mohan, get me neuro and ortho on standby.”
Everybody moved except Jack.
He stayed frozen beside you on the tile floor, one hand still cradling the side of your face like he physically could not force himself to let go.
“Jack,” Robby said.
No response.
Jack was staring at you with an expression Robby had never seen on him before. Not panic exactly. Worse than panic. Helplessness, maybe, like his brain had short-circuited somewhere between doctor and boyfriend and now could not figure out how to function as either.
“Jack,” Robby repeated more firmly.
That finally seemed to pull him back enough to blink.
“She isn’t breathing right,” he said hoarsely, voice rough enough it barely sounded like him anymore. “He had her by the throat. Her head hit the cabinet, probably. Possible LOC. Shoulder’s definitely dislocated, maybe fractured too.”
The words came out clipped and automatic, pure trauma assessment forced through panic, but his hands were still shaking.
Dana and Santos carefully slid a backboard beneath you while Mohan cut away the remains of the hoodie around your shoulder to assess the injury better. The second the fabric moved, Jack saw the full extent of the bruising spreading across your throat, dark purple already beneath your skin.
“He squeezed hard enough to leave petechiae,” Santos muttered quietly while examining your neck. “Shit.”
You stirred weakly then, letting out a broken sound somewhere between a gasp and a whimper as Dana stabilized your shoulder. Jack moved instantly at the sound.
“Hey,” he said, voice softening so fast it almost hurt to hear. “Hey, don’t move. You’re okay.”
Your eyes fluttered halfway open for barely a second before unfocusing again.
“She’s awake,” Jack breathed.
“For now,” Robby answered grimly while checking your pupils with a penlight. “Possible concussion. We’re not ruling anything out yet.”
Jack knew that tone. It was the same one they all used when things might be much worse than they looked initially.
Around them, the room was finally beginning to settle into controlled chaos instead of outright panic. Security had Leon restrained now while Santos pushed sedatives through an IV line with tight, controlled movements. Leon’s terrified shouting dissolved into confused, exhausted mumbling as the medication began taking effect.
“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mohan said quietly, mostly to fill the horrible silence hanging over the room.
Jack did not answer. Rationally, he already knew that. Postictal aggression, neurological confusion, severe agitation after seizure activity. They had all seen it before. But none of it mattered right now, because every time Jack blinked, he saw your body hitting the floor again.
“On my count,” Santos said firmly while positioning herself near your head. “One, two, three.”
They lifted you carefully onto the gurney, and the second they moved your shoulder, a sharp cry tore from your throat despite your barely conscious state.
Jack physically flinched.
Robby looked at him immediately. “Jack, I need you with me here.”
But Jack still looked frozen. His prosthetic locked slightly as he stood too quickly, pain shooting sharply through the joint while exhaustion and adrenaline crashed violently together inside his body. Normally, he compensated automatically for it. Years of physical therapy had taught him exactly how to move through pain without thinking.
Right now, he barely noticed it. All he could see was you strapped to a trauma gurney instead of standing beside one, and somehow that felt profoundly wrong in a way his brain could not fully process yet.
Dana squeezed his arm briefly as she passed him. “She’s alive,” she said quietly, firmly enough that it sounded almost like an order. “So stay with us.”
Jack swallowed hard, then finally nodded once.
The second the gurney locked into place beside the trauma bed, the room shifted fully into trauma mode. Controlled chaos. Fast hands. Sharply clipped orders. Monitor alarms blending into the constant noise of the ER outside while everybody moved around you with the kind of practiced coordination that only came from years of emergency medicine.
“BP dropping,” Santos called from the monitor station. “Ninety-two over fifty-six. Heart rate one-forty. Pulse ox ninety-four.”
Robby swore quietly under his breath before stepping beside the gurney. “Dana, I need another large bore IV. CBC, CMP, coags, type and screen, lactate. Full trauma panel.”
Dana was already moving before he finished speaking.
Mohan carefully stabilized your cervical spine while Perlah adjusted the collar more securely around your neck. Blood stained the side of your face now, dark against pale skin beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while bruising continued spreading visibly across your throat.
“She’s tachycardic from pain and adrenaline,” Mohan said quickly while palpating carefully along your ribs and clavicle. “Left shoulder deformity obvious. Could be anterior dislocation, maybe proximal humerus fracture too.”
“She hit hard,” Dana added grimly while cutting away the sleeve of your scrub top completely. “Look at the swelling already, poor baby.”
Jack forced himself closer finally, though every instinct in his body screamed at him to stop looking entirely.
Your shoulder looked wrong. Not subtly wrong, catastrophically wrong. The joint sat visibly displaced beneath skin already darkening with bruising while your arm rested protectively against your torso in unconscious guarding. Even barely responsive, your body was trying to protect the injury.
“Y/N?” Robby called firmly while shining the penlight into your eyes again. “Hey, stay with me.”
Your eyelids fluttered weakly, and your lips parted slightly before a small broken sound escaped you, more pain than words.
“There you go,” Dana said softly. “That’s good, hey sweetie.”
Jack swallowed hard. Normally those words would have sounded clinical. Routine. Hearing them about you made him feel sick.
Robby’s fingers moved carefully along your scalp before stopping near the back of your head. “She’s got a laceration here. Probably where she hit the cabinet.”
“How bad?” Jack asked immediately.
Robby looked up briefly. “Needs staples. I’m more concerned about intracranial bleed.”
Jack felt the room narrow sharply around him as his brain supplied every possibility instantly. Subdural. Epidural. Contusion. Diffuse axonal injury. Years of trauma medicine suddenly felt less like a skill and more like torture because now he knew exactly how bad this could become.
“BP’s still dropping,” Santos called sharply.
“Hang another liter.”
Dana connected fluids immediately while Mohan checked your abdomen carefully for rigidity and tenderness.
“She guarding?”
“Little bit.”
“Could just be pain response.”
“Or internal injury,” Robby answered grimly.
Jack closed his eyes briefly. Only twenty minutes ago, he had been teasing you for refusing to change out of wet scrubs. Twenty minutes ago, you had been standing beside him alive and exhausted and rolling your eyes at him. Now you were strapped to a trauma gurney while your coworkers discussed possible brain bleeds.
The trauma bay doors pushed open again.
“What do we have?”
Garcia entered already pulling gloves on, clearly expecting another routine consult before her eyes landed on the gurney. Then she froze.
“Is that...?”
Nobody answered immediately because suddenly saying it aloud made everything feel horrifyingly real.
Garcia moved closer automatically, surgical instincts taking over even while shock still flickered visibly across her face. Her eyes swept quickly across your injuries, taking in the bruising around your throat, the unstable shoulder, and the blood matted into your hair.
“Oh my God.”
Jack looked away sharply at the sound in her voice. He could handle panic, trauma, blood, failed resuscitations, and catastrophic injuries. But he could not handle hearing pity directed at you.
“What happened?” Garcia asked quietly.
“Postictal assault,” Robby answered while reviewing your vitals. “Patient seized after MVC. Became combative during recovery.”
Garcia’s jaw tightened immediately. Her eyes flicked briefly toward Jack, and somehow that made everything worse. Everybody in the hospital knew about the two of you. Not because either of you talked about it much, but because some things became obvious after enough years working together. The way Jack unconsciously searched for you in crowded rooms. The way your voice softened around him even during impossible shifts. The way both of you somehow always ended up side by side during difficult traumas without discussing it first.
And now everybody was watching him try not to fall apart while you lay bleeding in front of him.
“Y/N,” Garcia said gently while stepping closer to assess your airway. “Can you hear me?”
Your brow twitched faintly at the sound of your name.
“Good,” she murmured softly. “Stay with us.”
Jack finally moved closer again until he stood directly beside the gurney. For a second, he just stared at you. Really stared. At the bruises darkening beneath your jaw, at the trembling rise and fall of your breathing, at the blood drying against your temple.
Then very carefully, he reached down and took your hand.
Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm almost immediately.
Tiny movement. Huge relief.
“Okay,” Robby said firmly, forcing the room back into focus. “Let’s move. I want CT angio head and neck immediately. We’re ruling out intracranial bleed and carotid injury.”
Garcia nodded once beside him, already assessing your airway with practiced hands. “Neck swelling’s getting worse.”
Jack saw it too now that she said it aloud. The bruising around your throat had spread darker beneath the fluorescent lights while swelling gathered visibly beneath your jawline. Every breath you took sounded wrong now. Wet. Shallow. Strained enough to make every survival instinct in his body start screaming.
“Pulse ox is dipping,” Santos called sharply. “Ninety-one.”
“Jaw thrust,” Garcia ordered immediately.
Dana repositioned carefully at your head while Garcia leaned closer, studying the bruising around your airway with growing concern. “She may need to be intubated before CT if the swelling progresses.”
The word hit Jack like a physical blow. Intubated. His brain immediately supplied images he did not want. Ventilator settings. Sedation drips. ICU monitors. Neurological checks every hour.
“No,” he said automatically before he could stop himself.
Everybody looked at him.
Jack swallowed hard immediately, realizing too late he had said it aloud.
Robby’s expression softened slightly. “Jack.”
He hated the way Robby said his name right now. Carefully. Like he was one bad second away from falling apart completely.
“I know,” Jack muttered quickly, dragging a shaky hand down his face. “I know.”
But he didn’t. Not really. Because his brain kept splitting violently between two impossible realities. One side of him catalogued injuries automatically. Airway trauma after strangulation. Possible cervical instability. Hypoxia. Concussion. Internal bleeding. Shoulder fracture-dislocation. The other side could barely process the fact that you were lying here at all.
Your breathing suddenly hitched sharply.
Jack’s head snapped toward you instantly.
Your eyes fluttered weakly before opening. Confusion crossed your face immediately while you tried weakly to move, but pain flashed across your expression so fast it made Jack physically tense.
“Don’t,” he said immediately, stepping closer. “Baby, don’t move.”
Your gaze drifted slowly around the trauma bay like you were trying to understand where you were. The bright lights. The people surrounding you. The monitors beeping overhead. Then finally, your eyes landed on Jack.
Relief flickered there instantly. Small. Barely there. Enough to nearly destroy him.
“Hey,” he said softly, gripping your hand tighter without realizing it. “Hey, I’m right here.”
Your lips parted slightly, but nothing came out at first except a weak breath.
Jack leaned closer immediately. “What?”
Your brow pinched faintly in confusion.
“...Leon?”
The room went quiet for half a second.
Even now, barely conscious and injured and terrified, your first instinct was still the patient. Something inside Jack cracked painfully at that.
“He’s restrained,” Robby answered gently before Jack could. “You’re safe.”
Your eyes shifted again, slower this time.
“Hurts,” you whispered faintly.
Jack looked immediately toward your shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly, voice finally cracking despite how hard he tried to control it. “I know, sweetheart.”
Garcia’s eyes flicked sharply toward him at the sound. Jack almost never lost composure at work. Not like this.
Robby swore quietly under his breath. “We tube here or risk losing it in CT.”
The room shifted instantly again. More movement. More urgency. Dana reached for airway equipment while Santos prepared sedation meds with visibly tighter movements now. Mohan adjusted oxygen flow quickly while Garcia moved toward the head of the bed.
Jack felt suddenly frozen all over again.
Your eyes moved back toward him weakly, panic beginning to flicker beneath the pain now that you were awake enough to understand pieces of the conversation around you.
“Jack,” you whispered hoarsely.
His chest tightened violently. “I’m here.”
Your fingers curled weakly against his hand.
“Don’t...” Your breathing hitched painfully. “Don’t leave.”
That finally broke him.
Because you sounded scared. You, the person who stayed calm during pediatric arrests and mass casualty incidents and catastrophic traumas that made residents physically sick afterward.
Jack leaned down immediately, pressing his forehead briefly against yours despite the blood and chaos surrounding both of you. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered shakily. “Okay? I’m right here.”
Then your heart rate spiked sharply.
“One-fifty,” Santos warned.
Your oxygen dipped again.
“Eighty-eight.”
Garcia looked up instantly. “That’s it. We’re securing the airway.”
Panic flashed visibly across your face, and Jack felt your hand tighten weakly around his.
“Hey,” he said immediately, brushing damp hair carefully away from your forehead. “Look at me, sweetheart.”
Your unfocused eyes found his again.
“You’re okay,” he whispered, even though his own heart was pounding hard enough to make him nauseous. “Just keep breathing for me.”
Garcia stepped beside him carefully. “Jack,” she said quietly. “I need room.”
And suddenly he realized there was nothing else he could do. No medication to order. No procedure capable of fixing this himself. No trauma protocol separating him from the overwhelming terror flooding his chest.
All he could do was let go of your hand and watch other people try to save you, and somehow that felt worse than anything he had seen in his entire career.
And somehow that felt infinitely worse than any injury he had seen in his entire career.
The intubation blurred together afterward in fragments Jack knew would probably stay with him for the rest of his life.
Garcia’s voice turned sharp and clinical the second she stepped fully into procedure mode. “Etomidate ready?”
“Ready.”
“Succinylcholine?”
“Ready.”
“Pulse ox?”
“Eighty-seven and dropping.”
The room moved quickly around you after that. Packaging tore open, monitors screamed softly overhead, and Santos pushed medications through your IV with controlled precision while Dana stabilized your cervical spine at the head of the bed.
Jack stood rooted beside the wall, feeling completely fucking useless.
He had watched hundreds of intubations in his career. He had performed them himself during impossible traumas, with blood filling airways and families screaming outside the room. Usually, the procedure grounded him. Medicine always grounded him because medicine made sense. Algorithms. Protocols. Airway, breathing, circulation. Find the problem and fix it.
But this was you, and suddenly none of it felt clinical anymore.
Your eyes found his one last time before the sedatives fully took effect. Fear still flickered there beneath the exhaustion and pain, but so did trust. Complete trust. The kind that made his chest ache violently because you were still looking at him like he could somehow fix this.
Then your body relaxed beneath the medication.
Garcia moved immediately. “Going in.”
The room fell quieter for a second except for the ventilator alarms and the sound of Jack’s own pulse hammering violently in his ears. He watched Garcia guide the laryngoscope carefully while Robby monitored your vitals from beside the bed.
“Visualized.”
“Tube.”
“Advancing.”
Jack swallowed hard enough that it hurt.
You looked so small suddenly. That was the thought that kept repeating in his head while he stared at your motionless body beneath trauma lights that suddenly felt much too bright. You had always seemed larger than life somehow. Loud when you wanted to be. Brilliant. Sharp-edged. Impossible to intimidate. The kind of doctor residents followed instinctively because even during disasters, you carried yourself like you could handle anything thrown at you.
Now you were lying completely still while somebody else breathed for you.
“Tube’s in,” Garcia confirmed.
Relief swept through the room instantly, subtle but collective.
“End tidal color change confirmed.”
“Breath sounds bilateral.”
“Secure it.”
Dana taped the ET tube carefully into place while the ventilator connected with a soft mechanical hiss. Your chest finally began rising in slow, controlled breaths afterward, steady and artificial and horrifyingly impersonal.
Jack hated the sound immediately.
The ventilator transformed you from injured into critical in a way his brain could no longer avoid.
Robby was already moving again. “Okay, we transport now. I want CTA head and neck, cervical spine imaging, chest CT, trauma series. Somebody call ortho and tell them she’s likely got a fracture-dislocation.”
“She’s still hypotensive,” Santos warned while adjusting fluids.
“Pressure?”
“Ninety systolic.”
“Hang another liter.”
Everything continued moving around him after that, but Jack could barely process any of it fully anymore. The room had narrowed into snapshots burned violently into his memory. Blood staining the collar of your scrub top. Finger-shaped bruises spreading darker around your throat. Your hand slipping weakly from his when they rolled the gurney toward the doors.
He followed automatically beside the bed while they rushed you toward imaging. His prosthetic protested immediately beneath the sudden pace, sharp pain radiating through the socket with every uneven step, but he barely registered it now. His entire body had narrowed itself into one singular instinct.
Stay close. Do not lose sight of her.
Hallway lights blurred overhead while the gurney rattled violently across tile. Nurses moved aside instantly when they recognized who was lying on the stretcher, and somehow that silence hurt worse than panic would have.
People stopped talking when they saw you.
A respiratory therapist physically froze near the elevators before whispering, “Oh my God.”
Jack looked away immediately. He could not handle watching other people realize how bad this was.
Then suddenly, he was left standing alone in the hallway.
The silence hit him all at once.
He stared numbly at the closed doors for several long seconds before finally turning back toward Trauma Two because he genuinely did not know what else to do with himself.
By the time he returned, the room was mostly empty again. The chaos was over. Only the aftermath remained.
One overturned tray still sat abandoned near the wall where it had been kicked over during the struggle. Wrappers and syringes littered the floor beside shattered plastic packaging while a monitor continued beeping pointlessly beside an empty bed.
And blood.
Your blood was still everywhere.
Jack stopped walking.
For a second he just stood there staring at it. Tiny streaks across the tile floor. Smears against the cabinets where your head had hit. Dark fingerprints dried against the bedrail.
His stomach twisted so violently he thought he might actually throw up.
Because the only thing left of you in this room now was blood.
Not your laugh echoing across the nurses’ station during overnight shifts. Not your sarcasm when Santos annoyed you on purpose. Not the warmth of your body curled against his after impossible shifts when both of you were too exhausted to even speak properly anymore.
Just blood.
Jack looked down slowly at his own hands. There was still dried blood caught beneath his fingernails from where he had held your face trying to keep you conscious. More stained the sleeves of his scrub top in dark rust-colored smears that made his chest tighten painfully every time he looked at them.
You were intubated upstairs while trauma surgeons searched your brain for bleeding.
The thought cracked something open inside him.
If he had stayed. If he had trusted his instincts. If he had checked sooner.
“Jack.”
Dana’s voice came softly from the doorway behind him.
He did not turn around immediately. For a second, neither of them spoke while she took in the scene around him. Dana had worked in emergency medicine long enough to understand what trauma aftermath looked like, not just physically, but emotionally too.
Jack looked wrecked. Not outwardly hysterical. That almost would have been easier. Instead, he looked hollowed out from the inside.
“You should sit down,” she said gently.
“I’m fine.”
The answer came automatically, immediate and empty.
Dana almost sighed because they both knew it was complete bullshit. She stepped further into the room slowly, careful with him now in the same way people approached trauma patients who had not realized how badly they were injured yet.
“You’re shaking.”
His hands were trembling badly now that the adrenaline had started wearing off, small uncontrollable tremors moving through his fingers no matter how tightly he clenched them into fists.
“I left her,” he said quietly.
Dana’s expression softened immediately. “Jack.”
“I left her alone with him.”
The guilt in his voice nearly hurt to hear.
Dana moved closer. “You could not have predicted postictal aggression escalating like that.”
“But I should’ve checked sooner.”
Jack laughed once under his breath, but there was absolutely no humor in it. Just panic and exhaustion and guilt twisting together so tightly he could barely breathe around it anymore.
“She sounded scared,” he whispered roughly. “Do you know how bad it has to be for her to sound scared?”
Dana’s chest tightened painfully because she did know. Everybody in that hospital knew how terrifyingly calm you usually were under pressure. You were the person comforting other people during disasters. The doctor residents looked for during bad traumas because your voice never shook.
But tonight it had.
Dana stepped directly in front of him then and reached up without hesitation, gripping the back of his neck firmly enough to ground him.
“Listen to me,” she said softly but seriously. “She is alive.”
Jack swallowed hard. “She squeezed my hand before CT.”
“Then hold onto that.”
His eyes burned immediately at the words.
For a second, he looked terrifyingly close to falling apart completely.
“She was looking at me like she thought she was dying.”
Dana’s face crumpled slightly at the crack in his voice because Jack Abbot almost never sounded fragile. Not after everything life had already put him through.
But this was different.
This was you.
“You know her,” Dana said quietly. “You know how hard she fights.”
Jack closed his eyes briefly because somehow that made this hurt even worse. He did know. He knew the exact stubborn determination living inside you, the way you worked through exhaustion and grief and pain because your body physically did not know how to stop caring about people.
And suddenly, the idea of losing you felt so catastrophic he genuinely could not imagine surviving it.
When you woke up, the first thing you felt was pain.
Not sharp at first. Not localized enough to understand. Just heavy.
A crushing ache spread through your entire body like every bone had shattered somewhere deep beneath your skin. Awareness dragged itself slowly upward through layers of medication and exhaustion while fluorescent hospital light glowed faintly red through your eyelids. For one blissfully empty second, your brain stayed blank enough that you did not remember anything at all.
Then your chest tightened violently around the ventilator tube lodged in your throat.
Panic hit instantly.
Your eyes snapped open as your body reacted on pure instinct, trying desperately to fight the foreign object forcing air into your lungs. The movement sent agony ripping through your throat and jaw so violently it nearly knocked you unconscious again. A horrible choking sound escaped around the tube while pain exploded across the side of your head hard enough to blur your vision immediately.
The monitors beside your bed erupted into sharp alarms.
Then suddenly Jack was there.
He moved so quickly the chair beside your ICU bed nearly tipped backward onto the floor. One second the room felt empty and terrifying and unfamiliar, and the next his hands were hovering carefully near your face like he wanted to touch you everywhere at once but was terrified of hurting you more.
“Hey, hey, don’t fight it,” he said immediately, voice low and urgent. “You’re okay. Breathe with it.”
You could see his mouth moving. Could see panic written all over his face.
But you could not hear him properly.
Everything sounded distorted beneath the ringing in your ears, voices muffled and warped together like you were trapped underwater. The ventilator hissed rhythmically beside you while your chest rose mechanically against your will, and the sensation was horrifying enough to send another wave of panic crashing violently through your body.
Jack kept talking anyway.
You recognized the cadence of his voice more than the words themselves. Calm. Steady. But underneath it there was something rawer now, something desperate he usually hid much better than this.
Your entire body hurt.
Your throat burned every time the ventilator pushed another breath into your lungs. Your jaw ached violently from the intubation while your left shoulder throbbed with deep nauseating pain that radiated all the way down your arm. Even breathing hurt despite the machine doing most of the work for you.
Then memory came back all at once.
The trauma bay. Leon seizing. Hands crushing around your throat. Your head slamming violently against the cabinet. The floor.
You started crying before you even realized it was happening.
Tears slipped silently sideways into your hair while panic clawed straight up your chest hard enough to blur your vision again. You could not stop shaking. Every instinct in your body still screamed danger even though logically you knew you were safe now.
Jack’s entire expression broke the second he realized you were crying.
“Oh, baby,” he whispered hoarsely.
At least you thought that was what he said.
He sat carefully on the edge of the chair beside your bed before reaching for your hand, avoiding IV lines and bruises with practiced gentleness. The second his fingers touched yours, you grabbed onto him desperately enough that pain shot violently through your injured shoulder again.
You did not care.
Jack was here.
And somehow that meant alive. Safe.
Your grip tightened harder around his hand while your breathing turned ragged around the tube again. Jack immediately leaned closer, his thumb brushing shakily across your knuckles while he tried to calm you before you exhausted yourself further.
“It’s okay,” he murmured softly. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
Only then did you really look at him.
And God.
He looked awful.
Dark bruising sat beneath his eyes like he had not slept once since this happened. His hair looked messy in a way that suggested he had spent hours dragging anxious hands through it, and there was something hollowed out in his expression now that made your chest tighten painfully.
You mouthed the question anyway despite the ventilator.
What happened to you?
Jack watched your lips carefully before understanding finally crossed his face. His throat worked once visibly while emotion flashed so openly across his expression it almost scared you more than the pain itself.
He still looked terrified.
Even now.
Instead of speaking, he carefully turned your hand over in his and began tracing slow letters against your palm with his thumb.
Patient attacked you.
The memory crashed back completely after that.
The pressure around your throat. Leon’s empty unfocused eyes. Your body hitting the wall. The terrifying realization that he genuinely did not recognize you anymore.
You jerked violently on instinct before you could stop yourself, panic surging through your bloodstream so fast your vision blurred instantly while the cardiac monitor erupted into another wave of alarms beside the bed.
Jack reacted immediately.
“Hey, hey, look at me.”
You could not fully hear the words, but you knew his voice. Knew the shape of it. The desperation underneath it.
Your breathing turned frantic around the ventilator while terror clawed violently through your chest again. You remembered thinking you were going to die. Not abstractly. Not distantly.
Really die.
And for one horrifying second, lying in this ICU bed unable to speak or breathe on your own, that feeling came rushing back all over again.
Jack kept one hand wrapped tightly around yours while the other hovered uncertainly near your face. He looked like he wanted to pull you against him and protect you from everything all at once but knew touching you too much would only hurt you further.
Your eyes darted weakly around the ICU room instead. Machines. IV poles. Bandages. Your leg elevated and immobilized beneath blankets. Soft restraints loosely secured around your wrists so you would not accidentally pull the ventilator tube out while disoriented.
You felt trapped inside your own body.
The panic became unbearable.
Then your eyes landed on the PCA pump beside the bed.
Jack noticed immediately.
His entire face fell.
“Baby…”
You reached weakly toward the button anyway with trembling fingers.
Jack looked absolutely shattered watching you press it. Not angry. Not disappointed.
Heartbroken.
Because he understood immediately what you were doing.
You could not stop the fear. Could not stop the pain.
So you were choosing unconsciousness instead.
Medication flooded slowly through your bloodstream almost immediately afterward. Warmth spread outward in gradual waves, softening the sharp edges of panic first before the pain finally began loosening its grip around your body. The terror still lingered somewhere deep beneath everything else, but it no longer felt sharp enough to suffocate you alive.
Your grip weakened slightly around Jack’s hand as exhaustion dragged heavily at your eyelids again.
Jack stayed exactly where he was.
You could barely keep your eyes open anymore, but you still saw the way he looked at you while the medication slowly pulled you back under.
Completely devastated.
Like watching you choose sedation over consciousness hurt him almost as much as the attack itself.
Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm before your eyes finally slipped closed again.
The last thing you felt before unconsciousness dragged you under completely was Jack lifting your hand carefully toward his mouth and pressing one shaking kiss against your bruised knuckles.
The second time you woke up was somehow worse because this time you stayed conscious long enough to understand what had happened to you.
Pain existed everywhere now.
Not sharp anymore. Not even severe enough in one specific place to focus on. It had settled deeper than that, heavy and constant, wrapping itself around your entire body until even breathing felt exhausting. Every inhale pulled painfully against bruised ribs while your jaw throbbed in slow aching pulses that spread all the way into your skull. The medication dulled the edges enough to keep panic from swallowing you whole again, but not enough to make you forget.
Nothing let you forget for very long.
Garcia stood beside your ICU bed when your eyes finally opened again, flashlight moving carefully across your pupils while monitors hummed steadily around the room. The overhead lights had been dimmed sometime while you slept, leaving everything washed in pale blue-gray shadows that made the hospital feel strangely unreal.
“Hey,” Garcia said softly the second she noticed you were awake. “Welcome back.”
Your hearing still came and went in fractured bursts after the concussion. Some sounds arrived painfully sharp while others disappeared completely beneath the relentless ringing inside your ears. Voices felt warped and distant, like everybody speaking stood underwater somewhere far away from you.
You blinked slowly toward the doorway and spotted Santos hovering there awkwardly holding a bouquet of flowers that looked aggressively stolen from the hospital gift shop. Half the stems bent sideways beneath crinkled plastic wrap while one of the price tags still dangled visibly from the bouquet.
You stared at them for a second before a weak breath of laughter escaped you despite the pain immediately punishing the movement.
Santos looked so relieved at the sound she nearly seemed close to crying herself.
“You scared the absolute shit out of us,” she said quickly, like humor was the only thing keeping her from saying something genuinely emotional instead.
The ghost of a smile tugged weakly at your mouth.
Garcia stepped back after finishing the neuro assessment while Santos moved a little closer to the bed, still clutching the flowers awkwardly against her chest.
“Abbott threatened like six people,” she muttered after clearing her throat.
Your eyes shifted toward her slowly.
“He almost went through security trying to get back to Leon.”
Your stomach twisted instantly.
Leon.
For one horrible second you saw him again exactly as he looked before the attack happened. Pale and exhausted beneath ambulance lights while rain hammered against the windows around both of you. Laughing weakly through pain. Asking if you were always that calm. Looking at you like you were safe.
You swallowed hard against the sudden nausea crawling into your throat.
“What happened to him?” you asked quietly, each word dragging painfully through the ache in your fractured jaw.
Santos’ expression changed immediately. The sarcasm disappeared first. Then the humor.
“He’s okay,” she answered after a moment, voice softer now. “Physically, I mean.”
You closed your eyes briefly.
Santos hesitated before continuing more carefully. “He doesn’t remember anything after the seizure started. Robby thinks it’s the postictal state mixed with the head trauma.”
The room fell quiet after that.
Not awkward quiet.
Heavy quiet.
The kind that settled directly into your ribs and stayed there.
Because the worst part was that you believed her completely.
You knew exactly what postictal violence looked like. You understood the neurological confusion, the blind panic, the total loss of recognition that sometimes followed severe seizures. Rationally and medically, every part of your brain understood exactly what had happened inside Trauma Two.
But emotionally, it still hurt in ways you did not know how to untangle yet.
A strange grief wrapped itself around the fear sitting inside your chest because less than an hour before the attack, Leon had been sitting beside you in the back of an ambulance talking about his daughter and his wife and soccer games and stupid jokes while rain pounded against the windows. You remembered thinking he seemed kind, the sort of patient who apologized too much for being in pain.
You had liked him.
And then suddenly he became the person who nearly killed you.
Emergency medicine was cruel like that sometimes. One second somebody was human to you. The next they became trauma.
Santos stepped closer quietly before squeezing your foot gently through the blanket. “We’ll come back later, okay?”
You nodded weakly.
After they left, the ICU room felt unbearably quiet again. Machines hummed softly around you while rain tapped faintly against distant windows somewhere beyond the hallway. Pittsburgh looked gray outside the narrow ICU window, the city blurred beneath another storm rolling slowly across the skyline.
You drifted in and out for hours after that.
Sometimes nurses came in to check vitals and neuro responses. Sometimes transport arrived to wheel you toward imaging. Sometimes you only woke long enough to register pain before medication dragged you under again.
Then sometime deep into the night, consciousness returned slowly enough that you realized somebody was sitting beside your bed.
Jack.
At first you thought he was asleep.
His head rested bowed carefully against your hand where it lay on top of the blanket, broad shoulders slumped forward like exhaustion had physically crushed him downward into the chair. The dim ICU lighting softened the edges of him enough that for one brief second he looked strangely fragile.
Then you noticed he was shaking.
Your heart cracked instantly.
Jack was crying.
Quietly. Almost silently. But hard enough that his shoulders trembled every few seconds beneath the dim blue ICU lights.
The sight hurt worse than any fracture in your body.
You had seen Jack exhausted before. Angry. Burned out after impossible shifts and mass casualty nights and pediatric codes that left entire departments emotionally gutted afterward.
But you had never seen him like this.
Very slowly, ignoring the pain shooting through your ribs and shoulder, you lifted your fingers weakly toward his hair.
The movement alone was enough.
Jack lifted his head immediately.
His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed beneath exhaustion so deep it looked painful. There was stubble shadowing his jaw now like he had not even thought about himself since this happened, and the healing cut near his cheekbone stood out harshly beneath fluorescent light.
Destroyed.
That was the only word your exhausted brain could find for the way he looked.
Jack Abbott was always the steady one. The person everybody else leaned on during disasters because he never seemed to break no matter how catastrophic things became around him.
Until now.
“I should’ve stayed.”
The words came out rough enough they barely sounded like him at all. Raw. Torn open somewhere deep inside.
You frowned weakly despite the pain. “No.”
“I knew something was wrong.”
“You couldn’t know.”
“I did.”
Jack stood abruptly then, pacing once across the small ICU room before turning back toward you like he physically could not force himself to stay still anymore. His prosthetic clicked sharply against the tile beneath his scrub pants while one trembling hand dragged hard through his hair again.
“I left you alone in there.”
“Jack.”
His face crumpled so suddenly it stole what little breath your bruised ribs could manage.
“When they pulled him off you...” His voice broke completely for one horrible second before he forced himself to continue anyway. “You weren’t moving.”
Your own eyes filled instantly.
Jack pressed shaking fingers hard against his mouth, trying desperately to regain control of himself and failing anyway.
“There was so much blood,” he whispered finally.
The confession hollowed the entire room out around both of you.
You reached toward him carefully despite the pain.
Jack moved back to your bedside immediately this time, like he physically could not tolerate distance from you anymore, and leaned down slowly until his forehead rested carefully against yours.
For a long time neither of you spoke.
Machines hummed softly around the room while rain tapped gently against the windows again. Jack’s breathing still shook every few seconds no matter how hard he tried controlling it, and you realized with sudden aching clarity that he had been holding himself together by force ever since the attack happened.
Probably for everyone else.
For the department.
For you.
Until now.
Finally, through the ache in your jaw and throat, you whispered softly, “You saved me.”
Jack closed his eyes immediately like the words hurt almost as much as the memory itself.
For a long moment he did not say anything at all. His forehead stayed pressed carefully against yours while his breathing shook unevenly every few seconds, and you realized suddenly that he was trying very hard not to completely fall apart in front of you. The effort of it sat visibly in every tense line of his body, in the way his fingers curled tightly around yours like letting go might physically destroy him, in the way his shoulders remained rigid even now like some part of him still expected another disaster to happen the second he stopped bracing for it.
“You almost died.”
The words came out so quietly you nearly missed them beneath the hum of machines surrounding both of you.
Jack pulled back just enough to look at you again, and the expression on his face made something ache deep inside your chest because he looked terrified still.
Not panicked anymore. Not frantic.
Just deeply, genuinely terrified in a way you had never seen before.
“I couldn’t get to you fast enough,” he admitted roughly, eyes fixed on your face like he needed constant proof you were still here. “I heard the safe word and I ran, but by the time I got there...” His throat tightened visibly. “You were on the floor.”
You swallowed painfully.
Bits and pieces still came back in flashes more than complete memories. Leon’s hands around your throat. The cabinet slamming against the back of your skull. The overwhelming certainty that your body was beginning to give out beneath you.
Then Jack.
Your eyes drifted slowly across his face now, taking him in properly for the first time since waking up. The exhaustion. The fear. The sleepless hollowing beneath his eyes. He looked like somebody who had been surviving on adrenaline alone for far too long.
“You did get to me,” you whispered carefully.
Jack laughed once under his breath, but the sound cracked painfully in the middle. “Barely.”
“That’s not true.”
His jaw tightened immediately.
You knew that look. The same one he got after bad outcomes. After losses he carried around long after everybody else moved on. Jack had always been harder on himself than anyone else could ever be, especially when the people he loved were involved.
And God, he loved deeply.
Even when he pretended not to.
You shifted your hand weakly against his, ignoring the ache radiating through your shoulder and ribs.
“Jack.”
His eyes lifted back to yours instantly.
“I’m here.”
Something inside him seemed to break completely at those words.
Jack lowered his head again, pressing one trembling kiss carefully against your bruised knuckles before holding your hand against his chest. His heartbeat pounded hard and uneven beneath your fingers, fast enough that you could still feel the leftover adrenaline vibrating through him.
For a while neither of you spoke again.
The ICU remained dim and quiet around you while rain continued tapping softly against the windows outside. Nurses’ footsteps echoed faintly somewhere down the hallway, distant enough that it almost felt like the rest of the world existed somewhere very far away from this room.
Your eyelids had started growing heavy again by the time Jack finally spoke.
“You scared me,” he admitted quietly.
The confession sounded small somehow. Honest in a way that made your chest ache more than the injuries did.
You looked at him for a second before squeezing his hand as tightly as your exhausted body would allow.
“I know,” you whispered.
Jack nodded once, eyes never leaving your face.
Then very carefully, like he was handling something impossibly fragile, he leaned closer and pressed a kiss against your forehead while exhaustion slowly began pulling you back under again.
This time, when sleep finally took you, Jack’s hand never left yours.
