I have finally decided to lock in and fully throw myself into fic writing, so HERE WE ARE. This post is going to change over time as I drop more one‑shots (and, like… full fics… eventually… when the stars align and my brain cooperates).
One day I’ll branch out into other fandoms, but for now we are IN the Pitt.
Requests? OPEN. Always. Toss them at me like you’re feeding pigeons at the park.
If you prefer to read on other platforms, you can find me on Wattpad here.
i actually think it was really hot for trinity santos to walk in on her first day with that amount of confidence, make nicknames for every loser in there, try and get to do as many cool procedures as she could, catching some asshole stealing drugs, flirt with a 30+ year old surgery resident and still bag her after stabbing her in the foot, and just in general walking around and taking up her rightful space. i think women should do that more
apologies for the pregnancy trope, life has been lifeing and writing has been on the backburner
The stick was sitting on the edge of the sink, facedown, like if you didn't look at it directly it couldn't be real. Two minutes. That's what the box said. You'd been staring at the grout lines on the bathroom floor for closer to five, counting them out loud.
You exhaled and flipped it over. Two lines.
You sat down on the closed toilet lid and just breathed for a second. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The same thing you told patients when they were getting bad news, when the room was tilting and they needed an anchor. Funny how useless the advice felt from the other side of it.
You were five months into your senior residency and you had been sleeping with your night shift attending for four months, which was either the most interesting or the most professionally catastrophic thing that had ever happened to you. Jack Abbot wasn’t the kind of man who made things easy. That was probably why you'd started this in the first place.
It started after a bad shift. Not bad like a rough day, bad like a nine-year-old who didn't make it and a double trauma at three in the morning that resulted in standing in the break room at the end of it, too wired to leave and too exhausted to stay upright. He'd walked in, poured himself coffee, and just stood there with you for a few minutes without saying anything. No "that's medicine" speech, just company in the quiet. You didn't even remember who moved first. You thought it was him, but maybe it was you. It didn't really matter anymore. What mattered was that it kept happening. Neither of you talked about it.
The rules were unspoken and pretty clear. Not at the hospital, not in front of anyone, and you didn't ask each other questions you didn't want answered. It worked because you were both wired the same way, or at least you'd told yourself that. Easier than admitting that some nights when he texted just you up? at two in the morning you picked up your phone faster than you should have for someone who was supposedly keeping things simple.
He called you sweetheart when he was half asleep. Not in a hey-little-lady way, more casual. Just like it slipped out. You never said anything about it because doing so would have made it real, and the whole point was that none of this was real. Except now it was.
You went to work the next night because you had a shift. Hiding in your apartment staring at a pregnancy test wasn't going to solve anything. You were good at compartmentalizing. Residency had basically been a four-year class in it.
The ER was its usual chaos. You moved through it on autopilot, stitches and assessments and one guy who'd definitely broken his ankle and was still insisting it was "probably just sprained." You kept your head down. You were fine until Jack came around the corner of the trauma bay, chart in hand, and you felt your whole chest go sideways.
He looked the same, that slightly-too-calm expression he wore when he was watching everything and absorbing twice as much as he let on. He nodded at you the way he always did, neutral and professional, just enough acknowledgement to be polite, nothing that would mean anything to anyone who might see.
"Doctor," he said, using your title the way he always did in the hospital, and then he looked at you for about a half second longer than he normally would, "You good?"
"Fine," you said, because you were a disaster and he was your attending and the trauma bay was not the place.
He looked at you for another few seconds. He had a way of doing that, just waiting, like he'd learned somewhere that silence was more honest than anything you could actually say. You'd read a study once that surgeons and ER doctors developed abnormally high tolerance for discomfort in conversation because they had to deliver bad news so often. You wondered if that was what made him so good at seeing through you.
"Okay," he said finally, and let it go.
You got through the shift. He texted you at one in the afternoon when he was off.
you still up?
You typed three different responses and deleted all of them and then just wrote yeah and when he knocked on your door twenty minutes later, you let him in. He was barely through the door when he looked at you and stopped.
"Something happened," he said. Not a question.
You'd planned a whole speech, but standing there in your kitchen with the overhead light on and him watching you with that careful quiet attention he probably didn't even realize he had, the whole thing just kind of fell apart. "I'm pregnant," you said.
He didn't say anything right away. You had been prepared for a lot of reactions but silence was not one of them. You felt the anxiety start crawling up the back of your throat.
"How far?" he said finally.
"About six weeks, I think. I have an appointment on Thursday."
He nodded slowly. He was processing, you could see that, his jaw doing that tight thing.
"What do you want to do?" he asked. His voice was level, but it was the careful kind of level, the same voice he used in the ER when a situation was bad.
"I don't know yet," you said honestly. "I'm still kind of in the part where I'm trying to accept that it's real."
Another nod. He leaned back against your kitchen counter and just stood there as the silence stretched out between you. You were fully braced for the part where this became complicated and maybe awful.
"I'll come with you," he said. "Thursday. If you want."
You blinked. "You don't have to."
"I know."
"It's a lot," you said, meaning more than the appointment. Meaning this whole thing that had no name and no rules and had apparently been happening long enough to result in a second line on a pregnancy test.
"Yeah," he said. Just that. He pushed off the counter and came over to where you were standing by the kitchen table, and he put his hand on the back of your neck, "It's a lot."
You leaned your forehead against his shoulder. He didn't make it weird. He didn't say anything else right away. He just stayed, his thumb moving slowly against the base of your skull, and the apartment was quiet enough that you could hear the refrigerator humming. "I didn't know what you were going to say," you admitted, talking into his shirt.
"What'd you think I was gonna say?."
"I don’t know. That's the part that was freaking me out."
He was quiet. You felt him exhale. "I'm not going anywhere," he said. There was a little bit of gruffness, like it was harder to say than he wanted it to be.
You closed your eyes. You'd spent four months being careful about what you let yourself want. You'd been good at it, mostly, but standing in your kitchen at one in the afternoon with Jack Abbot's hand steady on the back of your neck, you thought that maybe being careful was something you could afford to put down for a little while.
"Okay," you said quietly.
He pressed his mouth to the top of your head, brief and warm.
You look like someone who'd make coffee taste better.
Dennis Whitaker never seemed to notice when people were staring at him, which was both deeply endearing and a little bit frustrating when you were the one doing the staring. You had been assigned to his rotation approximately four hours ago, and in that time you had learned two things. Most importantly, he was patient in a way that didn't feel practiced, the kind of patience that came from somewhere real. Second, he had absolutely no idea you had been following him around the ER like a lost golden retriever for the better part of the morning.
"You're doing it again," Dana said from the station, not even looking up from her computer.
"Doing what?" you said.
She just raised her eyebrows, which was answer enough. You straightened up and followed Dr. Whitaker into bay four. The patient was a man in his late sixties who had come in convinced he was having a heart attack and was now, having been told it was acid reflux, working through the five stages of grief about his dinner choices. Whitaker was listening to him with his whole body, leaned slightly forward, stethoscope still around his neck, and you stood near the curtain and tried to look like you were absorbing information rather than absorbing how handsome he looked right now.
"I'm just saying, the brisket was worth it," the man said.
"I'm not arguing with you on that," Whitaker said. "I'm just saying your esophagus might disagree."
The man laughed and Whitaker's shoulders relaxed. You bit the inside of your cheek. Out in the hall afterward, he glanced over at you like he'd just remembered you were there. "What'd you take away from that?"
"That brisket is a hill some people are willing to die on," you said, and then immediately regretted it, because that was not the answer a serious intern gave her supervising resident. Whitaker just looked at you for a second before something shifted in his expression, not quite a smile but close to one. "Yeah," he said. "Also, his medications need adjusting and he's not telling his wife about the reflux because she already thinks he eats too fast." He started walking and you fell into step beside him. "You catch that part?"
"The part where he kept saying 'the food was fine' instead of 'I'm fine'?"
"That's the part," he said, and this time he did smile, quick and sideways, before he looked back down at the tablet in his hand. You weren’t handling this well.
The morning moved the way every day in the ER did, and you stayed close to Whitaker through all of it. You told yourself it was because he was your assigned supervisor and not because you'd noticed he always handed patients their water cup instead of just setting it on the table, or because he remembered the name of the eight-year-old in pediatrics from two hours ago and asked the nurses how she was doing when he passed. You told yourself a lot of things. Around noon, you were standing outside a trauma bay waiting for labs when he appeared beside you with two coffees and held one out without a word.
You took it. "Is this a reward for good behavior or a bribe for better behavior?"
"Neither," he said. "You've been on your feet since six and you haven't complained once, which is honestly a little unnerving." He leaned against the wall next to you, the two of you standing there in the comfortable quiet of people who had been through a shared morning. "Most of the newbies I've worked with start making noise around hour three."
"Most interns probably haven't been looking forward to this rotation for six months," you said, and then the honesty of that sat in the air between you as you studied your coffee cup with great interest.
Whitaker was quiet for a moment. "Six months?"
"You have a reputation," you said carefully. "A good one. You're the resident people actually want to be assigned to." You glanced up at him. "Dr. Robby's favorite, solid with patients, doesn't make you feel stupid when you don't know something. That's the word."
He looked genuinely thrown by this, like the concept of having a good reputation hadn't occurred to him as a possibility. It was so earnest that something in your chest went soft. "That's, uh." He cleared his throat. "I didn't know people said that."
"People say a lot of things," you said. "I just happened to pay attention to the useful ones."
The labs came back and the moment moved on the way moments in an ER always did, swallowed up by the next thing. Something had quietly shifted though. He started explaining things more, not in the patronizing way some of the residents did, but like he was thinking out loud and happened to be bringing you along. He asked what you thought before he told you what he thought. Once, when you noticed something in a patient's chart that he'd flagged ten minutes earlier, he pointed at you and said "good eye" with enough sincerity that you felt it from your head to your toes for three more patients.
By four o'clock you had shadowed him through twelve patients, one very creative excuse for a kitchen injury, and a truly impressive moment where he de-escalated an agitated family in the waiting room through the sheer force of being calm and direct and kind. You were writing up your patient notes at a computer near the back when he dropped into the chair beside you. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at your screen.
"How's it coming?"
"Good, I think. You can double check them if you want."
He leaned over and read through your notes. You tried to focus on something other than how close he was and the way he was still paying attention even at the end of a long shift, because paying attention was just how he was built.
"This is solid," he said, and pointed at one line. "Change 'patient appeared calm' to 'patient maintained eye contact and responded to questions without delay.' More specific, less subjective."
You made the change. "How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Stay that precise when you're this tired."
He considered that for a second before responding with warm sincerity. "I grew up on a farm," he said. "You learn pretty early that tired doesn't really care about your schedule." He glanced at you. "You also get really good at finding the one specific thing you can actually do and doing that instead of thinking about the whole thing."
You looked at him. "That's surprisingly good life advice."
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain."
You laughed and he smiled at his own computer screen, pleased with himself. You thought about how you had four more weeks on this rotation and how that felt like both a lot and not nearly enough. You were saving your notes when he spoke again.
"There's a coffee place two blocks from here that's pretty good," he said. "Not hospital coffee. Real coffee. Some of the residents go after shift sometimes." He paused. "You could come, if you wanted."
You looked up at him. He was looking at his screen, but his jaw was set in the way of someone waiting for something. There was something almost shy in it under the steadiness, the farm boy from Nebraska who had built himself into someone competent and good and still seemed a little surprised when people noticed.
"Yeah," you said. "I want to."
He nodded once, like that settled it, and stood up. "Okay. Meet up in 15?"
You watched him walk back toward the nurses' station and thought that six months of anticipation had turned out to be a very reasonable investment.
And I'm so tired of lying, trying like hell to fight it
Well, I could say it′s just the whiskey talking, but we both know that it's not
The bar was loud, all overlapping voices and the kind of laughter that came from somewhere deep in the chest, the kind you only really let out when you'd spent the whole week holding it together by sheer force of will. The Pitt nightshift crew had claimed the back corner like they always did on the rare nights they actually made it out together, and the drinks had come fast because Whitaker knew the bartender and Santos had a gift for waving her card around at exactly the right moments.
You were four drinks in when you stopped counting. It had been a week. The kind of week where you drove home in silence because the radio felt like too much and you stood in the shower until the hot water ran out. So maybe the drinks were going down a little faster than usual. When Jack Abbot walked in twenty minutes late with his jacket slung over one arm and that particular exhausted-but-trying look on his face, you might’ve stared for just a second longer than you should have before looking back down at your drink.
That part was nothing new. You had been doing that for the better part of eighteen months, which was embarrassing even to think about in the abstract. Nurse falls for the attending, a story as old as hospitals themselves, practically its own genre of badly-written novels. You had told yourself early on that you weren't going to be that person, that you had too much self-respect and too much pride to become a cliché. Whatever soft, inconvenient thing had started happening in your chest every time Jack Abbot stood next to you at the supply station was just from closeness and stress, nothing worth examining too closely. You had kept that promise more or less for a year and a half, which felt like an achievement worth noting even if nobody but you would ever know about it.
He was brilliant in that quiet way that somehow made it worse, the kind of doctor who listened to patients like what they were saying was the most important thing in the room, who said good catch like he actually meant it and remembered your name on your first day when you were certain nobody would. He was also incredibly handsome in a way that you had developed a fairly sophisticated system of not-noticing, which mostly involved keeping your eyes somewhere in the vicinity of his chin and maintaining a professional conversational distance at all times. That system worked great in the hospital, but it didn’t account for four drinks on an empty stomach.
"You okay over there?" Santos appeared beside you with an expression that suggested she'd been watching you stare at the middle distance for a little longer than was socially acceptable.
"Completely fine," you said, which was technically true in that you were upright and smiling and your drink was still in your hand.
"You sure? You've got a look."
"I don't have a look."
"You have a look." She glanced across the table to where Jack was in conversation with Langdon about something, his head tilted slightly the way it did when he was actually listening, and then she looked back at you. "Interesting look."
"I’m going to get another drink," you announced, standing up a little faster than your body was prepared for, and the room wobbled in a way that suggested maybe you weren’t completely fine.
By drink six, you were sitting sideways in your chair with your head tipped back against Santos's shoulder telling a story about your college roommate that didn't have a point but felt important to get through to the end, and you were aware on some distant level that you were speaking a little bit louder than necessary. The bar had gotten warmer. Your shoes felt unnecessary. At some point Whitaker had switched to water and was giving you the look that people gave you when they were deciding whether to say something.
"I'm fine," you told him, preemptively.
"Nobody who's fine says they're fine that many times," he said.
Jack appeared at the edge of your vision, which was a thing he had a talent for, appearing when you weren't quite braced for it. He was looking at you with that expression he got that you'd spent months telling yourself was just professional concern. "Hey," he said, and his voice was quieter than the bar deserved, like he was saving it just for you. "You doing alright?"
"Wonderful," you said. "Fantastic. Great week, Jack. Really great week."
"Yeah," he said, and the softness in it almost undid you, the way he just accepted that. He didn't push. "It was."
"I should probably go home," you said and then laughed because the sentence had come out sincere and philosophical, like you were making a significant life announcement.
"Yeah, probably," he agreed. "I'll take you."
You started to say that you were fine, that you could just call an Uber, but Jack was already reaching past you for your jacket and handing it to you in a way that you just let it happen. He helped you to your feet and brought you around to say good night to everyone with a hand at the small of your back that you were going to think about for a very long time.
The night air hit you like a door swinging open, cool and clarifying in the way that fresh air fixed everything after you'd spent a couple of hours in a warm room, which is to say it clarified mostly that you were more than a little drunk. Jack's car was parked down the block, a sensible truck that suited him so well, and he opened the back door instead of the front. Somewhere in your brain understood that he was letting you stretch out, giving you the most comfortable arrangement available, which was such a Jack thing to do that your chest did something complicated.
"Thank you," you said, climbing in with slightly more coordination than you expected from yourself.
"Don't mention it," he said, and got in the front.
The drive was quiet for maybe two minutes. "You have really nice eyes," you told the back of his head, very conversationally, as he turned out of the parking lot.
There was a pause. "Thank you," Jack said carefully.
"Like, objectively. I'm not just saying that." You were settled against the door with your knees pulled up, watching the streetlights move past the window, and there was something about the specific quality of being in a moving car at night that made things feel both less and more real than they normally did. "I've thought about it."
"Have you?" he asked, in the tone of someone who was concentrating very hard on driving safely.
"I've thought about a lot of things," you said thoughtfully. "About you, I mean. I think about you kind of a lot, honestly. Is that weird to say? That feels like maybe a weird thing to say." You considered it. "I'm gonna say it anyway. I think about you all the time."
The hands on the steering wheel shifted slightly. "You're drunk," he said gently.
"I know, I'm aware." You watched a stoplight turn green. "That doesn't mean I'm wrong though. I've been thinking about you for like a year and a half, Jack. That's a lot of thinking. I have opinions." You paused. "I think we would have really good conversations over breakfast. Like the really long kind where your coffee gets cold because you're too busy talking. I've thought about that specifically."
He didn't say anything, but you could see the slight change in his expression from the rearview mirror, something that wasn't quite a smile.
"I've thought about that little place on 21st," you continued, because the words were apparently hard to stop. "With the window seats. You seem like a window seat person. I'm also a window seat person. We could fight about it." You smiled at the ceiling. "I would let you have it, though. Because you're taller than me and I feel like natural light does something nice to your face."
"You need to drink some water when I get you home," Jack said, and his voice was doing something that you couldn't place, controlled and effortful.
"I would also like to hold your hand," you informed him. "I've thought about that. You have great hands. I notice them at work. That's probably not something I'm supposed to tell you." You frowned slightly. "I also think about the way you laugh. You don't laugh that much but when you do it's really good, like it surprises you a little, and I really like it. I've been trying to make you laugh for a year and a half probably."
"I know," he said quietly, and there was something so careful in the way he said it, so restrained, that you might have heard it if you'd been a little less wrapped in the specific floating warmth of six drinks and night air and the relief of saying things out loud that had been taking up so much space.
"I decided not to have a crush on you," you told him. "I made that decision very deliberately. It's such a thing, right, the nurse and the doctor, everybody's seen that movie, I didn't want to be that." You let your head fall against the cold glass of the window. "I don't think it worked, honestly. I think I have the crush anyway."
"Yeah," he said, very quietly.
"You're also," you said after a moment, with the gravity of someone making a formal declaration, "the prettiest person I have ever seen in my entire life. I want to say that out loud one time. Just once. You're so handsome, Jack, you should know that."
The only sound for a moment was the turn signal. "We're almost at your place," he said, his voice was steady and kind with something tight at the edges.
Your building appeared in the darkness and you were suddenly aware of navigating the sidewalk with Jack's hand on your elbow, and the familiar smell of your own hallway. He had apparently gotten your keys out of your bag at some point, because the door was open and the lamp was on and then you were sitting on the edge of your bed while he pulled off your shoes with focused efficiency.
"You're very good at this," you observed.
He got you a glass of water and two tablets of Tylenol from your bathroom cabinet and set them both on the nightstand. He pulled the blanket up around you and you grabbed his wrist because it felt important to say one more thing, or possibly six more things.
"I meant it," you told him, very seriously, looking up at his face in the lamplight, which was great lighting for a person with a face like his. "All of it. I want you to know I meant it."
He looked at you for a long moment with an expression that did something unusual to the air in the room. "Get some sleep," he said softly.
You were unconscious before you heard the door close.
When you woke up, the late morning light told you that you'd slept longer than usual. Your first conscious sensation was your own heartbeat, which was a bad sign. Your second thought was the glass of water and the Tylenol on the nightstand, which you dealt with before you were ready to deal with anything else.
As you drank the whole glass, the memory of the car ride home arrived in full and very vivid detail. You put the glass down and stared at the ceiling for a while. I've thought about you for like a year and a half. You're the prettiest person I've ever seen in my entire life. I would let you have the window seat.
There was a small piece of paper folded under the Tylenol and you unfolded it with the dread of someone who already knows the contents are going to require a conversation. His handwriting was neat, slightly cramped the way doctors' handwriting always surprised you by being legible.
Water first. Tylenol if you need it. Text me when you're up. -Jack
You put the note down. You picked up your phone. There was a text from a number you'd saved under Abbot (work) because that had felt like a sufficiently professional label at the time, sent at 7:43 this morning. Breakfast when you're ready. Wherever you want. No rush. You stared at it for a long moment. You typed back: Give me an hour.
He was parked outside when you came down. You got in the front seat this time, and he looked the way he always looked, just Jack, PTMC jacket on, his coffee in the cupholder. He glanced over at you with an expression that was trying not to be too much of anything all at once. "Morning," he said.
"Morning," you said.
He drove to the place on 21st. You got a window seat, technically two window seats, across from each other at a small table with a slight wobble that you only noticed once the food arrived. You spent the first twenty minutes being extremely normal, talking about nothing that mattered, the week, the hospital, a story he'd heard from Langdon, and you could feel the conversation that needed to happen sitting between you like a third presence at the table, patient and unmovable. Your coffee was getting cold.
"I remember," you said suddenly, not quite interrupting but landing into a brief silence like you'd been waiting for the right moment. "Last night. I remember pretty much all of it." He looked at you over his coffee cup. "I was sort of hoping it was a weird dream," you admitted. "I spent most of this morning hoping that."
"And?" he said.
"I don't think it was." You looked at your hands on the table. "I meant every single word. I know that’s a lot to put on a Sunday morning, and if you want to just pretend I said nothing I completely understand, I can absolutely go back to being professional and normal and we never have to mention the part where I told you that you have the best hands I've ever seen in my life."
He was quiet for a moment, a smile teasing the edge of his mouth. "You also said we'd fight over the window seat," he said.
"I said I would let you have it."
"I know." He set down his coffee cup, and he had the look on his face that you'd spent a year and a half cataloguing without meaning to. The careful, considered one that meant he was about to say something important. "I've been trying to find a reason to ask you to breakfast for eight months." You looked up at him. "Santos told me you weren't interested," he said. "About six months ago. She said you were very clear about it."
"Santos," you said, with the tone of someone who is definitely going to address that at a later date.
"I should have asked you directly," he said. "I think I was scared you'd say no, which is not usually a thing I let stop me but apparently it was this time." He looked at you with that straightforwardness that had always made you feel like you could say anything to him. "You were always so easygoing and cool about everything at work. I assumed that meant you didn't feel it."
"I was trying really hard," you told him.
"I know that now," he said, the softness landing somewhere in the center of your chest.
You talked through the rest of breakfast about the things you actually meant. Easy and unhurried, the coffee going cold and neither of you caring. He paid over your mild protest and you walked out into the pale winter sun. He drove you home because that's what you did now apparently, walked you to your door and you stood in the hallway outside your apartment feeling slightly like you were in somebody else's life, the better version of it.
"Thank you for breakfast," you said.
"Thank you for last night," he said, with a slight smile. "For saying it out loud."
"I had help," you said. "From the drinks."
"Yeah," he said, "but you meant it."
"Yeah," you said. "I meant it."
He kissed you then, right there in your hallway with the terrible lighting that does nothing for anyone. One hand against the side of your jaw as you thought about a year and a half of not-staring and not-saying and professional distance. The kiss deepened, you thought about breakfast tables and window seats and conversations where the coffee got cold. When he pulled back, you were both smiling in the slightly helpless way of people who had just figured out that they'd been wasting a hell of a lot of time.
"Next Saturday," he said, quietly. "Actual date. Not a rescue mission."
Darlin', I feel within myself
I need a strong man that I can hold on to
Hour eleven of a twelve-hour shift, and the ER had finally, blessedly, dipped into something that could charitably be called calm. Not quiet. The ER was never quiet, but the particular chaos of the last few hours had settled into a dull, manageable hum. You stood at the nurses' station with both hands wrapped around a coffee cup that had long gone cold, staring at a chart you'd already read twice and retained none of.
You blamed the exhaustion and definitely not the fact that Dr. Jack Abbot was currently standing six feet away from you with his sleeves rolled up. That was the thing about him. The man could simply stand there doing something completely ordinary and professional, and it was genuinely unfair. You'd done your residency through some of the most grueling rotations a hospital could throw at a person. You'd handled traumas, difficult families, three-day stretches on zero sleep. You were competent. You were sharp. You had received compliments on your clinical composure under pressure on more than one occasion.
And yet…his forearms. You were a grown adult with a medical degree and you were losing brain cells over a man's forearms. You had studied for boards with more dignity than this. Okay, it wasn't just the forearms. It was the whole situation of him. The way he moved through a trauma bay like he had all the time in the world when actually he was the fastest hands in the department. The dry humor he deployed at the worst possible moments, when you were already exhausted and your defenses were down. The fact that he was genuinely, irritatingly great at his job in a way that made you want to be better at yours. The forearms were simply the most visible problem because he kept rolling up his sleeves and apparently no one in this hospital had thought to address that. You dragged your eyes back to your chart. Very professional, very focused.
"You've been staring at that same page for about four minutes."
You looked up and there he was, leaning against the counter beside you with that expression he wore specifically when he was entertained by something and didn't want you to know how entertained he was. He was bad at hiding it. The corner of his mouth gave him away every time.
"I'm reading," you said.
"You're reading the same lab values over and over."
"I'm being thorough."
"The potassium is 3.9. It's been 3.9 for the last four minutes. I don't think it's going to change."
You closed the chart with as much dignity as you could manage and set it down on the counter. "Thank you, Dr. Abbot. Your input is always deeply helpful."
The corner of his mouth did the thing. "You're welcome."
He turned back to his own work, and you watched him for three seconds before catching yourself and looking at the wall instead. This was the problem with late nights and long shifts. Your filters dissolved somewhere around hour eight. You spent the first two-thirds of every shift operating at full professional capacity: composed, efficient, not visibly afflicted. The last third was a gamble. Tonight you'd made it to hour eleven, which you privately considered a personal record.
It had started the way most things started in the ER, which was sudden and chaotic. You'd come on shift six weeks ago to find him already there, mid-debrief with Dr. Robby, and he'd glanced over at you the way attendings sometimes glanced at residents: assessing, brief, categorizing. He'd handed you a chart before you'd even set down your bag and said, "Bay three, rule out dissection, let me know what you think," and walked away, and you had thought, “Okay. Fine. That's fine. I can work with this.”
And you could. You were good at working, and he turned out to be good to work with. Demanding in the way that made you better rather than the way that made you miserable, generous with teaching when you needed it and expectant when you didn't. He treated you like a colleague, which was rarer than it should've been. You respected him before you ever had a problem with his forearms. The forearms came later. Specifically, they came during a complicated resuscitation on your third shift together, when he'd shrugged out of his jacket mid-procedure and rolled up his sleeves and you'd had five seconds of extremely inappropriate awareness before your training took over and you'd locked it down and gotten back to work. You'd been locking it down ever since. With, it had to be said, variable success.
The worst part, the truly humiliating part, was that you were fairly sure he knew.
Not because you'd done anything egregious. You were professional. You maintained eye contact during conversations like a normal person. There were some small things. The way he'd pause when he caught you looking and say nothing, just hold eye contact for one beat too long before going back to whatever he was doing. The way he'd reach across you for something at the supply station when he could have easily gone around, close enough that you could smell his cologne, and then just keep working, unbothered, like nothing had happened, while you stood there recalibrating. And then there was the "sweetheart."
He'd started using it a few weeks in, dropped it into a sentence so casually the first time that you'd almost missed it, and you'd spent approximately twenty minutes afterward replaying it in your head like a lunatic. It wasn't frequent, maybe once a shift if you were lucky, sometimes less, deployed at moments that felt deliberate. When you'd finally snapped at a med student who deserved it and Jack had materialized beside you immediately after and said, low and easy, "You good, sweetheart?" like it was the most natural thing in the world. When you'd nailed a difficult intubation on a trauma that could've gone sideways and he'd caught your eye across the bay and said it quietly, like it was just for you. It was doing something to your sanity.
The last hour of the shift brought in a laceration that needed suturing, and because the universe occasionally had mercy on you, it was yours to handle. Something to do, something to focus on, something that was not the way Jack laughed quietly at something a nurse said two stations over. You gloved up, gathered your supplies, and got to work. You were two-thirds of the way through a neat row of sutures when you heard him pull back the curtain and lean in. "How's it looking?"
"Clean," you said, without turning around. "Nice lac, actually. Good depth, no tendon involvement."
"Good depth," the patient repeated, sounding uncertain about whether that was a compliment.
"It means it's interesting," you told him, which made him look more uncertain, and Jack made a sound behind you that was definitely a suppressed laugh.
"She means you're in good hands," he said. And then to you, "Nice work."
"I know," you said, and heard him pull the curtain shut on what you were almost certain was a smile.
You finished the lac in good spirits, disposed of your gloves, and were doing your final charting at a work station when the shift officially ended. Dr. Robby materialized from somewhere, there was a brief handoff, and then it was over. The strange, sudden freedom of post-shift, the particular tired-relief of reaching the end of something hard. You rolled your neck, heard it crack in three places, and started gathering your things.
"Heading out?" Jack was pulling on his jacket, which meant his sleeves were now covered. It was technically a mercy and practically a tragedy. You looked at his face instead, which was its own separate issue, honestly, but a more manageable one.
"Unless you need me to stay," you said. "For medical reasons. Or whatever."
"Or whatever," he repeated, like he was tasting the words, and you hated him a little bit.
"Good shift," you said, pivoting cleanly to professionalism like the emotionally competent adult you were.
"Good shift," he agreed. He fell into step beside you as you headed toward the exit, unhurried, the way he was about most things. The hallway was fluorescent and unglamorous and it smelled like every hospital hallway everywhere, and none of that stopped your heart from doing something stupid and embarrassing in your chest. At the door, he held it open for you. You passed through and he followed. You both stopped in the relative quiet of the corridor outside, the particular stillness of a hospital at the tail end of night. The world felt slightly unreal the way it always did at the end of long shifts, soft at the edges, time a little slippery.
"You know," he said, conversationally, like he was discussing labs, "for someone who spends a lot of effort playing it cool, you are surprisingly..." he paused, head tilting just slightly, "readable."
"I don't know what you're talking about," you said, which was the biggest lie you had ever told in your entire life, including that one time in second year when you'd told your attending you were "totally fine" on two hours of sleep.
Jack looked at you for a long moment, not long enough to be uncomfortable, just long enough to be teasing, and the corner of his mouth did that thing it always did. He didn't call you out on the lie. He just nodded, slow and easy, and said, "Sure," in the tone of a man who absolutely knew what he was talking about.
"Goodnight, sweetheart," he said, and he said it like it was the easiest thing in the world, like it wasn't sitting in your chest warm and stupidly significant, and then he turned and headed down the corridor, unhurried and unbothered, and you stood there for a full minute being absolutely normal about everything before you started walking in the opposite direction.
The whiteboard had been Jack's idea. You'd been spread across the living room floor with your flashcards, highlighted notes, and three different review books open to when he'd come home from his shift at 7 AM, looked at the chaos, and disappeared into the spare bedroom without a word. Twenty minutes later he'd reappeared with a four-foot whiteboard on wheels that you were fairly certain hadn’t been in the apartment before this moment.
"Where did that come from?" you asked.
"I bought it two months ago," he said. "I was going to use it for something else, but you need it more."
That had been the beginning of what you privately thought of as the most effective and also most distracting study session of your entire fifth year.
It was a Saturday, which meant you had him for thirty-six hours and approximately zero of those hours were supposed to be spent doing anything other than studying for your boards. You had told him this. He had listened to you say it with that expression he had, the one that meant he was taking you seriously but he wasn’t going to let you be miserable about it.
"Studying for boards can coexist with breakfast," he said.
"This board prep can’t coexist with anything. I only have two weeks left."
"I know you have two weeks." He handed you coffee. "I also know you've been awake since four and you're going to crash in about two hours if you don't slow down and eat something."
You drank the coffee because he was right and because he always made it exactly the way you liked. That was six hours ago. Now it was early afternoon and the whiteboard was covered in your handwriting and some of his, and you were sitting cross-legged on the couch with a stack of flashcards in your lap. Jack was in the armchair across from you with his reading glasses on, holding the answer key, looking entirely too awake for someone who had just worked a twelve hour shift.
"Ready?" he said.
"I was born ready."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Septic shock. First line vasopressor."
"Norepinephrine."
"Correct." He flipped the card to the back. "Dosage range?"
"Zero point one to zero point three micrograms per kilo per minute titrated to MAP greater than sixty-five."
He looked at you over the top of his glasses. It was a brief look, and it did very little to help your concentration. He set the card aside and reached over to the end table where he'd put a separate small pile, the one you'd noticed him building over the last hour. The above-and-beyond pile, if you had to guess. You hadn't asked him about it yet.
"Next," he said.
The system became more obvious around the two hour mark. You'd gotten the first forty-seven correct, which was honestly better than your practice exams had been running, and you suspected it had something to do with the fact that Jack read each question in his regular voice, low and level, without that edge of anxiety that crept into your own internal monologue when you quizzed yourself. Even before all of this, back when he'd been your attending and you'd been trying very hard not to notice anything about him at all, there had been something about the way he occupied a room that made it feel so much more manageable.
"Tension pneumothorax," he said. "Immediate management."
"Needle decompression, second intercostal space, midclavicular line, followed by chest tube."
He held up the small pile. There were four cards in it now. "What is that?" you said.
"What's what?"
"That pile. You keep adding to it."
"I do," he agreed.
"What does it mean?"
He looked at you, the reading glasses making him look slightly more professorial than usual. "It means that every time you give me an answer that goes beyond what the card asks for, something comes off."
You stared at him with a quizzical look. "Something comes off?"
"You heard me."
"I heard you say something completely unproductive for a study session."
"We're not at the hospital," he said, with the particular reasonableness that you found both attractive and maddening. "And you have, in the last forty-eight cards, demonstrated an above-average recall rate and a tendency to over answer when you're confident." He tilted his head slightly. "I'm choosing to reward that."
"With a strip study session."
"With incentivized learning. Call it what you want." He shrugged.
You looked at him for a long moment. He looked back right back, four cards in his hand, reading glasses slightly down his nose. "Fine," you said.
Something moved through his expression. Not quite a smile, but something warmer, more private. "Good. Next card. STEMI equivalent that doesn't show classic ST elevation."
By card sixty-two, the pile had grown to seven.
You had gotten your shoes off, which seemed minor but which Jack had accepted with a gravity that made you laugh, and your cardigan, which he had received with slightly more interest, folding it over the arm of his chair with a deliberateness that you were choosing not to think about, and one of your socks, because you'd given a technically correct answer on aortic dissection without including the blood pressure differential between arms, and he'd ruled it a partial.
"That's punitive," you said.
"That's accurate. You know the BP differential. You know that I know you know it. Try again."
You gave him the full answer and he added the card to the pile. "The sock was already off," he said.
"The sock is a technicality."
"Medicine is nothing but technicalities, sweetheart."
There it was. The word that still did something to you every single time, even now after months of dating, even sitting here in your own living room with a stack of flashcards and a whiteboard behind you covered in vasopressor algorithms. He said it like it was the most natural thing, like it had always been his word for you, which you supposed it had been for long enough now that the surprise should have worn off. It hadn't.
"Next card," you said, which was your way of telling him to stop looking at you like that before you stopped caring about boards entirely. He didn't stop looking at you like that. He did, however, pick up the next card.
"Hypertensive emergency versus urgency. Differentiate."
Around card eighty, you got one wrong.
It wasn't a bad miss. It was a fatigue miss, the kind that happened when your brain had been running hot for too long and you grabbed the first thing that rose to the surface instead of pausing to think it through. You knew it was wrong half a second after you said it, and Jack knew you knew. He looked at you with an expression that was professionally neutral and privately amused in equal measure. "Try again," he said.
"I know what the right answer is."
"I know you do. Say it."
You said it and he didn't add it to the pile, but he also didn't do anything punitive about the wrong answer, which you'd been slightly curious about. He just set it aside. "You're tired," he said.
"I'm fine."
"You're tired." Not unkindly. "You got seventy-nine out of eighty, you've been at this since four in the morning, and your eyes have been doing the thing for the last twenty minutes."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're looking at the card but your mind is somewhere else." He set down the answer key. "Take ten minutes."
"I don't need ten minutes, I need to get through the cardiovascular section."
"The cardiovascular section will still be there in ten minutes." He stood, set the cards on the coffee table, and came to sit beside you on the couch, close enough that his shoulder was against yours. You felt some of the tension in your back release without your permission. "Ten minutes," he said again.
You tipped your head back against the couch cushions and looked at the ceiling and let out a long breath. "I'm going to fail."
"You're not."
"I got one wrong."
"You got one wrong out of eighty after seven hours of studying following a week of overnight prep on top of your shifts. That's not failing. That's being human." He was quiet for a moment. "You know this material, sweetheart."
"Knowing it here is different from knowing it in a testing environment."
"Yes," he said. "It is." He didn't pretend otherwise, which was one of the things about him. He didn't soften things into lies. "But you've been in the room before. You know how to do that part too."
You turned your head to look at him. He was close. He looked tired too, actually, now that you were paying attention, the way he always looked after a night shift if you caught him in the right light. He was still carrying the posture of someone with the answer key but here on the couch he was different. Quieter.
"You should be sleeping," you said.
"Probably."
"You worked all night."
"I'm aware." He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, a small gesture, unhurried. "I'd rather be here."
You held that for a moment. "There are seven cards in that pile," you said.
His expression shifted. Warmer. "There are."
"That seems like something we should address before we continue."
"I thought you had a cardiovascular section to get through."
"Ten minutes," you said. "You said so yourself."
He looked at you for a long moment, the private version of his face, the one you'd been the slow recipient of over months of careful unhurried getting-to-know, and then he reached over to the coffee table and picked up the small pile of seven cards and held them out to you. "I believe these are yours," he said.
You took them and flipped through them slowly, each one an answer you'd given that had gone past what was asked, each one a moment where you'd known more than the minimum and said so. "You built a whole incentive system," you said.
"I find that incentive systems work better when the person understands what they're working toward."
"That is genuinely something an attending would say."
"I'm genuinely an attending."
"Not right now you're not."
His expression darkened in the most delicious way. The attending went somewhere else. What was left was just Jack. "No," he said. "Not right now."
Twenty minutes later and you were back on the couch with the flashcards, a little more rumpled than before, Jack's button-down shirt replacing the cardigan that was still folded over the arm of his chair. He was back in the armchair with the answer key, though he'd lost his scrub top somewhere in the last twenty minutes and was down to his undershirt.
"Ready?" he said.
"Oh, I’m so ready," you said.
"You're going to do well on this exam," he said, picking up the next card.
"You don't know that."
"I know you. I know that you are going to make an amazing emergency medicine doctor." He looked at you over the cards. "That's the same thing."
You held his gaze for a moment, then picked up your highlighter and your notes and decided not to argue the point. "Next card," you said.
He read it. You answered it thoroughly and precisely, with three additional details he hadn't asked for. He added it to the pile with a smirk.
Age is irrelevant in matters of the heart. Love is not determined by status but by the presence of respect, care, support, and mutual understanding.
The spin class had been fine. That's what Jack told himself the first time you dragged him out of bed at six in the morning for it, and honestly, he believed it. He was fifty, not dead. He could handle a stationary bike and an overly enthusiastic instructor. The hiking trip was fine too, even if his knee had a few quiet opinions about the elevation. He'd kept up. Mostly. You'd gotten a little ahead on the steeper switchbacks, but you'd always waited at the top, cheeks pink from the cold, grinning at him like he hung the moon, and it was hard to feel embarrassed about anything when you looked at him like that.
The rock climbing gym, though. That one had been a mistake. He knew it the moment he woke up Sunday morning and tried to roll over. Everything hurt. Not in the vague, general way that comes with getting older, but in a targeted, almost personal way, like his body had compiled a list of every muscle he'd ignored for the last decade and decided to address them all at once. His forearms. His hands. His back. His core, which he'd genuinely believed was still in decent shape until approximately right now.
He stared at the ceiling and didn’t move. He heard you in the kitchen before he saw you. The soft sound of cabinet doors, the unbothered movement of someone who had slept well and woken up without any physical consequences whatsoever. It was deeply unfair. You were twenty-eight and it showed, and on any other morning that thought made him smile, but right now he was lying completely still trying to figure out how to sit up without letting on that he'd completely wrecked himself trying to keep pace with you at an activity designed for people half his age. You came through the doorway holding two coffees, wearing his old sweatshirt, looking soft and warm and entirely too awake.
"Morning, handsome" you said.
"Morning."
You looked at him for a second. Just a second, but long enough. You crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, and the small shift in the mattress sent a ripple of protest straight up his spine that he absorbed without so much as a blink. He was proud of that. You handed him his coffee. He took it. "You okay?" you asked.
"Fine."
You gave him the look. The one that meant you already knew the answer and were giving him the chance to tell the truth before you said it for him. You'd gotten very good at that look. It was one of the things he loved about you and also occasionally found inconvenient. "You haven't moved," you said.
"I'm comfortable."
"Jack. I was standing in the doorway for a full minute."
"That's a little unsettling, sweetheart."
You smiled, and even completely horizontal and too sore to do much about it, that smile did the thing it always did to him. Something in his chest just gave way a little, the way it had been doing since the first time you'd looked at him like he was someone special.
"On a scale of one to ten," you said.
He thought about lying. He genuinely considered it for a moment. "Seven," he admitted.
"A seven." You pressed your lips together, and he could see you trying not to smile in a way that wasn't unkind, just teasing. "Okay. Where?"
"Everywhere."
You made this soft sound, somewhere between a laugh and sympathy, and then you were setting your mug down and moving, swinging your legs up onto the bed, taking his free hand into your lap and pressing your thumbs into his palm in a slow, deliberate way that pulled a long exhale out of him before he could stop it. You'd done a sports medicine rotation. Of course you had. You knew exactly what you were doing.
"You don't have to," he started.
"I know."
He let you. It felt too good to argue about. You worked up to his wrist, his forearm, patient and unhurried, and he watched you do it and felt something uncomfortable settling in his chest that had nothing to do with the soreness. It was the same thing he'd been trying not to think about for a while now. The thing that lived in the back of his mind on nights when he couldn't sleep, when the math of them would start working itself out whether he wanted it to or not.
"You don't have to keep doing this," you said quietly. You weren't looking at him yet. "Pretending things aren't hard."
"I'm not pretending anything."
"You absolutely are." You said it gently, without any edge to it. "I'm not asking you to keep up with me, Jack. I never asked for that."
He looked at the ceiling. The morning light was coming through the curtains in that slow, easy way it did on Sundays when neither of you had anywhere to be.
"It's not about pride," he said because it wasn't, not entirely. "Not really."
"Then what is it?"
He was quiet for a moment. You waited, which was something you were always good at, better than most people he knew. You didn't rush him or fill the silence. You just stayed there with his hand in yours and let him find the words. "I don't want to be the part of your life that you have to work around," he said finally. "You're twenty-eight. You've got all this energy, all this appetite for things, and I just." He stopped. Started again. "I don't want to be the reason you slow down."
You looked up at him then. You were quiet for a moment, and he watched you while you were thinking, watched you decide something. Then you moved, easy and deliberate, swinging one leg over him and settling carefully against his hips, gentle enough that he knew you were accounting for the damage, your hands resting warm and light on his chest. He looked up at you and his heart did something completely unreasonable.
"Jack," you said.
"Yeah."
"I'm an R2. I have shifts that last eighteen hours. I have attendings who make me feel like I'm drowning on a weekly basis." You held his gaze, steady and certain in that way you had that always made him feel like whatever you were about to say was simply the truth and had always been the truth. "When I come home, the thing I want is you. Asleep on the couch with a book on your chest, probably. That's it. That's what I want."
He didn't say anything. "I'm not with you in spite of your age," you said. "That's not how this works for me."
Something cracked open in the middle of his chest, quiet and slow. He reached up and put his hands on your hips, sore fingers and all. "You're very perceptive," he said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "For someone who also put me in physical ruin."
You laughed and leaned down to press your mouth to his jaw, his throat, slow enough that his hands tightened a little without him deciding to. "I'll run you a bath," you murmured against his skin. "Epsom salts. You're going to be fine."
"I know I'm going to be fine."
"And," you said, pulling back to look at him, "when I want to do something that requires a twenty-eight year old's recovery time, I'll go with my co-residents and come home and tell you about it."
"I could come."
"You can come watch," you said, and you were smiling in that soft, easy way that meant you were happy. "From a bench. With your coffee."
"That's acceptable."
You kissed him then, properly, and it was slow and unhurried and tasted like Sunday morning, like something he hadn't known he was allowed to have until you came along and just handed it to him like it was obvious. When you pulled back you were still close, and you tucked a strand of hair behind your ear and looked at him with this quiet, settled kind of warmth.
"Stay," you said. "I'll go run the water."
"You don't have to sweetheart, I can manage." He moved like he was going to get off the bed.
You put your hand on his chest. "Stay, Jack."
He listened to the water running in the other room and looked at the slow Sunday light coming through the curtains and thought about how fifty hadn't felt like much of anything until you made it feel like the best possible time to be alive. He picked up his coffee and simply waited for you to come back.
Watch her silk dress dancing in the wind
Watch it brush against her skin
Makes me wanna try her on
can be read as a standalone or as part 2 to "yes ma'am"
Thursdays are your longest days, twelve hours minimum and usually creeping toward fourteen. By the time your shift ends, you’re running on vending machine coffee and sheer professional spite. Your hair is half-escaped from its ponytail. Your scrubs have seen better days. You are, in short, not at your most charming. You’re gathering up your things from your locker when you hear her.
"Hey." You turn. Trinity is leaning in the doorway of the locker room, one shoulder against the frame looking like she stepped off the set of a medical drama.
"Hi," you manage. She pushes off the doorframe and walks toward you, unhurried, like she has all the time in the world.
"Good shift?" she asks.
"Long shift."
"Mm." She stops a few feet away. "You handled that code at nine beautifully, by the way."
Your face warms. "I had a good team."
"You were the team." She tilts her head. "Take the compliment."
You take a breath. "Thank you, Dr. Santos."
That gets you a small smile. She crosses her arms and considers you for a moment like you’re a puzzle she has already solved and simply wants to admire. "I'm going to ask you something," she says, "and I want you to actually answer. Not panic, just an answer."
Your stomach swoops. "Okay."
"Have dinner with me."
Silence. You stare at her. She stares back with the patience of a saint.
"That wasn't a question," you finally say.
"No," she agrees, and her smile curves. "It wasn't. Is that okay?"
You are aware you’re gripping the strap of your bag so hard your knuckles are probably white, and every coherent thought has vacated your brain and left nothing behind but yes and please and how are you real.
"Yes," you say. "That's okay."
She smiles properly then, the full version, the one that makes the whole room tilt slightly.
"Saturday," she says. "Seven o'clock. I'll text you the address." She pauses at the door. "Wear something you feel good in."
"That's it? No other instructions?"
She glances back over her shoulder. "Just be there." Then she's gone and you’re standing in the empty locker room for a long moment before you slide down your locker until you're sitting on the floor staring at the ceiling.
"Oh my god," you say to no one.
Saturday finally arrives. The restaurant she picks is warm and low-lit, the kind of place with candles on every table and a wine list the length of a medical textbook, and you're there first because of course you are, you've been early to everything your whole life and you’re especially early tonight because being late to this feels like a category of disaster you refuse to even think about. You're three sips into a glass of water when she walks in wearing a deep burgundy wrap dress with her hair down. You’ve seen Trinity Santos in scrubs and trauma gear, but you have never seen her like this. Off-duty. Soft around the edges. Somehow, inexplicably, more beautiful. She spots you immediately and crosses the restaurant with that same unhurried walk and slides into the seat across from you.
"You're early," she says.
"I'm punctual."
"You've been here twenty minutes." Her eyes are bright. "I called ahead."
You open your mouth, then close it. "That's..."
"Cute," she says simply. "I thought it was very cute." She picks up the menu without looking away from you. "Hi, by the way."
"Hi," you breathe.
The thing about Trinity on a date is that she is exactly the same as Trinity at work, precise and attentive and unhurried, but now all of it focused entirely on you and the effect is annihilating. She asks questions and actually listens to the answers. She notices when your glass is empty before you do. There’s subtle flirting throughout all of dinner. It's the way her fingers brush yours when she reaches across the table, the way she says your name, not doctor but just your name, low and deliberate, and watches what it does to you. Oh, how it does things to you.
"Stop that," you tell her somewhere around the second glass of wine.
"Stop what?"
"Watching me like that."
"Like what?" She is the picture of innocence, which is a lie.
"Like you're waiting for something."
She smiles slowly. "Maybe I am."
"For what?"
"For you to stop being nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
"Your hand has been around that wine glass for forty minutes."
You look down as you set the glass on the table. "Fine. I'm a little nervous."
"I know." Her voice softens just slightly, not losing the heat but letting something gentler in underneath it. "You don't have to be. This is just us."
Just us. Like that's a small thing. Like the two of you sitting in candlelight isn't the most disorienting, wonderful thing that has happened to you in a very long time.
"Tell me something no one at the hospital knows about you," she says.
You think about it. "I was in the ballroom dancing club through med school."
She blinks, then laughs, a real one, head tipping back. "You're serious."
"I was good."
"I don't doubt it." She's still smiling, looking at you like you've given her a gift. "You have excellent posture."
"And you have an excellent memory," you say, and she raises an eyebrow. "You knew I'd been there twenty minutes. You knew how long I'd been holding my glass. You probably know what I ordered the last time I ate in the cafeteria."
A beat. "Grilled cheese," she says. "Tuesday. You got the tomato soup but didn't finish it."
You stare at her, and something shifts in your chest, warm and a little overwhelming. "You've been watching me this whole time."
"Yes," she says. Simply, like it's obvious.
"Why?"
She holds your gaze. "Because you're interesting. The way you get flustered is genuinely one of the best things I've ever seen. And because I wanted you to know that I actually see you, not just the capable senior resident, but you."
The restaurant noise continues around you. The candle between you flickers.
"That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me," you say quietly.
"Good," she says. "You deserve nice things."
You look at each other. "Check?" you ask.
Her smile turns slow and knowing. "Check."
You live twelve minutes from the restaurant and Trinity walks beside you the whole way, close enough that your arms brush, and when you shiver in the October air she simply shifts so she's between you and the wind, saying nothing about it. She walks you to your building, up to your floor, and at your door you turn to face her.
"Do you want to come in?" you ask.
She looks at you for a moment, reading you the way she always does before responding, "Yes."
Inside, you barely get the lights on before she's close, close enough that you have to tilt your chin up to hold her gaze. She reaches out and tucks a loose strand of hair behind your ear like she's been thinking about doing it for weeks. She probably has. "Hi," she says softly.
"Hi," you whisper.
"Still nervous?"
"A little."
"Good nervous or bad nervous?"
You think about the flutter in your chest and the way your whole body has been orienting toward her all evening like it already knew the answer. "Good," you say. "Definitely good."
She leans in and kisses you. It starts off restrained, her hand cradling your jaw, her mouth moving against yours like she's in no hurry at all, and you hold onto the lapels of her jacket and try to remember how breathing works. When she pulls back, just barely, you make a small embarrassing sound of protest. You feel her smile against your lips.
"Impatient," she murmurs.
"You've been driving me crazy for months."
"I have." Not a question. She knows.
"Yes, ma’am."
"Do you want more?"
"Please."
She pulls back to look at you properly, and her eyes have gone dark and intent and there's something fond in it too, which is almost worse. "Tell me what you want," she says.
"You," you say, and your voice comes out steadier than you feel. "I want you to keep touching me. I want to know what you're like when you actually stop being patient."
Something shifts in her expression, the playfulness still there but sharpening underneath. "I'm always patient," she says. "That doesn't mean I'm not thorough." She walks you backward toward the hallway and you go willingly, pulling her by the front of her jacket, until your back meets the wall and she presses in close, unhurried even now, her mouth finding your throat while your hands move over her back and your breath comes shorter.
"You have too many buttons," you manage.
"You have a bedroom," she says against your neck.
The bedroom is warm and dim, the city outside going about its business like nothing of any consequence is happening in here. You get her jacket off her shoulders and she works the buttons of your shirt slowly, one at a time, with her eyes on yours.
"You're doing this on purpose," you say.
"You said you wanted to know what I'm like when I stop being patient." The next button. "This is it."
"God," you breathe.
She looks at you when the shirt comes off, really looks, and it's not the quick clinical appraisal she gives a patient, it's something slower and more deliberate, like she wants you to feel the full weight of her attention. You do. "Beautiful," she says, matter-of-fact, and then her mouth closes over your skin and your whole train of thought derails completely. She pays attention to every response you give her and she remembers them. She’s tender and precise, and she draws it out longer than you thought you could stand, until you are shamelessly, breathlessly begging for what you want.
"Please," you manage. "Please."
She looks at you, finds whatever she's looking for in your face. "I've got you," she says softly.
You found out very quickly that yes, she does have you. Afterwards, you lie in the quiet with your head against her shoulder and her hand tracing slow patterns on your back, the clock on the nightstand showing something that looks like two in the morning.
"So," you say eventually.
"So," she agrees.
"You know I'm going to be completely insufferable at work now."
She laughs, the kind you are already a little greedy for. "You've been insufferable at work since my first day."
"I was professional."
"You walked into a supply cart."
"That was…"
"Because I smiled at you." She tilts her chin to look down at you, still amused but softer now. "It was endearing."
You hide your face against her shoulder. "This is a nightmare."
Her arms tighten around you. "I think it's the opposite."
You lie there quietly for a moment. "Yeah. Me too."
hi friends, readers, pitt fans! this week/next week i have finals for nursing school (almost done with this term finally ahhh) so my uploads will be a bit sporadic. i have a few edited pieces scheduled to post so hopefully you won't miss me too much!
i have a two week break before next term so i promise there will be lots of wonderful reading to come. feel free to send all fic requests in now and i will get to them next week!!
See marriage don't change nothing but your name
Unless it's real love, through the sunshine and the rain
For better or for worse, girl, this is not a game
can be read as a standalone or as part 4 in the "coming home" series
The reception ends at 11. Jack somehow manages to find you at 11:01.
You’re talking to your aunt near the bar with a champagne glass in hand, laughing at something she said when a warm hand settles at the small of your back. You don't have to turn around to know. You have always known, from the very first time he touched you, exactly what his hands feel like.
"We're leaving, sweetheart," he says quietly. Not a question.
Your aunt raises her eyebrows. You hand her your champagne. "Goodnight, thank you again for coming," you tell her.
The hotel is ten minutes from the venue. Jack drives. You sit in the passenger seat in your ivory dress, fitted, buttons down the back that you have been thinking about since the ceremony. Absentmindedly, you watch his hands on the wheel. Steady. Unhurried. The same hands that sutured a femoral artery last Tuesday without a tremor. He hasn't said much since you left. He doesn't need to. You can feel the quality of his silence the same way you can feel weather coming, something charged and deliberate.
"You're very quiet," you say.
"Thinking."
"About what?"
He glances at you. Brief. The look he gives you does something to your insides. "How long I've been waiting to get you out of that dress."
You face forward. "Eleven months, two weeks, four days."
A pause. "You counted?"
"You didn’t?"
Another glance. Longer this time. "Yeah," he says. "I did."
The room is on the fourteenth floor, corner suite, and someone has clearly been in ahead of you. The lights are low, bed turned down, a bottle of champagne sweating quietly in a bucket on the nightstand. Flowers somewhere. You barely register any of it because Jack closes the door behind you and that's the end of the outside world.
He doesn't rush. This is your favorite thing about him, the thing you knew going in and still weren’t entirely prepared for. Jack Abbot approaches everything with the same deliberate economy. No wasted motion or words. He takes the bouquet from your hands and sets it on the table. He removes his jacket and drapes it over a chair. He loosens his tie one careful increment, leaving it loose around his neck. The whole time, he watches you.
"Jack," you say.
"Mm."
"You're doing this on purpose."
"Doing what?" He pulls the tie free. Sets it down. Rolls his left cuff up to the elbow, then his right. You stare at his forearms. You’ve always had a thing about his forearms. He knows this very well.
"You're going to make me wait," you say.
"I'm going to take my time," he corrects, like there's a meaningful difference. He steps toward you, stopping close enough that you must look up. His hand comes up and tucks a loose strand of hair behind your ear, the same gesture he's made a hundred times, completely ordinary, except nothing about tonight is ordinary. "We have all night. I plan to use it."
Your breath comes out a little unsteady. "You're insufferable."
"And yet," His mouth curves. Just slightly. "Here you are, Mrs. Abbot."
Here you are. Married to him. Standing in a hotel room in a dress with seventeen buttons down the back, your heart doing something completely unbecoming of a medical professional.
"Turn around," he says quietly. You listen.
He starts at the top button. One at a time. Slow and methodical, the way he does everything, and between each one his fingers brush the newly exposed skin of your spine. Not enough to be called anything, not quite a caress, just contact. Acknowledgment. I'm here. I see you. I'm not in any hurry. By the fifth button, you've stopped breathing correctly. By the tenth, you've dropped your head forward, his mouth has found the back of your neck, and you’re making sounds that you have no control over.
"Steady," he murmurs against your skin.
"Easy for you to say."
He laughs that low, private one, the one that lives in his chest. His hands are at the last few buttons now. "You know," he says, unhurried, conversational, "I thought about this all through the ceremony."
"The buttons?"
"Undoing them." The last one finally gives. His hands slide to your shoulders, pushing the fabric forward until it falls. He takes a moment and then his palms run slowly down the length of your back, from shoulder to waist, like he’s learning something new. "Christ," he says quietly. To himself, almost. You turn around. He looks at you the way he looked at you at the end of the aisle, the unguarded version of Jack Abbot that very few people ever get to see. You are one of them. You’re the only one, now.
"Hi, Mr. Abbot," you say softly.
"Hi, Mrs. Abbot." He reaches out and cups your face in both hands. Tilts your chin up. Kisses you once, slow and thorough and complete. When he pulls back, his eyes are dark. "Bed. Now."
He keeps all his promises. Every single one. He takes his time with every inch of you with that focused precision that makes you feel like the most important thing in any room he's ever been in. He finds every place that makes you gasp and returns to it until you're pulling at his shoulders, his hair, anything you can reach. He draws it out with expert deliberateness. He repeats the cycle of getting you close and then easing back, his mouth curved against your skin when you make an outraged sound.
"Jack-"
"I heard you."
"Then-"
"I know." He presses a kiss to your hip. Your ribs. The curve of your shoulder. "I know what you need."
"Then please-"
"When I'm ready." Low and even. A doctor's voice, calm under pressure. "You can take it."
You make a sound that isn’t dignified in the slightest.
"There she is," he says before his mouth closes over your breast and your back arches clean off the mattress.
By the time he finally gives you what you're asking for you have begged, actually begged, twice, and he has the audacity to look satisfied about it. "Look at me," he says.
You look at him. His hands are braced on either side of you, his gaze steady and dark and intent, and this is exactly what you signed up for and somehow you still weren't ready.
"Okay?" he asks.
"Yes," you manage. "Jack, yes, I'm fine, I am more than-" He finally moves and the sentence dissolves entirely.
Afterward, the city glows fourteen floors below and the champagne sits unopened on the nightstand. You’re lying with your head on Jack's chest listening to his heartbeat come down from something elevated toward something steady. His hand is in your hair. Slow, absent strokes. The most unguarded he ever gets. You love this time afterward, quiet and warm in the dark.
"You opened with the forearms," you say eventually.
A pause. "What?"
"When we came in. You rolled your sleeves up first thing. You knew exactly what you were doing."
His chest moves with a breath that might be a laugh. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You absolutely do."
Another pause. "Maybe."
You lift your head to look at him. He's looking at the ceiling with that almost-smile, the one that lives at the very corner of his mouth and requires excavation to find. You have made it your project, for eleven months and two weeks and four days, to find it as often as possible.
"You planned this whole thing out," you say.
"I had some thoughts."
"Thoughts."
"A general framework." He glances down at you. "Medically speaking, preparation improves outcomes."
You stare at him. "You did not just cite outcome data for our wedding night."
"It was informal." His arm tightens around you. "Don't document it."
You laugh loud and unguarded, the way you always laugh around him, and he watches you do it with that expression that is still, after everything, the most disarming thing about him. Not the competence or the steadiness or the hands. Just the way he looks at you when you're laughing. Like you're the only data point that has ever mattered.
"I love you," you tell him.
He tucks you back against his chest and presses a kiss to the top of your head. "I know," he says. You pinch his ribs. "I love you too, Mrs. Abbot," he says. Quieter. Real.
Outside, the city goes about its business. In here, Jack Abbot, no-frills, military-straight, infuriating and steady and entirely yours, holds you as his new wife and doesn't let go.
“I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.”
part 2 of 2 in the "begin again" mini series, read part 1 here
cw: addiction
What came next was supposed to be Cassie's voice in your head, saying one step at a time. What actually came next was none of that. The suspension was quiet. No formal announcement, no explanation offered to the floor, just Frank's name gone from the schedule, his slot covered by another resident you didn't know who had no opinions about anything and left no coffee on the counter. The floor continued. The ER continued. The monitors beeped their indifferent noises, and patients came and went and the work was exactly as relentless as it had always been.
You continued too, technically. You showed up. You put on your white coat. You were competent, you were always competent, competence had been the costume you wore over everything else for so long you'd forgotten there was an everything else. You handled your patients with the complete attention they deserved, and you handed off your charts and you answered your pages and from the outside you were fine. On the inside, you were in freefall. It was worse without the pills, and you knew it was worse because of the pills, and this loop of knowing, the clinical clarity and the total inability to do anything useful with it, was its own special kind of torment. You weren't sleeping. You weren't eating, not really, which is how Cassie eventually noticed, because Cassie noticed everything. You'd lost eight pounds in two weeks and you had the hollow look of someone running on adrenaline and self-loathing.
You were also still using. Not from the hospital, that access was too fraught now, too surveilled, and some part of you that hadn't gone fully dark yet understood that it would be catastrophic, would confirm everything, would take the thing Frank had done and set it on fire. But you had other means. You'd had other means for a while, and you used them with the bleak efficiency of someone who has stopped pretending they're managing it and just needs to get through the night.
He's in there taking the fall for both of us. You thought about it constantly. In the hollow hours between shifts and in the middle of shifts and at three in the morning when you lay in your bed staring at the ceiling. You turned it over and over and it looked different depending on the angle, from one side it was sacrifice, from another it was arrogance, from another it was the most complicated expression of caring that you had ever been given and also the one you had least asked for.
From all angles, it hurt. You were angry. You were angry in the way that has roots under it, that goes down past the presenting complaint to the thing actually injured. You were angry that he'd decided for you. You were angry that you understood why. And underneath the anger, which you never looked at directly, you were terrified for him. Terrified in the way you are terrified for people who matter.
Cassie found you on a Wednesday. The break room, 8 a.m., between a night shift and a morning shift that you had, for reasons that were starting to feel less rational by the day, agreed to cover. You were on your third coffee and a granola bar that you'd been holding for twenty minutes without eating. She sat down across from you. She looked at your face. She looked at the granola bar.
"When did you last sleep?" she said.
"I sleep."
"When?"
"Cassie."
"I'm asking you a question." Her voice was quiet, non-negotiable kind. "When did you last sleep more than four hours?"
You looked at the granola bar. "Hey." She leaned across the table. "Look at me. Not at the granola bar."
You looked at her. Her face was doing the thing it did when she was scared for someone and not showing the scared, just the steady. You'd seen her wear this face in trauma bays and at bedsides and in family consultation rooms, and seeing it aimed at you did something to the structure of your chest. "I'm fine," you said.
"You're not." She said it without cruelty, without drama. "You're not fine, and you haven't been fine since before he left, and I've been waiting for you to come to me and you're not coming to me, so I'm coming to you." She folded her hands on the table. "I think you need to stop."
You looked away. "I know," she said. "I know it's not that simple. I know that's not how it works. But I'm sitting here looking at you and I'm scared, and I don't get scared easily, and I need you to hear me say it." A pause. "I need you to hear that I'm asking you to let someone help you. Not because you're weak and not because you're broken. Because you're my person and you are not okay and I'm not willing to watch this."
The break room hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeped. You looked down at the granola bar. You put it on the table. "I don't know how to do this," you said, very quietly.
"I know," she said. "But I do. Or I know someone who does." She slid a business card across the table, she'd had it ready, you realized, she'd brought it with her, she'd been planning this conversation. "Thirty-day inpatient program. Hospital-affiliated, full confidentiality. The same kind Frank's-" She stopped. Rephrased. "A good program."
You stared at the card. "They're calling it a sabbatical on the paperwork," she said. "Which is a very polite hospital word for…"
"I know what the word means."
"Yeah." She was quiet. "I know you do."
You picked up the card. You held it in both hands and looked at it and thought about the last sixty-three days and about the look on Frank's face across the corridor and about the granola bar and the not sleeping and the quality of the freefall you had been in and you thought: this is what rock bottom looks like. I'm sitting in it and I can see the walls.
"Okay," you said.
Cassie let out a breath. Slow, careful, like she'd been holding it for a while. "Okay," she said.
One thirty-day inpatient stay later…
The hospital smelled the same. That was the first thing you noticed when the elevator doors slid open onto the ER floor, that cocktail of antiseptic and burnt coffee. Something human and desperate and relentless. It hit you like a wall, and you stood there in the elevator doorway a beat too long, and the doors tried to close on you, and you had to stick your arm out to stop them. You can do this.
That was what your therapist had said. Dr. Caleb Jefferson, with his sure voice and direct eyes and his complete, unflinching refusal to let you spiral in his office without at least naming it first. You can do this. And if you can't, call me. And then you do it anyway.
You squared your shoulders and walked out onto the floor. It was a Tuesday morning, 6:48 a.m., and the ER was already moving at the velocity it always did, organized chaos with a thin veneer of protocol stretched over the top of it. Nurses cutting through the corridor with tablets, a resident arguing quietly with an attending near the trauma bay, someone crying behind a curtain in bay four. You had been gone for thirty-seven days. Not that you were counting…except you absolutely were.
"Oh my god." You turned. Cassie was coming out of the supply room with her arms full of saline bags, and when she saw you, her face did something complicated, relief and worry and that brand of fierce love that she'd aimed at you like a weapon for as long as you'd known her. She dumped the bags on the nearest counter without ceremony and crossed the hall in six steps and pulled you into a hug so hard it rearranged something in your spine.
"Hey," you said onto her shoulder, and your voice came out smaller than you intended.
"Hey yourself." She held on for another moment before she pulled back and looked at you, hands on your shoulders, studying your face the way she studied a chart, thorough, clinical, but with something underneath it that no chart could ever hold. "You look good. Really good, not 'I'm-lying-to-everyone-including-myself' good."
"High bar."
"I set realistic goals." She squeezed your shoulders once before letting go. "How are you feeling? And I mean actually."
"Terrified," you said, because thirty-seven days had taught you at least that much, that honesty was cheaper than the alternative, and the alternative had nearly cost you everything. "Cautiously optimistic, I think. Also, I haven't had real coffee in over a month and I'm told the machine on three is broken, so…"
Cassie laughed, and it was such a normal sound, such a her sound, that something in your chest loosened by a fraction. "The machine on three has been broken since February. Collins put a sticky note on it that just says 'LOL' and nobody's dealt with it."
"Some things don't change."
"Some things do." She said it gently, watching you. "He's back, too."
You knew it was coming. You had been told, Dr. Robby had been careful and professional about it in your return meeting yesterday, had mentioned it the way you mentioned a difficult patient history, factual and without fanfare. Dr. Langdon completed his program and will be returning to active duty the same week as you. HR has prepared some guidelines. Knowing it was coming and hearing Cassie say it out loud were apparently two entirely different things.
"I know," you said.
"Have you two talked?"
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"Cassie."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have right now." You picked up your badge from where you'd clipped it to your jacket and looked at it for a moment, your own face looking back at you, the photo taken two years ago before everything, when you'd still looked like someone who was sleeping. "Where is he?"
"Trauma two, I think. He came in about twenty minutes ago." She paused. "He looked good too. Different. Like you."
You nodded and didn't say anything.
"You don't have to talk to him today," Cassie said. "There's no rule that says-"
"I know." You clipped the badge on your coat. "I know. Let's just…can we just work? I need to work."
She looked at you for one more long moment, then nodded. "Bay six has a forty-two-year-old with chest pain that's been waiting twenty minutes. EKG's on the board."
"On it," you said, and went to work.
You didn't see him until noon. You'd managed five hours on the floor without a direct encounter, which felt both like a small miracle and like borrowing time at a rate you couldn't afford. The ER wasn't built for avoidance, it was built for collision, for the forced intimacy of people operating at the edge of their competence in a space with too few rooms and too much need. You'd felt him, though, in the way you always had, a peripheral awareness, a shift in the atmosphere, the way that the nurses' station seemed to orient itself differently when he was near.
You were writing up a disposition note when he came around the corner. He stopped. You looked up. For a moment neither of you said anything, and the noise of the ER continued around you like a river going around two rocks, indifferent, unstoppable, and you had thirty-seven days of therapy and twelve-step work and the most honest conversations of your life stacked up behind you, and none of it had prepared you for the specific way Frank Langdon looked in that moment.
He looked different. Cassie had said so and she was right. The shadows under his eyes that had become so familiar you'd stopped seeing them were lighter. He was standing differently, some tension you'd both carried like a second skeleton having been, if not resolved, at least acknowledged and named. He'd gotten a haircut. His white coat was pressed. He looked like someone who had been through something real and had come back from it. You imagined you looked the same.
"Hey," he said. His voice was careful. The voice of someone choosing each word like footing on uncertain ground.
"Hey." Yours wasn't much better.
He glanced at the chart in your hand, then back at your face. "How's your morning been?"
"Fine. Good." You paused. "Busy."
"Yeah." He nodded toward the board. "Looks like it." Another pause. The kind of pause that had its own weight. "How are you?"
It was such a simple question. You'd answered it forty times this morning, reflexively, automatically, fine, good, glad to be back, and each time it had slid off you like water. When Frank asked it, it landed differently. Because he was the only other person in this building who knew exactly what how you are meant, exactly which thirty-seven days were behind it, exactly what it had cost.
"I'm okay," you said, and meant it more precisely than you'd meant anything all day. Not fine. Okay. Ambulatory. Present. One foot in front of the other. "You?"
Something shifted in his expression, recognition, maybe, or relief that you'd answered honestly instead of performing. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."
Dr. Whitaker appeared around the corner calling your name with a chart, and you held Frank's gaze for one more second before you turned away. You didn't speak again until Thursday.
It happened in the break room at 8 p.m., which was either poetic or inevitable or both. A thirteen-hour shift. A trauma that had gone sideways and then right again at the last possible second, a teenager, a car accident, a collapsed lung and a surgery resident who'd held it together by the thinnest thread. The exhausted quiet of the aftermath, when the adrenaline was done and you were left with just the facts of what had happened and the fact that you were still standing.
You were sitting at the break room table with a cup of cold coffee and the thousand-yard stare of someone who'd been running on competence and muscle memory for most of the day, when the door opened and Frank came in. He saw you. His hand went briefly to the door like he might leave, and then he didn't. He came in, went to the coffee machine, poured himself a cup, and sat down at the other end of the table. For a while, neither of you said anything.
"Good catch tonight," he said finally. "The tension pneumo."
"You would've caught it."
"Maybe thirty seconds later."
"Thirty seconds matter."
"Yeah." He turned his cup in his hands. "It does."
Silence again. But it was different this time, it had less edge to it, less of that terrible careful distance. Just two people sitting in the fluorescent quiet at two in the morning after a long day, which was something you had done before, back when things were different, back before everything.
"I didn't know," you said, and then stopped. He looked at you. "When they told me you'd, that you'd taken all of it. The formal complaint. I didn't know you were going to do that." Your voice was steady, mostly. "I didn't get a chance to, I would have told them it wasn't just you."
"I know you would’ve." He said it simply. "That's why I didn't tell you what I was going to do."
You stared at him. "Frank…"
"You were already…" He stopped. Started again, choosing carefully. "I could see where you were heading. You were worse than me, at that point. You needed the out."
"That wasn't your call to make."
"No," he agreed. "It wasn't. And I made it anyway, and I've spent the last ninety days sitting with that in group therapy and with my sponsor and with a very patient therapist who charges two hundred dollars an hour, and here's where I've landed: I don't regret it. I regret…" He paused. "I regret a lot of other things. Not that."
The honest weight of that pressed against your sternum. "I was so angry at you," you said quietly. "When I found out. I was furious."
"I know. Cassie told me." A ghost of something moved across his face. "She also told me you stopped eating for about two weeks, so."
"She wasn't supposed to tell you that."
"She loves you. She was scared." He met your eyes. "I was scared."
"I didn't handle it well," you said, which was the understatement of the year, of the decade, of perhaps your entire adult life. "After you, after everything came out and you were gone. I didn't handle it at all."
"Neither did I, at first. First two weeks in that place I was…” He shook his head. "They almost had to put me on a different unit."
You looked at him. This careful, complicated man who you had stood next to in the dark for two years, who had offered you your first pill at a rooftop party after a thirty-six-hour shift and a patient death that had hit you both harder than you'd admitted, who had somehow, somewhere in the middle of all the wreckage, become the person you most wanted in a room when things went wrong. "We were really stupid," you said.
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Yeah."
"I mean genuinely, catastrophically-”
"I know."
"We're doctors. We knew…"
"We knew," he agreed, quietly. "And we did it anyway. That's kind of the whole thing, isn't it? That's the part they make you sit with." He looked down at his coffee cup. "Knowing and doing it anyway. Knowing and not stopping. Knowing and watching someone you-" He stopped.
The unfinished sentence sat between you. You were both very still. "Frank," you said carefully.
"Don't." His voice was low. "Don't do the thing where you let me off the hook before I finish saying it."
You closed your mouth. He took a breath. "Knowing and watching someone you care about go down with you, and telling yourself it's fine, telling yourself it's just, stress, circumstance, it's manageable, we're managing it. When you are very clearly not managing it." He looked up. "I'm sorry. For my part in how it started. I'm sorry that I kept going when I could see what it was doing to you. I'm sorry I made a unilateral decision about your career. And I'm sorry I let things between us get so…” Another pause. "Complicated. Without ever, without being honest about why."
You thought about your thirty-seven days. About sitting in a circle of folding chairs in a church basement, saying things out loud that you'd never said to another human being. About the terrible clarity of sobriety in those first few weeks when everything you'd been numbing came rising up to meet you, and one of the things that had risen, patient, persistent, waiting, was the shape of what you actually felt about Frank Langdon.
"I wasn't honest either," you said. He watched you. "I kept telling myself it was just proximity. Circumstances. Two people under too much pressure leaning on each other." You turned your coffee cup on the table. "That's not what it was."
"No," he said softly. "It wasn't."
The break room felt very small. The post-shift quiet felt very loud.
"I don't think we should-" you started.
"No," he agreed immediately, and the quickness of it made you look at him.
"I was going to say I don't think we should rush anything."
"That's what I meant."
"We've been back for two days, Frank."
"I know."
"I'm still, I'm early. We're both early. And this place is…" You gestured vaguely at the walls, at the hospital that had been the backdrop for all of it, good and terrible alike. "This is complicated."
"All of that is true," he said. "Not to mention," He looked at you steadily, with the directness that was so essentially him, the thing you'd missed without letting yourself know you were missing it. "I meant what I didn't finish saying. You know that, right?"
The words settled on you like something coming home. "Yeah," you said quietly. "I know."
It happened slowly, the way real things do. Months flew by. The ER did what the ER always did, it demanded everything and took it, and you gave it, and somewhere in the rhythm of that you rediscovered that you loved this work, that it was one of the true things about you, that the problem had never been the work. Cassie started meeting you for coffee before shifts, real coffee from the place two blocks over with the mismatched chairs, and it became the quiet axis of your weeks.
You went to meetings. Tuesday nights at the church on West Liberty, Thursday mornings at the hospital employee assistance group that was aggressively, almost comically underpublicized but that turned out to contain at least four people you deeply respected. You called Dr. Jefferson every Wednesday. You built the scaffolding of a different life around the same bones. Frank was there, in the peripheral way he'd always been, and then, gradually, in a more direct way.
It started with coffee at the nurses' station again, the easy conversational kind that had no subtext and no agenda. It moved to a walk around the block after a particularly brutal shift, just air and dark and the particular companionable silence of two people who had learned to stop filling silence with noise. He texted you about a patient one afternoon and the conversation went sideways for an hour into something that had nothing to do with medicine, and you went to bed smiling in a way that felt clean.
He told you about his therapist, a dry, sardonic man named Dr. Boke who apparently communicated exclusively through Socratic questioning and looked profoundly unimpressed by everything. You told him about Caleb and his refusal to let you minimize things. You compared notes the way you compared clinical approaches, seriously, with genuine curiosity, with the respect of two people who had both been to the bottom of something and were both carefully, methodically climbing back.
In December, he asked if you wanted to get dinner. Not asked the way he'd asked before, with that charged quality, that thing you'd both spent two years pretending not to feel. He asked it simply: there's that Thai place on Penn that's supposed to be good, do you want to go Saturday, and you said yes, and it was dinner, just dinner, and it was the best evening you'd had in longer than you could easily measure.
He walked you home after. It was cold, your breath made small clouds. At your door, you both stood in that moment of threshold. "This was good," you said.
"Yeah." He was looking at you carefully. Honestly. "It was."
You thought about everything. The entire weight and shape of it. The wreckage and the rebuilding both. The version of yourself you'd been and the version you were still, slowly, becoming. "I'm not ready," you said. "I want to be clear that I know that."
"Okay," he said, without flinching.
"But I'm…getting there, I think." You searched for the right words and landed on the simplest ones. "I don't want to lose this again. Whatever this is. I don't want to go backwards."
"We're not going backwards," he said, with a certainty that came from somewhere real.
You nodded. You believed him. You went inside. You leaned against the closed door for a long moment in the dark of your hallway, and you weren’t quite okay, but you were something. Something oriented. Something pointed in a direction that felt, for the first time in a long time, like it might be the right one.
January. A slow Tuesday. You're charting at the nurses' station when he materializes at your elbow with a cup of coffee, real coffee, from the place two blocks away, the good kind, not the machine on three that still has Collins' LOL sticky note on it.
You look at the cup. You look at him. "You walked two blocks," you say.
"I had twenty minutes." He sets it beside your keyboard. "You looked like you needed it."
"How could you tell?"
"You do this thing with your pen when you're running on empty." He mimes a tap-tap-tap. "You've been doing it for the last hour."
You look down at your pen. You have, in fact, been doing it for the last hour. "That's annoyingly observant," you say.
"I pay attention," he says, simply, and something in the way he says it lands differently now. Just truth. Just I see you. The cleanest version of it.
"Thank you," you say, and pick up the coffee.
He leans on the counter beside you, looking at the board. "How's the twelve-year-old in bay three?"
"Better. Mom's with her now." You take a sip. It's exactly how you take it, which you have definitely never told him, he just knows. "She was scared."
"Kids always are." A pause. "Adults, too. They're just better at hiding it."
You look at him sideways. He's watching the board with that focused, considered look. "Frank," you say. He looks at you. "Saturday," you say. "That Italian place on Fifth that Cassie keeps talking about."
A pause. His expression shifts, the careful hopeful quality that you recognize now as the most honest version of his face. "Dinner?" he says.
"Dinner," you confirm. And then because you have learned that the bravest thing is usually just saying the honest thing, "I think I might be getting there."
He holds your gaze for a long moment. "Okay, baby," he says softly.
The ER moves around you. The monitors beep. Someone calls for a gurney down the hall. It’ s loud and bright and relentless, the same as it has always been, and you are standing in the middle of it, clear-eyed, present, tired in the honest way and not the other way, and it feels, improbably, like enough. It feels like the beginning.
I can't let you go
I try, but I always know
I wish you was holding me close
Can't be without you, I'd rather overdose
part 1 of 2 in the "begin again" mini series
cw: addiction
It started at a party.
Dr. Walsh had a rooftop. It was a great party spot, wide and flat with string lights someone had optimistically hung along the perimeter railing and a folding table that had been repurposed into a bar. The kind of gathering that called itself casual but was absolutely not, because everyone there was a doctor and doctors didn't know how to be casual. You stood around and performed casualness at each other and drank and talked shop because there was nothing else, really, not after years of work drilling everything else out. You had come because Cassie made you. You need to leave the building sometimes, she'd said, with the tone she reserved for things she wasn't going to argue about. You need to remember you have a body that exists outside of the ER. You'd been there for six weeks at that point and the ER had started to feel more real than everywhere else, which should have been a warning sign and wasn't.
You were on your second drink, leaning against the railing and watching the city do what cities do at night, when someone came to stand beside you. There was a respectful foot of distance, the body language of someone who was actually watching and not performing. You looked over. Dr. Frank Langdon. Senior resident, two years your senior in the department, the man whose handoff notes were so thorough they'd become something of an unofficial standard. You'd worked alongside him twice in six weeks and both times he'd been exactly what a good emergency med doctor was: precise, fast, calm in the unshowy way that meant he'd earned it. You hadn't spoken to him outside of patient context.
"Good city," he said, looking out at it.
"Pretty good," you agreed.
"You're the new emergency medicine resident."
"That sounds like me."
"How's it going?"
"Ask me again after I sleep." You took a sip of your drink. "How long does it take before the ER stops feeling like a different planet?"
He considered this with what you would come to recognize as characteristic seriousness, Frank Langdon treated questions like they deserved actual answers. "About eight months," he said. "And then it flips. Everywhere else starts feeling like a different planet."
"That's not reassuring."
"No," he agreed, and the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more restrained and more interesting. "It's not. Frank Langdon by the way," he said, and held out his hand.
"I know who you are." You shook it anyway. "Your handoff notes are legendary."
"That's either a compliment or an indictment."
"Both, probably." You let go of his hand. "I’m…”
"I know who you are too," he said, and looked back at the city.
You stood there for a while in a silence that was somehow comfortable. The party went on behind you. Someone laughed too loudly near the bar, the string lights swayed in whatever breeze the rooftop caught.
"Long week?" he asked eventually.
"Long month." You finished your drink. "Lost a patient on Thursday. Forty-one years old, two kids, came in with what looked like a straightforward presentation and then just…" You stopped. Shook your head. "I keep running the chart. Over and over in my head."
He was quiet for a moment. "You'll do that for a while," he said. "The running. It doesn't mean you missed something."
"You don't know that."
"No," he said. "But I know that feeling, and most of the time it's grief wearing the costume of doubt." He paused. "What do you do with it? After a bad one."
You thought about the honest answer and gave it, because something about standing next to him in the dark made honesty feel like the easier option. "So far? I go home and I don't sleep and I stare at the ceiling until my shift starts again."
He nodded slowly like that landed somewhere he recognized. "I've been known to take the edge off," he said carefully. "When it gets loud enough."
You looked at him. He reached into his jacket pocket and held out a small orange prescription bottle. He did it without fanfare, the same way he'd hand you a chart. "I'm not pushing," he said. "Just. If you want."
You should have said no. You knew, in the clinical, intellectual, I-went-to-medical-school way, exactly what you should have said. You knew the pharmacology. You knew the literature. You knew what the risk profile looked like for physicians and you knew the statistics on substance use disorder in emergency medicine specifically, and you knew all of it the way you knew a lot of things, academically, abstractly, at a comfortable remove from the fact of your own life. You took two from the bottle anyways.
He watched you without judgment, without anything you could easily name, then he took the same. You stood there on the rooftop above the city while the party churned behind you, and the noise in your head went, for the first time in weeks, genuinely quiet.
"Oh," you said, after a while. "Yeah," he said. The string lights swayed. Below, the city kept going.
Months passed. The ER became your planet, like he said it would. And Frank Langdon became something. Something you didn't have clean language for, because the language that fit the feeling was the kind you didn't say out loud at work, and you were always at work, and so the feeling lived in the register below language, in the fluency of proximity. The way you knew where he was on the floor without looking. The way a shift felt structurally different when he was on it versus when he wasn't. The specific quality of his attention when he turned it on you, which he did, often, that focused unhurried way, like you were a problem he found genuinely interesting.
The rooftop thing became a pattern. Not always pills, sometimes it was his apartment after a brutal overnight, a drink that became two, the two of you on his couch talking the way you could talk at two in the morning with the right pharmaceutical assistance and nowhere to be. Sometimes it was the hospital itself, the supply room during a quiet hour, the transgressive thrill of it that neither of you acknowledged directly, that lived in the looks you exchanged afterward, quick and electric and gone. The flirting happened the way things happen when two people are too smart to admit what they're doing.
"You're in my space, baby," he said one morning at the nurses' station, looking down at where you'd parked yourself directly in front of his usual spot, deliberately, to see what he'd do.
"There’s fifteen feet of counter," you said, not looking up from your chart. "You're a big boy, I think you'll manage."
He leaned over your shoulder to reach the keyboard, unnecessary, the keyboard wasn't in his way, and you felt the warmth of him and smelled his soap, the clean ordinary realness of it, and kept your face completely neutral by force of will. "You're doing it on purpose," he said, low, near your ear.
"Doing what?" you said innocently.
He made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh and pushed off the counter. "Chart's wrong on bay four," he said, his voice back to normal volume, professional, the mask sliding back into place as effortlessly as it had slipped. "MVA, not MVC."
"Thanks," you said, and fixed it, and felt his eyes on you for another moment before he moved away. Cassie appeared at your elbow approximately four seconds later.
"What," you said, preemptively.
"Nothing," she said, with an expression that communicated a great deal.
"Cassie."
"I'm just standing here."
"You're standing here at me."
"I'm standing here with genuine professional neutrality." She picked up a chart. "He watches you, you know. Like, a lot."
"He's a senior resident. He watches everyone."
"He watches everyone," she agreed, "and then he watches you differently." She opened the chart. "I'm just noting it."
"Note something else."
"Consider it noted."
There was an afternoon in the supply room that you replayed later, with the particular exhausting helplessness of replaying things. You'd gone in for a medication count, standard, routine, the careful logging that was part of the job. You'd been there two minutes when Frank came in behind you, pulling the door mostly closed in that absent way that meant he was thinking about something else. He saw you and stopped.
"Sorry," he said. "Didn't know you were in here, I can come back."
"It's fine." You were already writing. "I'm almost done."
He moved to the other side of the room. You were very aware of the size of the space and the fact that he was in it. The supply room was not built for two people to feel like a comfortable distance from each other, which you were absolutely not thinking about.
"You look tired," he said.
"Eighty-hour week."
"That's a slow week for us."
"I know. That's what's sad." You clicked your pen. "You look…" You glanced at him and then wished you hadn't, because he was looking at you with that look, the direct one, the one that never had a clean clinical name. "Actually fine. Annoyingly fine, given that you were here before I was."
"I slept," he said.
"In the building?"
"On the couch in the residents' lounge. Six whole hours. Felt decadent."
You laughed despite yourself, and he smiled at it, actually smiled, not the corner-of-the-mouth thing but the real one, the rare one, and you looked away first.
"I should…" you started.
"I've got something," he said, quieter. He didn't move, but his hand went briefly to his coat pocket. "If you need it tonight, baby. It's been a rough week."
It had been a rough week. A patient you'd fought for had lost. A first-year resident had dissolved in the middle of a trauma and you'd had to hold both of them together simultaneously, the patient and the resident, and by the end of it you were hollow in the way that sleep didn't touch. "Yeah," you said. "Okay."
He crossed the room. He was tall enough that this close he blocked out some of the overhead light, and he reached past you to set the small folded paper packet on the shelf beside your clipboard, and he didn't step back immediately. "You good?" he asked. The question at close range, with nobody else in the room, had a different texture than it did in the corridor.
"Getting there," you said, which was what you always said.
He held your gaze for a beat. Two. Then stepped back, professional distance restored, the world clicking back into its normal register. "Finish your count," he said.
"Bossy," you said.
"I'm a level above you on the food chain."
"The food chain is just a social construct."
"So is your employment contract," he said, and left, and you stood there in the supply room with your clipboard and your racing pulse and your very carefully maintained expression of total normalcy. You took the paper packet off the shelf and put it in your pocket and finished your count.
The taking of meds from the hospital started small until it wasn't, which is how these things usually go. The first few times it was Frank, he knew the inventory rhythms, he knew which counts happened when, he had four years of institutional knowledge and a manner so unruffled that nobody looked at him twice. You were the lookout, then the accomplice, then eventually a co-architect of the whole thing, because you were good at patterns and you found the gaps in the rotation and you told yourself it was controlled, it was manageable, you both had medical degrees and you knew exactly what you were taking and at what doses and that made it fundamentally different from…you didn't finish that sentence.
The flirtation during all of this was the one thing that stayed clean. The teasing and the banter and the charged silences, the reaching over you for keyboards that were never actually in the way, the coffee he'd leave on the nurses' station with no note and no explanation and the way you'd catch his eye when you picked it up, this was the thread that ran through the dark middle of everything else, warm and consistent and almost ordinary. Almost like something that existed in daylight.
"You know," you said one night in the break room, both of you coming off a double, the good-numbness sitting smooth and warm over the day's sharp edges, "for someone who doesn't talk much, you're very loud."
He looked up from his coffee. "Come again?"
"Loud. You take up a lot of space. Not physically, I mean." You waved a hand. "You're just very present. You walk onto the floor and the whole floor knows it."
He considered this. "Is that a complaint?"
"It's an observation." You pulled your feet up on the chair. "I'm undecided on whether or not it's a complaint."
"Undecided," he repeated, with a quality in his voice that was dry and warm at the same time, somehow, which was a very Frank Langdon way to sound. "I'll take undecided."
"It's better than decided against."
"Is it better than decided for?"
You looked at him and he looked at you as the break room hummed its quiet song, and neither of you said the next thing, because there wasn't a next thing yet, there was just this, the orbit, the almost, the specific tension of two people who had said enough without saying anything. "Goodnight, Frank," you said.
He lifted his coffee cup. "Have a good night, baby."
You were almost at the door when he said, "Hey." You turned.
"It's not undecided," he said, not quite looking at you. "For what it's worth."
You stood there for a moment. "Goodnight, Frank," you said again, softer.
You walked home with something sitting in your chest that felt, dangerously, like warmth. You weren't there when the very bad thing happened. That was the thing you would come back to, again and again, the thing that lived in the gap between it happened and you found out, the hours you spent not knowing, working your shift, handling a hypoglycemic eighty-year-old in bay two, arguing with a medical student about the correct interpretation of an EKG, existing in your ordinary oblivious life while across the hospital everything was coming apart.
Dr. Santos found him in the medication storage unit off the main pharmacy corridor. You pieced it together later from what Cassie told you, from what could not be denied and what Frank chose not to deny. Santos had been tracking a discrepancy in the controlled substance log for two weeks. A meticulous woman, Dr. Santos, the kind of resident who noticed when numbers were off by single digits and kept noticing until she understood why. She'd mentioned it to the pharmacy director. She'd pulled the access logs. She'd cross-referenced them. And then she'd gone to medication storage at 7 p.m. on a Thursday, and Frank had been there.
He hadn't tried to explain. That was the other thing Cassie told you. He'd looked at Dr. Santos, and he'd looked at what was in his hand, and he hadn't offered a single word of excuse. He'd set the medication down on the shelf with great care. He'd said: I'd like to speak to Dr. Robby.
You found out at 7:42 p.m., when Cassie found you on the floor. She pulled you into the family consultation room, one of those functional beige spaces with three chairs and a tissue box and a landscape painting that was trying its best, and she closed the door and turned to look at you and her face had the look of someone carrying something they did not want to carry.
"What," you said.
"Something's happened," she said. "With Frank."
The bottom of everything dropped out. Later you would identify this as the moment your body knew before your mind did, the cold flooding sensation, the sudden acute awareness of your own heartbeat. "What kind of something?" you asked, very carefully.
She told you. You sat down in one of the beige chairs. You sat there for what was probably thirty seconds while Cassie stood near the door with her arms wrapped around herself and her expression doing the work of someone watching a person receive a blow and not being able to do anything about it.
"He's with Robby now," she said. "They've been in there for-"
"He's alone?" Your voice came out strange. Stripped of something.
"He asked for it. He…" She hesitated. "He said he wanted to do it alone."
Something in you understood that, in the animal way you understood things about Frank before you could articulate them. He was in there alone because he had chosen to be in there alone. He was telling a particular version of a story, and he had chosen to tell it without you. "Cassie," you said.
"I know."
"He's not, it wasn't only him. It wasn't…"
"I know." She crossed the room and sat down in the chair beside you. "I know that."
"Then I have to, I should go in there. I should tell them-"
"He told Robby he wanted to make a formal statement first. HR is involved. You can't-" She stopped. Looked at you carefully. "And I think-" She said it gently, the way you said a diagnosis you knew the patient didn't want to hear. "I think he doesn't want you to."
You stared at her. "I think he's doing it on purpose," she said. "I think he knows exactly what he's doing."
The consultation room was very small. The landscape painting was a forest scene. You looked at it without seeing it and felt the cold weight of what Cassie was telling you land in layers, what it meant, what he was choosing, what the choice meant about what he thought of you, what the choice was going to cost him. "He can't," you said.
"He's going to."
"Cassie, he can't do this, I have to…"
"Hey." She put her hand over yours. "Hey. Look at me."
You looked at her. Her face was steady and careful and fully present in the way Cassie always was when things got genuinely bad, she didn't flinch, didn't manage, just showed up and stayed. "Right now," she said, "you don't walk into that office. Right now, you finish your shift and you don't do anything that makes this bigger than it already is. And then we figure out what comes next."
"There's nothing to figure out," you said. "He's in there taking the fall for both of us and I'm standing here in a family consultation room, and that's, that's not-" Your voice broke on the last word. You pressed your fingers against your mouth for a moment.
"I know," Cassie said, and held your hand.
You saw Frank once, briefly, at the end of that night. He came out of the administrative offices at 10 p.m. looking like something had happened to his face, the particular quality of someone who had said very difficult things in a room and was now on the other side of having said them. His white coat was gone. He was in his regular clothes, which meant he had been sent home, which meant it was done. He saw you from across the hall. You were standing at the nurses' station with a chart you weren’t actually reading, and the distance between you was twenty feet and uncrossable in a way that had nothing to do with physics.
He looked at you. You looked at him. His expression said a great many things. It said I'm sorry in the specific way that means I know this doesn't help. It said I know you're furious and I knew you would be. It said, underneath those things, something quieter and more fundamental that you could not name in that moment because the fury was too loud. You were furious. You needed him to know you were furious. You held his gaze and you let him see it, all of it, the anger and the terror and the horrible helpless quality of watching someone make a decision for you that you would not have made yourself, that you could not undo.
His jaw tightened slightly. He nodded, once. The acknowledgment of someone who isn’t going to argue, who is going to take the blow and stand in it. Then Robby appeared behind him and said something you couldn't hear, and Frank turned, the hallway swallowed him up, and that was the last time you saw him.
My my, how word gets around
She strangles for a good time
And she kills my self-control
She's my man, don't be too sad
You were currently standing at the nurses’ station pretending to read through a patient chart, though your attention kept drifting in a certain direction every few seconds whether you wanted it to or not. Dr. Cassie McKay was leaning against the counter across the room, flipping through a chart while talking to Dana. The overhead lights caught the sharp lines of her jaw and the dark sweep of her hair, and she looked so composed in the middle of the chaos that it almost felt unfair. She had the kind of presence that filled a room without effort, that confidence of someone who knew exactly what she was doing and didn’t need to prove it to anyone. People listened when Dr. Cassie McKay spoke. They moved when she told them to.
And you… well. You stared. Not intentionally, of course. You actually tried very hard not to stare. But something about the steady authority in her voice and the subtle edge of amusement that always seemed to linger behind her eyes had a way of pulling your attention toward her like a moth to a flame. You were mid-stare when she looked up. Your eyes snapped back to your computer screen so quickly you nearly gave yourself whiplash. From across the desk, you heard the faintest sound of a chuckle.
Five minutes later, she appeared beside you like she had been summoned by your embarrassment. “Room fourteen,” she said calmly, tapping the chart on your screen with a pen. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
You forced your brain to shift gears. “Possible appendicitis,” you said. “Right lower quadrant pain, nausea, mild fever. I ordered labs and I was thinking we might send her for imaging if the pain doesn’t settle.”
Cassie tilted her head slightly, studying you with that look that always made your pulse jump. “And why imaging?”
You walked through your reasoning, trying very hard not to get flustered under the weight of her attention. She listened without interrupting, her expression thoughtful rather than critical. When you finished, she nodded once. “Good call.” She pushed away from the counter. “Come on.”
You blinked. “Where?”
“Rounds,” she said, already walking. “Keep up.” You hurried after her.
The two of you moved through the department together, checking on patients while Cassie issued instructions with easy authority. She never rushed but somehow, everything got done faster when she was involved. Nurses trusted her judgment and even the most difficult family members seemed to calm down after a few minutes of speaking with her. Watching her work was like watching someone conduct an orchestra. After rounds, she stopped in the hallway outside a patient room and turned toward you. “You’re quiet tonight.”
“I’m always quiet.”
She gave you a look that clearly said that was not an acceptable answer. “You’re distracted.”
“I’m not distracted.”
Her brow lifted slightly. “You’ve been staring at me all shift.”
Your brain short circuited. “I have not.”
“Babygirl.” The word landed softly between you. “You absolutely have.”
You swallowed hard and looked down at your shoes. Cassie’s mouth curved in the faintest hint of a smirk. “Relax,” she said. “I’m not complaining.”
Your face was definitely on fire now. Before you could respond someone, called her name from across the department and the moment dissolved back into the normal rush of the ER. Patients came in waves. A lac repair turned into two. A trauma alert pulled everyone into motion for nearly half an hour. Eventually, the rush tapered off. For the first time in hours, the department grew momentarily quiet. You leaned against the nurses’ station and rubbed your eyes.
“Tired?” Cassie’s voice came from beside you.
You startled slightly. “No. Just finishing notes.”
She studied you for a moment, eyes thoughtful. “Come with me.” You followed without a second thought. The hallway leading to the on call room was noticeably quieter than the rest of the ER. Cassie opened one of the doors and stepped inside, glancing back at you with an expectant look. “Well?”
You stepped in and she closed the door behind you. The room was small and dimly lit, the narrow bed pushed against one wall and a single chair sitting near the corner. The silence felt almost surreal after the constant noise of the department. Cassie leaned casually against the door. “You’ve been wound up all shift,” she said.
“I have not.”
“Babygirl.”
You looked away, which was apparently all the confirmation she needed. She pushed off the door and crossed the room slowly, stopping close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off her.
“You know,” she continued softly, “for someone who pretends to be very confident during rounds, you get shy the second I actually look at you.”
Your heart thudded in your chest. “I’m not shy.”
“Sure.” She tilted her head slightly, studying your expression. “You like it though.”
Your brain blanked. “What?”
“Being told what to do,” she clarified.
You opened your mouth to protest but nothing came out. Her smirk grew more pronounced. “That’s what I thought.” She reached out and gently lifted your chin with two fingers, guiding your gaze back to hers.
“You follow me around the department like I’ve got you on a leash,” she said quietly. “I say walk with me and you’re already moving before I finish the sentence.”
“That’s because you’re my senior resident.”
Cassie laughed softly. “I’m sure that’s part of it.” Her thumb brushed briefly along your jaw before she let go. “But mostly it’s because you like it when someone takes charge.”
Your pulse was doing something ridiculous. “I do not.”
“You do,” she said easily. “And honestly? It’s kind of adorable.”
You huffed out a breath that was half nervous laugh, half surrender. Cassie leaned back against the edge of the bed, arms folding loosely while she looked at you. “You’re doing good work tonight,” she added.
The compliment caught you off guard. “I am?”
“Yes.” Her voice was steady, sincere. “You’re thoughtful, you listen to your patients, and you don’t panic when things get complicated. That’s more than I can say for a lot of people.”
Warmth spread through your chest. “Thank you.”
She watched you for a second longer, something softer in her expression. “You just need to stop doubting yourself,” she said.
“I don’t doubt myself.”
“Babygirl.”
You sighed. “A little bit. Maybe. Sometimes.”
Cassie chuckled quietly. “Thought so.”
For a moment, neither of you spoke. The air between you felt thick with something you couldn’t quite place, the tension building in a way that made you feel warm and fuzzy.
After another beautifully quiet minute, she straightened and glanced toward the door. “Unfortunately,” she said, “we probably shouldn’t hide in here much longer.”
You blinked. “Right.”
She opened the door and stepped back into the hallway, waiting for you to follow. Just before you reached the nurses’ station she leaned slightly closer, her voice dropping low enough that only you could hear it. “Try not to stare at me too much,” she murmured.
You looked up at her helplessly. Her lips curved into that cocky, dangerous smile. “I know you like a woman who runs the show,” she said softly. “But you’ve still got a shift to finish, babygirl.”
