Mel’s voice carried across the snowy parking lot, and Shen’s attention snapped back to her. He patted his scrub pants and relief coursed through him when he located his phone and badge. Did I miss placing an order? He flipped through his patients as she approached him, sans coat, red already blooming across her cheeks.
He took off his puffer and gave it to her, but she pushed it away.
“No, I’m still on for another six hours,” she said as she hopped from foot to foot, dressed only in her thin black scrubs and sneakers. “I wanted to ask you something.”
He kept pushing the coat into her chest and she finally let out a breath and wrapped it around herself like a cape, not even bothering to put her arms through the holes.
“Oh this is nice,” she said as she clutched it tighter to her chest.
Virgin wool over down feathers. Pricey. He’d gotten it on a trip to New York to see his brother in law who worked in Finance. He’d been lured into a boutique with bright lights and glossy mannequins and spent an ungodly amount of money on it because the cute salesgirl said it suited him. Making the kind of money he made as an attending was still new, still fresh.
The cold was starting to hit him now as snow fell. His twelve hour shift was making him impatient to leave.
“What, Mel?”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “This is a personal question.”
“Okay?”
She shifted back and forth, nervous.
“It’s okay, Mel,” he said with a sigh. She was always so prim and proper around him. A model resident.
“It’s uh—” her blush grew, creeping down her neck. “Sexual in nature.”
“Lay it on me.” He glanced away, back to the Pitt. An ambulance’s siren focused his attention at the door, where Ellis and Abbot were arguing as they unloaded two fresh bodies. Mel would need to get back soon.
“You know I’m seeing Frank,” she began.
“Isn’t he married?”
She shook her head. “Separated. They might reconcile but Abby’s seeing other people too so…” she sucked in a huge breath.
You can ask me your sex question, Mel, Shen mentally blasted at her, trying to school his face into a neutral and helpful expression. Poor girl probably didn’t have many others to talk to about those kind of things. She couldn’t listen to Santos’s godawful advice, for example, because then she’d be doing some kind of stripper fitness classes on the weekends.
“I uh—” she sucked in another huge breath. “I wanted to see if you would be interested in joining us. In the bedroom.”
What? Shen’s mind blanked out completely. He let out a wordless sound of disbelief.
“Intimately,” Mel said. She covered her mouth with her hand. “I know this is so inappropriate and you have every right to go to HR but I wanted to ask.”
“You want to have a threesome?” Shen searched her face for duplicity. Maybe she’d lost a bet. But her eyes were bright, sincere, and she bobbed her head in affirmation.
“Yes! Exactly! A menage a tois as the French say.” She grinned for a split second before embarrassment swallowed up her features. She gestured to him. “I just thought… you might…”
Laid back. Non judgy.
Shen knew what people thought about him, that he was so relaxed he practically lived his life semi-reclined. But this threw him for a loop.
“A threesome,” he said again, as if somehow the meaning of the word would change.
Mel shut her eyes tight and scrunched them together. “Specifically I would like to be doubly penetrated.” She raised a finger. “It is a specific thing but I’ve wanted it forever and Frank says I’m too young to close myself off to new experiences.”
“Oh I bet he’d say that,” Shen said with a gust of disbelief. Then, finally. “Holy shit, Mel.”
She opened one eye. “Yeah.”
Already his mind was filled with images of Mel on her knees, sitting on Frank’s cock, her mouth open and pliant and ready to take him.
“What the fuck, sure,” Shen said with a shrug. If it was a joke, who gave a shit. If it wasn’t, maybe he’d get to come down Mel King’s throat. “Call me, I guess.”
“Oh! Oh good!” Mel said, and handed him back the coat. Relief coursed across her face. “I’m– I’m so glad, Dr. Shen.”
“John. Please call me John.”
She smiled so big that it made Shen’s insides twist in a way he wasn’t expecting. He didn’t need to put the coat back on, because he was suddenly warm all over.
“Cool, Mel,” he said as he unlocked his car. “Call me.”
+
Mel called him exactly five business days later and gave him the plan in a very prim voice: his place, if possible, because she had Becca and Frank had his kids. She’d provide her clean test results and her lubricant of choice. Seven o’clock on a Tuesday, because that’s when they were all free.
“Any questions?” she asked when she was done.
“No?” Shen couldn’t think of any.
He could hear her smile. “Okay, thanks John. I’ll see you then.”
It was so strange and weird and terrifying to think he was going to invite his two coworkers to his house to fuck. He hoped it wasn’t some terrible prank leading to Santos leaping from behind a bush and yelling “gotcha, pervert!”
But in his own defense, it wasn’t a bad offer. Mel’s hot. Frank’s hot. He’d do either of them separately, so why not together?
loved you mel/frank/abby fic🥰 do you think you'll write anything else for the pairing
thank you!!! I really hope so bc I'm ALWAYS thinking about them 😫😫 I'm trying to think of a continuation for Feels like home but who knows how that's going to turn out lol
@kingdonmicrofic day 3: gala 493/467. reverse age gap. implied secret relationship
Frank Langdon is sweating buckets from anxiety, dread and the thick suit he borrowed from a colleague who worked in the ICU who had forgotten to mention that it was a winter suit.
Which would’ve been helpful, as the hospital’s annual gala was in July.
It wasn’t mandated to come, but lots of people from upstairs had come down to mention all the networking opportunities events like this came with, how it helps make the hospital look good for the public and in simpler terms if you want to finish your residency here, smile your pretty face to the donors, intern.
And Frank can admit, he’s a charmer. It’s how he stayed out of trouble in school and in college, smiling at teachers and professors, putting on his Southern drawl a bit thicker and laying out an extra ma’am or sir when the situation called for it.
But between the heat, the heavy suit and the ways dozens of people’s eyes turned blank the moment he mentions it’s only his first year at the hospital, the night out was a loss.
So, after a while, here he was people watching beside the bar, surrounded by other colleagues from PTMC that are busy talking amongst themselves; as he holds onto an almost empty champagne glass that he doesn’t want to let go of because he has no idea what to do with his hands.
“You know, you’re supposed to hold the glass at the stem.” A voice comes up from behind him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck.
He’d recognize that voice anywhere, even amongst the constant drawl of ass-kissing and schmoozing in the room. When he turns around, he sees Dr. Mel King, smiling, her crows feet out in force, wearing a simple ankle length light green dress, her hair loose and wavy.
“Enjoying the party?” She smiles, now standing beside him, looking out to the event.
“I am now.” He whispers to her, pleased when Mel rolls her eyes and hits him on the shoulder softly, arm subtly sliding down to his forearm,
“You look…” Breathtaking. Beautiful. Devastatingly hot. Every other completely inappropriate HR-worthy term. “Very lovely, Dr. King.”
She flushes “Mel, please. And thank you, you look lovely as well, Frank.”
“Have you been able to mingle?”
“Oh, yes. Dr. Underwood enjoys showing off her show-pony for autistic representation.” Mel remarks dryly, stealing his finger-print-stained flute glass and drinking the last dregs. “I was actually about to head out when I saw my favorite intern standing by himself.”
“I’ll have to tell Whitaker you hold him in such high esteem.” Frank says lowly, stealing a glance around if someone’s watching, feeling like he’s dancing around something dangerous.
“He could never.” Mel says, kind yet firm, something almost possessive flashing in her eyes
Her hand that had never really departed him his forearm squeezes softly and Frank’s feels it almost as she were holding his lungs in her hands.
Mel used to be one of those kids, the annoying ones who would dramatically cough when someone smoking a cigarette passed by, to make them rethink their choices. She didn’t realize until later in life how black and white she saw the world back then, everything fitting neatly into the categories of good or bad.
Frank Langdon, she’d realized, was one of life’s many gray areas. He was smart, empathetic, strong; she watched him excel through the end of his residency, land a job as an attending at PTMC, and that didn’t even come close to the way he loved her. He braided her hair when she was too tired, made sure she took her medicine every morning, and had given her orgasms so mind-melting she couldn’t describe them.
He was also brash, self-doubting, and, since rehab, a smoker. He asked her out a few months after coming back, and when he picked her up for the first time, she struggled with the lingering scent of stale tobacco in his car.
“Sorry. I can quit smoking in here,” he said, rolling down the windows and blasting the AC.
“No, don’t worry,” she said, a daring hand moving to his thigh. “I’ll get used to it.”
The first time he’d kissed her, she tasted the smoke on his tongue, light and sweet. She liked the newness of it, the unfamiliarity. The first time he took her home, her face buried in his sheets, she smelled it, faint and mixed with the clean scent of his detergent, and she let out a moan.
The problem was that now, every cigarette she smelled reminded her of him. A patient came in after smoking three packs in a night, hyperventilating from nicotine overdose, and she zoned out, thinking only of his tongue against hers. When her neighbor smoked his pipe in the morning her stomach would flutter, remembering the fogged windows of his car, the pack of American Spirits that she saw in the center console when she leaned over to suck his cock.
In the ambulance bay one day, after a particularly devastating case, he lit one up while she held onto him, grounding each other until both of their breathing had returned to normal. The smell of the smoke took her brain elsewhere, watching the way it drifted from his perfect lips. She couldn’t help but lean in, kissing sloppily at his jaw when he moved to ash it.
“Woah, slow down,” he said with a smirk.
“I’m sorry,” she whined, “I can’t help it. I think the smell just drive me crazy now because it reminds me of you.”
He laughed and shook his head, taking another long drag as he stared at her.
“You can’t really be telling me that the smell of cigarettes makes you horny.”
She blushed, burying her face into the scrubs on his shoulder.
“Mel, angel,” he said, lifting up her chin, “you Pavlov’d yourself.”
@kingdonmicrofic @kingdonmacrofic day 12: gold. 808/340. no content warnings. canon divergence: frank langdon as teen dad, so penny and tanner are teens and he's thirty three. (definitely not the first to think about this idea but i can't remember who had a post about teen dad!frank so please tell me if it was you!)
“Dad, stay right there the light is hitting you perfectly.” Penny calls out, reaching for her phone to take pictures of her dad in the orange hue of the sunset. Of course, when she calls out for him, he immediately turns around and ruins the natural pose he’d been in.
“What was that Pen?” He says and starts walking towards her, destroying her shot.
“No, go back!” Penny says, pushing at him to return to where he’d been. But the moment was lost and her father’s awkward relationship with the camera immediately set in as he faced forward and gave a random thumbs up.
Clearly sensing her frustration, he tries to divert. “Penny Lane, let me take some of you and your brother, for your mom. I know your gold hour is probably going to end soon.”
“Golden hour.” She pouts and he just chuckles.
It’s not a big deal, she tried to comfort herself as Tanner, same as their father, struggles terribly in front of a camera.
Ever since her dad came back from rehab, she felt every moment with him like sand in an hour glass, slowly and inevitably slipping away. Into what? She wasn’t sure.
It didn’t help that since their parents split up, they barely even saw dad anymore. Visits were limited to just the weekends until dad finished his medical residency and even after that it was still “to be determined”.
On days where they visit their mom, she’d heard her aunts make comments of when he relapses, and not if.
Penny’s recent search history covered in pages for the statistics of relapse in drug addicts, the consequences, the PHP page, and how to stay clean.
Her dad was doing well, he had purpose, being a doctor was something that kept him alive. Kept him motivated despite being a teen dad at sixteen and getting surprised with a new kid two years later. Those two things drove him to keep going.
But she also knew that her dad was lonely. His life only consisted of going to work, listening to medical podcasts, and waiting for the weekend so he could see them.
So her mind always jumps to the worst outcome: him being so lonely he relapses, causing him to lose everything at work, she never sees her dad again, he goes to jail and her aunts would laud over her how they’d been right.
“I want one with all three of us.” Penny says and immediately heads towards a young blonde woman passing by who had seen her and removed her headphones “Sorry to interrupt, do you mind taking some pictures of us?”
The woman smiles kindly. “Sure! Not much of a photographer, but I can try.” She smiles, Penny smiles back and hands the woman her phone, jogging back to where her dad and brother await.
Posing with her family, steadying her heart knowing that her dad’s still here, she checks for any spontaneous thumbs up, and smiles for the camera.
“Oh! I like your Fort Pitt shirt.” The woman says, genuinely enthusiastic.
The other part of knowing her dad so well is that she doesn’t even need to see him to feel the smug look on his face “Yeah? ´Well there you go, some people like Fort Pitt.” Dad says and her eyes roll into the back of her head.
“And some people like watching paint dry.” Tanner says between his teeth.
They pose for a few seconds, the golden hue finally fading away and the blonde woman comes near them, giving Penny her cell phone back, to which she immediately starts checking over the photos.
An accidental photo of the ground, oh the light was already gone by then.
“My sister doesn’t like going to Fort Pitt either. She told me she likes our excursions to have “less facts”.”
Tanner making a weird face, her dad mid-sentence, one of her eyes looked too small…
“—looking for a Fort Pitt buddy if you’re ever interested.”
These are out of focus because the light was changing.
“—love that! I’ve just moved here to the city for my residency so I haven’t—"
Why does Dad always have his mouth open? Why does Tanner insist on ruining every picture?
“—way! I’m doing an Emergency Medicine at—”
Did this woman just press her finger on the button and hope for the best?
“—Mel King, by the way.”
Just as she’s about to finish and smile and lie to the woman saying they were all great, she found a perfect one. Right at the beginning, the live photo showing her dad look down at his shirt and smiles back brightly, to the camera as she and Tanner roll their eyes.
“Frank Langdon.” She sees her dad smile to the woman, shaking her hand. She wonders if she missed something.
I had this sitting in my drafts for a while and polished it up a bit. It's not my best writing (sorry) but I did further my Penny Loves Bugs agenda, my Frank Langdon is from Appalachia agenda, and my Mel loves Touching Langdon's Arm agenda :)
(also you can probably tell that I am grieving because grief is all I really want to write about lol). Post Abby divorce, maybe the start of their relationship if you squint a bit. Autistic Mel (as always).
CONTENT WARNING: mention of suicide
***
“Hey.”
“Hey."
Frank wasn’t sure why they greeted each other like that at the end of shifts, who had started it, what events prompted it. Like so many other rituals, the initial meaning had been lost to time. He knew only that it felt natural as breathing, their acknowledgement of each other. That the day had come and went and they had survived.
“Penny asked me why the other kids don’t like her. Why they think bugs are stupid.”
There was an urgency to his voice, the words itching to get out, and no one else he wanted to tell. He thought of Penny: her glasses, her cherub cheeks, her crushing need to take care of things. She loved bugs, cicadas especially, for some reason. Over the summer, she plucked a desiccated shell straight from the sidewalk and held it in her fist as if it were alive. He thought it’d be a temporary thing. Now it had been six months, and she still carried it around with her. He wondered what would happen when the shell finally cracked.
“She grossed the other kids out in the playground, apparently. She saw a wolf spider carrying her eggs on her back. Said she was like Santa Claus. She brought the class out to see and they were horrified.
Then the asshole teacher---I know it’s just a spider, but come on---stomped on it. She couldn’t stop crying, Mel, and I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted. It felt good just to say it, to lay his fear on the concrete and watch Mel tend to it. She would make it right; she always did. It was like Dana said. Mel had the healing touch.
“What was it like for you and Becca, growing up? How did you get through it?”
She looked past him as she spoke. “We had each other. That helped. But, outside of her, I got very good at imagining friends. I had whole, um, storylines. I was always at the periphery of making friends, of connection, but never really close to anyone.” She pushed her glasses up. “My dad called me Mel-Bel. Said I was so quiet, I needed a bell, so people could keep track of me.” Mel had never mentioned him before. Her father.
“Kids are assholes,” Frank said. She’d shown him photos of her and Becca as kids--Mel squinting in ill-fitted glasses, Becca grimacing into a smile, both like small woodland creatures rounded up and forced to pose. There was, as far as he could tell, nothing about either sister that stood out. In a bad way, at least. Mel had the bruises and cuts, the baseball jersey, the boyish hair, of one of those girls child-Frank had always watched, transfixed, hoping for the slightest crumb of attention.
In fact, in his hometown -- right outside Hendersonville, in a pocket of road and valley where the same names kept appearing on mailboxes -- there had been so few children around that being discriminating meant being friendless. His best friend had been the neighbor’s daughter. He had not considered, for a moment, that she could be anything else. Friends were decided by geography: you hung out with whoever happened to have emerged from the same outcropping of civilization, the same winding cul-de-sac.
He wanted to hug Mel. To make better whatever hurt she still carried inside her. Maybe she felt it -- his overwhelming need to be useful, to be needed -- because she squeezed his arm, the triceps brachii, a signal they now understood to mean I want to be touched. Working that out had not been painless. Sometimes Mel grabbed his arm anyway, out of nerves or habit, and he had learned not to presume. But there was no mistaking this, the pressure of her hand, urgent and pleading. He hugged her, felt her pulse, hare-quick, and the ridge of her spine. Shit, he thought. Is she eating enough? Another item for his mental checklist.
She leaned into him, arms crossed around him, tight, then tighter, hungry for something. He had an inkling of what that was and pushed it down.
“Just…never let Penny feel bad for loving what she loves,” she said, into his shirt. “Make sure she knows, um, she’s not alone. That there’s people out there who like spiders too.”
He wanted to keep her there, against him, but she leaned back and looked up at him, head turned, thoughtful. “Have you ever taken her to a firefly festival?”
“No. I didn't know those existed, to be honest." It sounded like exactly the sort of thing Mel would know about.
“My dad used to tell us about fireflies, growing up. Apparently, there’s a kind in the mountains that blink synchronously. He tried to get me to go with him once, and I said no.”
“Tell me about him,” Mel whispered, the slight hitch in her throat meaning if you want to.
“Okay. Will you tell me about yours? A dad for a dad?”
“Only,” he added, “if you want to.”
Frank knew people like Mel -- people who cared this deeply, this carefully -- rarely sprang from the earth fully formed. There was always a backstory, a precipitating event. He wanted to know hers, badly, if she was willing.
Something wistful crossed her face. She nodded. “You first.”
“He was deeply religious, like most men born in western North Carolina, I guess. He was forty-five when they had me, and the way my mom tells it, he cried for hours when the pregnancy test came back positive. They’d been trying for years. The doctor swore up and down it wasn’t possible. Adoption -- well, they would’ve, but it never worked out. And then they had me. All eyebrows and hair and exceptionally long and skinny, in a concerning way, for a newborn.”
Mel smiled. “How old was your mom, then?”
“Forty.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “And they’d been trying all that time? What do you think was wrong?”
“No clue. Knowing my dad, maybe he hadn’t quite figured out how the whole reproduction thing worked. He was a very sheltered man.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean--”
“I’m just joking, Mel. I don’t think they ever figured out why it took so long.”
“And your dad?” It was embarrassing, how much he wanted to know. He had overshared, maybe, about his own father. He felt raw, having exposed some part of his life he couldn’t take back. He also knew Mel would be careful with the information; she always was.
“He…uh, killed himself,” she said, matter-of-factly. If it distressed her to tell him this, her face did not show it. He realized she had probably gotten used to saying these words, had said them so many times, to so many different people, that they had lost all meaning.
“Shit, Mel. I’m sorry--”
“It’s okay, Frank,” she mumbled. “I said I would.”
“We were young. Eight years old. I have memories, but sometimes I don’t trust them. Whether they’re really memories, or just things people said happened, you know?”
“I do.”
“He and Mom never got along, or if they did, I don’t remember it. He’d bring home candy sometimes, from the store, for me and Bec--um, that feels so stupid. My dad died and all I remember about him is that he brought us candy.”
“You were eight. We don’t choose what we remember. Shit, wouldn’t it be nice if we did?”
“Well, yeah,” she admitted. “But…how can we know what’s going to matter? I just want to talk to them. To ask them why they would leave us. It’s all I can think about. I read this book, a few years ago, and uh, I’m paraphrasing here, but the author said when his wife died, he wanted to tell her about it. That was his first thought. That's all you ever really want.”
“I wake up and for a minute, I'm okay. Then I think, They're gone. They're never coming back. That's why I clung to Becca, I guess, convinced myself we would never be apart. That’s what we wanted. I never even considered she would think differently.” Her voice got quiet.
“I… was selfish. Of course she wants to live independently, to have a husband, and a dog, and a family. The things we dreamed about as kids, like looking into a toy store, knowing you won’t ever have the thing you want, but maybe looking is enough. It must be.”
“Do you ever want those things?” he asked, half-dreading her answer.
“Uh, well, it never seemed like it was in the cards. Any of it. A family?” Her voice cracked. “I love kids. I don’t know that I love, um, the gestating part. How much they need from you, for so long.”
“I can see that,” he said. “Considering the job we have.”
“If I could…lay an egg, and it would hatch, and the child would be precocial, like a foal, ready to walk the second its feet hit the ground, I’d be okay with that, I think.”
“So, the kids would need to come ready-made? How many?”
pregnant mel catches a stray elbow while on shift, how does frank react?
Langdon heard the code over the speakers the way he heard almost everything when he was in a trauma - distant, filtered through eight other layers of information, pushed to the side until the immediate emergency was resolved. His MVA victim was a fourteen-year-old girl with bleeding in her belly and no pulse in her left foot and she was screaming for her mother so no one in the room was paying much attention to anything else, really. It was only after she was partially sedated with less disastrous vitals that he processed the fact that there were cops out in the hallways herding patients away from the south side and that Dana was on the phone at central with a look on her face he hadn't seen in months.
"Langdon, East Five," she barked, before he even got all his PPE off.
"What's happening," he managed, before Perlah popped up at his elbow and grabbed his arm so tightly he almost jumped.
"I got it, Dana," she barked, pulling him off towards the east corridor. Dana opened her mouth like she was about to say something but a loud shout from chairs drew her attention and she whipped around, nearly pulling the phone off the counter as she strained to look.
"What's happening," he repeated, trusting Perlah enough to follow while he talked instead of demanding full details first like he would from someone greener. "I heard the gray code."
"Fifty-two year old male, deep laceration to his right arm," Perlah said tersely, grabbing new gloves off a wall and shoving them into his hands as she herded him through the chaos. "He didn't present with any signs of intoxication until he got into the room. He got pissed off and lost it."
"Who?" Langdon said, his pulse racketing up a notch.
"Emma's in here," Perlah said tersely, pulling him to a stop at East Four. Langdon frowned and then his head went quiet and tunneled again when he saw Emma Nolan crying on a trauma bed, holding Kim's hand as Carrie gently swabbed blood away from her eye. "He pushed her into the wall and she hit her eye against the edge of a sharps box. We're worried she might have punctured it." She squeezed his arm and then added in an undertone, "I need you to examine her, Dana wanted to send Santos and we both know why that's a bad idea."
"Shit. Okay," Langdon said, pushing inside with one shoulder. At his entrance, both Carrie and Kim looked up with identical, bullish looks on their faces, but seeing that it was him turned back to Emma without a word. "Aw, kid. Rough morning, huh?"
"Hey, Dr. Langdon," Emma said, shaky and tearful but relatively calm, considering, and Langdon resisted the urge to say something cheesy and condescending like atta girl before sitting down and getting to work.
Thankfully the source of the blood was a laceration just below the eye - small mercies - but he was worried about orbital fracture and she couldn't see out of it, could barely even keep her eyelid open for more than a second in fact, which was concerning. Langdon did his best to cheer her up and make her more comfortable - as much as one could after you were just violently attacked at work, anyway - and by the time he got her labs ordered and verbally threatened two different imaging technicians to get her moved up the CT list, she was at least laughing a little, which was a good sign.
"He just sort of flipped out, out of nowhere," Emma said, once she was calm enough to start explaining. Carrie had been called out of the room but Kim had planted herself on the bed with her arm around Emma's shoulder with a look on her face like she might physically attack anyone who asked her to leave, which was another reason why Langdon always trusted nurses way more than attendings. "We were doing an H and P and asking about what medications he was taking and he got very belligerent. Then Dr. King told him he needed to calm down so we could help him and he just lost it."
Langdon went still for a moment, freezing over the sterile waste bin for a second before taking a breath and disposing of the bloody gauze. When he turned back around Kim was biting her lip and watching him.
"Dr. King was in the room too?" he asked. Calm, he thought. Don't say anything. Don't react.
Emma shot him a stricken, one-eyed look. "Is she okay? I couldn't see what happened, they took me out of the room so quick, but - oh my God, I heard her yelling, and it was so scary - "
"She's fine, she just got a little banged up, like you," Kim said soothingly, with her gaze locked on Langdon.
East five, Langdon thought, and took a long, deep, box breath. Then he sat back down on the stool and reached up again for Emma's face, gently replacing the bandage with fresh gauze.
"You're made of tough stuff, the two of you," he said lightly, his heart twisting a little at the weak smile Emma attempted. She reminded him of his baby cousin, which was maybe why he was a little overprotective of the kid, which the other nurses had clearly noticed. "I'd put my money on Mel over a drunk angry guy any day."
Emma laughed, which was the point, but it sounded a little skeptical. Probably because not only was it not that funny, Langdon thought, but also the most obvious lie he'd told a patient all week.
-
It was nearly an hour before he managed to track down Perlah again, who was having a tense-looking conversation with al-Hashimi by the ambo bay and clutching a tablet at her side so tightly her knuckles were white. Not wanting to risk the wrath of the one attending who even mildly liked him (and even that depended on the day) he went around the desk the long way and caught her eye, raising his eyebrows at her until she nodded and gestured at him with the tablet.
"Thanks," he said, when Perlah extracted herself, meeting him at the cross-junction of the corridors, out of sight of al-Hashimi. "Thank you for that."
"Mel told me you guys were keeping it quiet," Perlah said in an undertone, matching his pace as they speed-walked towards the elevators. She handed him the tablet silently. "Black eye and a bloody lip but no signs of concussion. I pulled Ellis and Toomarian to take care of her."
Another bit of tension leaked out of his shoulders. Langdon concentrated on the chart, speed-reading the summary and trying not to react too violently to patient (medical resident) was assaulted by an aggressive, intoxicated male, pushed physically into the wall and then kicked once on the right side of her - "Jesus fuck, he kicked her?"
Perlah grabbed his arm. "She said it barely made contact, but that's why Ellis wants her to stay for observation."
Langdon shoved the tablet back into her hands, taking another long box breath. "Jesus. Jesus, Perlah." His voice cracked.
"What?" She slowed, by the observation window into Central Six, and tugged on his arm to make him look. "What is it?"
Langdon covered his face with his hands for a moment. He found, suddenly, that it was nearly impossible to speak. His throat just wouldn't open.
"Oh my God," Perlah said, much quieter. "She's - is she - ?"
He nodded.
"How far along?" she hissed, pulling up the tablet and tapping rapidly.
"Ten and a half weeks," Langdon said, so quietly Perlah had to lean in to hear. "The timing is bad, with the divorce, she wanted to... I don't know. We just found out like six days ago."
Perlah muttered a prayer under her breath and started walking again, nudging him hard with one elbow to follow. "Okay. She didn't say anything."
"No, she wouldn't," he said, a touch bitterly. "Probably didn't even occur to her."
"Someone should've asked, damn it, but everything was so - you know," Perlah said, frustrated. She twirled around and hit the door with her back, wrenching the door to the back stairs open, their trusty secret passage between the two sides of the ED without having to walk past Central. "Okay. I had to tell Ellis about the two of you, but Toomarian is probably clueless. I'll find an excuse to get her out of the way and I'll tell Dana that you're sitting with Mel."
"What'd you tell her anyway, about putting me on Emma?" Langdon asked hoarsely. His hands were starting to shake and he folded his arms tightly, pressing them beneath his armpits.
"That Mel wanted you to be her friend, not her doctor. But she's Dana, you know. You guys are probably gonna have to have that conversation sooner rather than later."
Langdon laughed without humor. Yeah, probably.
-
It was overly cautious of Perlah to intervene to keep him off Mel's case, but Langdon had to be overly cautious about pretty much everything, these days. Most doctors never thought twice about writing scripts for friends and relatives, starting charts for themselves to save a colleague the trouble, signing their name for friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, all of the above. Not Langdon. Not anymore, anyway. (Just another way he was now an extra time-sucking pain in the ass to everyone he worked with. Fun.)
"I didn't want you to get in trouble," Mel said tearfully, holding his palm to her heart, her bruised, beautiful face pressed gently against his shoulder. Langdon had his other elbow propped against the head of her bed, breathing box breaths against her hair and trying very, very hard not to either cry or yell or do some ghostly third option that was probably worse. "You know, later, when it comes out - "
"I know, baby, thank you," he murmured. To be honest he was relieved too. He didn't want to be her doctor anymore than HR probably wanted him to. "You did the right thing, it's okay."
Ellis shot them a sympathetic look from her computer, typing rapidly, ordering all the routine tests for a pregnant patient with potential trauma to the abdomen, plus an extra half-dozen for good measure, probably. She'd taken the news relatively coolly, though Langdon hadn't expected anything else from her. She'd keep a poker face, serene and professional, throughout the entire thing and then a week later he'd get a text at 3am that said, so about this Mel thing. Brother, you better tell me everything, and so help me God if you leave anything out I'll cook your balls and serve em a la mode to your mother. Cuz I have her number now, motherfucker!!!!
"It just happened so fast," Mel said, sniffling. She leaned back a little for air and Langdon cupped the back of her head, pulling back to look again at the bruising on her face. He felt like his esophagus was eating itself, tracking the darkening purple ring around her eye.
"You're sure you have no pain in your abdomen?" he asked for the third time, and obediently, she nodded. "Okay. Okay. Yeah, honey, it sounded terrifying."
"I still want to check," she said, turning slightly to Ellis. "Just to be sure, I mean - "
"Of course we're gonna check," Ellis said breezily. She came over to check Mel's IV bag - just fluids, of course she was fucking dehydrated, she never drank enough water - and paused to give Mel one of her trust me I know everything looks. "We're gonna check everything, Dr. King, if only because we like ya so much. How's the pain now, is the tylenol working?"
Mel nodded, and Langdon narrowed his eyes, examining her face for any hint of lying. "Yeah, it's throbbing less." She licked her swollen lip and curled into Langdon's side, making his chest twist again. "I don't need any pain meds or anything, I'll be fine."
"Well, nothing prescription, but I sure as fuck hope you'll keep taking tylenol, that's one hell of a shiner," Ellis said dryly. She sat down on the stool and huffed a little, addressing both of them. "Okay. We're gonna get a blood count, a coag panel, and I want urine and an ultrasound to be safe. Odds are you're probably fine, but I'm gonna want to talk to your OB, and if you start bleeding at any point, even minimally, tell us right away."
Mel was nodding earnestly, her hand twisting in Langdon's scrubs. "Yes, of course."
"You're sure there's no pain in your abdomen? No cramping, or - even a weird sensation? Butterflies in your stomach, nausea, anything?"
"No," Mel said, wide-eyed. Langdon let himself tentatively believe she was being truthful and not downplaying it for once, if for no other reason than because he knew the idea of losing the fetus terrified her. Even if she wasn't sure she wanted to keep it yet, he knew she didn't want that at all. "No. It didn't even make full contact with my stomach - his foot, I mean - my arm was in the way, so it mostly hit me there. It was just the - the force of it, it sort of pushed me backwards on the floor and knocked the wind out of me. But he was just trying to get away, he wasn't trying to kill me or anything."
Langdon closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, the vision of Mel crouched on the floor with her arms around her stomach, curled up to protect herself from an angry attacker - yeah that wouldn't be going away anytime soon. He squeezed her knee silently and she leaned into him a little more, her cheek resting against his bicep.
"Okay," Ellis said, nodding. "Then we'll still check. But we'll be optimistic about it." She shot Langdon a significant look and then stood up. "Your medical records are of course confidential, but you've worked here long enough to know how people talk. You'll probably get a visit from someone upstairs as soon as I send these orders up, so be prepared for that."
"Emma's okay, right?" Mel said anxiously. "She was bleeding."
"She has a cut on her cheekbone and possible trauma to her right eye," Langdon said. "I'm waiting on her CT to see if she fractured anything. I also put in a call to that guy over at Presby - "
"Oh, the ocular surgeon? The one you met at the MEDevice meeting?"
"Yeah. He's gonna come consult as soon as he gets an hour or two free."
Mel relaxed a little. "That's good. Good thinking. Oh, I hope her eye's okay."
Ellis shot him another look, and Langdon tensed. "Shitty day," she said. "Langdon?"
"Okay, okay," Langdon said. He squeezed Mel's knee and leaned in to nuzzle her cheek, feeling something delicate and powerful unfurling in his chest at the sensation of her breath on his cheek. She'd broken her glasses in the scuffle and they hadn't been able to find her spares in her locker - they were probably in his car, she was always forgetting him there because she wore them when they went jogging in the park - so she was squinting at everything, leaning in to read the forms Ellis gave her and looking smaller and younger than she usually did. And of course the black eye didn't hurt. "I'll be right back."
"You have patients, Frank," Mel said weakly, her grip tightening on his shirt despite the sentiment. "You don't have to sit with me forever. I'll be here all night, probably."
"I'll be right back," he said again, and kissed her eyebrow, right above the bruising. She smiled up at him, blushing despite herself, and he carefully did not look at Ellis as he walked past her out of the room, even though she was raising one eyebrow at him like a fucking cartoon character, leaning in the doorway and holding the door open pointedly.
"Okay," Ellis said again in the hallway, when they were alone. Thankfully she was very talented at talking very quietly in a busy corridor, unlike some other docs Langdon could mention. "So."
"I appreciate your discretion," he said pointedly, and she bit back a smile. "And - this is unrelated - what's your login for the EHR? Just in case I need it."
"Oh, fuck off," Ellis said, snorting. "I'll keep you updated okay? Pinkie promise. As soon as I know something you'll know it. But Langdon." She leaned in and held up her fist, which he stared at, unimpressed. "Nice one. She's way cuter than Abby."
"Fuck you," Langdon whispered, but then glanced again down at her fist, sighed, and bumped it. Ellie sniggered. "It's - they're different. They're both beautiful."
"Spoken like a true co-parent," Ellis said, laughing. She tucked the tablet under her arm and clapped him on the shoulder, going serious again. "I think she's good, man. Really. I don't see anything concerning, and you know I'm gonna test for everything I can before they cut me off for wasting resources."
"Thank you," he said, also more genuinely. He looked down at his feet for a second, closing his eyes, and took a deep breath. "God, I feel like I just survived a heart attack."
"Yeah," Ellis said. "Yeah, I bet." She eyed him for a second. "Pretty serious, then, huh? I mean." She raised her eyebrows, somehow communicating the word baby in a way that was both silent and, incredibly, sort of crude. "Serious serious."
"We're - it's early," Langdon stammered. "It was... we just found out. It's new."
"Yeah," Ellis said. She looked at him sympathetically for a moment, then blew out a breath and raised her eyebrows. Clapped him on the shoulder again, shaking her head like she thought he was crazy, which she probably did. "Okay, well. I won't tell Robby."
"Thanks, man," Langdon said. He knew she'd be solid, with something like this. Perlah deserved a raise.
"With Dana though, you're on your own," she added, already turning away, voice distracted.
"Yeah," Langdon said, resigned to it. He knew that too.
I think Jesse and Mel were fwb for awhile and no one in the ER caught on at all. They were just very normal and professional at work. It ended amicably, truly no hard feelings and they’re still friends. One time Mel has a get together at her place and everyone is looking for utensils or bowls and Jesse just quietly pulls everything out from the right spot.
Nobody catches on except for Frank who’s side eyeing him very hard but can’t quite put his finger on it.
It’s getting kind of ridiculous until someone knocks the book out from under Mel’s table that was holding up a leg and Jesse’s like “Mel just let me pay for a new one already! It was my fault for breaking it!”
And Mel’s like “no i think we were both eager and willing in the breaking.”
