⤷ michael robinavitch x fem! resident! reader || 4.8k
synopsis. Robby tells himself he's paying attention because you're his resident. The explanation gets harder to defend with time.
warnings. attending/resident relationship, mutual pining, workplace romance, age gap, explicit sexual content, protected sexual intercourse.
The trauma bay smelled like antiseptic and the end of things, and you were at the sink, back to him, hands under the tap, humming.
He'd clocked it forty-three minutes ago. Done absolutely nothing useful with the information since.
Robby kept his eyes on the chart. He was, objectively, a man capable of extraordinary focus under extraordinary pressure — this had been proven, repeatedly, in rooms far worse than this one — and yet here he was, reading the same line about magnesium levels for the fourth time because you were humming something without any apparent awareness of his existence.
That was the thing that got him, if he was being precise about it. The total lack of awareness. Like you were alone in the room. Like the fact of him standing eight feet away was information your nervous system had simply not received and wasn't particularly interested in processing.
"Are you signing off on Martinez or are you planning to stand there all night?"
You turned around. Hands still wet. "Her oxygen sat's been stable for two hours. I was doing one last check." You reached for a paper towel, unhurried. "Good evening."
"It's nearly midnight."
"Good evening, Dr. Robinavitch."
He did not look up. He was very deliberate about not looking up. "Paperwork first. Pleasantries second. Order of operations."
"I'll keep that in mind." Perfectly pleasant. Not a trace of sarcasm. Impervious. Like being curt with you was something that happened to other people and simply bounced off you. He'd watched it happen across an entire shift — residents trying to one-up each other and you deflecting it with some mild observation about coffee going cold, a nurse coming at you frazzled and leaving calmer, and him, standing at the nurses' station, doing the thing where he read the same line four times.
He watched you cross the bay to get the chart, moving through the wreckage of twelve hours like you had a fundamental dispute with the idea that any of it had been hard.
He looked back at the magnesium levels. They remained uninteresting. Across the bay, you turned off the tap and the humming stopped, and somehow that was worse — the sudden awareness of its absence, the way the room rearranged itself around the quiet.
Robby set the chart down. Picked it back up. Read the magnesium levels a fifth time.
He'd been an asshole. He was aware of this with the specific clarity of someone who knew and had decided, at some point, that knowing was sufficient.
It hadn't started that way. He'd been neutral in the beginning, the way he was with most residents — professionally indifferent, appropriately demanding, nothing beyond. And then somewhere between you explaining to a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker why he needed to stay still and not, in your words, be a hero about the needle, because you'd dealt with actual heroes today and they had all, uniformly, behaved themselves — something had shifted. Slowly. The kind of shift where you don't notice until the geography's already changed and you're standing somewhere you didn't plan to be. And by the time he'd noticed, the only thing he knew how to do was be curt about it.
The curt had escalated. He corrected your charting when it didn't need correcting. He'd sent you to the Mathers consult — a three-hour admit, the kind that hollowed a person out — and watched you handle it with the patient attentiveness of someone who didn't know there was another option. He'd told himself it was assessment. He'd told himself a lot of things.
Then was the supply closet.
Pediatric case. Bad, in the quiet way. He'd delivered the news himself and sent everyone back to their stations and gone to chart it, and he couldn't find you anywhere. He checked the on-call room. Then, following some dim instinct he chose not to examine, he tried the supply closet.
You were on the floor, back against the IV bag shelf, knees pulled up, crying.
He stood in the doorway. Thought about leaving.
You looked up. And then — immediately, the reflex of it — you said "I'm sorry" and started to wipe your face. Then you tried to smile at him. Eyes wet, nose red, and you assembled a smile. Like you'd built one in advance for whoever came through the door so they wouldn't have to deal with the crying. Like you'd gotten efficient at this.
That ate at him. He couldn't name it more precisely. Something about the apologizing, and then immediately the smile, in that order, bothered him in a way he didn't have a word for.
He stepped inside and let the door close. "You don't need to be back out in thirty seconds."
"It's unprofessional."
"You're a resident. First one?" He meant the loss. You understood, nodded once. "Then it's biology. Not a failing."
He wasn't good at this. He knew that. There was a box of tissues on the shelf nearest him and he handed it to you, because it was the only object in reach that might approximate the gesture of offering something, and you looked at it and then laughed — barely, a wet sound, but a real one.
"That's not what I—" he started.
"No, I know." You took one anyway, turned it over in your hands. "Thank you."
He stood there another minute. Couldn't leave. Watched you put yourself back together the way you apparently did everything — methodically, without drama, heel of your hand to your eye, one slow breath, and then back. Like a person who had practice.
He went back to his charts and was sharp with two nurses and a second-year before he'd made it to the bay, and didn't connect the two things until weeks later.
Then was the case of the blueberry muffins. In a container with a lid that didn't close properly, and every time there was one sitting on the counter near the coffee maker, and every time an attending found their way over within twenty minutes. He'd eaten four of them across separate occasions. He never planned to acknowledge this.
You hummed when you were focused. A different song every shift, always half-familiar, always just past where he could name it. It was maddening in a way that defied professional articulation.
Every patient remembered your name. Not just remembered — asked for you specifically, used it. He'd had a seventy-three-year-old man with a hairline hip fracture ask him to send back "the nice one, who explained the scan thing." He'd known immediately. He'd sent you. He'd told himself this was about patient outcomes.
He started cataloguing things. Unconsciously, the way you develop a reflex. The way you always sat down to explain a diagnosis — never stood over them. The fact that you took notes by hand on rounds and had told him, unprompted, early on, as if expecting to be corrected, that you retained it better that way. He hadn't corrected it. The snack bars you kept in your coat pocket and distributed to nurses around hour eight without making anything of it. The way you said thank you to orderlies. The way you phrased bad news — he'd noticed the phrasing, catalogued it, thought about it.
He had no use for any of this information. He kept it anyway.
There was a morning, somewhere in the middle of all of it, when he'd been post-call and running on three hours and you'd appeared at the nurses' station with coffee you handed to him before he'd asked, or looked like he needed it, or given any outward indication whatsoever that he was capable of human wants.
"How did you know I take it black?" he said.
"I didn't." You were already walking away. "I just figured if you were you, you probably didn't want anything done to it."
He'd stood there for a moment with the coffee in his hand.
He'd been annoyed about it. The presumption of it, the casual intimacy of the gesture, the fact that you'd got him right. He'd been annoyed about it right up until the moment he'd taken a sip and thought, with a clarity that three hours of sleep had done nothing to dull, that he was in actual trouble.
The Torres chart hand-off happened on a Tuesday. You came up behind him at the nurses' station and he smelled the muffins before you'd said anything.
"Torres hand-off. She's been stable since fourteen hundred hours, no fever. I flagged a note about the blood pressure trend — it's within normal, I just wanted to document I'd been watching it."
"I can read."
"I know you can read." Still pleasant. "She also wants me to tell you you have a nice voice."
"She's seventy-one and on morphine."
"She said it before the morphine." You set the chart down. "There's a muffin on the counter."
He took the chart and didn't look up, and he stood there for a moment after you'd gone and thought, with some irritation, that he'd been tracking Torres's blood pressure every two hours all shift. He hadn't flagged it. He fixed the formatting error at the top of page two — not because it was egregious, it wasn't — and didn't tell you about it. He told himself this was efficiency and moved on before he could disagree with himself.
Jack waited until the lounge was empty. In retrospect, Robby should have taken that as a warning.
They were both doing charts. Fourteen minutes of workable silence, which was the best kind, and then Jack said without looking up, "Kowalski was at the nurses' station again."
Robby said nothing.
"Third time this week. Ortho. No clinical reason to be down here three times in a week." A pause. "He keeps asking about her."
"Her who?"
"Your her."
"She's not — she's a resident. She's on shift."
"That's not what he's asking." Jack closed his laptop. That was always the tell — the deliberate setting-aside, the signal that you were in a conversation now, predetermined. He looked at Robby with the patience of a man who has decided to wait you out. "You want to say anything about that?"
"I don't have anything to say about Kowalski."
"No. But you've been short with her."
"I'm short with everyone."
"Not the same short." Jack leaned back. "You corrected her on a splint she did correctly. I checked afterward."
Robby set his pen down. Picked it back up. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I don't want you to say anything." Jack opened his laptop again. Closed it. "You know what I think?"
"No. But I suspect you're going to—"
"I think you've been so busy being her attending that you forgot she's going to leave and be someone else's problem in about eight months." A pause. "And I think that bothers you."
Robby looked at the coffee. Then the chart. Then some middle distance between the two.
"He's going to ask her to dinner. Kowalski."
The coffee in Robby's mug was still warm. He looked at it.
"Let him," he said.
Jack made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Sure," he said, and opened the laptop for the last time.
He went to the attending lounge because it was past two in the morning and he needed somewhere to sit that wasn't the nurses' station, and you happened to be there when he opened the door.
Asleep in the chair by the window. Your chart was still open in your lap. Pen loosely between your fingers. At some point, the sleep had simply won.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
There was a warmth in his chest that was entirely inconvenient and he looked at it sideways, the way you look at something too bright. You'd been here since seven that morning. He knew this without meaning to know it — knew which admits you'd taken, what you'd ordered for the woman in bay three, that you'd eaten something from the vending machine at fourteen hundred because you'd complained about it to Dana with the mournfulness of someone deeply wronged by a sandwich. He'd started logging your schedule without any conscious decision to do so. That was a recent development he hadn't examined closely.
He should go to the couch. Do his own charts.
He stood there another moment. You looked cold. He picked up the green blanket — the ones you sometimes used, which he had no reason knowing — and draped it over your body. Tucked under your feet for good measure.
Then he stepped back and eased the door shut, very quietly, and stood under the fluorescent light of the hallway, and thought: oh.
The acknowledgment of something he'd been refusing to file anywhere useful for long enough that the refusal had become its own noise. Oh. Right. He understood now why Jack had closed his laptop.
He was reviewing a discharge summary in the corridor, and you stepped out of the lounge with the green blanket under your arm and walked directly into his eyeline. He wasn't staring. Sure, he wasn't.
"Were you out here when I fell asleep?"
"Yep."
"You didn't sleep?"
"I checked the lounge. You were in there."
"That's not an answer."
He'd underestimated you in that specific way, in the beginning — the quiet refusal to be redirected. You did it without any sharpness, without confrontation, like you'd noticed it and decided not to. It surprised him the first time. It had never stopped surprising him, exactly.
"I didn't want to wake you," he said.
You stopped. Something crossed your face that he couldn't quite catch the shape of. "That was actually very considerate of you."
"You sound surprised."
"A little." You tucked the blanket more firmly under your arm. "You've been different lately."
"I'm professionally consistent."
"Dr. Robinavitch." Very patient. "I watched you make a first-year cry over a documentation error."
"His documentation was wrong."
"Mine had a formatting error on the Torres file. Page two. You didn't say anything."
He said nothing.
"You fixed it yourself." Still not accusing — just noticing. "I saw the edit timestamp."
The corridor was quiet. A monitor beeped down the hall in its steady automated note.
"You didn't have to do that," you said. Softer now. "I would've caught it."
"I know you would have."
A pause. You were looking at him with that look — the curious one, the one that felt like you were trying to work something out carefully, without making a production of it. Like he was a thing worth figuring out. Like you'd decided to be patient about it.
He found he had nothing useful to say to any of that. You opened your mouth and he thought for a second you were going to say something that would require him to respond in kind, and he wasn't ready for that, not in a corridor at three in the morning with the green blanket under your arm and his chest doing what it was doing.
"Get some sleep," he said. "In an actual bed. Not a chair."
"Are you worried about me?"
"I'm concerned with your clinical function tomorrow if you're running on four hours in a—"
"Robby."
Just his name. Without the professional buffer of the title, and the way you said it — quiet, slightly tentative, like you were testing whether it was allowed—
"The blanket," you said. "In the lounge. Was that you?"
He looked at you.
You looked back, and there was nothing confrontational in it, nothing probing, just — curious, and underneath that, something that was almost gentle. Waiting.
"Go to sleep," he said, and walked back toward the bay.
He didn't quite remember, in the moment, how you got here.
That was a lie. He remembered exactly — you'd followed him into the on-call room with a consult chart, and you'd asked him something, and he'd turned around and you were closer than he'd expected, and the chart had ended up on the floor, and something that had been accumulating for a long time finally hit a pressure it couldn't sustain.
You'd kissed him first. Barely. More like you'd tipped toward him and he'd closed the remaining distance, which meant they were equally responsible, and he was prepared to argue this point at length.
Now your back was against the on-call room door and you were looking at him like he was slightly terrifying and very interesting, which was, objectively, the most appealing combination of expressions he'd seen in some time.
"Are we—"
"Yes."
"Okay." A breath. "Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"What am I supposed to say?"
He pressed his mouth to the side of your neck and held it there — not moving, just breathing you in — until you went very still under him. He felt your pulse against his lips. He stayed there until you made a sound, small, involuntary, the sound of someone trying not to make a sound and losing the effort.
"Something more useful," he said against your skin.
Your hands found his collar. Fisted into it without quite pulling. "What do you want me to say?"
He pulled back enough to look at you. Already undone, and he'd barely started — the flush high on your throat, the way you were holding his shirt like it was the only fixed object in the room. Something settled in him that he recognised, distantly, as the opposite of the thing that had been sitting in his chest for months.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
You looked at him. Then sideways. Then back, with something stubborn in it underneath the flush. "You."
"More specific."
"Robby—"
"Dr. Robinavitch," he said, and watched your face cycle through several things.
"You cannot possibly be serious."
"I'm always serious." He undid the first button of your scrubs. "More specific."
Your breath came out uneven. "I want you to touch me."
"I am touching you."
"You know what I—" The thought didn't complete. He undid the second button and whatever you'd been about to say dissolved. "I want your hands on me. Properly."
"Properly," he said. "There you go."
He walked you back to the narrow bed and sat you on the edge of it. Then stood there for a moment — just looked. He had spent a professionally inadvisable amount of time not looking at you, deliberately, as a sustained practice, and he was going to allow himself a moment now that the situation had changed.
You looked back. Flushed, lower lip caught between your teeth.
He got your scrub top off, then the undershirt, then reached around and unclipped your bra. When you moved to cover yourself, he caught both wrists.
"Don't."
"I just—"
He pressed your wrists to the mattress, one on either side, gentle but deliberate, and held them there. You let him immediately. He filed that away. "Keep them there."
He took his time. He'd earned the right to take his time — all those months of being deliberately removed, of watching you from across the bay and looking back at his charts — he had accumulated a significant amount of patience that was now going to get spent in one place.
He put his mouth to your collarbone and worked down slowly, and every time you moved he said stay and felt you try, felt the effort of it in the tension running through you, your hands gripping the mattress. He got his mouth to your nipple and felt you arch up sharp, and he pulled back just enough.
"Stay still."
"I'm trying—"
"Try harder."
"Robby, please—" And there it was — the specific texture of your voice when you were overwhelmed, the thing he'd catalogued and refused to think about directly. The way it went soft and raw at the edges. Your eyes had gone glassy. "Please. I need—"
"Tell me what you need."
"You know what I need—"
"I do. I want you to say it."
You made a frustrated sound that turned into something else when he dragged his thumb along the inside of your thigh and stopped before it got useful. "I need you to touch me. Please. I need—please."
"Where?"
"You know where—"
"Where?" Quieter. Final.
"My cunt," you said, and your face went red saying it, and he pressed his mouth to your stomach to have somewhere to put the expression that wanted to happen. The slight mortification and the fact that you'd said it anyway. He was going to be thinking about that for a long time.
He pulled your scrubs down and the underwear followed, and he sat back on his heels and looked at you spread across the narrow mattress, flushed to your chest, thighs pressed together out of some residual instinct toward dignity, and thought with a startling clarity that you had absolutely no idea what you'd been doing to him.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of your thigh and felt you exhale shakily. Pressed it to the other. Kissed up slowly, felt you start to tremble, your thighs trying to close around him.
"You're already so wet," he said against your skin, and heard you make a sound. "I've barely done anything."
"Don't say it like that —" you whined.
"I'm just statin' what I see." He pressed his mouth to you properly and felt you gasp, felt your hands go immediately into his hair. He worked you slowly, his tongue flat against your clit and then pointed, then flat again, and two fingers pressing inside you, curling — and you made sounds he was going to be hearing in his head for years, the pitch of them, the way they went higher when he changed the pressure. He brought you right to the edge, felt it in the way you tightened around his fingers and your thighs started shaking—
And he stopped.
"What—" The outrage of it, immediate and genuine. Your hips chased nothing. "I was so close, I was right—please—"
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to make me come," you said, without hesitation this time, and your voice was wet at the edges and your eyes were wet, actual tears on your lashes, and he pressed his mouth to the inside of your knee and held it there for a second.
"Please," you added, smaller. "Please. Robby."
He put his mouth back, and this time he didn't stop. He held your hips down with his forearms and kept the pressure steady and relentless, worked two fingers inside you in a rhythm that he'd figured out about four minutes in and was going to use mercilessly, and you came hard — shaking, properly shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, his name said so many times it became something else. He kissed your inner thigh through the end of it and felt you go loose by degrees.
He straightened. You had tears running down your temples. He kissed them away without entirely deciding to, and you laughed weakly.
"I'm just bein' thorough." He got his scrubs off, found the condom from the pocket he'd put it in on a hope, and looked up to find you watching him with red-rimmed eyes and an expression of dazed, complete attention.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
He didn't answer. He settled over you and paused — his forearm beside your head, his weight on his knees — and just looked at you for a moment.
"Robby." Breathless. "Please."
"I've got you," he said, quietly, and pressed in slow.
He felt you exhale under him, felt you shift to pull him deeper, felt your legs wrap around him before he'd done anything. He set a pace that was, he'd admit only to himself, not particularly controlled — the months of it had a way of making themselves felt when the situation finally changed. He pressed his mouth to your ear and told you exactly what you felt like — and he was precise about it, anatomical in a way that made you shiver, hot and tight and so fucking wet that he'd had to think about something else when he'd first pushed inside you — told you what he'd been thinking about, in terms that left nothing abstract.
You made a sound into his shoulder that he was going to think about for a long time.
"You've been thinking about this?" you managed.
"At length."
"How long?"
"Longer than is appropriate." He pressed deeper and felt you gasp. "Considerably." He pulled back and pushed in again, slow, deliberate in the way that he could feel you registering — the way your breath caught, the way your nails pressed into his back. "You want me to tell you how long?"
"Yes," you said, slightly desperate.
"When you had the Torres admit. You were at the nurses' station and you leaned over to get a chart and your scrubs—" He stopped for a second because the memory had found him at an inconvenient angle. "I had to go chart something."
"You left because of me?"
"I left before I did something professionally unsound." He pressed a hand to the back of your thigh and pushed it higher, changed the angle, felt you make an embarrassingly gratifying sound. "Stop talking."
"You were the one who—"
"Stop talking," he said, and moved, and you did.
You cried through the second orgasm — actual tears, the way he'd half-expected, your face buried in his shoulder, both arms around his neck, holding on. He kissed the side of your face. The corner of your eye. Felt you clutch at him like you'd decided he was staying.
When he followed he was considerably less composed than he'd planned, face in your hair, your name said once, very quietly.
He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He understood this approximately fifteen minutes later when he woke to find you beside him, awake, looking at some mid-distance point with the expression of someone slowly processing a sequence of events and finding it, on the whole, acceptable.
"You fell asleep," you said.
"I rested my eyes."
"For fifteen minutes."
He looked at his watch. "Thirteen."
"Fifteen." You turned your head. Still flushed. He was not going to have feelings about that. "Should I—" You gestured vaguely toward the door.
"In a minute." He pulled you back before he'd consciously decided to, and you went without resistance, settled against him like you'd considered the geometry and found it reasonable. "Stop thinking so loudly."
"I'm not thinking loudly."
"You are." A pause. "Say it."
"I was just going to say." You seemed to be choosing words with some care. "This doesn't have to be weird."
"It's not weird."
"You've been weird about me for a while."
He looked at the wall for a moment. "Months," he said.
You lifted your head. Looked at him. He looked back with the equanimity of a man who had made a decision and was now on the other side of it.
"Months," you repeated.
"Don't make it a thing."
"You had a crush on me." The laugh was already happening, quiet, against his shoulder. "You've been making my shifts difficult because you had a crush."
"I don't have a crush. I'm almost fifty."
"You made a first-year cry."
"His documentation—"
"Was wrong, yes." You were laughing properly now, helpless, into his skin, and he let it happen and did not find it as irritating as he should have. "You fixed my formatting error. You ate four muffins."
"I ate one. Maybe two."
"Dana counted. She has a tally."
He absorbed this.
"Dana has a tally," he said.
"Apparently she's been running it since March."
He sat with that for a moment. The cart with the squeaky wheel went past outside, its regular circuit, the one maintenance had been promising to fix for weeks. He'd started timing the rounds. He wasn't going to tell you that.
"Robby," you said, quieter.
"Mm."
"The blanket." A pause. "It was you."
He said nothing.
You pressed your face back into his shoulder. He felt you smiling — actually felt it, the shape of it against his collarbone — and didn't say anything about it.
"Thank you," you said, very small. "For not waking me up."
He didn't answer.
You settled more completely against him. Outside, the hospital kept going — someone called down the hall, a monitor beeped its steady note, the cart made another pass. He listened to the intervals and thought this was probably fine. More than probably.
A thought occurred to him, belatedly. "Did Kowalski ask you to dinner?"
A pause.
"Last Thursday," you said.
"What did you say?"
Another pause. Longer. He could feel you deciding whether to make him ask twice.
"I said I was busy," you said.
"Were you?"
"No." You shifted against his shoulder. "But I had a feeling I'd be busier."
He didn't say anything. Outside, the cart went past again with its squeaky wheel.
"Robby," you said, half-asleep already.
"Go to sleep."
"Everyones's going to know."
"Hmm."
A pause. "Does that bother you?"
He thought about that for a moment. Dana had apparently been running a tally since March. Dana had apparently noticed before he had. That was its own kind of information about the past several months that he chose not to examine too closely.
"No," he said.
"Is that okay?"
He looked at the top of your head. "Go to sleep," he said.
a/n - thank you for reading. comments and reblogs are appreciated.
⤷ michael robinavitch x fem! resident! reader || 4.8k
synopsis. Robby tells himself he's paying attention because you're his resident. The explanation gets harder to defend with time.
warnings. attending/resident relationship, mutual pining, workplace romance, age gap, explicit sexual content, protected sexual intercourse.
The trauma bay smelled like antiseptic and the end of things, and you were at the sink, back to him, hands under the tap, humming.
He'd clocked it forty-three minutes ago. Done absolutely nothing useful with the information since.
Robby kept his eyes on the chart. He was, objectively, a man capable of extraordinary focus under extraordinary pressure — this had been proven, repeatedly, in rooms far worse than this one — and yet here he was, reading the same line about magnesium levels for the fourth time because you were humming something without any apparent awareness of his existence.
That was the thing that got him, if he was being precise about it. The total lack of awareness. Like you were alone in the room. Like the fact of him standing eight feet away was information your nervous system had simply not received and wasn't particularly interested in processing.
"Are you signing off on Martinez or are you planning to stand there all night?"
You turned around. Hands still wet. "Her oxygen sat's been stable for two hours. I was doing one last check." You reached for a paper towel, unhurried. "Good evening."
"It's nearly midnight."
"Good evening, Dr. Robinavitch."
He did not look up. He was very deliberate about not looking up. "Paperwork first. Pleasantries second. Order of operations."
"I'll keep that in mind." Perfectly pleasant. Not a trace of sarcasm. Impervious. Like being curt with you was something that happened to other people and simply bounced off you. He'd watched it happen across an entire shift — residents trying to one-up each other and you deflecting it with some mild observation about coffee going cold, a nurse coming at you frazzled and leaving calmer, and him, standing at the nurses' station, doing the thing where he read the same line four times.
He watched you cross the bay to get the chart, moving through the wreckage of twelve hours like you had a fundamental dispute with the idea that any of it had been hard.
He looked back at the magnesium levels. They remained uninteresting. Across the bay, you turned off the tap and the humming stopped, and somehow that was worse — the sudden awareness of its absence, the way the room rearranged itself around the quiet.
Robby set the chart down. Picked it back up. Read the magnesium levels a fifth time.
He'd been an asshole. He was aware of this with the specific clarity of someone who knew and had decided, at some point, that knowing was sufficient.
It hadn't started that way. He'd been neutral in the beginning, the way he was with most residents — professionally indifferent, appropriately demanding, nothing beyond. And then somewhere between you explaining to a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker why he needed to stay still and not, in your words, be a hero about the needle, because you'd dealt with actual heroes today and they had all, uniformly, behaved themselves — something had shifted. Slowly. The kind of shift where you don't notice until the geography's already changed and you're standing somewhere you didn't plan to be. And by the time he'd noticed, the only thing he knew how to do was be curt about it.
The curt had escalated. He corrected your charting when it didn't need correcting. He'd sent you to the Mathers consult — a three-hour admit, the kind that hollowed a person out — and watched you handle it with the patient attentiveness of someone who didn't know there was another option. He'd told himself it was assessment. He'd told himself a lot of things.
Then was the supply closet.
Pediatric case. Bad, in the quiet way. He'd delivered the news himself and sent everyone back to their stations and gone to chart it, and he couldn't find you anywhere. He checked the on-call room. Then, following some dim instinct he chose not to examine, he tried the supply closet.
You were on the floor, back against the IV bag shelf, knees pulled up, crying.
He stood in the doorway. Thought about leaving.
You looked up. And then — immediately, the reflex of it — you said "I'm sorry" and started to wipe your face. Then you tried to smile at him. Eyes wet, nose red, and you assembled a smile. Like you'd built one in advance for whoever came through the door so they wouldn't have to deal with the crying. Like you'd gotten efficient at this.
That ate at him. He couldn't name it more precisely. Something about the apologizing, and then immediately the smile, in that order, bothered him in a way he didn't have a word for.
He stepped inside and let the door close. "You don't need to be back out in thirty seconds."
"It's unprofessional."
"You're a resident. First one?" He meant the loss. You understood, nodded once. "Then it's biology. Not a failing."
He wasn't good at this. He knew that. There was a box of tissues on the shelf nearest him and he handed it to you, because it was the only object in reach that might approximate the gesture of offering something, and you looked at it and then laughed — barely, a wet sound, but a real one.
"That's not what I—" he started.
"No, I know." You took one anyway, turned it over in your hands. "Thank you."
He stood there another minute. Couldn't leave. Watched you put yourself back together the way you apparently did everything — methodically, without drama, heel of your hand to your eye, one slow breath, and then back. Like a person who had practice.
He went back to his charts and was sharp with two nurses and a second-year before he'd made it to the bay, and didn't connect the two things until weeks later.
Then was the case of the blueberry muffins. In a container with a lid that didn't close properly, and every time there was one sitting on the counter near the coffee maker, and every time an attending found their way over within twenty minutes. He'd eaten four of them across separate occasions. He never planned to acknowledge this.
You hummed when you were focused. A different song every shift, always half-familiar, always just past where he could name it. It was maddening in a way that defied professional articulation.
Every patient remembered your name. Not just remembered — asked for you specifically, used it. He'd had a seventy-three-year-old man with a hairline hip fracture ask him to send back "the nice one, who explained the scan thing." He'd known immediately. He'd sent you. He'd told himself this was about patient outcomes.
He started cataloguing things. Unconsciously, the way you develop a reflex. The way you always sat down to explain a diagnosis — never stood over them. The fact that you took notes by hand on rounds and had told him, unprompted, early on, as if expecting to be corrected, that you retained it better that way. He hadn't corrected it. The snack bars you kept in your coat pocket and distributed to nurses around hour eight without making anything of it. The way you said thank you to orderlies. The way you phrased bad news — he'd noticed the phrasing, catalogued it, thought about it.
He had no use for any of this information. He kept it anyway.
There was a morning, somewhere in the middle of all of it, when he'd been post-call and running on three hours and you'd appeared at the nurses' station with coffee you handed to him before he'd asked, or looked like he needed it, or given any outward indication whatsoever that he was capable of human wants.
"How did you know I take it black?" he said.
"I didn't." You were already walking away. "I just figured if you were you, you probably didn't want anything done to it."
He'd stood there for a moment with the coffee in his hand.
He'd been annoyed about it. The presumption of it, the casual intimacy of the gesture, the fact that you'd got him right. He'd been annoyed about it right up until the moment he'd taken a sip and thought, with a clarity that three hours of sleep had done nothing to dull, that he was in actual trouble.
The Torres chart hand-off happened on a Tuesday. You came up behind him at the nurses' station and he smelled the muffins before you'd said anything.
"Torres hand-off. She's been stable since fourteen hundred hours, no fever. I flagged a note about the blood pressure trend — it's within normal, I just wanted to document I'd been watching it."
"I can read."
"I know you can read." Still pleasant. "She also wants me to tell you you have a nice voice."
"She's seventy-one and on morphine."
"She said it before the morphine." You set the chart down. "There's a muffin on the counter."
He took the chart and didn't look up, and he stood there for a moment after you'd gone and thought, with some irritation, that he'd been tracking Torres's blood pressure every two hours all shift. He hadn't flagged it. He fixed the formatting error at the top of page two — not because it was egregious, it wasn't — and didn't tell you about it. He told himself this was efficiency and moved on before he could disagree with himself.
Jack waited until the lounge was empty. In retrospect, Robby should have taken that as a warning.
They were both doing charts. Fourteen minutes of workable silence, which was the best kind, and then Jack said without looking up, "Kowalski was at the nurses' station again."
Robby said nothing.
"Third time this week. Ortho. No clinical reason to be down here three times in a week." A pause. "He keeps asking about her."
"Her who?"
"Your her."
"She's not — she's a resident. She's on shift."
"That's not what he's asking." Jack closed his laptop. That was always the tell — the deliberate setting-aside, the signal that you were in a conversation now, predetermined. He looked at Robby with the patience of a man who has decided to wait you out. "You want to say anything about that?"
"I don't have anything to say about Kowalski."
"No. But you've been short with her."
"I'm short with everyone."
"Not the same short." Jack leaned back. "You corrected her on a splint she did correctly. I checked afterward."
Robby set his pen down. Picked it back up. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I don't want you to say anything." Jack opened his laptop again. Closed it. "You know what I think?"
"No. But I suspect you're going to—"
"I think you've been so busy being her attending that you forgot she's going to leave and be someone else's problem in about eight months." A pause. "And I think that bothers you."
Robby looked at the coffee. Then the chart. Then some middle distance between the two.
"He's going to ask her to dinner. Kowalski."
The coffee in Robby's mug was still warm. He looked at it.
"Let him," he said.
Jack made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Sure," he said, and opened the laptop for the last time.
He went to the attending lounge because it was past two in the morning and he needed somewhere to sit that wasn't the nurses' station, and you happened to be there when he opened the door.
Asleep in the chair by the window. Your chart was still open in your lap. Pen loosely between your fingers. At some point, the sleep had simply won.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
There was a warmth in his chest that was entirely inconvenient and he looked at it sideways, the way you look at something too bright. You'd been here since seven that morning. He knew this without meaning to know it — knew which admits you'd taken, what you'd ordered for the woman in bay three, that you'd eaten something from the vending machine at fourteen hundred because you'd complained about it to Dana with the mournfulness of someone deeply wronged by a sandwich. He'd started logging your schedule without any conscious decision to do so. That was a recent development he hadn't examined closely.
He should go to the couch. Do his own charts.
He stood there another moment. You looked cold. He picked up the green blanket — the ones you sometimes used, which he had no reason knowing — and draped it over your body. Tucked under your feet for good measure.
Then he stepped back and eased the door shut, very quietly, and stood under the fluorescent light of the hallway, and thought: oh.
The acknowledgment of something he'd been refusing to file anywhere useful for long enough that the refusal had become its own noise. Oh. Right. He understood now why Jack had closed his laptop.
He was reviewing a discharge summary in the corridor, and you stepped out of the lounge with the green blanket under your arm and walked directly into his eyeline. He wasn't staring. Sure, he wasn't.
"Were you out here when I fell asleep?"
"Yep."
"You didn't sleep?"
"I checked the lounge. You were in there."
"That's not an answer."
He'd underestimated you in that specific way, in the beginning — the quiet refusal to be redirected. You did it without any sharpness, without confrontation, like you'd noticed it and decided not to. It surprised him the first time. It had never stopped surprising him, exactly.
"I didn't want to wake you," he said.
You stopped. Something crossed your face that he couldn't quite catch the shape of. "That was actually very considerate of you."
"You sound surprised."
"A little." You tucked the blanket more firmly under your arm. "You've been different lately."
"I'm professionally consistent."
"Dr. Robinavitch." Very patient. "I watched you make a first-year cry over a documentation error."
"His documentation was wrong."
"Mine had a formatting error on the Torres file. Page two. You didn't say anything."
He said nothing.
"You fixed it yourself." Still not accusing — just noticing. "I saw the edit timestamp."
The corridor was quiet. A monitor beeped down the hall in its steady automated note.
"You didn't have to do that," you said. Softer now. "I would've caught it."
"I know you would have."
A pause. You were looking at him with that look — the curious one, the one that felt like you were trying to work something out carefully, without making a production of it. Like he was a thing worth figuring out. Like you'd decided to be patient about it.
He found he had nothing useful to say to any of that. You opened your mouth and he thought for a second you were going to say something that would require him to respond in kind, and he wasn't ready for that, not in a corridor at three in the morning with the green blanket under your arm and his chest doing what it was doing.
"Get some sleep," he said. "In an actual bed. Not a chair."
"Are you worried about me?"
"I'm concerned with your clinical function tomorrow if you're running on four hours in a—"
"Robby."
Just his name. Without the professional buffer of the title, and the way you said it — quiet, slightly tentative, like you were testing whether it was allowed—
"The blanket," you said. "In the lounge. Was that you?"
He looked at you.
You looked back, and there was nothing confrontational in it, nothing probing, just — curious, and underneath that, something that was almost gentle. Waiting.
"Go to sleep," he said, and walked back toward the bay.
He didn't quite remember, in the moment, how you got here.
That was a lie. He remembered exactly — you'd followed him into the on-call room with a consult chart, and you'd asked him something, and he'd turned around and you were closer than he'd expected, and the chart had ended up on the floor, and something that had been accumulating for a long time finally hit a pressure it couldn't sustain.
You'd kissed him first. Barely. More like you'd tipped toward him and he'd closed the remaining distance, which meant they were equally responsible, and he was prepared to argue this point at length.
Now your back was against the on-call room door and you were looking at him like he was slightly terrifying and very interesting, which was, objectively, the most appealing combination of expressions he'd seen in some time.
"Are we—"
"Yes."
"Okay." A breath. "Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"What am I supposed to say?"
He pressed his mouth to the side of your neck and held it there — not moving, just breathing you in — until you went very still under him. He felt your pulse against his lips. He stayed there until you made a sound, small, involuntary, the sound of someone trying not to make a sound and losing the effort.
"Something more useful," he said against your skin.
Your hands found his collar. Fisted into it without quite pulling. "What do you want me to say?"
He pulled back enough to look at you. Already undone, and he'd barely started — the flush high on your throat, the way you were holding his shirt like it was the only fixed object in the room. Something settled in him that he recognised, distantly, as the opposite of the thing that had been sitting in his chest for months.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
You looked at him. Then sideways. Then back, with something stubborn in it underneath the flush. "You."
"More specific."
"Robby—"
"Dr. Robinavitch," he said, and watched your face cycle through several things.
"You cannot possibly be serious."
"I'm always serious." He undid the first button of your scrubs. "More specific."
Your breath came out uneven. "I want you to touch me."
"I am touching you."
"You know what I—" The thought didn't complete. He undid the second button and whatever you'd been about to say dissolved. "I want your hands on me. Properly."
"Properly," he said. "There you go."
He walked you back to the narrow bed and sat you on the edge of it. Then stood there for a moment — just looked. He had spent a professionally inadvisable amount of time not looking at you, deliberately, as a sustained practice, and he was going to allow himself a moment now that the situation had changed.
You looked back. Flushed, lower lip caught between your teeth.
He got your scrub top off, then the undershirt, then reached around and unclipped your bra. When you moved to cover yourself, he caught both wrists.
"Don't."
"I just—"
He pressed your wrists to the mattress, one on either side, gentle but deliberate, and held them there. You let him immediately. He filed that away. "Keep them there."
He took his time. He'd earned the right to take his time — all those months of being deliberately removed, of watching you from across the bay and looking back at his charts — he had accumulated a significant amount of patience that was now going to get spent in one place.
He put his mouth to your collarbone and worked down slowly, and every time you moved he said stay and felt you try, felt the effort of it in the tension running through you, your hands gripping the mattress. He got his mouth to your nipple and felt you arch up sharp, and he pulled back just enough.
"Stay still."
"I'm trying—"
"Try harder."
"Robby, please—" And there it was — the specific texture of your voice when you were overwhelmed, the thing he'd catalogued and refused to think about directly. The way it went soft and raw at the edges. Your eyes had gone glassy. "Please. I need—"
"Tell me what you need."
"You know what I need—"
"I do. I want you to say it."
You made a frustrated sound that turned into something else when he dragged his thumb along the inside of your thigh and stopped before it got useful. "I need you to touch me. Please. I need—please."
"Where?"
"You know where—"
"Where?" Quieter. Final.
"My cunt," you said, and your face went red saying it, and he pressed his mouth to your stomach to have somewhere to put the expression that wanted to happen. The slight mortification and the fact that you'd said it anyway. He was going to be thinking about that for a long time.
He pulled your scrubs down and the underwear followed, and he sat back on his heels and looked at you spread across the narrow mattress, flushed to your chest, thighs pressed together out of some residual instinct toward dignity, and thought with a startling clarity that you had absolutely no idea what you'd been doing to him.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of your thigh and felt you exhale shakily. Pressed it to the other. Kissed up slowly, felt you start to tremble, your thighs trying to close around him.
"You're already so wet," he said against your skin, and heard you make a sound. "I've barely done anything."
"Don't say it like that —" you whined.
"I'm just statin' what I see." He pressed his mouth to you properly and felt you gasp, felt your hands go immediately into his hair. He worked you slowly, his tongue flat against your clit and then pointed, then flat again, and two fingers pressing inside you, curling — and you made sounds he was going to be hearing in his head for years, the pitch of them, the way they went higher when he changed the pressure. He brought you right to the edge, felt it in the way you tightened around his fingers and your thighs started shaking—
And he stopped.
"What—" The outrage of it, immediate and genuine. Your hips chased nothing. "I was so close, I was right—please—"
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to make me come," you said, without hesitation this time, and your voice was wet at the edges and your eyes were wet, actual tears on your lashes, and he pressed his mouth to the inside of your knee and held it there for a second.
"Please," you added, smaller. "Please. Robby."
He put his mouth back, and this time he didn't stop. He held your hips down with his forearms and kept the pressure steady and relentless, worked two fingers inside you in a rhythm that he'd figured out about four minutes in and was going to use mercilessly, and you came hard — shaking, properly shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, his name said so many times it became something else. He kissed your inner thigh through the end of it and felt you go loose by degrees.
He straightened. You had tears running down your temples. He kissed them away without entirely deciding to, and you laughed weakly.
"I'm just bein' thorough." He got his scrubs off, found the condom from the pocket he'd put it in on a hope, and looked up to find you watching him with red-rimmed eyes and an expression of dazed, complete attention.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
He didn't answer. He settled over you and paused — his forearm beside your head, his weight on his knees — and just looked at you for a moment.
"Robby." Breathless. "Please."
"I've got you," he said, quietly, and pressed in slow.
He felt you exhale under him, felt you shift to pull him deeper, felt your legs wrap around him before he'd done anything. He set a pace that was, he'd admit only to himself, not particularly controlled — the months of it had a way of making themselves felt when the situation finally changed. He pressed his mouth to your ear and told you exactly what you felt like — and he was precise about it, anatomical in a way that made you shiver, hot and tight and so fucking wet that he'd had to think about something else when he'd first pushed inside you — told you what he'd been thinking about, in terms that left nothing abstract.
You made a sound into his shoulder that he was going to think about for a long time.
"You've been thinking about this?" you managed.
"At length."
"How long?"
"Longer than is appropriate." He pressed deeper and felt you gasp. "Considerably." He pulled back and pushed in again, slow, deliberate in the way that he could feel you registering — the way your breath caught, the way your nails pressed into his back. "You want me to tell you how long?"
"Yes," you said, slightly desperate.
"When you had the Torres admit. You were at the nurses' station and you leaned over to get a chart and your scrubs—" He stopped for a second because the memory had found him at an inconvenient angle. "I had to go chart something."
"You left because of me?"
"I left before I did something professionally unsound." He pressed a hand to the back of your thigh and pushed it higher, changed the angle, felt you make an embarrassingly gratifying sound. "Stop talking."
"You were the one who—"
"Stop talking," he said, and moved, and you did.
You cried through the second orgasm — actual tears, the way he'd half-expected, your face buried in his shoulder, both arms around his neck, holding on. He kissed the side of your face. The corner of your eye. Felt you clutch at him like you'd decided he was staying.
When he followed he was considerably less composed than he'd planned, face in your hair, your name said once, very quietly.
He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He understood this approximately fifteen minutes later when he woke to find you beside him, awake, looking at some mid-distance point with the expression of someone slowly processing a sequence of events and finding it, on the whole, acceptable.
"You fell asleep," you said.
"I rested my eyes."
"For fifteen minutes."
He looked at his watch. "Thirteen."
"Fifteen." You turned your head. Still flushed. He was not going to have feelings about that. "Should I—" You gestured vaguely toward the door.
"In a minute." He pulled you back before he'd consciously decided to, and you went without resistance, settled against him like you'd considered the geometry and found it reasonable. "Stop thinking so loudly."
"I'm not thinking loudly."
"You are." A pause. "Say it."
"I was just going to say." You seemed to be choosing words with some care. "This doesn't have to be weird."
"It's not weird."
"You've been weird about me for a while."
He looked at the wall for a moment. "Months," he said.
You lifted your head. Looked at him. He looked back with the equanimity of a man who had made a decision and was now on the other side of it.
"Months," you repeated.
"Don't make it a thing."
"You had a crush on me." The laugh was already happening, quiet, against his shoulder. "You've been making my shifts difficult because you had a crush."
"I don't have a crush. I'm almost fifty."
"You made a first-year cry."
"His documentation—"
"Was wrong, yes." You were laughing properly now, helpless, into his skin, and he let it happen and did not find it as irritating as he should have. "You fixed my formatting error. You ate four muffins."
"I ate one. Maybe two."
"Dana counted. She has a tally."
He absorbed this.
"Dana has a tally," he said.
"Apparently she's been running it since March."
He sat with that for a moment. The cart with the squeaky wheel went past outside, its regular circuit, the one maintenance had been promising to fix for weeks. He'd started timing the rounds. He wasn't going to tell you that.
"Robby," you said, quieter.
"Mm."
"The blanket." A pause. "It was you."
He said nothing.
You pressed your face back into his shoulder. He felt you smiling — actually felt it, the shape of it against his collarbone — and didn't say anything about it.
"Thank you," you said, very small. "For not waking me up."
He didn't answer.
You settled more completely against him. Outside, the hospital kept going — someone called down the hall, a monitor beeped its steady note, the cart made another pass. He listened to the intervals and thought this was probably fine. More than probably.
A thought occurred to him, belatedly. "Did Kowalski ask you to dinner?"
A pause.
"Last Thursday," you said.
"What did you say?"
Another pause. Longer. He could feel you deciding whether to make him ask twice.
"I said I was busy," you said.
"Were you?"
"No." You shifted against his shoulder. "But I had a feeling I'd be busier."
He didn't say anything. Outside, the cart went past again with its squeaky wheel.
"Robby," you said, half-asleep already.
"Go to sleep."
"Everyones's going to know."
"Hmm."
A pause. "Does that bother you?"
He thought about that for a moment. Dana had apparently been running a tally since March. Dana had apparently noticed before he had. That was its own kind of information about the past several months that he chose not to examine too closely.
"No," he said.
"Is that okay?"
He looked at the top of your head. "Go to sleep," he said.
a/n - thank you for reading. comments and reblogs are appreciated.
This was incredible!! You’ve got such an amazing eye for details, and use them so well to build up the scene and the characters within. I really love how you’ve captured Robby here. Beautiful, gorgeous writing!
⤷ michael robinavitch x fem! resident! reader || 4.8k
synopsis. Robby tells himself he's paying attention because you're his resident. The explanation gets harder to defend with time.
warnings. attending/resident relationship, mutual pining, workplace romance, age gap, explicit sexual content, protected sexual intercourse.
The trauma bay smelled like antiseptic and the end of things, and you were at the sink, back to him, hands under the tap, humming.
He'd clocked it forty-three minutes ago. Done absolutely nothing useful with the information since.
Robby kept his eyes on the chart. He was, objectively, a man capable of extraordinary focus under extraordinary pressure — this had been proven, repeatedly, in rooms far worse than this one — and yet here he was, reading the same line about magnesium levels for the fourth time because you were humming something without any apparent awareness of his existence.
That was the thing that got him, if he was being precise about it. The total lack of awareness. Like you were alone in the room. Like the fact of him standing eight feet away was information your nervous system had simply not received and wasn't particularly interested in processing.
"Are you signing off on Martinez or are you planning to stand there all night?"
You turned around. Hands still wet. "Her oxygen sat's been stable for two hours. I was doing one last check." You reached for a paper towel, unhurried. "Good evening."
"It's nearly midnight."
"Good evening, Dr. Robinavitch."
He did not look up. He was very deliberate about not looking up. "Paperwork first. Pleasantries second. Order of operations."
"I'll keep that in mind." Perfectly pleasant. Not a trace of sarcasm. Impervious. Like being curt with you was something that happened to other people and simply bounced off you. He'd watched it happen across an entire shift — residents trying to one-up each other and you deflecting it with some mild observation about coffee going cold, a nurse coming at you frazzled and leaving calmer, and him, standing at the nurses' station, doing the thing where he read the same line four times.
He watched you cross the bay to get the chart, moving through the wreckage of twelve hours like you had a fundamental dispute with the idea that any of it had been hard.
He looked back at the magnesium levels. They remained uninteresting. Across the bay, you turned off the tap and the humming stopped, and somehow that was worse — the sudden awareness of its absence, the way the room rearranged itself around the quiet.
Robby set the chart down. Picked it back up. Read the magnesium levels a fifth time.
He'd been an asshole. He was aware of this with the specific clarity of someone who knew and had decided, at some point, that knowing was sufficient.
It hadn't started that way. He'd been neutral in the beginning, the way he was with most residents — professionally indifferent, appropriately demanding, nothing beyond. And then somewhere between you explaining to a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker why he needed to stay still and not, in your words, be a hero about the needle, because you'd dealt with actual heroes today and they had all, uniformly, behaved themselves — something had shifted. Slowly. The kind of shift where you don't notice until the geography's already changed and you're standing somewhere you didn't plan to be. And by the time he'd noticed, the only thing he knew how to do was be curt about it.
The curt had escalated. He corrected your charting when it didn't need correcting. He'd sent you to the Mathers consult — a three-hour admit, the kind that hollowed a person out — and watched you handle it with the patient attentiveness of someone who didn't know there was another option. He'd told himself it was assessment. He'd told himself a lot of things.
Then was the supply closet.
Pediatric case. Bad, in the quiet way. He'd delivered the news himself and sent everyone back to their stations and gone to chart it, and he couldn't find you anywhere. He checked the on-call room. Then, following some dim instinct he chose not to examine, he tried the supply closet.
You were on the floor, back against the IV bag shelf, knees pulled up, crying.
He stood in the doorway. Thought about leaving.
You looked up. And then — immediately, the reflex of it — you said "I'm sorry" and started to wipe your face. Then you tried to smile at him. Eyes wet, nose red, and you assembled a smile. Like you'd built one in advance for whoever came through the door so they wouldn't have to deal with the crying. Like you'd gotten efficient at this.
That ate at him. He couldn't name it more precisely. Something about the apologizing, and then immediately the smile, in that order, bothered him in a way he didn't have a word for.
He stepped inside and let the door close. "You don't need to be back out in thirty seconds."
"It's unprofessional."
"You're a resident. First one?" He meant the loss. You understood, nodded once. "Then it's biology. Not a failing."
He wasn't good at this. He knew that. There was a box of tissues on the shelf nearest him and he handed it to you, because it was the only object in reach that might approximate the gesture of offering something, and you looked at it and then laughed — barely, a wet sound, but a real one.
"That's not what I—" he started.
"No, I know." You took one anyway, turned it over in your hands. "Thank you."
He stood there another minute. Couldn't leave. Watched you put yourself back together the way you apparently did everything — methodically, without drama, heel of your hand to your eye, one slow breath, and then back. Like a person who had practice.
He went back to his charts and was sharp with two nurses and a second-year before he'd made it to the bay, and didn't connect the two things until weeks later.
Then was the case of the blueberry muffins. In a container with a lid that didn't close properly, and every time there was one sitting on the counter near the coffee maker, and every time an attending found their way over within twenty minutes. He'd eaten four of them across separate occasions. He never planned to acknowledge this.
You hummed when you were focused. A different song every shift, always half-familiar, always just past where he could name it. It was maddening in a way that defied professional articulation.
Every patient remembered your name. Not just remembered — asked for you specifically, used it. He'd had a seventy-three-year-old man with a hairline hip fracture ask him to send back "the nice one, who explained the scan thing." He'd known immediately. He'd sent you. He'd told himself this was about patient outcomes.
He started cataloguing things. Unconsciously, the way you develop a reflex. The way you always sat down to explain a diagnosis — never stood over them. The fact that you took notes by hand on rounds and had told him, unprompted, early on, as if expecting to be corrected, that you retained it better that way. He hadn't corrected it. The snack bars you kept in your coat pocket and distributed to nurses around hour eight without making anything of it. The way you said thank you to orderlies. The way you phrased bad news — he'd noticed the phrasing, catalogued it, thought about it.
He had no use for any of this information. He kept it anyway.
There was a morning, somewhere in the middle of all of it, when he'd been post-call and running on three hours and you'd appeared at the nurses' station with coffee you handed to him before he'd asked, or looked like he needed it, or given any outward indication whatsoever that he was capable of human wants.
"How did you know I take it black?" he said.
"I didn't." You were already walking away. "I just figured if you were you, you probably didn't want anything done to it."
He'd stood there for a moment with the coffee in his hand.
He'd been annoyed about it. The presumption of it, the casual intimacy of the gesture, the fact that you'd got him right. He'd been annoyed about it right up until the moment he'd taken a sip and thought, with a clarity that three hours of sleep had done nothing to dull, that he was in actual trouble.
The Torres chart hand-off happened on a Tuesday. You came up behind him at the nurses' station and he smelled the muffins before you'd said anything.
"Torres hand-off. She's been stable since fourteen hundred hours, no fever. I flagged a note about the blood pressure trend — it's within normal, I just wanted to document I'd been watching it."
"I can read."
"I know you can read." Still pleasant. "She also wants me to tell you you have a nice voice."
"She's seventy-one and on morphine."
"She said it before the morphine." You set the chart down. "There's a muffin on the counter."
He took the chart and didn't look up, and he stood there for a moment after you'd gone and thought, with some irritation, that he'd been tracking Torres's blood pressure every two hours all shift. He hadn't flagged it. He fixed the formatting error at the top of page two — not because it was egregious, it wasn't — and didn't tell you about it. He told himself this was efficiency and moved on before he could disagree with himself.
Jack waited until the lounge was empty. In retrospect, Robby should have taken that as a warning.
They were both doing charts. Fourteen minutes of workable silence, which was the best kind, and then Jack said without looking up, "Kowalski was at the nurses' station again."
Robby said nothing.
"Third time this week. Ortho. No clinical reason to be down here three times in a week." A pause. "He keeps asking about her."
"Her who?"
"Your her."
"She's not — she's a resident. She's on shift."
"That's not what he's asking." Jack closed his laptop. That was always the tell — the deliberate setting-aside, the signal that you were in a conversation now, predetermined. He looked at Robby with the patience of a man who has decided to wait you out. "You want to say anything about that?"
"I don't have anything to say about Kowalski."
"No. But you've been short with her."
"I'm short with everyone."
"Not the same short." Jack leaned back. "You corrected her on a splint she did correctly. I checked afterward."
Robby set his pen down. Picked it back up. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I don't want you to say anything." Jack opened his laptop again. Closed it. "You know what I think?"
"No. But I suspect you're going to—"
"I think you've been so busy being her attending that you forgot she's going to leave and be someone else's problem in about eight months." A pause. "And I think that bothers you."
Robby looked at the coffee. Then the chart. Then some middle distance between the two.
"He's going to ask her to dinner. Kowalski."
The coffee in Robby's mug was still warm. He looked at it.
"Let him," he said.
Jack made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Sure," he said, and opened the laptop for the last time.
He went to the attending lounge because it was past two in the morning and he needed somewhere to sit that wasn't the nurses' station, and you happened to be there when he opened the door.
Asleep in the chair by the window. Your chart was still open in your lap. Pen loosely between your fingers. At some point, the sleep had simply won.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
There was a warmth in his chest that was entirely inconvenient and he looked at it sideways, the way you look at something too bright. You'd been here since seven that morning. He knew this without meaning to know it — knew which admits you'd taken, what you'd ordered for the woman in bay three, that you'd eaten something from the vending machine at fourteen hundred because you'd complained about it to Dana with the mournfulness of someone deeply wronged by a sandwich. He'd started logging your schedule without any conscious decision to do so. That was a recent development he hadn't examined closely.
He should go to the couch. Do his own charts.
He stood there another moment. You looked cold. He picked up the green blanket — the ones you sometimes used, which he had no reason knowing — and draped it over your body. Tucked under your feet for good measure.
Then he stepped back and eased the door shut, very quietly, and stood under the fluorescent light of the hallway, and thought: oh.
The acknowledgment of something he'd been refusing to file anywhere useful for long enough that the refusal had become its own noise. Oh. Right. He understood now why Jack had closed his laptop.
He was reviewing a discharge summary in the corridor, and you stepped out of the lounge with the green blanket under your arm and walked directly into his eyeline. He wasn't staring. Sure, he wasn't.
"Were you out here when I fell asleep?"
"Yep."
"You didn't sleep?"
"I checked the lounge. You were in there."
"That's not an answer."
He'd underestimated you in that specific way, in the beginning — the quiet refusal to be redirected. You did it without any sharpness, without confrontation, like you'd noticed it and decided not to. It surprised him the first time. It had never stopped surprising him, exactly.
"I didn't want to wake you," he said.
You stopped. Something crossed your face that he couldn't quite catch the shape of. "That was actually very considerate of you."
"You sound surprised."
"A little." You tucked the blanket more firmly under your arm. "You've been different lately."
"I'm professionally consistent."
"Dr. Robinavitch." Very patient. "I watched you make a first-year cry over a documentation error."
"His documentation was wrong."
"Mine had a formatting error on the Torres file. Page two. You didn't say anything."
He said nothing.
"You fixed it yourself." Still not accusing — just noticing. "I saw the edit timestamp."
The corridor was quiet. A monitor beeped down the hall in its steady automated note.
"You didn't have to do that," you said. Softer now. "I would've caught it."
"I know you would have."
A pause. You were looking at him with that look — the curious one, the one that felt like you were trying to work something out carefully, without making a production of it. Like he was a thing worth figuring out. Like you'd decided to be patient about it.
He found he had nothing useful to say to any of that. You opened your mouth and he thought for a second you were going to say something that would require him to respond in kind, and he wasn't ready for that, not in a corridor at three in the morning with the green blanket under your arm and his chest doing what it was doing.
"Get some sleep," he said. "In an actual bed. Not a chair."
"Are you worried about me?"
"I'm concerned with your clinical function tomorrow if you're running on four hours in a—"
"Robby."
Just his name. Without the professional buffer of the title, and the way you said it — quiet, slightly tentative, like you were testing whether it was allowed—
"The blanket," you said. "In the lounge. Was that you?"
He looked at you.
You looked back, and there was nothing confrontational in it, nothing probing, just — curious, and underneath that, something that was almost gentle. Waiting.
"Go to sleep," he said, and walked back toward the bay.
He didn't quite remember, in the moment, how you got here.
That was a lie. He remembered exactly — you'd followed him into the on-call room with a consult chart, and you'd asked him something, and he'd turned around and you were closer than he'd expected, and the chart had ended up on the floor, and something that had been accumulating for a long time finally hit a pressure it couldn't sustain.
You'd kissed him first. Barely. More like you'd tipped toward him and he'd closed the remaining distance, which meant they were equally responsible, and he was prepared to argue this point at length.
Now your back was against the on-call room door and you were looking at him like he was slightly terrifying and very interesting, which was, objectively, the most appealing combination of expressions he'd seen in some time.
"Are we—"
"Yes."
"Okay." A breath. "Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"What am I supposed to say?"
He pressed his mouth to the side of your neck and held it there — not moving, just breathing you in — until you went very still under him. He felt your pulse against his lips. He stayed there until you made a sound, small, involuntary, the sound of someone trying not to make a sound and losing the effort.
"Something more useful," he said against your skin.
Your hands found his collar. Fisted into it without quite pulling. "What do you want me to say?"
He pulled back enough to look at you. Already undone, and he'd barely started — the flush high on your throat, the way you were holding his shirt like it was the only fixed object in the room. Something settled in him that he recognised, distantly, as the opposite of the thing that had been sitting in his chest for months.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
You looked at him. Then sideways. Then back, with something stubborn in it underneath the flush. "You."
"More specific."
"Robby—"
"Dr. Robinavitch," he said, and watched your face cycle through several things.
"You cannot possibly be serious."
"I'm always serious." He undid the first button of your scrubs. "More specific."
Your breath came out uneven. "I want you to touch me."
"I am touching you."
"You know what I—" The thought didn't complete. He undid the second button and whatever you'd been about to say dissolved. "I want your hands on me. Properly."
"Properly," he said. "There you go."
He walked you back to the narrow bed and sat you on the edge of it. Then stood there for a moment — just looked. He had spent a professionally inadvisable amount of time not looking at you, deliberately, as a sustained practice, and he was going to allow himself a moment now that the situation had changed.
You looked back. Flushed, lower lip caught between your teeth.
He got your scrub top off, then the undershirt, then reached around and unclipped your bra. When you moved to cover yourself, he caught both wrists.
"Don't."
"I just—"
He pressed your wrists to the mattress, one on either side, gentle but deliberate, and held them there. You let him immediately. He filed that away. "Keep them there."
He took his time. He'd earned the right to take his time — all those months of being deliberately removed, of watching you from across the bay and looking back at his charts — he had accumulated a significant amount of patience that was now going to get spent in one place.
He put his mouth to your collarbone and worked down slowly, and every time you moved he said stay and felt you try, felt the effort of it in the tension running through you, your hands gripping the mattress. He got his mouth to your nipple and felt you arch up sharp, and he pulled back just enough.
"Stay still."
"I'm trying—"
"Try harder."
"Robby, please—" And there it was — the specific texture of your voice when you were overwhelmed, the thing he'd catalogued and refused to think about directly. The way it went soft and raw at the edges. Your eyes had gone glassy. "Please. I need—"
"Tell me what you need."
"You know what I need—"
"I do. I want you to say it."
You made a frustrated sound that turned into something else when he dragged his thumb along the inside of your thigh and stopped before it got useful. "I need you to touch me. Please. I need—please."
"Where?"
"You know where—"
"Where?" Quieter. Final.
"My cunt," you said, and your face went red saying it, and he pressed his mouth to your stomach to have somewhere to put the expression that wanted to happen. The slight mortification and the fact that you'd said it anyway. He was going to be thinking about that for a long time.
He pulled your scrubs down and the underwear followed, and he sat back on his heels and looked at you spread across the narrow mattress, flushed to your chest, thighs pressed together out of some residual instinct toward dignity, and thought with a startling clarity that you had absolutely no idea what you'd been doing to him.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of your thigh and felt you exhale shakily. Pressed it to the other. Kissed up slowly, felt you start to tremble, your thighs trying to close around him.
"You're already so wet," he said against your skin, and heard you make a sound. "I've barely done anything."
"Don't say it like that —" you whined.
"I'm just statin' what I see." He pressed his mouth to you properly and felt you gasp, felt your hands go immediately into his hair. He worked you slowly, his tongue flat against your clit and then pointed, then flat again, and two fingers pressing inside you, curling — and you made sounds he was going to be hearing in his head for years, the pitch of them, the way they went higher when he changed the pressure. He brought you right to the edge, felt it in the way you tightened around his fingers and your thighs started shaking—
And he stopped.
"What—" The outrage of it, immediate and genuine. Your hips chased nothing. "I was so close, I was right—please—"
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to make me come," you said, without hesitation this time, and your voice was wet at the edges and your eyes were wet, actual tears on your lashes, and he pressed his mouth to the inside of your knee and held it there for a second.
"Please," you added, smaller. "Please. Robby."
He put his mouth back, and this time he didn't stop. He held your hips down with his forearms and kept the pressure steady and relentless, worked two fingers inside you in a rhythm that he'd figured out about four minutes in and was going to use mercilessly, and you came hard — shaking, properly shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, his name said so many times it became something else. He kissed your inner thigh through the end of it and felt you go loose by degrees.
He straightened. You had tears running down your temples. He kissed them away without entirely deciding to, and you laughed weakly.
"I'm just bein' thorough." He got his scrubs off, found the condom from the pocket he'd put it in on a hope, and looked up to find you watching him with red-rimmed eyes and an expression of dazed, complete attention.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
He didn't answer. He settled over you and paused — his forearm beside your head, his weight on his knees — and just looked at you for a moment.
"Robby." Breathless. "Please."
"I've got you," he said, quietly, and pressed in slow.
He felt you exhale under him, felt you shift to pull him deeper, felt your legs wrap around him before he'd done anything. He set a pace that was, he'd admit only to himself, not particularly controlled — the months of it had a way of making themselves felt when the situation finally changed. He pressed his mouth to your ear and told you exactly what you felt like — and he was precise about it, anatomical in a way that made you shiver, hot and tight and so fucking wet that he'd had to think about something else when he'd first pushed inside you — told you what he'd been thinking about, in terms that left nothing abstract.
You made a sound into his shoulder that he was going to think about for a long time.
"You've been thinking about this?" you managed.
"At length."
"How long?"
"Longer than is appropriate." He pressed deeper and felt you gasp. "Considerably." He pulled back and pushed in again, slow, deliberate in the way that he could feel you registering — the way your breath caught, the way your nails pressed into his back. "You want me to tell you how long?"
"Yes," you said, slightly desperate.
"When you had the Torres admit. You were at the nurses' station and you leaned over to get a chart and your scrubs—" He stopped for a second because the memory had found him at an inconvenient angle. "I had to go chart something."
"You left because of me?"
"I left before I did something professionally unsound." He pressed a hand to the back of your thigh and pushed it higher, changed the angle, felt you make an embarrassingly gratifying sound. "Stop talking."
"You were the one who—"
"Stop talking," he said, and moved, and you did.
You cried through the second orgasm — actual tears, the way he'd half-expected, your face buried in his shoulder, both arms around his neck, holding on. He kissed the side of your face. The corner of your eye. Felt you clutch at him like you'd decided he was staying.
When he followed he was considerably less composed than he'd planned, face in your hair, your name said once, very quietly.
He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He understood this approximately fifteen minutes later when he woke to find you beside him, awake, looking at some mid-distance point with the expression of someone slowly processing a sequence of events and finding it, on the whole, acceptable.
"You fell asleep," you said.
"I rested my eyes."
"For fifteen minutes."
He looked at his watch. "Thirteen."
"Fifteen." You turned your head. Still flushed. He was not going to have feelings about that. "Should I—" You gestured vaguely toward the door.
"In a minute." He pulled you back before he'd consciously decided to, and you went without resistance, settled against him like you'd considered the geometry and found it reasonable. "Stop thinking so loudly."
"I'm not thinking loudly."
"You are." A pause. "Say it."
"I was just going to say." You seemed to be choosing words with some care. "This doesn't have to be weird."
"It's not weird."
"You've been weird about me for a while."
He looked at the wall for a moment. "Months," he said.
You lifted your head. Looked at him. He looked back with the equanimity of a man who had made a decision and was now on the other side of it.
"Months," you repeated.
"Don't make it a thing."
"You had a crush on me." The laugh was already happening, quiet, against his shoulder. "You've been making my shifts difficult because you had a crush."
"I don't have a crush. I'm almost fifty."
"You made a first-year cry."
"His documentation—"
"Was wrong, yes." You were laughing properly now, helpless, into his skin, and he let it happen and did not find it as irritating as he should have. "You fixed my formatting error. You ate four muffins."
"I ate one. Maybe two."
"Dana counted. She has a tally."
He absorbed this.
"Dana has a tally," he said.
"Apparently she's been running it since March."
He sat with that for a moment. The cart with the squeaky wheel went past outside, its regular circuit, the one maintenance had been promising to fix for weeks. He'd started timing the rounds. He wasn't going to tell you that.
"Robby," you said, quieter.
"Mm."
"The blanket." A pause. "It was you."
He said nothing.
You pressed your face back into his shoulder. He felt you smiling — actually felt it, the shape of it against his collarbone — and didn't say anything about it.
"Thank you," you said, very small. "For not waking me up."
He didn't answer.
You settled more completely against him. Outside, the hospital kept going — someone called down the hall, a monitor beeped its steady note, the cart made another pass. He listened to the intervals and thought this was probably fine. More than probably.
A thought occurred to him, belatedly. "Did Kowalski ask you to dinner?"
A pause.
"Last Thursday," you said.
"What did you say?"
Another pause. Longer. He could feel you deciding whether to make him ask twice.
"I said I was busy," you said.
"Were you?"
"No." You shifted against his shoulder. "But I had a feeling I'd be busier."
He didn't say anything. Outside, the cart went past again with its squeaky wheel.
"Robby," you said, half-asleep already.
"Go to sleep."
"Everyones's going to know."
"Hmm."
A pause. "Does that bother you?"
He thought about that for a moment. Dana had apparently been running a tally since March. Dana had apparently noticed before he had. That was its own kind of information about the past several months that he chose not to examine too closely.
"No," he said.
"Is that okay?"
He looked at the top of your head. "Go to sleep," he said.
a/n - thank you for reading. comments and reblogs are appreciated.
⤷ michael robinavitch x fem! resident! reader || 4.8k
synopsis. Robby tells himself he's paying attention because you're his resident. The explanation gets harder to defend with time.
warnings. attending/resident relationship, mutual pining, workplace romance, age gap, explicit sexual content, protected sexual intercourse.
The trauma bay smelled like antiseptic and the end of things, and you were at the sink, back to him, hands under the tap, humming.
He'd clocked it forty-three minutes ago. Done absolutely nothing useful with the information since.
Robby kept his eyes on the chart. He was, objectively, a man capable of extraordinary focus under extraordinary pressure — this had been proven, repeatedly, in rooms far worse than this one — and yet here he was, reading the same line about magnesium levels for the fourth time because you were humming something without any apparent awareness of his existence.
That was the thing that got him, if he was being precise about it. The total lack of awareness. Like you were alone in the room. Like the fact of him standing eight feet away was information your nervous system had simply not received and wasn't particularly interested in processing.
"Are you signing off on Martinez or are you planning to stand there all night?"
You turned around. Hands still wet. "Her oxygen sat's been stable for two hours. I was doing one last check." You reached for a paper towel, unhurried. "Good evening."
"It's nearly midnight."
"Good evening, Dr. Robinavitch."
He did not look up. He was very deliberate about not looking up. "Paperwork first. Pleasantries second. Order of operations."
"I'll keep that in mind." Perfectly pleasant. Not a trace of sarcasm. Impervious. Like being curt with you was something that happened to other people and simply bounced off you. He'd watched it happen across an entire shift — residents trying to one-up each other and you deflecting it with some mild observation about coffee going cold, a nurse coming at you frazzled and leaving calmer, and him, standing at the nurses' station, doing the thing where he read the same line four times.
He watched you cross the bay to get the chart, moving through the wreckage of twelve hours like you had a fundamental dispute with the idea that any of it had been hard.
He looked back at the magnesium levels. They remained uninteresting. Across the bay, you turned off the tap and the humming stopped, and somehow that was worse — the sudden awareness of its absence, the way the room rearranged itself around the quiet.
Robby set the chart down. Picked it back up. Read the magnesium levels a fifth time.
He'd been an asshole. He was aware of this with the specific clarity of someone who knew and had decided, at some point, that knowing was sufficient.
It hadn't started that way. He'd been neutral in the beginning, the way he was with most residents — professionally indifferent, appropriately demanding, nothing beyond. And then somewhere between you explaining to a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker why he needed to stay still and not, in your words, be a hero about the needle, because you'd dealt with actual heroes today and they had all, uniformly, behaved themselves — something had shifted. Slowly. The kind of shift where you don't notice until the geography's already changed and you're standing somewhere you didn't plan to be. And by the time he'd noticed, the only thing he knew how to do was be curt about it.
The curt had escalated. He corrected your charting when it didn't need correcting. He'd sent you to the Mathers consult — a three-hour admit, the kind that hollowed a person out — and watched you handle it with the patient attentiveness of someone who didn't know there was another option. He'd told himself it was assessment. He'd told himself a lot of things.
Then was the supply closet.
Pediatric case. Bad, in the quiet way. He'd delivered the news himself and sent everyone back to their stations and gone to chart it, and he couldn't find you anywhere. He checked the on-call room. Then, following some dim instinct he chose not to examine, he tried the supply closet.
You were on the floor, back against the IV bag shelf, knees pulled up, crying.
He stood in the doorway. Thought about leaving.
You looked up. And then — immediately, the reflex of it — you said "I'm sorry" and started to wipe your face. Then you tried to smile at him. Eyes wet, nose red, and you assembled a smile. Like you'd built one in advance for whoever came through the door so they wouldn't have to deal with the crying. Like you'd gotten efficient at this.
That ate at him. He couldn't name it more precisely. Something about the apologizing, and then immediately the smile, in that order, bothered him in a way he didn't have a word for.
He stepped inside and let the door close. "You don't need to be back out in thirty seconds."
"It's unprofessional."
"You're a resident. First one?" He meant the loss. You understood, nodded once. "Then it's biology. Not a failing."
He wasn't good at this. He knew that. There was a box of tissues on the shelf nearest him and he handed it to you, because it was the only object in reach that might approximate the gesture of offering something, and you looked at it and then laughed — barely, a wet sound, but a real one.
"That's not what I—" he started.
"No, I know." You took one anyway, turned it over in your hands. "Thank you."
He stood there another minute. Couldn't leave. Watched you put yourself back together the way you apparently did everything — methodically, without drama, heel of your hand to your eye, one slow breath, and then back. Like a person who had practice.
He went back to his charts and was sharp with two nurses and a second-year before he'd made it to the bay, and didn't connect the two things until weeks later.
Then was the case of the blueberry muffins. In a container with a lid that didn't close properly, and every time there was one sitting on the counter near the coffee maker, and every time an attending found their way over within twenty minutes. He'd eaten four of them across separate occasions. He never planned to acknowledge this.
You hummed when you were focused. A different song every shift, always half-familiar, always just past where he could name it. It was maddening in a way that defied professional articulation.
Every patient remembered your name. Not just remembered — asked for you specifically, used it. He'd had a seventy-three-year-old man with a hairline hip fracture ask him to send back "the nice one, who explained the scan thing." He'd known immediately. He'd sent you. He'd told himself this was about patient outcomes.
He started cataloguing things. Unconsciously, the way you develop a reflex. The way you always sat down to explain a diagnosis — never stood over them. The fact that you took notes by hand on rounds and had told him, unprompted, early on, as if expecting to be corrected, that you retained it better that way. He hadn't corrected it. The snack bars you kept in your coat pocket and distributed to nurses around hour eight without making anything of it. The way you said thank you to orderlies. The way you phrased bad news — he'd noticed the phrasing, catalogued it, thought about it.
He had no use for any of this information. He kept it anyway.
There was a morning, somewhere in the middle of all of it, when he'd been post-call and running on three hours and you'd appeared at the nurses' station with coffee you handed to him before he'd asked, or looked like he needed it, or given any outward indication whatsoever that he was capable of human wants.
"How did you know I take it black?" he said.
"I didn't." You were already walking away. "I just figured if you were you, you probably didn't want anything done to it."
He'd stood there for a moment with the coffee in his hand.
He'd been annoyed about it. The presumption of it, the casual intimacy of the gesture, the fact that you'd got him right. He'd been annoyed about it right up until the moment he'd taken a sip and thought, with a clarity that three hours of sleep had done nothing to dull, that he was in actual trouble.
The Torres chart hand-off happened on a Tuesday. You came up behind him at the nurses' station and he smelled the muffins before you'd said anything.
"Torres hand-off. She's been stable since fourteen hundred hours, no fever. I flagged a note about the blood pressure trend — it's within normal, I just wanted to document I'd been watching it."
"I can read."
"I know you can read." Still pleasant. "She also wants me to tell you you have a nice voice."
"She's seventy-one and on morphine."
"She said it before the morphine." You set the chart down. "There's a muffin on the counter."
He took the chart and didn't look up, and he stood there for a moment after you'd gone and thought, with some irritation, that he'd been tracking Torres's blood pressure every two hours all shift. He hadn't flagged it. He fixed the formatting error at the top of page two — not because it was egregious, it wasn't — and didn't tell you about it. He told himself this was efficiency and moved on before he could disagree with himself.
Jack waited until the lounge was empty. In retrospect, Robby should have taken that as a warning.
They were both doing charts. Fourteen minutes of workable silence, which was the best kind, and then Jack said without looking up, "Kowalski was at the nurses' station again."
Robby said nothing.
"Third time this week. Ortho. No clinical reason to be down here three times in a week." A pause. "He keeps asking about her."
"Her who?"
"Your her."
"She's not — she's a resident. She's on shift."
"That's not what he's asking." Jack closed his laptop. That was always the tell — the deliberate setting-aside, the signal that you were in a conversation now, predetermined. He looked at Robby with the patience of a man who has decided to wait you out. "You want to say anything about that?"
"I don't have anything to say about Kowalski."
"No. But you've been short with her."
"I'm short with everyone."
"Not the same short." Jack leaned back. "You corrected her on a splint she did correctly. I checked afterward."
Robby set his pen down. Picked it back up. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I don't want you to say anything." Jack opened his laptop again. Closed it. "You know what I think?"
"No. But I suspect you're going to—"
"I think you've been so busy being her attending that you forgot she's going to leave and be someone else's problem in about eight months." A pause. "And I think that bothers you."
Robby looked at the coffee. Then the chart. Then some middle distance between the two.
"He's going to ask her to dinner. Kowalski."
The coffee in Robby's mug was still warm. He looked at it.
"Let him," he said.
Jack made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Sure," he said, and opened the laptop for the last time.
He went to the attending lounge because it was past two in the morning and he needed somewhere to sit that wasn't the nurses' station, and you happened to be there when he opened the door.
Asleep in the chair by the window. Your chart was still open in your lap. Pen loosely between your fingers. At some point, the sleep had simply won.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
There was a warmth in his chest that was entirely inconvenient and he looked at it sideways, the way you look at something too bright. You'd been here since seven that morning. He knew this without meaning to know it — knew which admits you'd taken, what you'd ordered for the woman in bay three, that you'd eaten something from the vending machine at fourteen hundred because you'd complained about it to Dana with the mournfulness of someone deeply wronged by a sandwich. He'd started logging your schedule without any conscious decision to do so. That was a recent development he hadn't examined closely.
He should go to the couch. Do his own charts.
He stood there another moment. You looked cold. He picked up the green blanket — the ones you sometimes used, which he had no reason knowing — and draped it over your body. Tucked under your feet for good measure.
Then he stepped back and eased the door shut, very quietly, and stood under the fluorescent light of the hallway, and thought: oh.
The acknowledgment of something he'd been refusing to file anywhere useful for long enough that the refusal had become its own noise. Oh. Right. He understood now why Jack had closed his laptop.
He was reviewing a discharge summary in the corridor, and you stepped out of the lounge with the green blanket under your arm and walked directly into his eyeline. He wasn't staring. Sure, he wasn't.
"Were you out here when I fell asleep?"
"Yep."
"You didn't sleep?"
"I checked the lounge. You were in there."
"That's not an answer."
He'd underestimated you in that specific way, in the beginning — the quiet refusal to be redirected. You did it without any sharpness, without confrontation, like you'd noticed it and decided not to. It surprised him the first time. It had never stopped surprising him, exactly.
"I didn't want to wake you," he said.
You stopped. Something crossed your face that he couldn't quite catch the shape of. "That was actually very considerate of you."
"You sound surprised."
"A little." You tucked the blanket more firmly under your arm. "You've been different lately."
"I'm professionally consistent."
"Dr. Robinavitch." Very patient. "I watched you make a first-year cry over a documentation error."
"His documentation was wrong."
"Mine had a formatting error on the Torres file. Page two. You didn't say anything."
He said nothing.
"You fixed it yourself." Still not accusing — just noticing. "I saw the edit timestamp."
The corridor was quiet. A monitor beeped down the hall in its steady automated note.
"You didn't have to do that," you said. Softer now. "I would've caught it."
"I know you would have."
A pause. You were looking at him with that look — the curious one, the one that felt like you were trying to work something out carefully, without making a production of it. Like he was a thing worth figuring out. Like you'd decided to be patient about it.
He found he had nothing useful to say to any of that. You opened your mouth and he thought for a second you were going to say something that would require him to respond in kind, and he wasn't ready for that, not in a corridor at three in the morning with the green blanket under your arm and his chest doing what it was doing.
"Get some sleep," he said. "In an actual bed. Not a chair."
"Are you worried about me?"
"I'm concerned with your clinical function tomorrow if you're running on four hours in a—"
"Robby."
Just his name. Without the professional buffer of the title, and the way you said it — quiet, slightly tentative, like you were testing whether it was allowed—
"The blanket," you said. "In the lounge. Was that you?"
He looked at you.
You looked back, and there was nothing confrontational in it, nothing probing, just — curious, and underneath that, something that was almost gentle. Waiting.
"Go to sleep," he said, and walked back toward the bay.
He didn't quite remember, in the moment, how you got here.
That was a lie. He remembered exactly — you'd followed him into the on-call room with a consult chart, and you'd asked him something, and he'd turned around and you were closer than he'd expected, and the chart had ended up on the floor, and something that had been accumulating for a long time finally hit a pressure it couldn't sustain.
You'd kissed him first. Barely. More like you'd tipped toward him and he'd closed the remaining distance, which meant they were equally responsible, and he was prepared to argue this point at length.
Now your back was against the on-call room door and you were looking at him like he was slightly terrifying and very interesting, which was, objectively, the most appealing combination of expressions he'd seen in some time.
"Are we—"
"Yes."
"Okay." A breath. "Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"What am I supposed to say?"
He pressed his mouth to the side of your neck and held it there — not moving, just breathing you in — until you went very still under him. He felt your pulse against his lips. He stayed there until you made a sound, small, involuntary, the sound of someone trying not to make a sound and losing the effort.
"Something more useful," he said against your skin.
Your hands found his collar. Fisted into it without quite pulling. "What do you want me to say?"
He pulled back enough to look at you. Already undone, and he'd barely started — the flush high on your throat, the way you were holding his shirt like it was the only fixed object in the room. Something settled in him that he recognised, distantly, as the opposite of the thing that had been sitting in his chest for months.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
You looked at him. Then sideways. Then back, with something stubborn in it underneath the flush. "You."
"More specific."
"Robby—"
"Dr. Robinavitch," he said, and watched your face cycle through several things.
"You cannot possibly be serious."
"I'm always serious." He undid the first button of your scrubs. "More specific."
Your breath came out uneven. "I want you to touch me."
"I am touching you."
"You know what I—" The thought didn't complete. He undid the second button and whatever you'd been about to say dissolved. "I want your hands on me. Properly."
"Properly," he said. "There you go."
He walked you back to the narrow bed and sat you on the edge of it. Then stood there for a moment — just looked. He had spent a professionally inadvisable amount of time not looking at you, deliberately, as a sustained practice, and he was going to allow himself a moment now that the situation had changed.
You looked back. Flushed, lower lip caught between your teeth.
He got your scrub top off, then the undershirt, then reached around and unclipped your bra. When you moved to cover yourself, he caught both wrists.
"Don't."
"I just—"
He pressed your wrists to the mattress, one on either side, gentle but deliberate, and held them there. You let him immediately. He filed that away. "Keep them there."
He took his time. He'd earned the right to take his time — all those months of being deliberately removed, of watching you from across the bay and looking back at his charts — he had accumulated a significant amount of patience that was now going to get spent in one place.
He put his mouth to your collarbone and worked down slowly, and every time you moved he said stay and felt you try, felt the effort of it in the tension running through you, your hands gripping the mattress. He got his mouth to your nipple and felt you arch up sharp, and he pulled back just enough.
"Stay still."
"I'm trying—"
"Try harder."
"Robby, please—" And there it was — the specific texture of your voice when you were overwhelmed, the thing he'd catalogued and refused to think about directly. The way it went soft and raw at the edges. Your eyes had gone glassy. "Please. I need—"
"Tell me what you need."
"You know what I need—"
"I do. I want you to say it."
You made a frustrated sound that turned into something else when he dragged his thumb along the inside of your thigh and stopped before it got useful. "I need you to touch me. Please. I need—please."
"Where?"
"You know where—"
"Where?" Quieter. Final.
"My cunt," you said, and your face went red saying it, and he pressed his mouth to your stomach to have somewhere to put the expression that wanted to happen. The slight mortification and the fact that you'd said it anyway. He was going to be thinking about that for a long time.
He pulled your scrubs down and the underwear followed, and he sat back on his heels and looked at you spread across the narrow mattress, flushed to your chest, thighs pressed together out of some residual instinct toward dignity, and thought with a startling clarity that you had absolutely no idea what you'd been doing to him.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of your thigh and felt you exhale shakily. Pressed it to the other. Kissed up slowly, felt you start to tremble, your thighs trying to close around him.
"You're already so wet," he said against your skin, and heard you make a sound. "I've barely done anything."
"Don't say it like that —" you whined.
"I'm just statin' what I see." He pressed his mouth to you properly and felt you gasp, felt your hands go immediately into his hair. He worked you slowly, his tongue flat against your clit and then pointed, then flat again, and two fingers pressing inside you, curling — and you made sounds he was going to be hearing in his head for years, the pitch of them, the way they went higher when he changed the pressure. He brought you right to the edge, felt it in the way you tightened around his fingers and your thighs started shaking—
And he stopped.
"What—" The outrage of it, immediate and genuine. Your hips chased nothing. "I was so close, I was right—please—"
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to make me come," you said, without hesitation this time, and your voice was wet at the edges and your eyes were wet, actual tears on your lashes, and he pressed his mouth to the inside of your knee and held it there for a second.
"Please," you added, smaller. "Please. Robby."
He put his mouth back, and this time he didn't stop. He held your hips down with his forearms and kept the pressure steady and relentless, worked two fingers inside you in a rhythm that he'd figured out about four minutes in and was going to use mercilessly, and you came hard — shaking, properly shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, his name said so many times it became something else. He kissed your inner thigh through the end of it and felt you go loose by degrees.
He straightened. You had tears running down your temples. He kissed them away without entirely deciding to, and you laughed weakly.
"I'm just bein' thorough." He got his scrubs off, found the condom from the pocket he'd put it in on a hope, and looked up to find you watching him with red-rimmed eyes and an expression of dazed, complete attention.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
He didn't answer. He settled over you and paused — his forearm beside your head, his weight on his knees — and just looked at you for a moment.
"Robby." Breathless. "Please."
"I've got you," he said, quietly, and pressed in slow.
He felt you exhale under him, felt you shift to pull him deeper, felt your legs wrap around him before he'd done anything. He set a pace that was, he'd admit only to himself, not particularly controlled — the months of it had a way of making themselves felt when the situation finally changed. He pressed his mouth to your ear and told you exactly what you felt like — and he was precise about it, anatomical in a way that made you shiver, hot and tight and so fucking wet that he'd had to think about something else when he'd first pushed inside you — told you what he'd been thinking about, in terms that left nothing abstract.
You made a sound into his shoulder that he was going to think about for a long time.
"You've been thinking about this?" you managed.
"At length."
"How long?"
"Longer than is appropriate." He pressed deeper and felt you gasp. "Considerably." He pulled back and pushed in again, slow, deliberate in the way that he could feel you registering — the way your breath caught, the way your nails pressed into his back. "You want me to tell you how long?"
"Yes," you said, slightly desperate.
"When you had the Torres admit. You were at the nurses' station and you leaned over to get a chart and your scrubs—" He stopped for a second because the memory had found him at an inconvenient angle. "I had to go chart something."
"You left because of me?"
"I left before I did something professionally unsound." He pressed a hand to the back of your thigh and pushed it higher, changed the angle, felt you make an embarrassingly gratifying sound. "Stop talking."
"You were the one who—"
"Stop talking," he said, and moved, and you did.
You cried through the second orgasm — actual tears, the way he'd half-expected, your face buried in his shoulder, both arms around his neck, holding on. He kissed the side of your face. The corner of your eye. Felt you clutch at him like you'd decided he was staying.
When he followed he was considerably less composed than he'd planned, face in your hair, your name said once, very quietly.
He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He understood this approximately fifteen minutes later when he woke to find you beside him, awake, looking at some mid-distance point with the expression of someone slowly processing a sequence of events and finding it, on the whole, acceptable.
"You fell asleep," you said.
"I rested my eyes."
"For fifteen minutes."
He looked at his watch. "Thirteen."
"Fifteen." You turned your head. Still flushed. He was not going to have feelings about that. "Should I—" You gestured vaguely toward the door.
"In a minute." He pulled you back before he'd consciously decided to, and you went without resistance, settled against him like you'd considered the geometry and found it reasonable. "Stop thinking so loudly."
"I'm not thinking loudly."
"You are." A pause. "Say it."
"I was just going to say." You seemed to be choosing words with some care. "This doesn't have to be weird."
"It's not weird."
"You've been weird about me for a while."
He looked at the wall for a moment. "Months," he said.
You lifted your head. Looked at him. He looked back with the equanimity of a man who had made a decision and was now on the other side of it.
"Months," you repeated.
"Don't make it a thing."
"You had a crush on me." The laugh was already happening, quiet, against his shoulder. "You've been making my shifts difficult because you had a crush."
"I don't have a crush. I'm almost fifty."
"You made a first-year cry."
"His documentation—"
"Was wrong, yes." You were laughing properly now, helpless, into his skin, and he let it happen and did not find it as irritating as he should have. "You fixed my formatting error. You ate four muffins."
"I ate one. Maybe two."
"Dana counted. She has a tally."
He absorbed this.
"Dana has a tally," he said.
"Apparently she's been running it since March."
He sat with that for a moment. The cart with the squeaky wheel went past outside, its regular circuit, the one maintenance had been promising to fix for weeks. He'd started timing the rounds. He wasn't going to tell you that.
"Robby," you said, quieter.
"Mm."
"The blanket." A pause. "It was you."
He said nothing.
You pressed your face back into his shoulder. He felt you smiling — actually felt it, the shape of it against his collarbone — and didn't say anything about it.
"Thank you," you said, very small. "For not waking me up."
He didn't answer.
You settled more completely against him. Outside, the hospital kept going — someone called down the hall, a monitor beeped its steady note, the cart made another pass. He listened to the intervals and thought this was probably fine. More than probably.
A thought occurred to him, belatedly. "Did Kowalski ask you to dinner?"
A pause.
"Last Thursday," you said.
"What did you say?"
Another pause. Longer. He could feel you deciding whether to make him ask twice.
"I said I was busy," you said.
"Were you?"
"No." You shifted against his shoulder. "But I had a feeling I'd be busier."
He didn't say anything. Outside, the cart went past again with its squeaky wheel.
"Robby," you said, half-asleep already.
"Go to sleep."
"Everyones's going to know."
"Hmm."
A pause. "Does that bother you?"
He thought about that for a moment. Dana had apparently been running a tally since March. Dana had apparently noticed before he had. That was its own kind of information about the past several months that he chose not to examine too closely.
"No," he said.
"Is that okay?"
He looked at the top of your head. "Go to sleep," he said.
a/n - thank you for reading. comments and reblogs are appreciated.
snowghoul
prguitarman
discoholicmusic
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
2087
kaledo-art